Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Books

  • Book Blog

    Adam Curry has announced his new Book Blog:

    I’ve been interested in the Gutenberg Project for some time now, and find it fascinating that so many really well known titles are available online and free from copyright. As an experiment I’m going to upload selected works to a this new weblog, in all available formats (html, rss) as well as a speech-synthesized version in mp3 format. These files are attached to each posted chapter as an RSS enclosure and can be automatically downloaded to your hard disk or mobile mp3 player.

    Cool. Along the lines of my ebooks page. I’d been doing some thinking lately about offering the converted books I’ve done in HTML format as well as Palm Reader format.

  • Broken email prognostication

    I’ve been reading a lot about how email is broken these days—articles here, here and here are examples—and interestingly, I came across the following passage in Cryptonomicon (published in 1999) that I thought was apropos:

    “I hate e-mail,” John says.

    Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. “What do you mean?”

    “The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don’t observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it’s really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.”

  • More PHP Errata

    Again reading Larry Ullman’s PHP Advanced and finding it okay, but I came across another glaring error.

    On page 169, in the discussion about variable order, Ullman’s got the variable order entirely backwards. The out-of-the-box order for PHP variables is EGPCS (which refer to Environment, Get, Post, Cookie, and Server variables), meaning that PHP processes input into variables from those sources in that order. The book incorrectly lists these in reverse while claiming it’s the proper order.

    The funniest part is there’s a graphic of a screen shot from the php.ini file, which clearly shows the EGPCS ordering, contrary to the text.

    Hello? Editors? Anyone?

  • Independence Weekend

    So what does July 4th even mean to people any more? A day off from work? Shelling out the bucks to buy enough fireworks to blow up your house? I have to admit, I’ve caught myself thinking along those lines and forgetting why we have the day off and what the fireworks represent. But the way the world is screwed up these days, who knows?

    Anyway. Busy weekend. We took the kids to the Pet Parade, and the festival in the park, and my parents came over for steaks, cake, and fireworks. Beautiful weather, all weekend. The rest of the weekend was spent on yardwork; trees got pruned, some edging got done, bark dust laid down, garden got weeded. The lawn hasn’t recovered much from the dethatching, but no matter.

    Oh, and I finished up Ender’s Shadow and plowed through Shadow of the Hegemon this weekend, too. It’s been awhile since I’ve gone through 2 books in a single week. Dunno if I’ll keep up with it.

  • Killer App

    The next killer app?

    Not weblogs.

    Not grid computing.

    Not wikis.

    Not even Google.

    It’s a non-volatile, random access, analog memory storage device that’s cheap, durable, mass-produced and ubiquitous.

  • Ender’s Shadow

    I began reading Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card this past weekend, and, predictably, I can’t put it down. Brilliantly written, ties in beautifully to the Enderverse yet remains completely fresh.

    Particularly well written, and heartbreaking, is the depiction of Bean’s childhood on the streets of Rotterdam. Brutal, harsh, and utterly believable even though my mind wants to reject this point of view from its cozy, sheltered outlook on the world.

    Go read it.

  • More random things

    While in Portland for Kaitlyn’s surgery, we found a little bit of time to go to Goodwill to accomodate my wife’s eBay habit. Browsing through the science fiction section of their used books, I happened across a paperback Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson that was in pretty good shape. I’d been wanting this book, and for the super-low Goodwill price of $1.99 I couldn’t pass it up. So it was just icing on the cake to find out the book was also signed by the author!

    I’ve been playing with Wikipedia a lot lately, even contributing some articles and editing others. I’ve mentioned Wikipedia before, but I’ve been becoming addicted to it and had to slip in a mention again. Go check it out. You’ll be glad that you did.

    We got a new computer a little over a week ago, an eMachines from Costco. Cheap, and far better than the other computers in the house. Unfortunately, I’m still not completely caught up with installing all my old software to it, so my Palm eBook “project” has been delayed. Rest assured, it will be continued again. Soon, I hope.

    PHP rocks. Yeah, I just had to slip that in there.

  • Palm Reader eBooks

    I’ve been merrily playing with the Sony CLIÉ that I got for my birthday, installing apps and loading it up with data, and one of my bright ideas is to start playing around with eBooks. See, the CLIÉ runs the PalmOS, for which there is a really nifty free eBook Palm Reader available from Palm Digital Media. Palm Digital Media also offers a fairly extensive catalog of eBooks for sale (and a few for free); think Amazon of Palm eBooks.

    I downloaded two of the free eBooks, The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling, and The Coming Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge, and I read the Vinge work while in Las Vegas.

    But the cool thing— the really cool thing— is that Palm Digital Media provides you with the software and the means to create your own eBooks for the Palm Reader.

    So what I’m thinking is that there’s a real dearth of free eBooks out there—aside from the two I mention above, about the only other free books I found are texts from the Bible. Yet with the software to make books, and the wealth of content available from sites like Project Gutenburg, I don’t see any reason why there shouldn’t be a lot more free eBooks for Palm.

    You can probably see where this is going.

    My bright idea relating to this is to start creating Palm Reader eBooks (from works in the public domain), and offering them for download from this site. And then distributing them accordingly. For free.

    Because it just seems like a neat thing to do.

    The first books I plan to convert, I think, will be Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (and then Huck Finn), and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

    But then, you know… the sky’s the limit. Any particular book you’d like to see? How many people out there are using Palm-compatible PDA’s, anyway? And how many would read eBooks on them? Email me with answers to these questions, or any other ideas for Palm books.

  • Procrastination; Father’s Day; Summer Reading

    Ack. I’ve been letting my mutant ability for procrastination take over on this site, and I haven’t even finished getting the relatively simple stuff done that I had intended— like, making the “Check it Out” area handle more than one item, or putting up more background material. Or perhaps I shouldn’t chalk it all up to procrastination; my interest level in various projects ebbs and flows like the tide. Probably just got caught up in an eddy before getting back on track…

    And of course, today was Father’s Day. It was a good day; I got several books and got to spend my day playing with the kids and relaxing. And got to drink some Pike Kilt Lifter (though it was flat).

    My summer reading list:
    • Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko
    • Programming Jabber by DJ Adams
    • Everything’s Eventual by Stephen King
    • Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

    And more to come…