Archive for December, 2007

More Audiobook Reviews

| December 29th, 2007
I finished Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card:
rating: I liked it but would call it fair compared to the other books, I now regret that I decided to head down the path of bean instead of ender for how I would read the series.

1776 by David McCullough:
rating: excellent, would have liked an epilogue to cover the first 3 months of 1777.

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore:
rating: awesome, fun! This book was a blast, dark humor but I found myself laughing out loud a number of times, the narration on this was great....I could literally picture the story unfold. I want will definitely read Moore :)

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
rating: quite good, definitely interesting....I have always subscribed to the theory of "Person Smart, People Stupid" this tome attempts to propose the exact opposite.

The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss
rating: in progress....so far a number of great points and ideas, definitely will result in pissing a lot of people should people choose to follow his advice, at least this is true for people in a corporate setting. Probably works much better for people in product oriented occupations that are individual contributors without much in the way of management aspirations or responsibilities, but then again I'm not finished yet.

Up Next:
Restless by William Boyd.

Can you tell I love this Audible Subscription.
PIR is Parrot's native programming language. In this conclusion of his series, chromatic presents a variety of techniques to program and validate subroutines. Learn how to create libraries and test your code in this hands-on primer.

String Ducky

| December 10th, 2007
An update....a while back I posted an article about Discover Channels contest to explain String Theory in 2 minutes or less. Here is the chosen winner.

The holidays are fast approaching, and that means it's swag time, and this year there's plenty of tech goodies and geekish gifts to put on your list or buy for your friends and family. From inexpensive, but nifty, gadgets to high-dollar top-of-the-line tech, we've got a shopping list that will satisfy the most discriminating shopper.
Parrot is not just a virtual machine for running dynamic languages; it also includes several tools for building dynamic languages, including a grammars engine and a tree transformation system. Currently, all of these tools are available through PIR, Parrot's native programming language.
Jeremy Garcia provides a short introduction to F-Spot, a handy personal photo management application written in Mono.

Podcast: Ted Ts’o Interview

| December 5th, 2007
In this podcast, Ted Ts'o, the Linux Foundation's newly appointed Chief Platform Strategist, takes a few minutes to talk to Linux Magazine about his new role with the Linux Foundation, the status of Ext4, the Linux Standard Base, and more.

Pixels to PetaFLOPS

| December 5th, 2007
Learn how graphics processing units are pushing the HPC envelope.
As the year draws to a close, it's time to look back and reflect on... IT security. Was 2007 a banner year for secure systems, or rampant attacks? Did your shop sail through the year with no problems, or did you spend late nights recovering systems?

Inside Intel

| December 3rd, 2007
When you hear "Intel Inside," you're likely to think of hardware, particularly processor technology, chip sets, motherboards, servers, and desktops. But the company has a "softer" side as well — for a number of years, Intel has been building up its software divisions, creating tools that target everything from performance libraries, to XML, to mobility.