The official website of Armand Halbert: Software Engineer
Cassandra at the Wedding . By Dorothy Baker. 256 pages. According to New York Magazine , everyone is reading Cassandra at the Wedding . Based on the number of Goodreads ratings, this is not actually true 1 , which is a shame because it is quite good. Reissued by a few publishers since its initial publication in 1962, it has accumulated a quiet, durable reputation, the kind of book passed between…
Game Engine Black Book: Doom . By Fabien Sanglard. 429 pages. Doom. The game that popularized the term “deathmatch”. The game that made modding accessible to millions of players. The game that killed productivity across thousands of offices around the world. It wasn’t the first first-person shooter (for example, Doom’s developer id Software had released Wolfenstein 3D just a year prior) but it was…
I use Jekyll, Markdown and Vim to write content for my blog. Rather than wrestling with a full-fledged CMS or writing raw HTML, I can use a human readable markup language to write my posts. Vim is my editor of choice, and while I like the friendliness of GUI markdown tools, I miss my shortcuts, autocomplete and plugins in vim. Having a minimalistic text editor gives me an environment that is…
I love reading blog posts that go into a subject in depth. So nothing disappoints me more to find a part 3 of a blog post and not know where to find part 1 and 2. I can look at the blog archive, but if it’s mixed in with other posts, I may not be able to find it. The author sometimes links to the previous post at the beginning of each one, which is better, but then I don’t know if there’s a fourth…
Invasion of the Body Snatchers . By Jack Finney. 228 pages. Jack Finney’s 1955 novel is one of those works that has seeped into popular consciousness without many people watching or reading the source material. The plot is a familiar one: aliens invade earth not with a loud show of technological terror, but quietly and slowly, replacing people one at a time. Author Jack Finney denied writing…
Nightwood . By Djuna Barnes. 180 pages. To say that Nightwood will appeal primarily to readers of poetry does not mean that it is not a novel, but that it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it. No less a luminary than T.S. Eliot provided the introduction to Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel. He wasn’t kidding when he said it was more poetry than prose.…
Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool . By Emily Oster, PhD. 326 pages. Mommy forums are full of arguments about what is right and wrong for your child. What should your policy be for screen time? What’s the best way to approach potty training? Most of these arguments are based around ancedata. Worse, they often come with a lot of judgment…
Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know . By Emily Oster. 328 pages. When Emily Oster found out she was pregnant, she immediately began researching the best ways to take care of her child in utero. On the internet, there are a lot of opinions and not a lot of data, even among the medical community. For example, she wanted a cup of coffee…
Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront . By Lois Wille. 185 pages. Public Ground - A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or Other Obstruction whatever. With these words, the founders of Chicago declared that the most valuable land of the city, its shoreline, would be reserved for the people. Of the thirty miles of Lake Michigan shoreline…
Before 400 million years ago, before the brutal winters, Chicago was once a land of perpetual summer. Warm, shallow seas covered the entire Mississippi Valley. Where skyscrapers now rise, coral reefs once bloomed. These reefs would turn into limestone, providing a solid foundation for those skyscrapers. Over the last million years, ice sheets swept down the valley and receded, draining Lake…