Review: The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #30
Publisher:	HarperTempest
Copyright:	2003
Printing:	2006
ISBN:	0-06-001238-2
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	375

The Wee Free Men is the 30th Discworld novel but the first Tiffany Aching book and doesn't rely on prior knowledge of Discworld, although the witches from previous books do appear. You could start here, although I think the tail end of the book has more impact if you already know who Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents was the first Discworld novel written to be young adult, and although I could see that if I squinted, it didn't feel that obviously YA to me. The Wee Free Men is clearly young adult (or perhaps middle grade), right down to the quintessential protagonist: a nine-year-old girl who is practical and determined and a bit of a misfit and does a lot of growing up over the course of the story. Tiffany Aching is the youngest daughter in a large Aching family that comes from a long history of Aching families living in the Chalk. She has a pile of older relatives and one younger brother named Wentworth who is an annoying toddler obsessed with sweets. Her family work a farm that is theoretically the property of the local baron but has been in their family for years. There is always lots to do and Tiffany is an excellent dairymaid, so people mostly leave her alone with her thoughts and her tiny collection of books from her grandmother. Her now-deceased Grandma Aching was a witch. Tiffany, as it turns out, is also a witch, not that she knows that. As the book opens, certain... things are trying to get into her world from elsewhere. The first is a green monster that pops up out of the river and attempts to snatch Wentworth, much to Tiffany's annoyance. She identifies it as Jenny Green-Teeth via a book of fairy tales and dispatches it with a frying pan, somewhat to her surprise, but worse are coming. Even more surprised by her frying pan offensive are the Nac Mac Feegle, last seen in Carpe Jugulum, who know something about where this intrusion is coming from. In short order, the Aching farm has a Nac Mac Feegle infestation. This is, unfortunately, another book about Discworld's version of fairy (or elves, as they were called in Lords and Ladies). I find stories about the fae somewhat hit and miss, and Pratchett's version is one of my least favorites. The Discworld Queen of Fairy is mostly a one-dimensional evil monster and not a very interesting one. A big chunk of the plot is an extended sequence of dreams that annoyed me and went on for about twice as long as it needed to. That's the downside of this book. The upside is that Tiffany Aching is exactly the type of protagonist I loved reading about as a kid, and still love reading about as an adult. She's thoughtful, curious, observant, determined, and uninterested in taking any nonsense from anyone. She has a lot to learn, both about the world and about herself, but she doesn't have to be taught lessons twice and she has a powerful innate sense of justice. She also has a delightfully sarcastic sense of humor.

"Zoology, eh? That's a big word, isn't it." "No, actually it isn't," said Tiffany. "Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short."

One of the best things that Pratchett does with this book is let Tiffany dislike her little brother. Wentworth eventually ends up in trouble and Tiffany has to go rescue him, which of course she does because he's her baby brother. But she doesn't like him; he's annoying and sticky and constantly going on about sweets and never says anything interesting. Tiffany is aware that she's supposed to love him because he's her little brother, but of course this is not how love actually works, and she doesn't. But she goes and rescues him anyway, because that's the right thing to do, and because he's hers. There are a lot of adult novels that show the nuanced and sometimes uncomfortable emotions we have about family members, but this sort of thing is a bit rarer in novels pitched at pre-teens, and I loved it. One valid way to read it is that Tiffany is neurodivergent, but I think she simply has a reasonable reaction to a brother who is endlessly annoying and too young to have many redeeming qualities in her eyes, and no one forces her to have a more socially expected one. It doesn't matter what you feel about things; it matters what you do, and as long as you do the right thing, you can have whatever feelings about it you want. This is a great lesson for this type of book. The other part of this book that I adored was the stories of Grandma Aching. Tiffany is fairly matter-of-fact about her dead grandmother at the start of the book, but it becomes clear over the course of the story that she's grieving in her own way. Grandma Aching was a taciturn shepherd who rarely put more than two words together and was much better with sheep than people, but she was the local witch in the way that Granny Weatherwax was a witch, and Tiffany was paying close attention. They never managed to communicate as much as either of them wanted, but the love shines through Tiffany's memories. Grandma Aching was teaching her how to be a witch: not the magical parts, but the far more important parts about justice and fairness and respect for other people. This was a great introduction of a new character and a solid middle-grade or young YA novel. I was not a fan of the villain and I can take or leave the Nac Mac Feegle (who are basically Scottish Smurfs crossed with ants and are a little too obviously the comic relief, for all that they're also effective warriors). But Tiffany is great and the stories of Grandma Aching are even better. This was not as good as Night Watch (very few things are), but it was well worth reading. Followed in publication order by Monstrous Regiment. The next Tiffany Aching novel is A Hat Full of Sky. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #23
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	1998
Printing:	May 2014
ISBN:	0-06-228014-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	409

Carpe Jugulum is the 23rd Discworld novel and the 6th witches novel. I would not recommend reading it before Maskerade, which introduces Agnes. There are some spoilers for Wyrd Sisters, Lords and Ladies, and Maskerade in the setup here and hence in the plot description below. I don't think they matter that much, but if you're avoiding all spoilers for earlier books, you may want to skip over this one. (You're unlikely to want to read it before those books anyway.) It is time to name the child of the king of Lancre, and in a gesture of good will and modernization, he has invited his neighbors in Uberwald to attend. Given that those neighbors are vampires, an open invitation was perhaps not the wisest choice. Meanwhile, Granny Weatherwax's invitation has gone missing. On the plus side, that meant she was home to be summoned to the bedside of a pregnant woman who was kicked by a cow, where she makes the type of hard decision that Granny has been making throughout the series. On the minus side, the apparent snub seems to send her into a spiral of anger at the lack of appreciation. Points off right from the start for a plot based on a misunderstanding and a subsequent refusal of people to simply talk to each other. It is partly engineered, but still, it's a cheap and irritating plot. This is an odd book. The vampires (or vampyres, as the Count wants to use) think of themselves as modern and sophisticated, making a break from the past by attempting to overcome such traditional problems as burning up in the sunlight and fear of religious symbols and garlic. The Count has put his family through rigorous training and desensitization, deciding such traditional vulnerabilities are outdated things of the past. He has, however, kept the belief that vampires are at the top of a natural chain of being, humans are essentially cattle, and vampires naturally should rule and feed on the population. Lancre is an attractive new food source. Vampires also have mind control powers, control the weather, and can put their minds into magpies. They are, in short, enemies designed for Granny Weatherwax, the witch expert in headology. A shame that Granny is apparently off sulking. Nanny and Agnes may have to handle the vampires on their own, with the help of Magrat. One of the things that makes this book odd is that it seemed like Pratchett was setting up some character growth, giving Agnes a chance to shine, and giving Nanny Ogg a challenge that she didn't want. This sort of happens, but then nothing much comes of it. Most of the book is the vampires preening about how powerful they are and easily conquering Lancre, while everyone else flails ineffectively. Pratchett does pull together an ending with some nice set pieces, but that ending doesn't deliver on any of the changes or developments it felt like the story was setting up. We do get a lot of Granny, along with an amusingly earnest priest of Om (lots of references to Small Gods here, while firmly establishing it as long-ago history). Granny is one of my favorite Discworld characters, so I don't mind that, but we've seen Granny solve a lot of problems before. I wanted to see more of Agnes, who is the interesting new character and whose dynamic with her inner voice feels like it has a great deal of unrealized potential. There is a sharp and condensed version of comparative religion from Granny, which is probably the strongest part of the book and includes one of those Discworld quotes that has been widely repeated out of context:

"And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." "It's a lot more complicated than that " "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won t like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."

This loses a bit in context because this book is literally about treating people as things, and thus the observation feels more obvious when it arrives in this book than when you encounter it on its own, but it's still a great quote. Sadly, I found a lot of this book annoying. One of those annoyances is a pet peeve that others may or may not share: I have very little patience for dialogue in phonetically-spelled dialect, and there are two substantial cases of that here. One is a servant named Igor who speaks with an affected lisp represented by replacing every ess sound with th, resulting in lots of this:

"No, my Uncle Igor thtill workth for him. Been thtruck by lightning three hundred timeth and thtill putth in a full night'th work."

I like Igor as a character (he's essentially a refugee from The Addams Family, which adds a good counterpoint to the malicious and arrogant evil of the vampires), but my brain stumbles over words like "thtill" every time. It's not that I can't decipher it; it's that the deciphering breaks the flow of reading in a way that I found not at all fun. It bugged me enough that I started skipping his lines if I couldn't work them out right away. The other example is the Nac Mac Feegles, who are... well, in the book, they're Pictsies and a type of fairy, but they're Scottish Smurfs, right down to only having one female (at least in this book). They're entertainingly homicidal, but they all talk like this:

"Ach, hins tak yar scaggie, yer dank yowl callyake!"

I'm from the US and bad with accents and even worse with accents reproduced in weird spellings, and I'm afraid that I found 95% of everything said by Nac Mac Feegles completely incomprehensible to the point where I gave up even trying to read it. (I'm now rather worried about the Tiffany Aching books and am hoping Pratchett toned the dialect down a lot, because I'm not sure I can deal with more of this.) But even apart from the dialect, I thought something was off about the plot structure of this book. There's a lot of focus on characters who don't seem to contribute much to the plot resolution. I wanted more of the varied strengths of Lancre coming together, rather than the focus on Granny. And the vampires are absurdly powerful, unflappable, smarmy, and contemptuous of everyone, which makes for threatening villains but also means spending a lot of narrative time with a Discworld version of Jacob Rees-Mogg. I feel like there's enough of that in the news already. Also, while I will avoid saying too much about the plot, I get very suspicious when older forms of oppression are presented as good alternatives to modernizing, rationalist spins on exploitation. I see what Pratchett was trying to do, and there is an interesting point here about everyone having personal relationships and knowing their roles (a long-standing theme of the Lancre Discworld stories). But I think the reason why there is some nostalgia for older autocracy is that we only hear about it from stories, and the process of storytelling often creates emotional distance and a patina of adventure and happy outcomes. Maybe you can make an argument that classic British imperialism is superior to smug neoliberalism, but both of them are quite bad and I don't want either of them. On a similar note, Nanny Ogg's tyranny over her entire extended clan continues to be played for laughs, but it's rather unappealing and seems more abusive the more one thinks about it. I realize the witches are not intended to be wholly good or uncomplicated moral figures, but I want to like Nanny, and Pratchett seems to be writing her as likable, even though she has an astonishing lack of respect for all the people she's related to. One might even say that she treats them like things. There are some great bits in this book, and I suspect there are many people who liked it more than I did. I wouldn't be surprised if it was someone's favorite Discworld novel. But there were enough bits that didn't work for me that I thought it averaged out to a middle-of-the-road entry. Followed by The Fifth Elephant in publication order. This is the last regular witches novel, but some of the thematic thread is picked up by The Wee Free Men, the first Tiffany Aching novel. Rating: 7 out of 10

This year, Sarah and I spent two weeks off the coast of Dubrovnik, on Kolo ep island. We'd never been to Croatia before, and I was a little nervous that if there wasn't much to do on the island, we wouldn't be able to get elsewhere particularly easily. I needn't have worried: We thoroughly enjoyed our stay. It might even be my favourite holiday so far. We did travel around a bit: twice to Dubrovnik's old town and once to a botanical gardens in Trsteno but there was also loads to see on the island itself. One of our favourite trips was simply to a cave on the opposite side of the island known as a "blue cave" because you looked like a Smurf on the inside. We had to jump into the sea from the boat and swim into and out of the cave before continuing on our trip. Simply puttering about on the boat, either around the island or to Trsteno was a great experience in itself. Our guide Sammi was very friendly, the weather was great and swimming around or just enjoying the sun on the back of the boat was enough for me to want to check property prices out there. On Kolo ep island is a little restaurant called Villa Ruza. We managed to eat there twice during our stay. I think it is considered to be one of the top ten restaurants in Croatia. It's one of the best places I've ever eaten in my life. In terms of price, it was about half that of restaurants in Dubrovnik itself. Dubrovnik itself was, quite predictably, much busier than Kolo ep. It is a stunningly attractive old town. On our second visit we took a tour. There are a variety of different themed tours that you can take, including Game Of Thrones sight-seeing tours, and there were Game Of Thrones tat shops all over the place. We opted for A Story About The War. One thing we love to do when visiting foreign places is to get an idea of what life is like for people there, and this war was not all that long ago - I can remember the news coverage from the time. We were the only two people on that particular tour, so we had a fairly tailored experience. I wish I could remember our guide's name. She was the same age as us and grew up as a child in the city when it was under siege. Her personal story included details about where her family stayed; what life was like for kids growing up at the time; how people got supplies; which areas were badly affected and much more. It was a very heartfelt tour and gave us an intimate and personal portrait of what life was like for people there at a time that most tour operators tend to prefer to ignore. This was exactly what we were looking for. Sarah and I were both a little teary at the end! We tried to do things a little different on this holiday. Normally we keep ourselves to ourselves and don't socialise much with other guests. We also rarely do trips and excursions, preferring to sort things out for ourselves. This time we made an effort to be more sociable and I'm glad we did because we met some really nice people. The trips we did were great fun and on the last day I blew through most of the rest of our currency by hiring a jet ski for half an hour. Those things are FUN. Top speed on the one I was using was 57 land mph. Every muscle in my body was screaming for a few days afterwards! Often on a two-week holiday we reach a point around 10 days where we've pretty much had enough. This time around I could have stayed for twice as long. This was the first proper test of my new camera and I've uploaded a set of photographs from our holiday to a Flickr gallery.

I was contacted today via private e-mail by Rafal Czlonka, as the hackergotchi I use (at least) in Planet Debian is wrongly rendreed by his WebKit-based web browser, Arora. So, in order to get more people to notice the bug if it exists: This is my hackergotchi (copied from Planet Debian, so I can update it and this post still shows a valid one): And this is the sample he sent me on how it is rendered by Arora - Pay no attention to the horizontal lines (those are taken from the background where it is rendered): So, is the first image correctly rendered? (I usually have my skin in a pinkish tone, and I was wearing a blue shirt). But, yes, that makes understanding the PNG encoding a bit more interesting. I guess PNG defines hues (as neither of those colors is completely uniform, they both vary slightly depending on the section of the picture)... And for some reason, my hackergotchi (generated by the Gimp) confuses the renderer and makes it switch the hue areas? (Note that I am tempted to use the corrected version as my hackergotchi.. It looks more interesting!) [update] I could not resist it... and have uploaded my blue hackergotchi to planet.debian.org - Yes, I'm a smurf now, it's no longer a rendering error.

>> Thank you for your message to the Adaptec Customer Service department.
>> Your case # is 000000000005432. (NB: not the real number.)

*ROTFL*  Exactly how many customer requests do they expect to handle?

If the answer is "about 100/day", which sounds somewhat high to me given the above number, then space will last roughly three times as long as the time until this nice planet will die a fiery death in its expanding sun's outer heliosphere.

Maybe somebody was afraid of the Year-100-Billion problem

Heh, its been more than a day now since I got back from Manila after the Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour, and even then I have some stuff to do here (both IRL and IOL work) before I could find some time to blog Here are the highlights of my trip:

• Feb 1 - Arrived in Manila around 6 in the evening; spent the early part of the evening looking for an internet cafe to check on mail. libmemcache got ACCEPTED, but it FTBFS on powerpc $DEITY, I sure wish I had my desktop with me! (or at least some access to a ppc Looked for someone on #debianPPC to help me solve it (and indeed got the hint by the next day Slept late.
• Feb 2 - Woke up late, checked mail only to be told by Jerome to GO HERE NOW to the Peninsula Manila for the ABT breakfast meeting. After a short tirade with some Ayala traffic enforcers about crossing pedestrian lanes, I was able to arrive (already late) to Garcia Villa, seeing Jerome, Charo, Clair, and Dom, providing a nice representation for both PLUG and Ubuntu-PH. The Inceptions folks (who I met last time at LinuxWorld) were there as well. Mark was already talking when I arrived, while Hande and Malcolm from Canonical were at the back with the local media; and after that, I got to talk with the SABDFL, of all things, about my Debian packaging adventure last night :/ After lunch, we then transferred to the National Computer Center at UP Diliman (Canonical in the chopper, Ubuntu-PH and PLUG in Jerome’s Picanto) to continue the Tour for government representatives and CIOs (which didn’t go quite well in my opinion; imagine crickets signing in the night), NGOs, and academe (which was much better, especially since Doc Pablo Manalastas asked the last question regarding backports.) Mark and company had to leave early, which left us PLUG/Ubuntu-PH people going to the UP Shopping Center for snacks, some talk, and an early wrapup. I however still slept late. Photos by Charo are visible.
• Feb 3 - After doing some errands in the morning, I went to Makati to meet up with Shelley, Markku, and Rommel of Inceptions. I will be doing a project with them

I’ve adopted opendchub, rccp, and xshisen from Grzegorz Prokopski too Heh, I’ll be quite busy this coming week…

Sorry about the LiveJournal spam. Apparently they messed up.

I'll move to my own system. Real Soon Now.

Deep breathing here. Finally, sem break! Well, actually, it already is sem break since the 15th, and only now at the end of this month did I felt it. I was so busy doing things, both online and offline, that I didn’t even realize that the next sem will be up in the week after next. Sigh… So, what have I been doing since school’s close? Mostly Ubuntu work:

• Translating. At the Lauchpad the aboutubuntu document has been completed, and now I’m slaving over the faqguide.
• Packaging. I notice that Lighttpd has been included in UniverseCandidates, so I decided to start my MOTU work there. It also turns out that Lighttpd also need libmemcache, which is missing on both Debian and Ubuntu. There’s an ITP of Lighttpd already, but it seems stalled; I guess this needs pinging. And on the Debian front, pabs3 from #debian-mentors shares some hints for ecb that I need to fix for the next RFS.
• Reading. There are lots of Fine Documentation at the Ubuntu and Debian wikis that I’m grokking atm; among these are the CDBS manual and MaintainerScripts documentation.
• Writing. I’ve managed to put up a WinModemConexantHSF quick-howto, and soon I’ll write up about my experience in maintaining packages with GNU Arch/Bazaar.

Aside from hacking, I’ve been busy baking as well, and preparing for next sem. The only thing I’m quite missing is the “traditional” Halloween get-together with my High School batchmates; hell, it is only 1 year to go before a Homecoming… PS: My Ubuntu work has paid off. Thanks to Kamion, Seveas, smurf, dholbach, tseng, and ogra for voting me in as a Ubuntu Member! And to Jerome Gotangco and the Ubuntu-PH team: mabuhay kayo!

Yet another item on the already-too-long list of blatantly unethical behavior by Micro$oft.

This says everything, and should surprise nobody.

So I'm setting up a new web server. It need to be secure (no user A spying in user B's files). It needs to run PHP. Yes, you may run away now. Oh yes, it also needs to be fast...

So how to do that? I'm not going to run Apache+mod_php on the thing. :-/

I've started with Apache2, FastCGI, PHP via FCGI, installed eaccelerator for 60% speed-up.

All of this works reasonably well, except for PHP scripts that want PATH_INFO (like http://.../blog.php/2005/12/03/some_random_gunk). mod_fcgi passes the whole thing's pseudo file system path in PATH_TRANSLATED. The PHP FCGI process checks that path, sees that it doesn't exist (blog.php is a file after all), and immediately returns an unhelpful error.

I've worked around that thing with an ugly hack, but I suspect that the real fix would be to add this same hack to PHP instead.

Opinions, anybody?

NB: Oh, and if somebody could tell me why my mysql server's kernel randomly ignores incoming TCP connections for a few seconds every minute (and yes, it's the kernel), I'd be grateful. I suspect that the solution is going to be "upgrade to something newer than 2.6.12-9-686-smp (Ubuntu Breezy's kernel)"... :-/

NB2: There's also a mod_fcgid for Apache2. Hint: It's crap -- if all FCGI processes happen to be busy, I want new requests to be delayed. I do not want them to be rejected with a terse, hard-coded error message.

Do not read further. If you couldn't control yourself, do not go here. If you did, run sudo apt-get remove frotz. Immediately. If by any chance you didn't, under no circumstances should you open a terminal and type frotz bookvol.z5. You did? Oh dear. Try not to ... spend ... the rest ... of your ... week ... aarrrggghhh .. too late... See you sometime later. Much later.