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From Lotte came No Time gum.

Might be older, but my earliest memory of it was around 1990. There's not much detail on the Amazon page, but search the web and various blogs and stores will turn up with more info.

I'm not really a political or litigious person by nature, but as I've aged, I've come to this somewhat depressing conclusion; occasionally, the only way to effect change in this world is to exact some kind of financial cost on those who disregard the rights of their fellow human beings.

David Brancaccio (from public radio's Marketplace) wrote a quite entertaining book that deals with the concept of socially responsible investing, and asks the question of whether or not applying fuzzy concepts of "good " and "evil" to publicly traded companies makes any kind of sense.

He was sort of sarcastic about it, and had a tendency to make fun of new-age hippies showing at the annual shareholder's meeting in Montana with their 100% natural non-bleached cotton moccasins, and painfully detailed dietary requirements, but overall it was funny, and it made an otherwise dry subject a lot more palatable. Check it out if you're sick of O'Reilly books - it was a good companion on the road last summer.

Hopefully, we will continue to develop more accurate and effective ways to evaluate companies and maybe even their corresponding Good:Evil ratios in the future; maybe then companies guilty of human rights violations or severe pollution disasters will feel a direct effect on their bottom line.

I recently bought the iAudio G3, which supports Vorbis, among a number of other formats.

My favorite feature though? Definitely the bookmarks, which are great when I'm listening to a podcast or some other long-format piece of audio.

First, the scrum book, by its co-creator ken schwaber http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735 61993X/ref=pd_sim_b_4/103-6526029-2864653?_encodin g=UTF8&v=glance interestingly enough, its published by MS Press Second: what people seem to be missing in this thread is that scrum is essentially a anarchist/communist/utopian project management technique. there are no bosses telling you what to do. teams are self-organizing and autonomous. this is a _radically_ different project management technique -- no folks, its not about the daily meetings. it's about being bossless. A buddy of mine went through scrum training with schwaber, and he had them do an interesting exercise. teams of two were instructed to walk exactly 300 paces in exactly 2 minutes. each team was composed of a boss and a walker. the walker was told by the boss to take a step, slow down, or go faster. _none_ of the teams successfully walked the 300 paces in the time period. so they were broken up such that each person had no boss, and simply had to walk the 300 paces. _every_ person completed the task. lesson: micro-managing bosses just slow you down. third: a very interesting practical example of this sort of project management technique is the GE jet engine plant in durham, NC. http://www.fastcompany.com/online/28/ge.html This shop is organized around a bossless culture. They are the most successful and productive jet engine manufacturer in the world. A great example of how this sort of technique isn't just for pot smoking hippies. Finally: the essential thing that binds all of these agile/xp/scrum-ish like techniques together is TESTING. No code can be written without unit tests. All requirements have a direct mapping to a suite of acceptance tests (written, say, using fitnesse -- www.fitnesse.org). There are three types of developers in this world: those that test first (the ones I want to work with), those that have never tested at all, and don't want to (stay away from these ones), and those that have read/heard about test first and want to try it out (these can be saved). --sozin

Real Book is the name of one brand of fake book. They are still in production, and are now "legit" and wholly above-board. In addition to The New Real Book, which is all new selections in new transcriptions, Hal Leonard has recently re-published all of the Real Book series, with minor corrections. Publishers get their cut, the books are cheaper now than back then, and everybody is happy.

"Fake book" is a generic term for any book of simplified musical scores (not necessarily simplified in the sense of being easy to play, as a lot of the songs in jazz fake books are definitely for advanced musicians) that includes the melody, chord symbols, and usually a pretty good representation of the overall structure of the song. The majority of fake book scores fit on one or two facing pages, so that turning pages is minimized. Fake books predate Real Books by many years, but the Real Book folks did a fantastic job of getting good transcriptions onto paper and getting them distributed very widely. The music industry turned a blind eye to this thriving publishing business (mostly) because it was good for their business to have their artists songs being played reasonably accurately all over the world. And, of course, the musicians themselves were using these books on a daily basis and so certainly wouldn't raise a stink about not getting royalties when their own songs appeared in these bibles of Jazz.

The Real Books are still the best of the lot, by far, and I certainly recommend any musician pick up copies of at least the first Real Book. The quality of The New Real Book series is superior, and the supplemental material (like a page of chord spellings and notation conventions) and arrangements are more complete, but the song selection is less exciting to me. The first Real Book has everything you need to be able to fake your way through a whole career as a working musician (which, I guess was the point).

Here's the link:

The Real Book at Amazon

You can, of course, find all of the old ones online in one form or another...they're just too damned useful, and they have such a long history of ignoring copyright law, that copies seem to grow in any cool dark place. I consider $16.50 a small price to pay to get the corrected versions in a nicely bound volume, but there have been times when I didn't have my books and needed a song and I've downloaded and printed it out...and I don't feel even a little guilty about it.

All is not lost. A dead cat still has many useful applications. 101 in fact.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0517 545160/qid=1131887056/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-6528 581-9349705?v=glance&s=books&n=507846/

...that hits have anything to do with their content? People are simple: they like music when it's force fed to them all the time. Buy off enough radio stations, tv commercial producers and malls, and BAM! It's a miracle, you've got a hit!

Besides, isn't this Slashdot? I thought we abandoned the idea that the record industry is actually relying on quality content to make money back during the lawsuits, or the collusive price gougings, or during the suck that was music around the turn of the millenium, (or maybe when we first started stealing from them, it's hard to say).

Confessions of a Record Producer probably demands a plug.

But...you're only looking at *some* videos from a CD that accompanies a book, Point & Click OpenOffice.org, that'll be in bookstores by mid-December. You only saw an excerpt of the complete work, which goes into lots more depth than what you've seen. Plus I'll be making and posting more videos soon. Email me (robin at roblimo dot com) with your suggestions. I'll (obviously) start with the ones for which I get the most requests.

Format choice side note: Like it or not, Flash offers the most bandwidth-efficient way to reach the most computer users, on the most platforms. Those who want to redistribute these videos in other file formats are welcome to do so as long as they preserve attribution and all that (Creative Commons License), although I'd suggest emailing me to get AVI or MPEG copies instead of trying to retrack the compressed Flash versions. This will give a better end result.

I'd also like to point out that these videos are primarily for Windows users, not for the slick Linux crowd that reads Slashdot, which is why they're relaxed and kind of fumbly (so they don't intimidate people who aren't comfortable with computers). This also explains the eMachine box. I needed something with Windows and it was on sale cheap. My "real" computers run Linux, just as you'd expect. :)

- Robin

Hooray, somebody knows Music Biz 101. This question shouldn't have even been asked.

Damn right! Surely the OP has a musician acquaintance he could ask. Or preferably a lawyer in the music business. Why ask us??

If he's too lazy to get out of his chair, he could order this book and stop wasting our time!

Also, the price on older games tends to go down after a while. You can eventually get the best games for under $20 each, or sometimes for as little as $10ish. While they may not sport the most cutting edge graphics, they still are fun to play and may be a better value than the majority of $50 (or now, $60) titles available for the new system. If you didn't own the previous generation console, this can be an important selling point, especially early in the life of the next-gen console, when your selection of quality titles is very small.

You can sell your own system, which, granted, you may not get a ton of money for if a shiny, new backwards compatible system has just been released by the same company, but you'll still probably get enough for at least one shiny new cutting edge game (except perhaps in the case of the GameCube, which is so inexpensive already that I have a hard time imagining someone getting more than $50 for it on eBay, particularly after the Revolution comes.

So backwards compatability may not be something that makes someone decide that they definitely aren't going to buy the system, it is a great bonus feature that will make the decision to buy easier.

If you want to get beyond that (CCNP or CCIE), you need some real network gear (i.e., real routers and switches). I'm not saying that Cisco certs are the end-all of network knowledge, but if your goal is to really learn about networks, then they're good guideposts.

Another fine thing to digest is Stevens' classic book TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1.

This should help with Windows networks.

There's TONS of people like me with CASH now, that would be 50 bucks for a Super Mario World 2.

I think you mean Super Mario World 3. But yeah, just imagine all the side scrolling goodness they could fit on a gamecube disk. It could have like 20 different endings or any number of non-3D graphical innovations.

Actually, Mendel's problem had nothing to do with the age of the earth, but rather the discreet nature of the genetics he had discovered argued against any gradual model of change. There still does not exist a gradual model that has any sort of experimental validity.

As for the age of the earth, there are only _some_ measures which give the earth a great age, most of them dealing with alpha nuclear decay. Beta nuclear decay indicates a young age of the earth, as do other metrics such as helium diffusion within crystals. See the book Thousands not Billions. If you want to look at what they were investigating, you can see their pre-research book, Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth.

Much of their work is summarized in the following posters they had available at the American Geophysical Union:

Precambrian Zircons Yield a Helium Diffusion Age of 6,000 years.
The Enigma of the Ubiquity of 14C in Organic Samples Older than 100 ka.
Abundant Po Radiohalos in Phanerozoic Granites and Timescale Implications for their Formation.

Or you can buy it for 23.50 USD at bookpool:
http://www.bookpool.com/sm/1590594444

or for 29.69 at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590594444/002-09 47562-0071223?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v =glance

or you could spend 40.49 at BN:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?userid=ao05LCTCMJ&isbn=1590594444&itm=3


But of course BN is linked in this review.

Save yourself $15.30 by buying the book here: Hardening Linux. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $15.30 by buying the book here: Hardening Linux. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

come get me, Amazon.

might as well go ahead & set up your legal fund donate button ... before they patent that!

What Amazon is doing, of course, is protecting a vast amount of intellectual property that it has amassed over the years in the form of consumer reviews. While Amazon does not own the copyright to those reviews, they do have extensive rights to them as set out in the Amazon Conditions of Use:

If you do post content or submit material, and unless we indicate otherwise, you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media. You grant Amazon.com and its affiliates and sublicensees the right to use the name that you submit in connection with such content, if they choose. You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content that you post; that the content is accurate; that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity; and that you will indemnify Amazon.com or its affiliates for all claims resulting from content you supply. Amazon.com has the right but not the obligation to monitor and edit or remove any activity or content. Amazon.com takes no responsibility and assumes no liability for any content posted by you or any third party.

This data that it has managed to collect is an important selling tool, especially for book authors. Why? Because potential book buyers often look at the Amazon reviews to get more details about what a book is really about, even if they don't end up buying it on Amazon (but it gives Amazon more opportunities to push products on those eyeballs). Sure, us authors will fuss over the star ratings (of course you want a 5-star rating, who wouldn't!) but the reality is that the negative ratings can also sell books -- if they're constructive. Those reviews get shared with Amazon partners through the Amazon Web Services, so they just don't end up on the Amazon.com site (though I do find it odd that the reviews aren't shared between the different English-locale Amazon sites). All this data just helps them become the e-commerce portal of choice.

So trying to protect the gathering and processing of this information -- visitor-supplied metadata -- is completely understandable from their point of view. They'd be fools not to do so, especially with the ease with which these kinds of patents seem to be granted.

Eric
Read my Invisible Fence story

Albert Laszlo Barabasi explains it all clearly and succinctly in his book, Linked, which should be required reading by everyone, because networks, with their inherent feedback loops, dynamic decentralized structure, and inherent robustness, exist in all facets of our lives. Understanding that these networks exist, why they exist, and how they work (and more importantly, how they don't work), is increasingly becoming essential to understanding our lives, our roles in life, workplace dynamics, etc - in short, living in today's networked world.

Attempting to move a robust networks away from the model of "intelligence at the ends, stupidity in the middle" will break such robustness, and cause the utility of the network, if not the network itself, to crumble. At best, it will mean even slower communications within the network, at an ever increasing price for both the users and controllers. At worst, it means the dissolution of the network, along with the dissolution of all that depends on that network (economically and socially).

Actually, it's not "all white folk" but "all non-Islamics". Much of what is occuring is because the radical/fundamental Islam they follow doesn't allow for the existance non-believers into the area and has very little do with politics. (see Holy War, Inc.) For instance, American bases in Saudi Arabia. So, at least in theory, if all the "white folk" left, the terrorism should stop. Now, of course it won't, because the planet isn't big enough for two religions and the "no Christians/Jews/Americans/etc in our land" argument is just the fundamentalist rhetoric they use to drum up financial support.

Or better yet, the string tribute to Nine Inch Nails.

Seriously, WTF?

In fact, the new immigrants do not even have to be of a different race, just somehow different and make less money. There is simply a different value system between older residents and newer immigrants. New immigrants tend to relatively have these things in common: less financially well off, louder (in fights or in celebrations), percieved problems with youth gangs, and often will attempt to do a lot of gardening for food rather than just buying from a grocery store. These things are generally considered aesthetically unapealling to more wealthy people who had been there for a while.

A good example of this in one neighborhood is Riverwest, by Tom Tolan. In this book he explores many different waves of immigrants to the Riverwest neighborhood in Milwaukee, starting with the "original" German Settlers, moving to the Polish in the early 1900's, to black people coming from the rural south during the civil rights movement, to Puerto Ricans in the early 1960's, to hippies in the late 1960's and early 1970's to punk-rockers in the 1990's and first part of this decade. Every single group of "old school" residents felt the same way about new immigrants that the previous group felt about them (except for the German group, where they were originally wealthy settlers and businessmen and started the whole neighborhood essentially as any sprawling suburb begins today.) Some of these waves of immigration may have been at about the same time, but took places in different places in Riverwest, leading to some level of clash when the boundaries started to cross.

Sorry if you can't find the book, it was a rather limited print. A basic review of the timeline presented in the book can be found in the neighborhood's local paper, but it does not go into the difficulties that each generation of immigrants went through.

Different manifestations pop up depending on the milieu: today it's radio signals from government controlled satellites, but in the late 1940's Shaver's tales of "Dero rays" being emitted by a race of evil subterranean dwellers proved a popular framework for the delusion.

And before that (in 1796), there was James Tilly Matthews's Air Loom, a "pneumatic machine" that could manipulate the ether to influence its victims. See The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness by Mike Jay for more details.

In addition to insights into one of the earliest documented manifestations of paranoid delusion, the book has lots of juicy details about mental health facilities in the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth centuries, the French Revolution, Mesmerism, and lots more. A really interesting book.

No kidding, between this and seeing all the tremendously elaborate pranks in NightWork, I'm starting to think that the greatest prank that MIT ever pulled was convincing the world that they have actual classes going on.

I think you are wrong. There was a list of the infected cds posted yesterday here at Slashdot. Go over to Amazon and read the reviews of every single item. They are schockful of "Stay Away" notes. I can only remember Neil Diamond. Look here at Neil Diamond's 12 Songs

van Zant: Get right with the man. It's not looking good for the artists...

5x5x5 cubes exist, I even owned one once (before it broke). Took me about 20-30 minutes to solve it - not very quick, but I was still happy to have memorised all the little formulas :-)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 83HIHM/002-1699118-6329633?v=glance

While just solving the cube quickly may be interesting. I think it's far more interesting that the cube movements can be thought of elements of a subgroup of a very large permutation group, S48 to be precise. If you have some math background and like abstract things you might want to take a look at Adventures in Group Theory : Rubik's Cube, Merlin's Machine, and Other Mathematical Toys which, despite the title is a fairly serious little math book.

Robert Love is from the Ximian division (see here). He is also a kernel hacker. (See, e.g., here; see also here.) So, the comment may not have been sarcastic at all. Ximian actually does have at least one very accomplished Linux kernel hacker.

Look here

Those kinds of things are possible because the C++ template metalanguage is Turing Complete.

Of course, the syntax gets real ugly real fast, because, I think, the template metalanguage is Turinc Complete by accident, and not design, but it's amazing what you can do.

I haven't looked at Java Genrics closely enough to know if they have the same expressive power, but I suspect they don't.

If it ain't Japanese it ain't manga. They should have picked up Azumanga Daioh.

its also true of the non 60gig versions. If you look on Amazon the only ipods that they price as new are the color screen video and/or picture ones. All the rest are sold by other venders and refurbished or used, and thus would not have been a good indicator of price difference in my comparison.

It has the benefit of having many popular science fiction references.

You can pre-order the game here: Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

You can pre-order the game here: Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Same thing with Linux users.

Apple and iPod look cool and all that, I'm just not big on paying their premium to be cool as it were. Instead I got the same basic product for $100 less.
60 gig iPod - $400
60 gig Creative Nomad zen - $300.

Apple and iPod look cool and all that, I'm just not big on paying their premium to be cool as it were. Instead I got the same basic product for $100 less.
60 gig iPod - $400
60 gig Creative Nomad zen - $300.

You can buy the game here: City of Villains. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

You can buy the game here: City of Villains. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $11.88 by buying the book here: Write Portable Code: An Introduction to Developing Software for Multiple Platforms. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $11.88 by buying the book here: Write Portable Code: An Introduction to Developing Software for Multiple Platforms. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

all the big problems in the country- from 9/11 to Katria relief- are the result of chaos, sloppiness and stupidity unguided by secret cabals or ninja assassins or Skull and Bones members.

[sarcasm]Yes it makes MUCH more sense that all these things happened by coincidence. You can call it "coincidence theory." None of the super-rich EVER work together to advance mutual interests.[/sarcasm]

This might be a good place to start getting a clue.

"Huh? Creationists deny that there has been change!"

That's incorrect. Even Linnaeus didn't think that. Perhaps the problem is that you've been fighting straw men. The difference between evolution and creation (in general) are whether there is a monophyletic tree (evolution) or a polyphyletic tree (creation). YEC has the additional belief that the age of the geologic column is about 6,000 years, and that most of the paleozoic and mesozoic were deposited by a single flood.

Young Earth Creationists believe that the created "kind" is roughly at the family level of taxonomy.

If you're going to berate creationists, you should find out what they actually believe. For that, I recommend Understanding the Pattern of Life. The authors are both scientists. Todd Wood was one of the geneticists who sequenced the rice genome, and Kurt Wise earned his PhD under Stephen Jay Gould.

"Also, exactly how unlikely is "mathematically unlikely"? Is there any credible calculation of this probability anywhere?"

Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues.

Also, biologists agree that the search space for a viable protein is extremely small. Only 1 in 10^11 randomly generated proteins are active _at all_ (not necessarily _usefully_ active, just active at all -- as in have a binding site for ATP).

Functional proteins from a random-sequence library.

Likewise, Dembski has done some work regarding such search spaces in his book No Free Lunch and the online paper Searching Large Spaces.

"The thing is, the Earth is a very large system, and it spans a very long timeframe."

The timeframe proposed is actually very short for the kinds of changes required by evolution.

"Just about anything can be done with enough time and resources"

This is actually false. It is based on a misreading of the probability formula. The classic probability formula is for looking at the probability of independent events. Since all biological reactions are equilibrium reactions, the probabilities are drastically smaller (if not 0) than otherwise examined.

"Indeed, since I am here arguing about it, something must obviously have worked, and thus we set out to find that something."

You are assuming that matter and motion are all that exists. ID states that not all of reality is reducible to matter and motion. If it were, then choice would be an invalid concept.

"And even more finally, even if "accidental" or "random" evolution is shown to be very unlikely, it means only that."

Scientifically, it does. That's exactly what "error bars" are for in science. What you are saying is error bars are unnecessary in science, because it's possible that whatever we are looking at beat the probabilities. So, not only did you abandon testability for evolution, you have simultaneously removed it from all of science.

I would like to ask the Kansas Board of Education one question: who created their designer? Another designer? Is it turtles all the way down?

There are plenty of responses to this argument. This is the worst anti-creation argument, and it is the most overused, with perhaps the execption of "ID cannot be falsified and it makes no predictions".

Look here for some answers to this question:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-fo rm/104-1239660-1137541

Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons prohibits the use of laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision, that is to the naked eye or to the eye with corrective eyesight devices. The High Contracting Parties shall not transfer such weapons to any State or non-State entity.

I just happened to be finishing up an excellent, if a little dated, book on Laser Weapons called 'Laser Weapons - The Dawn of a New Military Age' Its out of print, but if you can find it, I highly recommend it. Co-authored by a military Major General and a Biomedical Engineering professor specializing in eye injuries, etc.

One thing that is NOT in TFA, is this key fact about Low Energy Laser weapons:

It is not possible to only flash blind a person with a laser for a sufficient time in broad daylight without simultaneously causing permanent changes to his eyes. Temproary flash blinding by a laser is only possible when eyes are more or less adapted to darkness.

The key point here is that a laser weapon like this will only be 'safe' on the targets at night. During the day it won't work.

If you really want to poke around and see whats out there, both experimental and deployed, try some of these searches (and since most stuff related to laser weapons is still highly classified, take what you read with a grain of salt):

• HELEX
• LDS - Laser Dazzle Sight
• C-CLAW/RoadRunner
• StingRay
• Cameo Bluejay
• Coronet Prince
• DAZER
• COBRA

These are programs primarily from the late 1980's and 1990's, but it gives you an idea what they were looking at back then and some may still be in R&D today. Systems like Stingray and LDS were deployed at some point or came very close to it.

One thing most people don't realize is that High Energy Laser weapons (HEL) like proposed for SDI, etc, are VERY difficult to deploy and run into serious problems with atmospheric distortion and interference (lookup Laser Thermal Blooming on Google - its a neat effect) But Low Energy Laser (LEL) weapons can easily blind soldiers, destroy optics, and destory sensitive sensors on vehicles, aircraft, and missles, and aren't as severely impacted by the environment like HEL weapons are. Plus they are CHEAP to build and the technology is widely available - thus the weapons aren't limited to the G-8. If you think terrorists haven't considered using LELs you're kidding yourself. They may not have the dramatic effect - but imagine the psychological impact on a society (think DC Sniper) if numerous people started going blind just walking down the street. Why do you think the FAA freaked out so badly when people pointed handheld laser pointers at landing aircraft. I have a Class IIIa laser on my desk I bought for $50 - how hard would it

You need to understand exactly what a theory is, from a philosophical perspective. If I wanted to, I could claim that nothing, not even your own knowledge of yourself, is real knowledge, because it is based on observations you make as a human, which are subject to error. You're taking a similarly radical position when you claim that ID is not falsifiable. In this case you do the best you can to come to a rational conclusion, and many of the foundational questions in science have been answered with weak arguments. You go ask a true skeptic about either of the two topics and he/she will tell you there are two many unknowns at this point, to come to a solid conclusion, whichever side you take. There are a lot of good books on the subject, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview, The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup, I've read the latter and recommend it, the former is next on my hit list.

You need to understand exactly what a theory is, from a philosophical perspective. If I wanted to, I could claim that nothing, not even your own knowledge of yourself, is real knowledge, because it is based on observations you make as a human, which are subject to error. You're taking a similarly radical position when you claim that ID is not falsifiable. In this case you do the best you can to come to a rational conclusion, and many of the foundational questions in science have been answered with weak arguments. You go ask a true skeptic about either of the two topics and he/she will tell you there are two many unknowns at this point, to come to a solid conclusion, whichever side you take. There are a lot of good books on the subject, The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview, The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup, I've read the latter and recommend it, the former is next on my hit list.