book
The children of Húrin
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 | Personal | No Comments
As a christmas gift, I got Tolkien’s The children of Húrin, since my parents have by now realised that I am partial to fantasy novels. Mostly what I enjoy is to read about unlikely heroes who seek the good in themselves and try to persevere in the face of overwhelming foes. This is what true heroes would do, the ones of epic proportions. However, The children of Húrin is not like this at all.
The most positive surprise about the book is its physical quality. The paper is not thin and cheap like in most works of fiction, but dense with good texture. The story, however, is a whole other matter. It is a story of the two children of Húrin, Niënor and Túrin, whom the evil Valar, Morgoth, have set his evil will upon, and perhaps their fates can be explained by this, but there is no striving for a greater goodness in them. They are haughty, vain, and egotistical, and hardly once do they do what one would think to be right.
Perhaps these negative tales need to be spun from time to time so that the tales of goodness may shine the brighter, but I must admit that I am somewhat dismayed by the bleakness of the story, at least it is not what I like to seek in a novel.
Il Cucchiaio d’Argento
Friday, December 14th, 2007 | Personal | No Comments
My wife and I both appreciate good food, be it Danish, French, Chinese, Thai, Italian, or what have you. Our bookcase will most likely bear witness to this as we have an entire shelf dedicated to cookbooks. A few days ago when we were passing the time until my wife’s boots were fixed, we invariably found our way past a bookshop, and, of course, to the cooking section (I had to drag my wife away from the gardening section, but that’s a whole other matter).
In Denmark we have some solid classics like God Mad: Let at lave (Good food, easy to cook), and Frk. Jensens kogebog (Mrs. Jensen’s cookbook), and both are fairly complete with lots of information about cooking. However, the book I discovered in the bookshop put both to shame, Il Cucchiaio d’Argento (Sølvskeen in Danish, The Silverspoon in English) is the traditional Italian cookbook, with more than 2000 recipes from all the Italian regions. As a testament to its completeness, the book weighs in at over a thousand pages, more than 20 recipes with rabbit, themed recipes from antipasto over pesci (fish) to carni (meat) and dolci (desserts).
The cookbook is entirely unwieldy and extremely lovely, and while there are altogether too few pictures of the food, the book promises to turn you into a real connoisseur on traditional Italian food, and with the thorough descriptions of what kitchen equipment serves what purposes, illustrations of how animals are cut and what each piece of meat is good for, it will, in my opinion, be a priceless reference when cooking. Lastly, as the book also mentions, nothing goes to waste in the Italian kitchen, so the book also features recipes on brain, ox jaws and calf head. Intriguing!
Buono appetito.
William Gibson
Sunday, June 4th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments
Ever since I read Neuromancer by William Gibson, I have been hooked by the truly artistic writing style. His penchant for portraying a plausible, dystopian society in a setting not unlike present-day Earth, is envious. But we should not forget that his books are for the most part a commentary about contemporary issues, but you can, of course, ignore this aspect when reading them, though it does give the books an interesting other dimension to them.
A while back I took to rereading the books I had by him, and also picked up a few new ones. The long-standing classic, Neuromancer is, of course, the thing that really gathered readers for Gibson’s novels, and he hasn’t quite managed to write something that good for a long while. That is, until his latest book, Pattern Recognition, that I picked up recently. It is unique for a William Gibson book in that it is the first of his book that takes place in a contemporary setting, interweaving actual events such as the planes crashing into the World Trade Center in 2001. In the book we follow Cayce Pollard, who has an affliction that’ll make my lactose intolerance seem benign: she has allergic reactions to succesful brandings like the Michelin man. Cayce has found an avenue to exploit her curious allergy: high-level marketing consultancy. If she gets an allergic reaction, the customer has a good design.
Cayce does, of course, suffer from this allergy, so she lives in her own world, stripped of any style or fashion. She has only one hobby: the footage. The footage is mysterious segments of video that are released seemingly at random on the internet. As it has a lot of people interested one of her less-than-appealing clients, Bigend, wants to figure out who is behind the footage, and he wants Cayce to figure it out for him. Reluctantly Cayce is forced into it and is swept across Europe in a chase where it isn’t always apparent who is being chased. It is a classic William Gibson novel in style with Neuromancer where layer upon layer is added with no apparent connection, only to be completely unravelled at the end, bringing all the parts together in one big whole. One of my most-recommended Gibson books, by far.
Another William Gibson book I return to often is the short-story collection, Burning Chrome, which contains a long palette of fascinating stories. Some with more action than others. The two favourites of mine in the book are Fragments of a Hologram Rose by Gibson and The Belonging Kind that Gibson co-authored with John Shirley.
Fragments of a Hologram Rose is a meandering tale of a breakup, painted with words. It’s not that the story is great, it is actually rather benign, but it is just told in this very fascinating style that makes me reread the short-story again and again.
The other story, The Belonging Kind, is more atypical of Gibson as in it is set in what could be contemporary America or Europe. It is a fascinating tale of a rather boring and altogether uninteresting social interactions professor who hasn’t got the foggiest clue how to interact socially himself. To alleviate the boredom he visits nondescript pubs in the evenings where he drinks with himself, until, one day, he discovers something else pubcrawling a varied range of places. He discovers the belonging kind.
I still haven’t picked up a couple of the intermediaries like Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties. I will have to rectify that sometime soon.
Prince of Fire
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 | Personal | No Comments
I have blogged earlier about Daniel Silva‘s books, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin and The Confessor, so it was with great anticipation I picked up Prince of Fire at the bookstore last week. It continues shortly after A Death in Vienna, which I regrettably haven’t gotten my hand on yet, but once more we follow the Israeli spy Gabriel Allon as events unfold in the grander scheme of Israeli-Palestine intrigues involving the both loved and hated leader Yassir Arafat.
Once more Ari Shamron arrives to meet Mario Delvecchio, Gabriels alternate identity, and he has to flee his beloved Venice and journey home to Israel. Something he has tried not to do from the moment we first met him. Once more evil Palestine terrorists threaten the Israeli state and the prodigal son has to lead the investigation into these threats. This will be a race through history, memories and relationships throughout the history.
Despite portraying some of the transgressions
committed by the Jews then this story reads somewhat more one-sided as the earlier books involving the Israeli-Palestine conflict as being almost completely pro-Israeli. This is, of course, fine in works of fiction, but it does peel off some of the Gabriel in conflict that I found very fascinating in the other novels I’ve read. This will, of course, not keep me from having a look at A Death in Vienna and the sequel The Messenger as I really enjoy Daniel Silva’s writing style. The portrayal of a spy world where not everything is pure glamour, where everything isn’t black and white, where moral superiority hardly ever belongs to anyone, where unspeakable truths are put before your eyes and you’re forced to consider whether these things might give you moral justification to do what will be done. It is quite thought provocative at any length.
Collaborative writing
Saturday, January 7th, 2006 | Personal | No Comments
I have recently been investigating various forms of online, synchronous collaborative text editing, and have in my pursuits found the less aggravating program for Windows, moonedit, that allows one party to host one or more files, and others to connect to this person and edit these files.
As part of testing this editor, Jonas Öien and I have written a small short-story set in the typical crime novel style. It is, as the picture suggests, called The English Umbrella (PDF). For the interested parties there’s a small exerpt below.
The sky was dark grey, brooding, rain falling heavily and without mercy.
It had all day. I looked at my gold watch. It was fifteen twenty, almost
time to go home. I shuffled the papers on my large mahogany desk aimlessly.
Work had been scarce lately and my coffers were almost empty.
Another few days from now I would have to default on my rent. Where
was the glamour and excitement the other private eyes seemed to go on
about? God, I hate mondays.
I decided to leave a bit early. It wouldn’t matter, no one was showing
up today anyway. I was a failure at the trade, just like my father had
predicted when I proudly announced that I would become the greatest
private eye that had ever lived. How ignorant one can be.
I took my coat from the hall tree in the corner of the office. It was
looking worn and a few sizes too small, or perhaps I was a few sizes too
big. I tried to button it, but like usual I gave up after a few fumbles. I
reached out to take my felt hat when there was a careful knock at the
outer door. I stood still, not really sure whether I had heard the knock
at all. It came again.
Read the PDF for the full story and the captivating ending (or something). We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.
Reading and some lights
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 | Personal | No Comments
The busy christmas vacation has been, the world is slowly starting up again after all the festivities, and everything is just looking cold, snowy and January again. Fortunately I had planned to take a bit of time off from my studies during the vacation so I wouldn’t go entirely insane over the next six months. This time off was spent pondering over the new books I got for christmas: Daniel Silva’s The Kill Artist and The English Assassin. I have earlier read the third in the series, The Confessor, and I must say that they are all good in each their own way. The series start off a bit weak with The Kill Artist, but Silva has cleaned up his writing style a lot in the two latter books about the art restorer Delveccio who is, in reality, the Israeli agent Gabriel Allon. So if you like a nice thriller with some fun plot twists, pick them up from someplace and read them.
Since it’s winter and I’m up here in the semi-north it has, of course, been snowing. A lot. Oh and don’t try to bike in the snow unless you know what you’re doing. It’s tough. But that wasn’t really what I was going to say.
By request and because it’s always nice to take pictures of the snow, I brought my camera with me to work yesterday and had planned to snap some photos on the way there and on my way home as well, but I was too rushed getting there and going home was too dark, so I had to settle with experimenting with a few shots of the rush hour traffic on the motorway.
The light streaks were done with about a two second exposure. Unfortunately I couldn’t hold the camera entirely steady so the streaks jump a bit more than they were supposed to. You can see how much my hand shook by looking at the light poles. It’s pretty decent for a first try of long exposure, but I will definitely have to try it again with our tripod.
The other picture came out a bit shaken as well, but you don’t notice it as much. It really is terribly hard to try to do panning photographs. In the dark. Without a viewfinder. Without any indication of whether your motive is still in the centre of your objective. So, considering all that, it turned out rather decently, I’d say.
I’ll have to remember to try a more classic panning photograph from the side of the objective someday as well. But the night photos have a fascinating quality to them that I have always liked. Perhaps it’s because at night the geeks prowl. Who knows?
On CRC Cards and Design
Saturday, May 14th, 2005 | Development | No Comments
Sometimes you just wish you had paid a bit more attention back then in the first few semesters of studying Computer Science, but oh no, you were too busy/young conquering the world. As such it has been that I have been overlooking The CRC Card Book for nearly five years now, where it has been standing vigilantly on my bookcase. Since I have gotten more interested in teaching object-oriented methodologies over the past year and some, partially due to my internship, I figured it was on high time to take it down from its place on the shelf and read through it. I was not disappointed.
The book takes you through the object-oriented terms, strategies for evolving good designs, bringing the users into the process, and guiding everything along nicely by role-playing use cases, etc. While the ideas seem sound, psychologically speaking, I cannot help but feel that the described test cases work out just a bit too well. However, I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised and see that it can indeed work in a setting where people’s understanding of object-oriented design is rather rudimentary.
Reengineering
Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 | Personal | No Comments
So I’ve been reading a bit lately as I’m heading an analysis on a restructuring of our enterprise systems and a true pearl in the lines of books I’ve consulted lately has been Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns by Demeyer, Ducasse and Nierstrasz. It details ways to go about reengineering object-oriented systems, the phases you progress through, what you need to remember, things to consider. It is a very pragmatic guide and even though the systems I am looking at reengineering aren’t object-oriented, sadly, then it provides an ample amount of information to not only get you started in a good way, but to remind you that there is more than a technical aspect to this, it is as much a sociological process when reengineering a company’s systems.
In order to avoid grief and possible litigation and other interesting things I am not going go into the enterprise system, why it needs reengineering or other things, so don’t ask about it.
So if you’re in a likewise position of looking at your company’s systems and figuring out what went wrong and how to go about fixing it, this book is an absolute treasure of information. Much recommended if you’re filling out an architect position.
Enterprise Architecture
Monday, February 14th, 2005 | Development | No Comments
I just finished reading Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, the last Christmas present I still had to finish. I can’t seem to help feeling that it misses its audience in part with its narratives, depicting different aspects of enterprise programming, and even then all of a sudden go back to text-book descriptions of atomicity in transaction handling for threading. Very odd.
As usual, Fowler notes that he just records the patterns he has witnessed and everyone experienced in enterprise architecture will know these already, and it is rightfully so, so no mark against him there. Now, the Java crowd seems rather enamoured by the OR-mappings and being from that crowd, Fowler recounts those patterns. I am rather ambivalent on its merit, both the book’s and OR-mappings’, so I think I will settle with suggesting this book to newcomers to enterprise development, as a quick introduction to some of the more recurring patterns in the field.
Refactoring to patterns
Tuesday, January 18th, 2005 | Personal | No Comments
So, I got a lot of refactoring books for christmas and I finally ploughed through Joshua Kerievsky’s Refactoring to Patterns. It continues where Martin Fowler left off in his Refactoring book, but Kerievsky paints the broader picture, showing how patterns can be fitted into existing code.
A bonus for Kerievsky is that he is a good deal less patronising than Fowler and Beck, but the thing that really won me over to the book is the verbosity of his examples that accompany each and every refactoring in the book. These are priceless in understanding the motivation for refactoring, and while I may not always entirely agree with his motivations, and while some of the things are non-issues in non-Java languages, it provides a wealth of information.
But like John Brant and Don Roberts write in the afterword: use this book as a primer, not as a reference guide.
Categories
Archives
- February 2012
- July 2011
- June 2011
- November 2010
- October 2010
- April 2010
- November 2009
- October 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- June 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
- June 2004
- April 2004
- February 2004
- November 2003
- January 2003
- November 2002