Cobalt Edge

I have some tech books that I will be donating to the local library, unless someone wants any of them. If you would like one or more of these books, I'm happy to send them to you for the price of shipping. Click through to the Flickr page and message me, or leave a comment on my blog (make sure you include your email address (which doesn't get published) in your comment, so I can reply. The books are primarily cover Java and Linux, but also Python, Jabber, Mozilla, Emacs, etc.

Also, not in the picture, but most likely available is, "Object Oriented Perl" by Damian Conway, from Manning Press. It's on eBay, but doesn't appear it'll sell.

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The latest issue of Wired has an article by Clive Thompson titled, Take the Red Book. The article, available on Mr. Thompson's web site struck a chord with me. I have not been a big reader of SciFi, but I've noticed that over the last couple years, I've been reading less fiction, and amazingly (to myself), a lot of non-fiction. I think his article resonated because I realized that I have been a bit bored with some of the fiction as well. Further, his article got me to read Cory Doctorow's, After the Siege, which is a great short story. It is also not crazy out-there SciFi.

I've read William Gibson's two latest books, er, scratch that, I'm still in the middle of his latest, and honestly, I don't think I'll finish it. Granted, these are a departure for him, and are not SciFi, but IMHO, aren't that good. I liked some of his earlier work, and I know he's highly regarded, but a lot of it was just too far out there, too much tech. I've read Snow Crash, various Heinlein, Asimov, Douglas Adams, etc. And actually, while I haven't read all of his works, Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather is an absolute favorite, that was right up my alley. And now, having read After the Siege, and based on the Take the Red Book article, I'm thinking I need to get back to some SciFi, and just try some different authors. Recommendations?

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I received my Kindle the other day, and have had a chance to read with it for several hours now. So far, so great! I like it quite a bit. I'm going to keep this short, because the Kindle has been covered a lot elsewhere.

Things I like:

• Trivial setup. The unit comes completely setup, tied to your account, and included all the books I'd already bought. All I had to do was turn the thing on and start using it. I did follow directions and plug it in to charge, which reached full within maybe 15 minutes. Also, the unit starts right into a quicky getting started, that I found to be just the right length and usefulness.


• The "electronic ink" display is awesome. You can read this thing in any kind of light, no problems like you'd have with a laptop screen or many other devices. Very pleasant to read to as well, did not tire my eyes at all after several hours!


• Easy to use UI. Basically, learn a couple buttons and the scroller and you're done.


• Neato features like clippings, search, and bookmarks.


• When the unit is in sleep mode, the display actually has an image on it, and it tells you how to wake it up (in case you forgot ;-)

What I don't like... I can really only think of two things to start off:

• No PDF support. This is a pretty big deal. I knew this going in, but had read you could convert documents. You can, but have to use a Windows app, and it's unclear how well it works. I haven't tried it yet, but plan to. I was hoping to place some of the existing ebooks I have onto the Kindle this way. This is hands down my #1 complaint and the thing I truly hope Amazon can remedy. I understand the reasons, but I'd like to see them solve it, even if it's not ideal.


• The price of subscribing to blogs. Usually it's cheap, such as $1/month, but really, blogs are free, and yes, obviously this is partially to cover Whispernet fees (which Amazon always says they cover in their docs, but obviously it's built into the price you're paying), and to cover management on your account, but seriously, it's a blog. How about you give us at least 10 for free, and then make them dirt cheap thereafter. Or at least don't tell us that you're covering the Whispernet fees.

All in all, I love this thing so far, and am really excited to see how I use it going forward. I very much like the idea that I can take this one thing when I travel, instead of having to either figure out what I might want to read ahead of time (I'm usually in the middle of a few books), or take multiple books with me. Also, nice to have even around the house, for just the ability to grab it and know I've got various reading material on it.

I will be most curious to see if I try blogs, newspapers, or magazines on it. Cost wise I probably won't, and I don't get a newspaper as it is (blogs, newspapers/news, I get all online). Magazines maybe, although most of the ones I read have a good visual component (various cycling mags, National Geographic Adventure and Outside, techy mags which typically don't translate to something like this very well, Wired, or whatever). Time will tell, but it's pretty cool so far.

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I bit the bullet and ordered up an Amazon Kindle ebook reading device. I'm a big reader and this thing has serious appeal. As Don MacAskill says, I am often into several books at a time, and don't know what mood I'll be in, so when traveling it's hard to trim down the list to something easy to travel with.

I am also very intrigued by its ability to send documents to it, in particular PDF. The PDF translation (to the MOBI format the Kindle needs) is apparently not perfect, but this is huge, as it'll allow me to take all the ebook versions of tech books I have and use with me. I always have these on my laptop, but there are times when I want to actually sit down and read some of them (as opposed to just do a quick lookup while coding).

It's pretty promising, and I promise to review it once I have it, which won't be for a few weeks (mid-December is my approx ship date).

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I've put up more books on eBay, including a copy of "Essential COM", signed by Don Box himself (eBay listing). I've also got books on Zope and Plone (listing, which has links to the others), and various other Windows books. I didn't sell a single one of the Java books I had up there, which kind of surprised me (nearly all were listed at $4).

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I just posted a slew of Java books for sale on eBay. They are all priced between $3-6. Some are current, some aren't. Here's a listing (and the link goes to the eBay listing):

• Graphic Java 2, Volume 2: Swing (3rd Edition)


• Graphic Java 1.2, Volume 1: AWT, Third Edition


• The Java Class Libraries, Volume 1: java.io, java.la...


• Patterns in Java, Volume 1, A Catalog of Reusable De...


• Patterns in Java, Volume 2


• Programming Web Services with XML-RPC (O'Reilly Inte...


• Java Web Services


• JSTL: Practical Guide for JSP Programmers (The Pract...


• Web Development with Java Server Pages


• Designing Enterprise Applications with the Java(TM) ...


• JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition


• Java Threads, Second Edition Java 2


• Java(TM) Native Interface: Programmer's Guide and Sp...


• Art of Java Web Development: Struts, Tapestry, Commo...


• Building Imaging Applications with Java(TM) Technolo...

I will have more, on other subjects to come, but I've started to prune my library, in preparation for our move to Eugene.

For the curious, I use iSale on the Mac to post on eBay, it's superb. It easily filled in most of the auction on each book simply by me letting it search Amazon for the ISBN and importing the info (all automatically). The new version of iSale also has iSight support for taking quick pics, etc. But, the listing above was a simple hack by exporting my auction items from iSale (as CSV), plopping that in Excel and dropping out all but the eBay ID column and title column, then dropping that in TextMate, and simply wrapping those with the above HTML, trivially done by using TextMate's awesome column editing abilities (a regex search and replace would've done fine too, but this seemed even faster).

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