I had a day trip up to Vegas to talk at Interop earlier this week, so had time to finish off a couple more of my free Amazon books. There are three to review this time:
- Simon Rich’s Free-Range Chickens. Essentially a series of short vignettes, emphasis on short (both the vignettes and the book; this was a very fast read). It was entertaining, but I’m glad it was free.
- Laurie Notaro’s Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death definitely wins a prize for unusual title. It’s a series of stories and essays that, while longer than Simon’s, are still bite-size pieces. While not as purely humorous as Simon’s work, I enjoyed Laurie’s writing more than I’d expected to (I suspect that I’m not exactly the intended audience). At free it was a great deal; I’m not sure I’d pay for it.
- David Liss’ The Whiskey Rebels. David’s work is historical fiction, set right before the Whiskey Rebellion in American history (think George Washington and Alexander Hamilton). I generally enjoy historical fiction, although I found this book a little slow in places. Not so much for the emphasis on financial matters (much of the plot centers on early banking in the US), which I actually enjoyed, but because the author took awhile to set the plot in motion. Once it started the book hummed along at a pretty good clip, and the author’s prose is very readable. This book might actually be worth the $9.99 Kindle price, but personally I’d be tempted to check out Liss’ Conspiracy of Paper or The Coffee Trader first; the former is more highly rated on Amazon, and the latter… while let’s just say the subject matter appeals to me.
I’m working through this month’s Atlantic magazine now, so I’m not sure what free Kindle book I’ll tackle next. I might actually take a break from my Kindle for a bit and work through Prototype and script.aculo.us; I’ve been meaning to learn more about some of the higher-level Javascript libraries.
I indulged my technology fetish and install Moblin’s v2 beta on my Lenovo S10 netbook. If I had to characterize the OS, I’d have to say that it’s slick but not polished. Slick because there are some nice ideas that are well-suited to the netbook form factor: the use of zones (like virtual desktops), tabs for switching between common functionality (status updates, media, web browsing, etc.), and a nice “home zone” (the m_zone) that makes a set of pertinent information available.
However, it’s still clearly a work in progress. Wifi doesn’t work on the S10 under Moblin (word has it that the reason is because Broadcom’s driver license is too restrictive to allow Mobin to redistribute it, although I haven’t confirmed that). There are a number of bugs that cause applications to crash, and the support for common social services is pretty limited (e.g., Twitter and Last.fm, but not Facebook). Plus there’s no email client provided by default, and the default repositories for new applications are pretty limited.
So overall I think Moblin could turn out to be rather nice, but it’ll likely be awhile before it’s ready for regular use. I don’t see myself giving up Ubuntu on my netbook anytime soon (Ubuntu’s netbook remix, while not as polished from a UI standpoint, is much more functional). On the other hand, I did leave it installed on my netbook, so now it’s a triple boot machine (Windows 7 RC, Ubuntu 9.04, and Moblin).
I upgraded my Lenovo S10 netbook to Windows 7 RC 1 today (I turned it into a dual boot Windows / Ubuntu machine shortly after I got it, so after upgrading the Ubuntu partition to 9.04 (Jaunty) it was time to upgrade the Windows partition from 7 beta to the release candidate.
Overall the process was pretty smooth, but it was stereotypically Microsoft in one sense: the installation completely stomped on grub, so that after installing RC 1 I had to pull out my Jaunty install USB drive and re-install grub on the master boot record to be able to access Ubuntu again.
Compared to the Ubuntu install process (which makes it trivial to make a Windows-only machine into a dual boot Windows / Linux machine), it just seems downright childish of Microsoft to cavalier stomp over the bootloader. You’d think after all these years they’d have learned to play a little nicer with others, but apparently not.
I realize that the 24 hours news channels are running out of things to talk about and that newspapers are desperate for readers, but I must confess that I’m getting tired of the media attempting to start a panic around H1N1, the “swine flu”, just to get people to pay attention to them. Yes, the flu is contagious. And yes, people do die from it (as NPR keeps quoting, approximately 36,000 per year in the U.S.). Y’know what? Against that metric, the swine flu is pretty tame.
Consider a recent headline in a Bay Area newpaper: “Now 24 cases of swine flu in California.” I submit to you that if you remove the word swine from that sentence, the result (“Now 24 cases of flu in California”) would draw jeers rather than frantic attention. Don’t people have more important things to worry about right now?
This whole situation strikes me as a reminder of how people are miserable at calculating risk. The number of people that died in the last few weeks from car accidents, heart disease, and probably even slipping and falling in their bathtubs significantly outweighs the number of swine flu deaths. And yet from all of the breathless news coverage you’d think significantly swathes of the population were at immediate risk of death.
To quote Bruce Schneier, refuse to be terrorized people!
Canonical released the latest version of Ubuntu (9.04, or the Jaunty Jackelope) last week. I held off installing it until this week because I was traveling last week, but finally made time on Monday. I reinstalled it from scratch on my Lenovo S10 netbook so that I could set up the file system to use ext4. So far so good; the netbook remix is a little more polished, and I haven’t had any driver problems so far. And the boot time is definitely faster, which for a netbook is all good.
I’m a bit behind in posting reviews of my free Kindle books. Last week I had some business travel, and I took the opportunity to try to catch up (there seemed to be another burst of free offerings around the Kindle 2 release date, so I again have a large number of free books waiting to be read.
On this latest trip I finished Robin Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice (which is actually still available free on Amazon’s site), T.A. Pratt’s Blood Engines (also still available free), and Lee Child’s Persuader (also still free; apparently publishers are lengthening the period during which books are available free). All the books are parts of series, so the publishers are playing the “first one’s free” game in hopes of hooking you. It’s a gambit that’s worked on me before; there are a number of authors I’ve discovered through free Kindle books whose others I’ve subsequently paid for.
Of the three in this batch, Hobb’s Assassin’s Apprentice is the best and at some point I’ll likely buy and read the next book in its series. The short version of the plot is that a prince’s illegitimate son is taken in by the king and trained by the king’s illegitimate brother to be the next royal assassin (apparently it’s the family calling for bastards). The kingdom is under assault by outsiders, one of the princes is scheming to gain power, etc. etc. Relatively standard stuff, but well and entertainingly told. Good brain candy.
Blood Engines is even light candy fare, but is still entertaining. The characters are pretty flat, but I read it on a six hour flight and it served as a great distraction. Essentially magic is real, and each city is governed by the strongest practitioner that lives there. The other practitioners spend most of their time scheming to take over. The protagonist has to travel from her city to San Francisco to defeat a takeover attempt by one of her rivals, and ends up also saving their city while she’s at it. As I said, total fluff, but great to read while traveling.
Persuader is an action thriller (apparently the author, Lee Child, is a former television writer). It’s fun primarily because the writing is pretty tight and because it’s not trying to be anything what it is. I think I enjoyed primarily for reasons of nostalgia; it reminded me of nothing so much as the Mack Bolan books I would occasionally read in middle school. Fun, but intellectually empty.
I’m trying to figure out which of my collection to read next. One of the features it’d be nice to have the Kindle add in the future is a simple synopsis; with enough free books it’s occasionally difficult to remember which one was which. Functionality that provides the equivalent of skimming the blurb on the back would be welcome to help figure out what to read next. I usually end up reading the synopses and reviews on Amazon instead (so you know Amazon already has the relevant data).
So all three books were entertaining, but Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy (of which Assassin’s Apprentice is the first book) is probably the only one I’ll read further in.
What is it with technologists and the desire to start from scratch? I spent the last few days at the annual Stanford Affiliates meeting. While a number of the talks were quite interesting (John Ousterhout’s Fiz looked the most intriguing), I have to confess that the workshop on Tuesday (themed around the Programmable Open Mobile Internet, although I didn’t find the day focused that much on mobile) set my teeth on edge. Why? It was led by the Stanford Clean Slate project folks.
The Stanford Clean Slate project has the premise, “Let’s look at how we should design the Internet if we could start from scratch.” While that’s an interesting intellectual exercise, I also regard it as a waste of my taxpayer dollars. Yes, great, if you had to build it over again you could make it better. Guess what? You can’t build it over again. The IPv6 folks have been trying to deploy it for over a decade now (when I was in grad school in the 90s IPv6 was “just a few years away”, and it’s stayed that way ever since), and yet you’re convinced you can get people to give up on the current Internet and start over? Yeah, good luck with that.
And it wasn’t just the academics; some of the industry speakers were just as guilty. One of my favorites was the speaker who argued that we should start UI design over again and this time just all agree to use the social graph as the fundamental primitive. That fails on two counts: it assumes you can start UI design over again and that you can get computer scientists to agree (the latter being even more improbable than the former).
I have a new phrase for technologists to learn: “the inertia of deployed systems”. Once you have million (and billions) of people using your technology, you can’t just start all over again. It’s great you think you have a better way of doing it. No one cares unless you also have a great story of how to get there from here.
I gave a talk at the Berkeley Institute of Design seminar yesterday. Since I was taking public transit (light rail – bus – BART, oh my!), I decided to use my netbook to give the talk rather than lugging up one of my laptops. Overall I have to say it was a win for the netbook; noticeably easier to tote to and from the light rail station (around a 20 minute walk), and it handled projecting my slides just fine. The one area for improvement would be that the netbook doesn’t handle projecting slides and showing them on the built-in display well; it opts for a lower resolution than projecting alone would provide. So I ended up just showing my slides on the projector, which has the drawback that I have to look at the screen to see what slide I’m on. An annoyance, but not a showstopper.
And I have to say, Berkeley students much less wired into the Silicon Valley technology craze than Stanford students. Every time I talk to the latter they’re up on start ups and new application/service ideas that I haven’t even heard of yet. The Berkeley students, by contrast, hadn’t heard of some services I was using regularly and could muster a bare handful of students with cutting edge mobile devices (note to Berkeley profs: get your students better equipment).
BusinessWeek is doing an online series about time management and covered some of our research. Color me happy (particularly since they got their facts essentially right too, which is always refreshing – and surprising – for press coverage of research work).
Alas, the beta of Safari 4, while otherwise quite nice (ok, I’m not completely sold on the tabs on top yet, but I like the rest of it), appears to have a few issues with WordPress. Most noticeably it doesn’t like the UI element that pops up when you try to link text to a URL in the WordPress editor. Ah well; that’s why I keep Firefox (and Camino, actually) installed.
jeff pierce 