Investigations of a Dog

Last year computer programming was out, but now it’s back in. For me anyway. Having finished my data entry job in October I’ve got more spare computer time, which means I can be more active in digital history again. Some things are different now. Zotero has groups and syncing. The Programming Historian has moved since the last time I looked at it. I can finish my digital edition of Sandall’s history of the 5th Lincolns because Major Teall’s epilogue came out of copyright in the UK at the start of this year. But the biggest change is that I’ve switched my operating system from Windows to Linux. When I built my new desktop PC (codenamed Zen) I installed Ubuntu, and I love it. My laptop (codenamed Orac) still has Windows Vista, but I don’t use it much.

Changing to a completely different operating system might sound like a big step but it was actually really easy. This is partly because most of the applications I use are cross platform. I use Firefox more than any other application (and possibly more than all other applications put together). Don’t think that I spend all my time idly browsing the web: Firefox is vital for my historical research and writing. I use Zotero to store, sort, and access all the bibliographic data plus associated notes and PDFs for my research projects. These can all be synced between my PCs via the Zotero server and my own WebDAV server. My works in progress are now drafted on a private wiki which is also necessarily accessed through my web browser. This is much more powerful and flexible than writing in Word like I used to. Every page has an edit history so I can easily compare versions and revert to an earlier one. Wikilinks make it easy to fit sections together in different orders and link to supplementary information. Thanks to Google my e-mail and RSS feed reader are also on the web. When I’m not using Firefox, I still mostly use cross-platform applications. For the last few years I’ve used oXygen for XML editing and jEdit for find and replace operations, both of which are written in Java. Python can run on Linux, Windows and Macs, and although that doesn’t necessarily make individual scripts cross-platform it doesn’t really matter when I’m writing them for myself. The only Windows specific app that I’ve relied on in the last few years is MS Access. Even that was mainly because I was getting paid good money to put data into it for someone else. For my own research I’ve got some old databases from my PhD research, but all I ever need to do with them is export data into other formats.

Given all this, changing to Linux was not likely to be much of a problem, but that would be understating things. In fact it turned out to be a big advantage. Ubuntu is actually much quicker and easier to install and set up than Windows. It just works out of the box and comes with most of the things that most people need to get started. Open Office, Firefox, and even Python are all pre-installed. Once I’d added my favourite Firefox extensions and synced my Zotero library I was ready to do most of what I need to do. The only tricky things were manually installing a proprietary graphics driver and setting up DVD playback, but even this wasn’t too hard. If you don’t have a powerful new graphics card and don’t need 3D performance out of it, the pre-installed open source driver will be adequate for desktop stuff. Even setting up a network printer was completely painless.

Adding new applications is generally much easier than on Windows. Instead of buying a CD or downloading an executable file you can just access software repositories via a menu and tick boxes to select apps you want to be downloaded and installed. Because most of these apps are free in every sense of the word (like Ubuntu itself) you won’t have to pay money or agree to a licence that sells your soul to the devil. Via the repositories I could easily install Geany (a code editor which I now use for Python programming: I actually like it more than Komodo), gFTP (FTP client), the aforementioned jEdit, and the BeautifulSoup library for Python. It only took a few simple commands at the terminal to install and set up an Apache server with PHP and MySQL for local testing. oXygen had to be downloaded and installed manually as it’s a proprietary application, but the academic licence is cheap and cross-platform: I originally bought it for Windows but my licence automatically carries over to Linux. To get it working properly I had to install the proprietary Sun version of Java, but that was easy to do via the repository. There is a thing called WINE which lets you run some Windows programs in Linux, but so far I’ve only used it for listening to music with Spotify.

With everything set up to my liking, Ubuntu has made me fitter, happier and more productive. It’s faster, more secure, more stable, and less annoying than Windows. You can start using it as soon as the desktop appears on the screen instead of waiting for it to finish starting, or dealing with a patronising storm of pop-ups about how your anti-virus might be out of date or how you’ve got unused icons on your desktop. The Blue Screen of Death is now just an unpleasant memory. Linux users generally don’t have virus scanners or software firewalls because we don’t need them. The only major problem I’ve had so far is when an upgrade to a new version didn’t agree with my proprietary graphics driver and made it impossible to boot to the desktop from the hard disk. Even that was surprisingly easy to recover from, as being able to run the operating system from the LiveCD makes it very easy to rescue any files which aren’t already backed up before doing a clean reinstall (and the reinstall process is quicker and easier than for Windows).

So those are my reasons for preferring Ubuntu to Windows. If you haven’t tried Linux before you can download Ubuntu, burn it onto a CD, and then boot from the CD, which gives you an option to try it out without actually installing it on your PC. And it won’t cost you anything. Meanwhile I’ll be getting on with my research, writing and programming. And blogging about those things…

After a long break, the next Military History Carnival will be at Edge of the American West on 17 January. You can submit posts using the submission form. If you’d like to host a future edition, pleace contact TJ at Battlefield Biker.

Back in July I posted a “review” of the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History. One of the strange, interesting, and almost certainly untrue stories in it was that Cromwell and Charles I had a fight when they were small boys:

Oliver’s uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, was an important man, and lived on an estate much larger than the farm belonging to Oliver’s father. He was in fact so important in the county that on more than one occasion he was visited by the King, James I. On one of these visits the King was accompanied by his son Charles, and whilst Sir Oliver was entertaining the King, the two boys, Oliver Cromwell and Prince Charles, were sent into the garden to play. According to the story, the boys quarrelled and fought, and Oliver was the winner.

As I mentioned, one of the suspicious things about this story is the complete absence of Henry Prince of Wales, Charles’s older, more militaristic, and more Calvinist brother. That led me to believe that the story must have originated after Henry (who died as a teenager leaving Charles as heir to the throne) had faded from popular memory.

Now I’ve found a new lead. I’ve been reading Vernon Snow’s Essex the Rebel, a biography of the third Earl of Essex. During my PhD I read the bits about the civil war but skipped the rest. Now I’m going through the whole thing because I’m interested in all of Essex’s life. Page 43 mentions that at some time from 1609 to 1611 (dates are surprisingly vague in this book) Essex had an argument with Prince Henry while they were playing tennis. Henry called him “the son of a traitor”, and he responded by hitting the prince on the head with a tennis racket! James I seems to have Stoically accepted the assault on his son, telling him that “He who did strike him then, would be sure, with more violent blows, to strike his enemy in times to come”. This prophecy didn’t quite come true, as Essex became the military leader of the armed rebellion against Charles I in 1642. Like Prince Henry, Essex the Lord General has largely faded from popular memory. Just as Henry was overshadowed by Charles, Essex was overshadowed by Cromwell. If the tennis court incident is one of the influences on the story of Charles and Oliver fighting each other, this could be yet another case of Cromwell stealing Essex’s thunder.

Welcome to the 56th edition of Carnivalesque, the pre-modern history blog carnival. This is an early-modern edition, covering roughly 1500-1800. (more…)

David Lawrence’s The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 is the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. At £118 it was more than twice the previous record holder, Barbara Donagan’s War In England, but I really need it and it’s not in any of the libraries I can borrow books from. It turned out to be worth reading because it’s really good and vindicates some of the things I’ve written about drill books and cavalry tactics. (more…)

I’ve been reading Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture by Catherine Roach, which is really good and has made me think about lots of things. These are some random observations about it or inspired by it. (more…)

The new ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque is now up at Bavardess (with a special Halloween theme).

The next early-modern edition will be right here at Investigations of a Dog on 22nd November.

It’s now three years since I started this blog (by some coincidence I started the day before Tenured Radical). There isn’t much to reflect on since the last anniversary as it’s been a fairly quiet year. This year I seem to have got more political (but when is anything not political?). Looking back at my style of writing three years ago I can’t believe how reasonable and equivocal it is. I might also be slightly less postmodern. Since reading Judith Bennett I’ve realised that strident empiricism can be the perfect companion for strident feminism. The Military History Carnival seems to have more or less died, and it looks like history carnivals in general might be on the way out. Not organising a carnival is kind of a relief as it’s freed me from the shackles of even-handedness. For me, the most exciting development in the history blogosphere was the horse in history and culture group blog, which grew out of that most rare of things – a genuinely interesting and enjoyable conference. And all the cool kids are on Twitter now, but I’m not.

This week I decided to make a few changes to my blog. Most radical is that the blogroll is now gone. It occurred to me that it wasn’t much use because it kept getting out of sync with what I was actually reading, and I doubt that many people take much notice of it anyway. Instead I’ve imported my shared items from Google Reader, which should give a more accurate impression of what I’m reading and what I think is good. Also there’s now a Publication Archive in the page links on the sidebar. As it’s well over a year since my first article was published in War In History the terms of my contract allow me to publish a self-archived version. In this case you can find two versions: as well as the final version, which is more or less the same as the published version, I’ve uploaded the original submission. If you’ve got too much time on your hands it might be interesting to compare them to see how peer-review and revisions changed the article and made it better. If you want to cite the article you’ll still need to use the official version, not least because the page numbers are different. There’s always room for more improvement (I wish I’d engaged with Malcolm Wanklyn properly, mentioned more women, and not used the word “bias”), but I still think it’s not bad for a first attempt.

As for the future, the coming year could be the last year of Investigations of a Dog. After the fourth anniversary I might want to stop it and do Something Completely Different. Or I might not. In the meantime things probably won’t change much.

The next edition of carnivalesque will be an ancient and medieval edition at Bavardess on 31st October. Nominate your favourite ancient/medieval posts from September and October by completing the ancient/medieval nomination form, or by emailing them to bavardess AT gmail DOT com.

The next early-modern edition will be right here at Investigations of a Dog in November (only a year late – I’ll try not to injure myself this time!). Send submissions to jenna@4-lom.com or use the early-modern nomination form.

Last week I watched The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant. There’s not much I can say about it as a historical drama as I’m not familiar with the true story that it’s supposed to be based on. In general terms there are some things which I thought it got right and which you don’t necessarily see so much in more traditional costume dramas. Oppression and inequality were shown working as a system which dominated everyone rather than being the fault of individuals. There were no pantomime villains. The governor, lieutenant and marines had varying degrees of power and privilege, but they weren’t really free and clearly wanted to be somewhere else. Women were shown making patriarchal bargains to survive in difficult circumstances. Everyone from the governor to Mary made perfectly rational decisions to do really horrible things. As Marx said, we don’t choose the circumstances in which we have to make our choices.

But what really struck me was how similar it was to 70s science fiction series Blakes 7 (like Dexys Midnight Runners it shouldn’t have an apostrophe – Wikipedia is wrong!). A disparate group of convicts is transported to a penal colony and escapes in a boat/spaceship. None of them is unambiguously good or bad. They don’t like or trust each other but necessity forces them to work together. The only thing they have in common is a need to be free from an oppressive empire. You probably get that in lots of stories, but there were some more specific things. The scene on the beach where Will gets shot was very, very similar to the final scene of Blakes 7. Cox says almost the same things that Vila says about being forced to join the convicts. Will even has Avon’s smile! And Mary deciding to leave Sam is not too different from Avon deciding to kill Dr Plaxton by turning the engine on before she can get clear – in both cases their ruthlessness saves everyone else and proves them to be capable leaders but not nice people. So I wonder if the makers of the Mary Bryant series were consciously or unconsciously influenced by Blakes 7. Obviously it can’t all be a Blakes 7 rip-off because it’s also based on history. Which leads me to wonder whether Terry Nation knew about and was influenced by the story of the real Mary Bryant when he came up with Blakes 7. That would be an interesting case of intertextual relationships: a science fiction series influenced by historical events which goes on to influence a historical drama based on the same history. Intertextuality can be complicated like that.