Recently in Books Category

I had never planned to be a web-developer. I just sort of fell into it, which has worked out well overall, but I’ve had a rough time learning what is generally considered best practices in the industry. The first company I was working for had been built on virtually no infrastructure, by people whom I honestly feel knew a lot less than even I did. The application was poorly constructed, hard to reuse, and the servers configuration left a lot to be desired when our webmaster left, leaving me the sole IT staff of a company that wanted to be an eCommerce powerhouse. It was difficult to learn best practices, when the code-base which has been thrust upon you is in such a frightening state of disarray.

The code wasn’t in source-control, edits were made against the production site. There were multiple copies of each include file, typically only one of which was actually in use. The code was the best example of PHP Spaghetti Code I had ever seen. Whenever anyone says that PHP is a terrible language, this was exactly the application they were talking about (it was closed source, so I’m being a bit facetious, but it was awful). For a lot of reasons I wasn’t very disappointed when my life took me away from that place and into my current position. Sure the technology was classic ASP and VBScript, neither of which I knew, but the software was at least well designed. Within two weeks, I was contributing code changes, fixing bugs, and implementing features. Still no source control, but we’re close to fixing that.

I knew I needed to know more. The problems that we typically face are rarely real scaling problems, we do things that work well for our relatively small data sets and relatively small user-bases, that I know wouldn’t serve us forever if we expected real growth. But we’re a niche internal service, and we’ve got plenty of room to grow for the time being. Still, I needed to know more, so I found this book, Building Scalable Web Sites by Flickr engineer Cal Henderson.

For those unfamiliar with Flickr, it’s the photo sharing site that has over 4000 photos uploaded every minute as of this writing. It’s enormous. Clearly, Cal and his team know a thing or two about scaling web applications to the massive scale. And it shows. This book is written very generally, talking more about things you should consider than actually walking through building an application, and it walks it’s way through the stack from hardware to software to the NOC you host in. It’s best piece of advice is simple: build the site you need right now, not the site you hope to be next year.

The book is a little older, having been published in 2006, but a lot has happened in the web space in the last two years. We’ve had the launch of Google’s App Engine, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and Microsoft’s Windows Azure, which will have an enormous impact on the Web Applications space, because now you can host applications that scale nearly infinitely without ever investing in hardware, but I still believe that applications can and will outgrow these services, and even the hardware considerations discussed by Henderson will be useful.

More than that, however, is the discussion of how to design the software. Henderson talks again and again about a layered approach to application design, whether it be the business logic to support multiple front-ends, the database caching system, or the server farm in general, Henderson does an excellent job of walking you through all the considerations you might need in order to build the infrastructure for a successful web application which can scale with your company. A lot of what Henderson has to say seems like common sense once you’ve read it, but most really good ideas do, in my experience.

I now understand why Remember the Milk practically lists this book as required reading for their job applicants, and I suspect a lot of others feel the same way. Even if you’re planning on deploying to one of the newer cloud-services, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It won’t guarantee you success, nothing can, but it will at least make sure you’re as armed as you can be to enter the playing field on a fair level.

I’ve been a fan of Neal Stephenson’s since I first picked up Snow Crash. His books have all just been excellent sci-fi adventure stories, where he creates a compelling world to set the action in and fills it with interesting characters. Unfortunately, many authors miss one or the other of those points, so I feel it’s important to stress. Even The Big U, which was probably the weakest of his novels, did a good job with both sides of this equation. So, when Anathem was announced, and the trailer was released, I was excited.

Now, I had almost expected that this novel was going to follow in a similar theme to Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle, in that it would be historical fiction centered around the Shaftoes and the Waterhouses. While my understanding is that Stephenson intends to revisit that timeline, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Anathem had nothing to do with that timeline and was fresh and new and refreshing.

So what is Anathem? As the trailer says, it takes place on a World that is not Earth, in a Time that is not Now (okay, so that’s a thinly veiled rehash, luckily, I don’t think Stephenson wrote it). It takes place on a world called Arbre, which is similar to ours, or rather, it appears it was similar to ours at one point. At some time in the distant past on Arbre, the average joe became too afraid of Science, and what was happening in the world, so they took all the smarter-than-average people (and orphans) and crammed them into huge citadels, known as Concents, where these people, who became known as the Avout, were free to pursue their scholarly desires, outside of the control of the outside (Saecular) world.

Further, the Avout had separated themselves based on dedication, as well as taint by the Saecular world into four sects. One sect could leave the Concent every year, and was similar to a college in that wealthier, educated people tend to come for a while to study and then return to normal life. Another leaves every decade, another every century, and one every millennia. Further, these groups can only intermingle during a ten day yearly celebration (but only if their group would be able to leave the grounds in the first place). The story follows one young avout, Erasmas, and begins the day before the new year in 3890. Erasmas, being a Decinarian will be able to leave the Concent for the first time in ten years.

The world inside the concent (Intramuros) seems very monastic. Everyone wears robes, they study and discuss, they sleep in cells (rarely in the same cell from night to night), they grow their own food, and take turns at the chores necessary for the running of the concent.

The world outside the concent (Extramuros) seems awfully similar to our world of today, with bright screens, cell phones everywhere, and huge interest in movies and television. The only difference is that many of the people who would do science are hidden away, where the public feels they can do no harm. At one point, Erasmas comments on how very little progress has been made Extramuros in the nearly 4000 years since the Avout were locked away from society.

However, the world needs it’s educated people from time to time, and as this would be an awfully boring novel otherwise, the book is centered around one of those times. The Saecular world becomes aware of an alien spaceship orbiting Arbre, and calls for a Convox, a gathering of Avout from across the globe, to determine what to do about it. Erasmas and his friends are called into this Convox.

The book, like Stephenson’s others, takes a fascinating direction in that it occasionally digresses into Mathematical proofs and the nature of the universe. Unlike Stephenson’s other novels, some of the longer proofs, which are generally less important, are put into the appendix of the novel, however, I would suggest reading them. It’s a peculiarity of Stephenson’s. Whereas Tolkien would take a dozen pages to describe a landscape and some bizarre historical tidbit which carried little relevance to the story at hand, Stephenson will occasionally do that with Mathematical Proofs. While some of the exposition can seem tedious, it’s absolutely worth following it through for the story.

Anathem is not Stephenson’s best work. For that, I’d probably have to say The Baroque Cycle. But the Baroque Cycle was three novels the length of Anathem, and that may well have something to do with it. However, while it’s not his best, it ranks easily on the high end of my scale of Stephenson’s novels. It’s a great read, an interesting world, and the philosophical questions asked regarding the nature of the universe, and how we can describe it are interesting.

The climax of the story has a rather frustrating element, surrounding a Millenarian by the name of Jad, but while it feels as if there were loose ends surrounding that character, it was clearly done purposefully. Stephenson loves to introduce characters who have a seemingly mystical understanding of the Universe, and he never goes as deeply into that character as you might wish. In Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle, it’s Enoch Root, here it’s Jad. Many will likely interpret these characters as having traces of the Divine, it’s certainly easy to do so.

I’m not sure that’s the only interpretation. It seems to me that Stephenson is arguing for the ability of Man, if Man could completely understand the universe, to possess a level of control over the Universe that exists outside of technology. As if, by possessing a certain level of understanding, Man could be as God. To go Biblical with the idea: Adam and Eve, in most translations I’m familiar with, ate but a single bite each of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, giving them some understanding of the world. The serpent had told them that to eat of the Tree of Knowledge would make them as powerful as God. The little bit of knowledge they’d accepted had scared them, and they stopped, but if they had kept going…

Even if you’re not interested in the Math, Science, and Philosophy presented in the novel, the story is still a fun story, with interesting characters. But the meat of the story is definitely in the questions it asks, or perhaps more so in the questions it chooses not to ask directly.

Cory Doctorow is an interesting author. He’s just one of many people trying to make a living writing Science Fiction, and while he’s not my favorite author of all time, I have enjoyed his books. What makes Doctorow interesting is that he’s one of the very few people who seek to make a living in content production who seems to ‘get it’. Every book Doctorow has ever had published has been released for free on his website. Not only that, but they’re all licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA-US license.

What’s this mean? It means that we’re free to share, remix, and create derivative works of any of Doctorow’s books, as long as we attribute the original work as being his, don’t use our creation to make money, and license our contribution under the same license. If you’re not familiar with what the Creative Commons is, and why it’s important, the FAQ is a good place to start.

©ontent is a collection of essays, editorials, and op-eds that Doctorow has written for various publications over the recent years, where he addresses this issue of Content Production in the Internet Age. The point he makes is simple: the way the major producers are going about this is all wrong. I happen to agree. As I said, Doctorow has released free, re-mixable eBooks of all his books online. As part of that, the books have had something like a 30:1 download to sale ratio. On the surface, that looks kind of bleak. In reality, Doctorow argues, every last one of his books has outperformed the sales expectations of his publisher, so sales are better than he had any ‘right’ to expect.

The most relevant question, and the one for which there is no means to answer, is whether or not this would have been true without the free download. I agree with Doctorow’s ultimate statement, that most likely it wouldn’t be. Book Actuaries have made careers out of estimating how many copies of books to print based on statistical models of how well a book is likely to sell. It’s their job, it’s what they do. I’m sure these guys absolutely love being wrong from time to time, but for them to have been consistently wrong…it’s statistically unlikely, unless there is some form of positive correlation between the eBooks and the paper book sales.

The point that rises time and again throughout ©ontent is simple. Content Producers need to stop looking at content ‘piracy’ as lost sales. People who pirate media, more often than not, never would have paid for it anyway. And for Doctorow, the 30:1 ratio, he views more as if 30 people looked at his book in the bookstore, and one out of every 30 actually bought it, the publisher would be ridiculously ecstatic. And they are. Music is a similar thing. In the early days of Napster, an enormous amount of music was traded, but what doesn’t usually come up at that time, is that music sales were very strong during that time. Sure, not every song downloaded was met with a CD Sale, and there may have been more downloads than there were sales, but not everyone who looks at that CD is going to buy it anyway.

I’ve had this happen before. I began downloading Firefly back in 2004, and after watching one or two episodes, I ran out and bought the DVDs, at least partially because they’re reasonably priced. A lot of other shows, I’ve downloaded to watch, but I haven’t bought because I believe the price is too high for the physical media, and if the digital version is available at a reasonable price (rare), it’s got DRM. I’m a Linux user, I don’t have access to a legal means to view that media, so I don’t buy it.

What Doctorow argues is that DRM damages the industry as a whole. DRM is not hard to bypass by users who wish to, and for users who want to do the right thing and pay for media, they resent the seemingly arbitrary limitations put on their freedom to use the media where they wish. I see this argument regularly.

“But DRM doesn’t have to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals! It’s like a speedbump!”

While average individuals may not be able to break DRM on their own, they are generally smart enough to search Google to find tools to do the cracking for them. But more appropriate the ‘average individual’ is an honest individual, and they’re not interested in ripping people off. They’re perfectly fine with paying for media, and will do so provided the media is good enough, and the restrictions on it’s use are reasonable. Unfortunately, those two caveats rarely apply.

I’m going to have more posts over the next few weeks talking about the issues of DRM and Trusted Computing, but I’d fully suggest reading Doctorow’s book. Not sure you want to buy it? It’s freely available. If you like it, buy it, or do what I’m doing, donate a copy to your local library. It’s a good collection of essays, and I’d suggest anyone interested in the logistics of Content Publishing and DRM read through it.

In 1949, George Orwell, a British national who had lived through two world wars and a hideous economic depression, lacked any real faith in the future of Humanity. Or at least, it would seem that was the case, considering that the author completed his career with Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eight Four. Both paint humanity, and it’s future, in a highly negative light. In Animal Farm, the allegory regards the willingness of the few to take everything from the many, and the willingness of the many to simply hand it over.

Nineteen Eight Four takes the allegory further, painting a dystopian world where a small group of people (actually, three small groups), control almost every aspect of a larger, but still relatively small group who does all the dirty work of the Party. Below them, making up the majority of the population are the unwashed masses, the factory workers, the garbage men, and so on. The numbers are not so different from global society today, as far as hierarchies go, but the level of control exercised by the Inner Party (roughly 5% of the population), is frightening.

There are many who feel that the story of 1984 is one that we are still moving toward. Many of Orwell’s contemporaries joined him in writing these Anti-Utopias, which painted a frighteningly depressing view of humanities future. After the events of the early part of the 20th century, who could blame them.

Frankly, the last seven years have shown more movement to this world of completely supervision than any period of time. And technology has progressed to the point where Orwell’s vision, wasn’t even clear enough. Unfortunately, people have short memories, and where fear is involved, logic is often in short supply. In many ways, that was the most frightening part of the world Orwell created. The Inner Party did everything they could to keep the masses afraid, so that the masses would continue to let them do what they were doing, because it seemed that they were trying to help.

Fear is a powerful motivator, but the problem with motivation by fear is that it can be easily manipulated, and turned into something far more self-destructive.

I find some irony in that the English Socialism (Ingsoc) of the world of 1984 seemed to center around England, both because of England’s bent toward socialism politically, but also because England, far more even than this country, have taken steps toward universal surveillance of the populace. Just like Animal Farm before it, 1984 is a cry against the evils of Socialism, but it also paints a compelling image of why Socialism may be unavoidable.

The problem with Socialism is that it sounds good. It always has. But often, the people most vehemently speaking out for Socialist goals, have the least intention of living by them.

Because of Canada’s Socialized Health Care, the only Canadians who can get timely and good health care, are those who can afford to come to the US.

Al Gore told the world that they needed to cut down their energy production, while he and his family were using 20 times that of the average family. He buys ‘carbon credits’ from a company he owns himself. I’ll spare the continuing rant about that scam.

Socialism doesn’t work, not on a large scale. It never has. It never will.

For me, the worst part about the story, was the way that Orwell masterfully told of Winston’s (the protagonist) increasing understanding of the flaws of the system. His unhappiness at his understanding of the situation, and his desire the set things right, to break down the Party. The first two-thirds of the story do an amazing job of making us feel like there is hope. Like the world, which was allowed to get this way, can still be saved.

Perhaps that simply wouldn’t have fit Orwell’s needs. Perhaps he really believed what he wrote. In many ways, I think it was the latter. For Orwell, the society he wrote was beyond saving. In the end, they break Winston down so completely that there is absolutely nothing left of the man who hated the Party. The man who wanted the world to change. And that’s the danger. Using fear, misinformation, guilt, hatred…we can be manipulated. We can be changed.

We aren’t there yet. Society, though it has slipped in recent years, has not yet slipped that far. In some ways, I wonder if we are savable. Just two weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my parents, where my mother actually uttered the phrase, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about.”

My own Mother. An educated, professional woman. Such is the battle we face. If freedom is to be preserved, we must all do our part to show people why they should desire it, before they lose it completely.

I’ve spoken about Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother here before. If you’re in Australia, copyright has run out on Orwell’s works, allowing them to be distributed freely. I’ve already had my mother working on Little Brother.

I try to have hope that the world will be different, better, tomorrow. Some days that hope wanes, and all I can see is the is the face of Big Brother. Do some reading on your own. Remind yourself why freedom is important. Maybe then you’ll understand.

Author Cory Doctorow is apparently fairly well known in the Tech arena for his fiction. Frankly, until the last month or so, I’d never heard of him, until I’d heard some people talking about his latest novel, Little Brother, a novel targeted toward young adults. Of course, what really caught my eye, was that the book was being distributed under the Creative Commons, as are all of Doctorow’s novels.

This book is a cry that many in the Technology and Security arenas have been making for years. This book is a statement against those who would have us give up liberty, with the illusion that they are making us safer.

The story takes place in the near future, whatever future doesn’t really matter, as the story begins in a world very much like ours. It focuses on a 17-year old boy, Marcus Yallow, who takes part in the Hacker Underground, his innate understanding of security making him feel superior to those around him, who simply give into the increased surveillance and suspicion leveled at them. Young people in particular.

He’s a pretty standard hacker geek. Likes taking things apart, learning how they tick, modifying them to his bidding. And he’s into ARGs, which places him out of school on one fateful day when his hometown of San Francisco is bombed, the Bay Bridge (and the BART tunnel under it) being destroyed, leaving thousands dead. He and his friends are too close, and after nearly dying in the crush of the BART station, they break onto the surface, only to be arrested and detained by the Department of Homeland Security, simply because of where they were found.

Marcus quickly finds himself in deep trouble, because he refuses to give up access to his phone to the DHS agent questioning him, resulting in five days of detainment, interrogation, and humiliation until he broke and gave them everything. His friends, for the most part, made it out easier, as they tried to hide less than he had. Eventually, they decided to let Marcus go, though not without threats that he was under suspicion. However, one of Marcus’ friends, his best friend, didn’t get out of the prison. He’d been injured, and wasn’t ready for release. By the time he’d healed, he’d been detained so long that the DHS wouldn’t dare releasing him.

The set up is a little over-the-top, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Look at the stories out of Guantanamo Bay, the in depth discussions of whether or not certain activities constitute torture.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I supported the election of George W. Bush in 2000, and I voted for him again in 2004. Given the choices, I still believe that it was the best choice. However, I’ve never supported the actions taken after 9/11 in the name of National Security. The PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, increases in Data Mining, the list of activities done in the name of National Security which chip away at our liberties is long, and in the half a decade since September 11, 2001, it has only gotten longer.

Marcus Yallow’s San Francisco quickly becomes a intense caricature of our country today. People get picked up off the street simply because their BART travels don’t match the ‘normal’ patterns, camera’s show up in classrooms, teachers lose their jobs for being ‘dissidents’, everyone is under suspicion all the time. And most people, unsurprisingly, are so scared that they let it happen.

Marcus Yallow, having kept his incarceration secret, doesn’t. He starts up a network within the Internet, where people can post anonymously, and operate in a much more difficult to track manner. Through this, Marcus and the others begin making things difficult on the citizens of San Francisco by exposing the weaknesses in the DHS’ methods, and causing the DHS to greatly inconvenience thousands of innocent people. The DHS identifies him as a Terrorist, Marcus feels that they’re the Terrorists.

The book isn’t the best writing I’ve ever read. And the audience is clearly younger than I am. However, it is still a good book. The story is entertaining, well told, and most of all relevant. I would argue that it is the most relevant book written in the last few years. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the politics, but the core message, that Freedom is more important than anything, and particularly that trading Freedom for Security is dangerous, and doesn’t work.

Read this book. It’s available for free. I even have it mirrored. But after you finish, if you’re anything like me at least, you’ll be looking for a place to buy it. This book should be required reading in Middle School, as we need to teach our young people the value of Freedom. Freedom is what has made this country what it is, and for the last seven years that Freedom has been under attack in an incredibly number of ways. You may not agree with everything in it, but please, read this book. Pass it around. It’s that important.

O’Reilley just published a new book by well-known JavaScript Guru Douglas Crockford. JavaScript: The Good Parts is a excellent introduction to using JavaScript in an effective, maintainable manner, that will be easy to use and maintain into the future.

Crockford pulls no punches about the JavaScript in this book. He freely admits that it was released before it was ready, that there are a number of poorly considered, and some just plain dangerous features, especially in the wrong hands. He describes JavaScript as “Lisp in C’s clothing,” which is an apt description. JavaScript has hallmarks of both a Functional and a Procedural language, but the biggest dangers come from trying to use the Functional elements as if they were Procedural. Something which is far too easy to do.

JavaScript: The Good Parts was written for your average Procedural programmer (ie, most of us). It isn’t about the DOM, it isn’t about writing Web Applications. It’s about using JavaScript as an effective programming environment. He begins by running through the grammar of the language, giving a thorough overview of all the features of the language.

This is followed with a discussion of JavaScript’s Object model. JavaScript’s objects are dangerous because it seems enough like a Object-Oriented language to be dangerous. The prototype system is unlike any other object system, and while it can be used as if it weren’t, doing so tends to be incredibly slow. Luckily, JavaScript objects, due to JavaScript’s functional nature, are incredibly powerful, allowing complex data models to be built, easily, and every object can be easily extended to add new functionality. In fact, a fair amount of the book are convenient methods to be added to the core objects to add functionality that probably should have been there in the first place.

Most useful to me, was a discussion on inheritance. In JavaScript everything is a global. Worse, members of a class are all public, so there isn’t any directly obvious means to keep variables private. Luckily, JavaScript has an answer for that. The closure. By writing a function that creates and returns an object, you can declare variables inside the function which will be accessible to functions inside the object you return. Better yet, they remain accessible as long as the object you return is in scope.

JavaScript has it’s weaknesses. But it is the language of the web. I don’t see that changing. Crockford’s book is a great introduction in how to use JavaScript effectively. Just because JavaScript has a reputation as a toy language, doesn’t mean that real engineering isn’t possible in it. The direction the web has taken in the last few years has really proved that JavaScript is a powerful language, with powerful tools. You just need to use it correctly.

If you’re touching the web at all, you owe it to yourself to buy this book and read it. Hell, read it a few times. It gets better each time you read it.

At Boise Code Camp last month, I was able to get a free copy of O’Reilly’s C# 3.0 Pocket Guide, Second Edition, written by Joseph Albahari and Ben Albahari. Though O’Reilley publish the book in it’s “Pocket Guides” series, at 230 pages, it hardly counts. Still, the book has been a staple in my briefcase ever sense.

The book doesn’t only focus on C# 3.0 features, serving more as a comprehensive guide to C# language features, from the standard issues like Properties, to the fairly large number of pre-processor directives available. The 3.0 features might receive a bit more coverage than the older features, but even if you’d never touched C# before today, this book will serve as an excellent desktop companion to the language.

Unfortunately, since it is a general overview, it may not contain all the information you require to solve a problem. For instance, it’s section on Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is pretty short, which pretty much begs you as the reader to find a more in depth reference if you’re trying to get all you can out of LINQ (and if you’re a web-developer you really should be). Incidentally, the authors of this reference, wrote another Pocket Guide on just LINQ, which weighs in at 161 pages, which I suppose indicates I should be glad LINQ got the quality of coverage it did in this more general guide.

I’ve been a fan of C# since I first started looking at the language (which wasn’t until the Mono was well under way). It makes some excellent compromises between C/C++ and Java, and is fairly powerful. These days I’m tending more and more toward dynamic languages like Perl and Python, but C# is still generally a pleasure to program in, except for the ever expanding and increasingly obtuse .NET Framework Microsoft keeps churning out extensions to. To be fair to Microsoft, the .NET programming I’ve been doing lately has been against SQL Server and SharePoint, but those APIs could have been much better designed than they are.

If you do anything in C#, this reference would be an excellent one to keep on your desk. It’s clear, concise, with clean code examples. The authors do an excellent job of organizing the information and presenting it in a manner that any experienced programmer can easily follow what’s going on, and depending on your level of programming experience, this book can even serve to teach you the language.

.NET is a solid technology, and C# is the flagship language for the technology. If you’re doing any work in .NET, or simply want to learn the language for your own enrichment, the C# 3.0 Pocket Reference will be excellent to keep around.

Paul Graham has an interesting story. After earning a Ph.D from Harvard, Mr. Graham went to Europe to study Painting. After a few years of this, he returned to the States to start a new company in 1995 called Viaweb, the first web-based application service provider, who’s product was purchased by Yahoo! in 1998 and re-branded as Yahoo! Stores.

Since then, Mr. Graham has taken to writing essays on his website, which O’Reilley helped compile in 2004 into the book Hackers & Painters. The essays which make up the book consist of Graham’s experiences ranging from being a Nerd in High School (and what that means), to his thoughts on programming languages, and where they’re heading.

The essays are well written, using language that even lay-people should be able to follow. He doesn’t pull punches on the technical details, including quite a few code-samples in his discussion of Programming Langauges and where they’re headed. He argues that all Languages are slowly converging on LISP.

While I am far from fluent in any LISP dialect, I know just enough to be able to read the code, but I can appreciate what he means. LISP was a technology that was decades ahead of it’s time. You could do interesting things with LISP back in the ’60s, but the execution times were simply unacceptable for most business practices. My first programming language that I was truly fluent in was C, and now I wonder if that perhaps wasn’t a disadvantage, as I see how languages have moved more and more dynamic in the last decade. However, my favorite languages are more dynamic, like Perl and Python, which provide me with the power of the REPL, but a syntax that is more comfortable than that of LISP. I really do need to study LISP further, however.

The book isn’t really about the advantages of LISP, and the fact that languages appear to be implementing more and more LISP-isms every day. While that discussion was interesting, Mr. Graham offered interesting insight on the social and psychological effects of intelligence, and of how the Computer Revolution has changed the nature of business. He opens with the papers of sociology, in which he is highly critical of the modern education system, likening it to the prison system in this country. To a certain degree, I understand what he’s referring to. Young people are not particularly valued in this country, relegated to menial tasks and a daily situation where we’d been forced to create our own society which was anything but a meritocracy (unless you count the merit of athletic ability). His observation that perhaps the reason we require kids to read The Lord of Flies was to try to show students that the society we’d created was dangerous was, if true, definitely lost of me and my contemporaries, but I sometimes wonder if my High School experience was less negative than Graham’s.

More interesting was the insight that Graham was unique in being able to offer between Hackers and Painters, how great Hackers tend to resemble, at least mentally, to the Great Painters of the past. I’m apt to agree with that, but I think that it goes beyond Hackers and Painters to the more general class of people that are now being called Makers. Makers are are people who simply wish to create, whatever their medium is. The need to create is within everyone, but for some people it’s such a driving force that it appears to be the dominant aspect of their personalities. And Makers are always the most critical of their own work. If Michaelangelo were alive today, he could no doubt point out every last flaw in his work on the Sistine Chapel, just as a master carpenter can see flaws in every piece he’s ever constructed, flaws which no others can see.

If you’ve ever thought about starting your own company, you owe it to yourself to buy this book. Graham acknowledges that he was one of the lucky ones with Viaweb. Still, he acknowledges that Viaweb succeeded because they did things differently than so many companies that came after them. They did, where others promised. They had little in Venture Capitalist money, which they didn’t need because of their release- early-and-release-often design philosophy. They would sometimes push out half-a-dozen of features and dozens of bugfixes in a single day, simply because they depended upon their swiftness to market and the feedback they’d receive from their users.

While Graham’s business experience is particularly well suited to the web, anyone looking to start a business should consider his lessons. He’s absolutely right, that small companies have a huge advantage due to their lack of overhead. Tech Support guys could always walk down the hall to talk to the programmers when a customer was on the phone. He’s honest, small companies win because they move faster than big companies, big companies win because they can outspend (or simply buy) small companies. Startups are risky, most fail with nothing to show for the effort, but those that win, win big.

Even if you don’t agree with everything Paul Graham says, which I don’t think you should, his essays are still well thought out and written, and his points are worth reading. The book is fantastic, and a must read for anyone who’s even entertained the thought of founding a high-tech company in this day and age.

Scott Adams, the creator of the venerable Dilbert comic, presents to the world, his “thought experiment” God’s Debris in free e-book PDF form. What kind of thought experiment? Well, it’s basically new potential theory on how the Universe is driven by probability. It’s an interesting read.

I couldn’t help but be reminded while reading the book of Rufus, from Kevin Smith’s movie Dogma. In the movie, Rufus says “I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can’t generate. Life becomes stagnant.” In this book, Adams’ main point appears to be that all of Humanity’s ideas and beliefs regarding God are inherently flawed, because how could Man possibly understand a being such as God?

It’s an interesting point, and an interesting book. He approaches the book by having the main character (well, there are only two), who goes by the name of “Avatar” who apparently knows everything. Of course, Adams admits in the prologue that he simulated that glut of knowledge by always using the simplest explanation for everything, because even though it may not always be correct, it usually sounds plausible enough to be believable.

Frankly, while the book is interesting, an easy read, and probably worth going through, providing you aren’t a slobbering imbecile, it’s not nearly as revolutionary as Adams would have you believe. The idea that God is unfathomable to Man is not a new one. The idea that our views on the world our tainted by our inability to understand it all, is not new. However, it makes for an interesting read, especially when you being to examine what is true, and what isn’t.

In all, it’s an interest book, certainly worth the download, though I’m not sure if it would be worth the $12.95 the book retails for. However, I’m debating picking up the sequel. Like I said, it’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s likely to shock anyone to the core the way Adams seems to feel.

8.5/10

This book is the worst book I’ve ever read. Period. I picked it up since it was only a dollar, and the events in the book all take place in Spokane, WA, my hometown. Hey, this could be worth the read. It was published by a house called “First Books Publishing” which should have been my first clue as to the tripe that lay withing those cheaply designed covers.

The writing is horrid. I’m pretty sure no one proofread this book, as it contains frequent typos, like the main character making a “pack” with his friends. I wish I could say that this was just an intermittent thing, but it’s not, and usually the reason the words are misused is because I’m pretty sure the author doesn’t know what they mean, since he makes the same mistake time and again.

The characters, a Disc Jockey and a wealthy Schoolteacher who stumble across plans for HG Wells’ Time Machine (and eventually, Wells himself), are barely two-dimensional. Actually, they were almost interesting at times. Too bad all the dialouge in the book was wooden and uninspired.

However, the worst part about the book isn’t the crappy writing and dialouge. It’s the fact that the author insisted on constantly throwing in bizarre, and completely out of place “factoids” about the Spokane area. He’d talk about landmarks, like Dick’s Burgers on Sprague, the Fox Theater, and others. It wasn’t that these references were present, it was the way that they always felt so out of place and pointless.

0.25/5 This book had what could have been an okay plot, if it wasn’t for boring characters, terrible dialogue, and random crap that littered the pages.