Now that I’m solidly back into blogging, I have to give a shout-out to my core writing tool: MarsEdit. I’m only using the 1.2 version (licensed), but with every post I’m more and more inclined to fork over the $9.95 for an upgrade.

Now if I can only automate the process of generating an Amazon link from a book title, I’ll be in good shape.

Speaking of “meat and potatoes” science fiction, you can’t get much more stock science fiction than Isaac Asimov. And other than maybe the Robot series, nothing is more emblematic of Asimov than Foundation.

Foundation is really a sequence of short stories. The first establishes the core thread of the series. The massive Galactic Empire is slowly decaying and will eventually fall. Yet The Empire is so gigantic only one scientist, Hari Seldon, can actually foresee the oncoming catastrophe. Seldon is a devotee of “psychohistory”, which in today’s parlance would probably be a combination of statistics, sociology, and economics. He uses psychohistory to chart the future of humanity, and has devised a plan to radically shorten, though not eliminate, the oncoming dark ages. The plan involves the establishment of the Foundation at the outer edges of the galaxy, hidden from the Empire’s gaze, but destined to save humanity. The remainder of the stories chronicle the growth of the Foundation and a sequence of challenges it faces from its primitive neighbors out in the hinterlands.

First published in 1951, Foundation is obviously from a quite different era. Akin to my feelings about Rendezvous With Rama, I’m struck by how science and reason are held with such high regard in Foundation. Also the tech is quite muted, although distinctive to that era, atomic power is the trope behind the magic. The real strength of the book is its faith in reason and the interplay between those who rely on it and those how don’t.

Despite the years, Foundation still reads like a classic and is well worth anyone’s time.

The science fiction blog io9 has a nice ode to Dan Simmons, author of the Hyperion Cantos which includes the well-received The Rise of Endymion, micro-reviewed here earlier.

Alex Carnavale’s survey of Simmons’ work gives high marks to such works as Song of Kali and Prayers to Broken Stones. Carnavale usefully highlights Simmons’ novellas and short stories, which I didn’t know about. More grist for the reading mill.

Despite following Steven Johnson’s blog for a while, I’d only read one of his books, Emergence, many years ago. I bin Johnson in that category of technology pop writers such as Rheingold, Kelly, and Levy that make the stuff I deal with on a daily basis accessible to the wider population. For me though, reading their work is perilous since I often feel I know more than the author does. That does not apply here and Everything Bad is an enjoyable if not particularly deep read.

Everything Bad takes the contrarian view that various elements of our media culture (TV, video games) are making us smarter rather than dumber as numerous pundits claim. Johnson’s argument rests on two pillars: 1) modern media challenges us in new and different ways and 2) the complexity of modern media is increasing at an unprecedented rate. An admittedly limited discussion of various supporting demographic trends, and brief media analyses are used to bolster his side of the debate. His main point though is that we need to stop being dogmatic about how modern media affects us, especially our youth, and examine the impacts with a more nuanced eye.

I swallowed Everything Bad pretty much whole, but can’t say I was fully satisfied. As even Johnson might admit, the book is barely the start of a debate, not the definitive end of one. It’s a book worth reading, especially if you’re wondering what all the fuss was within the blogerati, but I wouldn’t rush out to make it happen.

I know John Rooney’s moved on to the Cardinals, but his signature closing is most appropriate tonight as the White Sox manage to beat the Twins and win the 2008 Central Division Title, 1-0. Amazingly the Sox did it with pitching and defense, not their hallmarks this season.

I was living in Chicago in 2003 and 2005. It’s a great city in general, but a real blast when there are baseball playoffs in town. Every corner bar, and there are still quite a few, is a great place to catch a game. I can’t imagine what the place will be like if both teams go deep in the playoffs.

Dreams of an eLevated series with the Cubs are still alive.

I like to use Mac native applications on the new MacBook. Camino tries to be a much more native than Firefox, so I’ve been using it, with small doses of Safari.

A lot of people complain about the lack of extensions, which is no big deal to me, but the tab navigation control is just not up to snuff. I’m so used to right clicking on a window and being able to resurrect a closed tab, it’s muscle memory. Memory that Camino consistently denies.

I may have to switch to Firefox.

John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War is straight ahead meat and potatoes science fiction. Starships, aliens and interplanetary warfare. Perfectly executed. Quite satisfying.

Old Man’s War is built around a premise of US citizens actually enlisting in the Colonial Defense Forces when they turn 75. Our protagonist, John Perry, honors his dead wife and then takes this route into the stars. He exhibits particularly fine mettle in making the transition to a soldier’s superhuman body, creative destruction of aliens, and survival in a hostile universe.

However, the story really thrives on a number of personal relationships developed by Perry. When you’ve already lived a life that you can’t return to, how you interact with others in the same boat makes for an interesting tale, not to mention fighting some nasty aliens. The contrast between the philosophies of the wise old soul and the soldier ethic is quite bracing, providing a juicy intersection to build upon.

Compared to Stross and Stephenson, Scalzi’s first novel is a walk in the park. There are no in depth excursions into how particularly technologies work, no involved historical digressions, and minimal fanboy jargon. Comes in at a reasonable page count too.

Old Man’s War retains a couple of interesting unresolved mysteries. First, apparently US citizens aren’t allowed to be colonists, only soldiers. Humans from more populous regions, e.g. India, seem slated to expand humanity’s hold on foreign planets. Second, Scalzi has little, if any, physical description of the characters. The reader is left to fill in the blanks. I just found this to be an odd little twist.

Saying Old Man’s War is meat and potatoes science fiction is not meant to demean the book. It actually ranks high on this year’s reading list and is strongly recommended. I’m looking forward to reading more of his work.

Well the Sox woke up to get a must win on Sunday and avoid elimination again today. The Twinkies visit US Cellular Field in a one game showdown. I can’t say as I’m too optimistic. Minnesota just seems like Kryptonite to the Sox.

Still while there’s breath, there’s life. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

So much for my plea. Javier Vasquez has his usual singularly explosively bad inning, a 6 run fifth, the Sox get way behind, and they can’t recover.

Hawk Harrelson said it best, “What we simply have here is two teams with tight butts.”

Pretty straightforward for the Sox. The playoffs are here now. Granted, they’re technically not facing elimination games, but they really need to start playing like these games are.

It’s stunning how quickly the Sox’s pitching, starting and middle relief, have gone south. Mark Buehrle’s on the mound and today’s one of those games where you think this is why he got that big contract extension. We need a Johan Santana like result with Buehrle style. 8 innings, 90 pitches, scattering 5 hits and allowing 1 run for the victory. All in 2 hours.

7:30 PM EDT and the Minnesota Twins have just lost to the Kansas City Royals, 4-2. At home. Again.

Having lost their last 4 games, my Chicago White Sox are 1/2 game behind the Twins for the AL Central title. The Sox are playing right now against the Tribe.

C’mon South Siders. Win tonight and put all the heat on the Twinkies. Nows the time!!

Charlie Stross’ Halting State is a little more tame than Stross’ typical conceptually overpopulated prose. But not by much. It wasn’t quite as affecting as The Atrocity Archives, but a ripping yarn nonetheless.

The kernel of the story is built around a multi-million dollar heist within a virtual world. Set in near future Edinburgh, the heist reverberates throughout multiple spheres in the “real” world. One of the strengths of Halting State is the realistic construction of a world in which virtual reality and augmented reality have intertwined with daily life. The seeds of this transformation are already here today and Stross convincingly projects them forward to some reasonable conclusions.

As a combination of a police procedural and techno thriller, there are plenty of surprises along the way, although I found the resolution and denouement to be a bit unsatisfying. Also, the appearance of the Men-in-Black in the middle of the story seemed a bit over the top and bolted on.

There’s a sweet, for a nerd techno thriller, little love story threaded through Halting State. I didn’t quite bond with the characters enough to get much out of it though. There wasn’t enough backstory on Elaine to fully flesh her out. Then again, you don’t really pick up a Stross book for the romance.

Still, of the authors I’ve read this year, Stross has been the most consistently entertaining and challenging. Halting State is another worthy contribution.

I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a book as miserable as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Not the writing which was excellent. Miserable in the sense of truly unpleasant, disquieting, and disturbing.

Anyhew, American Gods starts with our protagonist, Shadow, in jail counting the small number of days until he’s paroled and can join his wife. He gets out early only because she dies in a car accident. Things only go sideways from there.

American Gods’ main thesis, that America is not a good place for gods, but there’s plenty of them stuck here and doing quite badly as their worship fades, is captivating. These older, down on their luck gods are balanced with a set of newfangled deities of the sort you’d expect from our techno-driven, consumerist culture: Technology, Media, The Markets, etc. An odyssey for Shadow ensues, introducing us to various of these magical entities, major and minor. Drama is generated from an oncoming storm of war between the old and new gods. As is normal for this style of tale, not everything is as it appears.

The plot is complex, occasionally confused with dreamlike episodes that are a little hard to parse and put in context. But it moves well and leads to a satisfying, if somewhat anti-climatic resolution. All of the major characters are flawed, but fleshed out to a satisfying level. Thinking back, fresh from finishing, the tone is amazingly consistently, melancholy, low key, droll, even quite morbid and grisly at times. There’s bits of humor, but only of the gallows variety. Which is most appropriate. I found myself snorting occasionally, but never laughing out loud.

Gaiman is an interesting author relative to my tastes. It took me three tries to start and finish Neverwhere, but I really appreciated it after the effort. I’ll talk more about Anansi Boys in a later post, but that gets high marks too. I think of the three, I liked American Gods the least, it really is discomforting in a number of places, but I can still recommend it to others. Definitely worth the time.

My initial training in Computer Science used the Scheme programming language. I also did some undergrad research using Common Lisp on the Texas Instruments Lisp Machines. I’m not a whiny, bitter Lisp weenie, but I’m definitely sympathetic with the cause. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much of a chance to really use Lisp at all in recent years.

Just for grins on the new laptop I decided to kick the tires on a wide variety of Lisp implementations: CLISP, SBCL, Clozure CL, PLT Scheme, and scsh. While I haven’t pushed any of them too hard, I have to say I’m extremely impressed in how fast these guys run.

Lisp implementations out of the box performed pretty decently on mid-90’s stock hardware. Moore’s law dragged the Intel platform past the special purpose Lisp Machine architectures. Meanwhile, Common Lisp and Scheme have been pretty stable since then and despite their kitchen sink nature, regarding the former, and hyper advanced features, corresponding to the latter, technology’s march has blown past them. What used to be a large Lisp memory image is peanuts these days.

Next up, digging into how well these various Lisps interface to modern graphic toolkits and what kind of graphics performance do you actually get.

In my past life, I was interested in conducting research on RSS Aggregators, so I’m a bit of an afficianado. On the new Macbook, I use NetNewsWire, but I’m a really big fan of Google Reader.

I use Google Reader a lot, even to the point of hacking around with the unofficial API. I’m always thinking of ways to turn the application into a high powered information trapping tool.

Both GReader and GMail have the ability to star information. GMail one ups Reader though with the experimental Superstars feature. Superstars is basically a hyperfast way to tag items. Adding this to Reader, and then being able to see the results through the API, would be a great addition.

It’s amazing how efficient the classics can be.

Over 35 years old, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama checks in at a slim 240 pages. The technology, both human and alien, is nothing to blow you away. No singularity, cyberspace, virtual reality, or quantum computing to be found here. I’m guessing that even by the standards of the mid-70’s, the sci-fi aspect of Rama was pretty tame.

At it’s heart, Rendezvous with Rama is a mystery novel. Where did this massive alien cylinder come from? Why is it in our solar system? What is it for and how does it work? Where is it going and what is it going to do? Through a series of increasingly tense challenges, Clark weaves a totally engrossing tale that reveals a lot about human nature, without really revealing anything about the intruding alien craft.

A distinctive feature of the book, relatively to the more “modern” stuff I’ve been reading, is it’s faith in good old science. Clark acknowledges the petty wars within and between disciplines, but the astronauts that explore Rama are fundamentally scientists, and engineers, carefully investigating a new occurrence in the world. And he manages to make them quite heroic. Some are even steadfastly religious, yet still maintain scientific discipline. Would that this attribute was more common in these anti-intellectual times.

Apparently there’s a movie adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama in development. Obviously Hollywood can screw up anything (Bonfire of the Vanities anyone?), but it looks like there’s a solid foundation with Morgan Freeman starring and David Fincher directing.

Speaking of Freeman, did you know he was a regular on The Electric Company? I only know this because one of my best buddies from college TF clued me in. Coincidentally I vividly remember TF reading Rendezvous with Rama our freshman year.

One of the unfortunate things about moving to a MacBook for personal computing is the iTunes hegemony. I mainly listen to DJ mix CDs which makes me a very playlist oriented type of guy. iTunes is radically track oriented and over time I’ve found a number of “playlist hostile” warts. For example, I’ve never figured out a way to select multiple playlists and move them to my iPod.

But my biggest gripe is that iTunes doesn’t support streaming of music in Ogg Vorbis format. This is obviously a complete geek Rube Goldberg setup, but I have an icecast server setup on a UNIX machine, which I can drive from any remote shell with a combination of mpd and ncmpc. What can I say it works for me, and anywhere I can ssh from I can get to my music. Not to mention I can geek out and write scripts to control my jukebox.

Just for grins, I decided to download Songbird and give it a go. Dang if it didn’t do the right thing straight off of the disk image! It’s glitchy in a few places, for example there’s a noticeable lag when navigating playlists, and sometimes the streams skip. But Songbird’s got the right price and it fills an unfortunate hole in iTunes.

Even though I should know better, I don’t outsource my e-mail services. I pay for a cheap virtual private server from RimuHosting, and run Postfix with Courier IMAP. This is a lose if you have any e-mail addresses which receive spam, which by definition means a flood of spam. And I’ve got a couple of such addresses. Meanwhile, I’ve also got a CS PhD but was stymied in my attempts to stem the tide using stock open source tools.

GMail to the rescue. In addition to receiving messages on my VPS I just forward all of them to an account on Google’s mail servers. Then I just use IMAP to access GMail. This wins because:

1. GMail’s spam filtering is really good
2. I can use the Web frontend or Thunderbird
3. If GMail goes down, I still have my old, spam overrun way of getting to my mail.

John Robb’s Brave New War was another member of the 4th of July reading binge. BNW is an exploration of how relatively small, decentralized, non-state actors can radically disrupt nation states.

BNW argues that globalization has put Western, and Westernizing, nation states in tightly coupled configurations, exposing key leverage points to attack. Moreover, the cost/benefit ratio of attacks is extremely favorable to the small actors. An example might be a small terrorist group attacking large stretches of mostly unmonitored oil pipelines. Such easy attacks, thanks to interlocking markets, can lead to billions of dollars of impact, and can destabilize a nation state’s economy. Globalization has amplified asymmetric warfare.

Robb makes an analogy with open source software in that a wide range of strategies and tactics may be employed by these groups, the elements of said approaches being openly visible to peers. This can lead to rapid, replication, adoption, and adaptation of winning strategies. Also, technology advances across a wide range of fields, similar to enabled by computing, is further empowering these groups well past their historic means.

Released in April of 2007, it feels like BNW has been around much longer, probably because I’ve been reading Robb’s Global Guerillas weblog, where many of BNW’s ideas were test driven, since long before the book came out. Even in the short 18 months since publication, bits of confirming evidence have been seen in the real world.

In general, I’m quite sympathetic to Robb’s take on the world, but didn’t swallow it whole hog. For example, a key element of his response to these conditions is the development of platforms, “a collection of services and capabilities that are common to a wide variety of activities aggregated in a way that makes them exceedingly easy to access.” But platforms are tricky to design, trickier to deploy, and trickiest to build a healthy ecosystem around. There’s also an insistence on these being open platforms, which I don’t think are mandatory for large, scale success, c.f. Microsoft and Apple.

All in all though, I can recommend Brave New War, it’s well worth the time spent.

While I’ve enjoyed Charlie Stross‘s books before (Singularity Sky, Accelerando), I hadn’t been blown away, despite his vaunted reputation.

The Atrocity Archives blew me away.

I think I crushed this book in less than 48 hours as part of a 4th of July holiday reading binge. While quite rich in detail, and droll geeky asides, The Atrocity Archives is not nearly as conceptually dense as Accelerando. This was a welcome change as I found Accelerando incomprehensible at points.

The peak moment for me was the trip to Amsterdam. The actual atrocity archives left a true knot of horror in the pit of my stomach. After that I simply enjoyed the roller coaster combination of Lovecraftian horror (none of which I’ve ever read), traditional pop spy thrills (few of which I’ve ever read), and geek insider (which I’ve lived) story physics.

You get a bonus short story, The Concrete Jungle, which starts out great, but then devolves into office politics. Even with Stross’ style the result is the same as every inside baseball tale of bad blood: somewhat silly looking in retrospect, with a “what was all the fuss?” air.

The front cover of The Atrocity Archives, touts the terror of, “…a surprising number of meetings…,” but I was disappointed that there was only one stupefyingly bad meeting. And a training class at that. Would that Stross ventured to skewer the dreaded “weekly status update” or the truly monstrous corporate “All Hands Meeting”.

Speaking of long texts, Dan Simmons’ The Rise of Endymion is 708 pages of messianic, space opera. This is technically the fourth in a series, but is really the second half of a second pair. You can reasonably read Endymion without reading Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. The first pair of books are clearly better, principally owing to a rich literary connections to the Canterbury Tales and Keats, but the second pair is highly recommended.

The Rise of Endymion follows our protagonists, Aenea, Raul Endymion, A. Bettik, and friends as they complete their quest against an amazingly loathsome rendition of an intergalactic Catholic Church. I typically lose fascination with Messiah figures well before the crescendo of the story, but Simmons does quite a good job here. He has some of the best character development I’ve run across in my Sci-Fi/Fantasy readings. I was quite affected by the rather excruciating climax, because I was deeply invested in the characters. The final ending was really redemptive and just barely, but slickly, avoided a sickeningly cloying deus ex machina copout. All-in-all quite a good read.

If nothing else Endymion and The Rise of Endymion are worth reading for the provocative treatment of 1) how religion can be abused and 2) human life with unending resurrection.

One last thing. I’m still not sure if the question of “What is the Shrike?” was actually answered. And there were enough loose ends that I could easily see a third pair of books completing a trilogy of pairs someday.

Well, I managed to finish Stephenson’s WWII/cryptothriller tome. Again!!

Given that it’s been well over seven years since I originally read it in hardback, I didn’t really remember much of the storyline. A few things surfaced from dusty memories, such as Enoch Root, Golgotha, Amy Shaftoe and the river of gold at the end. However, I was still entranced by the interlocking historical, technical, and philosophical arcs, despite the numerous and lengthy sidebars.

But this time around I appreciated the Lawrence Waterhouse character, and his storyline, quite a bit more. Since my first read of Cryptonomicon, I had the opportunity to dig into the history of computing. Thus there was much more context available regarding Turing, the Enigma machine, Bletchley park, and the first computers. The resulting “backstory” really makes Waterhouse, and by extension Randy, much richer characters.

Just for the record, the actual completion date was 9/2/2008. Took me slightly over a month to read, end-to-end.

Talk about contrasts. The 19th book I read this year was Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” commonly known as “Blade Runner”. The cheap mass market paperback edition, prominently emblazoned with the movie title and poster, checked in at 246 pages. So Cryptonomicon is roughly 4.6 times as long as a noted classic of the genre.

I’m not sayin’ Stephenson could use a little editing, but I’m just sayin’. I think e-mail messages in Cryptonomicon might have taken up 246 pages by themselves.

Another interesting contrast is between Dick’s book and the movie that resulted from it. Other than some names, hovercars, and the concept of runaway androids from space, the book and movie don’t have a lot in common. C.f. dense urban LA setting (movie) vice sparse, lonely SF setting (book). Gives new meaning to the term “adapted from.”

One of the things I had forgotten about Cryptonomicon is how much of the book is really a World War II saga.

With a lot of unpleasant scenes.

Between guys accidentally cutting off their feet, cannibals, concentration camps and just generic war mayhem, the squick factor gets high pretty quick.

…warm MacBook, new, with 4 GB of RAM.

It might be the bottom of the line, but it beats a circa 2001 PowerPC desktop.

As a New Year’s resolution, I set out to read more books. Managing to keep up with that resolution, I’m up to my 20th for the year. Maybe Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon wasn’t such a good choice for number 20 though.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good stuff which I’ve read before. But 1130 pages of historical fiction cum cryptotechno thriller, would slow anyone’s momentum. I went through July on a roll, plowing through about 6 books, thanks to some extended leisure time around the 4th of July. It may take me all of August to finish Cryptonomicon.

We forge on.