tag archive: books

An objection I’ve had to many programming books and web sites is that they don’t make sample code available under a free software license. This is within the rights of the author, of course, but it seems counter to the spirit of teaching and sharing knowledge to restrict the use of example code.

A writer of instructional material may be doing so to earn some money, but I hope he or she is also motivated by the desire to help others. I think the best authors and teachers are motivated strongly by this desire. And if this is the case, I think it reasonably follows that the author of a programming work should want their students to be able to freely use their source code in the students’ own creations.

I was happy to exchange words recently with an author who was open and responsive to making his sample code available under a free license. With tomorrow being Software Freedom Day, it seemed like a good time …

Apparently.

U’S DEAL WITH GOOGLE

Disrespect for property

If I were to walk into a photocopy shop and ask for a duplicate of a copyright-protected book, the shop workers would show me the door. It does not matter whether I intended to distribute snippets of the text around the world or do anything else with the copy — the courts have ruled that the unlicensed duplication of an in-copyright book is illegal.

But when the University of Minnesota announces plans to digitally duplicate books, including copyright-protected works, in a commercial project with Internet giant Google (Star Tribune, June 7), it calls the effort groundbreaking and valuable.

As an author who teaches at the University of Minnesota, I wonder how I will talk to students about academic honesty and integrity when the university itself shows such disrespect for intellectual property rights. At the very least, the U should have awaited the resolution of the serious legal challenges to the Google Print project before …

I keep half an eye on references to this site by using feeds from Google News and Blog Search to catch links to here or mentions of the site (or me).

A lot of times the feeds turn up some crummy splog scraping my content. A lot of people get up in arms about this, but so far with the sites I’ve seen, I really don’t care. Whether they properly attribute the work or link or not; big deal. They’ve just been no-name sites. If some really popular site used my work without attribution (or with misattribution), that might bother me more. We’ll see if and when it happens.

I’m just not a fan of copyright or the idea that people can own published digital bits. My use of a Creative Commons license here is more to show people who care about doing the right thing that they are free to use the work. In my humble and …

Book the 1st:

He is a great waver of his arms over his head as he makes pronouncements like “There is nothing certain but taxes”—conspicuously excluding death.
–Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution

Google Blog Search tells me this has been going on for a while, but I just saw it for the first time at Peter Saint-Andre’s blog. Since it gave me an excuse to post, I’m playing the game:

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal…along with these instructions.
Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Radical Evolution was the nearest book at hand on my desk. I had started reading it a while back but it hasn’t grabbed me and I’ve grounded out on page 36. Growing up, I always finished books that I started. I had more time and patience. …

Just for FunLinus Torvalds

Welcome to my inaugural minimalist review. I recently finished reading Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. “The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary.” Now it’s time to blurt out a few comments.

(Remember: minimalist may refer to the small amount of substantive content rather than the word count. As often happens, I may have hidden some catchier stuff at the end: Pragmatism, Idealism, and Revolution.)

I have mixed feelings about doing reviews. Who am I to criticize anything? Well, I’m certainly not especially qualified, but everyone’s entitled to an opinion, right?

I enjoyed the book. I like computer “history” books; finding out about the people behind the technology and how they went about doing their thing, and there was a good dose of that with this book. …

I like reading reviews, usually of books and movies. I like it when the reviewer has some insight about the item being reviewed that helps me see things I missed, educates me, or clarifies my own feeble thinking.

Does that sound like I’m reading the review after the fact? Aren’t reviews supposed to help us make decisions on what to read or watch? Well, I use them sometimes for that purpose, but as often as not I want to read a review after finishing a book or movie, being curious what other people think.

Movies

Rotten Tomatoes is a good place to get a sprinkling of opinions on a movie, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen them link to my favorite movie reviewer: The Filthy Critic. (Caution: he really is filthy.) In addition to being very funny, he is insightful and surprisingly sensitive despite his foul-mouthed language and crude facade. …

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”– Walt Whitman
A while back, a coworker lent me a book called Self-Reliance, “The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living.” Edited and introduced by Richard Whelan, who says that he loves Emerson’s essays and has read them many times over the years but found eventually he could get the same and even better experience by just reading the many sections he had underlined over the years. He writes:

I came to think of the essays as gardens in which the underlined passages were magnificent flowers — and all the rest a rampant and choking growth of nineteenth-century rhetorical weeds and vines that were best rooted out and cut back. It was then that I realized that an abridged edition of the essays could introduce Emerson, and make his down-to-earth wisdom accessible, to a readership that might otherwise be put off by his …