Colin Charles Agenda

Since my last foray into writing book reviews, I figured it made a little more sense to get a few more out of the bag, that I remember, since then.

• Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson

Amazing autobiography. Does things in the name of fun, has become a billionaire, over and over, and has got some really practical advice about running a company (and now, companies) on a shoestring budget. Partnnership, diversification, is clearly key.

• iCon by Jeffrey Young & William Simon

Steve Jobs, Apple, Pixar. Successes over and over, but there were pains at the start. Management mistakes to not make. Probably a good read for any Mac fan.

• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Simply interesting, its a must read. Drop in violent crime, in thanks to abortion? Drug dealers who still live with their moms, because they don’t really make much money? Interesting scenarios, that will make you think, for certain. Most entertaining reading, picking the book up, makes it very hard to put it down till it was done.

• Lonely Planet: Thailand

Dodgy copy picked up while in Siem Reap, but served its purpose of giving me enough information to survive in Bangkok.

• Lonely Planet: Cambodia

Without this, I would have had no Siem Reap trip. Truly used this, plus the driver we hired, to have a good six day holiday, touring the Angkor, and the regions that most don’t visit. The book was mighty handy, and will probably serve well when writing the travelogue.

• A Year In The World by Frances Mayes

Reading this was actually inspirational, in the sense that it paved my way for last December’s travels. I actually had a passion to explore, plan to a certain extent, and leave some parts of travel to chance. I must say, I’ve never had a better amount of time, travelling, and its all thanks to her joyous sense of adventure and travel. Recommended reading if life’s feeling like a rut, and you’re just wating to escape into a holiday.

• Under The Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
  I read this after reading A Year In The World, as I absolutely adore Frances Mayes style. The recipes are typically helpful, and the idea of living such a Bohemian lifestyle, will make you want to visit Italy.
• God’s Callgirl by Carla Van Raay

A memoir, of a Dutch girl, who’s family emigrated to Australia. What’s interesting is she grows up in a full-on Catholic environment, goes on into the convent to become a nun, is a nun, then leaves for freedom. Upon leaving, her sex drive seems to be active, and she becomes a prostitute. This is her story, about self-sabotage, and being a working girl. Probably a very useful text for women’s studies.

• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

I am a big fan of the series, on Discovery Travel & Adventure. When I saw the book lying at the bookstore, I had to pick it up. Its a gripping tale spanning two decades of life as a cook. Starting from the bottom, right to being a chef in his own kitchen, he paints a very interesting story, of what it’s like to be behind the scenes, at a restaurant. There’s also practical advice for those wanting to cook (at chef levels, even). What makes this book highly interesting is all the anecdotes, of life as a chef. Its definitely a recommended memoir. Now to find his other book, A Cook’s Tour.

Caught:

• The World’s Fastest Indian – inspiring story, telling you, you can still achieve your dreams when old, and when everyone writes you off. Some Down Under-isms, and how it is when going to the US clearly made me chuckle
• Bulletproof – this came via Quickflix, and I realized that I’d already seen it before and not logged it. The wonders of cable TV, ala ASTRO, while I was in Malaysia. Its a funny show, with a bit of action here and there…
• Super Size Me – terrestial TV had this. Amazing show. I knew McDonalds was bad, but I’m pretty certain that my bulking up in recent years was caused by McDonalds, pizza, and Snicker bars. Slowly thats all being cut down, or cut off, but fast food is probably a really bad idea.
• Ghost Rider
• Wild Hogs
• Norbit
• Death to the Supermodels – utter rubbish, don’t ever waste your time watching it. Quickflix’s recommendations are getting worse.
• Kinky Boots – terribly interesting, great inspiration to remaking and reinventing things.
• Lonesome Jim – boring, put me to sleep, even the presence of Liv Tyler didn’t help.
• The Sweetest Thing – wow, television has come a long way in showing something I actually enjoyed. Funny, Cameron Diaz show, about taking that leap.
• EuroTrip – a teen flick, seemed very much like Road Trip on steroids, but I enjoyed it much (also on television).
• Derailed – the last good movie Quickflix has sent. Its excellent. The plot is something you can’t figure out till the end. Justice is served, pity that all the crooks die in the end :-(
• Bobby – amazing cast, all connected together by JFK. Interesting concept, but I think this might have been money better spent elsewhere. Watch it for the stars?
• Borat – its out on DVD. Incredibly funny. Crass. Though Ali G in my opinion, was much better.

Of course, when I cancel my account with Quickflix at the end of this month (the value I was getting was certainly not good, with each DVD costing at least $0.05 more than if I got them at a video rental store), I certainly want to watch a bunch more “old” movies, that I’ll probably just list here, quickly:

• Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets
• Win A Date With Tad Hamilton
• The Good Girl
• Boy Eats Girl
• Chocolat
• Ghost (but I remember getting this DVD, its just some 8000kms away, and I’ve seen bits and bobs on telly)
• Matchstick Men
• Changing Hearts
• The Day After Tomorrow
• Les Miserables

After typing that all, I realized that this would be best kept in Tomboy. But if anyone has recommendations or wants to tell me something in the above list sucks, by all means, do so.

If anyone’s missed these excellent posts, I should really point them out.

• Chris DiBona tells us all that the moral is “Don’t Talk. Do. Don’t yammer. Launch. Release. Ship.” He’s right. Look at Microsoft talking about freeing their database, and wanting to release their beloved FoxPro code to the world, via CodePlex. Open source or not, they surely received a lot of positive karma last week. I don’t doubt their delivery aspect of things, but why talk about it before it happens – it means a lot more, doing it first, I’d think. With the possiblity of users expanding on this, maybe someone will work on a FoxPro to MySQL migration suite, that will be feature complete?
• Then Jeremy Zawodny tells us about how silly lame announcements are (really, they are) and we should Shut Up and Ship! Action does speak louder than words. And PR time is cheap, as chips. Talking about future delivery is embarassing (of course, the shit really his the fan when you don’t even deliver, eventually). Most interesting quote: “The(y) feel like the sort of thing you’d get from a politician during an
  election year, not a company (or group of companies) hell bent on
  delivering something truly amazing and innovative.“

How does this relate to the community around your company/product? In a bad way, quite clearly. The open source way has always been to find an itch, scratch it, release something, then talk about it. Nowadays, it seems that people rather talk about an idea, become itchy with the publicty, attempt to scratch it, and by the time its out to ship, initial interest has already fizzled out.

Steve Jobs is right when he says “real artists ship”. The way Apple release products? Create in secrecy (itch, scratch), release with a big bang (release, then PR), get cult following (seems to work recetly, pretty well).

Its April 01 2007 today. Happy April Fool’s? Happy Birthday Apple – a long 31 years it has been.

Dear Interweb,

A tiny issue plagues me. With everyone’s favourite Linux distribution of choice, Ubuntu. I’m looking at the Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta and for the life of me, can’t decide which to install on a Core 2 Duo machine (this was no better with Ubuntu 6.10 – and I’ve got both the amd64 and i386 ISOs sitting here). Its not AMD64, and its not 32-bit, so what are my choices? Referencing a post with regards to System76 support, it looks like I might have to go with a 32-bit install disc?

If I do have to go with the 32-bit install disc, why is that so? I mean, with Fedora, I’m quite happily running x86_64.

Kudos to the wiki documentation on Core 2 Duo Support, though maybe its a little dated. This is a very important question to answer, because I can imagine a lot of new laptops are actually, Core 2 Duo based (as probably are a lot of new desktops).

Also, a little bit of disappointment, but Ubuntu 7.04 has support for SPARC and not PowerPC. In a time when it might be opportune for third-world countries to start having Ubuntu-running Macs on their desktop…

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, core 2 duo, feisty fawn, edgy eft, powerpc

Update: I have concluded that the 64-bit Feisty Fawn is good for a Core 2 Duo. Read, Today I am a virgin and see how I solve my 32-bit application requirement problems, in Skype on 64-bit Ubuntu Feisty Fawn via i386 chroot (and Gizmo Project too).

Thats right, web logs are clearly gaining popularity in old media. I was reading the newspaper, and watching some television earlier, and to my shock, have just been bombarded with information about websites and the logs that people keep.

Of interest would be related to the Moorabbin police murders, that happened back in 1998. The news on every channel has brought up the topic of Jason Roberts “web of lies” (tomorrow’s newspaper, today!). He’s got a website, with some journal entries of his prison life up on the Internet. He tends to mention that he’s innocent, has his postal address, and a bunch of poems as well as pictures available for the public to read. Whats really interesting is that his website isn’t searchable via Google (or any other major search engine that I tried), but I found it at a most interesting place – Wikipedia!

An excerpt from the latest Wikipedia history

Clearly the anonymous benefactor of the URL to Wikipedia is a Telstra customer (or on a Telstra owned IP block). If the counter is working, I am visitor number 297. I wonder what these numbers will grow to, with curious onlookers searching for the website later today, and probably tomorrow when it hits mainstream dead tree newspapers.

Then, in today’s Age, The Barbados Butterfly (archived via the Wayback Machine), an anonymous blog, setup by a surgeon, Jillian Tomlinson, has now become invite-only, and she’s been suspended for a week from The Alfred Hospital. The blog contained very little identifying details, and Jillian mentions she wanted to use the blog for teaching medical students to identify ailments from pictures posted. She believes that the blog helped her reflect on her job. From taking a cursory look at the archives, it does seem like it was completely a personal blog, with some meme’s posted as well. There is also a lengthy blogroll of other “doctor weblogs”.

Has any other doctor blogged about possibly confidential information (after all, what you say to a doctor is private and confidential) and been given the sack or a suspension? Does the act of blogging about your work violate medical ethics?

This wouldn’t be the first time someone is being suspended over a blog entry, or a web log in general. Will we be seeing a rise in people getting into trouble over their blog entries, based on violating corporate secrets, ethics, or just plain venting?

Technorati Tags: weblog, blog, jason roberts, web of lies, journal entries, prison life, wikipedia, barbados butterfly, jillian tomlinson, alfred hospital, blog from a doctor, medical ethics, melbourne, australia

Its definitely interesting to see how old media (print – newspapers, magazines, periodicals) are being replaced with new media (blogs, website, RSS feeds), as a trend recently.

Via Zack Urlocker, Infoworld is heading the way of the dodo, in print. They’re moving to a web only publication. So they’re not dying, they’re just reinventing themselves in this connected age – via a web browser or an increasingly popular RSS reader. Steve Fox, Editor in Chief states: “Online bookmarks may be more efficient, site
searches retrieve information faster, but it’s hard to beat a magazine
for its tactility and visceral thrill.” And he’s right – a magazine is something you can pick up at the newsagent, read it on the train, rip articles out, and leave the rest of the magazine for someone else.

Jeff Ooi, mentions PC Magazine Malaysia is going the way of the dodo – completely. They have opted to not even have a website, for their content. That was a magazine that cost less than RM10 per month (two meals at the mamak? Ten teh tariks?), yet they couldn’t provide the value necessary to keep the readers going. It is a safe assumption that most readers prefer to get their IT information fix, via online means (here come the Slashdot, Digg, and various online news sources like News.com, Computerworld, etc.). Besides being free (cost of bandwidth, implied), and ad-supported (most probably blocked via AdBlock Plus or similar), the only real inconvenience is not being able to carry the magazine with you.

However, increased portability of PDAs, the capability of phones to read PDF files, or even subscribe to RSS feeds and get them updated over the wire (via 3G, or WiFi) will make all this paper magazine loss, a thing of the past. What really seems to be lacking, is good syncing software. I like to read my RSS feeds anywhere possible, and more importantly, have them correctly synced – between my Linux Liferea, Mac OS X NetNewsWire, and if possible via a web browser. You’re telling me to go look at Google Reader right now – but it lacks one important feature, that is the ability to work offline.

Another thing is how magazines are read. I like to flip through, rip out important articles, and save them, while not actually keeping the entire magazine. How does that work with the online world? NetNewsWire allows me to flag important articles, I could add them to del.icio.us as I see fit, but only the former will allow true searching (but tie me to my Mac). Duplicate feed entries are also a problem – this might be less of a problem with magazines per se, as their feeds tend not to end up on Planet agregators (though some do), but why hasn’t someone implemented a good feed reader with a sensible database backend that removes duplicate posts?

Ideally, a solution to all this will be a feed reader that was database backed, removed duplicate posts smartly, allowed marking articles for saving and easy exporting, killer search through saved articles, the ability to highlight within saved articles, worked in a web browser but with the abilty to work offline. I wonder if Google will come up with an elegant solution, using some of the offline AJAX features found in Zimbra Desktop.

Technorati Tags: rss, magazines, web publication, rss readers, offline ajax, duplicate removal