Amazon and Random House have made another set of free Kindle books available. I’m particularly amused because one of the books, Red Mars, is one that I own a paperback copy of and had just decided to sell (we’re moving and culling our book collection of things we don’t read anymore). Now I can get rid of the paper copy and still have a digital version. I win.
Well dang. Amazon just made transportation databases, a Freebase database dump, the English version of Wikipedia, the DBpedia knowledge base, and the Genbank data available for use in machine readable formats. Large-scale database to play with, anyone?
I use ecto for blogging at work from my Mac, but have never really found a tool that works well with WordPress (granted the version of ecto I use is a bit out of date; the latest may play better with WP). So since I’ve been playing with a variety of tools on my netbook, I thought I’d try out Windows Live Writer (under the Windows 7 beta, which actually isn’t that bad on a netbook). It’s a bit early to tell, but the composing interface seems ok so far. It’s an open question how this post will look once posted to the site. And I haven’t yet found a way to view my previous posts in the tool.
Of course, since my netbook is dual boot I need a good Ubuntu blogging tool as well. Any suggestions?
Palm has posted the first chapter of Mitch Allen’s (Palm’s CTO) webOS book. I have to say, the more I hear about Palm’s new OS the more impressed I am. While obviously it’s hard to say anything concrete until Palm officially released the Pre, I like what I’ve seen and read so far.
I think Apple did a lot of things right with the iPhone OS, but the platform does currently have a number of limitations (most due to specific choices by Apple rather than implementation of the platform itself). Android overcomes a number of those limitations and has a more developer model, but it’s just not as elegant as the iPhone OS (Google has some great developers, but they need to hire some great designers as well). Palm’s webOS looks like it may offer some of the best of both worlds: a more open and flexible platform combined with really good design.
Palm’s choice of the web application development model (HTML+CSS+Javascript) also means that they can leverage existing developer tools. Although the iPhone platform is restrictive, Apple put together some great development tools; the combination of XCode + Interface Builder is really nice. Android’s tools are pretty limited. Yes, there’s an Eclipse plugin, but your alternative to building your interfaces in code is to specify them in XML. Yeah, that’s so much easier to do. Palm hasn’t widely released it’s SDK yet, but there are a bunch of tools for building web apps that they’ll hopefully be able to leverage. That probably puts them somewhere between Apple and Google for developer tooling, but closer to the former than the latter.
The biggest problem with webOS is that it’s not clear whether Palm will survive. But based on what I’ve seen, I hope they do. Right now I think that webOS has a better chance of providing elegant user experiences than Android (and will free you from giving Google all your data to boot). Short term I think Apple still has them beat, but if Apple doesn’t loosen their restrictions on developers moving forward I could see Palm giving them a run for their money.
If it survives as a company.
Ok, this one’s a little weird. Amazon has made some good books available free for the Kindle (in partnership with publishers), but a cookbook? Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of Cook’s Illustrated (we subscribe to the print magazine and these days most of the things we cook draw on their recipes). But do they really think people will plop their Kindle in the kitchen and cook near it? It’s a rather expensive device to be splashing sauce on.
Of course, I will confess that I ordered a free copy for my Kindle just to see how well a cookbook would work on the device. But I won’t actually be using mine in our kitchen.
Gotta love Unix geeks; someone noticed it’s 1234567890 day tomorrow and folks are throwing parties worldwide.
I finally caved and bought myself a netbook, an Ideapad S10 (Lenovo lowered the price enough that the IBM EPP made it significantly cheaper than getting a Dell Mini 9). I immediately stripped off WinXP and installed Ubuntu with the netbook remix. So far I like the remix; it’s a nice way of laying out the UI to handle the reduced screen space.
I also decided to install the Windows 7 beta (making the netbook dual boot) to kick its tires. I have to say, it’s not nearly as crappy as Vista; on the S10 it’s actually relatively peppy (granted I installed extra memory to bring it to 1.5 GB), so presumably it’ll be very nice on more powerful machines. Not that I’d give up OS X anytime soon as my OS of choice, but 7 is definitely less of an embarrassment for Microsoft. I’d certainly replace XP with it, at least so far (something I wouldn’t say for Vista).
While I’ve only had it a week so far, my overall impression of the S10 is positive. Small, light, and responsive. The 3 cell battery isn’t great, but I’m assuming at some point Lenovo will let me buy a 6 cell for longer trips. My only real gripe is the right Shift key; it’s half size, so I keep hitting the up arrow when trying to capitalize. I’ll have to train myself to use the left shift key more, or stretch more with my pinky. But aside from that it’s been all good.
Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin was the last of my free Kindle books from Tor. I saved it for last because I expected it to be bad; the Bookmarks Magazine review starts out:
Spin is not merely a SF thriller. It’s also a coming-of-age tale, a love story, a literary triumph, and an ecological and apocalyptic warning.
When something is billed as a coming-of-age tale my usual assumption is that it’s crap. Imagine my surprise when I found Spin deeply entertaining and addictive; probably one of the top three from the free Tor books. I’d actually pay for the sequel, but alas Tor hasn’t made it available for the Kindle yet (and what is up with that? There are multiple authors whose first book they made available for the Kindle free, but whose second book isn’t available yet. Wasn’t the whole point to drive sales?).
Having said all that, the book does have a few flaws. The big reveal is clever, but at the same time it doesn’t bear too close examination. But that’s ok; the book is moving fast enough at that point that you get drawn smoothly along to the conclusion and don’t find yourself looking at it too hard. And the romance threading through the story isn’t the most convincing. But the premise is interesting enough and the characters well enough drawn that I’d recommend Spin to others.
Now it’s on to my pile of free Random House books. Although I’m going to have to read the descriptions again to figure out which one to tackle first.
Four and Twenty Blackbirds, by Cherie Prient, was the last-but-one of my free Tor books for my Kindle. This one was a little “one of these things is not like the other”; rather than SF or fantasy it was Southern Gothic. Not my usual thing, but I found it entertaining in a don’t-look-at-the-plot-too-closely kind of way. It helped that the heroine was not the traditional type where you eventually start hoping the bad guys get her just to keep her idiocy out of the gene pool; Eden appears to draw from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer oeuvre. I’m not sure I would have paid money for it, but at free it was a good quick read.
Great quote from Bruce Schneier:
Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer news—car crashes, domestic violence—that’s when you should worry about it.
jeff pierce 