Smalltalk with James Robertson

The title - Sh*t My Dad Says - is more crude than things I usually put on my blog, but it's a hilarious book. Justin Halpern spent a lot of time with his family going back over things his dad had said and done over the years. The result is absolutely hysterical - I read it, my wife read it, and my daughter read it - we all laughed out loud a lot. Apparently, it all started with a Twitter feed, and grew into a book from that and some of the articles Halpern wrote. There's a lot of vulgarity in the book, so if that offends you, just avoid it. If that's not a problem, go get the book. It's a real hoot, and you'll laugh until it hurts.

On a side note, this is the first book I read on my iPad, and it's hooked me on the device for that purpose. I just grabbed a history book for the device while I sat in the living room. Cheaper than hardback or paperback, and nothing to pile up in my house :)

Technorati Tags: humor

I just finished reading Sramana Mitra's Entrepreneur Journeys v.4 : Innovation: Need Of the Hour (Volume 4) - a set of interviews/case studies with various people who have built businesses from the ground up. Some with venture capital, some without, some in manufacturing, and some in software. The software examples resonated better with me, simply because it's a field I live in; I did like many of the examples from the "harder" sectors though.

I especially liked Paul Cook's Raychem story - he was pretty adamant about the need to pay attention to customers/prospects, and about getting to profitability fast. It's a lesson a lot of software outfits could learn from; I think a lot of the VC money that's been burned in the industry has been a net negative. Mitra makes that point later in the book, when she covered CollabNet, SpringSource, and SugarCRM - all outfits that started from nothing, and bootstrapped themselves into big things.

In general, I liked her call for more rational behavior on the part of government, VC's, and academia - I just wish she hadn't then been so rah rah about the Xunlight thing, a company that's lived exclusively off government grants. I'm not sure I'd call that a success. I also wish she had gone a bit into the problems in the IPO space being caused by SarbOx - that's an example of well intentioned government action that has had the unintended consequence of hindering IPOs.

Overall, I liked the book though. It was fun to read the various stories. Having worked at ParcPlace in the latter part of its startup journey, it was nice to read about firms and people who had not made the same mistakes.

Technorati Tags: startup, innovation

I just finished reading The Accidental Time Machine, by Joe Haldeman. I haven't read a lot of his stuff since his classic The Forever War, but I like his writing style. The characters in this book are mostly good, although "Martha" from the immediate future ends up being a little stiff. The main character, Matt, is better drawn, but is mostly along for the ride. I found the first half of the book to be very compelling, but - as with the H.G. Wells story with which is shares an awful lot, how things got to be the way they are whenever Matt lands is never explained. Maybe it's my love of alternate history, but I really wanted to know how the throwback Massachusetts (a primitive religious culture guarded by obnoxious AIs) got to be the way it is. Never mind though; it's off to the next stop.

The rest of the book tied things up too tightly, I thought. The more or less magical beings who work with Matt to get him to somewhere better just don't make a lot of sense, and by the end of the story, I felt like I did at the end of The Stand - a great opening had been rushed to a conclusion, with a fair amount of stuff in the middle that we didn't really need. I liked the book, but I can't give it a ringing endorsement. If you like Haldeman, you'll like the book. Otherwise, it's a quick read, but not a great one.

Technorati Tags: scifi, reading

I just finished reading a the book Power Hungry - it's a good book, detailing where the power of today and tomorrow are likely to come from. You have to be willing to deal with some math to read this book - and the math makes it pretty clear (at least to me) that wind and solar are not going to be more than bit players in our energy future. That all comes down to something pretty simple: energy density. To over-simplify a lot, how much space do you need in order to generate a given amount of energy? For things like coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear (or for vehicles, gas), the space you need is pretty small, and you can locate the power generation capacity close to where the power is needed. For things like wind and solar, you need gobs of space, and, generally speaking, they need to be located pretty far away from where the power they generate is needed.

And that doesn't even get into the intermittancy problem (which the author, Robert Bryce, covers in some detaiil). I've written recently about my skepticism about electric cars, and one of the more amusing parts of this book is the series of headlines about electric cars being "the future" - with that series beginning in 1901. It seems that electric vehicles have been the "wave of the future" for a long time, and the problem remains the same now as it was for Edison - battery capacity and life.

Bryce thinks the future belongs to what he calls N2N - Natural gas and nuclear - and he makes the point that if you are concerned about air pollution (either CO2, or, to me at least, the more dangerous toxins that are emitted by burning things like coal), you should favor that future as well.

That's a very brief summary of his points - like I said, Bryce marshals a lot of data in support of his conclusions. I'd recommend taking a look before you draw your own conclusions. I think he makes a ton of sense.

Technorati Tags: energy, power

I just finished a fairly engaging techno-thriller: Counterstrike: The Last World War, Book 2. It's a follow on from The Last World War , something I read a few years ago. I happened upon the book at Borders while getting my daughter an AP prep guide; I had mostly forgotten about the earlier book.

It's a typical techno-thriller, with a Stargate wormhole type of plot device. The kicker - aliens fighting a long (think generations) war create the technology, hoping to use it as a game changer, allowing them to deploy across their own planet. Instead, they end up accidentally opening wormholes to Earth, and humanity gets involved in the war.

Through the first book, it's not at all clear why the war was happening; in the second book, a vague "cold war gone hot" device crops up, with Earth siding with the "Western" side of the conflict. An anti-war group becomes something of a plot device in the second book, but not for long - mostly, they help set up the predictable plot twist that puts the book on the race track towards the conclusion.

The story was fun enough to read, in a "beach reading" sort of way - although I really wonder how much longer authors can pull out grizzled Vietnam war vets to fight again. Seriously - that's a long time ago now :) On the other hand, how many techno-thrillers have you read recently where a North Korean tank jockey is one of the good guys?

Anyway, if you pick up these books, don't expect anything deep. They are enjoyable yarns, but that's about it.

Technorati Tags: scifi, techno+thriller

Like Amazon, B&N has apparently decided that the Nook is not a core item to be protected - the book business is the key thing:

Unlike Apple and Amazon, bookselling behemoth Barnes & Noble didn't have an e-reading app available for the iPad on day one. But it's just released an iPad version of its eReader

My wife was happy to hear that - it opens up another catalog of books for the iPad. While there are some luddites around claiming that print is better, I don't think that's the issue. This is an additional channel for reading, not a replacement. It will work better for some kinds of reading, and less well for others (I'm thinking textbooks in which you might want to annotate or highlight). Bear in mind though, most of us stop using textbooks after the age of 21 or so, so trumpeting that lack as a key problem is kind of narrow-minded...

Technorati Tags: reading, e-reader, iPad

I wrote a bit about Fred Brooks' fine book earlier, but now I've finished it. While the essays in the early part of the book were quite good (and I touched on that in my earlier post), the case studies were perhaps the most illustrative things. Why? Partly because Brooks does what far too few of us are willing to do - ponder oversights and mistakes made during the design process and how they impacted later use. That came up both in discussions of his beach house (which he was a co-designer), and of the IBM System/360.

After any major deliverable, I think it's worth taking stock of what happened and why. As well, these words from Brooks (in the context of the 360) make a ton of sense for any real system:

Allow plenty of time for design. It makes the product much better and useful longer, and it might even make delivery sooner by reducing rework

Two large examples from the history of VisualWorks come to mind: VW 2.0 and VW 5i.0. In the first case, what came to be known as the ObjectLens (and O/R mapping framework) was brought in from the outside by marketing, and then an additional year of development work was done in order to make it minimally deliverable. No on at PPS (or the successor owners) was ever happy with Lens - in fact, the original developer of the code had left engineering, and been allowed to take the code with him - partly because no one in engineering had much faith in it. That code has been problematic ever since, and is only now being replaced with something better (Glorp).

VW 5i.0 was rushed for management reasons - there were bad numbers about to come out, and management wanted a release "to soften the blow". 5i.0 was not even vaguely ready for release; Store was unstable, and the (then new) namespace system still had kinks in it. It took two releases from the new owner (Cincom) before the 5i line was minimally usable, and, to some extent, things didn't really stabilize until the 7.x release line.

Those were both management failures as well as design failures, but - a willingness to spend more time on design, and less on "quick fixes" would have been better for everyone. That's one of the major lessons of the case studies, at least for me. Overall, I liked the book - it's accessible to anyone who's associated even loosely with design, and makes high level points without going off into the weeds on any of the examples. I highly recommend it.

Technorati Tags: brooks, design

The online "Pharo by Example" book continues to grow - a new draft chapter was just added. Hat tip Torsten Bergmann

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, pharo

I haven't finished reading Fred Brooks' latest: "The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist" yet, but I really like what I've read. It's easy to read and quite pleasant; Brooks lets you know what he's thinking without a ton of jargon, and uses examples (the design of a beach house he was involved in) that are easy to grasp and make sense.

This bit, from a section on "telecollaboration" really struck true for me, based on the geographically dispersed team I work with at Cincom:

The most successful telecollaborations I have known have been built on extensive face-time histories, and even those have required some face time during ongoing telecollaboration. Absent such histories, travel is worth what it costs in money and time

A lot of people discount that, but I think it's very, very true. The less well people know each other, the easier it is to misconstrue an email, or the tone of voice in a skype chat. Face time isn't a cure all; you'll still have personality conflicts to deal with - but it will get people to know each other's quirks, and make allowances for them.

Anyway, there's a lot more in that book - it's just that what I posted above really hit home for me. Once I finish the book, I'll post more thoughts on it.

Technorati Tags: design, brooks