Book Review: Halting State by Charles Stross

If you’re a programmer/gamer geek and looking for a gripping book that you won’t be able to put down then look no further than Halting State.

Book Review: Everyware by Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield is a designer and one of the guys behind Boxes and Arrows. He’s also the guy who coined the term “moblogging” for blogging from your cellphone. He’s got a knack for inventing terms because “everyware” is such a simpler name than unicomp or “ubiquitous computing” that is used more often. This book is about the future, when software will be everywhere in our consumer electronic devices. It also touches on the other side of continuously connected devices and the social networking phenomenon.

Book Review: Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson

The thesis behind the book is simple: if you look at the popular media culture over time it is becoming more and more complex. There have always been avant garde examples that wove complex stories but over time the same techniques are used in mainstream pop culture. IE: It is becoming common place to produce tv shows and movies that require multiple watchings to fully digest.

Book Review: Ruby on Rails for Dummies

I don’t have anything against the for Dummies series (one of my friends is an author), but they’re only good when you want a very general understanding of a concept. I wouldn’t recommend the series for technical books. But my local library happened to have a copy of Ruby on Rails for Dummies, so I gave it a try.

Internet Duct Tape featured in Blogging Heroes

When bloggers like Gina Trapani, Mark Frauenfelder, Chris Anderson, and Phillip Lennsen are honored to be collected in New York Times’ bestselling author Michael A. Banks’ new book, Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers I can’t even begin to describe how exciting it is to be included in the list. “Someone must be making a mistake” went through my head several times.

The Attention Age: Accelerando, Software Agents, Filters and Gatekeepers

Last night I finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. Like many of the books I read these days, I heard about it from another blogger. It feels like a spiritual sequel to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, John Brunner’s the Shockwave Rider and Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan. It is about information overload to the nth degree and too much change in too short of a time.

Magazine Review: October 2007 Issue of Inc. Magazine

I came to a rather startling discovery in the past month: magazines are just blogs with the added luxury of being able to read them while on the toilet or in the bathtub (but hopefully not both).

I picked up the October issue of Inc. magazine because Joel Spolsky of Joel On Software has joined the magazine. I’m a Joel fan-boy. Internet Duct Tape was inspired by Joel on Software. Here are some random thoughts from spending a rainy Saturday flipping through the pages. Can this possibly be entertaining or of value to my readers? I have no idea.

Quotations from The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1978)

I’m going to celebrate Labour Day with the only book I’ve ever read that captured what it’s like to work at building integrated circuits. The Soul of a New Machine is a Pulitzer Prize winning book written in 1978 by a reporter named Tracy Kidder. Hat tip to Scott Rosenberg, or rather to James Fallows, for turning me on to this book by comparing it to Dreaming in Code.

Book Review: Overclocked by Cory Doctorow (and Fair Use Day)

Last night I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new collection of short stories, Overclocked, and I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

Book Review: Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers

I heard about Programmers at Work in the blog buzz surrounding the release of Founders at Work. Programmers at Work is a 20 year old book (1985) that interviews some of the top programmers of that era about the art of programming. It is not widely in print anymore, but it was easy to find [...]

Favorite Quotations from Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers

I’m one of those annoying people who writes in the margins of books, and one of the things I like to do is collect my favorite quotations so that I can remember them down the road. These are my favorite quotes from Programmers at Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry.

Book Review: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a writer from Toronto. He is well-known for being co-author of one of the most popular blogs on the planet (BoingBoing), his association with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and for his stance against copyright. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was his first novel and one of the first books to be simultaneously released in published form and as an online free download.

This is what I thought of it.

45 Books I Like More Than a Little

Write what you know. In this case, what I know about is being a geek. Over the next few days I’ll be suggesting things that I liked. I’ll be giving ball-park prices (in Canadian dollars) and at the end of each post I’ll include a link to where you can find all of the items [...]

How to be a Programmer with 10 Simple Books (GGG5)

(Continued from Gift Guide for Geeks Part 4 - Comic books)
(Start at Gift Guide for Geeks Part 1 - Tis the Season for Receiving)
Write what you know. In this case, what I know about is being a geek. Over the next few days I’ll be suggesting things that I liked. I’ll be giving ball-park [...]

Book Review: JPod by Douglas Coupland

Jpod is the sequel (in spirit) to Microserfs. The mid-nineties fast forwards to the mid-naughts and our protagonists switch from being monolithic Microsoft serfs in Seattle to serfs for a large game company in Vancouver. The title is a clever marketing ploy; it has nothing to do with Apple/iPod. JPod refers to the cubicle [...]

Quotes and Quotations from JPod by Douglas Coupland

This is a list of my favorite quotes and quotations from JPod by Douglas Coupland.
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Book Review: JPod by Douglas Coupland
Book Review: Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

(Photo by LomoGirl)
Favorite Quotes

Book Review: Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

There’s something very appropriate about reading Microserfs when you’re working at a startup and it is crunch time.
The year is 1993 and this is the story of Daniel, a software tester at Microsoft. He lives in a geek house with his co-workers, and his relationship with them and their relationship with the software industry [...]

Book Review: Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

joelonsoftware is one of the highest read programming blogs because Joel Spolsky does an excellent job of combining technical information with humour that makes his writing informative yet interesting. He was the program manager for the Microsoft Excel team and has since moved on to running his own startup. His books collects some of the [...]

Book Review: The Art of Happiness At Work by Dalai Lama

After reading Paul Coelho’s the Alchemist, I thought this would be a fantastic follow up. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Where the Alchemist was a very focused tale examining a specific theme of following your dreams, TAoHaW was more of a diatribe between two people exploring a subject without a clear hypothesis. I think there is [...]

Book Review: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

A friend from work recommended that I pick this up, and I was glad I did. This is one of those novels that everyone should read when they are at a crossroads in their life and wondering what kind of career path they should pursue. It is the tale of a young boy who decides [...]