diego's weblog
there and back again
Category Archives: books
mini-ode to “hello, world”
Posted by on January 2, 2012
“FORTRAN begat ALGOL, which begat CPL, which begat BCPL, from whence B, and then C, arose…” I hadn’t looked at Scala in a while, so I head over to www.scala-lang.org and start looking through docs. First the tutorial, and sure enough the first thing they do is show a Hello, World example. It suddenly struck [...]
hacker cooties
Posted by on December 24, 2011
I am definitely enjoying this, the tail end of 2011, living largely in disconnected mode, barely looking at news, catching up on books and movies. Come January, there will be time for frenetic engagement with the electronic world. Something I wanted to share though, was a fragment on Charlie Stross’s “how I got here in [...]
the story of ‘the plan’
Posted by on March 15, 2009
I’ve been writing a little bit (again) this past week — or, rather, doing mostly editing of things I wrote over the last few years but somehow never got around to finish. I’m going to be publishing them through Amazon (Createspace for dead-tree versions and the Amazon Digital Text Platform for Kindle versions). Each has [...]
october, eh?
Posted by on October 1, 2008
Allow me to crack my knuckles before I start. cracks knuckles. That’s better. It’s been over two months since I posted anything. I really don’t know where the hell time goes, but I hope it’s warm there. I just got back (only last week) from a couple of weeks of much-needed vacation. There’s of course [...]
Kindle, take 3
Posted by on November 24, 2007
Okay, after some more time with the device, here’s a few more thoughts (Prompted by Kyle, who started asking questions on IM. So it’s really his fault ). Again, in no particular order… The navigation buttons are really really well positioned. It’s very natural to use one side or the other to navigate forward and [...]
Kindle, take 2
Posted by on November 20, 2007
Okay, so after a few hours of playing around with the Kindle here’s some further thoughts on the device, in no particular order. The display is clearly better than the one on the Sony Reader PRS-500 (first gen): faster refresh, better contrast. I imagine it is on par with that of the PRS-505. The navigation [...]
Kindle!
Posted by on November 20, 2007
So yesterday morning I ordered a Kindle (as one of my first conscious acts of the day ) and it arrived a few minutes ago. Lightning Quick Impressions The Packaging is cool, very Apple-like. It’s like a book! Nicely done. The device has charge out of the box. Boot it up, and it already knows [...]
raid on the sun
Posted by on September 3, 2007
This weekend I finished reading Raid on the Sun: Inside Israel’s Secret Campaign that Denied Saddam the Bomb by Rodger W. Claire. It is the inside story of a secret Israeli mission that in 1981 took down Saddam’s first, biggest (and, as it would turn out, most successful) nuclear weapons project by destroying the Osirak [...]
on neuromancer
Posted by on August 27, 2007
Ok, next up in my list of belated blog posts is Neuromancer, more specifically my thoughts about the book. Russ recently read the book and was criticizing the ending as a “sort of afterthought”. Here’s my take on it: it’s not an afterthought but rather a very concrete expression of an idea that we’ve come [...]
spook country
Posted by on August 6, 2007
At the end of a process that William Gibson started in July 2005 there’s Spook Country, the latest from the master, which will be out tomorrow. It’s interesting to me that everywhere, including most recently this News.com article about the book, Gibson is mentioned as “[having] predicted many of the changes technology has brought about”. [...]
