Slashdot Mirror

If information wants to be free, where does it go when it's out? A string of Os and 1s, no matter how carefully modulated, means nothing unless it is eventually channeled, observed and understood by a recipient -- a person. As a reminder that those bits are there so that people can actually benefit from them, Cliff Lampe contributed this review of The Social Life of Information. It may make you rethink everything from your own program designs to evaluating the quality of the information (and information systems) around you.

The Social Life of Information author John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid pages 336 publisher Harvard Business School Press rating 10 reviewer Cliff Lampe ISBN 0-87584-762-5 summary Information makes a great blind date.

The Scenario

Hemos keeps handing me these books about how information technology is shaping our lives, how the digital is leaving an indelible stamp on the analog. What Brown and Duguid have done is write a refreshing reminder that no matter how it seems, it's the analog that shapes the digital, and social systems that are steering the way we use computers. I know, it sounds like talking-head crap, but the authors are from PARC, which is not really a place where people go to sit on their hands or be flighty.

Here are some of the pithy issues raised in The Social Life of Information:

• Agents -- the technology for artifical intelligence agents keeps improving, but the social structure for them is staying put. Who controls these agents? Do we really expect Amazon to have our best interests at heart? There are already agents that go through and reap information on you for nefarious purposes; who is going to develop protection agents?
• Telecommuting -- why hasn't telecommuting taken off like we thought it would? Where are the hordes of people working happily at home? Despite the myth of the lone hacker working away, we all know that our best tricks are usually gleaned from some keyboarding compatriot who shows us a thing or two. This is true in almost every other field as well. Even given two people of equal skill, their output is usually more than the sum of their efforts. There is something to be said for working in meatspace.
• Process vs. practice -- why is it that when we try encapsulate something in documentation, it always falls short? We've all had someone hand us a manual outlining some practice that ends up propping up an uneven table. It's also common wisdom that the best way to learn how to code is to actually start writing some code. Do you think this is unique to the computer profession?
• Newspaper -- why is it that newspaper still persists when there are a host of other, more interactive ways we can absorb the news? Newspaper has resisted the attacks of televison news, but will it be able to do the same with news provided by computer? This is a great example of how social systems colliding with technological systems at the point where information is disseminated. Newspaper is a great technology in many ways (yes, newspaper is a technology), but there is a constant pressure to come up with an alternative to it.
• Education -- why does the university continue to exist? Will information technology put the final nail in the coffin of the ol' university? Not damned likely. I get my share of ribbing from the Slashdot crew about being an academic, and I think there is rightfully some skepticism in the tech sector about the value of higher education. The university system has been around for more than a thousand years, and the authors of this book put their fingers right on why it is still a successful organism, one that is growing rather than dying out. Here's the secret: You don't go to a place of higher education for the courses, you go in order to hang out with like-minded people. That is hard to replicate on the Web, and "community" has become the buzzword that "portal" was 15 minutes ago. Who cares what classes I take as a graduate student? What's important is working with people who are interested in the same questions.

The central theme of this book, never overtly spelled out by the authors, for better or worse, is that Human interaction revolves around issues of trust, and trust in the anonymous computer realm is hard (but not impossible) to come by. Reputation systems are an important components of that, but in reality we judge the trustworthiness of a person on a million different factors, and it is hard to code that many different variables. A firm handshake, a shared joke, social capital, and a legion more of these nearly imperceptible cues allows us to work together. We're an overblown troop of monkeys in some ways, and would be foolish to deny that we're hardwired for these kinds of judgments.

What Duguid and Brown point out is that we ignore our monkey-ness when designing systems that are intended to replace face to face, human interaction. As my Uncle Bob once told me, "Embrace that monkey!" Keep in mind when designing your systems what invisible threads you are missing.

What's Bad?

Like in most books of this kind, I really had hoped for more hard statistics. Sometimes the authors make some statement about the shape of the universe that seems plausible enough, but I wonder would it hold up to the cold light of descriptive statistics. Still, it's not really the job of this book to provide information like this, and I'm just being a cranky pseudo-scientist. The only other thing that rubbed me the sandpaper way was a little repetition of the theme. A couple of chapters could have been reduced into one.

What's Good?

Technically speaking, the writing is efficient and readable, with lots of fine examples and an easy progression that makes this a quick and enjoyable read. This is something that would go very quickly as a free time read, and since the chapters are fairly autonomous, you can make it one of those books you just crank a few pages through before you fall asleep and absorb the meaning.

On the content side, this book is fantastic. I would like to buy a few dozen copies and pass them out in airports while I wear saffron robes. Or leave them in hotel rooms Gideon style. It's a vindication for a small, yet vocal, community of people who have addressed these issues is the past, while not blaming or talking down to the people who have refused to include the human in their design. It also gives some practical advice for people who would like to examine information from a more holistic point of view, including how to introduce a new technology into an already existing social system (Alexander Graham Bell did this). The Social Life of Information is one of those rare books that informs without preaching, advocates without subjecting, and entertains without pandering. It is a smart attempt at stepping away from the technological roller coaster (without getting out of line) and seeing how the social systems enveloping the technology batter it about. This is an important read for any person involved in information technology to read.

So What's In It For Me?

Hopefull, some humility. It is one thing to create brilliant technological systems, it is another to get people to use them. Despite the crap we usually give marketing guys, they instinctively understand some of these points. It also has a message for the Open Source movement. Often, an open source project fails because it does not adequately account for the social factors surrounding it. What are the social bits and pieces that surround a project that is trying to produce open source software?

I'm a little giddy from my tech high these days. Think of this book as intellectual and creative caffeine. A hundred ideas for projects must be outlined in my margin notes on this book. This book at the same time will reaffirm what you do, and debunk it. If you can take the cold dash of reflection, you'll be better off for it.

Other important links ...

Buy this fine text at ThinkGeek. Also, check out the Web site dedicated to this book. There's always a site for a book like this these days. You may also want to read an earlier John Seeley Brown deal called The Social Life of a Document.

It may have taken a semi-obscure German professor, the profit motive of the world's CD-ROM drive producers, ingenious hackers and aesthetically gifted interface designers, but the simple fact is that MP3s are out there, and they're everywhere -- every major desktop OS comes with players for your easy listening. Chronic book review madman chromatic points you to a fount of knowledge for anyone who needs more than "click here to play."

MP3: The Definitive Guide author Scott Hacker pages 388 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 8.5 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1-56592-661-7 summary Everything there is to know about MP3, as it stands right now and might be in the near future.

The Scoop Judging by the way even my non-technical friends are talking about MP3s, digital music is on a lot of minds. As usual, O'Reilly has published the definitive guide to all things MP3. Computer and music guru Scott Hacker takes you through the codec, the software, the controversies, the competition, and building your own equipment. Though it's aimed at end-users, the book is still accessible to the do-it-yourself weekend hardware wizard.

What's to Like? Hacker's writing is simple and not-too-technical. In places, it's even informal. Sure, there are plenty of gory details, but you won't miss anything essential if you skip over the sidebars now and then. An average computer user could probably create his own MP3s while reading chapter five, for example. Power users aren't left out, though: Audiophiles, hackers and tweakers will benefit from the extensive comparisons of players, encoders, hardware, and competing codecs.

No stranger to alternative operating systems (he also wrote the BeOS Bible), Hacker takes pains to be cross-platform, covering Windows, Mac, Linux, and BeOS. This isn't limited to playback options, though that's the most extensive discussion, but includes serving files over the Internet. Of special consideration are quality issues. The author's perspective as a sound connoisseur comes in handy while discussing optimal (and affordable) recording and playback equipment.

As per the title, the Guide completely covers the subject. If you're interested in collecting MP3s, creating them, playing them back with software, with portable hardware, car hardware, building your own hardware, making music available to others, discovering alternate means of delivery and other codecs, or just want a broad overview of all things MP3, you'll find something of immediate interest. If Hacker whets your appetite for more information, follow one of his references to the source itself. (That's especially nice in his treatment of the more exotic hardware players.)

What's to Consider? Though the chapter on legal information and MP3 is excellent, and among the most extensive treatments of the issue lay readers are likely to encounter, it's U.S. Centric. Also, it should be noted that the digital music debate is undeniably fuzzy, so any interpretations are open to correction. Though he debunks the common disclaimers found on shady MP3 sites, the author wisely sidesteps copyright arguments by explaining the relevant laws, and allowing his readers to come to their own conclusions in the gray areas.

People who've been tracking the scene for a while know how fast things change. Information on specific programs or hardware players could become obsolete quickly. (That's noted in the text.) For the most part, Hacker prefers to explain concepts and trends rather than the fine details of any particular implementation. For items still unresolved, such as the eventually supported ID3v2 specification, he provides caveats regarding compatibility issues.

The Summary Catch up to the digital music revolution with MP3: The Definitive Guide. It's packed with information, yet easy to read, and stuffed with links to satisfy your appetite for up-to-the-second information.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. The Nuts and Bolts of MP3
2. How MP3 Works: Inside the Codec
3. Getting and Playing MP3 Files
4. Playlists, Tags, and Skins: MP3 Options
5. Ripping and Encoding: Creating MP3 Files
6. Hardware, Portables, Home Stereos, and Kits
7. The Not-So-Fine-Print: Legal Bits and Pieces
8. Webcasting and Servers: Internet Distribution
9. Competing Codecs and Other File Formats

1. ID3v1 Genres

Managing software development is a job right up there with aircraft controller in the realm between fascinating and nerve-wracking. chromatic's latest review is of a book introducing one of the best known tools for managing the complexity inherent in such projects, Karl Fogel's Open Source Development with CVS.

Open Source Development with CVS author Karl Fogel pages 316 publisher Coriolis Open Press rating 8.5 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1-57610-490-7 summary More than a summary of CVS commands, Open Source Development with CVS is a study of how to organize and lead free software projects.

The Scoop Free software, the theory goes, is in a constant state of release. Instead of working in secret for years to produce a Grand Unified Model of Everything, then unleashing it on an unsuspecting world to the accompaniment of television commercials and full-page ads in trade magazines, development occurs in public view. That's aided, in no small part, by the convenience of CVS. So argues Karl Fogel in his introduction to Open Source Development with CVS. In that case, why not try it yourself?

Interspersed between CVS How-To chapters are Developer How-To chapters. For example, chapter 3 describes the author's theories on the entire Open Source process. That includes such common-sense advice as "Release something useful" and "Release something usable." There're plenty of examples to back up these ideas, drawn from the examples of large and popular open source projects.

What's to Like? CVS-specific chapters build on each other. Though 95% of the commands the average developer will ever use are covered in chapter two, the increasingly specific information just may come in handy someday. Though there's a price to pay for flexibility, the increased power it brings is worth it. If you've followed the examples and done some testing of your own, you'll have earned the title 'CVS Guru' by the end of chapter six.

Fogel's development essays take the pragmatic approach. Rather than preaching the One True Way to Do It, he analyzes several successful projects (Apache, the Linux kernel, and CVS itself being among the most prominent) and attempts to draw general principles from their histories. His overall philosophy seems to be "manage a few things well and strictly, and let your project evolve." With a good framework in place (both in your code and for your project administration), things will work smoothly and you'll be more likely to reap the benefits of the free software model.

Chapter eight gives troubleshooting tips. Fogel walks through the most common errors he's seen, doling out explanations and solutions with abandon. Chapter nine is a good reference, neatly summarizing CVS commands and files. Having completed the rest of the book -- and understanding the concepts, this section has the exact syntax at your fingertips.

What's to Consider? Though a complete reference on its own, occasionally the author defers discussion of some subjects in favor of referring to the Cederqvist manual accompanying a CVS source distribution. To be fair, these are often highly technical minutiae, but at 316 pages there is space for an expanded explanation of topics such as the RCS roots of CVS (knowing the source of CVS can help one to understand why some things are the way they are). Thankfully, there's information provided about the official FAQ and mailing lists where such data can be found. The Summary Beyond a comprehensive guide to using and administering CVS, Karl Fogel has written an easy-to-read guide on successful Open Source development. His practical focus and laid-back approach should prove workable for everything from pet projects to large undertakings. The author and Coriolis, the publisher, have also made chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, and 10 available online at http://cvsbook.red-bean.com, under the GPL. Table of Contents

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

1. Why Open Source Development and CVS Go Together
2. An Overview of CVS
3. The Open Source Process
4. CVS Repository Administration
5. Designing for Decentralized Development
6. Advanced CVS
7. Building, Testing, and Releasing
8. Tips and Troubleshooting
9. Complete CVS Reference
10. Third-Party Tools That Work With CVS

1. CVS Maintenance and Development Today
2. GNU General Public License

Never content to rest on his laurels, chromatic has again supplied us with a no-nonsense, informative book review. This time it's of O'Reilly's Programming the Perl DBI, for those of you unwilling to let any TLA go unconquered. If you're building a Web site or learning MySQL (or any other database) and want to combine Perl skills with data storage, he's got a few words for you. [Updated 13 June 3:20GMT by timothy:] Heck, it's a double header! PotPieMan gives a different perspective on the same book, all below.

Programming the Perl DBI author Alligator Descartes and Tim Bunce pages 346 publisher O'Reilly and Associates rating 8.5 reviewer chromatic, PotPieMan ISBN 1-56592-699-4 summary Everything you need to know about the Perl database interface, straight from the source. Store, update, and retreive information -- or even write your own database driver.

Review No. 1: chromatic

The Scoop At some point in your programming life, you'll run into the idea of persistence. Whether data mining or storing customer information gathered from Web forms, data will end up shelved somewhere. Luckily for the Perl monks among us, we have the excellent DBI (DataBase Independent) module to provide a layer of abstraction and compatibility for multiple database systems. This book makes a great introduction and reference for the DBI.

Newcomers will quickly come up to workable knowledge on database concepts like basic SQL and relational models as well as Perlish constructs like object storage. Experienced users can use the included DBI specification as a reference and Appendix B for particular DBD quirks and caveats.

What's to Like? The writing is exceptionally crisp and clean. A DBI novice could absorb the knowledge of masters in just three hours, simply by reading the chapters. It's hard to imagine a better explanation of most concepts. The quality is consistent, as is the data being manipulated. As soon as the relational database concept comes on stage, so does the sample database used throughout: a list of locations and descriptions of megalithic sites in the UK.

The real meat starts in chapter four, with a discussion of the DBI architecture. Get used to manipulating statement handles -- you'll be doing a lot of that. Be sure to follow the recommendations for quoting and error checking, to save yourself hours of tedious debugging! Chapter five continues the tutorial, exhaustively covering database interactions. As usual for O'Reilly books, the authors take pains to point out benefits and drawbacks of different approaches. As there are multiple ways to pull rows from a completed query, and which fetch method is most efficient, or more flexible? The Advanced DBI chapter talks about database attributes and metadata -- ways to communicate with underlying DB and to massage data there. There's also good information about optimizations and transactions.

The material covered doesn't stop at the title. Chapter 7 talks about ODBC -- which may be preferable in some cases. Along the same lines, chapter 2 introduces all of the most important database concepts (Storing, Updating, Fetching, and Deleting) by looking at non-SQL means for storing data. These include Data::Dumper, Storable, flat files, and the Berkeley Database Manager. Though DBI receives its due for flexibility, portability, and power, the more tricks in your toolbag, the better you'll program. If you're new to the concept of persistent data storage, it also serves as a good introduction.

Porters and rogue programmers will appreciate Appendix B: an analysis of 13 database systems and their DBI drivers. Information on special syntax, SQL flavors, and supported DBI operations is included. Be sure to catch the gotchas and issues of your particular database. Administrators will appreciate chapter 8, which discusses the DBI shell (useful for testing SQL statements and connections) and the DBD::Proxy modules (providing compression and encryption as well as query forwarding).

What's to Consider? Perhaps due to the clarity and simplicity of the writing, the tutorial-esque DBI feature section, is rather short. Of 186 pages, 46 cover non-DBI mechanisms (chapter 2). That's not to say that there's anything missing, but that you might reach chapter six and ask, "Oh, is that all?" Adding another example database might flesh out some illustrations -- demonstrating how to solve two different problems would reinforce the important concepts. The Summary With its clear explanations and concise reference value, serious Perl programmers ought to make room on their shelves for the Cheetah. When you're knee deep in your first serious Web project, or bundling information from one database to another, you'll happily reach for Programming the Perl DBI.

Review No. 2: PotPieMan

The Scoop

Programming the Perl DBI starts with the basics: flat-file databases (like /etc/passwd) and DBM file libraries. Most of us have implemented some type of database system using tab- or comma-delimited files, and the authors use these flat-file databases as a starting point for the rest of their discussion. First, they give an overview of the various functions that a programmer might want to perform on data that is placed in a database. This leads them into an organized explanation of the DBI and the advantages and disadvantages of using the DBI.

What's Bad?

My main gripe about this book is that the DBI programming examples seem very basic. Granted, the book is specifically written about DBI programming, not manipulation of data retrieved by the DBI. Depending on one's perspective, this can be bad. If you are a CGI programmer expecting to find all the answers on designing a database-driven Web site, you will be slightly disappointed.

What's Good?

On the other hand, if you have any skill as a programmer, you would be able to use this book as a great starting point for database-driven Web sites. It gives a great overview of all the important functions of a relational database and the structured query language. At first, the authors give examples of SQL statements, without any actual Perl code. They move slowly through the query language so as to make sure that the reader understands, and include a few tables to structure the discussion of the SQL operators. The authors then discuss queries over multiple tables, along with primary and foreign keys. Next, the authors discuss SQL statements to modify (insert, delete, and update) data.

The actual DBI programming sections begin with an explanation of the DBI architecture, which allows them to introduce all the elements of a Perl program that would interface with a database and grab data. The authors begin with a very basic program and then expand on it to include error checking, parameter binding, atomic fetching, and so on. (The parameter binding section is particularly informative.)

For the most part, programmers looking to get into database programming would be set after the first five chapters. The sixth chapter is concerned with advanced DBI programming, and does not seem absolutely necessary to read the first time through. However, its explanation of transactions will most likely be important. There is also a chapter that discusses ODBC and the DBI, which might be important if you have to deal with Windows machines or other ODBC data sources. The chapter gives a comparison between the DBD::ODBC and Win32::ODBC modules, which is nice. Finally, the eighth chapter concerns the DBI shell (dbish) and database proxying, which might be important to some.

The appendices are quite comprehensive. The authors (using man pages as a reference) go through all the nuts and bolts of the DBI and the various DBD drivers. Overall, Programming the Perl DBI gives a substantial explanation of utilizing the DBI.

So What's In It For Me?

On the one hand, if you already have Perl experience and are new to database programming, you should consider picking up this book. To be honest, I did not know much about the DBI until I read this book. Now, I am relatively confident in my ability to implement databases in my programming. If you already have experience in programming with the DBI, though, you might not need this book. The last few chapters might be helpful, but it would be good to flip through the book before buying it.

Purchase this book from ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Basic Non-DBI Databases
3. SQL and Relational Databases
4. Programming with the DBI
5. Interacting with the Database
6. Advanced DBI
7. ODBC and the DBI
8. DBI Shell and Database Proxying

1. DBI Specification
2. Driver and Database Characteristics
3. ASLaN Sacred Site Charter

Unstoppable reader Jason Bennett has penned another review, this time of Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe -- proof that it's good to venture beyond the O'Reilly section of the store, at least the few feet to the Current Science area.

The Elegant Universe author Brian Greene pages 448 publisher Norton rating 9/10 reviewer Jason Bennett ISBN 0-965-088806 summary An excellent, down-to-earth account of the development of string theory and the search for The Theory of Everything.

Background

Greetings, all. This book is yet another departure from my standard software theme, but a fascinating one nonetheless. Ever since the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics, the everyday world and the world as described by science have diverged. We have no frame of reference for time running at a different rate, nor for particles jumping through solid objects. Yet it is these very discoveries which have driven physics (and technology) for the past fifty years. Even worse, scientists have been unable to reconcile these difficult-to- understand theories with one another. Today, though, there are solutions in sight. String theory promises to revolutionize science once again by uniting the theory of the big (relativity) with the theory of the small (quantum mechanics), and now that they understand these theories better, scientists can explain to the rest of us how our world truly works. Michio Kaku did an excellent job with his Hyperspace five years ago, and now Brian Greene gives us a different and updated perspective. Although this book is not written for everyone, it is directed at anyone with a decent science background (high school physics), and a desire to learn more about how our reality works.

The Scenario

As the saying goes, let's start at the beginning. Science has recently (where recently = 100 years, recent in historical terms) faced down three major conflicts in its world view. The first, the conflict of Newton's theory of motion versus Maxwell's law of electromagnetism over whether a light wave can be outrun, was resolved by special relativity (Newton lost). The second conflict, and one initiated by the discovery of special relativity, was whether gravity can be transmitted instantaneously across distances. (Special relativity, of course, states that nothing can be transmitted instantaneously). From this conflict was born general relativity, the theory of curved space, and Newton lost again (although, to be fair to Newton, he was correct as much as he could have been). The third conflict, caused by the implications of general relativity (anyone see a pattern?), was and is between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Simply put, the theory that describes the big and the theory that describes the small do not make sense together. Therefore, either one is correct, or the atoms that make you up behave differently than the planet upon which you stand. The answer to this conflict may very well be string theory.

After a quick introduction to these conflicts, and the place of string theory in the modern framework of physics, Greene takes us on a looping yet fascinating tour through special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the details of the conflict between them. This foundation for his description of string theory is quite helpful in bringing the book down to the level that most people can understand (especially liberal arts grads :-). In the process, Greene shows how the weirdness and unpredictability of quantum mechanics is simply unreconcilable with relativity, given our current formulation of both theories.

Of course, such a state cannot continue forever. Enter string theory. String theory basically states that the universe is fundamentally made up of oscillating loops of "string", and it is those oscillations which determine the nature and makeup of the universe. String theory also postulates that the universe is composed of several rolled-up dimensions, influencing the vibrations of the strings, and thus the makeup of our universe.

Without going into detail (that's the author's job), string theory has gathered a lot of evidence and momentum in the past years, and what I have sketched is only a 5-minute sound bite. There's plenty more detail of both the theory and its implications in the later sections. Greene closes by explaining where physics and string theory are headed, and pronounces his hope that soon we will be able to hold in our hands a fundamental explanation of the universe (the Theory of Everything [TOE], the Holy Grail of physics).

What's Bad?

Not too much. I found some of the later chapters to drag somewhat, delving into mathematics that I neither wanted nor needed. The chapter on black holes, especially, held great promise, but tended to drag at times, on a subject that I consider horribly fascinating.

What's Good?

In a sentence, this book makes modern physics accessible. I dare say any Slashdot reader could readily read and enjoy the material, with only a little stretching here and there. It is important that we as a people know more about how our world works, and this book is a solid step in that direction. Just as Hyperspace was a bestseller, I hope TEU can acquaint more people with these fascinating and fundamental developments of science.

So What's In It For Me?

Very simply, a better understanding of how our world works, and little pain in getting there. There's something to be said for enjoying physics!

Purchase this at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Part I: The Edge of Knowledge
  1. Tied Up with String
• Part II: The Dilemma of Space, Time, and the Quanta
  1. Space, Time, and the Eye of the Beholder
  2. Of Warps and Ripples
  3. Microscopic Weirdness
  4. The need for a New Theory: General Relativity vs. Quantum Mechanics
• Part III: The Cosmic Symphony
  1. Nothing but Music: The Essentials of Superstring Theory
  2. The "Super" in Superstrings
  3. More Dimensions Than Meet the Eye
  4. The Smoking Gun: Experimental Signatures
• Part IV: String Theory and the Fabic of Spacetime
  1. Quanutm Geometry
  2. Tearing the Fabic of Space
  3. Beyond Strings: In Search of M-Theory
  4. Black Holes: A String/M-Theory Perspective
  5. Reflections on Cosmology
• Part V: Unification in the Twenty-First Century
  1. Prospects
• Notes
• Glossary of Scientific Terms
• References and Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index

From somehere just off the beaten path of SciFi, programming and encryption reviews, Kevin Whilden of Your Planet Earth submitted this review of Natural Capitalism, a book aimed at reconciling nature lovers with free market enthusiasts. The book's basic ideas may be old hat to many libertarians and other free-marketeers, but are phrased in way that seems aimed at a fairly conventional lay audience. How do you feel about the connections he draws between open source software and the eco-economy? What is the best economic atmosphere for a healthy environment, and is it also the best one for free software? How realistic is the Rocky Mountain Institute's analysis? Natural Capitalism author Paul Hawken, Amory Lovens, L. Hunter Lovens pages 416 publisher Rocky Mountain Institute rating 9 reviewer Kevin Whilden ISBN 0316353167 summary Treatise on saving the Earth through enlightened capitalism

Introduction to the book Natural Capitalism is as important to the environmental movement as Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar is to the Open Source Software. Natural Capitalism describes a new philosophy of doing business that runs counter to the very-well-established capitalist establishment. The book that summarizes and integrates complex concepts into an easy to read, coherent, and convincing whole, with the ultimate effect of raising consciousness and discussion to an entirely new level. Those are strong words, but the book really is that good. As a bonus, there are many similarities between the state of natural capitalism today and the state of Linux and OSS two years ago. Natural capitalism is fighting for acceptance in the marketplace, much like Linux did, and environmentalists and would-be natural capitalists would do very well to study how the OSS movement "won" its marketplace victory.

Natural capitalism is an alternative to so-called "conventional capitalism." They both share many aspects, and natural capitalism is nothing at all like Socialism or Communism. Natural capitalism is designed to fix some of the most significant problems with conventional capitalism. These problems are created because conventional capitalism takes a short-sighted approach to the environment and the value of the health and happiness of people that live within it. In other words, CC favors short-term profits at the expense of the environment and people's lives, while NC makes the contrary claim that short and long term profits can be equal if not greater when a higher value is placed on the environment and happy workers. Does anyone lose in the latter scenario?

The book itself describes various aspects of natural capitalism that must all work together to simultaneously protect the planet Earth and ensure that the global economy will not collapse. Capitalism and environmentalism are not mutually exclusive ideals, and the sooner everyone realizes this, the sooner we can all get to work on actively stopping global warming, ecosystem collapse, air and water pollution, and other environmental problems. Discussing the nature, magnitude, and urgency of these problems is the realm of many other books, scientific articles, non-profit action alerts, government and agencies -- Natural Capitalism (the book) discusses these problems only enough to talk about the revolutionary solutions that natural capitalism (the theory) provides. If you want to learn more about the problems, then you should check out my Web site Your Planet Earth, which is a slash-based site devoted to discussing environmental issues with a scientific perspective.

Part of the real attraction of natural capitalism is that some companies have implemented its principles with great success, so it is proven to work (much like OSS and Linux in the early stages). But the other half of the attraction is that it provides an essential piece of the solution to the world's environmental problems: market-based incentives to protect the environment. Our current economy will be crippled, if not destroyed, if we continue to ignore our present environmental destruction. This is because our current economic and social systems are based on obtaining resources from the natural world (e.g. food, air. water), and they cannot exist independently it.

Here are the four underlying principles of natural capitalism that can be developed into an environmentally friendly and profitable economic system.

The four tenets of natural capitalism

1. Radical Resource Productivity

   Just as the Industrial Revolution allowed one man to do the work of twenty with the help of modern machinery, so can we continue to improve processes and machinery that produce more work from less energy and resulting in less waste. This is not new concept, but the book describes a way to do this in an environmentally friendly way. What is more, it talks about how to achieve revolutionary gains in productivity vs. merely evolutionary gains using the so-called "whole-systems" approach to solving problems. An example of this is a building where the building was designed around the plumbing as opposed to the conventional practice of designing the plumbing around the building. This resulted in much smaller pumps and 90% lower energy use. This order of magnitude increase in efficiency constitutes a revolutionary gain in resource productivity. The book describes examples of how this was achieved in many ways, illustrating the contention that in natural capitalism, one gain always begets another.

   Another cool concept of natural capitalism is that radical achieving resource productivity results in the counter-intuitive result of creating more highly paying skilled jobs. Jobs are not lost because manufacturing processes become more efficient. Rather jobs are created by trying to figure out ways to make these radical resource gains. Instead of raising the bottom line a little bit by slashing jobs, the principles of natural capitalism raise the bottom line dramatically by hiring people to make whole systems more efficient.

2. Biomimicry

   We still have a lot to learn from how nature produces advanced materials and solves problems with waste. For example, not even our most advanced chemistry or engineering processes, which typically use extremely high temperatures (1000+ C) and produce much toxic waste, can even come close to creating materials as strong and light as spider silk, or as tough as abalone shells. Spiders produce their silk at roughly room temperature, out of materials that are no more toxic than the juice of crickets and bugs; while abalones make their shells in 50F sea water. We would do well to set our industrial goals to mimic the spider and other natural processes.

   Another important aspect of biomimicry is termed "closing the loop". This means creating circular recycling streams of materials in our society, because in nature, nothing is wasted, and everything is recycled. In nature, there are no toxic by-products that require superfund cleanup and no overflowing landfills that leach carcinogenic pollutants into our drinking water. Natural processes exist in a circular fashion such that the waste from one processes is the input to another process. Companies that develop these and other biomimicry techniques will produce better products from cheaper and more readily available materials, with fewer or no toxic by-products that would otherwise cost money to clean up. The book is filled with practical examples of how this works.

3. Service and Flow economy

   In the service and flow economy, the ownership of goods and services is reversed such that the company that produces a good owns that good throughout its entire lifetime. For example, when you buy carpeting for an office, you wouldn't own the physical carpet fibers, but you would own a contract that requires the carpet company to provide the service of carpeting in your office. After all, all you care about is having carpet to walk on and look at, and you would really rather not be responsible for repairing, replacing, or recycling it. The beauty of this service relationship is that the company that provides you with the carpet service has incentive to give you a longer lasting, higher quality product, because it costs them money every time they have to bring in a bunch of workers to replace it. The carpet company has incentive to innovate in its product design to follow the previous two principles of natural capitalism, because the problem of disposing of used carpet is its own problem. This principle can be extended in many ways, including recently designed "industrial ecology" business parks, designed to form a closed-loop mini-ecology: one business' waste output is another business' raw material input, just like in nature.

4. Invest in Natural Capital

   From the book:

   "Natural capital can be viewed as the sum total of the ecological systems that support life, different from human-made capital in that natural capital cannot be produced by human activity. It is easy to overlook because natural capital is the pond in which we swim, and, like fish, we are not aware we're in the water. Natural capital comes about not by singular miracles, but as the product of yeoman work carried out by thousands upon thousands of species in complex interactions. These interactions between plants and animals, in conjunction with the natural rhythms of weather, water, and tides, provide the basis for the cycle of life, a cycle that is ancient, complex, and highly interconnected. When one of its components - say, the carbon cycle - is disrupted, it in turn affects the oceans, soils, rainfall, heat, wind, disease, and tundras to name but some of the other components. Today, every part of the earth is influenced by human activity, and the consequences are unknowable. As biologist E. O. Wilson has commented, the multitudinous diversity of obscure species don't need us. Can we say with certainty the same about them?"

   The above is a number of excerpts from chapter 6, pasted together seamlessly, because their words define natural capitalism better than anything I might describe. Implicit in their description is that humans are systematically destroying the many ecosystems of the earth, either to make a quick few bucks, and/or because we foolishly do not realize the destructive nature of our actions. Yet we are 100% dependent on the natural services that the earth provides, such as fresh oxygen from plant respiration, clean water produced from healthy watersheds, and food from the earth. These things are not trivial -- try to imagine life without them.

   Yet in our messed up economy, the natural world remains valueless until it is chopped down, dug up, mined, drilled, dammed, paved, developed, and/or otherwise destroyed.

   The services that natural capital provides are priceless, yet scientists have indeed tried to quantify their value. In a landmark paper, they calculated the value of biological services flowing directly into society from the stock of natural capital as $36 trillion in 1999 dollars (Costanza et. Al. "The Value of the World's Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital", 1997, Nature 387:253-260). Compare this with the gross world product of $39 trillion, and you get an idea of just how much of our economy exists because of the services nature provides.

Other neat ideas from the book The book has some very interesting ideas on how our society can place a much higher value on natural capital that will eliminate waste and destruction of our ecosystems. One of these ideas is totally eliminating personal income tax, and instead taxing the use or waste of natural resource; the book does a great job of justifying that decidedly radical concept. The basic idea is that things have changed drastically since the early stages of the industrial revolution when labor was scarce and natural capital was abundant. Way back then, it made sense to tax what was scarce. Now however, labor is incredibly abundant (6 billion and counting), and natural capital is the resource that is becoming increasingly scarce. Considering that natural capital is ultimately priceless, we should tax those people and corporations that destroy it. This provides strong incentive to conserve and protect natural capital, which is what we all ultimately want and need. Currently, the U.S. gives away its natural capital for a song and dance (e.g. Mining Act of 1872, US Forest Service, etc ...) to corporations which then rape and pillage the environment to make a fortune for their shareholders.

Conclusion This is a landmark book that summarizes and integrates many different theories about how to practically achieve an environmentally friendly economy. It describes the theory and practice of natural capitalism, including what it is, why we need it, and why and how it works. There are countless interesting ideas put forth in this book, with many chapters devoted to the " what, why, and how" questions in specific areas of our economy. These areas include automobiles, efficient building design, the pulp and paper industry, the farm industry, fresh water supply, and climate change. Best of all, it never loses focus on how to implement the changes proposed. People are not very receptive to "doom and gloom" predictions of impending catastrophe unless there are tangible solutions to prevent it. Natural Capitalism has so many real-world examples of its principles in action that it's hard to disbelieve the primary message: protecting the environment is damn good for business. As you read the book, you may end up shaking your head, as I did, wondering why this concept has taken so long to develop. You may also realize that these principles present an incredible business opportunity for those who are smart enough to become the early adopters.

You can learn more about who these people are on the book's homepage, www.naturalcapitalism.org.

Buy Natural Capitalism at ThinkGeek.

Following the success of last year's User Friendly , O'Reilly strikes back. This time, it's a collection of 1999's comics (3 January through 11 December). Slightly oversized, with three daily strips or one daily and one Sunday strip to a page, this happy little collection will spruce up your coffee table and bring a smile to your guests. (If you have a coffee table, that is.)

Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell author Illiad pages 122 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 8 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1-56592-861-x summary See the world through slightly warped eyes with the gang at Columbia Internet in the second bound collection of Illiad's daily comic.

What's to Like? When he's on, he's really on. Some of the strips in here are laugh-out-loud funny. Even when it's merely amusing, Illiad captures elements of the real world in their twisted glories. Who can't put real names to half of the personalities running around in his little experiment?

There's Mike, a network engineer, forced to choose a server OS based on mascot issues. AJ, the designer, is torn between his feelings for Miranda and his inability to relate to anything organic -- when he's not debating a caffeine-induced hallucination. Greg, head of tech support, can't believe his customers questions. Pitr, coder extraodinaire, eagerly awaits his recognition as an Evil Genius. Stef, marketing weenie, is haunted by his poor Quake performance and his inability to make any progress with Miranda. Miranda, equal parts geek and goddess, finds herself the equal of the male techs, but cannot quite understand their unique brand of communication. On the far side of reality are the Dust Puppy (an intelligent, innocent, and adorable ball of that stuff you ought to clean out of your server -- but with feet) and Erwin, an AI who's switched bodies more than Cher.

On his best days, Illiad reads like a combination of Doonesbury and Bloom County, with the requisite Open Source flavor. Linux usually comes out ahead and Microsoft way behind, though occasionally the situation's reversed. (Insert photo of Alan Cox reeling from sunlight after the MS Terminator steals his sunglasses). That's not to say that sacred penguins don't make good hamburger. (Once the boss approves migrating the servers to Linux, what do you do? Answer -- Nerf Gun duels to determine whose pet distribution is best.)

What's to Consider? As UFies know, Illiad's Sunday comics are often topical. Remember eBay's spate of availability problems? ESR at Microsoft last summer? If so, you'll catch on pretty quickly. If not, you'll just have to scratch your head and keep reading. (There's also one comic missing the last panel on the top of page 18. If you're reading this, though, you'll find the proper punchline here.) For the purists, note that some strips appear in topic-related sections, not chronological order. That serves to bring out more of the subtle humor, in my opinion.

Also, Illiad's song parodies provoke mixed reactions. A lyricist, he's not, though his Gap parody hits squarely between the eyes. Illiad's better at the episodic stuff -- see his Star Wars storyline from the last book, or the strange tale of the One True Ping. Thankfully, the all-singing, all-dancing shorts are kept to a minimum.

The Summary A potent mixture of wry social commentary, high technology, cynicism that bites back, and a good dose of innocence that really does win out in the end, if you can put this book down for very long, you're either playing Quake or utterly humorless. Submit to your inner Evil Genius, and let the rest of the world wonder why you're grinning so much. (And if you're really evil, you won't loan out your copy.)

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

• Preface -- Eric S. Raymond
• Introduction -- Illiad
• The Comics

Greetings, all. I thought I'd let things settle down a little bit after my Cluetrain review, and try something slightly safer. :-) It never ceases to amaze me how, in an age where we use the phrase "that's so yesterday!" without flinching, the best lessons are those from "long ago." Book burning has been a hallmark of our century, although we certainly did not invent it. From the blatant actions of the Nazis to the self-censorship of the post-WWII age to today's filtering fights, the struggle to express ourselves has never ended. Come the middle of this century, at a time when the status quo was as strong as it has been in recent memory, a man with a story reminded us of something that Thomas Jefferson expressed two centuries before, that a little revolution now and then is a good thing. That revolution may generate some uncomfortable instability, but in the end we as a society are better for it. Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury pages 179 publisher Del Rey rating 10/10 reviewer Jason Bennett ISBN 0-345-41001-7 summary Although written in a "calmer" era, F451 still resonates with us today as uncomfortable views continue to be repressed.

The Scenario Since this is fiction, I'll keep this short to avoid giving away the story. Imagine the Jetsons in a time where owning a book is illegal, in a society dominated by mindless media. In other words, it's set in the present, as the present could be. Ok, I'm exaggerating, but not as much as I'd like to be. In this time, houses have been made completely fireproof, and therefore the firemen don't stop fires -- they start them, by burning down houses containing contraband (books). The rationale is quite simple: Books are divisive. There's always someone complaining, or feeling attacked, or generally unhappy that someone else knows something he shouldn't. But there's no need to repeat what Bradbury has so eloquently expressed.

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? [Giant list of every possible philosophical group] The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! ... It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. [italics mine] ... Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright'.... And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? ... And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely... [firemen] were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mine, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges, and executors.

Jon Katz, fifty years early. Be afraid.

What's Bad? I'm supposed to tell you what's bad about a classic of science fiction written around the time of my parent's birth? Yeah, right. I gave it a zero above for a reason: there's no way to rate this. Is this a better book than, for example, Cryptonomicon? In terms of influence and longevity, certainly. Will you like it more? Go find out for yourself! It's short!

What's Good? The best books are the ones that last, the ones with the timeless lessons that speak across the ages. I felt this way with my first review for Slashdot, of The Mythical Man Month, and I feel the same now. Fahrenheit 451 expresses the issue just as well today as it did when it was written. Cyberpatrol, the CDA, and peacefire may have been decades away, but that only makes the lesson all the more poignant. In addition, there are more recent addenda in this edition written by Bradbury himself that relate some of what has happened since the original publication. All in all, a satisfying and poignant read.

So What's In It For Me?

A needle that will prick your heart, and a voice that will speak to your soul.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

• Part One: The Hearth and the Salamander
• Part Two: The Sieve and the Sand
• Part Three: Burning Bright
• Afterword
• Coda

chromatic has brought us yet another pithy programming-book review, this time of Damien Conway's Object Oriented Perl. This sounds like a good book for those interested in not only an overview, but a book that pushes them into at least a few practical applications -- but not one too intimidating to learn from.

Object Oriented Perl author Damian Conway pages 490 publisher Manning Publications, 09/1999 rating 10 reviewer chromatic ISBN http://www.thinkgeek summary Damian Conway demonstrates the elegance of Object Oriented programming in Perl, exposing the flexibility and ingenuity of itsdesign

The Scoop A few common myths sully Perl's reputation in the Object Oriented world: Some claim the functionality is tacked on, while others insist that it is insecure, impure, and obscure. Damian Conway handily dispels these rumors in a gem of a book. Though occasionally delving into black magic, Object Oriented Perl is still accessible to novices. Paraphrasing the preface, this book might very well "[lower] cholesterol... [promote] world peace" -- for wizards and initiates alike. (Or at least raise their skills another level.) The Lowdown The starting point is an introduction to objects and the basic theory behind the OO discipline. This serves as a good overview of the first portion of the book. Following closly is an impressive thirty-page introduction to Perl. As newbies would shortly be overwhelmed, it is not intended as a first look at the language. Rather, it fills in the gaps left by an eclectic education. The chapter ends with a whirlwind tour of more advanced (read, underused) techniques, including the best typeglob discussion I've ever read.

Subsequent chapters narrow the focus and intensify the explanation. Conway first introduces three simple rules of Perl objects: classes are packages; methods are subroutines; and objects are blessed referents. While some forks of the trail are quite exotic (blessing a regular expression into an object?), they're all entertaining and very informative.

Programmatic examples follow an iterative and interactive development process, as is common in technical books. The author states a problem and then writes some initial code using a newly explained feature. Refining the program, he demonstrates other ways of achieving the same goal with less code, more features, and better style. Most examples are creative and fairly easily understood (a CD tracking system, a network model), though some, built from computer-science type examples (a pretty printer, a lexer), may be too esoteric for some readers.

As befitting the Perl philosophy, Conway is not hesitent to break with OO tradition as expressed in languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, or Eiffel. (Appendix B discusses language features of each with regard to Perl in compact but enlightening technical fashion.) There's an overwhelming sense of Perlishness about the whole thing, and that shines through on every page. Expect to exploit the language's flexibility to achieve amazing results.

By the end of chapter seven, you'll know everything you really need to know to be an effective and productive OO Perl hacker. Luckily, the increasingly specialized information in the last few chapters is optional. You may never use it, but you'll be better for it. As the most extreme example, the Multiple Dispatch chapter explores three rather exotic approaches I've never seen in a Perl program before (dynamic dispatch tables -- armed with this, you could probably write a window manager in Perl). For the paranoid or the purist, a chapter on encapsulation turns Perl's normally lenient access mechanisms around, protecting data through scalars and secure hashes.

The Summary Superbly organized and excellently explained, this is the definitive book on Object Oriented programming with Perl. Judging from the comments of more qualified experts, we agree that this book belongs on the shelf of any serious Perl hacker. Purchase this book at ThinkGeek. Table of Contents

1. What you need to know first (an object-orientation primer)
2. What you need to know second (a Perl refresher)
3. Getting started
4. Blessing arrays and scalars
5. Blessing other things
6. Inheritance
7. Polymorphism
8. Automating class creation
9. Ties
10. Operator overloading
11. Encapsulation
12. Genericity
13. Multiple Dispatch
14. Persistent objects

Appendices

1. Quick reference guide
2. What you might know instead

Reviewer Greg Smith here dissects a book aimed at programmers who want to add Perl to their stable of languages, but also useful to the Perl connoisseur. If your interest in Perl is more than casual -- especially if you're seeking practical code examples more substantial then in more introductory texts -- The Perl Black Book may be for you. (Read more.)

The Perl Black Book author Steven Holzner pages 1283 publisher Coriolis rating 7/10 reviewer Greg Smith ISBN 1-57610-465-6 summary Perl introduction and reference guide with lots of example code, targeted at those already familiar with another programming language.

The Scenario You already know C or BASIC or some other programming language, but there's some work you need to finish that none of these languages are the right tool for. Perhaps you want to create CGI programs. The Perl Black Book is an excellent choice to fill that need. It's a non-nonsense title that's focused on working example code in a form that will be familiar to those stepping from another programming language into Perl. What's Bad While the book is large, the scope of material it attempts to cover is considerably larger. Coriolis labels the book as intended for intermediate to advanced materials, and there's a minimum of introduction to general programming concepts. Non-programmers trying to learn Perl as their first language would be better served starting with a more introductory title and coming back to this book later. And while there are examples of things like object-oriented Perl and CGI, none of that material goes deep enough to really satisfy a serious student of those topics.

The most annoying thing about this Coriolis release is the introduction to most sections. Holzner spins these little stories about a Novice Programmer, his Big Boss, a Programming Correctness Czar, and other random characters to suggest why you'd need to know about a topic. I question the necessity of these motivational interludes, as they take up space, waste my time reading them, and offer very little in return. The kind of person I'd expect to be reading this book doesn't need a little story suggesting why you'd want to be able to format text when you print it; that this is a useful thing to learn is pretty obvious.

What's Good The Perl Black Book does an excellent job with the kinds of things intermediate programmers in the language are interested in. It's become the first place I turn to when looking for a snippet of Perl code to incorporate into a project. An example of why I like this book should illustrate why that is. I recently found myself writing a program that needed to ping a host and take some corrective action if that ping was unsuccessful. I would expect this is a straightforward request, and looked up "ping" in the index of O'Reilly's Programming Perl. This led to an example using the pingecho library call, which I typed in and found utterly unsuccessful at the task I was trying to accomplish. Looking up the same topic in the Perl Black Book, I found a section about twice as large on the subject. Holzner's example program worked just as I was expecting, and I went back to the rest of the application design without needing to focus for very long on the implementation details of this small piece. I've never liked the code in Programming Perl because the samples are all so terse. The Perl Black Book does a much better job in my view of providing programs long enough to demonstrate the appropriate Perl syntax for filling common needs. So What's In It For Me? Since so much Perl programming is done in the context of a CGI script, many chapters of this book are devoted to that topic. The majority of the material revolves around using Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm library. Much of this mimics Stein's own book, Official Guide to Programming with CGI.pm, but instead of the reference-guide approach, there's more of an emphasis on practical solutions for regularly recurring requests. Example code shows how to create Web counters, guest books, e-mailers, chat, shopping carts and other popular items. A single chapter also introduces usage of the older cgi-lib.pl to create basic HTML pages, but the main focus is definitely CGI.pm, using all of its abstraction. While the CGI section is substantial, considerably more so than the average Perl programming book, there are a number of areas that will need supplementation before you'd want to create a production system. The discussion of the taint mechanism for security is a bit weak, and the basic information about cookies and hidden fields doesn't really give an impression of how to build a larger-scale Web application and properly save state along the way. That is, to be fair, outside of what I'd expect a Perl book cover, and it's only because most of the other material so is helpful that these weaker areas stick out.

The Perl Black Book provides plenty of the kind of examples I'm looking for when writing a Perl program, and it's large and comprehensive enough to cover most areas in sufficient depth. The real question is whether it meshes well with your approach to the language. Holzner is obviously aiming this title at someone who is learning Perl as their second, third, or nth programming language. The samples avoid relying on Perl-specific idioms in most cases. Personally, I find this approach refreshing, as programs I write in Perl frequently end up getting ported to another language later, or co-opted by another programmer who isn't as familiar with the language. So for me, writing Perl that embraces too heavily Perl's language specific features leads to portability and maintenance problems later. For example, when I read through Randal Schwartz's Learning Perl, by page 11 he's already using regular expressions to match strings. I find myself wanting to use a more traditional substring/comparison operation in that context instead, because I know that code will port to any other language easily, and any competent programmer will understand what I'm doing regardless of their familiarity with Perl. Holzner understands that mindset, and writes his prose and programs accordingly; witness the following tip from P291:

"The line ++@_[0]; is a cute example of why nonprogrammers think Perl is obscure. Try showing that line to your grandmother and explaining that you write stuff like that for a living."

If you look at the example above and think that's a nice way to use Perl, by all means stick to the traditional books on the topic from Schwartz, Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen. But if you think that line is unnecessarily cryptic, I think you'll be impressed with how little material like that is inside Holzner's Perl Black Book. It doesn't try to embrace "The Perl Way," but it is a quite useful resource when you're on a short deadline to deliver a working program and don't have time to absorb too much of the language to do it. I'm buying a second copy for the office this week because mine keeps walking away, and there's no greater recommendation for a computer title than noting that copies of the book disappear regularly.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. Essential Perl
2. Scalar Variables and Lists
3. Arrays and Hashes
4. Operators and Precedence
5. Conditional Statements and Loops
6. Regular Expressions
7. Subroutines
8. Formats and String Handling
9. References
10. Predefined Variables
11. Built-In Functions: Data Processing
12. Built-In Functions: I/O
13. Built-In Functions: File Handling
14. Built-In Functions: Interprocess Communication
15. Standard Modules
16. Perl/Tk--Windows, Buttons, and More
17. Data Structures and Databases
18. Debugging and Style Guide
19. Creating Packages and Modules
20. Creating Classes and Objects
21. Object-Oriented Programming
22. Internet and Socket Programming
23. CGI Programming: CGI.pm
24. CGI Programming With Other Popular Package
25. CGI: Creating Web Counters, Guest Books, Emailers, and Secure Scripts
26. CGI: Creating Multiuser Chat, Server Push, Cookies, and Games
27. CGI: Creating Shopping Carts, Databases, Site Searches, and File Uploads
28. Handling the Web in Code

chromatic returns with a book tuned for anyone whose answer to heterogeneous networks is SAMBA, and wants 500 pages of practical advice (and answers to common problems) distilled from the fountain of SAMBA knowlege.

Samba Administrator's Handbook author Ed Booksbank, George Haberberger, Lisa Doyle pages 518 publisher M&T Books rating 7.5 reviewer chromatic ISBN 0-7645-4636-8 summary Know the theory? Here's the nuts and bolts of administrating a heterogenous network with Samba.

The Scoop Imagine you're the administrator for a diverse network. A couple of engineers have Unix boxes, while some programmers work on NT machines. Managers have Windows laptops, and you've talked them into letting you install Samba domain and print servers. You've read the documentation and understand how it works. Now what?

That's the scenario Samba Administrator's Handbook wants to address. Designed for the busy administrator who needs quick answers in a convenient package, it takes the pragmatic approach, and gets most things right. Need to set up a print queue on Solaris? Turn to the detailed table of contents to find a complete walkthrough. It's not the kind of book you'd sit down and read from cover to cover (Trust me on this), but at least you'll know what kinds of things pop up more than once in smb.conf.

What's to Like? Samba is designed to work with a variety of operating systems and platforms, and the authors cover quite a few: Solaris, RedHat and Caldera Linux distributions, and Free and Net BSD. These are good choices, because they represent a cross section of Unix land. Clients include the Windows family, as well as DOS and Unix (where applicable). Also included are task options (different utilities or command line switches). For example, the Samba installation section describes compilation, package selection during installation, and RPM installs. Samaba's rapid development receives due mention, with advanced users pointed to anonymous CVS and the excellent mailing lists.

SWAT receives the best coverage, reinforcing the notion that this book is meant to be used by administrators who don't have the luxury of looking up many pages on the server (or those who prefer to read printed versions). Additional configuration resources are also covered. These include SMBEdit, webmin and Linuxconf.

The handbook covers client-side issues very thoroughly, including a detailed section on troubleshooting under various operating systems. (The breadth of coverage surprised me, as there were commands I did not know even existed.) Also, the Best Practices chapter takes a server-level approach, with sections on backups and security.

What's to Consider? My one large gripe may only bother a few readers: The editing really seems half-hearted. This is annoying, as the layout is inconsistent in places and numerous typos mar the text. I did not notice any factual errors resulting from this, however.

Occasionally, options are mentioned but not explained. Most of the time, these are the smb.conf options included for debugging purposes, deprecated in newer versions, or options which should never be changed. Some additional information would be interesting, if not immediately useful. Likewise, the benchmarking chapter suffers from a skimpy treatment, mentioning tools but not what to do with them.

In some spots, more information than necessary is presented. For example, the generous SWAT chapter repeats some information verbatim, as certain sections of the smb.conf file take similar options. Erring on the side of caution fits the organizational goal, though reprinting tar man pages may be a bit extreme.

The SummaryShort on theory but long on facts, until you have your smb.conf memorized and can keep six different versions of the same command straight in your head, you can find quick and correct information here.

Buy this book at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. Installation and Basic Configuration
2. 1. Server Installation
   2. Client Installation
   3. Basic Configuration Using SWAT
   4. Basic Operating System Configuration
   5. Other GUI Configuration Tools
3. Advanced Configuration
4. 1. Naming Services
   2. Best Practices, Browsing, and Domains
   3. Performance Tuning
5. Troubleshooting
6. 1. Basic Network Connectivity
   2. Testing the Samba Configuration
   3. Accessing Samba
   4. Using Net Commands to Diagnose Problems
7. Appendices
8. 1. Error Codes
   2. GNU General Public License
   3. Online Resources

Pike writes: "Amateur cryptographers may wish to get out their pens, calculators and scratch paper to take a shot at this short encryption challenge. Solve it, get a $25 gift certificate from thinkgeek. It's pretty hard though, so good luck." But since this isn't wartime, there is at least the stub of the plaintext to check against.

How would you dip your feet in the water, learning enough to start dabbling with kernel development? Scott Maxwell might end up as the guide for a fresh batch of aspiring programmers, with his Linux Core Kernel Commentary. Starting with a lesson on the history and philosophy behind free software, you can learn enough to start contributing on your own.

Linux Core Kernel Commentary author Scott Maxwell pages 575 publisher Coriolis Open Press rating 9 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1576104699 summary In the spirit of Lions' Commentary on Unix, Scott Maxwell takes readers on a tour of the basic architecture and workings of the Linux kernel. The massive tome has nearly 40,000 lines of code from the x86/arch branches of the Linux kernel. That works out to two columns on each of over 400 pages. It's mostly free of annotations, except for small arrows referring to the commentary on that section. The commentary takes up the rest, at three columns per page. The architecture dependent functions target x86 code, and the core features (memory management, processes, scheduling, signals and threads, procfs) are covered.

What's to Like? Most interesting for me was the "a-ha!" factor. The normal chapter flow describes the subsection in general terms (memory management is designed to do such and such, with these issues), moves to the important data structure, and then walks through the vital functions for that section, stopping here and there to explain peculiarities and subtleties of the code. There's rough going in a few spots, but there are occasional moments of insight where the solutions come in to clear focus. (This happened most often for me in the SMP chapter, as the discussion of locks is particularly good.)

Maxwell manages to avoid unexplained jargon for the most part, though he invents names for implied kernel idioms. Even while dealing with highly specific topics, readers won't need a background in OS design to understand the text. Good C skills will help, as well as assembly, though the latter is explained in greater detail than the former.

The author also takes pains to point out flaws and possible optimizations in the kernel, though he often concludes that the route taken is the best for various reasons. Another theme is the tradeoffs necessary between speed, clarity, compatibility and portability. Finally, as kernel 2.4 will be out shortly, Appendix B discusses the modifications in the 2.3 tree as it went to press.

What's to Consider? As space is limited, Maxwell sometimes skips some interesting details -- especially in latter chapters. Unfortunately, phrases like "There's not room to cover this" or "that is out of the scope of this book" pop up now and then. I definitely wanted more.

Two other small nitpicks may be corrected in a future version. First, it would have been nice if the current filename was listed on each page of the source code listing, just for reference. Second, flipping back and forth between commentary and code was tricky, especially in a book of this size. Perhaps splitting things into two books would help? Serious students might find it easier to browse the code from the CD-ROM, which includes the code for kernel versions 0.01, 2.2.5, 2.2.10, 2.3.12, and the entire code of the first section, numbered as it appears.

The Summary This could serve as a textbook in an OS design class. Supplemental material will be necessary (file systems not covered for example, nor are drivers). Perhaps paired with a more theoretical text, it could form the basis of an intermediate computer science class.

The utility is not limited to students, though. Anyone wondering where to start understanding the Linux kernel would do well to consider this book.

Buy this book at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. Linux Core Kernel Code
2. Linux Core Kernel Commentary
3. 1. Introduction to Linux
   2. A First Look at the Code
   3. Kernel Architecture Overview
   4. System Initialization
   5. System Calls
   6. Signals, Interrupts, and Time
   7. Processes and Threads
   8. Memory
   9. System V IPC
   10. Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP)
   11. Tunable Kernel Parameters
4. Appendices
5. 1. Linux 2.4
   2. GNU General Public License

Jakob Nielsen is no Web-designer-come-lately. He's a respected, thoughful researcher and educator. When he speaks, (smart) people listen. The first review below is one of more than five hundred by reviewer Danny Yee. Likely to interest Slashdotters are reviews in the categories popular science, science fiction, and computing. Our second reviewer is Cliff Lampe, who brings his own expertise in human-computer relationships to the table. Readers may also want to read the Slashdot interview with Nielsen.

Designing Web Useability (The Practice Of Simplicity) author Jakob Nielsen pages 417 publisher New Riders 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Danny Yee, Cliff Lampe ISBN ISBN 1-56205-810-X summary Down-to-earth, practical advice on making Web sites work at all levels.

Review One: Danny Yee

Designing Web Usability is the most important book on Web publishing yet to appear. While it contains little that is novel, at least to those who have read Nielsen's www.useit.com Web site and other such resources, the lessons it teaches have not reached widely enough: there are all too many Web sites that are a continual source of frustration and stress to users. (Nielsen begins by explaining why he chose to write a printed book on Web design: for comprehensive, sustained arguments online reading is not yet as effective as print. Another consideration is that, going by the utter un-usability of so many corporate Web sites, there must be many web site managers who don't actually use the Web: some of these might read a printed volume.)

At the core of Designing Web Usability, and two thirds of it by page-count, are chapters on page, content, and site design. The first covers cross-platform design, the importance of minimizing response times, how to use links effectively, and the advantages and disadvantages of style-sheets and frames. The second covers writing for the Web, micro-content (titles, headlines and so forth), and multimedia content (images, animation, audio, and video). The last covers navigation, home pages ("splash screens must die"), search support, and "URL design." Other chapters cover special usability issues with intranets, accessibility for users with disabilities, and internationalization and localization; in a final chapter Nielsen takes a stab at predicting the future of the Web.

Because Designing Web Usability addresses underlying ideas rather than specific technologies, it will date far less rapidly than most books on Web publishing. It doesn't contain as much as its 400 pages would suggest, since a lot of space is used for screen shots of example Web pages. (These are not, however, gratuitous, as is often the case with books on HTML.) Web publishing is very different from paper publishing, but Designing Web Usability is a high quality, usable book -- only a few minor things got past the proof-readers. Check Danny's Other 500 Reviews

Review Two: Cliff Lampe

The Scenario

In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen codifies his ideas and wisdom on user-centered design. This is the first book in a two-parter, to be followed by Ensuring Web Usability, which will be more analysis centered.When I first was reading through this book, the irony of reviewing a usability book for Slashdot absolutely thrilled me. A common complaint about Linux, whether deserved or not, is that it is completely unusable. Except for a few shots at both the Windows and Mac OS, Nielsen obviously stays away from this topic. On the other hand, his advice on Web design is well researched, sensible, and right on target. Since human/computer interaction is what may be referred to as my "bag," I found this book impressively concise and comprehensive.

For those who may have missed the usability boat, Nielsen advocates user-centered design. This is the radical idea that a computer is a tool for managing information, not an end in itself. As many of us know, this concept is remarkably easy to lose in the rush to make everything work in the first place. When it comes to usability, everyone has their ideas about what they like, and tend to include them in their own designs. The problem is, we creators of Web sites may be too far removed from our users by experience or some other perspective to be designing in their best interest.

Eminently practical, Nielsen gives step-by-step advice on how to design with your user in mind. His examples are backed by screenshot examples and extensive user studies. The first section deals with page-level design, with advice on colors, layout and use of special features. Further sections of the book deal with site and intranet design, usability issues surrounding various disabilities and the future of Web design. One especially welcome chapter deals with actual creation of content in a Web environment. Writing for the Web is vastly different from writing for other media, like newspapers or magazines, but this is rarely recognized.

Once Nielsen has dispensed with the advice that is applicable to the Web environment we all deal with today, he spends the last section discussing the future. As the author says, we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technological change and underestimate the long term effects. Keeping this in mind, Nielsen makes some stabs at predictions of his own (like the gradual erosion of the Post Office) that seem accurate and eerie at the same time. He makes the good point that most of the user interfaces we deal with today are descendents of the 1984 Mac. That's like using your little aquarium net to snare salmon. With the eventual dissolution of Web browsers will come a need for user interfaces that more capably deal with a glut of information.

I have some advice for reading this book. Treat it like a computer manual, and don't necessarily read it from cover to cover. Read the section on content design for sure, but depending on your familiarity with human/computer interaction principles, you may want to poke around a little more. Fortunately, and in typical Nielsen fashion, the book is laid out perfectly to make this kind of browsing convenient. That being said, if you do read straight though it, you won't be disappointed.

What's Bad?

There are a couple of concerns I had with the book. One is that the layout is wacky, though I understand this is more the fault of the publisher than Nielsen. There is a straight narrative, like in any other manual, but it is broken frequently by screenshots and pull-out comments that attract attention away from the main narrative. The integration is good enough that you can pick up where you left off easily enough, but a tighter bundling of content with the visuals would have been welcome.

Secondly, the last chapter should have had some content stolen for the preface. Many of the limitations mentioned by Nielsen immediately beg the question of higher bandwidth on the horizon or more powerful computers. The book is so practical I almost found myself playing devil's advocate in response. At the same time, the advice is so well backed up by research, that to rail against it feels a little bit like yelling at your mom for telling you vegetables are good for you.

What's Good?

This book is so efficiently packed with tons of great advice that I read some sections again and again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Nielsen does not waste time over-elaborating his points, which is a welcome change from most books of this sort. The data from actual user studies are important to prove to a skeptical web developer that these considerations are real, and the actual examples of the Web pages and sites give incredible insight to the point being made. One of the pages captured even has a Jon Katz article on it.

So What's In It For Me?

If you are responsible for developing Web sites, or just a duffer who makes his greeting card collection available on the Web, read this book. The advice is sound, researched and proven over and over. If you are a usability engineer, this book may be on the general side for you, but otherwise it is the best introduction to these concepts assembled in one place that I have even seen.

As I was reading through this book, I kept thinking of various pages and sites that I had designed. What would be said if one of those pages had been captured and displayed? Would it be an example of what to do, or what only an idiot would do? These are good questions for any of us.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

chromatic, lord of many reviews, has come up with a review of MySQL, from the folks at New Riders. Author Paul DuBois has gone beyond the technically comprehensive MySQL documentation to produce an informative and entertaining compendium of MySQL knowledge. Requiring little prior experience ("What is a database and why should I care?"), he explains general SQL and RDBMSs, as well as the peculiarities of MySQL. MySQL author Paul DuBois pages 756 publisher New Riders rating 8.5 reviewer chromatic ISBN 07357-0921-1 summary There's something for everyone -- user, developer, administrator -- in Paul DuBois' excellent MySQL book.

The Scoop Paul DuBois has gone beyond the technically comprehensive MySQL documentation to produce an informative and entertaining compendium of MySQL knowledge. Requiring little prior experience ("What is a database and why should I care?"), he explains general SQL and RDBMSs as well as the peculiarities of MySQL. What's to Like? The prose is clear and readable. At the start, DuBois walks the reader through designing two very different database projects. After the first chapter, a normal user will be proficient at manipulating the client and issuing basic commands -- even designing her own tables. From there, the rest of the MySQL world opens up as more detail emerges. The sections on optimizing queries and table indexes will prove particularly valuable as the database grows from a hobby into a valuable project of its own.

Almost anyone working with MySQL will find appropriate information, no matter his approach. While the standard client receives ample attention, Perl and PHP Web interfaces are developed and explained in later chapters. After explaining the general ideas of the particular interface, DuBois walks through the design and evolution of programs to fill specific tasks. These programs start with basic functionality and gradually add more features until the original goal is met.

Though the book explicitly covers stable version 3.22 and development version 3.23, features introduced in newer versions are marked and features on the roadmap are mentioned. Deprecated functions and replacements are labeled, too. As well, the section on "missing features" is useful, giving suggested workarounds, when present. (Examples include subselects and transactions.) ANSI SQL receives plenty of attention -- even where the MySQL implementation strays. It's an honest approach.

DB administrators aren't left out -- a full section is dedicated to their own issues. Security and permissions receive due treatment, as does performance tuning. The section on maintenance and database relocation was particularly interesting. There's even a treatise on the structure of the database files (notable for the differences between the ISAM and MyISAM formats).

Finally, the included appendices are well-selected. Weighing in at slightly less than a third of the pages, this tome will not have time to gather dust on my bookshelf. Most pertain to programmers, but having a physical guide to the built-in MySQL functions has a certain appeal.

What's to Consider? While filed with useful information and clear examples, the Perl chapter had a distinctive C flavor to it. As the corresponding C chapter assumes familiarity with that language and the PHP discussion starts with an introduction to PHP, the author assumedly addresses potential MySQL programmers in three categories: C programmers, Perl dabblers, and PHP initiates. While this likely reflects the makeup of his intended audience, it may also prove distracting to more experienced users. (Suggestion for these folks: read the example code and skip to the API appendix.)

A minor nitpick is the binding and cover of the book. My review copy managed to attract lots of dirt on the nice cover, and it developed a serious crack in the spine, in the middle of the Perl DBI chapter. Some of the affected pages are coming loose, after moderate usage. Hopefully this is just a defect in my copy.

Be aware that much of the example prose has a touch of free-Unix to it. Nearly all options will work on the Windows platform, but users unaccustomed to extended command line forays may feel uncomfortable. (Since this also applies to the database, it's barely worth mentioning.)

The Summary MySQL is an excellent book, with a good balance of database introduction, believably practical examples, and technical information. Want to program, set up, or administer a MySQL system? You won't go wrong here.

Purchase the book at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. General MySQL Use
2. 1. Introduction to MySQL and SQL
   2. Working with Data in MySQL
   3. MySQL SQL Syntax and Use
   4. Query Optimization
3. Using MySQL Programming Interfaces
4. 1. Introduction to MySQL Programming
   2. The MySQL C API
   3. The Perl DBI API
   4. The PHP API
5. MySQL Administration
6. 1. Introduction to MySQL Administration
   2. The MySQL Data Directory
   3. General MySQL Administration
   4. Security
   5. Database Maintenance and Repair
7. Appendixes
8. 1. Obtaining and Installing Software
   2. Column Type Reference
   3. Operator and Function Reference
   4. SQL Syntax Reference
   5. MySQL Program Reference
   6. C API Reference
   7. Perl DBI API Reference
   8. PHP API Reference
   9. Useful Third-Party Tools
   10. Internet Service Providers

A little blatant self promotion today:Jon Katz has completed co-authoring, along with many Slashdot readers, a paperback version of Voices from the Hellmouth. The book is based on both the Slashdot reader comments and Katz's original columns Voices from the Hellmouth, More stories from the Hellmouth and The Price of Being Different which were written last year following Columbine. It is $14.95 (and comes complete with a cover designed by my girlfriend). The proceeds are being donated to an as-yet-undetermined charity.Update: 04/20 06:40 by H :I've addressed issues of comment posting below - please read more.

Yes, comments from Slashdot are used. They are short, terse quotes that provide in /no/ way indentification. That would cross privacy boundaries I'm not wiling to cross. We choose to use them to try and express to the rest of the world who will read this book the sort of things that happen to real people.

I tried to contact some of the commenters originally, but ran into dismal success. As well, many people were posting anonymously. Obviously, they were impossible to reach.

So - summary: Yes, comments were used. They were posted in a public forum, which means that anyone can quote from them - but we've removed any sort of identifying marks, to protect people. This was down to impress upon those reading the gravity of the situation.

A little blatant self promotion today:Jon Katz has completed co-authoring, along with many Slashdot readers, a paperback version of Voices from the Hellmouth. The book is based on both the Slashdot reader comments and Katz's original columns Voices from the Hellmouth, More stories from the Hellmouth and The Price of Being Different which were written last year following Columbine. It is $14.95 (and comes complete with a cover designed by my girlfriend). The proceeds are being donated to an as-yet-undetermined charity.Update: 04/20 06:40 by H :I've addressed issues of comment posting below - please read more.

Yes, comments from Slashdot are used. They are short, terse quotes that provide in /no/ way indentification. That would cross privacy boundaries I'm not wiling to cross. We choose to use them to try and express to the rest of the world who will read this book the sort of things that happen to real people.

I tried to contact some of the commenters originally, but ran into dismal success. As well, many people were posting anonymously. Obviously, they were impossible to reach.

So - summary: Yes, comments were used. They were posted in a public forum, which means that anyone can quote from them - but we've removed any sort of identifying marks, to protect people. This was down to impress upon those reading the gravity of the situation.

randombit has sent us a review of William Stallings' Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice, 2nd ed. The book is a history of cartoons' effects on American children. Er ... rather, the book looks at applications of cryptography and in networking today. If you've read it or have comments, please add to the discussion below. Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice, 2nd author William Stallings pages 569 publisher Prentice Hall, 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer randombit ISBN 0-13-869017-0 summary Cryptography and Network Security examines the practical applications of cryptography in today's networked systems The Scenario

So, after reading Applied Cryptography and the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, you want to see some real systems at work. Enough with this academic stuff, you say. Cryptography and Network Security may be just the book for you. It covers Kerberos, X.509, PGP, S/MIME, IPSec, SSL/TLS, and SET, in much greater detail than you will find in books such as Applied Cryptography. This is a book for "real world" crypto. Even if this would be your first book on cryptography, Stallings provides most of the background you need to understand what's going on.

What's Bad?

There are a few rather annoying omissions in the book's coverage, including no mention of Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP), which is used in many of the most important new cryptography standards, and only passing references to IEEE P1363, a very important proposed standard which has already produced copious industry and academic support.

Part 4 was less interesting, and also did not seem to delve as deeply into its topics as earlier chapters did.

What's Good?

Almost everything. Stallings' writing style makes for reasonably easy reading, though those without a good background in math and programming may have problems in the denser areas.

While the focus is on practical applications, the author gives you all the information you need. Instead of covering a large number of algorithms (most of which are never used in real applications) in a very brief manner like Applied Cryptography, Stallings examines in detail a small number of popular and commonly used algorithms, including IDEA, RC5, CAST-128, and Blowfish, and devotes a full chapter for DES. Public-key encryption is not ignored either, with coverage of RSA, Diffie-Hellman, DSA, and Elliptic Curve Cryptography.

But the really good stuff is in the second half of the book. Want a clear and thorough description of the IPSec protocols? Flip to chapter 13 and read away! Not to leave you hanging if you haven't been keeping up with the latest RFCs (for shame!), he also describes both the IPv4 and IPv6 packet formats. Similarly, in the section on S/MIME, before jumping straight into the cryptographic aspects, he helpfully first describes what MIME does, why it was invented, and how it works.

Handily enough, the book also makes a good introductory textbook. The explanations are clear, and little background is assumed. Also, there are problems at the end of each chapter which cover practical applications of and attacks on cryptographic systems.

So What's In It For Me?

If you want a good introduction to practical cryptography, get this book. It supplements the more theoretical focus of other popular books in the area, while still being fairly complete.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction

• Attacks, Services, and Mechanisms
• Security Attacks
• Security Services
• A Model for Internetwork Security
• Outline of this Book
• Recommended Reading

Part 1: Conventional Encryption

Chapter 2: Classical Techniques

• Conventional Encryption Model
• Steganography
• Classical Encryption Techniques

Chapter 3: Modern Techniques

• Simplified DES
• Block Cipher Principles
• The Data Encryption Standard
• The Strength of DES
• Differential and Linear Cryptanalysis
• Block Cipher Design Principles
• Block Cipher Modes of Operation
• Appendix: Bent Functions

Chapter 4: Algorithms

• Triple DES
• IDEA
• Blowfish
• RC5
• CAST-128
• RC2
• Characteristics of Advanced Symmetric Block Ciphers

Chapter 5: Confidentiality Using Conventional Encryption

• Placement of Encryption Function
• Traffic Confidentiality
• Key Distribution
• Random Number Generation

Part 2: Public-Key Encryption and Hash Functions

Chapter 6: Public-Key Cryptography

• Principles of Public-Key Cryptosystems
• The RSA Algorithm
• Key Management
• Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange
• Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Chapter 7: Introduction to Number Theory

• Prime and Relatively Prime Numbers
• Modular Arithmetic
• Fermat's and Euler's Theorems
• Testing for Primality
• Euclid's Algorithm
• The Chinese Remainder Theorem
• Discrete Logarithms

Chapter 8: Message Authentication and Hash Functions

• Authentication Requirements
• Authentication Functions
• Message Authentication Functions
• Hash Functions
• Security of Hash Functions and MACs
• Appendix: Mathematical Basis of the Birthday Attack

Chapter 9: Hash and MAC algorithms

• MD5
• SHA-1
• RIPEMD-160
• HMAC

Chapter 10: Digital Signatures and Authentication Protocols

• Digital Signatures
• Authentication Protocols
• Digital Signature Standard
• Appendix: Proof of the DSS Algorithm

Part 3: Network Security Practice

Chapter 11: Authentication Applications

• Kerberos
• X.509 Directory Authentication Service
• Appendix: Kerberos Encryption Techniques

Chapter 12: Electronic Mail Security

• Pretty Good Privacy
• S/MIME
• Appendix: Data Compression Using ZIP
• Appendix: Radix-64 Conversion
• Appendix: PGP Random Number Generation

Chapter 13: IP Security

• IP Security Overview
• IP Security Architecture
• Authentication Header
• Encapsulating Security Payload
• Combining Security Associations
• Key Management
• Appendix: Internetworking and Internet Protocols

Chapter 14: Web Security

• Web Security Requirements
• Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security
• Secure Electronic Transaction

Part 4: System Security

Chapter 15: Intruders, Viruses, and Worms

• Intruders
• Viruses and Related Threats

Chapter 16: Firewalls

• Firewall Design Principles
• Trusted Systems

Appendix A: Projects for Teaching Cryptography and Network Security

• Research Projects
• Programming Projects
• Reading/Report Assignments

Ellen Knowlton Wilson brings us this review of a book which has succeeded in presenting one of the important concepts of modern life -- cryptography -- by grounding it in its historical roots as well as its modern applications, including ones not yet implemented. (Read more.)

The Code Book: the Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Sco author Simon Singh pages 402 publisher Doubleday rating 8/10 reviewer Ellen Knowlton Wilson ISBN 0-385-49531-5 summary Singh chronicles the development of codes and ciphers as well as their roles in human events, and discusses the relevance of cryptography in the modern age.

In The Code Book: the Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography, Simon Singh begins with the courtroom drama of the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, and ends discussing current debate over the export of strong cryptography tools. In between, he touches on the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, buried treasure, the Enigma machine, Navajo code-talkers and quantum money, in a manner accessible to laypeople.

Singh approaches the story of cryptography from the perspective of both scientist and science writer. He received his doctorate in physics from Cambridge and produced a documentary about Fermat's Last Theorem which aired on both the BBC and PBS. He is also the author of Fermat's Enigma, which tells the story of Fermat's Last Theorem. Singh's background has prepared him well for this subject; he has the scientist's eye for detail and the writer's ability to communicate concepts in a non-patronizing manner. "Turning to purists," he writes in the introduction, "I should apologise for the title of this book. The Code Book is about more than just codes... Ciphers play an integral role in cryptography, and so this book should really have been called The Code and Cipher Book. I have, however, forsaken accuracy for snappiness."

Indeed, this book is not intended for the diehard cryptography buff, but rather for the general reader. Should the reader become captivated by the subject, Singh has included a section of suggested further readings. The book also contains a contest for $15,000 -- The Cipher Challenge (http://www.4thestate.co.uk/cipherchallenge).

Singh states in his introduction that the objectives of this book as twofold: first, to chart the evolution of codes and chronicle their impact on history; and second, to demonstrate the importance of cryptography in the modern age. Singh clearly succeeds with his first objective, but I found the case for the second to be slightly weaker.

The types of codes and ciphers are illustrated with stories of historical intrigue, such as the treason trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was executed when the cipher alphabet and code words used by her co-conspirators was cracked, revealing her involvement in a plot unfamiliar to most modern readers. The development of frequency analysis and polyalphabetic substitution ciphers is interwoven with the story of the buried treasure in the American west. The mechanization of codes and ciphers is covered in the sections about the first and second World Wars, and the relation of language and cryptography is illustrated by the use of Navajo code-talkers during the Pacific campaign of World War II. Concepts of cryptography are presented in an accessible and enjoyable manner throughout the book, although readers already familiar with the subject may not gain any new knowledge.

The final three chapters of the book cover public-key encryption and quantum cryptography. I found the explanation of the concepts behind PGP to be clear, and was fascinated by the brief explanation of the legal struggles surrounding encryption. Singh makes some good points about the importance of privacy in the current age, but does not delve too far into the subject. Admittedly, the question of information ownership is such a large one that it merits its own book. The final chapter covers quantum cryptography, which is illustrated by the idea of quantum money. Quantum money would contain polarized photons, known only to the bank, rendering counterfeiting impossible. While still purely theoretical, the idea is fascinating, and indicates the changes sure to evolve as technology changes.

Summary:

The Code Book is an enjoyable and readable introduction to codes and ciphers for the layperson. Examples of the principles of cryptography are illustrated with examples from history, showcasing their importance of the history, and Singh attempts to make the case for the increasing importance of privacy as technology develops.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Table of contents:

• Introduction
  1. The Cipher of Mary Queen of Scots
  2. Le Chiffre Indchiffrable
  3. The Mechanism of Secrecy
  4. Cracking the Enigma
  5. The Language Barrier
  6. Alice and Bob Go Public
  7. Pretty Good Privacy
  8. A Quantum Leap into the Future
• The Cipher Challenge
• Appendices
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Further Reading
• Picture Credits
• Index

Thanks to Crag Pfeifer for sending a review of James Gleick's Faster. If you've ever felt like life's moving faster then ever, this is worth reading. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything author James Gleick pages 324 publisher Pantheon, 1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Craig Pfeifer (cpfeifer@acm.org,http://www.cpfeifer.org ISBN 0679408371 summary An observation of some of the causes, symptoms and results of living in an accelerated age.Rating: (8/10)

The Scenario Ever feel that the pace of life today is much faster than 10 or 20 years ago? You're not alone. James Gleick offers us 37 insightful observations of the causes, symptoms and results of living in an accelerated age. Interestingly enough, this book is the victim of the condition it describes: out of the 37 chapters, not one of them is more than 12 pages long (7.36 pages on average).

If you are looking for high theory about the effects of technology on society and culture, shoot for Marshall McLuhan. If you're wondering who flipped the switch 20 years ago to push western society into overdrive, read on.

What's Bad? Absolutely nothing. The anecdotes hit their mark each time. But don't expect a precise scientific examination of the psycho/sociological effects of technology. Faster is a well-grounded reflection on the current state of society with references to relevant articles and interviews. These reflections do tend to wander slightly off course. For example, you probably didn't expect to receive a history of the major advances in modern elevator technology, in the middle of an explanation of the origin of the 'close door' button. What's Good? Gleick's perspective has the clarity of someone looking in the window of the western world, and the intimacy of a fellow participant. Gleick has a gift for expressing technical subjects with such sensitivity, passion and understanding that the topics and people come alive on the page. This is evident in Gleick's other works, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman most notably. Also, a wonderful bibliography is provided for further reading.

Summary of Selected Chapters: Pacemaker "Humanity is now a species with one watch and this is it," explains Gleick on his trip to the National Directorate of Time at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington, DC. In the first chapter, Gleick takes us on a visit to the global metronome that measures time in units so small they pass before you notice they existed. Here devices track the frequencies of atoms and engage 50 other devices around the world in the same conversation millions of times a day: what time is it? We know that a day is 24 hours, 1440 minutes, 86,400 seconds, but the length of a year changes. To account for the subtle wobble of the earth's axis and gradually slowing spin rate, they add a "leap" second whenever it is neccessary to keep everthing in synch. As time goes on, we will have to add this second more and more often.

The second half of this chapter is an overview of the 36 upcoming vignettes: Technology enables us to process more information than ever before, but it also allows us to produce more information than ever before. "500 channels" at the click of a button on a remote control, 30 different coffees at the corner coffee franchise. "What is true that we are awash in things, information, in news, in the old rubble and shiny new toys of our complex civilization, and -- strange, perhaps -- stuff means speed."

How Many Hours Do You Work? Juliet Schor calculated that the average American employee spends a full extra month working today compared with similar employees in the 1970's. Based on this, Gleick examines where all of this time went. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, payroll records show a stedy decling in weekly hours over the past four decades. But the research is inconclusive: some studies show that we're working more than ever, others show that working hours actually have decreased steadily since the 1950's. This could be due to the fact that the traditional definition of "work time" is changing. Today more people "work from home," spend more time outside of the office thinking about work, spend more time commuting, and take less vacation time than 20 years ago. Why? Gleick posits that time has become a "negative status symbol." If you have "spare time", you must not be very important. How about lunch next week? Let me check my Palm Pilot/Franklin Planner/leather-bound officious looking object that projects to everyone around me that I'm a very busy person... This week is bad, how about in two weeks? "Overwork equals importance." says Gleick. Attention Multitaskers! This chapter (weighing in at a terse 5.5 pages) hits very close to home. One of the biggest contributors to the speed up of life in the western world: multitasking. The simultaneous execution of unrelated activities (flossing and catching up on email) makes us feel more efficient that we shave seconds off of our daily routine, and ensures that we never have to sit idle. New devices have encouraged this habit: cell phones, so we can have meaningful conversations wherever we are, the remote control so we can watch 3 programs all at once, and the ultimate multitasking tool, the computer. Gleick tells us about a Bloomberg employee who is engaged in a phone conversation to a colleague in New York, and simultaneously exchanging e-mail volleys with another colleague in Connecticut. Multitasking is another way we try to do more with our vanishing time, and make sure that every second of our attention is fully utilized. So What's In It For Me? The insights are painfully true, and hit home on multiple levels. The French novelist Stendahl said "a novel is a mirror walking down a road." And that is exactly what purpose this books serves; it is a reflection of the collective choices we have made as a society over the past 20 years, for better or worse. Faster doesn't pass judgement about whether the acceleration that has taken place over the past 20 years is a "good thing" or a "bad thing," it simply points them out and presents the context which allowed them to happen.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. Pacemaker
2. Life as Type A
3. The Door Close Button
4. Your Other Face
5. Time Goes Standard
6. The New Accelerators
7. Seeing in Slow Motion
8. In Real Time
9. Lost in Time
10. On Internet Time
11. Quick -- Your Opinion?
12. Decomposition takes time
13. On Your Mark, Get Set, Think
14. A Millisecond Here, a Milisecond There
15. 1,440 Minutes a Day
16. Sex and Paperwork
17. Modern Conveniences
18. Jog More, Read Less
19. Eat and Run
20. How Man Hours Do You Work?
21. 7:15 Tooke Shower
22. Attention! Multitaskers
23. Shot-Shot-Shot-Shot
24. Prest-o! Change-o!
25. MTV Zooms By
26. Allegro ma Non Troppo
27. Can You See it?
28. High-Pressure Minutes
29. Time and Motion
30. The Paradox of Efficiency
31. 365 Ways to Save Time
32. The Telephone Lottery
33. Time is Not Money
34. Short-Term Memory
35. The Law of Small Numbers
36. Bored
37. The End
38. Acknowledgements and Notes
39. Index

Eric Krout writes: "Thanks to the U.S. Department of Defense, nutritional patches may be available by 2025 for a soldier in combat who (does not have access to / cannot waste time eating) a traditional meal as we know it today. The patch may consist of a tiny microchip that, after first determining exactly what your body needs, transfers vitamins to your body transdermally. Goodbye Penguin Mints, hello Penguin Patch! "

Jayakrishnan has returned with another review of a Java book. This time around it's Matthew Robinson and Pavel Vorobiev's Swing. Published by Manning Publications, this book is designed to give information to both beginners and advanced programmers. Swing author Matthew Robinson and Pavel Vorobiev pages 917 publisher Manning Publications, 08/1999 rating 10/10 reviewer Jayakrishnan (JK) ISBN 1884777848 summary Unique examples and the exhaustive coverage of Swing make this a valuable book for both beginners and advanced programmers.

How many times have you opened a book in search of a solution and found not only an answer, but also an elegant enhancement to your application? How many times have you ignored an O'Reilly book on the same subject lying on your table? The answer is Manning's new book Swing authored by Mathew Robinson and Pavel Vorobiev. And that is my final answer.

The book (with just a 5-character title) is 917 pages long and is divided into four parts containing 23 chapters, an appendix and a bibliography. The first part, "Foundations," introduces Swing, its architecture and the key mechanism underlying Swing. Part II, mysteriously called "The Basics," explains the most commonly used and simpler classes of the Swing toolkit like labels, buttons, menus, list boxes, progress bars and sliders. The third part of the book, "Advanced topics," deals with using complicated components like trees, tables, text components and layered panes, as well as creating pluggable look and feel. The final part, "Special topics" introduces printing and the Java2D API.

Only two chapters of the final part are included in the book. The remaining four chapters which discuss accessibility, JavaHelp API, CORBA and some examples contributed by experienced Swing developers are available on the book's Web site.

The structure of each chapter is the same. Let's look at the chapter on tables as an example. The JTable class is introduced followed by related classes and interfaces. This is followed by discussions on row and column selections from JTable, column width and resizing and customizing the appearance of the table. The important methods related to these issues are discussed and short code samples are used to demonstrate the main features.

Then comes the meat of the chapter -- the examples. The first example shows how to display stock market data in a JTable. Complete code for the example is given and important sections are discussed. The examples that follow are enhancements to the first example. In the JTable chapter, they include adding custom renderers, customizing the data rendering, retrieving and displaying data from a database.

Each of the examples builds upon the previous one and as promised on the cover of the book, is production-quality code. While most other Swing books serve as expensive javadoc dumps of JFC with trivial, forgettable examples, Swing provides code that saves lots of time for the developer. The other applications that are developed in the book include a JPEG image editor, an ftp client, an X-Window-style desktop environment and a word processor.

This book is for the developer building applications using the Swing components of the Java Foundation Classes. The large number of examples make this a great cookbook providing code samples that will vastly reduce your development time. The language is simple and the examples are well defined. All the Swing components are discussed in detail with several screen shots.

The part I liked the most in this book is the section in each chapter about extending the Swing components to create custom components. These include creating an oval shaped border, polygonal buttons, and a tabbed pane which takes an image as the background. These examples provide knowledge to extend the components in ways limited only by your imagination.

The book is sprinkled with UI design guidelines by David Anderson related to usability and presentation. There is no reference to the Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines issued by JavaSoft. So I would recommend referring to that book (published by Sun Microsystems) if you want to design applications with consistent appearance and behavior.

The only minor annoyances in this book are the figures which display the component hierarchy, as they have an unprofessional look. But there are only a few of them.

To summarize, the unique examples and the exhaustive coverage of Swing makes this book very valuable for both beginners and advanced programmers.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Here's another doubleheader review, this time of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the four-author print extension of the Web site of the same name. Hemos and Jason Bennett here dissect the book and provide some insight into where the cluetrain is steaming. The Cluetrain Manifesto author Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger pages 190 publisher Perseus Books, 12/1999 rating Suits:9/ reviewer hemos, Jason Bennett ISBN 0738202444 summary The book based on the website, TCF is a radical vision of the impact of the Internet on business-as-usual. Review One: hemos It's not often that I actually read a book that's targeted at the business market. Such books often get sent to our offices here for review, and we usually hold a short ceremony in which we desecrate the books, then send them out to the vast CEO gulags we've started outside of town.

Scratch that last part. In any case, it is true that I usually manage to avoid "business" writing. I've mostly found that the point the authors attempt to make could have been said in 15 pages, versus the 150 they took to say it. Even the most beautiful graphs cannot disguise a lack of content.

However, when Doc Searls (one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto) passed along several copies of the book, I was a bit taken aback. I'd heard it being talked up by quite a number of people, all of whom were (hurried intake of breath!) Manager-types! But the people writing it -- from Doc, to Christopher Locke, Rick Levine and David Weinberger -- are all folks I've either met, heard or read before and people I respect.

That left me with a bit of a conundrum. If this book was written by people I respected, but as a rule business books have been the closest to Harlequin romances in terms of worth, what the heck was going on? The answer, my dear Watson, is quite elementary: this is not a business book.

Or rather, it is. But not a book about how business today should run and operate, about "disintermediation" and other piles of drivel that I think should be apparent for what they are to anyone willing to think. Instead, Cluetrain gets at the heart of what's actually going with this whole "Internet Revolution" -- people talking to people. And I think that particular message has gotten lost in the haze of convenience, price-difference and all the other media hyped ideas about what's going on with the business side of the Internet. What the authors of the book argue is that what's actually happening, in many ways, is that we are ripping down the artifical walls between producers and sellers. I agree. Disintermediation by any other name, maybe, but their treatment is refreshing in that it focuses on the human side. Any book that includes the mantra: "I am not a business. I am a human being." is good by me. And they also mention "undead evil." I'm serious.

OK, here's my take on the book with some sembalance of mental order: Cluetrain does a great job of exploding much of the hype about the present revolution. Instead, the revolution we're creating is something that humanity had for a while, and lost. We're bringing back the conversation now, and we're taking it global. That's the book in a nutshell. But the folks writing it can actually make that message interesting enough to read for roughly two hundred pages -- enough that you want to read the author credits, and drop them a line, like I did. The book also gathers strength from its use of excellent quotes and examples.

Who should this book be read by? You, of course, but also passing the book along to bosses and friends who are afraid of the Internet. I'm serious -- this book has become my defacto primer for people who don't understand what the Internet is going to do -- and doing -- and are scared about it.

And even if you don't trust me, read the sample chapter. Review Two: Jason Bennet

Background

Greetings, all, and good to be back. After finishing some books in the past month, as well as finally getting some others written up, I'm ready to unleash a string of reviews on Slashdot. The first of these is one of the more talked-about books to come out recently, The Cluetrain Manifesto. I have to admit I didn't see the Web site until recently, and thus am a newcomer to the movement, but I must say the rhetoric is revolutionary, regardless of how much impact it eventually has. If nothing else, take a look at the site and read over the 95 theses. You may or may not agree with them, but they will make you think.

What's the book about?

Before addressing the various essays that make up the manifesto, I'll try to summarize the ideals and ideas behind the movement. Basically, commerce as we know it is a lie. For most of human history, trade has been about interacting with other people. Going to the market, seeing your friends, checking out the various stalls, conducting business, and generally doing the important things of life. Craftsmen proudly displayed their wares to all who would see, touch, and smell them. People discussed which merchants were fair, who had the best quality, and so on. The market was the center of human interaction, where politics, society and business merged (see the Greeks for an excellent example). The Industrial Revolution changed all that, however. With the advent of mass production and economies of scale, production and consumption became all important. Craftsmanship was discarded in favor of turning out as much interchangeable product as possible, using interchangeable workers in interchangeable factories. The marketplace ceased to be a conversation, and became a one-way street, aimed directly at the consumer. The rise of mass media completed the transformation from conversation to lecture. No longer did customers roam the marketplace, but instead consumers were lulled, bribed and manipulated into buying the latest and greatest, because TV told them so. The idea of the interchangeable consumer came to be the industrial ideal. Nothing was left to chance: You could get anyone to buy anything made by anyone, and all that mattered was the money. This ideal never totally came to pass, of course, but it was the driving force behind many decades of business.

The Internet has broken these chains, however. The market no longer stares exlusively at the great tube, but instead is engaged in the greatest conversation in human history. Customers now tell each other what is happening, and shoot down the grandiose marketing schemes of giant corporations. You can now talk to hundreds of people in your town about the latest restaurants, which car dealer is best, or what doctors give the best care. The bazaar has returned with a vengeance. The mass media assume we are stupid; the Internet makes us collectively smart. The Internet is a conversation.

Commensurate with the redemption of customers from the bondage of industry, workers are no longer cogs in a great production machine, but are now talking to each other in ways they never could before. Hierarchies are broken when you can e-mail anyone, anytime, to give or get help. It doesn't matter where you sit, or what your place is, everyone has access. Even worse, those employees (nee' resources) and those customers can now talk to each other easily. The two great conversations, inside the business and inside the market, are on a collision course. The only question is, will that collision propel your business to new heights, or destroy it?

Chapter 1 is more or less an overview of what is to come, and where I drew the above summary from. In short, because of the Internet, you, the customer, now have a voice, the ability to make yourself heard to others over the din of advertising and other stilted "business communication." You know what business-speak sounds like, you know what people sound like, and you know what you prefer and who you believe. Just as the customer is empowered, so is the worker, precisely because of the knowledge that a network allows to flow. These conversations threaten to completely overthrow business as we know it, and their merger will transform the market.

Chapter 2 quickly sums up why we so desperately want our voice back: because we sacrificed it, traded our souls, to be good professionals. The Web allows us to be ourselves again.

Chapter 3 discusses what's behind the Web: the unique voice of each person participating in the conversation. These voices are carried along various conduits: e-mail and mailing lists, newsgroups, chat rooms, and personal Web pages. The chapter details various ways that these modes of communication are already breaking down the barriers among customers, and between business and customers, including a very interesting newsgroup exchange about Saturn automobiles. Most of this will be old hat to Slashdot readers, but likely not to suits. Authenticity is the key here, along with spontaneity and a human touch. All of these things are conveyed by people in a conversation, and not conveyed by brochures or Powerpoint presentations. It doesn't matter so much that your company participates in all of these conversations, as it does that it is honest when is does participate. Some examples of honest, open organizations (United, Sun's Java team, at least at first) and closed organizations (Intel with the Pentium bug, Java later on) are analyzed, with clear results: those companies that try to talk succeed, while those that don't talk only hurt themselves. Someone will be talking, and it had better be you.

The anecdote which opens chapter 4 sums up the theme: even after hearing about markets as conversations for several hours to a group, some people still don't get it. The first few paragraphs basically repeat what has already been stated: markets stopped being conversations around the time mass production and mass marketing took over. What replaced this conversation was a one-way message, delivered from business to consumers. Unfortunately, no one really wants to listen to an overblown hype machine. The entire role of marketing is to make us want what we are supposed to want, but don't really want. This anti-conversation, however, is slowly but surely being pushed back by the rich tones of conversation on the Web. The knowledge contained in these conversations increases exponentially as more and more people join the party. Attempts to dominate this conversation with targeted message, i.e. push technology, have failed utterly. No one wants another television. In point of fact, conversation built the Web, manifested in the open source movement. Apache, Linux and the rest are all products of conversations. These are living examples of what can be accomplished when the market talks. The only way for marketing to survive is to work with the conversation, to give it what it wants. No more brochureware, but real information that the market recognizes as such. Work with the customer on price. Truely reposition, don't just spout different lines. Marketing sees the consumer as the enemy. The conversation is waiting for them to realize what's happening. All you have to do is talk honestly, and people will listen and talk back.

Chapter 5 details the other side of this sea change -- the change within business. In a "hyperlinked organization," people don't need the fancy office building or the top-down bureaucracy, they just want to be able to work with those people that best let them get a job done. Employees (or, dare I say it, resources) need no longer be bound by lines on an organizational chart. People go to who they need to get what they need. Centralized control is replaced by a web of people working with whoever they need. Groups form and collapse on an ad-hoc basis to meet the demands of the moment. All of the knowledge generated is managed through people telling each other stories. We already have tons of information; what we need is more knowledge, more understanding. Human communication generates this understanding. Because of all of this communication, and lack of hierarchy, it is inevitable that your customers will join in. Business intranets will expand to include customers along with employees, working together to make sure everyone gets what he needs. Business as a message is dead; Business as a conversation is beginning.

Chapter 6 summarizes the points made so far, then launches into a treatise on the future of the Web. Unfortunately, we're asking the wrong questions. We don't need to ask questions out of fear of the Web, but out of our desire to converse. The conversation we have will shape the Web the way it needs to be. There's no easy way to do this, just a journey into the unknown.

Chapter 7 concludes the Manifesto by stating that the revolution has already begun, and it's too far gone to stop. What we must do now is break our old habits, and start behaving in a new way. It's so tempting to keep an old, patched machine going even when everyone knows it needs to be replaced. Just remember, "I am not a company, I am a human being."

What's Good?

This book will blow your mind, all the more so if you're new to the Internet or unsure about what it means. It presents a radical new way to think about how we interact with commerce and with each other. To some extent or another, I think we all feel what is being communicated here. We're all tired of being cogs, of being consumers, of being resources. We want to be people, friendly customers, employees. As the conclusion says, it's already too late to stop this transformation. The Internet will only grow, and its fundamental nature means that the old is gone, and the new is come. If you are in business, you need to understand what is happening. You can either surf the wave, or drown in it.

What's Bad?

Any controversial book has its issues, and Cluetrain is no exception. The only reason I gave the book a Geek rating of 7 is because you already know what is being said. You know how people talk in newsgroups, and you probably don't want to read 50 pages telling you that. You don't need to hear this message repeated five times in the course of 200 pages. It's a good read, but know that you're likely to skip some parts, because you're tired of being beaten over the head with something you've already figured out.

Having said that, I do have quarrels with a few points that Weinberger makes when he discusses how the Internet came to be. I get the impression that he feels that the Internet sprung from chaos like Athena from Zeus, magically appearing out of the mist of conversation alone. He certainly believes that hierarchy is counterproductive in the Internet age. "[T]he most complex network ever imagined...[the WWW] has been implemented without any central control whatsoever," he writes on page 130. What exactly are the IETF and the W3C then? Didn't a small group of people design TCP/IP? There was a conversation, of course, but there was also control and hierarchy. No good open-source project lacks a leader, and every movement needs its inspiration. The Internet might not be the encrusted bureaucracy of a megacorporation, but authority is helpful in getting things done. I find the quote "[t]he Web succeeded where the Internet failed ..." (page 142) especially interesting. Although, as he says, the Web gave us the user-friendly browser, I'd rather think the Internet spawned the Web, since it is what transports the Web. Oh, and if someone can tell me what a "Unixlike language (145)" is, I'd appreciate it. I also find humorous the notion that e-mail has to be poorly written to be authentic. Finally, Chapter 6 is far too much of a political rant for my taste. Wanting to push pornography to the side does not make one a control freak. Control is not a bad thing. Anyway, I'm ranting now myself. It's a good book, despite these issues.

So What's In It For Me?

I think I've already said that. :-) This is an important book. You might love it. You might hate it. You'll likely feel threatened by it. Nevertheless, you owe it to yourself to at least read the 95 Theses. They will make you think. If you're a business type, read this. You need to, especially if you're still learning this Internet thing. If you've been around, read it if you want. There'll be some full parts, but it will mean a lot. The revolution has already begun.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

• Table of Contents
• Foreward
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Introduction
  1. Internet Apocalypso
  2. The Longing
  3. Talk is Cheap
  4. Markets are Conversations
  5. The Hyperlinked Organization
  6. EZ Answers
  7. Post-Apocalypso
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors

Thanks to Greg Smith for his review of O'Reilly and Associates' Unix Backup and Recovery. Not suprisingly, the book is complete coverage of Unix backup and recovery. Huh. Truth in advertising. Whodathunkit? Unix Backup & Recovery author W. Curtis Preston pages 709 publisher O'Reilly, 1999 rating 10/10 reviewer Greg Smith ISBN 1-56592-642-0 summary Complete coverage of Unix backup and recovery, just like the title says

Cover Image

The Scenario You're a system administrator suddenly tasked with handling the backup of all your employer's mission-critical data. Or maybe you've been handed a tape of questionable origin with the instructions "I need all the files off of this." Perhaps you're working on your company's disaster-recovery plan and are looking for advice about how to restore all the computers to operation in the event of catastrophe. Unix Backup & Recovery is a comprehensive volume designed to help with all of these tasks and many others. What's Bad While the organization of topics is clear, the sheer scope of the book prevents easy digestion of the material by the casual reader. Those expecting to read a chapter or two at random may find some of the concepts hard to follow unless they first read the full 65 pages of introductory material. Also, I would have liked to see a clearer discussion of the differences in procedure and general philosophy between a typical small shop (where tapes are organized based on the day the backup was made) and the kind of unique-volume labeling that tends to accompany larger systems or commercial backup products. Since a lot of Unix systems are being managed lately by people whose background is in smaller systems, making this kind of transition is a very important topic.

One part of the book's design may be good or bad depending on how you intend to read it. Areas deemed especially time-sensitive, like what features are included with which commercial backup system, are not addressed in the book. Instead, readers are referred to the author's backupcentral.com site for the latest information. While assuming that any Unix administrator has Internet access is probably not unreasonable, I found myself reading a lot of this book during spare moments while waiting for routine chores to complete. It was not helpful that I needed to access the Web site in order to follow the chapter I was reading while I waited for my car's oil to be changed.

What's Good With many years' worth of practical experience, several specialist contributors, and dozens of technical reviewers, this book leaves few stones unturned. No matter how experienced you are at managing backups, you could probably learn at least a few tricks from Curtis Preston and his crew. Normally discussions about backups are relegated to, at best, a single chapter in a Unix administration book. Unix Backup & Recovery is the first title I've ever seen that covers this territory in full detail. In fact, even if you aren't specifically a Unix administrator, the discussion of topics like the most common causes of system failure and how to pitch a more reliable backup scheme to management are very cross-platform. They're worth reading no matter what type of computer system you rely upon. So What's In It For Me? The first two chapters of the book provide a real-world approach to backups that include often-unaddressed topics like the availability of the backup hardware in the future, dealing with off-site storage, and exactly how high the cost of poor backups can be. With that basis, the native Unix utilities (dump, cpio, and tar) are evaluated. One particularly good part of that coverage is a discussion of tape portability, and notes on how the GNU versions of those utilities stack up in that and other contexts. Even Unix administrators who aren't involved with backups regularly might find this chapter interesting, as the information about how to read an unfamiliar tape you've been given is alone is worth the price of the book if you're ever stuck in that situation.

For those looking to back up systems without much of a budget, a discussion of free backup tools ranges from writing scripts to automate the built-in Unix tools to coverage of the popular AMANDA backup system. The third section covers what to look for in a commercial backup product. This is light on specific recommendations, instead trying to educate the reader well enough to perform his or her own product selection. A somewhat related chapter covers the main ideas behind High Availability, which is obviously too big of a topic to cover fully in a 15-page section.

The next few chapters cover bare-metal backup and recovery, where the goal is to make a backup of the system capable of being used to create a new system in the event of a total failure. Many traditional solutions to this problem involve first re-installing the operating system, then restoring the backup. The author maintains this is a bad approach, and instead focuses on constructing a small bootable system (i.e. a Linux rescue floppy) capable of partitioning the drive and restoring the backup without laying down the OS first. SunOS/Solaris, Linux, Compaq True-64 Unix, HP-UX, IRIX and AIX are all covered.

Four chapters on database backup and recovery suggest how to integrate your backup solution with the database vendor's tools. Along with a general discussion aimed at bringing non-database administrators up to speed on DB lingo, separate chapters cover Informix, Oracle and Sybase. Finally, the three closing chapters to the book include miscellaneous information like backing up Rational's ClearCase product and selecting backup hardware, as well as some notes on upcoming trends.

Competent system administrators, either through forward thinking or past battle scars, develop a level of paranoia about their computers and how strongly their data should be protected that people outside the field find it hard to fathom. If you'd like to hone your own sense that everyone is out to get you, and know how to stop them, Unix Backup & Recovery is as good of an introduction to that topic as you'll find anywhere.

Buy this from ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. Preparing for the Worst
2. Backing It All Up
3. Native Backup & Recovery Utilities
4. Free Backup Utilities
5. Commercial Backup Utilities
6. High Availability
7. Bare-Metal Backup & Recovery Methods: SunOS/Solaris
8. Bare-Metal: Linux
9. Bare-Metal: Compaq True-64 Unix
10. Bare-Metal: HP-UX
11. Bare-Metal: IRIX
12. Bare-Metal: AIX
13. Backing Up Databases
14. Informix Backup & Recovery
15. Oracle Backup & Recovery
16. Sybase Backup & Recovery
17. ClearCase Backup & Recovery
18. Backup Hardware
19. Miscellanea

In the new paperback edition of his book, Paul Davies takes us on a wonderful tour (metaphorically) through what he calls the "Mind of God." Physics may scare some people, but physicists like Davies (and Dyson and Walker) are doing some of the best writing on the planet on spirituality, science, and the powerful connection between the two. This paperback is a hypnotic exploration of some of the great questions of existence as well as a lively summary of recent developments in theoretical physics. Read more. The Mind of God author Paul Davies pages 250 publisher Touchstone/Simon & Schuster rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-671-79718-2 summary science and the search for a rational world

Einstein once said that the thing which most interested him wasn't whether God existed or not, but whether God had any choice in creating the world as it is. Einstein wasn't religious in the conventional sense, but he liked to use God as a metaphor for expressing the deeper questions about human existence, an instinct that runs deep in many scientific disciplines, especially physics.

As someone who was for years unnerved by the very term "physics" -- memories of high school, maybe -- one of the most pleasant surprises in recent years has been reading physicist/authors like Freeman Dyson and Evan Harris Walker and discovering the surprisingly strong link between physics and spirituality.

Physicists seem to have taken on some of the heaviest questions of human existence: "Why are we here? Why is the world the way it is? Where have all the Gods gone?"

In The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis For a Rational World, (just published in paperback by Simon and Schuster, US $12) Paul Davies, a professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Adelaide in Australia (and the author of God and the New Physics and The Cosmic Blueprint), continues this tradition brilliantly.

"The modern world is plagued by a greater diversity of beliefs than ever," writes Davies, "many of them eccentric or even dangerous, and rational argument is regarded by a lot of ordinary people as pointless sophistry. Only in science, and especially mathematics, have the ideals of the Greek philosophers been upheld (and in philosophy itself, of course). When it comes to addressing the really deep issues of existence, such as the origin and meaning of the universe, the place of human beings in the world, and the structure and organization of nature, there is a strong temptation to retreat into unreasoned belief."

Just what is rational thought, anyway? asks Davies, and true to his word, he jumps into a beautifully written, lively -- and yes, profoundly rational -- romp through some of the biggest mysteries in the universe: human reason and common sense, metaphysics, time and eternity, the creation, real and virtual worlds, theoretical physics, the necessity of God, and finally, "the mystery at the end of the universe."

Rather than a book of answers, this is a surprisingly readable, fast-paced inquiry into whether or not science and rationality can unlock the mysteries of the world, from the nature of consciousness to the notion that the world is really a kind of supercomputer, and all of us bits and data swirling around inside.

"I cannot believe," writes Davies near the end of the book, "that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Our involvement is too intimate. The physical species Homo may count for nothing, but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here."

Perhaps because they are trained to deconstruct the matter that makes up the universe, physicists go deeper into questions like this than almost any other contemporary subculture of writers.

If Paul Davies were teaching physics, every kid might learn to love science and appreciate its potential for tackling, and perhaps one day even answering, these age-old questions about life. Davies' ruminations here on Metaphysics: Who Needs It? ought to be required reading for anyone who needs to be reminded of the importance of science in the contemporary world. Since most scientific language is arcane and inaccessible to much of humanity, the rest of us tend to forget just how seminal, even spiritual, subjects like physics can be.

If you care about issues like the existence of God, rationality, and the reason for our very being, you can hardly do better than The Mind of God. Davies doesn't have all of the answers, nor does he pretend to, but he sure has the right questions.

Buy this book from ThinkGeek.

We've got a double-headed review of Simson Garfinkel's new book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy at the End of the 21st Century. It's a thought-provoking vision of the future which frankly scares the heck out of me. Database Nation: The Death of Privacy at the End of the 21st Ce author Simson Garfinkel pages 312 publisher O'Reilly & Associates rating 7/10; 9/ reviewer Matthias Wenger, Kurt Gray ISBN 1-56592-653-6 summary Thoughtful look at threats to privacy, and appropriate responses

Review 1: Matthias Wenger

Personally, privacy has been a big issue lately -- hearing about DoubleClick and Real Networks customer tracking made the issue a bit of a sore point for me. Then a friend of mine bought a shredder after her credit card fell victim to a Dumpster diver, and I started getting paranoid. Reading Database Nation hasn't helped, but it brings up some possible solutions and provides a good deal to think about as we march blindly on towards Big Brother, Inc.

Database Nation starts out strong, with a hypothetical day in the life of someone with no privacy -- cold-call telemarketing at 6:30 in the morning, surveillence cameras all around, veiled blackmail for a hospital in desperate need of cash and plenty of medical histories, still more cameras at work, etc. This story ends up being a rough outline for the book, which also covers electronic footprints (ATM and credit card records and the like), private databasing a la DoubleClick, identity vs. body, and surprisingly enough, AI and intelligence agents. Each of the major topics covered has at least a full chapter devoted to it -- explaining the specific issues at hand, what sort of data is at risk, who would be interested in such data, and how data can be protected.

The biggest flaw in the book is that it is too ambitious -- how can you cover the sanctity of medical records in 30 pages? It would be difficult to do a better job with such space limitations, certainly, but it does make for a more general view of privacy rather than dealing with specifics. The result is "Privacy in a Nutshell," to steal a turn of phrase from O'Reilly. Given the subject matter, the Nutshell approach might even be preferable, since the theory can be applied in any situation once the awareness is there. Still, each topic felt like it could be expanded much further.

The over-eager breadth of the subject matter is also wonderful. Enough particular concerns are illustrated in each topic that there is an outline of the larger picture of information management even though a good deal remains to be filled in. Covering so many topics makes it easier to see just how much information can be collected about an individual while they remain unawares, and just how much that information can be abused or misused. To illustrate this very point, Garfinkel relates the story of an Internet-based scavenger hunt where the end result was to find out as much as possible about a particular "target," working only with a name. The information collected in 1993 included his place of employment, parents' names, home address, degrees earned, doctoral dissertation, the operating system he used, what his fiance's name was, and more. I found out five minutes ago, with the help of google, that he's now married and that he and his wife hyphenated their last names together. That was just the first hit. And that was a very casual search -- if someone was really interested in finding information, what are the limits?

Database Nation is, in a way, the ultimate discussion of information security. Garfinkel covers an amazing range of topics in exploring privacy and personal information today and into the 21st century. This is both a blessing and a curse -- there are so many things to be aware of, so many topics and points of view to consider, yet each one is worthy of more attention. At the opening of the book, Garfinkel expresses hope that Database Nation will do for privacy what Silent Spring did for environmentalism -- if something doesn't do it soon, there wont be any privacy left to save.

Review 2: Kurt Gray

If Simson Garfinkel's name doesn't ring a bell, check the computer section of your local bookstore or library: Garfinkel co-authored the O'Reilly Practical UNIX Security book, the O'Reilly Stopping Spam book, and some six other books. Before I was a Slashdot addict I enjoyed reading Garfinkel's columns in Packet and the Boston Globe , where his talents for technology journalism and futurist projections make informative reading for geeks and lay persons alike.

Just as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle led to sweeping reforms in the meat-packing industry (and probably turned a lot of people to vegetarianism) Garfinkel's latest book, Database Nation, should draw some much-needed attention to the manner in which everyone's personal information is being captured, cataloged and sold as commodity, and how each aspect of this process detracts from our civil liberties. If you're an American, you certainly know what the IRS is, but have you ever heard of TRW? Equifax? Experian? Or the DMA? Or the MIB, the Medical Insurance Bureau? Each of these corporate entities keeps records on you that determine your eligibility for bank loans, lines of credit, and medical insurance. Are you allowed to see your own record? Well, it's their data, so it doesn't belong to you -- but maybe if you ask them nicely and have due cause, they'll make an exception. Suppose you discover an error in the records they keep on you; are you allowed to demand corrections? Now you're asking subversive questions so we're putting an CM31 flag on your file ... George Orwell warned that the march of technology could allow a monolithic, tyrannical Big Brother to emerge. Database Nation points out that it's the thousands of unsupervised "kid brothers" that have a far greater potential to disrupt your life, and in ways you never expected.

I find the best way to summarize this book is chapter-by-chapter, so here are my own brief reviews of each chapter:

Chapter 1: Privacy Under Attack: Garfinkel opens with his own futurist vision: a day in the life of a typical working American. This hapless near-future dweller is continuously surrounded by targeted advertising, monitored at home and even in his car, and works in an office where constant politeness is enforced by the company surveillance cameras that are programmed to recognize facial expressions and sound an alarm whenever an employee appears disgruntled. Garfinkel explains that this book is not about Big Brother, but rather how the widespread capture and exchange of our personal information has been eroding our civil liberties already and goes largely unnoticed. Garfinkel makes the positive point that no threat to our privacy that exists today is beyond our control, and that we can develop robust, built-in systems of privacy protection rather than allow them to be only loosely guaranteed by the legal equivalent of patchwork.

Chapter 2: Database Nation: Chapter 2 starts with a historical perspective, answering the question "How did we get here?" In short, via the national census, the Social Security Board (leading to the creation of the National Data Center) and the widespread adoption of the Social Security Number and its inherent flaws (limited data capacity and lack of a checksum digit to avoid clerical errors). Page 26 launches into the disturbing episode of Steve and Nancy Ross, whose lives were shattered when the IRS botched their tax returns in 1983 and put a lien on the Ross' house for $10,000. That lien was noted in their credit records at TRW and Equifax, which in turn sold this data to 187 other independent credit bureaus. Here Garfinkel makes an interesting observation: the Ross' bad credit data spread "like a computer virus that kept reinfecting TRW's computer with incorrect information," and it took over seven years for the bulk of their credit problems to subside. Chapter 2 then explains how simple identity theft can be, whether Dumpster diving for credit statements (hint: buy yourself a cross-cutting shredder), or using Equifax's quickie credit report service to find chumps with good lines of credit, then applying for new credit cards in the victims' names. Equifax provides such thieves with everything they need: mother's maiden name, previous addresses, SSN -- it's all there. The victim's credit rating is ruined for years while bill collectors harass them day and night, and the credit card company writes off the charges and flags the victim's file. Frequently, the credit thief gets a slap on the wrist if anything at all. Page 33 lists at least 30 government agencies that are hardwired to track you only by your SSN. Chapter 2 definitely had me sitting up and paying attention.

Chapter 3: Absolute Identification: Chapter 3 is about biometrics and unambiguous identification of every member in a society, a seductive idea that has tantalized policymakers for centuries. Garfinkel argues, however, that this idea is fundamentally flawed. Garfinkel again provides historical perspective, pointing out that using biometrics is an old idea that only appears new as the technology matures. Garfinkel reminds us that even DNA testing is flawled. When a person's name is linked to a given DNA profile, for example, how hard would it be to modify that database record and change the name attached to that profile? (And did you know that 99% of DNA from any two people is identical, so DNA tests actually compare only regions of the genome that are nonessential to cell life? Hmmm ...) Garfinkel then lists various other biometric technologies such as face, voice and iris recognition; even your signature can be used as a biometric identifier. Some of these systems are already in use: Have you signed for a UPS delivery lately, or signed for credit-card purchases on an electronic touch pad? Biometrics. So here's a near-future scenerio: suppose all children need to have a DNA test shortly after being born "for the baby's health." Then the FBI warehouses the DNA fingerprints of every citizen in the U.S., and sells the data to the insurance industry, which can then compare it to the human genome map to weed out the "at risk" people, then target healthy prospects for profitable health plan solicitations... big ol' cluestick being waved around here.

Chapter 4: What Did You Do Today?: Maybe you went shopping, got some cash from the ATM, racked up some more frequent flier miles? Even the most mundane events in your daily life are recorded and archived somewhere -- from how often you withdraw cash from an ATM, to your entire purchasing history at the neighborhood grocery store, even the movies you rent at the video store. Dramatic developments in data-storage technology make it easier for businesses to keep what Garfinkel calls "hot files" on every customer transaction from day one, and then describes how we are creating the Earth's "datasphere." Nearly every durable product you buy has a serial number. Often that serial number becomes attached to your name and personal information (ever filled out a warranty card?) which can then be sold on the open data market, Garfinkel argues that even seemingly mundane information needs to be treated with respect for privacy.

Chapter 5: The View From Above: Chapter 5 is about surveillence technology and the growing private market for satellite photos and Webcams. Does it bother me that right now someone can buy a grainy aerial photo of my neighborhood taken sometime in 1987? No, sorry, that doesn't bother me. City police departments are installing surveillance cameras in public places. I still don't care. Garfinkel then explains how he set up a QuickCam to time-lapse record his Realtor while allowing prospective buyers to browse through his home without supervision. At this point I can't tell if the chapter is supposed to a condemnation or an endorsement. I suppose Garfinkel is pointing out that it's technically possible that are being watched and recorded in places when you assume you're alone. At the very least, it should change your ideas about expectations of privacy.

Chapter 6: cite> To Know Your Future: So who is the MIB? Men in Black right? No, the MIB referred to here is the Medical Information Bureau, which happens to be the secretive data warehouse of the American medical insurance industry's "customer profiles." Think you have a God-given right to medical coverage? Well, if you like Kafka novels then you'll definitely enjoy the hijinks that erupt around page 139, where Garfinkel tells us of more than a few people who've been refused medical insurance because of clerical errors in their MIB records -- records which they never knew exisited. But wait, isn't it illegal in many cases to deny medical coverage to someone with preexisting conditions? Yeah, sure it is, so what's your point? Garfinkel points out that only 23 of the 50 states actually have laws that require citizens be allowed to view their own medical histories. My only complaint with this chapter is that it pursues flaws in existing policies rather than staying with the theme of technology marching faster than prudent policy.

Chapter 7: Buy Now!: The DMA is the Direct Marketing Association. They lobby lawmakers at the state and federal level to further what they consider a God-given right to own and sell any piece of information they can attach to you. One of the nation's largest direct marketing list resellers is Metromail, now owned by the credit bureau giant Experian. Ever apply for a shopping card or magazine subscription, or fill in a product bingo card? Ever fill out a change of address form at the post office? Direct marketers get an automatic notification of your new address from the U.S. Postal Service, which causes your name/address to be copied into a hot prospect list called "New Movers," one of many direct-mailing lists sold by Metromail at the rate of $60 per thousand names. Garfinkel lists some 50 products Experian sells to businesses, like AutoCredit for quickie loan approvals, Bankruptcy candidates, Business Owner Profiles, and Property Link which provides a details of a subject's property holdings. He then argues against the opt-out clause the DMA offers to whiners (arguing instead for a more consumer-oriented opt-in approach), and lists preventative steps you can take to keep your name on as few lists as possible. This chapter left me with a question: if you complain to a direct marketing firm about what they've been doing with your personal information and then they flag you as hostile, and that direct marketer happens to be owned by a major credit bureau, what would that to your credit rating? Food for thought.

Chapter 8: Who Owns Your Information?: Take the case of Ram Avarahmi, who tried to sue a magazine publisher for selling his name, which was in their list of subscribers, to other magazine publishers. Mr. Avarahmi argued that Virginia law states that his name and his image are his property which can not be used in advertising or trade without his consent, and guess what the courts told him? "Sorry Charlie, or Ram, whatever your name is." Information is basically owned by those who gather the information and personal information is a commodity. Medical information is also a commodity owned by medical insurance providers. But can all this medical information be abused? Or let me ask it like this: are we evolved enough to not attach genetic defects to say, a person's ethnicity? Garfinkel excerpts an ad he found in the New York Times: "Ashkenazi Jewish Families Are Needed to Help Scientists Understand the Biological Basis for Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder" -- a 1998 John Hopkins University study, right here in America in 1998. Certainly, some medical disorders are confined to certain populations; the question is, what if someone wants to abuse such links? So do you own the books you read or the software you use? No, thanks to copyright laws. Garfinkel makes the point that you can't use the concept of ownership to protect your privacy, because you don't own data about you, however I'm not convinced. Maybe I can't force you to take my name out of your address book, because you own your address book, but I think I do have the right to demand that you not send me mail or sell my address to other businesses without my consent.

Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists: This chapter argues that individual terrorists deploying low-tech explosive and biological contaminants have spooked us into accepting ever more surveillance of our everyday activities. True to his style, Garfinkel dismisses some well-known urban terrorist acts as amateur-night material, then describes two fairly effective methods of introducing anthrax into an unsuspecting office building. Further pages show how terrorists might gain access to nuclear and biochemical devices. Garfinkel's point here is that constant surveillance cannot save us from a determined kook. The chapter then moves into the Big Brother question: what constitutes thoughtcrime? Didn't our benevolent goverment inter over 100,000 Japanese-Americans at the start of World War II? Didn't J. Edgar Hoover's FBI spend much of 1950's investigating "Communists" and "homosexuals"? So could our government be trusted with "brain wiretapping" technology? Sounds far-fetched? We're already using polygraphs and experiments involving fast sucessive MRI scans. Garfinkel makes the point that if we are truly concerned about public safety, we should track dangerous materials rather than try to identify potentially dangerous people.

Chapter 10: Excuse Me, But Are You Human? Imagine you're on an electronic mailing list, and you strike up an e-mail dialog with another member of the list. He tells you some things bout himself and you share something about yourself in return. Turns out "he" was actually an AI conversationalist programmed by a marketing agency to gather personal information to be sold in the form of marketing lists. Garfinkel then describes various intelligent agents that can parse natural language. But how is this useful for marketing? It is technically feasible for a marketer to scan the entire datasphere for everything that can be found about you in order to create a predictive model of your behavior: When will you buying a new car? When you will be on vacation? Valuable stuff for direct marketers to know. Might it be possible in 50 years to create a complete AI behavorial copy of you, and test various marketing schemes against it? Garfinkel actually argues that avatars should be afforded the same privacy rights as humans.

Chapter 11: Privacy Now!: Is technology neutral in the war on privacy? Garfinkel's answer is no, technology permits the greater cataloging and measuring of the world around us, and therefore technology is inherently intrusive. He argues that for the cost of around $5 million added to the annual budget, a Federal oversight agency could be created to monitor and regulate the flow of personal information throughgovernment and business data channels. Further, he proposes a list of reasonable amendments to the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1970, such as giving consumers the ability to sue for damages resulting from the addition of erroneous information to their credit reports. Garfinkel argues that better laws and policies will be more effective than cryptography in protecting one's privacy, and warns that when some have their privacy violated, you can expect retaliation such as deliberate pollution -- and disruption to -- the datasphere. Overall, Garfinkel concludes that we need laws and policies that repect our personal information, not just a technological picket fence.

Before reading Database Nation, I had the typical "nothing-to-hide" attitude regarding my own privacy. I didn't care if some government agency or large corporation was able to read my academic records, my medical records, my magazine subscriptions, my credit-card purchases, my phone bill. "Let them read it all for all I care," I thought, "I'm sure it would bore them to tears." After reading this book, I realize it's not so much about Big Brother, it's about how the spread of your personal information can bite you in the ass someday.

My assessment: Garfinkel jam-packed this book with information every American ought to be aware of -- enough to think about to make your head spin. Thankfully his tone is not hopeless gloom-and-doom; he does remind you that 30 years ago the Cuyahoga River was an environmental disaster, but today it's safe to eat fish caught there. Overall, it's a great book. Yet another reason for me to give a favorable review to anything Simson Garfinkel writes.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

Matt Ridley claims in the introduction to Genome that we are living through the greatest intellectual moment in history: the unraveling of the mystery of our own genes. He's right. This is one of the most important and hypnotically interesting books I've ever read, covering an astonishing range of issues: Why are some of us combative, friendly, hopeful, grammatical? Does free will or genetic determinism shape our behavior? Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, is the autobiography of all of us. Read more below. "Genome:the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters" author Matt Ridley pages 344 publisher Harper Collins rating 10/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN 0-06-019497-9 summary Uses 23 pairs of chromosomes to explain our species

There is much more to each of us than a genetic code, writes Ridley, "[b]ut until now human genes were an almost complete mystery. We will be the first generation to penetrate that mystery. We stand on the brink of great new answers but, even more, of great new questions. This is what I have tried to convey in this book."

And he's succeeded, brilliantly, even entertainingly. Genome isn't about the Human Genome Project itself, but rather about what the project is uncovering in labs all over the world. Some time this year, geneticists say they will probably have a rough draft of the complete human genome. In a short time, we will have gone from knowing little about genes to knowing nearly everything.

The human genome, the complete set of genes housed in 23 pairs of chromosomes, form Ridley's outline for what he terms an autobiography of our species. Spelled out in a billion three-letter words using only the four-letter alphabet of DNA, the genome has been altered, edited and handed down for more than three billion years. With the first human-readable draft of the genome poised on the horizon, we -- the people Ridley calls "this lucky" generation" -- are the first beings who will be able to read and ponder this profound document about what it means to be, well, us.

In Genome, Ridley picks one newly-discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes and tells its story, in the process recounting some of the history of our species. Ridley weaves each chapter to be more compelling than the one before. Genes that cause disease, influence language, behavior and intelligence, genes that enable us to write grammatically, that guide the development of biology and intelligence, that permit us to remember, that relate ultimately to selfishness, hope, fate, self-interest, instinct and history.

Ridley aptly promises what he calls a "whistle-stop tour of some of the more interesting sites in the genome and what they tell us about ourselves." Some stops along that tour aren't pretty -- from the creation of Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (she looked like a bacterium and lived in a warm pond) to the blood-curdling research of Nazi scientists.

Two of the most powerful chapters come towards the end -- his horrific recounting of the history of eugenics, the perverted use of genetics to breed superior humans, and his chapter on free will. This chapter raises the most elemental question when it comes to the genome, one the world has and will continue to debate: do we truly have free will, or is our behavior and fate genetically pre-determined?

Ridley's answer is both affirming and disturbing.

This is an amazing book. It's hard to imagine a more sweeping, powerful or complex subject, yet Ridley, a former science editor and reporter, has made it completely accessible, clear and comprehensible. Genetics is important to every single human being, yet few people know much about it. But in Genome, hardly a paragraph is anything but lucid. You could give it to your grandmother and she'd have little trouble getting through it, or grasping its monumental significance.

Beyond that, Ridley's great ambition for the book, declared in his preface, isn't just hype. We are, in fact, on the verge of one of the great intellectual achievements in human history. We are about to learn more about ourselves, the way we evolve, and our behavior than anybody before us has ever dared to imagine. This is a book we all urgently need to read. We are entering a new era in human knowledge and self-awareness, and few of us are really prepared for it. This book will help get you ready.

Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.

SEGV has reviewed Coriolis Books title Game Architecture and Design. The book, written by Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris, is an incisive look into game development. Not just coding techniques, but it also looks at game design, architecture, process and the game industry. Click below to learn more - and perhaps be the next Carmack. Game Architecture and Design author Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris pages 742 publisher Coriolis rating 7.5/10 reviewer SEGV ISBN 1-57610-425-7 summary A rather good game development book.

A Good Game Book

Authors Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris have penned something truly rare: a good book on game development. This is the first one I have seen that I felt served the topic well.

To be sure, this is most definitely not a book on coding. Rather, it is a book on game design, architecture, process, and the industry.

Overview

The book is divided into four main parts. The first covers game design, taking you from the germ of an idea to the description of a product ready to be developed. The second discusses the formal process that will provide the proper environment for this to happen effectively. The third covers the architecture, where everything fits together. The final part, the appendices, provides detailed sample documents which the reader is invited to study.

There are case studies throughout, some of which are real, and others imaginary but illustrative. The first three parts each end with a discussion of the future of that topic, as predicted by the authors. Only time will tell if they are correct, but their views are interesting to read nonetheless.

Game Design

This was my favorite part of the book. The authors focus not just on computer games, but on software entertainment as a more general concept. To that end, they discuss such diverse influences as Aristotle's elements of drama and provide analogies with films and literature.

However, the main focus is on games, and I particularly enjoyed the applications of math and game theory to gameplay and balance. A nice touch was the discussion of emergence as it applies to the interaction of game rules.

Team Building and Management

This next part is a mini-process book embedded in a game book. This puts us on holy ground, and while I don't agree with every point the authors raise, they are for the most part on the right track. If you've read any of the gurus, you won't be surprised here. They correctly assert that the game development industry lags behind the rest of the software development industry on these points.

Game Architecture

By far, this is the largest part of the book. Although the focus is not on coding, it is here where the technical detail abounds. There are plenty of class and object diagrams, state machines, and even the odd illustrative code fragment.

There is a nice discussion of design patterns; the authors apply half of the Gang of Four patterns to game architecture. This ties in nicely with the soft architectures that are becoming more prevalent in today's games. They discuss topics as diverse as localization for foreign markets, deploying patches, and properly conducting the postmortem after a project is completed.

Appendices

The first appendix contains a collection of sample game design documents. The first is a working architecture for a project. Next are two game treatments. The fourth is a technical specification. Finally, there is a code review form and a test script.

I found these documents interesting. My main complaint is that they are all lumped together without organization. The appendix needs to be broken down. The second appendix is nicely annotated, but has an incorrect attribution.

Caveats

Notwithstanding the publisher's "to the reader" message of quality, there are some glitches, typos, and occasional errors. The authors sometimes ramble, making a section too long, but that may be a side effect of having two authors.

The diagrams are not UML, but rather modified OMT and home-brewed notation. The authors recommend learning modified OMT as they believe it is the de facto industry standard, which is no longer the case.

The CDROM contains some sample/demo software for Windows and Macintosh. It includes Python, which is nothing new for Linux users, who are left in the cold using the CDROM. The authors seem to have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft throughout the book. There's no significant mention of Linux or open source game development, not even in the future ponderings.

The book is huge, and my copy already has a cracked spine.

Summary

This book does have warts, but all in all I think it was executed rather well, given its ambition. For a game book, I give it 8/10. Make it 7/10 when compared to other technical books.

Your interests may vary, but I'd recommend this book if you are interested in game development. I think it's worth the time and effort.

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Table of Contents

Part I: Game Design
1. First Concept
2. Core Design
3. Gameplay
4. Detailed Design
5. Game Balance
6. Look and Feel
7. Wrapping Up
8. The Future of Game Design
Part II: Team Building and Management
9. Current Methods of Team Management
10. Roles and Divisions
11. The Software Factory
12. Milestones and Deadlines
13. Procedures and "Process"
14. Troubleshooting
15. The Future of the Industry
Part III: Game Architecture
16. Current Development Methods
17. Initial Design
18. Use of Technology
19. Building Blocks
20. Initial Architecture Design
21. Development
22. The Run-Up to Release
23. Postmortem
24. The Future of Game Development
Part IV: Appendixes
Appendix A: Sample Game Design Documents
Appendix B: Bibliography and References
Glossary
Index

Jayakrishnan, who recently reviewed Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, has returned with a review of Li Gong's Inside Java 2 Platform Security, Architecture, API Design and Implementation. With the increasing use of Java in many different situations, books like this will only increase in importance - so learn more about now, versus later. Inside Java 2 Platform Security, Architecture, API Design and I author Li Gong pages 262 publisher Addison-Wesley, 06/1999 rating 9/10 reviewer Jayakrishnan ISBN 0201310007 summary A very useful book for anyone who wants to get an in-depth knowledge of Java 2 security architecture.

The book begins with an introduction to computer and network security fundamentals. The different types of attacks, available defense mechanisms, current security models, cryptography, authentication, etc., are introduced. Chapter 2 brings you up to date with what has been happening 'til JDK 1.1 The different components of the Java security architecture such as the byte code verifier, security manager, the restrictive sandbox, signed applets, and the strong typing, etc. are briefly described.

Chapter Three, 73 pages long, explains the inner details of JDK 1.2 security architecture that provides for flexible, extensible and fine-grained access control. The important classes and their relationships are explained. Of these classes the key methods are explored in detail.

Chapter 4 and 5 talk about deployment and customization of the security architecture. Deployment involves creating policy files and using tools like keytool, policytool, jarsigner and customization involves creating new permission types and configuring the security policy. Also here you learn about how to migrate from the JDK 1.1 based security managers to JDK 1.2 based. Certain good coding practices for writing secure Java objects form the topic of Chapter 6- --Object Security. JDK 1.2 also introduces some new classes for the same SignedObject, SealedObject and GuardedObject

The generic crypto APIs of JDK along with the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) form the Java Cryptographic Architecture which provides platform independent cryptography APIs. Chapter 7, Programming cryptography introduces the classes of the JCE. The final chapter looks into the future. Security features that are being investigated for the future releases are discussed and since the author is also the chief Java security architect, this section resembles a trailer of what is coming.

This book is for developers who are very much interested in the inner details of the JDK 1.2 architecture and system administrators who have to configure the system security policy.

Developers will in particular enjoy the discussions where the author explains the rationale behind the design of key classes and algorithms of significant methods. We get to know what were the alternatives present, from where the ideas came, and why this particular one was chosen. For example, you need only private keys to create signatures and public keys to verify them, but then why does CodeSource deal with only certificates and not public keys?

This book is not just theory; it is also rich with examples. You will learn how to create a new Permission type, use the classes of the cryptographic package or use the tools that comes with JDK, just to name a few.

Sys Admins will benefit a lot from Chapter 4, which teaches how to configure and deploy policy files. The technical depth is one of the strong points of this book but it can be overwhelming to people who would just like to get an update on what all is new. But then you can skip the sections that get into the details and benefit a lot from the breadth of knowledge that is covered. There is also an excellent bibliography.

JDK 1.2 is feature rich. The author has done a commendable job in making all of this easy to comprehend by giving a number of real-world code examples. This book is definitely not for the newbie, but for someone who knows the language and the environment, so the book could have done without the section on how to install JDK or it would have been more appropriate in the appendix. I would recommend reading the Java Security trail (http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/security1.2/index.html) of the Java Tutorial before reading this book.

On the negative side, there are syntax errors in some of the Java code given. The keyword "class" is omitted in the definition of a class. Considering the fact that this book comes "from the source", this is a serious error.

The security model that came with the original version of Java was the very restrictive sandbox model. JDK 1.1 gave us the feature of signing applets. JDK 1.2 brings a whole lot of new features and tools which allows flexible and configurable security policies. One of the factors that hinder the adoption of new technology is complexity. Books like these, which clearly explain how to use it, will definitely make the process of using these security features a lot painless.

Finally, the author gives a tip to improve the security features on MS-Windows--- restrict all applications to be 100% Java code. Till we reach that golden era, I will stick with Robert T. Morris' three golden rules to ensure computer security: do not own a computer, do not power it on, and do not use it :)

Pick this book up at ThinkGeek.

If you click the read-more link below you will be treated to an excerpt from our own Jon Katz's new book Geeks. Regular readers know my aversion to paper books, but I've read this one, and it's worth your while. Katz explores Geek culture by following a couple of geek kids from Idaho to Chicago. It's a true story, and Jesse and Eric are Slashdot regulars. We don't feel right writing a review of the book since we'd be sadly biased, so read this chapter, and make up your own minds about it... but I hope you enjoy it. This is a story that I think many of us will understand.

Geek (noun) [probably from English dialect geek, geck fool, from Low German geck, from Middle Low German; First appeared 1914]: 1. a person often of an intellectual bent who is disapproved of. 2. a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake.

-Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Computer geek n. 1. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black vs. white-on-black usage of "nigger." A computer geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in larval stage. Also called turbo nerd, turbo geek. See also propeller head, clustergeeking, geek out, wannabee, terminal junkie, spod, weenie. 2. Some self-described computer geeks use this term in a positive sense and protest sense (this seems to have been a post-1990 development).

-Eric S. Raymond,

The New Hacker's Dictionary, third edition

Geek: A person who, for one reason or another, is considered socially unacceptable by the person speaking. A computer geek is someone who is socially inept but expert with computers. As computers become more important in the average person's life, this term becomes more often a compliment than an insult.
-Mike McConnell,

High-Tech Dictionary

Geek: Short for computer geek, an individual with a passion for computers, to the exclusion of other normal human interests. Depending on the context, it can be used in either a derogatory or affectionate manner. Basically, geek and nerd are synonymous.

-Webopedia

Geek: Encarta Encyclopedia found no matches for: GEEK

-Microsoft Encarta Encylopedia, 1998 edition

Geek: A member of the new cultural elite, a pop-culture-loving, techno-centered Community of Social Discontents. Most geeks rose above a suffocatingly unimaginative educational system, where they were surrounded by obnoxious social values and hostile peers, to build the freest and most inventive culture on the planet: the Internet and World Wide Web. Now running the systems that run the world.

Tendency toward braininess and individuality, traits that often trigger resentment, isolation, or exclusion. Identifiable by a singular obsessiveness about the things they love, both work and play, and a well-honed sense of bitter, even savage, outsider humor. Universally suspicious of authority. In this era, the Geek Ascension, a positive, even envied term. Definitions involving chicken heads no longer apply.

-Jon Katz,

Jackson Township, New York
June 1999

INTRODUCTION:

THE GEEK ASCENSION

WHERE DOES it begin, this sense of being the Other? It can come early on, when you find yourself alone in your childhood bedroom, raising tropical fish, composing a poem, writing code, meeting friends mostly online, playing by yourself. Or in middle school, when the jocks turn on you and you pray you will get through gym class alive.

Or maybe it comes in high school, where you find yourself on the outside looking in, getting jostled in the halls, watching TV on weekends while everyone else goes to parties.

After some time, there's an accumulation of slights, hurts, realizations: You don't have a lot of friends; other kids avoid you; you're not good at sports or interested in shopping; the teachers seem to like their other students a lot more. There are few school activities you want to be part of, even if you could. The things you like aren't the same things most other people like.

The alienation is sometimes mild, sometimes savage. Sometimes it lasts a few years, sometimes a lifetime. It depends on where you live, who your parents are, whether there's a single teacher who appreciates you, whether you can cling to one or two friends, how well you can hide your brains.

Increasingly, your lifeline is technology. Computers and the amazing power they give you-to install a new operating system, to confide in like-minded allies three time zones away, to slay tormentors on the screen even if you can't do much about the ones at school-are your passion. They give you skills and competence, or distraction and escape, or direction and stature, or all of the above.

Eventually, many of the people who call themselves geeks report a coming out, not unlike coming to terms with being gay or lesbian: a moment when you realize and acknowledge who you are and who you're never going to be.

"One day in my sophomore year," a kid named Jason e-mailed me, "I was sitting in the school cafeteria watching the kids at the other tables laugh and have fun, plotting how I was going to get home early and start playing Quake. And I suddenly got it. I was a geek. I was never going to be like them. They were never going to let me in. So I came out as a geek. . . . I can't say life has been a breeze, but after that, it was okay."

Some say they get comfortable with themselves afterward; many never do. But however long it lasts, at some point somewhere, you brush against this outsiderness-among geeks, it's the one common rite of passage. A few carry the scars around with them for good. Sometimes they hurt themselves. Sometimes-rarely-they hurt other people. But if you're lucky, you move past it, perhaps to a college where Others go. You find a community, a place where you're welcome.

For the first time, you're important, vital, on the inside; a citizen of an amazing new nation. You can instantly connect with the others like you. Being smart isn't a liability; it's usually the only thing that matters.

Whether you're a programmer or Web designer or developer, an artist, help-desk geek, or tech supporter, a filmmaker or writer, you're a part of the Geek Ascension. People need you. They hire you. They can't afford to be contemptuous. Life isn't a breeze, but it sure is different. You have an open invitation to what is, at the moment, the greatest party in the world: the Internet and the World Wide Web.

THE RISE OF THE GEEKS

I CAME face to face with the Geek Ascension at an ugly suburban Chicago cable-TV studio on a bitter winter morning in 1996, toward the end of a contentious tour for my first nonfiction book.

Virtuous Reality was a collection of essays about kids, culture, violence, and morality, a loosely focused defense of screen culture-the Net, the Web, TV, movies-against the politicians, journalists, and academics banging the drums, then and now, about the looming collapse of civilization. It was a position, therefore, that had prompted weeks of media sparring with members of the so-called intelligentsia and representatives of groups that had decency in their titles. I was the degenerate, the anti-Christ, a champion of porn and perversion.
The tour was winding down, thankfully, when I arrived for this predawn breakfast show. There was hardly anyone in the building but the anchorman, a handful of cameramen, the control-room techs, a producer, my book-tour escort, and me. Outside, the wind was howling; my fingers, though I was gripping a cup of coffee, were numb.

Watching the monitor in the green room, I saw Brian, the anchor, launch into the by-now-familiar tease of the segment as the inevitably frenetic producer guided me through makeup, prepped me for about ninety seconds, hustled me into the studio.

"Here's an interesting point of view," I heard the anchor say cheerfully just before I walked onto the set. "A former TV producer-and a father-who says the Internet isn't a dangerous place for your kids!"
I was wearing out, worn down by weeks of arguing. I was sick of myself, of the blah-blah coming out of my interviewers' mouths and my own. I was even more sick of people like this Parents for Decency flak, on the phone from Washington, D.C., where spokesmen for decency all seem to be.

"Just last week, a nine-year-old girl was lured into a park by some pervert online and raped," she announced in professional alarm. "Is that the kind of thing Mr. Katz wants us to ignore?"

Brian appeared stunned. "That sounds awful," he said, suddenly less friendly. "What about that?"

"Brian," I snapped, "it seems so dumb for us to be sitting here in a TV studio-with all the junk that you people put on the air all day, from soap operas to freeway shootings-and have to actually argue that the Internet isn't a dangerous place. Kids are more likely to have planes fall on their heads than to get hurt on the Net."

Brian and I were both startled to hear the sound of applause coming from somewhere in the cavernous studio. Brian flushed, hesitated, then plowed on. Shocked, I looked around. Two cameramen were standing right on the studio floor clapping. So were a handful of techs inside the darkened control room, nodding at me, smiling and waving, giving me the thumbs-up, and yelping, "Yeah!" and "Awright!"

In a past life, I'd been executive producer of The CBS Morning News. I knew how CBS management-or I, for that matter-would have reacted to such an outburst. Blood would have been spilled.

In fact, Brian was livid when we went to a commercial. "The bastards, I can't believe they did that."

"Jeez," I said, still startled but pleased. "How do they get away with that? I would think they'd get fired."

"Are you kidding?" Brian muttered through gritted teeth. "We just built a new digitalized control room and automated camera system. We're still working out the bugs. How could we fire those guys? Nobody else could possibly run the damn place!"

On the way out, I stopped by the control room. Three kids were sitting at the blinking, beeping, spaceship-like console, beaming at me and high-fiving each other. They had scraggly longish hair and were wearing T-shirts-one Star Trek, one that said HACKERS DO WANT SEX! and one that really caught my attention: GEEK AND PROUD.

I made the rounds, shaking hands, collecting good wishes and slaps on the back like a candidate working the crowd. Nothing remotely like this had happened on any of my previous book tours. I liked it. "Hey thanks," I said. "I appreciate that. I hope you don't get in trouble."

The three of them snorted. "Hey, no sweat," one answered. "We're safe in here, man. There are a hundred pretty-boy anchors they could hire. And they change general managers every other month. But we've been here for two years. We set this control room up. The cameras, graphics, and commercial scripts are fully computerized, all digitalized. We worked up the programs that run the studio. We are the only irreplaceable people in the building. Welcome to the geek kingdom."

During the tour, I'd been filing daily Virtuous Reality book tour reports to Hotwired, the website I wrote for. Readers followed my travels, critiqued my press interviews, showed up at book signings, called in to chat on talk shows. So I reported my encounter with the control-room crew in a column headlined "The Rise of the Geeks." The next day, I had hundreds of e-mail messages from people all over the country, proudly claiming the name for themselves.

It was eye-opening. The definition of "geek" no longer had anything to do with biting the heads off chickens. These self-proclaimed geeks invited me to visit their offices, studios, and homes. "We run the systems that run the world," one e-mailed me from New York. "Until recently, most CEOs wouldn't have let us in the door. Now we sit next to the CEOs. We are the only people who know how the place operates, how to retrieve files, how to keep the neural systems running. We are the indispensables."

I'd been inducted, suddenly, into a previously secret society. Wherever I went-Wisconsin Public Radio, CNN, radio stations in L.A. and San Francisco-these mostly young men in T-shirts, more secure and cheerful than almost everybody around them, came up and introduced themselves, patted me on the back, offered to take me out for pizza, warned me about nasty anchors and interviewers. They were all walking billboards for Star Wars, various ISPs, Beavis and Butt-Head, diverse websites and computer games.

As I learned more, I wrote several additional Hotwired columns about geekhood, and e-mail responses poured in by the metric ton. They flowed in for months. I'm still getting them.

THEIRS IS an accidental empire. Almost no one foresaw the explosion of the Internet or its mushrooming importance. "The Internet's pace of adoption eclipses all other technologies that preceded it," a U.S. Commerce Department report declared in 1998. "Radio was in existence thirty-eight years before fifty million people tuned in; TV took thirteen years to reach that benchmark. Sixteen years after the first PC [personal computer] kit came out, fifty million people were using one. Once it was opened to the general public, the Internet crossed that line in four years." Although most Americans had never even heard the term a generation ago, the United States will have more than 133 million Net users this year, according to the Computer Industry Almanac.

Historians can point to other periods of astonishing technological upheaval-the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution-but they're hard pressed to find a similar convergence of a particular subculture and an explosive economic boom. Tech industries are growing so quickly that almost anything you publish about them is instantly dated. A finding like the American Electronics Association's 1997 estimate that the U.S. high-tech industry employed 4.3 million workers is inaccurate as this is being written and will be more inaccurate when it's read.

But the sense of limitless prospects for geeks is confirmed by the job market itself. At the beginning of 1998, the Commerce Department reported that about 190,000 U.S. information technology jobs were going begging at any given time, and that close to 100,000 new ones would be created annually for the next decade. The three fastest-growing occupations over the next several years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics added, will be computer scientists (who can work as theorists, researchers, or inventors), computer engineers (who work with the hardware or software of systems design and development, including programming or networking), and systems analysts (who solve specific computer problems, and adapt systems to individual and or corporate needs).

Geeks, then, are literally building the new global economy, constructing and expanding the Internet and the World Wide Web as well as maintaining it. They're paid well for their skills: Starting salaries for college grads with computer degrees average $35,000 to $40,000, says the National Association of Colleges and Employers, but the demand is so intense that many geeks forego or abandon college. Elite geek-incubators like Caltech, Stanford, and MIT complain that some of their best students abandon graduate school for lucrative positions in technology industries. Top-tier recruits not only command high salaries, but the prospect of stock-option wealth before they're thirty.

A society that desperately needs geeks, however, does not have to like them. In fact geeks and their handiwork generate considerable wariness and mistrust. Historians of technology like Langdon Winner have written that throughout history, widespread unease about science and technology has amounted almost to a religious upheaval.

Notice the moral outrage present in so much contemporary media coverage and political criticism of technology. Critics lambaste overdoses of TV-watching, violent video games, and porn on the Net; they warn of online thieves, perverts, vandals, and hate-mongers; they call for V-chips, blocking and filtering software, elaborate ratings systems. They even want the Ten Commandments posted, like reassuring sprigs of wolfbane, in public schools.

If we are outraged and frightened by the spread of new technology, how are we supposed to feel about the new techno-elite busily making it all possible? "Why do I get this feeling that they-all of them, politicians, teachers, bosses-hate us more than ever?"

e-mailed Rocket Roger in the week after the Columbine High School tragedy.

Not surprisingly, geeks can harbor a xenophobic streak of their own. Geeks often see the workplace, and the world, as split into two camps-those who get it and those who don't. The latter are usually derided as clueless "suits," irritating obstacles to efficiency and technological progress. "We make the systems that the suits screw up," is how one geek described this conflict.

The suits, in turn, view geeks as antisocial, unpredictable, and difficult, though they need them too badly to do much about it. They resent the way geeks' strong bargaining power exempts them from having to mainstream, to "grow up," the way previous generations did when they entered the workforce.

Why shouldn't they have autonomy and power? geeks respond; they can be unnervingly arrogant. Geeks know a lot of things most people don't know and can do things most people are only beginning to understand.

Until now, nerds and geeks (and their more conventional predecessors, the engineers), marginalized as unglamorous, have never had great status or influence. But the Internet is the hottest and hippest place in American culture, and the whole notion of outsiderness has been up-ended in a world where geeks are uniquely-and often solely-qualified to operate the most complex and vital systems, and where the demand for their work will greatly exceed their ability to fulfill it for years to come.

For the first time ever, it's a great time to be a geek.

DEFINING GEEKHOOD

WHAT, EXACTLY, is a geek?

After years of trying to grapple with the question, I still find it largely unanswerable. Continually meeting and corresponding with geeks has made my idea broader than the stereotype of the asocial, techno-obsessed loner.

For one thing, you can hardly be a geek all by yourself. The online world is one giant community comprised of hundreds of thousands of smaller ones, all involving connections to other people. The geekiest hangouts on the Net and Web-the open source and free software movement sites-are vast, hivelike communities of worker geeks patching together cheap and efficient new software that they distribute freely and generously to one another. That's not something loners could or would do.

In fact, the word "geek" is growing so inclusive as to be practically undefinable. I've met skinny and fat geeks, awkward and charming ones, cheerful and grumpy ones-but never a dumb one.

Still, in the narrowest sense, a contemporary geek is a computer-centered obsessive, one of the legions building the infrastructure of the Net and its related programs and systems. Geeks are at its white-hot epicenter.

Beyond them are the brainy, single-minded outsiders drawn to a wide range of creative pursuits-from raves to Japanese animation-who live beyond the contented or constrained mainstream and find passion and joy in what they do. Sometimes they feel like and call themselves geeks.

The truth is, geeks aren't like other people. They've grown up in the freest media environment ever. They talk openly about sex and politics, debate the future of technology, dump on revered leaders, challenge the existence of God, and are viscerally libertarian. They defy government, business, or any other institution to shut down their freewheeling culture.

And how could anyone? Ideas are free, literally and figuratively. Geeks download software, movies, and music without charge; they never pay for news or information; they swap and barter. Increasingly, they live in a digital world, one much more compelling than the one that has rejected or marginalized them. Being online has liberated them in stunning ways. Looks don't matter online. Neither does race, the number of degrees one has or doesn't have, or the cadence of speech. Ideas and personalities, presented in their purest sense, have a different dimension.

Geeks know-perhaps better than anyone-that computers aren't a substitute for human contact, for family and friends, for neighborhoods and restaurants and theaters. But cyberspace is a world, albeit a virtual one. Contact and community mean somewhat different things there, but they are real nonetheless.

THE ROOTS of the term are important. At the turn of the century, "geek" had a very particular meaning-geeks were the destitute nomads who bit the heads off chickens and rats at circuses and carnivals in exchange for food or a place to sleep.

For nearly seventy years, the term was unambiguously derisive, expanding to label freaks, oddballs, anyone distinctly nonconformist or strange.

But in the 1980s, a number of sometimes outcast or persecuted social groups in America-blacks, gays, women, nerds-began practicing language inversion as a self-defense measure. They adopted the most hateful words used against them as a badge of pride.

Rappers began singing about "niggas" and gay activists started calling themselves "queers." A motorcycle group called Dykes on Bikes roared proudly at the head of gay pride parades. Young women invoked "grrrl" power. The noxious terms became the coolest-a cultural trick that, for their targets, seemed to remove the words' painful sting. Similarly, as hacker and writer Eric Raymond suggests, in the nineties the word "geek" evoked newer, more positive qualities.

As the Internet began to expand beyond its early cadre of hackers, some like-minded tenants in Santa Cruz, Austin, San Francisco, and Ann Arbor began dubbing their communal homes "geek houses." Formed at a time when the wide-bandwidth phone lines necessary to explore the Net were expensive and rare, these enclaves became techno-communities, sharing sometimes pirated T-1 lines and other requirements. The bright students they attracted used technology not to isolate themselves, as media stereotypes would have it, but to make connections.

The geek houses didn't last long. Faster and cheaper modems, ISDN and T-1 lines and other useful developments for data transmission became ubiquitous, spread to offices and university campuses, and made techno-communities almost instantly obsolete.

But the term kept spreading, picked up by the smart, obsessive, intensely focused people working to build the Internet and the World Wide Web-programmers, gamers, developers, and designers-and by their consumers and allies beyond. Geek chic-black-rimmed glasses, for instance-became a fashion trend. Bill Gates was a corporate geek, a category inconceivable a decade earlier, and no one was laughing. As the Web became culturally trendy, the image of its pale and asocial founders faded. Now it's amusing to see the term "geek" springing up almost everywhere-on TV shows (you know you've arrived when a network launches a primetime series called Freaks and Geeks), in advertising, on T-shirts and baseball caps. And appropriated by people who wouldn't have given a real geek the time of day just a few years ago.

People e-mail me all the time asking if they are geeks.
In this culture, I figure people have the right to name themselves; if you feel like a geek, you are one. But there are some clues: You are online a good part of the time. You feel a personal connection with technology, less its mechanics than its applications and consequences. You're a fan of The Simpsons and The Matrix. You saw Phantom Menace opening weekend despite the hype and despite Jar Jar. You are obsessive about pop culture, which is what you talk about with your friends or coworkers every Monday.

You don't like being told what to do, authority being a force you see as not generally on your side. Life began for you when you got out of high school, which, more likely than not, was a profoundly painful experience. You didn't go to the prom, or if you did, you certainly didn't feel comfortable there. Maybe your parents helped you get through, maybe a teacher or a soulmate.

Now, you zone out on your work. You solve problems and puzzles. You love to create things just for the kick of it. Even though you're indispensable to the company that's hired you, it's almost impossible to imagine yourself running it. You may have power of your own now-a family, money-yet you see yourself as one who never quite fits in. In many ways, geekdom is a state of mind, a sense of yourself in relation to the world that's not easily rewritten.

THE UR-GEEK AND HIS TRIBE

PONDERING GEEKNESS and its meaning, I made an excursion to Berkeley last year to put the question to somebody I trusted to know: Louis Rossetto, founder of Wired magazine.

The trip was a pilgrimage and an excuse. Louis was a geek in every sense of the word as I understood it, although not without his considerable contradictions: He lived and worked outside the mainstream, eschewed suits and "suits," was short on patience and social skills but passionate about the power of digital technology to reshape the world. I had written for Louis for five happy years, until he lost control of his magazine in a bitter financial wrangle and Wired was acquired by the Condé Nast Publishing Group.

I met him in the early nineties when I was media critic for Rolling Stone and got an unexpected e-mail: Louis was coming to New York on a business trip and invited me to dinner. There was no small talk of any sort in the message, no chat, no preamble. What he sent was a long and thoughtful invitation to write for Wired-a summons, really-accompanied by a wonderful screed about the Internet blasting away corrupt Eastern media institutions and replacing them with a new culture in which nothing would be the same-not words, images, businesses, or institutions.

A few years earlier, Louis had come out of nowhere-Amsterdam, in fact-to peddle his notion for a magazine about the computer culture. In Europe, he'd published a forerunner, a magazine called Language Technology that then became Electric Word. Now he thought America was ripe for such a publication, an idea almost universally rejected until Wired eventually made its debut and hit the magazine industry like a nuke.

Our dinner, Louis proposed, would take place at a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue. This was a surprise; media moguls that I'd dined with usually preferred Orso or, if truly anxious to signal their importance, had sandwiches brought into the office. I e-mailed somebody I knew at Wired to ask what Louis was like.

"Well," my friend replied, "we just had our annual Election Day meeting in which Louis calls the whole staff together and urges us all not to vote, so that we won't be supporting a useless, outdated, two-party political system."

I fell in love.

When I bought some copies of the magazine, I was further mesmerized. The cover was a luminous orange; some strange purple graphic blotted out most of the text on the contents page; and an incomprehensible quote about the future was sprawled across a staggeringly expensive four-page color spread up front.

Everyone I knew in New York, including editors at Rolling Stone, New York, and GQ, jeered at Wired. It was ugly. It was silly. It was, well, geeky. And doomed. Computers would never grow much beyond a small group of nerds.

The middle-class, whose dollars advertisers lusted for, would never embrace computers; thus nobody would ever make money with a computer magazine. Kids would never read it. Or, only kids would read it. It was incomprehensible, indulgent crap. The Net was a fringe medium, a toy, a fad. Wired was a brutal rebuke to the ingrown, narcissistic media culture of New York, where no story could be more important or interesting than the people who covered it.

Inside Wired, the stories were text-heavy and surprising, sometimes brilliant features about the wiring of the world, sometimes rambling manifestos about how the Internet would one day transform all of civilization.

The magazine violated every publishing precept and was almost immediately ragingly successful. It launched a counterculture that elbowed the increasingly resentful rock-and-rolling baby boomers aside for good and created a parallel nation, almost entirely constructed and inhabited by the people called geeks.

Intrigued, I sat in a Greek coffee shop and watched the door for the arrival of a man who had described himself as pale, skinny, and rumpled. A half hour or so after the appointed time, a pale, skinny, and rumpled man wearing a worn black sweatshirt that said Wired in barely visible letters, with the hood up over his head, came in and scanned the tables. My first thought was that this was the Unabomber; he rather resembled the hooded visage on the "wanted" posters being circulated by the FBI.

Louis sat down and ordered some tea. He wasn't hungry.

He talked like a Trotskyite, all fierce idealism, taking off on amazing riffs about history and politics, but also making it clear that he wanted to make a lot of money. He imagined a Wired media empire that would trumpet news of the coming revolution all over the world. For some reason, he took it as a given that I was potentially a kindred spirit who just didn't get it-yet.

He wanted the old media, which he reviled and castigated continuously, to love Wired and appreciate what he had done. (He was always astonished and hurt when they didn't.) He hated Wall Street; he wanted Wall Street to give him money. He had sometimes brilliant, sometimes barely fathomable visions for the future. Some of them came to pass.

A radical, even a revolutionary, it was easy to picture Louis tossing bricks outside the Bastille or running through the streets of Moscow with the Cossacks in hot pursuit. Yet he was approachable, too, at least if he found you interesting. If he didn't, he wasted no time in letting you know it.

The news about computers, he announced, wasn't about money, but ideas-how they could be manipulated, reproduced, stored, represented, combined, and connected. Computers and the Net would transform everything; nobody and no institution would remain untouched-not scientists, academics, artists, politicians, journalists, homemakers, doctors, lawyers, or schoolkids. Computing was no longer the sole province of nerds and engineers but also the new locus of creative people-poets, painters, novelists, critics. These, he said, were the geeks. It was probably the first time I remember hearing the word outside the context of freaks and carnivals, and I was momentarily startled. But it was just a word, a passing reference, and it didn't surface again for a while.

Computing had always been seen as a scientific process, Louis went on, but that was shortsighted. Networked computers were a medium, a world, a nation even-a new thing, a new method, a new process. Imagine words and images as fluid, mutable, nonlinear; all broken down into data, bits, atoms; all transmitted freely around the world to anyone with the right machine.

He pulled out several articles, some reprints of Net writings, early copies and prototypes of Wired and tossed them all at me. He peppered me with questions, harangued me with diatribes. I'd rarely met a magazine editor with such raw enthusiasm; the ones I knew tended to talk about marketing plans and demographics.

We talked about the Net and about Louis's idea of a civil society. We talked about Elvis and Thomas Paine. One thing you can be sure of, he told me, as he picked up the check before I had finished eating: the media I'd worked in were done, over. Newspapers were tired, stuffy, aging. Network TV was finished. The slick magazines, all of which featured the same celebrities on the same covers, were dinosaurs. None of them had anything to say to the young, to the future.

Was I coming or not? he asked abruptly.

Where? I stammered, thinking for a second that he meant San Francisco.

"Along," he said.

"Sure."

Good, he said, because otherwise, a media critic like me would soon have nothing to write about.

He tossed his backpack over his shoulder and got up. He was sorry he had to go, he said, but he had to get up early the next morning to get out to Bell Labs in New Jersey. They were doing a lot of neat stuff.

For the next few years, I had more fun than I'd ever had in my life writing for Wired, then for its website Hotwired as well.
In stunning contrast to the from-the-top-down world of Eastern media, where publishers and editors huddle constantly to decide what they want writers to write, Louis was a profoundly libertarian, if undisciplined, editorial genius. He overreached, alienated, and offended. But he also captured and advanced a revolutionary culture.

What happened to Wired was almost mythical, of course, following the inexorable march of modern American capitalism and its Darwinian laws. Louis overextended his revolution. After building the magazine, he hired platoons of brilliant geeks to develop the ambitious and expensive Hotwired. He launched British and Japanese editions of the magazine, followed by a book-publishing division and an ill-fated and short-lived TV show.

In July 1996, Wired offered its stock to Wall Street. The IPO failed to attract enough investors, and was withdrawn. The company that had defined the digital revolution so spectacularly was firmly rebuffed by the existing order. And the man who had helped spark the revolution was soon back on the outside-the traditional geek fate. Louis eventually lost control of everything in the Wired empire and retreated to the Berkeley Hills with his wife, Wired publisher Jane Metcalfe, where, in the next few years they had two children, Zoe and Orson.

Louis and I stayed in touch via e-mail. We never talked about the financial or legal maneuverings, but it was clear he was devastated by the loss of Wired, uncharacteristically depressed, in pain, uncertain about what to do next.

Condé Nast, the publisher of slick, sweet-smelling magazines like Glamour and Details, quickly purged Wired of the ideas, arguments, and rhetoric that had been the hallmarks of Louis and his strange band of cyber-theorists. If the new Wired was intelligent and professional, it also seemed bland, focused on celebrity, business, and machinery. It became the very kind of medium that Louis had always railed against. Not long afterward, Hotwired was also sold off, to the Net company Lycos.

I'd retreated back to Rolling Stone before Wired's new editors had a chance to toss me out, which they clearly were eager to do. Louis had e-mailed me his regrets when he'd heard I'd left.

Publicly, he had vanished, at least in the media sense. He was rumored to be involved in the legal and financial maneuverings over the sale of the magazine. He had refused to say anything to the press.

I felt almost superstitious about not starting this book without his input and his blessing, however. Though he'd hardly given an interview since his retreat, he agreed to see me and e-mailed elaborate directions to his house.

Louis's aerie proved accessible only by footpath. His son, Orson, was running around with his nanny, while workmen banged and hammered at the residence, which hung above San Francisco Bay. Louis made a cup of tea, then sat down on a couch.

He looked fit, but saddened, the pain visible in his eyes. But he was warm and welcoming. When I told him about my book and asked how he defined a geek, he grew instantly animated, leaning forward and waving his hands as he always did when captivated by an idea.

My own sense of a geek, I prompted, centered around the idea of alienation. That was part of what fascinated me, not the technology, but the seemingly common experience of life outside the mainstream, life with resentment and some pain. It seemed a thread linking the residents of the burgeoning Geek Kingdom.

Louis had little time for emotional deconstruction. Alienation was part of life for him and people like him, the ticket you paid to get in, neither surprising nor, to him, particularly interesting.

Class used to be about race, gender, social standing-old ideas, he said. Geeks were involved with the new ones. "The new cultural class has no physical demands or restrictions," he said. "There are music geeks and dance geeks. Geekdom is evolving. Anybody who is obsessed with a topic and becomes completely one with it . . . whether it's computers, music, or art-geeks come into that. Geeks is sometimes about technology but mostly, it's about brains, and about being resented for being smart."

He told me a story about the first time he met Bill Atkinson, "one of the people who worked on the Macintosh with Steve Jobs back at the beginning. He engineered the interface. I met him in Amsterdam when he was going around promoting a new Apple product called Hypercard. After our interview, we went out to the center of town, where we sat at a street café and watched the amazing people go by. He'd never been to Amsterdam before.

"He was there with a colleague, another nerd. And suddenly they started talking about calling home to find out what was on Star Trek; the first episode of the second series was debuting that night. And it struck me: these guys don't just make technology because they're paid for it, they do it because they like it, and they like it because of how it works and because of what it makes possible. They like it because they find aspects of it really cool.

"All geeks have this magpie sensibility, right up to and including Gates," he went on, warming up now. "Jobs says 'insanely great,' and Gates says 'really neat,' and what they both really mean is that they like the ingenuity, smartness, cleverness, intelligence, just plain coolness of stuff."

Then, lapsing into the sixties' jargon that marked his own youth, he said, "Geeks are cats who dig a special kind of cool. It's the newest cool, the cool of the new-and there's nothing sleeker, shinier, and newer than the human race's latest scientific intuitions that alter the universe."

Most of the editors and publishers I knew didn't want to talk about geeks at all. Louis would talk about them forever. "Because they revel in redefining what's possible, they are inherently revolutionaries," he went on, getting excited. "They live to hallucinate new visions, to invent the next big thing, to prove the smug adherents of the status quo wrong. For the longest time, they were unappreciated, servants to bureaucrats and politicians in whatever organization they were part of, a benign cult relegated to the margins of social respectability. But in a world where the human mind is the most precious node on the planet's nervous system, pure meritocracy is not only possible and desirable, but inevitable."

A few years earlier, a vintage Louis rant like this would have been emblazoned, along with suitably arresting and strange artwork, across several pages of Wired. But that morning, the only audience was me, sitting alone with him in his living room.

There had always been a biblical element to Louis's saga-he'd screwed up, and was therefore condemned to wander in the desert. He might never enter the promised land, but the young people he'd led out of bondage would cross over.
AND THEY were having a marvelous time, it seemed.

As responses to the geek columns continued to roll in, I heard from a Texas minister whose website allowed his parishioners to give him feedback on his sermons, and from an Alaskan Inuit who ran her tribe's computer operations. Programmers, gamers, designers, and systems operators weighed in with their tales of vindication, of a new order unfolding. "We're building the pyramids of tomorrow," wrote JameB2. "Ain't it cool?"

They thrilled to the great reversal: The suits were dependent on them. Let the gatekeepers and moral guardians cluck and caw about civilization crumbling. They loved their bold new world and were filled with passion and enthusiasm about it.

They also celebrated the experience of finding one another. They were almost painfully eager for community.

"The term 'geek' and the terribly powerful social and emotional stigma that accompanies the term had me running from it,"

e-mailed Doug Riordan, an online developer. "Now I find myself embracing what I am. I am my own geek."

One response stood out, from another correspondent who'd become his own geek. I happened to be online late at night, sorting through the geek outpouring, when an e-message appeared from a small town in southern Idaho. E-mail sometimes has a peculiar chemistry all its own. Instantly transfixed, I had the sense a writer sometimes gets when he's stumbled across the very thing he's been looking for.

Here was someone-a kid barely out of high school, Jesse Dailey-expressing surprise that his own experience with geekhood was so widespread, even universal; he'd been stunned to recognize his travails-and also his triumphs-in my columns.

He'd written to tell me about a Geek Club that a sympathetic teacher had founded for Jesse and a few of his friends, and how the club had quickly become an institution at their rural school. The idea of a Geek Club in Middleton, Idaho, amazed me in itself. But I also responded to the kid's tone; his mixture of vulnerability, pride, and defiance.

I e-mailed him back and asked him to tell me more about himself.

He was a working-class geek who had done almost everything it was possible to do to and with a computer, and who'd graduated from high school a year earlier, Jesse wrote. He was working unenthusiastically but diligently in a small computer shop in dreary Caldwell. He shared an apartment with a classmate and fellow Geek Club alumnus, Eric Twilegar, who had a different kind of dead-end job: selling computers at Office Max in nearby Nampa. They spent most of their lives online, Jesse said, gaming, trawling for music, downloading free software.

The Geek Club-and this was where the triumph came in-had changed his life, he said, given him a place to belong, a name to call himself. Caldwell wasn't a particularly rewarding or stimulating place to live, he acknowledged, but that mattered less than it used to: He lived on the Net, which alone formed the boundaries of his life.

I'd been planning to crisscross the country visiting a number of the geeks who had contacted me. But after exchanging a few

e-mails and phone calls with Jesse, I dropped that idea. I thought I'd found a better way to tell this story. I was soon on a plane to Idaho.

GEEKS

GEEK VOICES

July 1999

I'm the "Head Geek" at my high school, which means that I work for the tech administrator doing IT-type work and coordinating the other work-study nerds. As you may imagine, we catch a lot of flak from other students because we spend so much time and energy on the computers at school, not to mention our own machines at home. When this happens, one of the things we do to shrug it off is to joke that if they didn't have us to keep their computers running, the school would cease to function. This is not altogether untrue.

Anyway, I was thinking about this tonight and watching Dune, the movie (it's a lot better if you've read the book, by the way). It occurred to me that what is true of my school is also true of other organizations, from small businesses to the federal government. Just like the Fremen in the movie stopped the universe by stopping the export of Spice, if computer geeks stopped working en masse, the whole country, and even the world, would grind to a halt.

How would this work though? Could some teamsteresque union (hopefully sans Jimmy Hoffa) work together on things that are important to us? I figured you might be a good person to write to about this. You seem to get this kind of thing:).

-Aaron

Pick this book at ThinkGeek.

Contents of Book

Introduction: The Geek Ascension xvii

1. First Encounter 3
2. TheCave 16
3. The Geek Club 25
4. Leave Fast 37
5. The Trip 55
6. Thanksgiving 72
7. The More Things Change 81
8. Escape from Richton Park 98
9. The Dean 121
10. Into the Hellmouth 145
11. Don't Expect Miracles 180

The Letter 185
Finito 187
Epilogue 189

Well, we're finally closing in on the end of the show (Sleep! I can sleep again!). We're sending out as much streaming audio at mp3-2.thesync.com:8000 as we can - and hopefully we'll have video again by 3 PM EST. Jon Katz is here signing Geeks and will be on at noon EST. The show ends at 4 PM EST - so get it while you can. Update: 02/04 07:06 by CN : Footage from the Beanie awards is available over at TheSync now. See who won, who got hugged, and who got slagged. *grin*

Bringing a little competition to O'Reilly, this Manning Publications book Elements of Programming with Perl seems to be have struck a nerve with reviewer chromatic. Click below to find out how - and possibly add a new book to your library. Elements of Programming with Perl author Andrew L. Johnson pages 352 publisher Manning Publications, 09/1999 rating 8/10 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1884777805 summary New to programming, and think Perl may be up your alley? Andrew Johnson's excellent Elements of Programming with Perl will teach you both disciplines. What's the Purpose? Hundreds of books teach programming. Dozens of good books teach Perl. Where's a book for someone who wants to learn Perl and programming, at the same time? Thankfully, that's just what Elements of Programming with Perl does. What's Good? From the start, Johnson's explanations are clean and clear. It's obvious that he's polished his didactic style through years of real world teaching. Also from the start, good programming practices receive due emphasis. Though it's not specifically mentioned until chapter 9, Johnson advocates and demonstrates good program design through a mixture of Donald Knuth's Literate Programming and his own code tangling style (mingling documentation, design notes, and code in a single source file, similar to POD on steroids).

The teaching flow is logical and consistent, with chapters dividing the material into logical divisions. By the end of chapter flow, students should be capable of writing moderately complex programs. Subsequent chapters build on that foundation, and most provide a specific example program to tie things together. These programs all have a practical concentration.

On the Perl-specific side, Johnson does not shy away from recommending the copious Perl documentation, CPAN, other books like the Camel, and many other excellent resources. Much of the value of an education is learning where to go for further information.

What's not Great? Some of Johnson's focus is on mathematical applications, which may distract some readers. Also, this book may not serve as a future reference after you've become more comfortable with the language. Look to the Camel or Perl in a Nutshell for that -- Johnson concentrates on teaching the basics rather than documenting the iotas and tittles of internal Perl functions.

Finally, the example program in Chapter 19 may be hairy for novice programmers. Sit down in a very quiet room with a pad of note-paper and your beverage of choice. Consider it a final exam after you're familiar with everything preceding it.

Summary This is a good introduction to Perl, and a very good introduction to programming in general. Johnson promotes good habits and discipline. Elements may not sit on your shelf as a reference, but it will help you to become an effective programmer. It's a rare book that teaches as well as it informs, so take the plunge and teach yourself Perl and programming.

Pick this book up at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

• preface
• acknowledgments

1. Introductory elements
2. 1. Introduction
   2. Writing code
   3. Writing programs
3. Essential elements
4. 1. Data: types and variables
   2. Control structures
   3. Simple I/O and text processing
   4. Functions
   5. References and aggregate datastructures
   6. Documentation
5. Practical elements
6. 1. Regular expressions
   2. Working with text
   3. Working with lists
   4. More I/O
   5. Using modules
   6. Debugging
7. Advanced elements
8. 1. Modular programming
   2. Algorithms and data structuring
   3. Object-oriented programming and abstract data structures
   4. More OOP examples
   5. What's left?

• appendix A Command line switches
• appendix B Special variables
• appendix C Additional resources
• appendix D Numeric formats
• glossary
• index

Disgruntled Goat sent us a review of Intrusion Detection, a text sure to be of interest to all those working in organizations. The author is a former NSA employee and has written this book as a text to convince upper-level types of the need for security and actually paying attention to it. Click below to read more. Intrusion Detection author Rebecca Gurley Bace pages 339 publisher Macmillan Technical Publishing, o01/2000 rating 9/10 reviewer Disgruntled Goat, disgruntled_goat@hotmail.com ISBN 1-57870-185-6 summary Very good InfoSec handbook for suits and junior suits. The Scenario Security books, quite frankly, are pretty much a dime a dozen, most of which are written by people in IT field security. What immediately separates this book from the rest is the background of the author. Ms. Bace is an ex-government employee, spending 12 years in everyone's favorite spook organization, the National Security Agency. She led the Computer Misuse and Anonmaly Detection (CMAD) Research Program for six years at the NSA. She also collaborated on Computer Crime : A Crimefighter's Handbook by Dr. David Icove of the FBI. She also won the Distinguished Leadership Award in 1995 from the NSA.

What's Bad? This book is sort of dry reading. It's akin to reading college CS textbooks for pleasure. Or law books. What I didn't like is the fact that she wasn't real clear on the distinction of "hackers", nor how she describes them. She worries that "hackers" wish to "corrupt the trust process". And the focus for the book is not primarily for techies. It's designed for CIO smacking. Generally, if you're in an organization like mine, your CIO has very little technical background. So, good for CIO bashing.
And, it's $50 also.

What's Good? This is good if you're in a position where you need to convince management of security threats. It's also good for the kiddies who want to get an idea of what to look for when they're gunning for targets to disrupt.
What made this good for me was the fact that I could have points to show to management for InfoSec issues. I work in a hospital and we tend to attract a large amount of famous people as patients. If something damaging was leaked to the media about a famous person's medical condition that was potentially embarassing, we're looking at a good multi-million dollar lawsuit. This book isn't a by-the-book "How to protect your systems", but more of a book on what to safeguard, and how to detect patterns that may indicate patterns of unauthorized usage.
One of the things that I liked was the chapter on Legal Issues. One of the sections in the chapter was "What Real Cases Have Taught Us". It did a few page review on Mitnick's case, cut and dry. It shows that Shimomura was no rocket scientist, and with cooperation from the courts, you can bust almost anyone. But it did bring up several good points, such as obtaining court orders, how laws work, and how it can be considered evidence.

So What's In It For Me? If you're a script kiddie, probably nothing. But for those who are achin' to topple some network, this may be for you.

For those with functioning brains who have vested interests in InfoSec and protecting their organization from people who wish to do harm, and getting real security info, rather than from those half-assed "Security Experts" like JohnP, then pick this up.

Pick this book up at ThinkGeek.

Table of Contents

1. The History of Intrusion Detection
2. Concepts and Definitions
3. Information Sources
4. Analysis Schemes
5. Responses
6. Vulnerability Analysis: A Special Case
7. Technical Issues
8. Understanding the Real-World Challenge
9. Legal Issues
10. For Users
11. For Strategists
12. For Designers
13. Future Needs

Thanks to Jason Bennett for sending us a review of author Steve McConnell's lastest book After the Gold Rush. The book looks at the maturation of software development and what that means for us. Click below to read more. After the Gold Rush : Creating a True Profession of Software En author Steve McConnell pages 182 publisher Microsoft Press, 11/1999 rating 9/10 reviewer Jason Bennett ISBN 0735608776 summary One impression of the maturation of software development

Background

I've always been amazed that certain fields of endeavor exist in which many people prefer rank amateurs to trained professionals. I don't know many people who would choose their neighbor's kid to perform surgery, or hire a journalist to build a bridge, yet every day software development shops hire people whose only training is that they have read some book on Visual Basic or C++ or Perl, and put them to work on major projects. In fact, in the software development business, experience can sometimes be a liability (see the debate over immigrant programmers and age discrimination). Don't worry, you won't have to apply for a license to write code, and no one is going to confiscate your keyboard if you design your own web page. Accountability, however, is another story....

What's the book about? Steve McConnell, author of Code Complete , Software Project Survival Guide , and many other excellent books on software engineering, has returned. For those of you who might not be familiar with him, Steve is President and Chief Software Engineer of Construx Software, a software consulting firm based outside of Seattle. He's also the Editor in Chief of IEEE Software, and is generally regarded as one of today's best authorities on how to do software the right way. In After the Gold Rush, Steve gives his view of where the software world should go from here.

Currently, people don't know how to build software. Or, to be more accurate, there are good techniques out there to build software, but most people ignore them for one or more reasons, none of which hold up under close scrutiny. In addition, software development depends on death-march-style schedules, whereby programmers wreck themselves trying to get the software out the door at the appointed time. One major problem is that the developers are not trained in writing software in the first place. They are either trained in computer science, or some totally unrelated field. To compound this problem, very few if any continue their education in such areas as professional reading or training.

There is hope, however! Now that software development is moving out of its "gold rush" period, where the firstest gets the mostest, we can begin to develop software engineering as a profession. This means training people in engineering instead of science, and defining what it means to be a software engineer. Unfortunately, we have a lot of work to do both on the level of education, and in the mindset of today's software developers.

The third and final part of ATGR dwells on the future, especially as it relates to what these developments will mean for software developers of today. I'll spare you some of the suspense, and tell you that you won't be forced to be certified. Does anyone really care if your desktop clock was written by a true engineer? On the other hand, you bet I care that my air traffic control software and my medical scanning software and my car's control software were signed off on by someone who knows what he's doing. Licensing will be in software engineering what it is in other engineering fields: required in some areas, meaningless in others. In the end, however, software will be better for it.

What's Good?

Personally, I greatly enjoyed this book, mostly because it says what I've felt for some time now. The development of true software engineering will be akin to the development of true medicine. We will be able to move ourselves from the Age of Leeches to a more enlightened age where quality and process matter. McConnell makes a compelling case for why events will transpire in this way, and what the benefits are. No one thinks that these developments will be some sort of panacea or silver bullet, but when true software engineers, complete with a code of ethics and a professional organization, are responsible for developing software, there will exist an undercurrent of ownership and responsibility that currently does not exist.

What's Bad?

There's not much I didn't like about this book. If you develop software for a living, read this book. It describes where your industry is going in the next twenty years.

So What's In It For Me?

Maybe a lot, maybe nothing. If you develop your software purely as a hobby, these events won't directly effect you much. You will never need a license just to write code. If, however, you belong to that cadre of programmers that likes to think of themselves as "software engineers," or who would like to think of themselves as such, read this. You won't be forced to take a test tomorrow, but software development will never be the same.

Pick this up book up at ThinkGeek.

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  1. The Tar Pit
     1. Software Dinosaurs
     2. Fool's Gold
     3. Orphans Preferred
     4. Software Engineering Is Not Computer Science
  2. Prospecting
     1. After the Gold Rush
     2. Engineering a Profession
     3. Ptolemaic Reasoning
     4. Body of Knowledge
     5. Novum Organum
  3. Through the Pillars
     1. Stinking Badges
     2. Architects and Carpenters
     3. Hard Knocks
     4. The Professional's Code
     5. Alchemy
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index

ChrisCrosby was the first to notice that Hollywood Reporter has a story about our own Jon Katz' soon-to-be-released book "Geeks" being picked up by New Line Cinema for a feature film. Lawrence Bender (producer of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Good Will Hunting and more) and Laurie Bickford are producing. I'm really excited for Jon, and I just wanted to congratulate him: He's been working so hard on this, and the parts of the story that I've read have been really wonderful. And Hemos and I get cameos! Now since Bender has produced all of Quentin Tarantino's films, wouldn't it be fabulous if he directed this?Update: 01/14 04:09 by H : BTW, the actual book is available for pre-order through ThinkGeek. Check it out.

Well, with Christmas just around the corner, I'd like to thank Joe Mahoney for sending us a review of Can Reindeer Fly - The Science of Christmas, known in the States as The Physics of Christmas: From the Aerodynamics of Reindeer to the Thermodynamics of Turkey. It's an amusing little piece - and just in time for holiday shopping, I offer this blatant plug: Jon Katz' new book Geeks is ready for pre-order at ThinkGeek. It's really good, even though it's dedicated to two bozos who run this site. *grin* Can Reindeer Fly - The Science of Christmas author Roger Highfield pages 294 publisher Metro Books, 11/1998 rating 8/10 reviewer Joe Mahoney ISBN 0316366110 summary A fascinating discussion of the mechanics of Christmas magic The Scenario Can Reindeer Fly is a book about the culture, science, technologies and traditions that contribute to the Christmas season. Dr Highfield is a respected author and scientist who has written a well researched book that will appeal to a wide variety of people.

What's Good? If you liked the various 'Science of Star Trek' books and websites, you will probably enjoy this book. Dr Highfield covers almost every area of modern day science - from genetics to quantum theory to dieting to explain or theorize about many of the different aspects of Christmas. Christmas in different cultures is discussed too, with chapters on food and gift giving around the world. I really enjoyed Dr Highfield's approach. Rather than trying to disprove theories and legends, he tries to use every scientific tool available to see if something could be done - this is especially true in a chapter on the virgin birth of Jesus. Unfortunatley, Dr Highfield wasn't able to conclude that Santa Claus employs warp powered reindeer to boot it round the earth on Christmas eve :- What's Bad? This probably isn't an issue for most slashdot readers, but I found there was a definite Northern Hemisphere bias. Several chapters take it for granted that Christmas will be celebrated in the middle of Winter. Where I live, Dec 25 is usually a hot summer day and rather than building a snowman after a huge turky dinner, I am more likely to lie in the sun after a huge BBQ. It's not a big issue and it doesn't really detract from the text in any way.

So What's In It For Me? ThereÕs really something for everyone in 'Can Reindeer Fly'. If you want to know about the origins of the Christmas tree and other traditions there are several chapters to keep you happy. Interested in astronomy? A chapter on the Bethlehem star is what you're after. Science geeks will be interested in chapters on Snow and the tech involved to get a sleigh to travel to the hopes of every good little boy and girl. Dieticians will be interested in the chapter on Santa's diet and genetics.

Purchase this boook at fatbrain.

Table of Contents

1. Acknowledgements
2. Introduction: Christmas and the Scientist
3. 1. The Bethlehem Star
4. 2. Miracle
5. 3. Santa and Those Reindeer
6. 4. Gluttony; Santa's Genetics
7. 5. The flame and the Tree
8. 6. Giving and Shopping
9. 7. Snow
10. 8. Festive Fare
11. 9. Christmas Spirit
12. 10. Christmas Blues and Seasonal Moods
13. 11. Santa's Science
14. 12 Christmas 2020
15. Appendix The Formula for Christmas Day
16. Glossary
17. Bibliography
18. Index

Let's start this off with some Microsoft parodies: Polo pointed us to a version of office2000 that many Slashdotters might prefer to the Microsoft version. Lexie (ask out CowboyNeal!) sent us a Microsoft Monopoly that you probably won't see in stores. G. Crisp sent us a Lego Penguin: proof that someone has both too much spare time, and too many legos. An anonymous reader noted that you can get AccuWeather®5-Day Forecast for AREA 51. Forecast calls for black helecopters and Gillian Anderson. witten sent us a random Jon Katz story generator called (not surprisingly) Katzdot. While we're on the subject of Slashdot, it's worth nothing that ThinkGeek is now carrying new Slashdot T-Shirts. Of course personally I'd prefer the 'Kernel Panic' shot glasses, but then again, I've had a pretty long week. dayeight sent us something that is pretty indescribible. It involves video games, but presumably it also involved some sort of illegal substances too. I think its a metaphor for something. How about a few 'True Stories' to brighten up your day (no I'm not talking about zany Talking Heads movies). First zentropy sent us what seems to be a true story about why sports and Taco Bell just don't mix. An anonymous reader showed us a woman who is trying to get workers comp from her employer since she got carpal tunnel... her job involves phones, but it wasn't dialing them that caused the *ahem* injury.

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.