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Review

Yesterday I´ve received a copy of the book Wikipedia - The missing manual from O´Reilly for writing a review. Cool, isn´t it?!

I started to read it - but it´s really a big book with lots of information in it. Do all reviewers actually read their books from cover to cover? Are newspaper reviews really based on the books or just on summaries or press releases from their publishers? A while ago I wrote about an upcoming movie, mentioning only a review, without having seen it yet - and was critized for that.

Reviews, on the other hand, are quite some work. A journalist for a newspaper has to spend several hours to read a book or even several days for a computer or business book and then is only paid for a few paragraphs?

Actuality and speed is another problem. New, upcoming books have to be reviewed often in the short time-span before the book is released to help create demand for that book. I doubt that journalists are really readings all the books they receive.

Anyway, I will try to read that book as fast as possible and then post a review back here.

Clever recommendations

Amazon has some clever recommendation pages. No dull reloads when changing an item, recommendations for those categories where you already bought one or the other item or have stored a product in your wish-list; no recommendations, but information on new or popular products in the other categories. A simple modell with simple navigation and usage, yet very powerful.

In memoriam Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem has died today. I read quite a few books written by him - including Solaris and More Tales of Pirx the Pilot, mostly published by Suhrkamp in German - and also met his son while he was living in Austria. Here are a few links worth reading and re-reading: Ein Visionär auf den toten Schultern nicht existierender Maschinen, Wikipedia entry (german, english, polish), official site

Technorati Tags: Lem, Stanislaw_LemScience_Fiction

Book meme, again

Yesterday I was going to do a quick post and join the latest book meme - following recent posts by Horst and Armin, even without being invited to join this meme; but after typing nearly 2/3 of the text I lost it all. Why? Because the search results for a search done through Firefox´s search box opened in the tab opened for Typepad. Uhhh! Should have saved the text while editing it.

So here it´s again:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?
Good question, however, even that I had another day to think about it I can´t think of a good answer. Next question.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Yes, probably.

What are you currently reading?
Well, I always end-up reading several books at the same time. One of those is Endlich Nichtdenker by Hannes Stein - a bizarre books about the merits of giving up thinking (it remarks that one of the advantages of stopping thinking is getting more sex. Hilarious!).

Another one is Gute Frage! by Andrew Finlayson (english title: Questions that work - How to ask questions that will help you succeed in any business situation). Still unfinished, but mostly read is Testtraining 2000plus by Hesse/Schrader.

The last book you bought is:
Happy Projects!, by Roland Gareis. I also recently bought Will in der Welt (Will in the World) by Stephen Greenblatt, a biography of William Shakespeare, as a present for a friend.

The last book you read is:
S*PAM KINGS by Brian McWilliams.

Five books you would take to a desert island:
First of all, I´d love to go to a desert island, with or without the books, with friends, with a beautiful woman, with no computer and no phone, with time to enjoy the day, the evenings and the nights. Due to being unemployed and looking for a new job, I hadn´t done any travel that would come near to any exotic island.

Anyway, finding a list of books is pretty easy, so here it is:

First I would take a good crime novel, like the new book by Henning Mankell (german), plus an architektur guide from Taschen´s Architecture Now! series, Paul Graham´s Hackers and Painters (unread waiting on my bookshelf), Margaret Wertheim´s The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace - a great book linking arts history and the internet I read about 5 to 6 years ago and Leo Rosten´s great book (but also still mostly unread on my bookshelf) on the jewish language titled Jiddisch (german). That´s five books.

Who are you going to pass this stick to? and why?
Nobody, ´cause nobody passed it to me.

BTW, my (previously) favorite book website has re-launched again: Allconsuming.net, tracking books mentioned in the blogosphere. Previously favorite, because, I stopped using it for a while. Now it´s design really is horrible. Plus the old content is gone. The book trivia stuff is gone. Let´s wait what Erik Benson will achieve with this site. I give it one more month time, then it´s Ok to forget it again.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Transforming Loved Ones into Effective Agents of Guilt and Terror

This seems like an interesting book and a great photo, too (by Biz Stone): No Plot? No Problem!, a "Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days"

Maybe I should photograph some of my books, too.

Looks good

At this bookshop the books are sorted by colour. (via MegaWatt)

Chickenboners and the lumber cartel

Just finished reading SpamKings, the new book from Brian McWilliams published by O´Reilly. It´s an entertaining story listing the work of well-known spammers such as Davis Hawke, Brad Bournival and Sanford Wallace aka Spamford plus the never-tired spammer fighters including Susan "Shiksaa" Gunn and Steve Linford of Spamhaus.

Well, it´s a wicked good book. It´s so good actually, that I read it in 3 days (and could have done faster if there weren´t other things to life as well). Besides, I also learned more on the connection between spam senders and virus authors in an article from Brian McWilliams on the SoBig worm and an anonymous technical analysis (PDF) of that software. You can read Chapter 1 online (PDF) and get hooked into the book (Amazon Germany, Amazon.com), just as I did.

Excerpted from the glossary in the book:

Chickenboner - a label given to small-time spammers. Anti-spammers stereotype chickenboners as living in mobile homes with a personal computer on the kitchen table, surrounded by empty beer cans and empty buckets of fried chicken.

Lumber Cartel - a fictitious group formed by anti-spammers in 1997 in response to assertions by some bulk emailers that wood-products companies were funding anti-spammers in a effort to preserver paper-based direct-mail promotions.

There are even more articles by the author available over at Wired News, including an article on emails sent to Saddam Hussein.

Walking around

Praschl has this illustration from Simon Pope´s witty book London Walking, mentioning a new trend of

staying at home is the new going out - walk your flat

This ain´t no new trend. As Alain de Botton has noted in his book The art of travel, a book I can recommend to every traveller, in 1790 a 27 year old French men called Xavier de Maistre did a journey around his room - in his pyjamas - and wrote down his experience in a book called Journey around my room (which is being re-released now thanks to the work of Alain de Botton). 8 years later, he repeated that journey, moving further around the room and finally reaching - the window!

Whether travelling from his bed to his sofa, or even to his mirror, he wears his "travelling outfit", consisting of his favourite pink and blue pyjamas. Out of his forced reclusion comes a delightful fantasy, and de Maistre´s new take on the travel literature of the past went on to inspire many future writers, such as Marcel Proust. (quote from Amazon Synopsis)

Human oddities

This might be an interesting book: Armand Marie Leroi´s Mutants - On Genetic Variety and the Human Body (reviewed by the Guardian), on the perfection of human genetics, the "significance of human oddities" and other aspects of human deformity in the past and present.

The Page 23 meme

Greg Storey of Airbag asks the following:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Well, lets see: The book right on my desk is Windows XP Hacks by Preston Gralla. Page 23 is about Control User Logins by Hacking the Registry.

The fifth sentence is:
Following are the most important values you can edit to customize logons.

Well, posting that forever changes the path of the universe. Lets see who orginally had the idea: Greg says it Michael, who refers to Keith, who mentions Peter, who got instructed by Caterina, she was informed by David, before that was Kiplet, Elkins, Amy, Tabouli, and - wait, no more. The meme stops here. The end of the web. Exciting. :-)

And the music right now - should that somehow excuse this stupid post - is L'Amour Toujours by Gigi D'Agostino (italian dance music).

Update 17/04: There´s another version of this meme - regarding CDs (found at smi, and NO!, we won´t do the via-via-via game again)

1. Grab the nearest CD.
2. Put it in your CD-Player (or start your mp3-player, I-tunes, etc.).
3. Skip to Song 3 (or load the 3rd song in your 3rd playlist)
4. Post the first verse in your journal along with these instructions. Don't name the band, nor the album-title.

Bruce Sterling in LA

Live from Propellerheadsville, Blogistan, United States: Xeni Jardin photographs Bruce Sterling in LA. Great photos!

I kidnapped Bruce Sterling in an unguarded moment when he should really have been writing a novel or something.

.. and I still haven´t found time to finish reading his book Tomorrow Now.

DESIGNMUSIC*

DESIGNMUSIC is a book project by NERVOUSROOM, though yet unpublished - a book about design inspired by listening to music.

If something can go wrong, it will

Worst Case Scenarios has published another book, this time about Work and Amazon has sample pages available. There are already a couple books from this series, including topics such as Golf, Travel and Sex. I´ve read the one offering more classic scenarios and adding the cover warning "CAUTION: Book will explode if scanned. " to Allconsumings Meta Data, securing an all-time spot in the metadata score card.

NYC underground

In New York city there are many subcultures and subcommunities not only in the city, but also under the city - as portraited in the book The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth.

Amazon search-in-the-book

Even this blogs own title can be found in the new search-in-the-books search tool at Amazon: ad++ is found in the complete reference to IBM WebSphere Application Server and The Holy Spirit: Activating God´s Power in Your Life.

Virtual book tour

Another virtual book tour has started an Allconsuming.net for the book Screening Party by Dennis Hensly. The first virtual book tour was for Stiff - The curious lives of dead people, and is the 23th most mentioned book in the blogosphere (whatever that means, because it´s not sure what exactly is the blogosphere). Anyway, this are the blogsphere charts for now - aka the allconsuming list. Anyway, if you don´t know Allconsuming yet, check out the website, it´s great. If you are interesting in Amazon webservices, check out this article about the technical background of this site.

Interesting is also the metadata score card, a tool where people can add information about the books that´s not store in the Amazon book database. This includes the book website, the author´s website, dedication, first and last sentence, number of pages, and a myriad of other things - including rather obscure categories like this one I´ve entered: warning on book cover: CAUTION: book will explode if scanned - for this book. That actually the most exciting about this list: it shows have many metadata you´ve entered. I´ve contributed 118 pieces so far and thus currently I´m on #6. If was in the past even as far as number #3, but other have added more - obviously people living in English-language countries have more english-language books for adding to the database.

Reading habits

"I read books at random, based on whether they catch my eye while I’m browsing in a bookstore. As a result, I end up reading the WORST books." Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, in an interview.

The Future of Amazon

Forrester reviews the future of Amazon.com and presents the result as a video.

Tim O´Reilly about E-Books/P2P

Tim O´Reilly about E-Books and P2P

Book Tip: Windows XP Hacks

Book Tip: Windows XP Hacks. 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tricks. (Amazon.de), Amazon.com, ORA, Allconsuming.net