Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

My Geek Library: Neal Stephenson – In the Beginning… There Was the Command Line

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

I’m not much of a fanboy. But when you find there’s someone out there who has never failed in his or her professional capacity, to not just produce value, but to make you a bit giddy in the process, it’s time to pass along to others how great you’ve found the experience.

Neal Stephenson has written a metric buttload of awesomeness for the geek-minded novel devourer. And he has probably never written a sentence as bad as the preceding one. Over the years, his novels have become thicker, richer, and more… well, just more.

other ‘Geek Library’ posts

Note: Amazon has pulled the plug on Amazon Affiliates in retaliation for having to collect sales tax, so I’m not referring clients to Amazon, anymore. I’m also no longer buying from Amazon. #AmazonBoycott.

In the Beginning…was the Command Line is a thin, non-fiction, humorous manifesto describing the drift from the clean, simple OS to the bloated, overly controlling, icon flaunting, UI driven OS. It was written and published online in 1999, when the Mac OS was at it’s worst and Windows was just achieving true digital blasphemy with its revolting browsers, monopolistic practices and bombastic bloatware. For windows users it was still pretty true until Windows 7 came out last year. Shortly after the online rant came the book. But the online version is still available here.

Stephenson has since recanted a bit, admitting it was overstated. But, hey, that’s what rants are for. And, of course, technology rolls on. Imagine reading “In the Beginning…” on the iPad.

My Geek Library: Neal Stephenson – Diamond Age

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

I’m not much of a fanboy. But when you find there’s someone out there who has never failed in his or her professional capacity, to not just produce value, but to make you a bit giddy in the process, it’s time to pass along to others how great you’ve found the experience.

Neal Stephenson has written a metric buttload of awesomeness for the geek-minded novel devourer. And he has probably never written a sentence as bad as the preceding one. Over the years, his novels have become thicker, richer, and more… well, just more.

other ‘Geek Library’ posts

Note: Amazon has pulled the plug on Amazon Affiliates in retaliation for having to collect sales tax, so I’m not referring clients to Amazon, anymore. I’m also no longer buying from Amazon. #AmazonBoycott.

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson

After reading Snow Crash, I picked up The Diamond Age the first chance I got. I figured it’d maybe be a sequel, or another action-packed cyber-punk thing like Snow Crash. The only thing the two books had in common was writing style and complexity.

Once again, this book is too complex to describe the plot in any sensible way. The environment where the story takes place is enough novelty to carry most sci-fi fare: Imagine a time when anything can be made from existing molecules, restructured by a machine, following a recipe created by engineers. Need a spoon, just request it, like you’d request a web page from Google. A microwave-size device spits it out in seconds. Need a mattress? Find a bigger machine, make your request, and voila. The input is simply siphoned from the sea. Anything, any size, any complexity.

Society has (similarly to Snow Crash) broken into new segments, but instead of burbclaves, it’s more like classes. The engineers have redefined themselves as a class, modeled after Victorian-era ideals. One of the most talented of these engineers gets selected for a project: to make an interactive story-book for the daughter of a magnate. But he makes three copies: One for the magnates daughter, one for his own, and one gets into the hands of a tough little orphan girl. The books act as tutors for each of the three girls. There are any number of subplots, including viral memes spread by sex cults, along with nano-bots, Confucianism and revolution. Imagine that! Well, you couldn’t if Stephenson weren’t your guide.

The “Should I read this?” question isn’t really answered here, is it? The answer is, if you’re a geek, you should read this. If you don’t like it, you may not be a real geek.

My Geek Library: Neal Stephenson

Friday, August 20th, 2010

I’m not much of a fanboy. But when you find there’s someone out there who has never failed in his or her professional capacity, to not just produce value, but to make you a bit giddy in the process, it’s time to pass along to others how great you’ve found the experience.

Neal Stephenson has written a metric buttload of awesomeness for the geek-minded novel devourer. And he has probably never written a sentence as bad as the preceding one. Over the years, his novels have become thicker, richer, and more… well, just more.

other ‘Geek Library’ posts

Note: Amazon has pulled the plug on Amazon Affiliates in retaliation for having to collect sales tax, so I’m not referring clients to Amazon, anymore. I’m also no longer buying from Amazon. #AmazonBoycott.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

I started with Snow Crash. A colleague, younger and smarter and hipper than I, suggested it. In case you think this is ordinary sci-fi, you should note that it is among the Time Magazine Top 100 Novels (1923 to present). Honestly, it’s not just me!

Snow Crash was published in 1992, which is worth noting because it predated the World Wide Web. Yet it predicted modern immersive online worlds, a la Second Life. In fact, the creators of Second Life have attributed their inspiration to this book. It also predicted the suitcase-sized nuke people have been worried about lately, although the terrorist in question is certainly not of a stripe anyone would’ve predicted. And the “hero protagonist” of the story is a Japanese-American hacker named, er, Hiro Protagonist. Hot Damn, that’s some fine pun-ditry!

Stephenson also ran with the trend of White Flight to gated communities, and the breakdown of centralized government towards a mix of organized crime, anarchy, and ethno-religious isolationism to its ultimate conclusion: The Burbclave. (Suburban Enclave, for the less tuned-in.) And the stuff about the poor nuclear-powered guard-dog-bot who’s task it is to protect one such burbclave is enough to make you swear off buying a Roomba! None of which will make sense to you until you drill into the world-gone-mad that Stephenson has conjured. It’s almost as bad as Citrus Heights. Remember 1992? The Reagan-Bush recession (remember the first Bush? He couldn’t speak in complete sentences, either). The Burbclave, of course, is the outcome of the trend that Reagan started of killing government, and causing societal breakdowns. After Bush II and the Contract on America, we’re nearly there. Another 8 years of that kind of leadership, and this novel becomes even more prescient. If not for the ’90’s, we’d be there now. Read this book now, so you can be prepared, haha! This novel is more zany and fast paced than dark and foreboding, though. The characters are fun and hilarious, and the action is non-stop. And, honestly, I’m leaving out the good parts in this review, because there’s no point trying to explain…

Next week: The Diamond Age

Great Books by Neil Stephenson

Saturday, January 6th, 2007

Note: Amazon has pulled the plug on Amazon Affiliates in retaliation for having to collect sales tax, so I’m not referring clients to Amazon, anymore. I’m also no longer buying from Amazon. #AmazonBoycott.

I’ve been rereading “The Baroque Cycle” a trilogy of books by Neil Stephenson. I just finished “The Confusion”


“The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2)” (Neal Stephenson)

But you should definitely start with the first in the series:


“Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)” (Neal Stephenson)

I honestly think this is the most fun I’ve had reading a book. The possible exception might be the Terry Pratchet books, but as fun as those are, they are a “quick read”. The Baroque Cycle is three physical books, but could easily be six. These babies are fat! Yet every paragraph is fun, interesting, intriguing and even educational.

The time period is the 1600’s and the advent of the modern age of science is at hand. The characters include real people: Newton, Hooke, Wren, Leibniz, various kings, queens, and sundry nobility of France, England, Russia, Germany, and more. The story exposes early economics, venture capital, political science, warfare, alchemy and “natural philosophy” in a delicious multithreaded storyline spreading over most of the lifetime of the lead characters: Daniel Waterhouse, Jack Shaftoe, and Eliza a woman who works her way from slave to Duchess. If you read Cryptonomicon, some of these names may ring a bell. The thread of characters that spanned from WWII to the Dot Com era now reach back to some 400 years earlier.

It is for geeks, but perhaps the swashbuckling and historical context might spread the target audience. The sheer audacity of Stephenson to write such massive tomes of such broad scope with such phenomenal detail makes him a great writer. When you read the details of London burning, or the intrigues of the court of Versaille, you suspect that Stephenson must have been there, taking notes.

If you can hack these, go back and read everything of his. There are no bad Neil Stephenson books. He became famous for Snow Crash.


“Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)” (Neal Stephenson)

But my favorite before this series, was Diamond Age.


“The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)” (Neal Stephenson)

If someone sat down today to cover the possibilities of nanotech in a novel of the dystopian future, you could never imagine it would become so interesting a study of social constructs, much less that it would be a great read. But if you take into account that it was written back around ’95 you’d have to believe, once again, that Neil Stephenson owns a time machine.

Selective reality – how information works politically, with Terry Pratchet

Saturday, November 26th, 2005

I’m reading an author that is both really fun, funny, smart and simultaneously escapist and very relevant. Terry Pratchet writes about discworld (mostly) which is a bit like middle earth or any other mythical place, but funnier. I am reading Monstrous Regiment and just finished Night Watch. This is not for everyone. It is satire, mystery, myth fiction (sometimes called fantasy fiction, but more precisely, it is really it’s own thing.)

It always is about a small number of very bright people struggling against the general stupidity of everyone else. This may smack of intellectual elitism, but let’s face it, everyone thinks they think they’re smarter than someone else. And more morally grounded. And have “common sense”. And are “better than average” drivers.

Remember Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average?

This one starts out as a lesson in Patriotism, Nationalism, Jingoism or other generally Bushy behavior. Don’t worry about the U.S., we’re not special that way. The only concern is whether, here in the U.S. or anywhere else, that approach to government becomes dominant. Then, whether we swing left or right, we all end up in the same place: a few people making all the decisions regardless of the needs, or the will, of everyone else.

So here’s to the magic of words, and symbols.

Are you more moved by the Flag? Or the Constitution? Why is it that people who wave the Flag are the most willing to waive the Constitution.

Robert Byrd, a very old, very shaky, but relatively wise Democrat who is prone to old-fashioned speech-making, has proposed making Sept. 17th Constitution Day. Federal funds would go to provide educational materials, and schools would take time to teach the Constitution to the kids of the U.S. We teach about Thanksgiving more than we teach about the Consititution. No wonder people who consider themselves patriots so often promote anti-democratic, unconstitutional policies. Lately it seems like the courts find half the stuff coming out of our House of Representatives to be unconstitutional.

Interestingly, the town where I grew up (and still live, nearby) is Nevada City has had parades and speeches on Constitution Day, each year.

Byrd said in a speech the other day:
In the federalist papers, James Madison reasoned that in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. Accordingly, Madison and the other framers of constitution divided power so that no one person or branch of government could gain complete advantage. As Madison explained it, ambition must be made to counteract ambition. That is why the framers viewed the separation of powers with such importance. No single man, no single branch of government was to be given absolute power. No single man was to have sole authority to decide the fate of the nation. Oh, how different — how different today.”

This article from the Raleigh/Durham News Observer shows an indication of the problem:
“Students at one of the area’s largest Christian schools are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived “a life of plenty, of simple pleasures.”

One blog joked about the states of South Carolinastan and Talibama. This is where most of the activity around stopping schools from teaching evolution as fact has actually become law.

This crap fits into the same category of those who have written that the Nazis didn’t kill Jews, that Native Americans just died off from disease or lack of buffalo (like all indians lived on the plains and hunted buffalo), or that all our guys in Iraq are happy little soldiers, of perfect moral integrity, and heroic (on our side) and grateful Iraquis (on the sidelines) and Iranians and a few Saudis (causing all the trouble.) Or, that the deficit isn’t a problem. Or… I could go on forever.

I actually think visiting generals in Iraq probably believe a lot of this stuff. After all, who’s telling them the truth? Does a private talk directly to a general frankly about problems, or does he kiss ass? How rare is the guy who stood up and asked a direct, unscripted question of a guy like Rumsfeld? I know the truth doesn’t get discussed in the modern corporation, where the worst that will happen is job loss or no annual raise… in the military, the consequences are more serious for people who speak up.

It’s all about communication, folks. If it is euphimistic, source-limited, or generally bad, everything goes haywire. We’ve all worked in Dilbert-esque situations. The core problem is lack of willingness to deal with, sort out, and resolve situations that are negative, in any intellectually honest way.

That is what our constitution was designed to do: create a governmental structure where all information comes out, is debated, and the result is based on a compromise of competing interest.

That is what the scientific method was intended to do: Overcome the natural human tendency to believe whatever is convenient, career enhancing, or traditionally accepted, by putting it to the test of observation, repeatability, and peer review. The interesting thing is both our constitutional democracy and the scientific method only maintain credibility by way of argument. It progresses in fits and starts, and experiences long delays. It is very messy and frustrating. Sometimes the results are wrong for a time, but they tend to self-correct. But we have to keep an eye on, and a commitment to honest practice of each method.

’nuff for now…