TW Anthology

I learned about the TW Anthology today and checked it out on Amazon. Looks like they're a little expensive.

Books

I want one of each of these and the time to read them and good reasons to use what I learn in them. http://accu.org/index.php?module=bookreviews&func=browse

Or I could try to go back to sleep.

Books (novels)

Books I've read recently:

Miles Errant by Lois McMaster Bujold
It was very good. I went through it in two evenings and poof it was awesome. Charismatic underdog takes on governments and corporations in a war-scifi world and wins.

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond
He makes sense of hacker culture. Which I thought was impossible. Win.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling
Crazy crazy cyberpunk post-apocalyptic scifi.

CS books I haven't finished yet

I keep skipping from book to book and finishing none of them. But the one on top is almost done.

Cyberpunk tropes

I was looking for cyberpunk ebooks and began thinking about common themes in cyberpunk literature.

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/

AI evolves out of the internet

nanobots

India / Japan / China (is this just a western thing?)

neotribalism / geotribalism

copyright leads to war

lone hacker

against The Man

nearfuture (at least the beginning of the series)

space (in-system, not FTL)

urban

one-world syndrome / globalization

convergence

tech singularity

social breakdown as tech evolves faster than response

megacorporations

human vs. economy

lack of idealists / idealists die

hacker as protagonist

human mind incomplete without data access

ThoughtWorks Home Office Day

ThoughtWorks Home Office Day apparently hasn't happened in a while... like, a year or so (although Chi-Fridays happen every month?) Anyway, one of them happened today. I met Ronnigan, who's also a new hire starting in January. I introduced us as Newb One and Newb Two. I met a ridiculous number of people whose names I don't really remember, including the head of TW in the Americas, to whom I said "well, shit." I think that falls under the category of putting my foot in my mouth rather than speaking truth to power. He didn't seem to take it badly.

Joanne explained that TW has a very "flat" structure... which basically means that 1. I will someday get to meet Martin Fowler !!!!!!!! 2. It's normal to mingle socially at company events with people who are serious firepower.

I went to a session on Mingle, which is software that TW made to manage Agile projects with. It looks like it'll actually be useful. I like large parts of the UI. However, I am severely disappointed by how slowly that chart rendered. Seriously, it took over two minutes. Nothing should take over two minutes. Especially something that you need to do all the time...

I went to a session on noSQL, which as cool... mostly review for me, but shiny. MongoDB is a big thing at TW, it seems.

Went to a session on "the cloud" which was interesting. Lots of stuff about how it can apply to current and future TW projects, and things to watch out for... i.e. reserved vs. non-reserved instances.

I wonder what my life would be like if CleverSafe (a cloud services company) had hired me. I hope they fix the problems that the one marketing guy left behind. I still wonder how their algorithms work, dammit. (InStep Software called me to schedule an interview a couple days ago but I told them that I was currently employed. I am charmed that they called, though.)

I went to the lightning talks. I liked the one that was basically a State of the Union talk on what's up with Oracle and Java. It's all a little complicated... There was also a talk from the women's shelter people that the in-office hackathon was benefiting. And one from Julie and her Grace Hopper peeps, so that was cool.

There was a large session which focused on the three columns... breaking up into groups, etc. Post-its are awesome is the lesson here...

I went to the birds of a feather meetup and sat in the dev circle... it was pretty awesome. When Ron said "Flash" he got a kinda incredulous/eew reaction. When I said "crypto" I just got a hell of a lot of perfectly straight faces...

By the way, it turns out that the Borders that I pass on my way to TW has a bitching hacker section in their CS books. It's on the third floor... somehow, before tonight I was under the impression that there were only two floors. -shrug- Now I know. I intend to make some serious purchases someday soon... probably on Amazon, because those books are fucking expensive in-store.

As for further festivities at TW... there was beer pong, and a wine tasting... and excessive amounts of tasty beer, including Sierra and Blue Moon. So I can't fault their taste, although if there had been Guinness or cider I would've chosen that over anything.

After TW, I went to the IIT acappella concert. It was glorious. I think that it's the first time in perhaps several weeks that I've felt genuinely moved by something. They're having some trouble producing and delivering the CD that they took many pre-orders for, several months ago. I wish they would just distribute it on Bandcamp.

One of my friends bought a welding torch and he and some of the guys were practicing pulling good welding beads... on the kitchen floor... which is now scorched... sigh. Well, that can be covered up. I have to say, I'm excited to have access to a torch. (Yes, they also have a helmet facemask shield thing.) I plan to take pics of the welding in action.

Extreme Programming Applied by Auer and Miller

I got this book in the mail today. I don't think that it's the one that TW will want me to buy and read, but this is a fucking excellent book and I'll read their favorite when they tell me what it is, because they haven't done that yet (it's not like it'll take me until January to read it, so that doesn't bother me.)

Extreme Programming Applied by Auer and Miller http://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Programming-Applied-Playing-Win/dp/0201616408

Frankly, I bought it because 1. Fowler linked to it and 2. It was $0.01 (+shipping) used.

It is- let me say this again- awesome. It has stories. Which is to say, short biographical case studies. I skimmed the table of contents and then started skipping around in the book. It is tasty. Writing style is important, dammit.

"Suppose the best programmer on your team gets run over by a truck." p.170

I mean, I totally always start with that assumption...

"If I could write code that you couldn't understand, then I was, by implication, smarter than you. You can imagine the stinky code that came out of this group!" p.213

Anyway, the book might not be as entertaining as I think it is right now, but meh. Will see.

Agile

I read http://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html and it was pretty excellent. I even took a few notes. It prompted me to do a few things, like add some dev books to my Amazon wishlist. And join this mailing list. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/

I learned that XP stands for extreme programming, which is a flavor of agile dev. I met this XP website: http://www.extremeprogramming.org/ which has a list of "rules" i..e progceedures- very useful! I haven't read them yet. But they'll be useful. http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules.html

To be honest, I feel like my brain is a little fried. It's kinda late in the day and it might be time to have a drink and not stare at a glowing screen. My laptop is running hot. I want hot cocoa.

Here's a site which is less simple and usable (to my eyes) than extremeprogramming.org but the article titles look like I want to read them. http://xprogramming.com/index.php (burn down vs. kanban board? locating bottlenecks. Scrum. http://xprogramming.com/articles/kate-oneal-burning-down/) Aha! pics on Google Images tell me that I have seen kanban boards before, at dfr's old workplace and at TW. (What was the name of dfr's old company? Dammit.)

Here is yet another shiny website. For some reason it has book reviews, but there are also Tests from a Hat! Mmmm. Shiny. http://www.xp123.com/g4p/hat/
Also, Scrum on a page! I think I've seen this before, though hell knows where. http://xp123.com/xplor/xp0507/Scrum-dev.pdf There's one for XP but it looks like an undergrad made it for a giveaway project. Oh gods, I probably just stuck my foot in it hardcore. But it does. Let's make new versions. ...Man, I constantly think of things that my professors could have done better. But if they had done all of those things, the students would have had a nervous breakdown. Or balked like overloaded goats.

Anyway. I just ordered this book (Fowler linked to it) because, honestly, it's one cent on amazon, plus shipping. And the description looks like it'd be useful. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201616408/
Alistair Cockburn (Scrum/agile guy) has a blog but none of the recent titles caught my attention. Should review it delta time. http://alistair.cockburn.us/Blog?view=dlist

http://pettichord.com/ This guy mentions Selenium, which I've at least looked at although not used, and Watir, which I've never heard of. Time to change that.

Ah, Mingle. I think there's a free dl; it'd be interesting to run it locally. Free for up to five users, or for one year? Someone is pretty sure that the product will hook the customer. http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/mingle-agile-project-management

Tasty essay to read later "What is software design?" http://www.bleading-edge.com/Publications/C++Journal/Cpjour2.htm

Basically a white paper on why people are important when doing dev. Probably related to the concept that a teally topnotch guru can program 1000(more more)x faster than a basic. http://alistair.cockburn.us/Characterizing+people+as+non-linear%2c+first-order+components+in+software+development Too complicated for me right now. Maybe later.

Agile Alliance homepage! Very StarWars-sounding. http://www.agilealliance.org/

Golly, Fowler has written a lot. http://martinfowler.com/articles.html If I ever run out of books in an airport I know what I can do with my time.

I think that CS ppl believe that the future is inevitable and that trying to slow it down is [negative word here: silly/stupid/futile/etc]

Omg the manifesto! Must read. Heh. http://www.agilemanifesto.org/ I think that this is the coolest link from that article.

Red/Green refactoring- makes sense. Also, code "smells" (I recently learned what these things are and therefore think that they're cool.) http://jamesshore.com/Blog/Red-Green-Refactor.html

Anyway, I've run out of tabs now.

CS GRE

I have a study prep book for the CS GRE. I think the book is a year or few out of date, but the problems in it are lots of fun- which is to say that some of them are goddamn complicated.

I'm still halfway through four CS books because life is all complicated and stuff. Hopefully I'll get to finish them soon. They rock.

List:

CS GRE (I'm not taking it, just reading the book)

Coders at Work (big book!)

Practice of Programming

Design Patterns

and I have a couple more sitting around for when I get done with those. Mostly Ruby stuff.

Data entry

Ugh. I might get around to it sometime.

http://library.iit.edu/recommend/

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612

http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-Code/dp/0201485672

http://www.amazon.com/GRE-Computer-Science-REA-5th/dp/087891434X

http://www.amazon.com/Regular-Expression-Pocket-Reference-Expressions/dp/0596514271

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Perl-5th-Randal-Schwartz/dp/0596520107

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Perl-3rd-Larry-Wall/dp/0596000278

http://www.amazon.com/xkcd-0-Randall-Munroe/dp/0615314465

New books!

1. Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides

I own this, and it is wonderful.

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Elements-Reusable-Object-Oriented/dp/0201633612

Creational patterns, structural patterns, behavioral patterns. This book will blow your mind continuously and repetitively and probably make you enormously better at everything that you do that requires structure of any kind.

I'm reading it, and I keep having to look stuff up. It's wonderful.

These following four are from the "new books" shelves in the university library.

2. LINQ programming by Mayo c2009 http://www.amazon.com/LINQ-Programming-Joe-Mayo/dp/0071597832

LINQ is about databases. LINQ is to databases as web 2.0 is to 1995.

First sentence starts with "C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5 introduce a new set of language features and APIs for working with data called Language Integrated Query (LINQ)." So if you hate it already, go away and be a hater, because that's what the entire book is about. It actually looks pretty cool.

Here, have an uninformative Wiki link. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query

3. Eyetracking Web Usability by Nielsen and Pernice c2010 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eyetracking-Usability-Voices-That-Matter/dp/0321498364

Contrary to what I actually thought, this book is actually about what your eye looks at. Right now my eye is looking at the inside of my eyelid, because I'm tired and typing by touch. Dammit, typo. Go back and fix. Zone out while typing again- this time with eyes open but unfocused in the direction of my keyboard. Man, someone could make some serious revenue by sticking an ad in the whitespace to the right of the textbox that I'm typing in right now. Come on, people- the money isn't in ads on the blog, but in ads on the blog interface! Sooo many people blog that there's gotta be some serious money in there.

On the other hand I'd probably go a little mad if there was an ad there, especially if it were moving or blinking.

We're all guilty of immediately clicking the big button, then saying "oops" ...we're pretty well-trained lab rats.

One last note: lots of cool color pictures of websites with eyetrack patterns superimposed.

4. Six Themes on Variation, edited by Hardt. http://books.google.com/books?id=zuWttfJmexwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Six+Themes+on+Variation,+edited+by+Hardt.&source=bl&ots=B7wgOJhzxL&sig=tgH2fBx9W1Jer7m9u6_EFHdjMjs&hl=en&ei=gZqaTO2NCsSnnQfCocntDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Calculus of variations! Little eentsy book. alephomega might <3>

5. Protectors of Privacy by Newman http://www.amazon.com/Protectors-Privacy-Regulating-Personal-Economy/dp/0801445493

It's a nontechnical book with discussions of politics and regulations, expertise as power (in online communities), and makes surprisingly little mention of encryption. it addresses the issue of court cases about what one person accessed that was illegal in their country but hosted in another country. Lots of international law issues. This book is very meta and summarizes itself a little often. The bibliography is long and beautiful. Was this someone's thesis?

I was hoping for more discussion of crypto.

more books

I picked up everything that I passed that looked interesting.

1. Ruminations on C++ by Koenig and Moo.

I was wrong. Put it back. (also, copyright 1996)

2. Ruby Phrasebook by Clinton

Wins best of show. I'm considering stealing it. http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Phrasebook-Jason-D-Clinton/dp/0672328976

3. Object Solutions by Booch

Good narrative style, but you could find as much content by reading blogs for a while. There are some fun sections, including a discussion on how easy it is to build the wrong thing if management is being stubborn. Very dated discussion of project management. (i.e. waterfall is assumed, rather than agile dev)

4. Mastering Perl by Foy (O'Reilly book)

Obviously, anything O'Reilly is more or less worth reading. http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Perl-brian-d-foy/dp/0596527241

Verdict: I think I'm in love.

Advanced regex, untainting data, debugging perl, benchmarking, strictures, Pod (documentation), perltidy ftw, ...

Obviously I'm not a Perl Master. I should probably be reading an introductory text, if anything. But I'm impatient. :) Besides, I'm playing too hard with Ruby.

Lol, "talk to the bear" - the practice of explaining your code aloud to someone- coworker, bear, rubber ducky... usually leads to you saying "Oh, nevermind, I got it."

"Coding is where laziness meets impatience... oh, and competence."

5. Computer Forensics for Dummies by Volonino and Anzaldua

It's very basic. Chapter one will dispell your ignorant ideas (if you had any) about privacy. It has some fnu details. Ch. 2-6 are legalese. Ch. 7 is a transition to Ch. 8, which has some good stuff for people new to the realm. 9-11 are mirros of 8, but about email, docs, drives. Ch. 12 = cell phones. The rest of the book is mostly legalese.

Anyone who thinks that this books qualifies them for something is, indeed, a dummy. But it would be a good starter text for a scifi author trying to branch out into soft cyberpunk. And it might serve to intrigue teenagers (or careerchangers) into giving the profession a deeper look.

"World War Web: The Big One" should be a short story about crypto, legislation, and privacy.

6. Innocent Code by Huseby (Copyright 2004)

Not as dated as some, but the section on SQL injection is a a little old (I should blog about that, hmn), and the bit about sending email with a false address, while fun, is generally protected against nowadays.

p.193-195 is basically the summary of a class I took last year. Yay, packets.

7. Crypto by Levy.

This one, oddly, (none of the others have) has been checked out. Seven times. The most recent one was in 2003, though. So... meh. Makes you wonder why libraries even bother to have books, right?

It actually looks somewhat interesting- humanizing tales of the creation of DES and other crypto firsts.

http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digital/dp/0140244328

8. Open Source 2.0 edited by DiBona, Cooper, and Stone.

Glossy and orange, this book actually looks "modern." It's an O'Reilly, although it's not in the traditional visual format.

It mentions Mozilla and Slashdot by name in the index. In one of the appendixes, it provides the text of a few of the most common open source licenses.

I wouldn't call it worth buying, but here it is if you want it. http://www.amazon.com/Open-Sources-2-0-Continuing-Evolution/dp/0596008023

Right. Enough of that.

Three SQL books

In the main IIT library, there is a Computer Science section. It is woefully out of date and in general looks like something that you'd find in an abandoned bookstore, but as I was walking through it to sit down at a little table by the window with my new GRE prep book (and that's an entirely different story), I saw the SQL section.

I am uncommonly fond of SQL. Blame Dr. Nazli, who is a ridiculously good professor. http://www.ir.iit.edu/~nazli/

The three books are:
SQL Hacks by Cumming and Russel http://www.amazon.com/SQL-Hacks-Andrew-Cumming/dp/0596527993
SQL Cookbook by Molinaro (O'Reilly) http://www.amazon.com/Cookbook-Cookbooks-OReilly-Anthony-Molinaro/dp/0596009763
SQL Power by Hess http://www.amazon.com/SQL-Power-Comprehensive-Kenneth-Hess/dp/1598632124

I have not actually read these books. At most, I've skimmed them. Read the bits that looked interesting to me.

The Hess was published in 2007. That makes it old. It's kind of like a textbook, but a textbook which takes longer to say things than I think it should take to say them. In chapter 7 it goes into the basics of granting editing/admin privileges in databases, which Nazli didn't actually cover but which I picked up by running into it in use (and knowing that it MUST exist, right?)

SHOW GRANTS is so oldschool that it hurts. It's still nice to see it in print (not just on the internet.)

Nazli's teachings were wonderful, but limited; since we only ever worked with one database at a time, she only mentioned USE in passing, which (from my only slightly removed yet much more haughty viewpoint) I think is somewhat comical.

The longer and more complicated that queries get... the better. Well, not exactly. It's certainly better to get only the data out of your database that you want to get.
And queries are much better than doing it by hand, ha ha.

I guess it's the skill beyond the one that used to screw with me in middle school- translating long word problems into sensible, accurate algebraic equations that can be solved.

Oh, gods, CROSS JOIN. I'd forgotten about that one. In general, it's not useful unless you need ot do permutations. But sometimes you do, and I guess that's how you do it.

Batch data loading - possibly that is the cool part of databases. From what I understand, it's all about how to get the data from its current form- possibly its raw form- and load it into your database where you want it. Perl is your friend here. (I need to get better at Perl. I know just enough to write Hello World and recognize RSA encryption. Not the best skillset out there, but improving it is what sounds like fun to me.)

Chapter 8 goes on about different keywords as if they're new or something. I guess they might be. This would be a pretty ok textbook for an introductory class taught to non-CS majors. Or at a public school (hello, IIT snobbery). I can see why it's so cheap on Amazon.

Ch 9 is about Views. Maybe I should read that one; Nazli only went over it lightly, and I didn't ace it or anything. I mean... basic stuff, right? It's not like it's in C or something. VIEW generally makes something that's read only- great for when you're piping data to 1.0 web users. ...Yeah, Ruby is better. But the people I hang out with think that Ruby is better than EVERYTHING. Don't believe everything on the internet.

pg. 246 "PHP is my web language of choice." All well and good in 2007 but I think I have to stop reading this book now.

pg. 259 the author describes his first experience with regular expressions.

Appendix appendix how to install things that have had new versions since then and weren't too difficult anyway appendix appendix.

The Hacks book looks interesting. It's also copyright 2007, but it looks worth reading. It's not for noobs, and it's not a textbook. More like a level 2 mid-level book, with an index that lets you skip to what you want. (Did I mention that the index on the Hess was somewhat... awkward? In Ch. 6 there were a dozen lines in the index that read "objective" for some reason.)

I've been reading the Hacks book. It's pretty cool. Led to me reading this mini article on how to corrupt a database while it's running (so that you can then run tests on it). http://sqlblog.com/blogs/linchi_shea/archive/2007/08/29/how-to-corrupt-a-sql-server-2005-database.aspx

In ch. 6, there's a section on processing web server logs. I don't have any current need of it, but it looks fun.

Incidentally, I just now got my SQL Server running. Version 5.1.39, MySQL. I think I had installed it when I was taking that class with Nazli, but it never really worked out and I left it floating around my system unsetup. All better now. Although for some reason I'm getting some serious lag which I have yet to identify the causes of.

Oh, gods. Now it's time for me to look at the Cookbook. (The Hacks book looks neat, but I'm not currently trying to do anything which it covers- it has several specialized topics.)

The Cookbook is copyright 2006. That's horrifying. Hasn't Galvin bought any new books since 07? Perhaps not- the university cut out almost all TAs this semester to save on budgetary thingies. I wonder if the university will be surprised when fewer of the professors publish this semester, the average student grades go down (or suspiciously up), et cetera.

Skim index. First thought: cool, cool, skillbuilding, code snippets.
Second thought: what the hell is a pivot (in the contest of databses)?
Flip to page 349, where the topic is "finding knight values." I have never heard of a Knight Value.

Ahh. They're called "knight values" because, in order to get the "knight values" (your desired result set) you must navigate across the chessboard (database) like a knight does- i.e. kinda zigzag. It's a cute name for a complicated query.

pg 350 That is a fucking complicated query. I need to learn some kind of procedure for coming up with those on command, using nothing but a list of client demands, my own brain, and the database.

Generating Forecasts is another section heading. It sounded complicated but it turns out that, when it comes to shipping, it's not only the Thing To Do, but somewhat easy. ...go read the goddamn thing; I'm not retyping it. Easy doesn't mean short.

"Pivoting" is also known as transposing. Basically, turn rows into columns. (Sounds complicated.) I guess I DO know what that is. We never actually did it, though. Sounds like what we did with C in some lab once.

*complicated is a GOOD thing.

Pivoting. They use CASE and SUM here. It looks relatively easy, although you have to basically custom design it for every case. And what must it DO to your database design? Dear gods. Nazli stressed good dependencies, keys... pivoting is obviously a refactoring mechanism, but if you don't do as part of a larger plan, all of your dependencies will go shoot themselves.

Reading on, things get more complicated and yet strangely more intelligible...

Enough.

Books

I'm currently reading the book She's Such a GEEK! It's a compilation of short autobiographical stories by female geeks. It focuses on the difficulties in the field which are unique to women. http://www.amazon.com/Shes-Such-Geek-Science-Technology/dp/1580051901

Also currently reading Quest for Cthulu by August Derleth. It's a compilation of short stories in the Cthulu mythos. It's well-written horror and I'm enjoying it. I bought it offline and I can't actually seem to find it on Amazon, but here's a link to a similar compilation. http://www.amazon.com/Watchers-Out-Time-Fifteen-soul-chilling/dp/0345485696/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1284490628&sr=1-1

I'm currently applying to jobs that I find through twitter, Craigslist, and friends because, although I am currently working at Aquinas Literacy Center and Benton House, I need reliable full time long-term work.