Books

Are Publishers Insane?

March 29, 2012
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I love reading books. My house is littered with thousands of them. And to me the Kindle is a godsend in that I can have, in my hand, thousands of books and read whatever I feel like whenever and wherever I want. I can travel with the Kindle and ensure that if I’m not in the mood for a given book in a second or two I can start in on another. It’s made packing for a trip that much easier: just pack the Kindle and have all my books. Yet publishers, well some publishers, seem to hate the Kindle. I’ve seen books I’ve been interested in buying priced at or above! the price of the Kindle version by publishers. What the hell is going through their brains? If the hardcover is $18.70 why is the Kindle version $18.67? What this has done to me is that I simply will not buy books from any publisher that does that. I will buy from those that price the Kindle version fairly from $3 – 13, depending on a variety of factors that I can live with. But I won’t buy an electronic copy of a book for the price I can

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Kindling

October 15, 2010
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I’ve been looking at the Kindle. I installed the Kindle app on my iPad and must say I’m impressed. But maybe not in the way a lot of people see it. Instead of something that allows me to lug lots of books around instead I see it as the means to an end. At the moment my house has thousands of books in it. They’re everywhere. My biggest problem is I love books and read 50 – 100 per year. Problem is, more than that many interesting books are published per year. Take into account yesterday. I wandered through Chapters here in town and immediately saw 4 books I wanted to buy. I had to restrain myself, but in the end bought 2 anyway. Sigh. The problem I have is one of space. At the moment I still have some room for books, but that will end. And I doubt I can convince my wife to allow me to have yet another room filled with bookcases. So, I have to come up with a solution and the Kindle is a major part of that solution. Instead of always buying physical books I have decided to separate my reading into three

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Asylum Seekers

September 26, 2010
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Asylum Seekers

One book I constantly reference is Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. It is an excellent book explaining the difference between what a techie sees are how software should function versus what a normal person sees and wishes software would do. It all boils down to the difference of putting the onus on the developer to make the software as easy and intuitive as possible versus making the poor end-user jump through hoops to get anything accomplished. It’s the notion that whatever is done should be as easy as possible for the programmer to code as opposed to making sure the end-product is something that doesn’t aggravate, confuse, or otherwise enrage the end-user. Cooper further states that software should just be “good enough”. This is a common refrain today, but a few years ago was rather heady stuff. I’ve long believed “good enough” would solve a lot of our troubles but most people in high-tech are perfectionists who spend an infinite amount of time honing their craft and their software to such an extent that it either never gets out or when it does get out is rather useless. In this way Cooper is also proclaiming that Agile

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The Fattening of America

September 18, 2010
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The Fattening of America

I recently finished The End of Overeating by Dr. David Kessler, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. It was primarily of interest to me because, like many people, I’ve struggled with weight gain. And following the so-called “Food Pyramid” has only exacerbated the condition. So it was eye opening to read Dr. Kessler’s book on the food industry and why sometimes the food we eat is particularly bad for us. Furthermore, it readily explains much, perhaps all, of the fattening of America that has occurred during the last 50 years or so. The basic question behind the book is simple: What’s causing the so-called “Obesity Epidemic”. Whether you believe in the epidemic or not is immaterial. We all know that way too many people are struggling with huge weight issues. And the usual methods of staying slim don’t seem to work — more on that when I finish Good Calories, Bad Calories. In the book Dr. Kessler examines what we’d consider “normal” food — i.e., the stuff nature produces — vs. the food we often consume from restaurants, processed food sections of supermarkets, etc. He determines that it isn’t fat that makes us fat. And that’s something

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Good Enough to be Great

September 14, 2010
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Good Enough to be Great

I’ve just revisited Good to Great by Jim Collins again thinking about how it ties back to startups. Although the reviews are all over the map I do wonder how many reviewers have tried to start a company or work at a mediocre firm with people that just don’t care? After reading the book I found myself nodding constantly and realizing what we had done right at Texar and what we had done wrong. It makes me appreciate people like Bill Gates all the more. Originally a talented geek he was also a savvy businessman, which, I’ve found out, is all too rare. He quickly (and I mean quickly — by the age of 20) grasped the notion of “good enough” in terms of deliverable requirements while demanding top performance from this team. The goal is to create a great company that will drive great results. Bill Gates did that and more at Microsoft — no one in their right mind can argue that. Some may argue about the quality of Microsoft’s software but I will simply state: What stopped anyone else from building better software and selling it? For an interesting take on how a leader can lose out by

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DRiVE

September 6, 2010
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DRiVE

I pointed out the great video explaining what truly motivates people before. The book just goes into more details, highlighting research and what it takes to truly motivate people. The irony of much of the book is that the answer to how to motivate is simply “Get out of the way.” Throw in some trust and you’ll have folks truly motivated. Of course, it presumes that the folks you’re hiring are capable. But if you’re in any type of company that requires intellectual effort, motivated people are not that hard to find. Keeping them motivated is the trick. And most firms fail by simply failing to realize that so-called “incentives” are anything but. The book is filled with tidbits, such as: “Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation … When institutions … focus on the short-term and opt for controlling people’s behaviour they do considerable long-term damage.” (pg. 39) “For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation … is essential for high levels of creativity.” (pg. 46) “… researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half

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The Venture Cafe

September 6, 2010
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The Venture Cafe

I’m catching up on posting on a slew of excellent books I’ve read recently. One such book is The Venture Cafe by Teresa Esser. It documents the road taken by a series of high-tech entrepreneurs in the Boston area. The book was an easy read and, after having started and run a VC funded start-up I can attest to the veracity of the stories. While reading the book I was reminded time and again about how Texar began and how it was and how it ended. Documenting the arduous task from idea through funding effort and finally to product realization was akin to reliving those 4 years of my life at Texar. Ms. Esser’s account of the various start-ups and founders final days was enlightening as well as oddly comforting and liberating. You can see entrepreneurs making the right decisions and still losing. You feel the pain of the various entrepreneurs who were forced out of their companies or saw their life work collapse around them. Even some of those that were financially rewarded suffered as they were wrenched from their companies only to watch as the companies became something other than what they had intended. I found it comforting to realize that the

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On Design

April 20, 2010
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I’m quickly reading through Brooks’ latest tome, The Design of Design. As usual, Brooks is straight up and to the point explaining his views on design and why it’s a solo or, at most, a 2-person task. This makes sense to me, but I tend to be biased. The implementation is a team effort, but not the design. One thing I noticed courtesy of John Cook’s blog is what amounts to two new additions to Brooks’ Law. Brooks’ Law is the famous “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” We can now add: “Many hands make light work” — Often. Corollary: “Many hands make more work” — Always. And what I’d call Brooks’ Law of Design: Most great works have been made by one mind. The exceptions have been made by two minds. Obviously, I highly recommend anything written by Fred Brooks. His Mythical Man Month is a classic that everyone should read, especially project managers. His new book is the same, a must read. I’ve always loved the fact that Brooks has little use for the Waterfall Model. I loathe it, and it seems he does too. I like being in good company .

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Coders at Work

December 14, 2009
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I recently finished reading Coders at Work by Peter Seibel. You can pick up a copy at your local bookstore or on online at places like Chapters or Amazon. You can read Peter’s blog here, also well worth visiting. I found it a great read, though there are a number of typos, format errors, and grammatical mistakes. I do also find he should have cleaned up the format a bit. It’s in an interview format, which is fine, but there are places where it could have flowed better. Sometimes there’s a single interjection by either the author or the coder being interviewed. I didn’t quite see the point as those small interjections didn’t offer much, if anything. However, overall, I really enjoyed the book. There are some nice tidbits, including the overall dislike of C++ — with which I can sympathize. While reading the book I decided to tag passages I thought were insightful or interesting. Here’s a summary. Jamie Zawinski   (7) Brad Fitzpatrick  (7) Douglas Crockford  (12) Brendan Eich  (7) Joshua Bloch   (7) Joe Armstrong   (9) Simon Peyton Jones    (4) Peter Norvig   (4) Guy Steele   (14) Dan Ingalls   (7) L Peter Deutsch  (13) Ken Thompson   (9) Fran Allen   (4)

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The Management Myth

September 11, 2009
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I’m reading Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth. It’s an excellent book and I recommend it highly. Although I hope to write a bit of a review once I’m through the book, this post, however, concerns a quote from his book that just struck me on a number of levels. Strategy makes sense as a project only in the context of uncertainty, or, more generally, in a context where pure reason will not deliver a definitive answer to the question “what is to be done?” But a purely rational framework … leaves no space for such “irrationality.” So the framework solves strategic problems only in a context where there is no possibility that such problems will arise. A stunning statement. And it reminds me oh so much of Project Management, especially as applied to software projects — which, to be honest, are highly irrational. However, we try to push some form of framework atop a project only to watch projects flounder the more tightly we adhere to a given framework or project management strategy. Stewart’s book reminds me of deMarco’s recent paper in the IEEE on Project Management and this choice quote: My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement,

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Musings

A blog of my musings. Some folks find it interesting and so I continue. Hopefully it will remain fairly interesting. At worst, it'll keep me writing orthogonally to my day job.

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