Slashdot Mirror

blee37 writes "Last March we discussed Google's patent for a rapid book scanning system. This article describes and provides pictures of how the system works in practice. Google is secretive, but the system's inner workings were apparently divulged by University of Tokyo researchers who wrote a research article on essentially identical technology. There are also videos of robotic page flippers and information about how Google wants to use music to help humans flip pages."

We've discussed cellphones and cancer many times. Here's a new angle: reader olddotter sends in a Reuters article suggesting that cellphone radiation may protect the brain from Alzheimer's disease. "At the end of that time, they found cellphone exposure erased a build-up of beta amyloid, a protein that serves as a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The Alzheimer's mice showed improvement and had reversal of their brain pathology..."

We've discussed cellphones and cancer many times. Here's a new angle: reader olddotter sends in a Reuters article suggesting that cellphone radiation may protect the brain from Alzheimer's disease. "At the end of that time, they found cellphone exposure erased a build-up of beta amyloid, a protein that serves as a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The Alzheimer's mice showed improvement and had reversal of their brain pathology..."

An anonymous reader writes "Following yesterday's announcement of a late 2010 launch date for Natal, more details are emerging on exactly how Natal works. Alex Kipman, the project's lead developer, explains that Natal uses only 10-15% of the Xbox's resources to calibrate to a new player inside 160 milliseconds, track one or two players simultaneously, and use rudimentary knowledge of body anatomy to estimate where hands or other body parts are even when they can't be seen by Natal — for instance when they are held behind the back."

Barence writes with some more information on a device mentioned in passing earlier today: "The enTourage eDGe eBook reader was the highlight of the CES Unveiled event, which gives journalists a sneak preview of what’s set to appear this year’s show. It has a 9.7in e-paper display on one side and a 10.1in LCD screen on the other, both of which are touchscreens, allowing you to annotate eBooks with handwritten notes or scan through web pages with the flick of a finger on the LCD screen. In a brief hands-on demonstration, the eDGe showed several clever touches, such as allowing you to perform a Google search on the term using the built-in web browser, and then link the search results to the eBook page, which is a great research tool for students reading academic texts. It's an Android device, too."

brothke writes "If Shakespeare were to write an information security tragedy, it would not be titled Hamlet, rather Bayuk. The story of Jennifer Bayuk is tragic in that she spent a decade as CISO at Bear, Stearns, building up its security group to be one of the best in the business; only to find it vaporized when the firm collapsed and was acquired by J.P. Morgan Clearing Corp. After all that toil and sweat, Bayuk was out of a job. (Full disclosure: Bayuk and I have given a presentation together in the past, and I did get a copy of this book for free.)" Read below for Ben's review. Enterprise Security For the Executive author Jennifer Bayuk pages 176 publisher Praeger Publishers rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 0313376603 summary helps business executives become familiar with security concepts and techniques While the information security engineering group that was at Bear, Stearns is no more, Bayuk has taken her vast expertise and put it in a great new book: Enterprise Security for the Executive: Setting the Tone from the Top. While many other books equate security with technology, and are written for technologists; Bayuk writes that information security is all about management control. And to the extent which a CxO controls assets, is the extent to which others can't use them in unexpected ways.

The book is written to help CxO's and business executives become familiar with information security concepts and techniques to make sure they are able to manage and support the efforts of their security team. This is an issue, as a big problem for the poor state of information security is that CxO's are far too often disconnected from their information security groups. No story is more manifest than that of when Heartland Payment Systems CEO Robert Carr blamed his PCI auditors for his firm's security problems. Carr is a perfect example of the type of person that needs to read this book. As an aside, for an excellent reply to Carr's kvetching, read what Rich Mogull wrote in An Open Letter to Robert Carr, CEO of Heartland Payment Systems.

While many CxO's think that security is about firewalls and other cool security products, it is truly a top-down management approach, and not a technology one. The book notes that the only way for information security to succeed in an organization is when management understands what their role is.

What is unique about the book is that Bayuk uses what she calls SHS (security horror stories). Rather than typical FUD stories, the horror stories detail systematic security problems and how they could have been obviated. By seeing how these companies have done it wrong, it makes it easier for pragmatic organizations to accomplish effective security by setting a strong tone from the top down.

Bayuk details the overall problem in the introduction and notes that many CxO's have wrongly spent significant amounts of money on security to avert security incidents; but have done that without any context of a greater information security methodology. The leads to executives thinking that security as nothing more than one long spending pattern.

Chapter 1 — Tone at The Top, notes that tone exists at the top, whether it is set or not. The tone is reflected in how an organization thinks about the things it really cares about. Employees can tell how a CxO cares about security by their level of personal involvement. Not that a CxO needs to be, or should be involved with minutia of firewall configuration or system administration; the key is rather that they are for example, championing the effective and consistent use of firewalls and how systems are securely administered.

In chapter 5 — Security through Matrix Management — Bayuk does a good job of detailing the various places that the security group can be placed in an organization. The chapter notes that there are as many ways to organize security as there are organization structures. Bayuk writes for example that if CxO's in a given organization are a tight-knit group, accustomed to close coordination, then it should not matter to which CxO the person managing information security reports to. If that is not the case, there may be multiple security programs that end up far too below the required C-levels that are needed for effective security. The chapter provides a number of different organizational scenarios, with requisite roles and responsibilities.

Chapter 5 closes with an important observation that a CxO should task the human resources department to put a line in all performance reviews whereby managers attest (or not) that the person being reviewed follows security policy. A CxO should fire people who willfully avoid compliance with security policy. Whatever tone at the top exists should be employed to make sure that everyone knows that the CxO is serious about the corporate security program. Such a tone clearly demonstrates an organization that is resolute about information security.

One thing that Bayuk does very well repeatedly throughout the book is to succinctly identify an issue and its cause. In chapter 6 — Navigating the Regulatory Landscape — she writes that if a CxO does not have management control over an organization, then the organization will fail the audit. It will fail because even if the organization is secure today, there is no assurance that it will be going forward. In addition, control means that the CxO will ensure that the organization is attempting to do the right thing. And in such cases, passing an audit is much easier.

Overall, Enterprise Security for the Executive is a fantastic book. It provides a no-nonsense approach to attaining effective information security. For those executives that are serious about security, the book will be their guiding light down the dark information security tunnel. In its 8 chapters (and a case study), the book focuses on a straightforward and plain-speaking approach to enable CxO's to get a handle on information security. As such, it is hoped that Enterprise Security for the Executive will soon find its way onto every executives required reading list.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know .

You can purchase Enterprise Security for the Executive: Setting the Tone from the Top from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

brothke writes "If Shakespeare were to write an information security tragedy, it would not be titled Hamlet, rather Bayuk. The story of Jennifer Bayuk is tragic in that she spent a decade as CISO at Bear, Stearns, building up its security group to be one of the best in the business; only to find it vaporized when the firm collapsed and was acquired by J.P. Morgan Clearing Corp. After all that toil and sweat, Bayuk was out of a job. (Full disclosure: Bayuk and I have given a presentation together in the past, and I did get a copy of this book for free.)" Read below for Ben's review. Enterprise Security For the Executive author Jennifer Bayuk pages 176 publisher Praeger Publishers rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 0313376603 summary helps business executives become familiar with security concepts and techniques While the information security engineering group that was at Bear, Stearns is no more, Bayuk has taken her vast expertise and put it in a great new book: Enterprise Security for the Executive: Setting the Tone from the Top. While many other books equate security with technology, and are written for technologists; Bayuk writes that information security is all about management control. And to the extent which a CxO controls assets, is the extent to which others can't use them in unexpected ways.

The book is written to help CxO's and business executives become familiar with information security concepts and techniques to make sure they are able to manage and support the efforts of their security team. This is an issue, as a big problem for the poor state of information security is that CxO's are far too often disconnected from their information security groups. No story is more manifest than that of when Heartland Payment Systems CEO Robert Carr blamed his PCI auditors for his firm's security problems. Carr is a perfect example of the type of person that needs to read this book. As an aside, for an excellent reply to Carr's kvetching, read what Rich Mogull wrote in An Open Letter to Robert Carr, CEO of Heartland Payment Systems.

While many CxO's think that security is about firewalls and other cool security products, it is truly a top-down management approach, and not a technology one. The book notes that the only way for information security to succeed in an organization is when management understands what their role is.

What is unique about the book is that Bayuk uses what she calls SHS (security horror stories). Rather than typical FUD stories, the horror stories detail systematic security problems and how they could have been obviated. By seeing how these companies have done it wrong, it makes it easier for pragmatic organizations to accomplish effective security by setting a strong tone from the top down.

Bayuk details the overall problem in the introduction and notes that many CxO's have wrongly spent significant amounts of money on security to avert security incidents; but have done that without any context of a greater information security methodology. The leads to executives thinking that security as nothing more than one long spending pattern.

Chapter 1 — Tone at The Top, notes that tone exists at the top, whether it is set or not. The tone is reflected in how an organization thinks about the things it really cares about. Employees can tell how a CxO cares about security by their level of personal involvement. Not that a CxO needs to be, or should be involved with minutia of firewall configuration or system administration; the key is rather that they are for example, championing the effective and consistent use of firewalls and how systems are securely administered.

In chapter 5 — Security through Matrix Management — Bayuk does a good job of detailing the various places that the security group can be placed in an organization. The chapter notes that there are as many ways to organize security as there are organization structures. Bayuk writes for example that if CxO's in a given organization are a tight-knit group, accustomed to close coordination, then it should not matter to which CxO the person managing information security reports to. If that is not the case, there may be multiple security programs that end up far too below the required C-levels that are needed for effective security. The chapter provides a number of different organizational scenarios, with requisite roles and responsibilities.

Chapter 5 closes with an important observation that a CxO should task the human resources department to put a line in all performance reviews whereby managers attest (or not) that the person being reviewed follows security policy. A CxO should fire people who willfully avoid compliance with security policy. Whatever tone at the top exists should be employed to make sure that everyone knows that the CxO is serious about the corporate security program. Such a tone clearly demonstrates an organization that is resolute about information security.

One thing that Bayuk does very well repeatedly throughout the book is to succinctly identify an issue and its cause. In chapter 6 — Navigating the Regulatory Landscape — she writes that if a CxO does not have management control over an organization, then the organization will fail the audit. It will fail because even if the organization is secure today, there is no assurance that it will be going forward. In addition, control means that the CxO will ensure that the organization is attempting to do the right thing. And in such cases, passing an audit is much easier.

Overall, Enterprise Security for the Executive is a fantastic book. It provides a no-nonsense approach to attaining effective information security. For those executives that are serious about security, the book will be their guiding light down the dark information security tunnel. In its 8 chapters (and a case study), the book focuses on a straightforward and plain-speaking approach to enable CxO's to get a handle on information security. As such, it is hoped that Enterprise Security for the Executive will soon find its way onto every executives required reading list.

Ben Rothke is the author of Computer Security: 20 Things Every Employee Should Know .

You can purchase Enterprise Security for the Executive: Setting the Tone from the Top from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

After our recent discussion of decimal/hexadecimal confusion at the turn of 2010, alphadogg writes in with a Network World survey of wider problems caused by the date change. "A decade after the Y2K crisis, date changes still pose technology problems, making some security software upgrades difficult and locking millions of bank ATM users out of their accounts. Chips used in bank cards to identify account numbers could not read the year 2010 properly, making it impossible for ATMs and point of sale machines in Germany to read debit cards of 30 million people since New Year's Day, according to published reports. The workaround is to reprogram the machines so the chips don't have to deal with the number. In Australia, point-of-sales machines skipped ahead to 2016 rather than 2010 at midnight Dec. 31, rendering them unusable by retailers, some of whom reported thousands of dollars in lost sales. Meanwhile Symantec's network-access control software that is supposed to check whether spam and virus definitions have been updated recently enough fails because of this 2010 problem."

An anonymous reader writes "Studios digitally restricting (drm) or locking down content with DVD-CSS not enough for you? Well, get ready, here comes the entertainment cartel's Holy Grail, all-hardware encryption, via 'DECE.' And let's not forget this little issue."

An anonymous reader writes "The Stephen Conroy 'Minister for Fascism' website, whose stephenconroy.com.au domain was forced offline by the Australian Domain Name Administrator, has now reclaimed the name after the initial 14-day injunction expired. During those 14 days, the protesters managed to comply with the Australian domain name registration criteria. However, contrary to auDA's own rules and contrary to public quotes by the auDA CEO, the protesters were continually refused the domain. Now, however, it seems that they have unequivocally shown that they have the right to the domain and have re-registered it."

hint3 writes "Fabrice Bellard has calculated Pi to about 2.7 trillion decimal digits, besting the previous record by over 120 billion digits. While the improvement may seem small, it is an outstanding achievement because only a single desktop PC, costing less than $3,000, was used — instead of a multi-million dollar supercomputer as in the previous records."

captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."

ShakaUVM writes "A couple of weeks ago without any fanfare or notice in the media, President Obama granted INTERPOL full diplomatic immunity while conducting investigations on American soil. While INTERPOL has been allowed to operate in the US in the past, under an executive order by President Reagan, they've had to follow the same rules as the FBI, CIA, etc., while on American soil. This means, among other things, the new executive order makes INTERPOL immune to Freedom of Information Act requests and that INTERPOL agents cannot be punished for most any crimes they may commit. Hopefully the worst we'll see from this is INTERPOL agents ignoring their speeding tickets." Update: 01/05 02:57 GMT by KD : Reader davecb pointed out an ABC News blog that comes to pretty much the opposite conclusion as to the import of the executive order.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the defendant has filed a motion for new trial, attacking, among other things, the constitutionality of the jury's $675,000 award as being violative of due process. In his 32-page brief (PDF), Tenenbaum argues that the award exceeded constitutional due process standards, both under the Court's 1919 decision in St. Louis Railway v. Williams, as well as under its more recent authorities State Farm v. Campbell and BMW v. Gore. Defendant also argues that the Court's application of fair use doctrine was incorrect, that statutory damages should not be imposed against music consumers, and that the Court erred in a key evidentiary ruling."

Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."

gregrolan writes "The Trousers of Reality — Volume 1, Working Life is indeed a book about finding balance and satisfaction in life work and play. The author's thesis can be applied to almost any discipline, but it is from his background as an IT consultant that most of his professional examples are drawn. He considers success in this field pretty broadly and addresses the technical, management, political, personal, and social aspects of the IT profession." Read on for the rest of Greg's review. The Trousers of Reality - Volume 1: Working Life author Barry Evans pages 294 publisher Code Green Publishing rating 8 reviewer Greg Rolan ISBN 978-1907215001 summary Find balance and satisfaction in life work and play Rather than expound upon the virtues of Yet Another Methodology or a Prescribed Practice, the author sets out to show that the wisdom and experiences of the last few millennia have lead to principles and practices that transcend particular methodologies or approaches and form the basis of success; that introspection and empathy will serve better than adherence to position and retreat behind logical argument; and that, ultimately, we all want similar outcomes — even if it's not obvious on the face of it.

If you have ever been torn between deadlines and burnout, stretched between politics and technology, or simply wondered "How am I going to get through this?" I think that this book definitely has something to offer you.

Firstly: a disclaimer. I worked with Barry Evans for approximately nine months about fifteen years ago in London. We kept in touch, sporadically, after I returned to Australia and, over the years, I followed his career from Software Engineer to Team Leader to Organizational Project Mentor to his own Practice Consultancy business throughout Europe and beyond. What struck me in retrospect was that, in the mid-nineties, Evans was doing Agile — not that it had a name back then, or even that we recognized it as such. He talked philosophy, was passionate about practice and meaning and we delivered (on time and in budget) which was surprising given the nature of the project. This was a pattern that he would come to repeat within many projects and organizations.

When he announced that he was taking time out to commit his experiences to paper, I admit I was keen read his book. It turns out that this is the first volume in a series of four and addresses developing a set of principles to guide working life. The other three (yet to be published) cover how to use these principles; specific examples of their use; and the principles in broader contexts — relationships, society and the world.

The first thing the reader notices about this work is the breadth of the material drawn upon in order to build the author's arguments — ranging from historical, contemporary, technical and personal sources. The second is the copious footnoting and rigorous referencing of other works. This in itself is valuable allowing the reader to delve deeper into particular themes if they wish. The book is supported with additional material at the author's web site

The main body of the book opens with the short chapter "Themes, Directions and Koans" which outlines the broad ideas and concepts of the volume. It's a pretty starkly written chapter — the first few pages in particular are daunting — but soon you realize that the book is written somewhat fractally. Concepts are stated, revisited and linked with others into a whole, adding details as the iterations progress. In fact the book itself is a good example of the author's themes: "Evolution and Interconnectedness" and "Universality and Context" — the other ones being "Reciprocity and Balance" and "Longevity and Inspiration". Here, the themes are introduced, connected and linked with the tools one needs to begin to address them.

"The Most Important Chapter In This Book" follows next and introduces the idea of "Deep Structure and Surface Structure". Most of our activities in professional and personal life involve discerning others' expectations and perspectives and working to accommodating them. This chapter accounts for differences in perspective we have in relation to even commonly held ideas. It explores the conflicts that may arise due to this duopoly and shows how the evolution of ideas and practices give rise to the paradox "The more we know, the less we know". It also lays the foundations of understanding prejudices and the mechanisms of socialization of ideas. None of these concepts are new, but are drawn together in forehead slapping clarity. This, I think, is what makes this book accessible, the author's ability to describe an easily digestible deep structure from seemingly disparate surface structure concepts.

The third main chapter "The Map" draws the distinction between process and principle and gives guidelines on how to form one's principles for professional and personal life. As the author explains, this is a process of "differentiate[ing] between opinion and observation", and "determine[ing] which rules we can trust and which are wolves in sheep's clothing". Such principles facilitates one's own meta-practice, balancing "empiricism rigor and repeatability" against "inspiration, wonder and motivation", enabling the practitioner to develop the most effective approach to take for various life endeavors.

"The Key" introduces a series of tools or skills that can be brought to bear on the themes of this book. They include Agile Development, Theory of Constraints, Systems Thinking, Lateral Thinking and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, metaphor, refinement and pattern recognition amongst others. The author then shows how they relate to discovering the deep structures of problems and how they can be combined to support principles and practice. I found myself more familiar with some of these than others, however this chapter provided a good introduction to these techniques and their applicability, as well as providing many references to enable further study.

The chapter "Inspiration" concerns the motivation or desire to achieve on a personal level and, in particular, inspiring others. Here, the author rather cheekily turns the title of the volume around from "Working Life" to "A Life That Works" and goes on to explain that to inspire or be inspired you must place work into the context of that which gives one's life meaning. He draws the distinction between inspiration (as a principle) and motivation (as a process), going on to discuss management styles involving counterproductive attempts to motivate and inappropriate introduction of competition. This chapter also covers the introduction of change into an organization or team — particularly in the sense of changing context, methodology or practice — and mechanisms for avoiding conflict and inspiring others to embrace the change.

The longest chapter in the book is entitled "Balance" and discusses finding the inspired and effective centre or "norm" of your life, your team, your project etc. and staying there in the face of change. It is a rather long and rambling chapter and I think the book would have been better served by breaking it up into more digestible chunks. It is, however, where the previous threads coalesce, the author bringing them together with case studies and lengthy examples. He starts this chapter with the metaphor of life as a high wire balancing act with the processes we employ as the balancing pole. He then discusses the different feedback sensitivities and reactions required to regain the centre of balance as it shifts. The author gives as examples: the tensions between software stability and responsiveness to changing requirements, productivity and fatigue, skill and process, priority and effort, importance and urgency, and complexity and difficulty — all of which may need to be balanced against one another. He then covers in more detail issues surrounding the prioritizing of work activities and their impact on stress using a common importance/urgency quadrant model. This is followed by a description of strategies for negotiating this area. The author then touches upon the need to balance the requirement for skills, tools and processes at both a team and at a personal level, noting how to avoid potential conflict between personal career objectives and organizational goals.

The core of this chapter is based on a discussion of fulcrums, levers, balance and counterbalance as a metaphor for understanding where to apply effort in order to bring about change. This metaphor leads to a suggested mechanism for bringing the domain under analysis — whether your life, a project, or an organization — into balance. This follows on to a case study of the common situation regarding the competing needs of an organization's commercial, software development and production support groups which the author terms "The Consultant's Conundrum". This part of the chapter concludes with a fairly detailed approach to dealing with the seemingly disparate perceptions, aspirations and needs of these groups and bringing them into accord. It points out the role of management in this exercise and concludes that, like good jazz, the best of people in any discipline is born from an environment of controlled freedom.

The last main chapter "Context" rounds off the foregoing by introducing the concept of hierarchies of focus, the ability to move between the gestalt and the detail, and the pitfalls, challenges and mechanisms for success when doing so. The author entreats us to always know where are in the hierarchy of concerns and points out that many "arguments about the details" are due to fuzzy understanding of the higher layers of the problem at hand. A large portion of this chapter will be familiar to software developers as it uses metaphors drawn from object-oriented programming to describe problem analysis, the interactions between processes, and the relationship between organizational hierarchies and groups. This analysis of organization design leads into recommendations for those in a position to influence organizational structure. The chapter concludes with a discussion regarding project planning and process refactoring — and the various techniques that may be employed to inform these processes at various levels of a hierarchy of focus. I found this last part of immense value and the most important part of this chapter.

By the end of this volume, it is apparent that the author has much to say and is at times overeager to get it all out — bubbling over with ideas and metaphors. I found this volume somewhat unconventional in it's layout and writing style, but compelling and challenging nonetheless. It is the sort of book that lends itself to taking place on a professional 's bookshelf to be read and re-read over time — each reading yielding some nugget or insight overlooked in the past. I am certainly looking forward to the subsequent volumes and would recommend this series to anyone engaged in or with the IT industry.

You can purchase The Trousers of Reality - Volume 1: Working Life from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

gregrolan writes "The Trousers of Reality — Volume 1, Working Life is indeed a book about finding balance and satisfaction in life work and play. The author's thesis can be applied to almost any discipline, but it is from his background as an IT consultant that most of his professional examples are drawn. He considers success in this field pretty broadly and addresses the technical, management, political, personal, and social aspects of the IT profession." Read on for the rest of Greg's review. The Trousers of Reality - Volume 1: Working Life author Barry Evans pages 294 publisher Code Green Publishing rating 8 reviewer Greg Rolan ISBN 978-1907215001 summary Find balance and satisfaction in life work and play Rather than expound upon the virtues of Yet Another Methodology or a Prescribed Practice, the author sets out to show that the wisdom and experiences of the last few millennia have lead to principles and practices that transcend particular methodologies or approaches and form the basis of success; that introspection and empathy will serve better than adherence to position and retreat behind logical argument; and that, ultimately, we all want similar outcomes — even if it's not obvious on the face of it.

If you have ever been torn between deadlines and burnout, stretched between politics and technology, or simply wondered "How am I going to get through this?" I think that this book definitely has something to offer you.

Firstly: a disclaimer. I worked with Barry Evans for approximately nine months about fifteen years ago in London. We kept in touch, sporadically, after I returned to Australia and, over the years, I followed his career from Software Engineer to Team Leader to Organizational Project Mentor to his own Practice Consultancy business throughout Europe and beyond. What struck me in retrospect was that, in the mid-nineties, Evans was doing Agile — not that it had a name back then, or even that we recognized it as such. He talked philosophy, was passionate about practice and meaning and we delivered (on time and in budget) which was surprising given the nature of the project. This was a pattern that he would come to repeat within many projects and organizations.

When he announced that he was taking time out to commit his experiences to paper, I admit I was keen read his book. It turns out that this is the first volume in a series of four and addresses developing a set of principles to guide working life. The other three (yet to be published) cover how to use these principles; specific examples of their use; and the principles in broader contexts — relationships, society and the world.

The first thing the reader notices about this work is the breadth of the material drawn upon in order to build the author's arguments — ranging from historical, contemporary, technical and personal sources. The second is the copious footnoting and rigorous referencing of other works. This in itself is valuable allowing the reader to delve deeper into particular themes if they wish. The book is supported with additional material at the author's web site

The main body of the book opens with the short chapter "Themes, Directions and Koans" which outlines the broad ideas and concepts of the volume. It's a pretty starkly written chapter — the first few pages in particular are daunting — but soon you realize that the book is written somewhat fractally. Concepts are stated, revisited and linked with others into a whole, adding details as the iterations progress. In fact the book itself is a good example of the author's themes: "Evolution and Interconnectedness" and "Universality and Context" — the other ones being "Reciprocity and Balance" and "Longevity and Inspiration". Here, the themes are introduced, connected and linked with the tools one needs to begin to address them.

"The Most Important Chapter In This Book" follows next and introduces the idea of "Deep Structure and Surface Structure". Most of our activities in professional and personal life involve discerning others' expectations and perspectives and working to accommodating them. This chapter accounts for differences in perspective we have in relation to even commonly held ideas. It explores the conflicts that may arise due to this duopoly and shows how the evolution of ideas and practices give rise to the paradox "The more we know, the less we know". It also lays the foundations of understanding prejudices and the mechanisms of socialization of ideas. None of these concepts are new, but are drawn together in forehead slapping clarity. This, I think, is what makes this book accessible, the author's ability to describe an easily digestible deep structure from seemingly disparate surface structure concepts.

The third main chapter "The Map" draws the distinction between process and principle and gives guidelines on how to form one's principles for professional and personal life. As the author explains, this is a process of "differentiate[ing] between opinion and observation", and "determine[ing] which rules we can trust and which are wolves in sheep's clothing". Such principles facilitates one's own meta-practice, balancing "empiricism rigor and repeatability" against "inspiration, wonder and motivation", enabling the practitioner to develop the most effective approach to take for various life endeavors.

"The Key" introduces a series of tools or skills that can be brought to bear on the themes of this book. They include Agile Development, Theory of Constraints, Systems Thinking, Lateral Thinking and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, metaphor, refinement and pattern recognition amongst others. The author then shows how they relate to discovering the deep structures of problems and how they can be combined to support principles and practice. I found myself more familiar with some of these than others, however this chapter provided a good introduction to these techniques and their applicability, as well as providing many references to enable further study.

The chapter "Inspiration" concerns the motivation or desire to achieve on a personal level and, in particular, inspiring others. Here, the author rather cheekily turns the title of the volume around from "Working Life" to "A Life That Works" and goes on to explain that to inspire or be inspired you must place work into the context of that which gives one's life meaning. He draws the distinction between inspiration (as a principle) and motivation (as a process), going on to discuss management styles involving counterproductive attempts to motivate and inappropriate introduction of competition. This chapter also covers the introduction of change into an organization or team — particularly in the sense of changing context, methodology or practice — and mechanisms for avoiding conflict and inspiring others to embrace the change.

The longest chapter in the book is entitled "Balance" and discusses finding the inspired and effective centre or "norm" of your life, your team, your project etc. and staying there in the face of change. It is a rather long and rambling chapter and I think the book would have been better served by breaking it up into more digestible chunks. It is, however, where the previous threads coalesce, the author bringing them together with case studies and lengthy examples. He starts this chapter with the metaphor of life as a high wire balancing act with the processes we employ as the balancing pole. He then discusses the different feedback sensitivities and reactions required to regain the centre of balance as it shifts. The author gives as examples: the tensions between software stability and responsiveness to changing requirements, productivity and fatigue, skill and process, priority and effort, importance and urgency, and complexity and difficulty — all of which may need to be balanced against one another. He then covers in more detail issues surrounding the prioritizing of work activities and their impact on stress using a common importance/urgency quadrant model. This is followed by a description of strategies for negotiating this area. The author then touches upon the need to balance the requirement for skills, tools and processes at both a team and at a personal level, noting how to avoid potential conflict between personal career objectives and organizational goals.

The core of this chapter is based on a discussion of fulcrums, levers, balance and counterbalance as a metaphor for understanding where to apply effort in order to bring about change. This metaphor leads to a suggested mechanism for bringing the domain under analysis — whether your life, a project, or an organization — into balance. This follows on to a case study of the common situation regarding the competing needs of an organization's commercial, software development and production support groups which the author terms "The Consultant's Conundrum". This part of the chapter concludes with a fairly detailed approach to dealing with the seemingly disparate perceptions, aspirations and needs of these groups and bringing them into accord. It points out the role of management in this exercise and concludes that, like good jazz, the best of people in any discipline is born from an environment of controlled freedom.

The last main chapter "Context" rounds off the foregoing by introducing the concept of hierarchies of focus, the ability to move between the gestalt and the detail, and the pitfalls, challenges and mechanisms for success when doing so. The author entreats us to always know where are in the hierarchy of concerns and points out that many "arguments about the details" are due to fuzzy understanding of the higher layers of the problem at hand. A large portion of this chapter will be familiar to software developers as it uses metaphors drawn from object-oriented programming to describe problem analysis, the interactions between processes, and the relationship between organizational hierarchies and groups. This analysis of organization design leads into recommendations for those in a position to influence organizational structure. The chapter concludes with a discussion regarding project planning and process refactoring — and the various techniques that may be employed to inform these processes at various levels of a hierarchy of focus. I found this last part of immense value and the most important part of this chapter.

By the end of this volume, it is apparent that the author has much to say and is at times overeager to get it all out — bubbling over with ideas and metaphors. I found this volume somewhat unconventional in it's layout and writing style, but compelling and challenging nonetheless. It is the sort of book that lends itself to taking place on a professional 's bookshelf to be read and re-read over time — each reading yielding some nugget or insight overlooked in the past. I am certainly looking forward to the subsequent volumes and would recommend this series to anyone engaged in or with the IT industry.

You can purchase The Trousers of Reality - Volume 1: Working Life from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

DeviceGuru writes "Following closely on the heels of the December announcement of D-Link's BoxeeBox, Syabas Technology today said it will ship the PopBox, a $129 Internet-based A/V streaming set-top box (STB) in March. Both new gadgets have the potential to give Roku's popular STB a run for its money. All three boxes can deliver a range of Internet-based A/V streaming and social networking services to consumers' TVs. Like Roku's digital video player STB, the PopBox will include Netflix on-demand video streaming when it first ships. D-Link, meanwhile, is rumored to be scrambling to add Netflix streaming support to its BoxeeBox device as well, prior to inaugural shipments of that device. All three run embedded Linux OSes, and all are expected to sell for less than $200."

MojoKid writes "Intel has officially launched their new Core i5 and Core i3 lineup of Arrandale and Clarkdale processors today, for mobile and desktop platforms respectively. Like Intel's recent release of the Pinetrail platform for netbooks, new Arrandale and Clarkdale processors combine both an integrated memory controller (DDR3) and GPU (graphics processor) on the same package as the main processor. Though it's not a monolithic device, but is built upon multi-chip module packaging, it does allow these primary functional blocks to coexist in a single chip footprint or socket. In addition, Intel beefed up their graphics core and it appears that the new Intel GMA HD integrated graphics engine offers solid HD video performance and even a bit of light gaming capability."

eldavojohn writes "A recent study puts observed numbers on genome mutations in plants. This kind of research is becoming more popular in understanding evolution. The research 'followed all genetic changes in five lines of the mustard relative Arabidopsis thaliana that occurred during 30 generations. In the genome of the final generation they then searched for differences to the genome of the original ancestor.' A single generation has about a one in 140 million chance of mutating any letter of the genome (which has about 120 million base pairs). Sound like bad odds? From the article, 'if one starts to consider that they occur in the genomes of every member of a species, it becomes clear how fluid the genome is: In a collection of only 60 million Arabidopsis plants, each letter in the genome is changed, on average, once. For an organism that produces thousands of seeds in each generation, 60 million is not such a big number at all.' The academic paper is available in Science, though seeing more than the abstract requires a subscription."

theodp writes "In a blog post, venture capitalist Fred Wilson gives his thoughts on ripe areas for tech investment in 2010 — mobile, gaming, new forms of commerce/currency, Cloud platforms/APIs, education and energy/environment. Asked to comment on scams and social gaming (he is an investor in Zynga), Wilson defended Zynga's Farmville: 'Zynga makes almost all of its revenue on virtual goods. I said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold every day in Farmville than are sold in the US every year. That's where the money is in social gaming. The "scammy ads" thing is total red herring that everyone got excited about but is almost entirely irrelevant.'"

theodp writes "In a blog post, venture capitalist Fred Wilson gives his thoughts on ripe areas for tech investment in 2010 — mobile, gaming, new forms of commerce/currency, Cloud platforms/APIs, education and energy/environment. Asked to comment on scams and social gaming (he is an investor in Zynga), Wilson defended Zynga's Farmville: 'Zynga makes almost all of its revenue on virtual goods. I said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold every day in Farmville than are sold in the US every year. That's where the money is in social gaming. The "scammy ads" thing is total red herring that everyone got excited about but is almost entirely irrelevant.'"

eldavojohn writes "Censorship varies from country to country but India, home to a sixth of the world's population, appears to be shaping up much like China. Not far behind everyone else, Google has increasingly censored websites with an incident where a very popular politician died and Google forcibly deleted and dissolved a group on Orkut where offensive comments about the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh were posted. An official from India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said, 'If you are doing business here, you should follow the local law, the sentiments of the people, the culture of the country. If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots.' The lengthy opinion piece calls attention to the beginnings of a definitive lack of free speech online for Indian citizens. A spokeswoman for the 'Do No Evil' company explained, 'India does value free speech and political speech. But they are weighing the harm of free speech against violence in their streets.'"

eldavojohn writes "Censorship varies from country to country but India, home to a sixth of the world's population, appears to be shaping up much like China. Not far behind everyone else, Google has increasingly censored websites with an incident where a very popular politician died and Google forcibly deleted and dissolved a group on Orkut where offensive comments about the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh were posted. An official from India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said, 'If you are doing business here, you should follow the local law, the sentiments of the people, the culture of the country. If somebody starts abusing Lord Rama on a Web site, that could start riots.' The lengthy opinion piece calls attention to the beginnings of a definitive lack of free speech online for Indian citizens. A spokeswoman for the 'Do No Evil' company explained, 'India does value free speech and political speech. But they are weighing the harm of free speech against violence in their streets.'"

awyeah writes "A recently revealed Apple patent looks remarkably similar to the functionality of Google Latitude, which Apple relegated to WebApp status earlier this year. Obviously if Apple is working on their own version of Google Latitude (or owns the IP rights to this functionality), they'd be hesitant to put an app with the same functionality on their devices from another company."

wwphx writes "In the wake of public outcry against the Transportation Security Administration for serving civil subpoenas on two bloggers, the government agency has canceled the legal action and apologized for the strong-arm tactics agents used."

Andy Updegrove writes "As you may recall, Microsoft announced back on September 10 that it had launched a new, open source organization called the CodePlex Foundation. Since then, it has announced Project Acceptance and Operation Guidelines, its first 'Gallery' (a project area), supporting Microsoft's ASP.NET, and two projects in that gallery. But it had also launched in a 'less than open' state with an interim Board of Directors, and a promise to elect a permanent one in 100 days. Problem is, December 19 — the 100 day mark — passed quietly, with no announcement of a new Board or a status update on the other goals it had set for the launch period. So what's up with the CodePlex Foundation, and its pledge to promptly transition into a more independent organization?"

snl2587 writes "You may remember the story of the man who was selected for 'the best job in the world' as a blogging island caretaker in Australia for the tidy sum of 150,000 Australian dollars ($120,000). Now it seems that the stunt may have backfired as a tourism boost since the man has been stung by a potentially fatal jellyfish in his last days there. As he said, though, he 'really should have been wearing a full stinger suit.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Following a Pirate Bay block more than a year ago, Italy continues its attempts to censor torrent sites. The Italian Supreme Court has ruled that copyright holders can now force ISPs to block BitTorrent sites, even if they are hosted outside Italy. The torrent sites which 'hold' copyrighted materials are accused of taking part in criminal activity. It seems someone should enlighten Italian jurists about technology."

bhagwad writes "Following recent news on how Bing decided sex was too sensitive for India, Yahoo! and its associated site Flickr have decided to do the same. While it's true that this is because of India passing laws that prohibit the publication of porn, no complaint was ever launched (and never will be), and glorious Google still continues to return accurate and unbiased results. So why is Yahoo! doing this? Is it because of its tie-up with Bing? I assume this is the case. Indian ISPs have already told the government and the courts that it's not their job to restrict porn and it's technologically infeasible too. In the absence of a complaint, I can only assume that Yahoo! has decided to do this of their own volition. Given that the 'sex' search term is searched more in India than in any other country, isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers? It can always plausibly deny control of its results and claim that filtering porn is infeasible. Since Yahoo! already has a low search market share in India, this will drive it even lower."

bhagwad writes "Following recent news on how Bing decided sex was too sensitive for India, Yahoo! and its associated site Flickr have decided to do the same. While it's true that this is because of India passing laws that prohibit the publication of porn, no complaint was ever launched (and never will be), and glorious Google still continues to return accurate and unbiased results. So why is Yahoo! doing this? Is it because of its tie-up with Bing? I assume this is the case. Indian ISPs have already told the government and the courts that it's not their job to restrict porn and it's technologically infeasible too. In the absence of a complaint, I can only assume that Yahoo! has decided to do this of their own volition. Given that the 'sex' search term is searched more in India than in any other country, isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers? It can always plausibly deny control of its results and claim that filtering porn is infeasible. Since Yahoo! already has a low search market share in India, this will drive it even lower."

andylim writes "It looks as if Duke Nukem isn't completely 'nuked' after all. Someone has ported the 90s classic on to a Nokia N900. As you'll see in the video, you control Duke using the Qwerty keypad and shoot using the touchscreen. I'm wondering how long it will take for this to get on other mobile platforms." In other Duke news, reader Jupix points out that 3D Realms' CEO Scott Miller recently said, "There are numerous other Duke games in various stages of development, several due out this year. We are definitely looking to bring Duke into casual gaming spaces, plus there are other major Duke games in production."

bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that Microsoft has begun offering what appears to be a patch for its popular Word software, allowing it to comply with a recent court ruling which has banned the software giant from selling patent-infringing versions of the word processing product. The workaround should put an end to a long-running dispute between Canadian i4i and Redmond, although it has hinted that the legal battle might yet take another turn."

MojoKid writes "Shortly after hearing of a simple, two-way Spanish-to-English translator for the iPhone, Toshiba has announced that it has developed a new language translation system that requires no server-side interaction. The app is designed to be operated independently on a smartphone, which will eliminate costly data roaming fees that are generally incurred using systems that require an internet connection to retrieve translations. The system is trilingual in nature and enables users to translate freely among Japanese, Chinese, and English."

littleidea writes "Ruby In Practice is like a sampler platter that picks up where The Ruby Way leaves off. Depending on your tastes each of the different offerings are delicious, but sometimes leave you wishing you had a whole order of just that. Then again, if you eat the whole thing, chances are you won't be hungry." Keep reading for the rest of Andrew's review. Ruby In Practice author Jeremy McAnally, Assaf Arkin with Yehuda Katz, David Black, Gregory Brown, Peter Cooper and Luke Melia pages 335 publisher Manning rating 8 reviewer Andrew Clay Shafer ISBN 1933988479 summary A cookbook style reference with Ruby code examples for systems integration, monitoring, messaging, web development, processing documents and databases in a clear problem/solution format. I really jumped headfirst into Ruby and the Ruby ecosystem when I started working on Puppet around Fall 2007. I had spent years writing code in compiled imperative and object oriented languages and just dabbled with interpreted languages before that. I've met Jeremy and several of the authors of Ruby In Practice at Ruby conferences since then.

I had a particularly hard time rating this book. If you have just learned the Ruby basics and you need to hook up your jabber server to a message queue that will spawn workers that interact with RESTful web services exposing indexed logs to twitter by tomorrow, then this book is a 10. If you are a hard core Rubyist plugged into the Ruby ecosystem, and 'Ruby In Practice' is what you do all the time, then this book is probably a 6, useful and enjoyable but hard to recommend. I'm somewhere in the middle, so I'm giving the book an 8.

The books starts out with the premise that the reader can read Ruby code. I wouldn't call the style 'code heavy' but this book is definitely 'code ample'. If you haven't been through the Pickaxe or at least a Ruby primer of some sort, be prepared to spend some time head scratching and googling before all the code syntax makes sense. That being said, you don't need to understand the subtleties of 'yield' or 'inject' to understand the examples and the book does a reasonably good job of walking through and explaining them. The exceptions to that are some of the examples involving Rails make the assumption that the reader is familiar with those idioms, which is probably fair statistically speaking and those bits can be filled in rather quickly with one of the many books on the topic or your search engine of choice.

The book credits a number of Rubyists with contributions for each of the sections. This makes for some noticeable variation in the stylistic presentation from topic to topic. As I alluded to earlier, each of the sections is more of a taste of a topic than a full exploration, but there are also references to the resources one would need to pursue each topic more fully.

The book starts out with chapter on 'Why Ruby' followed by an attempt to convert readers to become 'Test Infected', then the real Ruby fun begins in chapter 3. The first example is scaling images, stuffing them in Amazon S3 and printing the link to Twitter in 30 something lines of code. If you don't understand Ruby syntax and passing blocks, you will probably be a little lost here, but the good news is: if you take the time to sort out these first examples the rest of the code in the book should be relatively accessible. The application domain will vary throughout the book, but the level required to understand the ideas expressed in the code remains relatively constant. (which one might argue is one of the strengths of Ruby as well)

By this point, the rest of the book basically follows this pattern, discussion on a technology topic, gem install, code examples, links to more resources. I'm not going to list all the topics, though I alluded to many of them when I discussed the rating. (Here's the TOC to give you some idea.) The book definitely covers ground.

There is some really choice stuff in there and I definitely learned things, but there are a few things that are presented through Ruby colored glasses (as one would probably expect). The one that will always stick out is 'Say goodbye to dependency hell!' in reference to setting up a gem repository and using RubyGems (gems is Ruby's network library/package manager, similar to CPAN for perl or apt for Debian Linux) . I had a little chuckle and eye roll at that one. (Sorry Jeremy)

One quick note, and this is a comment about the Ruby ecosystem as much as anything, Ruby libraries change relatively quickly. On the one hand, gems are mostly up to date and tracking new versions of whatever they integrate with, on the other, this can sometimes break backwards compatibility. I didn't run every line of code in the book, but I played around with a good portion of it. There were a few gem updates which were not compatible with the code in the book. The twitter gem in particular had non-backward compatible changes to authentication (to support OAuth). I was able to get the example working with a few minutes of Google and looking at the code, but that might have taken longer and been frustrating if I didn't have a Ruby background. Ruby In Practice provides enough context and information that you can probably find the maintainer or community for a project without much trouble if you really get stuck.

I would strongly recommend this book to someone who has come to Ruby through Rails and is ready to learn more about what is possible with the language or someone who is coming from another language background with experience and perspective on things like stomp servers or Lucene and who's interest in dynamic languages has been piqued (if you have a background in any OO language, a simple primer is probably enough to make this book accessible. Also, you should remember irb, the interactive ruby interpreter, is your friend.) Anyone in either of those groups will get working examples and resources that could realistically be used in useful applications right away.

You can purchase Ruby In Practice from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

littleidea writes "Ruby In Practice is like a sampler platter that picks up where The Ruby Way leaves off. Depending on your tastes each of the different offerings are delicious, but sometimes leave you wishing you had a whole order of just that. Then again, if you eat the whole thing, chances are you won't be hungry." Keep reading for the rest of Andrew's review. Ruby In Practice author Jeremy McAnally, Assaf Arkin with Yehuda Katz, David Black, Gregory Brown, Peter Cooper and Luke Melia pages 335 publisher Manning rating 8 reviewer Andrew Clay Shafer ISBN 1933988479 summary A cookbook style reference with Ruby code examples for systems integration, monitoring, messaging, web development, processing documents and databases in a clear problem/solution format. I really jumped headfirst into Ruby and the Ruby ecosystem when I started working on Puppet around Fall 2007. I had spent years writing code in compiled imperative and object oriented languages and just dabbled with interpreted languages before that. I've met Jeremy and several of the authors of Ruby In Practice at Ruby conferences since then.

I had a particularly hard time rating this book. If you have just learned the Ruby basics and you need to hook up your jabber server to a message queue that will spawn workers that interact with RESTful web services exposing indexed logs to twitter by tomorrow, then this book is a 10. If you are a hard core Rubyist plugged into the Ruby ecosystem, and 'Ruby In Practice' is what you do all the time, then this book is probably a 6, useful and enjoyable but hard to recommend. I'm somewhere in the middle, so I'm giving the book an 8.

The books starts out with the premise that the reader can read Ruby code. I wouldn't call the style 'code heavy' but this book is definitely 'code ample'. If you haven't been through the Pickaxe or at least a Ruby primer of some sort, be prepared to spend some time head scratching and googling before all the code syntax makes sense. That being said, you don't need to understand the subtleties of 'yield' or 'inject' to understand the examples and the book does a reasonably good job of walking through and explaining them. The exceptions to that are some of the examples involving Rails make the assumption that the reader is familiar with those idioms, which is probably fair statistically speaking and those bits can be filled in rather quickly with one of the many books on the topic or your search engine of choice.

The book credits a number of Rubyists with contributions for each of the sections. This makes for some noticeable variation in the stylistic presentation from topic to topic. As I alluded to earlier, each of the sections is more of a taste of a topic than a full exploration, but there are also references to the resources one would need to pursue each topic more fully.

The book starts out with chapter on 'Why Ruby' followed by an attempt to convert readers to become 'Test Infected', then the real Ruby fun begins in chapter 3. The first example is scaling images, stuffing them in Amazon S3 and printing the link to Twitter in 30 something lines of code. If you don't understand Ruby syntax and passing blocks, you will probably be a little lost here, but the good news is: if you take the time to sort out these first examples the rest of the code in the book should be relatively accessible. The application domain will vary throughout the book, but the level required to understand the ideas expressed in the code remains relatively constant. (which one might argue is one of the strengths of Ruby as well)

By this point, the rest of the book basically follows this pattern, discussion on a technology topic, gem install, code examples, links to more resources. I'm not going to list all the topics, though I alluded to many of them when I discussed the rating. (Here's the TOC to give you some idea.) The book definitely covers ground.

There is some really choice stuff in there and I definitely learned things, but there are a few things that are presented through Ruby colored glasses (as one would probably expect). The one that will always stick out is 'Say goodbye to dependency hell!' in reference to setting up a gem repository and using RubyGems (gems is Ruby's network library/package manager, similar to CPAN for perl or apt for Debian Linux) . I had a little chuckle and eye roll at that one. (Sorry Jeremy)

One quick note, and this is a comment about the Ruby ecosystem as much as anything, Ruby libraries change relatively quickly. On the one hand, gems are mostly up to date and tracking new versions of whatever they integrate with, on the other, this can sometimes break backwards compatibility. I didn't run every line of code in the book, but I played around with a good portion of it. There were a few gem updates which were not compatible with the code in the book. The twitter gem in particular had non-backward compatible changes to authentication (to support OAuth). I was able to get the example working with a few minutes of Google and looking at the code, but that might have taken longer and been frustrating if I didn't have a Ruby background. Ruby In Practice provides enough context and information that you can probably find the maintainer or community for a project without much trouble if you really get stuck.

I would strongly recommend this book to someone who has come to Ruby through Rails and is ready to learn more about what is possible with the language or someone who is coming from another language background with experience and perspective on things like stomp servers or Lucene and who's interest in dynamic languages has been piqued (if you have a background in any OO language, a simple primer is probably enough to make this book accessible. Also, you should remember irb, the interactive ruby interpreter, is your friend.) Anyone in either of those groups will get working examples and resources that could realistically be used in useful applications right away.

You can purchase Ruby In Practice from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Luminous Coward writes "As previously discussed on Slashdot, according to AnandTech and The Tech Report, hard disk drive manufacturers are now ready to bump the size of the disk sector from 512 to 4096 bytes, in order to minimize storage lost to ECC and sync. This may not be a smooth transition, because some OSes do not align partitions on 4K boundaries."

The New York Times takes an inside look at DARPA, the secretive defense agency, mentioned frequently on Slashdot, that is "changing the way we use machines — and the way they use us" in the form of a review of Michael Belfiore's The Department of Mad Scientists. Besides tracing the history of the agency, Belfiore's book expounds on the well-known Grand Challenge and its link to ever-more-automated vehicle control in civilian and military contexts, as well as other DARPA pet projects, including robotic surgery, information analysis, and the integration of electronics with the human body.

An anonymous reader excerpts from an AP story as carried by Yahoo News about changes stemming from yesterday's foiled bombing attempt of a Northwest Airlines flight: "Some airlines were telling passengers on Saturday that new government security regulations prohibit them from leaving their seats beginning an hour before landing. The regulations are a response to a suspected terrorism incident on Christmas Day. Air Canada said in a statement that new rules imposed by the Transportation Security Administration limit on-board activities by passengers and crew in US airspace. ... Flight attendants on some domestic flights are informing passengers of similar rules. Passengers on a flight from New York to Tampa Saturday morning were also told they must remain in their seats and couldn't have items in their laps, including laptops and pillows." The TSA's list of prohibited items doesn't seem to have changed in the last day, though.

With the recent announcement of OLPC's shift in focus, many are criticizing the nonprofit's attempt to design what could be seen as unrealistic hardware at an impossible price point. "The OLPC project has become an unrealistic hardware 'dream' and lost its focus on education, wrote blogger Wayan Vota on OLPC News, which has followed the OLPC since its inception. The project comes up with unrealistic hardware designs and price points that destroy its purpose even more, he wrote. 'Excuse me if I get mad at the XO-3 hype. I'm angry at the energy devoted to fantasy XO hardware instead of OLPC educational reality. I miss the original OLPC Mission, where children, not computers, controlled our dreams,' Vota wrote."

Azureflare writes "The first device using a Pixel Qi screen has been confirmed. It is produced by Notion Ink, and it appears they took a few design tips from Apple by sticking with a design that has tapered edges. This tablet should give Apple a run for their money, especially considering the recently confirmed rumor of an Apple tablet. 'The Notion Ink smartpad measures 6.3 x 9.8 x 0.6 inches and weighs 1.7lbs; as well as the tri-band (850/1900/2100) UMTS/HSDPA, WiFi b/g and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR it also squeezes in A-GPS, a digital compass, accelerometer and proximity, ambient light and water sensors. Connectivity includes USB, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microphone input, and there’s also a 3-megapixel auto-focus camera with video recording support. Onboard storage is either 16GB or 32GB of SSD, and there's an SD slot for augmenting that.'" Update: 12/25 21:44 GMT by SS : Removed erroneous reference to Nokia.

An anonymous reader writes "In one of the do-the-developers-actually-use-their-own-software decisions in the Linux Desktop World, back in 2004 Gnome switched to the 'Spatial' view by default with their Nautilus file manager opening a new window with each new folder viewed. Many derided the decision as poor design or as being different for the sake of being different. Well, after five long years the Gnome powers that be have decided to switch back to browser mode."

An anonymous reader writes "What's Twitter good for? How about crowd sourcing control of your Christmas tree. Dangerous Prototypes built an open source, networked Christmas tree that you can control from Twitter. Send a color or hexadecimal color code to @tweet_tree, then watch the color change on the live video stream. This project is based on an updated version of the open source business card size web server covered previously."

jamie writes "chromatic has a great post today on the conflict between OS distributions and CPAN's installations of perl modules, along with some suggestions for how to start resolving this maddening problem: '[Though Debian has] made plenty of CPAN distributions available as .debs, I have to configure my CPAN client myself, and it does not work with the system package manager. There's no reason it couldn't. Imagine that the system Perl 5 included in the default package... had a CPAN client configured appropriately. It has selected an appropriate mirror (or uses the redirector). It knows about installation paths. It understands how to use LWP...' The idea of providing guidelines to distros for how to safely package modules is a great one. Could modules request (a modified?) test suite be run after distro-installation? Could Module::Build help module authors and distro maintainers establish the rules somehow?"

eldavojohn writes "Despite news that VLC might not have anyone to work on the Mac release, Lifehacker brings word of a video editor that the VLC team is working on dubbed VideoLAN Media Creator. It hasn't been released yet (git clone git://github.com/VLMC/vlmc.git) but a pre-release is due out soon."

An anonymous reader writes "Following Sun Microsystems' decision to release a raft of open source applications to support its secure cloud computing strategy, companies may be wondering if they should conduct security tests of their customized open source software before deployment. While the use of encryption and VPNs to extend a secure bridge between a company IT resource and a private cloud facility is very positive — especially now that Amazon is beta testing its pay-as-you-go private cloud facility — it's important that the underlying application code is also secure. What do you think?"

eldavojohn writes "Comcast has settled out of court to the tune of $16 million in one of several ongoing P2P throttling class action lawsuits. You may be eligible for up to $16 restitution if 'you live in the United States or its Territories, have a current or former Comcast High-Speed Internet account, and either used or attempted to use Comcast service to use the Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack or Gnutella P2P protocols at any time from April 1, 2006 to December 31, 2008; and/or Lotus Notes to send emails any time from March 26, 2007 to October 3, 2007.' $16 million seems low. And it's too bad this was an out-of-court settlement instead of a solid precedent-setting decision for your right to use P2P applications. The settlement will probably not affect the slews of other Comcast P2P throttling suits, and it's unclear whether it will placate the FCC."

eldavojohn writes "Comcast has settled out of court to the tune of $16 million in one of several ongoing P2P throttling class action lawsuits. You may be eligible for up to $16 restitution if 'you live in the United States or its Territories, have a current or former Comcast High-Speed Internet account, and either used or attempted to use Comcast service to use the Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack or Gnutella P2P protocols at any time from April 1, 2006 to December 31, 2008; and/or Lotus Notes to send emails any time from March 26, 2007 to October 3, 2007.' $16 million seems low. And it's too bad this was an out-of-court settlement instead of a solid precedent-setting decision for your right to use P2P applications. The settlement will probably not affect the slews of other Comcast P2P throttling suits, and it's unclear whether it will placate the FCC."

Cytalk and other readers tipped us to Microsoft's loss in a US appeals court, in a patent case brought by Canadian company i4i. Microsoft must now pay $290M and either stop selling Word (and probably Office) by January 11, or somehow work around the patent by that date. A Seattle PI blog reports that Redmond has a few options left: "In a statement, Microsoft said it was working hard to comply with the injunction. The company also said it is considering further legal options, including possible requests for a new hearing or a writ of certiorari from the US Supreme Court." Update: 12/22 20:47 GMT by KD : Tim Bray has up a blog post explaining why it would be no great loss if Microsoft dropped the "custom XML" feature in dispute.
Update: 12/22 23:04 GMT by KD : Reader adeelarshad82 pointed out a statement released by Microsoft earlier today, which says in part: "We expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date. In addition, the beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction."

Cytalk and other readers tipped us to Microsoft's loss in a US appeals court, in a patent case brought by Canadian company i4i. Microsoft must now pay $290M and either stop selling Word (and probably Office) by January 11, or somehow work around the patent by that date. A Seattle PI blog reports that Redmond has a few options left: "In a statement, Microsoft said it was working hard to comply with the injunction. The company also said it is considering further legal options, including possible requests for a new hearing or a writ of certiorari from the US Supreme Court." Update: 12/22 20:47 GMT by KD : Tim Bray has up a blog post explaining why it would be no great loss if Microsoft dropped the "custom XML" feature in dispute.
Update: 12/22 23:04 GMT by KD : Reader adeelarshad82 pointed out a statement released by Microsoft earlier today, which says in part: "We expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date. In addition, the beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction."