Obsolete Your Idols

One of my original three superpowers after my first superhero origin was the ability to make any source code compile and run on a Unix operating system.  I let that power rust when I became a full time systems administrator but I occasionally like to dabble again in that field.  Towards that end I read a technical book on a related topic recently, Advanced Linux Programming.  It’s been on my shelf for some time, perhaps years.

Despite the age it’s still pertinent to developing in C or C++ in the Linux environment.  It does a decent job of covering the core concepts of different kinds of resources used by processes including threads.  Many code examples make the nitty gritty manifest and it has pointers to even more resources, including a site dedicated to the book.

The target audience of this book is purportedly primarily Windows developers who have decided to develop on Linux.  Right.  Because that happens.  But as it turns out, this book is well targeted for rusty Unix developers and dabblers like myself.

Who might like this book

• C coders who have somehow mysteriously failed to use this ‘looooo-nix’ thing
• Linux system administrators who can shrug off their sick dependency on webmin long enough to look at a command line
• Someone wanting to read about the innards of the Linux environment

Who might not like this book

• Windows users.  It contains no Wizards, bluescreens

David Byrne + Brian Eno.

I’ve started using friendfeed as a waystation for aggregation before my feeds hit Planet Binder.  So you don’t need to be pulling from both.  Or, either, really.  Note that the tumblr and gReader feeds often contain pr0n so you may prefer to exclude those from your pull.  Or perhaps prefer and highlight them. Get down with your bad elf.

I did what I’ve been threatening to do and deployed OpenID someplace. Here. This blog. I used an existing plugin to do it because I’ve got less time than ambition right now. Enjoy.

Sometimes the internet is great for wasting time.  This is one of them.

What do you so wish?

I’ve created a planet for myself at http://planet.manjusri.org/ because I’m just that vain.

More terraforming will have to happen before it’s habitable.

No, not Gravity.

Gravatar.  It’s now installed here.  So if you’re a Gramatan, I mean Gravatan, you can get down with your bad self.

A very long time ago I heard about a program which sounded like it would be perfect for the way I wanted to deal with all of my personally important information.  It was named Chandler and I itched to use it.  Then I got distracted with other things, and forgot all about it.

I’d recently started hearing people talking about a book about a software project in Python, named Dreaming in Code.  It took an unexpectedly long time for me to realize that this was the same Chandler project I’d heard about six years ago.  In fact it was being pointed at this blog post by someone who had just read the book which made me realize, yes, the same Chandler and that I should probably read the book.

So I did.  It’s a fast read and is incredibly accessible to people with only the most minor nerdy tendencies.  It does what seems to me a stellar job of presenting the frustrating and wonderful world of software development to readers who don’t necessarily know anything about it.  It tells stories about people and how they act when they care about something.  As a side-effect, it shows what goes into software development.  There are a few chapters at the end where the focus drifts off of the people into more abstract realms and I’d probably have enjoyed this book more without them as they were redundant for me and I suspect they’ll be boring for people who aren’t interested in the history of software development, ie, almost everybody.

What I liked about this book

• The focus on people
• The look inside of a project I wish now I’d paid more attention to all along
• The writer’s ability to make the particular generally applicable

What I didn’t like

• The book falls apart at the end
• No actual code shown.  Hey, even Cryptonomicon showed us the code

Who might like this book

• People who must work with software developers
• People who are otherwise close to software developers
• People who are still wondering what the big deal about open source is
• People who are not software developers or who can grapple the feelings of futility this book will remind you of

After reading this book I was inspired to go take a look at the OSAFoundation and the state of Chandler and I was pleasantly surprised to see much recent activity around it.  Perhaps the publication of this book sparked new interest and vitality.  I sure hope so.  Now that I remember it exists, I kind of wish it were already done so I could use Chandler.  What the hell, I’ll give the preview a try.

It took me more than a year and two runs at it to finish reading David Kahn’s The Codebreakers. Not because it’s a bad book, by any means. In fact, it’s great. But it’s also long. 1200 or so pages long. That’s a lot of book. Each chapter is dense with information, pointers to other related material and packed with thought provoking insight.

It’s a very rewarding book to read but for me was very time consuming. If you found something like Applied Cryptography too mathy and other books on crypto too fluffy, this book does a pretty decent job of combining human interest with the underlying math involved. Has pictures and representations of some primary source material you might not have seen before.

Who might enjoy this book

• People interested in cryptography (duh)
• People looking for a really heavy book which they can savor for a long time

This is the better Tufte book, Visual Explanations. It’s short, concise, clever, superbly polished and easier to get my mental hands around.  It’s most everything you needed to learn from The Visual Display of Quantitive Information but in bite sized chunks.  Accessible throughout and visually striking at points, this is a thoroughly enjoyable book.

It presents some very good and very bad examples of how to present explanations, well, visually.

Short, fast read and highly recommended.  I won’t bother itemizing why, because I think this is a book everyone should at least look at and many should read.