Recent Science Fiction

Certain troubles were going on lately, which barring the details meant I was unable to read anything remotely heavy. Thankfully a (small) pile of science fiction came to my rescue. Here is what

Isaac Asimov : The complete stories Volume I : Asimov has been called the greatest science fiction author of all time (Clark has been too, and I am sure many others have been and will be). Statements concerning 'all time' are perilous, but Asimov certainly was one of the most clever. Read this book to convince yourself (besides spending many pleasat hours). The breadth of themes and plots is simply astonishing.

A Time Odyssey Book I: Time's Eye: I remeber borrowing this one from V a long time back and not finishing it. Did that recently. Enjoyable, if a bit stretched at some points. Full of scientific and historical nuggets like Clarke's other books. Good, but not great.

Quicksilver: Not science fiction per say, but close. Very clever, but descriptions of places and dresses are a bit laborious to read. But dialogues more than make up for it. Some familiarity with the early history of Royal Society and principals involved is (I think) required to fully appreciate it though.

Enjoy!!

My third computer

First: July 2003. 1.8GHz Pentium 4, 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD. Assembled.

Second: Feb 2009. 1.6GHz Core i7, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD. Dell Studio 16.

Third: Dec 2011. 1.4GHz A9, 1GB RAM, 16GB Solid state drive. Samsung Galaxy Note.

Must read RFC

Here.

And the field testing report.

With great reverence

Happy birthday, Sir.

Update: One more link

Tales of the long tail

Short, interesting and important.

THE 'Book of Jobs'

If you are not busy being born, you are busy dying.
-Bob Dylan (Quoted by Steve Jobs)

Just finished reading the most anticipated biography of the year. I had read one Jobs biography before, iCon. Curiously it was the only one Jobs wanted banned, I later came to know. To be sure, it does portray him mostly in bad light. Probably it wanted to say 'I,con' instead of 'icon'.

Expectations from this one were high, coming as it was from Walter Isaacson, and it does fulfill them. For me, it dispelled some popular misconceptions. For example, that Apple 'imported' GUI wholesale from Xerox PARC. That is not true. Apple sure got the concept, but Mac team made significant improvements of their own, like overlapping windows and window drag-and-drop. Or that Jobs stole all the credit from Jeff Raskin, the real father of Mac. No. Raskin sure was leader of the Mac project before Jobs took it over (which forced him to leave), but under Raskin Mac was an underpowered machine with minimal graphics. It was Jobs who turned it into the phenomenon that it became. But this is not to say that Jobs was a 'Mahatma' that got vilified somehow. His was a complex personality, not of the typical hero, and the book is impressively balanced in that regard.

Jobs, not the typical CEO, made many specific product improvements. I liked this part because in what I had read earlier, his criticism was acute, but his praise very vague. To be specific, original iTunes had a search interface that required specifying the search parameter (lyrics or album, say); he wanted one where you simply type in the box. Now it has become the default on non Apple products too. And he came up with the idea of iPod shuffle, getting rid of the screen altogether, because he saw that people were heavily using the shuffle functionality on the original iPod. Let me add one last example, a less well known one. The original iPhone was supposed to have a plastic screen, but Jobs thought glass was more aesthetic. So he went searching for a solution and found a company that made 'gorilla glass'. The only problem was, the company, which had pioneered the process of making it in 1960s had found no market and stopped making it. When Jobs placed a large order, the manufacturer was unsure he could do it. Jobs convinced him he can. Gorilla glass is almost a standard on today's cellphones.

The book is full of such interesting nuggets, but there is one important thing that comes through. Jobs made great products because he focused on making great products. Sometimes that meant micromanagment, hurt egos and financial overruns, but his strong will prevailed, and the results are before us. Don't miss this book. You will learn much, but it is also plain old good reading.

Probably misplaced

Jabberwocky ⊂ 'Alice in Wonderland' the movie.
Jabberwocky ⊄ 'Alice in Wonderland' the book. (The real name is 'Alice's adventures in Wonderland').

And one might as well s/Jabberwocky/Coherence/.

Not that either is bad. Read the latter recently.