An O'Reilly book without the popular animal cover design that collects essays where leading programmers explain how they think and present examples of elegant solutions to hard problems.

Author	Subject	Programming Language
Brian Kernighan	A regular expression matcher	C
Karl Fogel	An internal data structure of Subversion	C
Jon Bentley	Quicksort	C
Tim Bray	Web server log file analysis	Ruby
Elliotte Rusty Harold	XML verification	Java
Michael Feathers	The FIT Framework for Integrated Test	Java
Alberto Savoia	JUnit	Java
Charles Petzold	On-the-fly code generation	C, C#, CLR Intermediate Language
Douglas Crockford	Top-down-operator-precedence parsers	JavaScript
Henry S. Warren, Jr.	Counting the number of set bits in a word	C and circuit diagrams
Ashish Gulhati	Secure web-based email	Perl
Lincoln Stein	Data visualisation for bioinformatics	Perl
Jim Kent	A genome analyser web application	C
Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek	Libraries to solve linear equations	MATLAB, Fortran
Adam Kolawa	The CERN mathematical library	Fortran
Greg Kroah-Hartman	Linux kernel drivers	C
Diomidis Spinellis	Layers of indirection in the FreeBSD filesystem drivers	C
Andrew Kuchling	Python's dictionary data structure	C, Python
Travis E. Oliphant	Multidimensional array iterators	C, Python
Ronald Mak	A highly reliable information portal for the NASA Mars Rover Mission	Java
Rogerio Atem de Carvalho and Rafael Monnerat	Enterprise Resource Planning	Python
Bryan Cantrill	Thread synchronisation and prioritisation in Solaris	C
Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat	Map-Reduce	C++
Simon Peyton Jones	Software Transactional Memory	Haskell
R. Kent Dybvig	Macro expansions	Scheme
William R. Otte and Douglas C. Schmidt	A networked logging service	C++
Andrew Patzer	REST (as opposed to SOAP) for integrating business partners	Java
Andreas Zeller	Systematic debugging	Python
Yukihiro Matsumoto	Brevity and human-readability	Ruby
Arun Mehta	A one-button user interface for Professor Hawking	Visual Basic
T.V. Raman	Emacspeak (auditory output from Emacs)	Emacs Lisp
Laura Wingerd and Christopher Seiwald	The Seven Pillars of Pretty Code	C
Brian Hayes	Computational Geometry	Lisp

I quite enjoyed the Golden Compass movie and immediately ordered this boxed set of Lyra's adventures (the Golden Compass, the Subtle Knife, and the Amber Spyglass) from Amazon. It is being marketed as a Young Adult book, probably as a result of the main characters all being teenagers, but it certainly tackles more serious topics than, say, Harry Potter, and there are also a number of rather shocking plot developments.

When the Catholic League called for a boycott of the Golden Compass movie, they said it was less about the picture, but more about keeping children away from the books. And indeed, Pullman is quite aggressive in his attack on the concept of organised religion, to the point where one has to wonder if he is actively trying to offend.

Hardcore fans of the novels also disparaged the movie for watering down the controversial content to make it more commercially viable. I do not think that this actually happened, and the religious themes are not all that prominent until the later volumes anyway, but the movie does deviate from the source material in other ways, most notably in that it cuts off the ending (an anti-Happy-Ending if there ever was one) and reverses the order of the two main events before that. Apparently Pullman approved of these changes, though.

HarperCollins has released another free MP3 recording of Neil Gaiman reading one of his stories, which he does very, very well. A letter-form story set in Cthulhu-Victorian London (and narrated in wonderful Victorian English), A Study in Emerald follows the protagonist, who shares lodging in Baker Street with the city's foremost consulting detective, as he assists his friend in the case of a murdered German noble.

Ten years after Ringworld, and after having received many letters with feedback apparently mostly about the mathematical assumptions and implications of the construction of the Ringworld, Larry Niven revisits his best-known creation.

Almost thirty years after their original exploration of the Ringworld, Louis Wu and the Kzin Chmee are abducted by the recently deposed Hindmost and forced to go there again. They find the Ringworld knocked off-centre and about to collide with its sun. Louis embarks on a quest to try and prevent the catastrophe and learn more of Ringworld's secrets and its elusive builders. In the process he gets to know (quite often even in the biblical sense) a few of the various humanoid species that populate this most stunning artifact in known space.

From the Hugo-Award-nominated-short-story-department. Both audio (read by the author) and text versions are available for free download from Gaiman's web site.

Hockenberry and the Trojan Women have tricked Achilles and Hector into an uneasy alliance, and at least for the moment all the Greeks, Trojans and their moravec allies follow them in their war against the Olympian gods. But both camps are far from united: Menelaus is still trying to kill his stolen wife Helen, and seize control of the Greek armies back from Achilles. The only thing that keeps the gods from banding up against each other is the ultimate authority of Zeus, who himself must be careful not to offend the Titans of Tartarus.

Back on Earth, things are going badly: The few remaining old-style humans are being slaughtered left and right by antisemitic robots, by Caliban, and by Caliban's god Setebos. They have to hope that help will arrive from Odysseus (either the old one that lives among them, or the young one that has just been kidnapped away from Mars), or from combat moravecs, or from any surviving post-humans, or from Prospero and Ariel. Or from the Quiet.

The book makes for an exciting (if confusing) read, but in the end, most of the plot lines are not resolved in a satisfactory way. There is no epic showdown, just a couple of last-minute super-sudden ex-machina turns of events, and some major threads are just dropped completely. Maybe Simmons is planning on a third volume (or a second dilogy) to wrap things up.

The Trojan War has been going on for nine years, prolonged and complicated by the meddling gods, who from their seat on the terra-formed Olympos Mons on Mars use Greeks and Trojans to play out their private feuds. In the midst of all this is Thomas Hockenberry, a twenty-first-century literature professor, who has been transported there to confirm if everything plays out according to Homer's epic. But then Aphrodite orders him to kill Athena.

Meanwhile on Earth, the last few hundred thousand humans spend their lives of exactly one hundred years each in blissful ignorance (which includes watching the Trojan War for entertainment). Who needs to know how to read when everything is taken care of by helpful machines? Only Savi, the Wandering Jew, who has been around for more than a millenium, remembers the (not so good) old days. And then there is Odysseus, the Wandering Greek, who quite enjoys hunting dinosaurs.

Mahnmut is a sentient submarine robot, who spends his days exploring Jupiter's moon Europa and discussing Shakespeare's sonnets with his friend Orphus, who has a similar job on Io, but is actually more fond of Proust. Both of them are sent to Mars on a mission to investigate the recent, strange and quite possibly dangerous activities on the red planet.

As with most other of Simmons' books, the story is split into two volumes, and after Ilium comes Olympos, which I already placed on the night-stand.

A motley crew of explorers (two human, two alien) is sent to the mysterious ring world to find out if the unknwon, yet unbelievably advanced Ringworld Engineers who built the place are friendly. Unfortunately, their spacecraft crashes and leaves them stranded on what seems to be a mostly deserted world, whose inhabitants are few, far in between, and, having devolved back to a pre-technological stage, unable to help them to get back home.

The air-plane book. Previously published under a pseudonym, this political thriller is set in the months leading to the first Gulf War: A low-ranking CIA analyst uncovers hints that Saddam Hussein could be preparing for a major military operation, but her superiors do not want to hear about it, because it does not fit into their own scheme of things. At the same time, a small-town Iowa Deputy Sheriff (and great admirer of Sherlock Holmes) investigates the murder of a foreign exchange student and stirs up a great deal of attention in Washington and in the Middle East. The plot and setting is not too exciting, but Stephenson's witty writing style is well worth your time.

Oh, and if anyone was wondering, I did finish the Baroque Cycle, and it was great. I started to blog about it, but trying to come up with something special to match the extraordinary books turned out to be too ambitious and I could not finish the posts. It would have required continuous note-taking throughout (which did not happen), or a page-by-page revisit (and pages there are plenty). Well, maybe one day. It was a concept.

Tsutaya hands out an annual handbook with descriptions, rankings, and pictures of their rental DVD. It's nice. There is a chapter for every genre (Drama, Love Story, Comedy, Musical, Classic, Literary, Documentary, Mystery, Action, SF, Horror, Asia, TV drama), each with an Editor's choice, several top tens, and a long ranking compiled from customer's recommendations. For every title, there is a picture of the DVD cover, a plot summary, topical icons, a checkbox for you to tick off, information about cast, crew, runtime, languages, picture and audio formats and so on.

Here are my coverage ratios for the top tens:

• Drama: 20%
• Love Story: 80%
• Comedy: 60%
• Musical: 40%
• Classic: 40%
• Literary: 70%
• Documentary: 20%
• Mystery: 20%
• Action: 60%
• SF: 90%
• Horror: 10%
• Asia: 0%
• TV drama: 20%
• Social: 20%

There is also a funny little mix-up with the original movie titles. The following films are all listed as Clear and Present Danger:

• For Love of the Game
• Seven Chances
• Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
• Runaway Jury
• Air Force One
• Miller's Crossing
• The Island

Things are not going well in and out of Hogwarts: Lord Voldemort has managed to gain control of the Ministry of Magic, turning it from the already unpleasantly Orwellian organisation of the previous two books into a downright fascist regime. Harry Potter has been named Undesirable Number One and has to live in hiding. Not that he would want to return to Hogwarts, now that his least favourite teacher Snape has been named Headmaster there. The quest to find and destroy the remaining Horcruxes, upon which Voldemort's power depends, is not going too well. Maybe the mysterious three Deathly Hallows could be of help?

And this is how I spent the weekend. Quite necessary, really, in order to defuse the danger of someone spilling the beans about the ending.

The second half of the Hyperion duology directly picks up where the first book (rather abruptly) ended. But in addition to finishing the story of the pilgrimage, the story expands to include dramatic events beyond the planet of Hyperion, mostly narrated through the eyes of a cybrid recreation of early 19th century poet John Keats (who has been very inspirational for Simmons, right up to the naming of his books). It is a little sad that the focus shifts away from the pilgrims, and both the more metaphysical and the more artistically involved parts are a little less readily accessible than the first part was, but Simmons again posits interesting topics, mainly about the relationship between Creator, his Creatures, and the rest of Creation: What happens if the Creatures try to depose the Creator? How trustworthy are Artificial Intelligences once they become sentient? Should mankind in its expansion across the universe be allowed to reconstruct the natural environment according to its needs, thereby destroying other forms of life? Or should man adapt to new environments, evolving itself into something that may no longer be considered entirely human?

Terrorised by a heat wave and a violent street gang, Gotham City is as bad a place is it ever was. Ten years after Batman's forced retirement, Bruce Wayne is pushing sixty. But despite of his age and his best intentions (and his efforts to drown his dark side in alcohol), despite butler Alfred's complaints and Commissioner Gordon's warnings, the Dark Knight breaks free again. Unfortunately, he is not welcome anymore. Police and politicians refuse to put up with his brand of vigilante justice, and the violence gets worse, especially after his comeback stirs The Joker out of catatonia. To make things worse, he is not twenty-nine anymore, and only gets out of some fights by luck, and badly bruised, too. Nevertheless, he continues to slug it out. Eventually Superman is brought in to put Batman away for good.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the broken mountain named Dragonmount. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

I bought Book Eleven of Wheel of Time (the penultimate) when it came out in 2005 but shelved it at the time in order not to have to wait for Book Twelve (A Memory Of Light), which according to Wikipedia has been pushed back to early 2009 due to health issues. Now I read it anyway.

The main plot threads of the previous two instalments are mostly resolved in this one (Faile's kidnapping, Mat's marriage, Elayne's struggle for the throne; only Egwene' struggle for the Amyrlin Seat goes on.) The main story arc is also progressing, but probably a little too rushed (you get enormous Shadow armies appearing out of nowhere and being dispatched with over a few pages), and too casual (as the Last Battle is approaching, the world starts falling apart; but while the dead walk the land, the ground opens up to swallow people and buildings change their structure over night, this does not seem to have much of an impact on what anyone is doing).

Overall an enjoyable read, and next month Harry Potter will step up to ease the wait.

After seeing many of the movies (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly... ) that brought Dick the posthumous fame and commercial success that eluded him in his lifetime, I finally got my hands on one of his books. Unfortunately, clearly not his best one.

Lies, Inc. starts out quite interesting: Over-crowded Planet Earth in the future. Rachmael Ben Applebaum is an inter-stellar shipping entrepreneur whose business is ruined when teleportation is invented. It now only takes fifteen minutes to reach the recently discovered Earth-like planet Whale's Mouth. People emigrate to Whale's Mouth by the millions, while almost no one is suspicious of the fact that the teleportation technology works only one way, and the only information about the new paradise are the shiny advertisements issued by the company that runs the teleporters. Applebaum figures that there must be some people wanting to a return trip and decides to set out on the eighteen year flight with his last remaining vessel. Since this is a Dick novel, he is also plagued by hallucinations about being a rat.

So far, so good. This first part of the book had been previously published, with the second part having being rejected by the editor at the time. Turns out, the editor made a good call. The extra material is very difficult to read, and probably not worth the effort. It describes Applebaum's (I think, even that is hard to tell, as the character names seem to change) experiences after being hit by an LSD dart, is very incoherent and not much related to the rest of the book. After this part is finished, the novel drops back into the original storyline and brings it to a rather sudden, unsatisfying end.

Part One of the Baroque Cycle contains:

• Discussions about history with young Benjamin Franklin.
• A water-powered computer at the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts.
• Murder at Trinity College.
• A voyage back to Europe from Boston.
• Room-sharing with Isaac Newton.
• Natural Philosophy during the Plague Year outside of London.
• Pirates in Plymouth Bay.
• London burning.
• Meetings of the Royal Society.
• The unseen flows of precious metals.
• War against the Dutch.
• Suspicious and dangerous activities involving gunpowder.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz coming to London.
• Dying of the stone.
• Bankruptcy.
• A mistress.
• Two boys in the execution relief business.
• Chasing an ostrich through the Turkish camp before Vienna.
• Abduction from Qwghlm by a band of Barbary Corsairs led by a very perverted Personage.
• The Leipzig Trade Fair.
• Leibniz trying to find investors for his mines in the Harz Mountains.
• Walpurgisnacht.
• Amsterdam, the financial centre of the world.
• Paris, smelliest city of the world.
• Disputes about diplomatic protocol between the Ambassadors of England and France.
• Ice skating in The Hague.
• Staging a civil war to manipulate the stock market.
• Persecution turns Huguenots into galley slaves.
• Sanity succumbing to syphilis.
• The politest man in France.
• The Vagabond King crashing the Sun King's party.
• Would-be slave-traders enslaved by the Barbary Corsairs.
• Performing spying and other services to William of Orange.
• The death bed of Charles II.
• Rising in rank at the court of Versailles.
• A dispute between Leibniz and Newton that splits the scientific community in two camps.
• Sand-sailers on the beach.
• A soldier with a grudge.
• Sex on Huygen's dinner table.
• Defending the Protestant Defender.
• Being tortured by a secret court at Westminster Palace.
• Imprisonment in the Tower of London.
• A comprehensive report to Louis XIV by His Royal Cryptanalyst.
• James II in a bar fight.
• The central role of childbirth in the political sphere.
• Being cut for the stone by the world's foremost surgeon.

Harry's sixth year at Hogwarts is over-shadowed by the war that is now openly raging between the wizarding world and Lord Voldemort's Death Eaters (other topics are love interests - they are all teenagers now - and of course Quidditch). While the Ministry of Magic is arguably not doing a good job at fighting Voldemort, Headmaster Dumbledore probably is, judging from his constant and secretive absences and the state he is in when he returns. Dumbledore arranges private lessons for Harry in order to teach him as much as possible about Voldemort in order to prepare him for the final battle that has been foretold to take place between the two. At the same time, Harry also receives training from a text book containing notes left behind by the unknown and somewhat suspect Half-Blood Prince, and spends his free time trying to uncover a Death Eater plot within Hogwarts that not even Ron and Hermione believe is taking place.

At the risk of repeating myself, the story continues to pick up steam and also become much darker and more serious. Half-Blood Prince, just like Order of the Phoenix, ends with a wizardry showdown between Death Eaters and the good guys, that leaves one of the good guys dead (and this time it is a central character) and the reader wanting to immediately dig into the next book.

In this essay, Neal Stephenson shares his personal history of computer operating systems and his views on the culture of their creators and users. His journey begins with a programming course at high school where he has to prepare the program in advance, type it into a tape puncher, feed the tape to a modem that transfers it to the university mainframe across town, and finally receive the result as a print-out.

His love affair with the Mac starts in 1984 and introduces him to graphical user interfaces, which would become his primary way to interact with computers until 1995, when his PowerBook destroys a big important file, and he turns to Debian Linux instead.

With Linux, he rediscovers the command line interface, and is also impressed by the concept of free software, especially how everyone can take a good look at all the components, and how openly bugs and problems are being discussed, which leads to issues being resolved very timely and transparently. Stephenson contrasts the Debian bug database to Microsoft and Apple's support model, where bugs cannot be publicly disclosed as it could impact sales, and users have to rely on updates and procedures without understanding what those really do.

At the time of writing, in 1999, he has moved on to BeOS, which he praises as an ideal combination of shiny interface and the power of command line and GNU tools. Interestingly, even though BeOS has disappeared in the meantime and Stephenson (at least according to a 2004 Slashdot interview) has now embraced OS X, the book does not seem outdated. It is still full of valid remarks and an entertaining read.

I am just wondering whether the comments about popular culture would have been different if the book was written after 2001. He describes the American public as ignorant masses who lead their lives in a unified amorphous culture by means of a graphical user interface (TV, Disneyland), whereas the small elite that controls them knows how to use the command line interface (books, laws) and tries to preserve their separate culture, how all this is maybe not a bad thing as it keeps people peaceful, and how this lack of culture and the drive to export it explains that members of older, richer cultures (such as France or the Islam) sometimes get so irritated about their sons coming home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways that they sometimes pop in places like Luxor and begin pumping bullets into Westerners.

The critics' quotes on the cover compare Mo Hayder to Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs). At the very least her psychopaths are equally repulsive, and you want to make sure your stomach can handle the grisly things contained in these pages.

Grey, a physically and mentally scarred young British woman comes to Japan to meet a Chinese guest professor at Tokyo University, who she believes possesses a film documenting the horrors committed by the Japanese army in Nanking 1937. Her story is interspersed by chapters from the professor's diary of that period, and a few flashbacks into her own past. Most of the novel is a rather slow read, seems to rely on some rather big coincidences, and you cannot really feel involved with the characters before their background and motivation is revealed. Near the end though, the pace picks up, the puzzle pieces fall into place, you get to know why Grey is so obsessed with the horrible details of the Nanking Massacre, you get to see the film, and as with any serious thriller, you wish that you had not.

I have not read any of the wildly popular Harry Potter books so far, but after watching the Goblet of Fire I just needed to know what happens next. The first thing that struck me in the bookstore is that the later volumes are much thicker than the earlier ones. The next thing that becomes quickly apparent is that as Harry grows older, the story picks up steam and also becomes much darker and more serious. Order of the Phoenix, just like Goblet of Fire, ends with a wizardry showdown between He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and the good guys, that leaves one of the good guys dead (and this time it is a major character) and the reader wanting to immediately dig into the next book.

So in addition to being able to enjoy following the speculations as to who will be cast to play the new characters in the upcoming movie, I am now in the same situation as with Wheel of Time: Two more books to go, only one of them written yet.