Started out strong....

I started out this year strong; three books, three weeks. In the following three weeks though, I've dawdled through three books; not completing any of them; one of them I even threw out. So what am I to do?

1. Wikinomics (Can't read it. Threw it out.)
2. The Art of Strategy (Sounds interesting but haven't started it.)
3. Anathem (Too much gobbly gook. I think I'm over Neal Stephenson)
4. The Maltese Falcon (I'd like to see the movie(s) first.)
5. The Satanic Verses (I'm 20% finished and having a hard time understanding what is going on).
6. Insert your suggestion here

So there we have it. Five books that I can think of, off the top of my head that I haven't started reading or am having trouble getting through not to mention the countless

Labels: books

10:51 AM 0 comments links to this post

Bi-weekly books.

Like my friend Drew who is reading a book every week this year, I am trying to read a book every two weeks. I just finished up reading "Dies the Fire," by SM Stirling. It was a good book though a bit slow at parts. I don't have much of a review for it though -- Its a low-magic fantasy book complete with swords, gods and some modern conviences. No Electricity or Gunpowder though. The book chronicles two major characters with differing styles leading a group of people in a new era of no technology.

Next is The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life, which I originally read about on the Freakonomics blog. It sounds interesting and engaging and should hold my curiosity. I want to alternate between fiction and non-fiction in my quest this year. I was originally going to read Ananthem next, in fact, I started it last night but I want to read this one first. Plus Anathem is intimidating at 900 pages.

Labels: books

10:57 AM 0 comments links to this post

Christopher Moore

I just finished reading a book for the first time since July. Really, it was two books and the book I read in July was just a very long online cyberpunk serialization that was book length. I am pretty pleased with myself. It is not often that I read these days. I've been spending so much time working on my projects that I resent taking the time away from them to do something as frivious as reading. Nevertheless I did just spend like 20 hours playing Fallout in the past week, saw the new Bond (disappointing) and spent some time staring at nothing.

Back to the books -- The first I read was Bloodsucking Fiends, by Christoper Moore. I had to read it because I also purchased You Suck by the same. It would not have made any sense to read You Suck and not Bloodsucking Fiends, as the former is a written-twelve-years-later-takes-place-20-minutes-later sequel to the the later. First off, they are very quick reads. I started reading them at 6pm last night and finished this morning -- about 5 hours per book. I tend to read a bit slower than I used to because I noticed myself "speed reading" through the books to suck up the plot (hehe, suck) and ignore the prose. This pattern is even more apparent when I read comic books -- I read them super fast because there is not much dialog; probably the reason I don't enjoy reading them very much.

Both books are about newb vampires being hunted/taunted/attacked/courted by an older vampire. The books take place in San Francisco. I haven't read a book based in San Francisco that I can remember (or cross reference with my list, http://joelapenna.com/vanity.html) then again, I have a terrible memory when it comes to books; hence I keep a list of books I've read.

The things I liked about the books: The dialog was very witty and felt very natural. The characters frequently had this "what the hell?" confusion about them which was funny. Not so great was the lack of "what the hell?" confusion going on in the second book. The saving grace of the second book was a new character "Abby Normal," who if I had to describe using an Internet phenomena is the Robert Hamburger of Vampires; the prototypical high school goth chick. Her chapters in the second book are had me laughing most. I enjoyed that so much of what was going on was just outrageous enough that aside from the vampirism you would keep asking yourself "This probably could happen, huh..."

On odd thing about these stories is that two years ago my friend Josh recommended them both to me. I think I might have to trust his book opinion a little more. The reason I picked these up was that another friend, an avid reader also recommended them to me. When she mentioned the author I recalled Josh's suggestion and their powers combined caused me to read for all of the last ten of my waking hours.

Labels: books, cyberpunk, San Francisco

9:57 AM 0 comments links to this post

100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library | The Art of Manliness

100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library | The Art of Manliness

The books I've read.

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• 1984 by George Orwell
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Hamlet by Shakespeare
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

That said, I thought this list was incomplete and felt like it was a rote listing of books-i-read-in-high-school and boy scout books. I guess since this is on "The art of Manliness" website I think it might be biased a bit towards those boyscout books. I laughed when I ready the quote from the bible, it is the same quote used by Cereal Killer in Hackers.

I think I'll read these next or something.

• The Count of Monte Cristo (I already own this, but its so long...)
• The Long Goodbye
• The Maltese Falcon

And, the full list of books I remember reading

Labels: books

9:44 AM 1 comments links to this post

Crooked Little Vein

Just finished reading Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis -- Author of Transmetropolitian among other comic books. I'll have to admit, its a pretty fine book. A bit short, with a slightly disappointing ending. But damn, its probably the best fiction book I've read in a while, not that I know how to read or anything.

Quick summary: Dude is a down and out PI (why does this *never* get boring?) who encounters a heroin addicted state official and is charged with retrieving a lost copy of the real constitution, built in part from a pillaging alien's hide laid down by no-one other than Benjamin Franklin.

There are numerous laugh out loud moments which really cuts the book enough to balance the outright outlandish predicaments the main characters get themselves into.

As I said, the ending is a bit disappointing with a preachy Internet will save us interlude that left me angry but I unlike most has probably heard that enough that there are few others who would get frustrated with that sentiment.

All in all I do plan on picking up some other works by Warren Ellis in the future. Good thing I live a couple blocks away from a comics store.

Labels: books, comics

3:22 PM 2 comments links to this post

Burning

I'm not sure why but the past two weeks I've felt pretty burned out. At work i get bored, at home all i want to do is sleep. I cant wait untill i come home next week. Its hard to believe the summer is over already; I miss my family and friends in Illinois.

I haven't done much programming as of late and even at work i struggle to concentrate; this is especially bad because im heading to Mountain View to work on a big project and thy to transfer teams.

On another note, I just finished reading Cryptonomicon again and I think as a result im going to go to manilla next month for a weekend. I picked up On Intelligence again and will finish it this weekend. Then when i get to the states i have a $150 amazon books order waiting at my doorstop. On the plane home i think i'm going to "sprint" a project and see if i can get a demo together for one of my project ideas.

Labels: books

5:05 AM 4 comments links to this post

Fermat's Enigma

It's hard to imagine someone writing an interesting book about math. Everyone is used to dull text books, fall asleep lectures and the unending hatred of a subject so complex that no other topic in the world has more students screaming "I'm never going to need this in real life." (Please excuse me, the preceeding statement is incorrect; there are people who enjoy math and don't find it incredibly frustrating but ask just about anyone and they'll say they will never need it in real life. wink).

Two years ago, while on a trip to Virginia, I read "The Code Book". by Simon Singh. It was a fascinating read about cryptography through the ages. When you have subject matter covering ancient greece, war, esponiage, royalty, politics and the future, its not difficult to imagine someone injecting color into a subject generally discussed in terms of prime numbers, diffie hellman and keys.

Tonight I read another of Singh's books: "Fermat's Enigma". The book is a tale of dedication, history, mysticism and even some P.T. Barnum circus antics all leading up to the 20th century's most important mathematical theorem solving the 17th's century most intreging mathematical hypothesis.

I'll spare the details of Fermat's theorm a^n + b^n = c^n, n > 2: No Solution, and instead jump inside the book.

What I liked most about this book is its willingness to both simplify mathematical concepts that most people (including myself) will never fully understand while always provoking the reader to go examine things on his or her own at every chance. There are numerous appendicies elaborating on a number of tricky concepts including Pythagoras's Theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2) through the proof that there are an infinite number of triples satisifing the previous equation. Singh's carefully crafted explainations continuaully led me to diverge from the book and take a look at some of the things he presented in just enough detail to make me do a little thinking on my own. Like in "The Code Book," Singh engages his reader and succesfully implores them to go out and learn on their own.

Another strong element in "Fermat's Enigma" is history. Again, like the last book of his I read, Singh prints a good picture of history covering mathematics over the ages while always converging on Andrew Wiles' quest to resolve Fermat's taunting suggestion.

I will assume that like myself reading "Nudist on the Late Shift," or other internet history books, Mathematicians may find Singhs analysis not nearly stimulating enough and at times wrong but for me, reading "Fermat's Enigma" definatly broadened my understanding of math, made me appreciate the work those smart people do and expaned my understanding of history. I would definatly recommend this book to anyone even minimally interested in mathematics from either a numerical/theoretical aspect or as an interesting thread of human progress.

Labels: books

2:26 AM 0 comments links to this post

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Labels: books

5:01 PM 0 comments links to this post

I have the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Title: I have the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The problem is that I only have the shell . . . unless I have an internet connection. As others have mentioned; Karoliina Salminen and Andrew Flegg; were someone to combine wikipedia and the Nokia 770 we would have that damned book right in our pocket. Henri Bergius mentions briefly what to do to get the Hitchhiker's Guide into his pocket. In this post, I'm going to outline what it is I need to do to make this a reality.

Getting Data

Wikipedia Contents

Wikimedia.org provides raw XML dumps of its article database on a rolling basis (as quickly as they can get the data dumped its on the site.) The first dump of enwiki is not yet available but it looks like I'm going to need to do a lot of chopping to get it to even fit on my 1GB rs-mmc card I purchased for my device. The uncompressed raw XML dump is 4.5G. I'm going to have to trim over 3.5G of data if I want to view wikipedia on my n770.

Wikitravel (?) Contents

Another option is to use a smaller corpus of data from wikitravel.org as the base for my hitchhiker's guide.

Geolocation

Using this iBlue GPS Reciever I will be able to determine the location a user is at; and summarily record that location for future downloads of wikipedia data.

Parsing the Raw Data

With python, parsing XML is pretty easy as long as it is well formed. I believe wikipedia's data is.

wikipedia Sample XML article

<page>
  <title>AaA</title>
  <id>1</id>
  <revision>
<id>32899315</id>
<timestamp>2005-12-27T18:46:47Z</timestamp>
<contributor>
  <username>Jsmethers</username>
  <id>614213</id>
</contributor>
<text xml:space="preserve">#REDIRECT [[AAA]]</text>
  </revision>
</page>

The easy python:

from xml import sax
from xml.sax import saxutils
from xml.sax import handler

class DelHandler(saxutils.DefaultHandler):
  def startElement(self, name, attrs):
if name != 'text':
  return
print attrs.get('text')

parser = sax.make_parser()
parser.setFeature(handler.feature_namespaces, 0)
dh = DelHandler()
parser.setContentHandler(dh)
parser.parse(file('whateveriwanttoopen','r'))

The schema looks to be pretty simple. I will have to find a wikitext python module (or write one myself) if I am going to do any sort of formatting (of course I have to) of the article text. That will be the harder part.

Implementation Details

Using python2.4 I will extend HTTPServer since it makes sense that the wikipages are served like a website. I also think the application would have a GUI component as well. Teemu's Blog will help with that endevor. I think that to make it easy to know that the hhgttg is running and make it easy to launch it, the GUI will internally launch the webserver and will provide some useful functionality for getting updates to pages. I have to flesh this out a lot more. If there is anything I've learned from working at Google, its that design docs do go a long way. This blog entry is a precursor to a more detailed designed spec. I find DDs useful because they help keep me on track and to organize what it is I have to do.

Labels: books

7:03 PM 3 comments links to this post

Fwd: Cyberpunk Canon

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Oct 22, 2004 12:18 AM
Subject: Belated cyberpunk reading list


I believe I owe you a copy of this; not just books, but comics & music
too. Enjoy.

[from a hackerish mailing list, 6 Nov 2003 at 22:45]

This is a very biased selection of books & short stories from the original
cyberpunks, not the next-gen Stephenson crap (I hated "Snowcrash"); I've
included related works & some music & comic book suggestions as well:

Start here:

Vernor Vinge
* True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier
 (The title short story came out in 1981, right before Gibson started
  writing Sprawl stories).
* Then read all the rest of his stuff.

Next, the classics:

William Gibson
* Burning Chrome (short story collection, (Neuromancer pt0)
* Neuromancer
* Agrippa (poem; read the history on this, or search the alt.cyberpunk
 archives so you can see what all the fuss was about)
Optional:
- Count Zero (Neuromancer pt2)
- Mona Lisa Overdrive (Neuromancer pt3)

Bruce Sterling
* Mirrorshades (the original cyberpunk anthology)
* Schismatrix Plus (includes Schismatrix and Selected Stories from
 Crystal Express)
* Crystal Express (track down the Arkham House edition if you want to
 be 'l33t)
Optional:
- The Difference Engine (with Gibson; steampunk - what if the Information
 Age started ~100 years earlier, during the Industrial revolution, when
 the British Empire was at its peak?)
- Holy Fire

Walter Jon Williams
* Hardwired (Neuromancer meets Mad Max/The Road Warrior)
* Voice of the Whirlwind (kinda like Neuromancer 100 years later)
* Facets (short story collection)
Optional:
- Angel Station

John "I'm an actual punk musician" Shirley
* The Eclipse trilogy - the rise of fascism in a future post-war Europe.
 1) Eclipse
 2) Eclipse Penumbra
 3) Eclipse Corona

Rudy "Mr. Math" Rucker
* Anything; the guy is an amazing and perverted nutcase.
 http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/ <--homepage
 You may want to start with the Software/Wetware/Freeware/Realware series,
 then the Seek! and Gnarl! collections.

Greg "I am not a cyberpunk" Bear
* Blood Music
* The Wind from a Burning Woman (Short story collection; get the Arkham
 House edition to be uber 'l33t; "Hardfought" is one of the most grimly
 terrifying and saddest things I've ever read.)
* Eon
* The Way of All Ghosts (short story in several anthologies)
Optional:
- The rest of his stuff up to about 1997 is good.

The protopunks:

Alfred Bester
* The Stars My Destination (MUST. READ.)
* The Demolished Man
* Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester
 He wrote this stuff in the frellin' 1950's! And it kicks ass!

William S. Burroughs
* Naked Lunch
* The Ticket that Exploded
* The Soft Machine
* Nova Boys
 Drug-addled cut-up surrealist sci-fi with S&M/homoerotic overtones.

Samuel Delany
* Nova
* Driftglass (short story collection; "The Star Pit" is a must-read)
* Dhalgren
* Babel-17 (neurolinguistics in warfare)

Also try:

* The Ultimate Cyberpunk (anthology) - by Pat Cadigan (editor)
* The Alt.Cyberpunk.Chatsubo Anthology - by Che Paula Dunlop (editor)
* Storming the Reality Studio:
 A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (essays and
 articles) - by Larry McCaffery (editor)

Pat Cadigan (chick cyberpunk)
* Synners
* Mindplayers
* Patterns (short story collection)

Philip K. Dick
* Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka the film "Bladerunner")
* A Scanner Darkly

Arthur C. Clark
* Childhood's End (Blood Music in an earlier incarnation)

Thomas Pynchon
* Gravity's Rainbow (another massive surreal cut-up weirdness book like
 Dhalgran and the Burroughs stuff that seems to make no real sense
 but is still cool, especially if you read it while hallucinating.)
 (You may want to pick up one of the various Gravity's Rainbow "readers
  companions" as well).

Music:

* Early Skinny Puppy, Einsturzende Naubauten & Sonic Youth. Front 242 is
 good too.

Comics.

* Adam Warren's stuff from Dark Horse Comics; this includes his "Dirty
 Pair" work, his run on "Gen13" and especially the "Titans: Scissors,
 Paper, Stone" one-shot.

* Anything by Masamune "Ghost in the Shell" Shirow (also via Dark Horse
 Comics).

-  Paul Pope has done some very interesting cp-ish comics: 100%,
  Heavy Liquid, THB, The Ballad of Dr. Richardson.

-  David Mack's Kabuki has many cp-ish overtones.

[This started a fairly long thread on the root@se2600.org mailing list;
other items that were suggested:]

Books:

- Frankenstein (M. Shelley)
- Faust (Goethe; W. Kaufman, translator)
- Terminal Man (M. Crichton; also, The Andromeda Strain)
- Shockwave Rider (J. Brunner)
- Vacuum Flowers (M. Swanwick)
- Permutation City (G. Egan)

Comics:
- Empty Zone - Jason Alexander
- Transmetropolitan - Warren Ellis
- Mek - Warren Ellis (little three book mini)
- Global Frequency - Warren Ellis (sorry Warren Ellis is/has done some
 of the best stuff in comics to date.

[Next thread, by E2:]

On 7 Jan 2004 at 14:14, E2 wrote:

> For my english class this semester I have to write a research paper on
> a body of fiction, be that book, film, or tv-series, roughly along the
> lines of 'detective' fiction (as in Sherlock Holmes, etc).  The idea is
> to higlight notions of criminality, perversion, delenquency, and deviance
> that arise in popular culture.  I was wondering if anybody had any
> suggestions for books that fall into a the hackeresque/cyberpunk field
> but still have the detective story elements.  Right now I'm thinking
> about Blade Runner (cause it's such a sweet movie) but I'm wondering how
> much tourqing it will take to make my paper topical.  Hit me.

[My reply:]

- "Bladerunner" (aka "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?")
 by Philip K. Dick
- "Altered Carbon" by Richard Morgan; new/3rd-wave cp/detective novel,
 very good IMO.
 [His 2nd novel, "Broken Angels", just came out & it is also very good
 & very disturbing.]
- "When Gravity Fails" by George Alec Effinger; 80's cp novel set in
 Cairo from a Muslim PoV.
- "The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester (original 50's proto-cp & the
 first novel to win the Hugo); murder investigation & detective work.
- "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K. Dick; not exactly a detective novel;
 an cop whose undercover alias is so secret that his supervisor and
 co-workers don't even know who he is, is assigned the impossible task
 of watching and eventually busting his alias (ie - himself); revealing
 that he is the cop *AND* the surveillance target to anyone would
 quickly get him killed by drug dealers & corrupt cops on the take.
- "Noir" by K. W. Jeter; interesting reviews, but I haven't read it
 yet; described as "a hardboiled cyberpunk detective novel".
- "Tea from an Empty Cup" by Pat Cadigan; I haven't read this one yet
 either, but I like her other work; also described as "cyberpunk noir
 detective fiction".

Not cp, but still interesting:

- Larry Niven's Gil "the ARM" Hamilton stories, collected into one
 novel; hard sf cop stories set a couple of centuries from now.
- Isaac Asimov's Elijah Baley & R. Daneel Olivaw novels, "Caves of
 Steel" and "The Naked Sun", followed by the related "The Robots
 of Dawn" and "Robots & Empire".
- "/" (aka "Slant") by Greg Bear; cp, not a detective story, but has
 a very interesting futuristic cp murder investigation.
- "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs; proto cp with a lot of
 criminality, perversion, delinquency, and deviance.

Hope that helps, post the paper when you're done. Hell, post it
before you turn it in if you want criticism (constructive & otherwise).

[Replies/additions:]

The very best "Hard Boiled Private Eye" meets SF stories I've ever
read/seen are "A Case For Charley" (1984) and "Charley Gets The Picture"
(1985) by John B. Spencer (A Brit. 1944-2002
http://www.johnbspencer.com/bibliography.htm and also a musician).
They may be somewhat hard to come by these days. Think Raymond Chandler
crossed with Bruce Sterling.

Not a body of fiction, but Clifford Stoll's "Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy
Through the Maze of Computer Espionage" might prove insightful.

[In a similar vein, Bruce Sterling's non-fiction "The Hacker Crackdown"
is online for free & documents the Secret Service raids on various hobby
BBS systems in the early 1990s and the comedy of errors that followed,
including:
- the "stolen $70,000 secret document that would let hackers take down the
emergency 911 system" (revealed in court to be a few pages of billing
procedures that was available to the public for ~$7);
- the assumption that role playing game publisher Steve Jackson Games was
really a secret front for training hackers, and that their "Cyberpunk"
gaming module was a "handbook for computer crime" (example: sections of
the module describe items like cybernetic neural jacks that will let one
plug into the Net, "black ice" and "icebreaker" software you can buy for
your cyberdeck, etc).
Google the book & author for numerous links.]

Also worth mentioning for atmosphere:

Roger Zelazny:
The Great Book of Amber (all 10 volumes; first five are great, 2nd five eh)
Lord of Light
Doorways in the Sand
Four for Tomorrow
Roadmarks
Jack of Shadows

Gene Wolfe:
Shadow and Claw
Sword and Citadel
Urth of the New Sun

I hear "Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville is good.

Labels: books

2:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

Reading

In the past couple of months I've started reading again. I'm quite pleased that I found one of my hobbies that I had abandoned a couple of years ago. I'm not one for giving reviews of books, but I think I might have to say a few words about the ones I've recently read:

Player Piano

Wow, the person that loaned this book to me expected the ending of this book to be wholy depressing for me. I surprized him, and probably others with my reaction to it. The basis of the novel is that the world has become very mechanized and engineered. If you're not smart enough to go through college, get a Masters and build machines, you'd better be fast enough to not have machines replace you in normal labor, otherwise it's off to the military or work corp with you.

What kept me from being so depressed by the books ending was that despite a looming presense of effeciency, automation and standardization, there were still a a few people (bunches in fact) who wouldn't stand for the norm. Even though revolutionaries were not entirely altruistic, it still gave me hope that at some point, if the world tends towards this vision there will still be some hope, and some people willing to try and make a change. . . . Even if nothing comes of it, and even if people fall back to pre-change behavior and the ordeal is a wash.

Good Omens

Ha, what can I say; when a center point of a plot revolves around a pair of friends who just happen to be from opposite sides of the celestial spectrum and a large bit of conflict comes from a baby mismatch you know you're in for a fun story. The story was written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimon, who I have been told are excellent authors, after reading this one, I tend to agree.

This was a funny book with a heartfelt ending. Thoroughly enjoyable reading.

1984

Privacy gone, history erradicated and love forbidden, the tennants of Oceana in a sentence. A classic defining the term "Big Brother."

Moreso that any book I have read in recent memory, 1984 has made me change my perceptions of life. Additionally, there has been no book to present someone more alone than Winston Smith. Like Player Piano the author paints a miserable picture of the future, but unlike Vonnegut, Orwell provides no glimmer of hope. This is the book that makes me want to stop eating for a week to see what it's like.

Labels: books

8:57 PM 0 comments links to this post