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On Friday Ben and I went to see Gorey End — a live performance of 13 songs based on the works of Edward Gorey. They were written and performed by the Tiger Lillies (of Shockheaded Peter fame) with the Kronos Quartet as backing band, and Alan Rickman and others reading from his works.

[By the way - the Tiger Lillies will be performing in Adelaide at the 2003 Cabaret Festival on the 6,7,8 June - go here for more info]

Now both the Tiger Lillies and the Kronos Quartet can be eclectic — in fact you could say they pride themselves on it — but to see the two groups on stage together is certainly surreal.

The performance was at the Lyric Hammersmith, itself quite a strange place. You enter through a prosaic looking 60s modernist building of bessa-brick and chrome, from a high street that has nothing to distinguish it from any other shopping mall infested suburb of London.

Inside however, is a genuine 1890 vaudeville theatre that was dismantled in the 60’s during a local ‘redevelopment’ and then rebuilt sometime in the 70s. As neither of us had been there before we had no idea what to expect, and a full-on victorian extravaganza was quite a surprise.

The show itself was reminiscent of Shockheaded Peter — the MC was the same actor as in that show, dressed in goth-black with heavy skull-like makeup. He introduces the songs mostly in mime and by turning the pages of a flip-book on the stage.

The songs were done much more like a ‘normal’ band performance — that is if your definition of normal extends to orchestrations of string quartet, drum, saw, piano accordian and counter-tenor.

There was no attempt to stage the works as there was in Shockheade Peter. This was the original intent — but unfortunately Gorey died before the project really got under way. This is a shame, since the reported interest of Terry Gilliam in joining in would have made quite a show.

Some of the works were read rather than sung - seriously intoned by several actors. I can’t help thinking that word in the pseudo-victorian pronunciation of ak-TORs in this case - the delivery was of that distanced seriousness that makes the content all the more surreal. Alan Rickman stood out as a name - but all the participants were very good, including the (inspired? twisted?) casting of a young girl of about 9 to read some of The Gashlycrumb Tinies.

The evening ended with a rousing rendition of Flying Robert — a very cool end to a very surreal evening.

The other day we were chatting about the method names in our test classes. We had noticed that one of our method names was about 40 characters long and reads like a sentence. This sounds stupid, but actually it makes things really easy to read in the test logs.

I got to thinking that you could do a lot worse for auto-generated test documentation than just de-camelizing the test method names and treating them as bullet point documentation for the classes. Sort of like javadoc-lite. So “public void testFooIsNotNull()” becomes “foo is not null”. An hour’s worth of coding using Joe’s qDox and I had a working prototype.

To give you an idea of how readable this kind of documentation can be, here is the output when it is run on its own code:

NamePrettifier
- Title has sensible defaults
- Cater for user defined suffix
- Cater for user defined prefix
- Test name is converted to a sentence
- Is a test is false for non test methods
DocumentGenerator
- Start class and end class are called
Main
- Main parses this test
- Main handles multiple document generators
- Ignore non test classes
- Ignore set up method

Neat huh? I think it almost reads like a mini spec of the system. Simple and to the point.

I’ll post the code as soon as I get a chance to clean it up a bit… not that there’s much of it :-)

Oh, and like all good geeky code there is a self-referential test in main: “Main parses this test”. And yes, I did do that test-first.

ONLamp.com: What I Hate About Your Programming Language [May. 12, 2003]

A really good article on what makes different languages powerful - or counter-intuitive.

I have just added a really cool feature to the site: email updates.

If you add your email to the list you will automatically be emailed whenever I add something…

From JSR 176 web page updates:

This JSR is to develop a specification for the feature and API set for the next feature release of Java 2 Standard Edition, code named “Tiger”, targeted to ship 1st half of CY 2004.

The bastards have slipped it! And here was I hoping that there might be a beta aroung JavaOne.

Damn

OK, so it did take 24 hours to compile (including KDE) and quite a while to get the thing configured, but I’ve finally managed to get GenToo up and running. Now to get it all configured as per my old system…

I have just upgraded movable type to version 2.63, and there are some nifty new features.

In particular, wiki style editing is now available via the Textile plug-in, and with the addition of SmartyPants we can now do the whole “Smart Quotes” (and em—dash) thing in blogs. About time.

Last night Ben, Rachel and I went to see the English National Opera production of Margaret Attwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale.

[PS. I just noticed you can get the Opera on CD from amazon UK.]

It was at the London Coliseum - not a theatre I have been to before. Its a bizarre sight - obviously built at the height of Victorian obsession with the Romans, it is covered in faux-marble, with friezes of roman chariots and two enormous statues of horse drawn chariots at the top corners of the proscenium arch.

I love this about London - there are things here that no-one in their right mind would propose building now (save maybe in Las Vegas) - Nelson’s column, the Victoria and Albert museum, the Albert Hall, St Paul’s, the underground, even in more recent times the London Eye and the Millenium Dome. They are all insane ideas - follies in their own way. But here they somehow get built, and weave they way into the soul of this amazing place.

So back to the opera.

I had spent the night before finishing the book, and this was just as well, as there were no surtitles, and despite the fact that the opera was sung in english, some of it was very hard to follow.

But with the story fresh in my mind I had no problems with the complex plot. The libretto follows the book very closely - in fact Ben and I could only think of a couple of minor plot points that were glossed over. This is quite an achievement for such an involved plot, and while I’m normally wary of slavish interpretations of books (vis the Harry Potter films) I think this one succeeds.

As the programme points out, the book is a dream for designers, with colour being a key distinguishing point for the different roles in society. So the handmaids wear red, the wives blue, the commanders black, all as per the book. Having said that, there were obviously some reservations with this in the director’s mind, since quite often in early scenes Offred whips off her red hood as if to prove that she is a woman underneath.

There is some interesting staging - the plot (as in the book) jumps back and forward as the narrator randomly recounts parts of her story, achieved by having the characters from the ‘time before’ perform around the frozen actors of the ‘present’. This works espescially well when Offred’s past self interacts with her, including the singing of a duet (appropriately enough in unison).

I would love to know how the opera would work for someone who did not know the book. It is a harrowing and affecting tale, and the second half is strong and confronting, with no characters (even those obviously ‘bad’) having a monopoly on virtue. Even the women in the play are complicit in their own afliction - Offred herself says near the end ‘Come and fill me Lord - I will be your empty vessel’. I would like to see this without knowing what was to come.

The music is frenetic, and quite angular, and with such a large number of female roles (only 3 men sing) the vocal texture is very soprano heavy. At times the school in the first act seems like a screeching match. I don’t mean this as a criticism though - clearly one of the key themes of the opera is the (dare I say it) hysteria of faith in this kind of theocracy.

After the Opera we went to Gaby’s on Charing Cross Road, an excellent lebanese restaurant, where I had a great salt-beef sandwich before we saw Rachel off at the station and headed off home.

Next up is a night dedicated to the works of Edward Gorey - ‘Gorey End’ starring the Tiger Lillies (of Shockheaded Peter fame) and Kronos Quartet (of just being the greatest contemporary string quartet in the world for the last 20 years fame).

I have no idea what the night will entail, but I know that it will be worth it.

I have finally bitten the bullet, swallowed the kool-aid, and removed the NT partition from my laptop.

Right now I am editing this in lynx, while on another console gentoo is compiling itself. RedHat is still sitting on another partition, but if this goes well I might just start using gentoo instead.

Actually its remarkable how good Movable Type looks in lynx, and google too for that matter. They have both put dome effort in to get it so good.

Why is that important? Well apart from us geeks who occaisionally find ourselves without a windowing OS, there are a whole lot of blind or partially sighted web users whose only experience of your website might be through a reading interface.

If all they hear is [spacer.gif] [spacer.gif] [spacer.gif] then chances are they won’t be back. Its even worse if they only hear [flash animation] click here to skip… :-)