≈ Relations

After buying three iPad development related books on Friday i noticed that i haven’t updated my book purchase list for over a year. What a shame. So for the record my book purchases since i left off. (Only books that somehow relate to this blog, coarsely categorized, in anti-chronically order):

Development

iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide
(Aaron Hillegass & Joe Conway, Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN: 9780321706249)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

HTML & CSS: The Good Parts
(Ben Henick, O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 9780596157609)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa
( Jonathan Stark, O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 9780596805784)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
(Sam Ruby & Dave Thomas & David Heinemeier Hansson, Pragmatic Bookshelf, ISBN: 9781934356166)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

The Ruby Programming Language
(David Flanagan & Yukihiro Matsumoto, O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 9780596516178)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

OpenStreetMap: Die freie Weltkarte nutzen und mitgestalten (German)
(Frederik Ramm & Jochen Topf, Lehmanns, ISBN: 9783865413208)
Direct Buy (DE)::

Apple Training Series: Mac OS X Advanced System Administration v10.5
(Edward R. Marczak, Peachpit Press , ISBN: 9780321563149)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
(Steve Souders, O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 9780596529307)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Using Google App Engine
(Charles Severance, O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 9780596800697)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

FBML Essentials: Facebook Markup Language Fundamentals
(Jesse Stay, O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 9780596519186)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World
(Joe Armstrong, Pragmatic Bookshelf, ISBN: 9781934356005)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Expert Python Programming: Best practices for designing, coding, and distributing your Python software
(Tarek Ziadé, Packt Publishing, ISBN: 9781847194947)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Practical Django Projects
(James Bennett, Apress, ISBN: 9781590599969)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Computer Science

Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
(Toby Segaran & Jeff Hammerbacher, O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 9780596157111)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Natural Language Processing with Python
(Steven Bird & Ewan Klein & Edward Loper, O’Reilly Media, ISBN: 9780596516499)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

IT

Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior
(Tom Demarco & Peter Hruschka & Tim Lister & Suzanne Robertson & James Robertson & Steve McMenamin, Dorset House, ISBN: 9780932633675)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Coders at Work
(Peter Seibel, Apress, ISBN: 9781430219484)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Content

The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages, 1851-2008
(The New York Times, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, ISBN: 9781579127497)Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Modell Bauhaus. 1919-2009 (German)
(Hatje Cantz Verlag, ISBN: 9783775724142)
Direct Buy (DE)::

Maps

The Agile Rabbit Book of Historical And Curious Maps
(Pepin Press, ISBN: 9789057680519)
Direct Buy (US)::
Direct Buy (DE)::

Atlas der Globalisierung: Sehen und verstehen, was die Welt bewegt (German)
(TAZ, ISBN: 9783937683256)
Direct Buy (DE)::

Fanstastic rant by Merlin Mann about his motivations to blog and to not like AllThingsD  voices underlying assumptions:

But, what if you’re trying to do something really different? What if the page views only really matter to you when they’re happening in front of a face you admire? What if your game is not primarily ads? What if — as I said in that email to Andy — what if you’re selling yourself? Or, even better put, what if you’re not really selling anything but the idea that you do interesting things? What if everyone’s best guesses about your motivation are wrong, cynical, and lead to decisions that actually harm rather than compliment? What if.

…

And, finally, as far as motivations go? If you’re married to page views, never assume that I am. If you’re angling for 1,000,000 Twitter followers whom you pretend to read, never assume that I am. And, if your project is based on generating compulsory year-over-year growth vis-a-vis market domination and fiduciary responsibility, never assume that I am.

Free as in “Me” | 43 Folders

Last weekend my wife and i paid a long overdue visit to our favourite computer bookstore: Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung in Hamburg. The staff, especially Mr. Kaeder is very knowledgeable and they have a quite good selection of “real” CS books, not only this ” Teach yourself …” and “… for dummies” crap.

Furthermore members of the GI – the german society of computer science professionals (something comparable to the ACM) get a 10% discount on imported english books. For the non germans over here: This is something special because of a german law called Buchpreisbindungsgesetz, a law that obligates publisher to fix a price and forbids that any bookseller to sell the book for a different price. (some other european countries like Austria and France have this too).

As usual we left with quite a number of books we found interesting:

• Ajax in Practice
• Joel on Software
• Agile Project Management with Scrum
• Grid Computing. Konzepte
• Fast SOA
• SOA-Expertenwissen
• The Geospatial Web
• Adaptive Business Intelligence
• Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns
• Groovy in Action
• Web Component Development with Zope 3
• The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0
• xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code

Quite a bit of reading. Will keep us occupied for some time. Especially when interleaving with other non-CS reads. Any opinion on these books? Which one to start with?

Yesterday i had the opportunity to read two brilliant pieces of journalism that perfectly showcase the dilemma newspapers are in :

• Online news is getting more and more fragmented via technical means. Hence People are able to pick their trusted sources on a much more fine grained scale as they had to do in the printed world.
• In the online world everybody, not only big companies with huge marketing budgets can be brands. And becoming a brand is about becoming a trusted source.

The first piece is a column (by Jason Fry in the WallStreet Journal ) called: A reality check for newspapers It has the copiepress vs. google dispute as the background setting but provides generic insights. I just enclose my favourite part:

The only surprise would be if newspapers were any different (Gerd: to the music and the video industries).

In moving online, newspapers have become collections of individual articles, each of which often stands on its own. Once, readers encountered articles by reading the paper a page at a time. Now, such readers are being supplanted by voracious online consumers who get their news in any number of unpredictable ways.

Articles are emailed around, copied to blogs for commentary, grouped together with stories on the same subject from rival publications, and found by search engines and aggregator services. I have no idea how you’re reading this column. Maybe you found it on the Online Journal’s home page or the technology page. Maybe you saw it because it includes Google’s stock symbol, or it hit your newsreader via an RSS feed. Maybe you followed a link from a blog, Google News or Technorati. Maybe someone emailed it to you. Maybe you printed it out this morning and are reading it now. (However you found it, thank you!)

I can’t control any of that and wouldn’t want to — like any writer, the most-important thing to me is to be read. If the Online Journal started directing readers who followed third-party links to this column to the home page and left them to find their way from there, I’d be furious — because I’d be guaranteed to lose readers who got lost. And if WSJ.com said they were doing that because there were ads on the home page but not on this article, I’d not so gently suggest hiring a competent Web designer instead of suing search engines.

The second piece is a portrait of Walt Mossberg (by Ken Auletta in The NewYorker) called: Critical Mass . I just enclose the last paragraph:

What differentiates Mossberg from most bloggers, according to Marissa Mayer, a Google vice-president who focusses in particular on the experience of consumers, is that what he writes “is all based on his use of the product”—he’s not racing to be first. Her colleague Eric Schmidt suggests that, while the Internet may yield enormous amounts of information, it is easy to drown in it. So consumers, Schmidt says, “go to brands they trust.” He adds, “Walt is a brand.”

This perfectly fits my own reading experience. Most of my daily reading is now done via a news reader (currently Google Reader). I’m actively reading about 100 feeds from sources i trust (or find interesting). Only very few feeds are from traditional main stream media. I found out about the two pieces cited above via some of these feeds. Without these feeds i would never have known that these pieces existed.

I also use Google Reader to provide a selection of the articles i find most interesting. You can read it directly or subscribe to this selection as a feed. The headlines of the last ten “shared” articles are also included at the top of this blogs home page.

One of my personal highlights of DLD was the talk given by Linda Stone: “On Attention”. So i started to write this article directly after the talk on January 21st. Unfortunalety i had to wait until today in order to be able to finish it.

Linda Stone started her talk asking some questions how the audience handles different attention requiring tasks and then went on to argue that in cycles of around 20 years the way we handle opportunities and how we spend out attention are changing.

Her thesis was, that starting around 1965 people spent their attention in a multitasking mode. They did this because they had a desire to create opportunities.

This mode then evolved during the 80s into a mode that she calls continous partial attention (CPA). This is a mode where we are paying some kind of attention simulteanously to various subjects based on a desire to scan for opportunities. This is the kind of behaviour you find in business meetings where nobody is paying attention on the discussion or presentation but to their blackberry and mobile phones. Or the kind of attention teens are paying when they are simulateously playing games, listening to music, chatiing via IM etc.

She continued that there is evidence that some early adopters are beginning to switch from CPA mode into a mode that is characterized by uni-focus and presence. In this mode people are driven by a desire to discern opportunities.

I was intrigued by her remarks, because i recognized this shift in the way i spend my attention. Having been one of the first persons in germany (my guess would be one of the first hundred) that had a blackberry, i’m probably also one of the first persons in germany that no longer has a blackberry.

She continued to give examples of this shift and how this shift interplays with the success of the iPod and its reduced, uni-focal design or the trend from first person shooters to the game concept of Nintendos Wii console. This even more resonated with my personal views.

Unfortunately i forgot to ask her, if it is possible to get a transscript of her talk and regretted it ever since. Some googleing showed that she had given this kind of talk already a couple of times, but that the DLD talk was definitely an major evolution.

Thankfully, Björn Brückerhoff didn’t forget to ask her. The complete transcript of her talk is now available as a part of Volume 51 of his online magazine “Neue Gegenwart”. I wholeheartedly recommend reading it.

Another read: John Maeda’s “Laws of simplicity”

During Macworld i visited San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and found John Maeda’s book “Laws of Simplicity”, which i read on flights from SF to Vancouver and back. While i forgot to ask her about a transscript i did ask her on her point of view on the differences between her notion of uni-focus and maeda’s notion of simplicity. Her answer was that Maeda’s “simplicity” is more along the lines of what she called “quality of live” in her talk than “uni-focus”. If you have the time and want to know what the heck my question to Linda was about, you can go on and read John Maeda’s book or visit the accompanying website.