Saturday, 12 July 2014
Theatre
Wolf Hall / Bring Up the Bodies
I tend to avoid popular things, and don't read much fiction. So I was probably in the minority in the audience today, having read neither Wolf Hall nor Bring Up the Bodies, Hillary Mantel's blockbuster books on which these two plays are based.
I'm also not exactly a big fan of history. I'd much rather live in the present.
But today's Emma's birthday, and I knew taking her to a double-bill in the West End would be the perfect gift.
It turned out to be the perfect day all round. It's been years since I've been to a West End theatre, and from the moment we entered the auditorium I felt a tingle of expectation and excitement that caught me off guard.
The plays were fantastic! Against a minimal set the actors let props and costume define the boundaries of the many scenes. Sometimes two "camera angles" on one scene are present on stage simultaneously. At other times, a scene in flashback flows around the reminiscing characters. In fact "flow" is probably the best way to describe the motion of the entire experience. The plays felt lyrical, echoing each other and weaving around the storyline effortlessly.
I thoroughly recommend both, but if you've only the stamina for one three-hour play, make it the first. I suspect you'll be back for the second anyway.
It's almost enough to make me want to read the books.
Wednesday, 2 July 2014
Books , O'Reilly Reviews , Tech
IPv6 Essentials
A good "leg-up" ★★★☆☆
There's a fundamental change occurring on the Internet: the venerable Internet Protocol by which all nodes communicate is being replaced with a new version, IPv6. Silvia Hagen's IPv6 Essentials provides engineers with a good leg-up to understanding the wide-ranging impacts of the new protocol.
That said, there's still a lot of legwork for the reader to do. This is not a gentle tutorial. By necessity it covers many technical areas in significant depth, sometimes bordering on being just a little bit too dry in its presentation. With so much material to cover, I'm sure the author faced a chicken-and-egg dilemma about what to present first. I imagine reading it a second time will be a much easier prospect.
The shining gem is chapter eight, which describes Mobile IPv6. The ability for a device to migrate seamlessly from one network to another without breaking sessions might not seem to be an "essential" part of the core protocol suite, but by reading the details I developed a genuine admiration for how the individual elements of IPv6 work together.
There's a wealth of information in this book. Sometimes the structure irked me, and I would have liked more tabular presentation that can be used for reference. However, it's bang up-to-date — a good thing since many technologies recommended over the past twenty years to aid the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 are no longer recommended, as the author points out.
It's undoubtedly be a book I come back to regularly as the transition gathers momentum.
[Note: I received a free electronic copy of this book through the O'Reilly Reader Review Program.]