Category: tech

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The Nonist mulls the next step in blogging and more importantly, in art:

Much of what I’ve learned about blogging, from the standpoint of a creative pursuit, reinforces my perception that the form, which includes as a subset all preconceptions and consumer habits, may be an artistic dead-end.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things from 2006

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As I write this, there’s only about 9 hours left in 2006. I thought it might be a little too gauche if I let this post slip over to 2007. To start, I’ve reviewed about 30 books here over the past 5 months. I think that works out to a review for every 2 or 3 that I read. Trolling my memory for things I liked from the entire year1, I come up with…
A Few of the Books I Really Liked This Year:

  • The Batman In: Nine Lives – I love Motter & Lark’s noir-ish rendition of the Gotham world. The limited, careful color palette is really cool.
  • Economics for Real People – Gene Callahan’s introduction to economic thinking is a nice refresher for nerds like myself, and a friendly welcome for those who wouldn’t read something like Man, Economy, & State. There’s also a PDF version of the book.
  • Beautiful Evidence – Edward Tufte makes a nice contribution to “forever knowledge” about visual communication here. Lovely work in a lovely container.
  • Getting Things Done – David Allen’s book didn’t convert me completely, but I haven’t found other personal development books that were so concrete and actually worth exploring in depth.
  • Understanding Comics – Scott McCloud’s book helped to revive my love for the form.
  • The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson’s compelling take on Sickness and the City. Though I think some of his other books are more tightly written, I like the bigger, broader ideas here.
  • The Broker – I don’t read a lot of pop fiction, so I wasn’t expecting John Grisham to be such a good writer. Besides being a fun read, he also has some well-crafted moments.

Worst Book:

  • Mary, Mary – I made sure not to set the bar too high for James Patterson, but this was still really awful. Ugh.

Best-Loved Music:

  • Feist: Let It Die – So much tasteful variety here. Aside from Leslie Feist’s great, great voice, the orchestration and instrument colors in this album are pretty incredible. There’s also a killer cover of the Bee Gees tune “Love You Inside Out”.
  • Joanna Newsom: Ys – At first listen, I wasn’t too sure. 30 seconds later, I was in heaven. Folksy wailing over tricky harp riffs. Trust me on this one.

Worst Music Surprise:

Personal Technology:

  • Samsung SGH T-509 – To the elation of all my friends, I broke down and got a cellphone this year. And I rather like it. What it really does best is stay unobtrusively in my pocket.
  • Apple 24″ iMac – Still drooling over this one. I’m a little ashamed that I still don’t feel like I have enough workspace.
  • Pen & Paper – Nothing beats this combo. I try to always keep them around.

Best-Loved Blogs:

  • Jason Kottke does a great job. After my brief time blogging, I appreciate his work even more. The quality is so consistently high. Great editing, and he’s willing to be patient to give better context or a personal contribution. Love it.
  • Shaun Inman‘s redesign is really cool.
  • Joshua Blankenship‘s blog is awesome. So much energy and optimism there. He makes me want to be more creative.
  • The Mises economics blog has a consistently great mix of high-brow academics and low-brow insight into everyday life.

—
1. Disclaimer: All memories are subject to change. If I remember something really good, I’ll add it to the list.

Just for Fun (review: 3/5)

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Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel and eventually one of the godfathers of open-source software development, tells all in Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. I don’t care much for biography, but this one did pretty well for itself. It starts off with the story of young Linus, growing up playing on his grandfather’s computer–and never really stopping. The subsequent years are a typical nerd routine of sleeping, eating, and computing away in a dark room. He developed Linux as a side project, an exercise in operating system development and exploration in low-level PC hardware. The first public release was a tentative version 0.01 that managed to catch the interest of a couple other folks involved in that geek niche.
And from there Linux just kept growing and growing, with its steadily improving quality and open-ness as its only real advertising. It’s that “accidental” aspect that makes it so interesting–Torvalds didn’t really set out to start an empire, and doesn’t really seem to want one now, either. Torvalds on Bill Gates:

I’m completely uninterested in the thing that he’s he best in the world at. And he’s not interested in the thing that maybe I’m the best in the world at. I couldn’t give him advice in business and he couldn’t give me advice in technology.

I like this bit on the freedom that open entails, freedom from mega-personalities, control freaks, and their whims:

The point about open source has never been that I’m more accessible than anybody else. It’s never been that I’m more open to other people’s suggestions… the issues is that even if I’m the blackest demon from Hell, even if I’m outright evil, people can choose to ignore me because they can just do the stuff themselves. It’s not about me being open, it’s about them have the power to ignore me. That’s important.

Near the end, there are a couple of philosophical chapters on intellectual property, control, and some industry prognostication. I like this gem from the intellectual property section: “The patent system of today is basically a Cold War with IP instead of nukes.” Most of the book isn’t that dogmatic, but just as enjoyable.

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I was just reading over the Wikipedia entry for Isaac Asimov‘s Three Laws of Robotics. I really liked Asimov’s I, Robot (the book! Let’s leave Will Smith out of this), which is a nice set of stories based around the laws in hypothetical situations. An interesting alternative to “laws” comes in the form of friendliness theory, saying that we should program the ‘bots to be basically nice in the first place.

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Bill Gates has said, “‚ĶSearch today is still kind of a hunt, where you get all these links, and as we teach software to understand the documents, really read them in the sense a human does, you’ll get answers more directly‚Ķ” And branching off of that, here are some predictions for where search engines are headed in the next year. While some are pretty wild, like when “a single query will bring a gallery of results equivalent to running multiple queries about the meaningful variations of the same topic,” I’d be happy enough with evolution such that “a search engine will let users evaluate answers on the spot by displaying uninterrupted and coherent text snippets, often letting searchers forgo having to click through to links.”

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New York Times article on our hapless Transportation Security Agency: “The T.S.A. is much more talented in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency‚Äôs security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student.” Ties in with the wild legal investigations of Chris Soghoian, who pointed out an embarrassing security weakness with the very clever Boarding Pass Generator. And it also features some nice comments from security whiz Bruce Schneier.

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I liked Chris Anderson’s articles this past week on the future of Wired magazine and media in general. “Editors catalyze and curate conversations that happen as much “out there” as on our own site.” Cool.