Tag: Books

Far from the tree

TL;DR: An impressive monumental work; read it if you have the guts

A good friend lent me a copy of “Far from the tree” to read. After reading the introduction (entitled “Son“) and the first chapter (“Deaf“) I told him “I understand why you gave this to me; I do not understand why you chose to read it”.

This is a book about children and their parents. About children that “fall far from the tree” and how their parents deal with what the author calls “a chronic state of sorrow” in their struggle to provide for their children’s needs. It is also a book on patterns Identity. If you are in the business of selling identity access management products you owe it to yourself to read the introduction of this book. You will understand that what you sell is not about identity at all. You will make more careful use of the word; at least when you come and sell to me.

The chapters of the book deal with the Deaf, Dwarf, Down Syndrome, Autism, Schizophrenia, Disability, Prodigies, Rape, Crime and Transgender. As I said the book is about patterns for in the 10 years that it took the author to finish it, through his extensive research and interviews he was able to locate patterns in behaviors. To this point the book is helpful to computer scientists for we abstract in order to be precise and we see this in a completely different domain than we are used to. I admit to not reading all the chapters. I read Deaf, Autism, Schizophrenia because I have some familiarity with them. I also read the introduction (“Son”) and epilogue (“Father“). Why they are named as such is a spoiler.

This is one of the best non fiction books I have ever read. I do not know whether I can recommend this to someone else or not. This is a tough book with real stories and struggles that break your heart. You have been warned. Even I as I was reading the following lines was not prepared to face the reality of them due to an accident two days later:

“You’ve had the star quarterback. He’s run over by a truck, breaks every limb in his body. Your hope now is not that he’ll be a star quarterback, but that he will walk again.”

Like I said, read it if you have the guts. It will help you better understand others and yourself. It will teach you respect in ways you never thought you needed.

Thank you X for lending this to me.

A Feast for Crows

I let a week go by before writing about “A Feast for Crows“. I have mixed feelings about the book. With all that went on in “A Strom of Swords” one is left expecting what more has G.R.R. Martin has thought and how is this all going to end? Maybe this is why he was forced to split the continuation of the Storm into two books (three volumes actually) but I cannot help thinking that he has turned this into a cash cow. I quote from the Wikipedia page of the book:

In May 2005 Martin announced that the “sheer size” of his still-unfinished manuscript for A Feast for Crows had led him and his publishers to split the narrative into two books. Rather than divide the text in half chronologically, Martin opted to instead split the material by character and location, resulting in “two novels taking place simultaneously” with different casts of characters. A Feast for Crows was published months later, and the concurrent novel A Dance with Dragons was released on July 12, 2011. Martin also noted that the A Song of Ice and Fire series would now likely total seven novels.

At least it is not like what Brian Herbert did to the Dune saga.

Maybe after I read the two volumes of “A Dance with Dragons” I will look into this book more fondly.

(A Storm of Swords) (A Dance with Dragons)

A Storm of Swords – Book 1

It took me longer than I expected to finish the first part of “A Storm of Swords“, but it was definitely worth the effort. And I say effort because after thousands of pages that I mostly read through the night, the multitude of names starts makes it hard to follow the chain of events and alliances without taking notes and running back to consult them. And that is why I am thankful for the Wiki of Ice and Fire.

(A Clash of Kings) (A Storm of Swords – Book 2)

Dancing with Elves

“Human interaction is a game, a dance, a playful thing that is deeply satisfying in itself” – John Gall

I got to read John Gall’s “Dancing with Elves” after reading his well known “Systems Bible” (for which I’ll blog another time). The book deals with strategies that one can use in order to influense kids in a positive way so as to achieve what the parent wants the kid to achieve. By that we do not mean to pre-plan the child’s life and then watch as the plan gets executed. This is not the plan. The plan is to overcome furstration (and disobedience) and find out strategies which will help the child arm itself before being released into the world as a responsible adult that does not require parental supervision.

I have to admit that the fifteen strategies presented in the book are interesting. They all strive to make the parent not say “no” or use any other negative, derrogatory or yelling arguments to have a point pass. Like the author says “don’t oppose forces- utilize them”. The strategies may seem conflicting, but Gall as an accomplished paediatrician undrestands that there is no unique strategy that would fit all children, or even one child all the time. So one of the first things that parents need to realise, is that you have to use the strategy that works at the given time and situation. And be prepared that it may not work some time afterwards. I think the message of the book is: Everytime you want to yell to make a point, can you do it without yelling? Here’s how.

a million ways
a million ways *

A book about (systems) management

I do not know how well am I going to use advice from the book as a parent, but this book is more than a parenting book. It is a management one. At least within the IT business where childish, erratic or other BOFH style behavior is common. This occured to me when reading that

“although every picture tells a story, the story it tells may not be the same for everyone. The meanining of communication is what the other person makes of it, and that’s not necessarily the same as what you intended. It’s up to you to notice that. That’s your feedback.”

Compare the above to the everything is a DNS problem mantra. But then again there is also other management insight that most overlook:

“But what does it mean when you say a person is “just lazy” or “just stubborn”? It really means that you have tried out some of your repertoire of behavioral interventions in order to elicit desired piece of behavior from the other person and you have failed, because yoour repertoire was too limited.”

Yes dear manager of weird IT people, sometimes you have to admit that your repertoire is limited. You too have to change your approach to get the job done.

I loved the book. How could I not love a management book presenting itself as a parenting one which in the last pages includes the definition of the law of requisite variety?

[*] – image and phrase came from my twitter timeline, not from the book

A traveler’s guide to cyber security

I am a big fan of Jeffrey Carr‘s “Inside Cyber Warfare“, so when he wrote “A traveler’s guide to cyber security” I went along and bought it. The booklet is exactly what the title says: A traveler’s guide. It puts you into the mind frame you have to have when you visit a foreign country (sometimes it may not even be a foreign country, it may be a certain building) and what measures to take in order to protect (as best as you can) your electronic data.

It is divided roughly in three parts, the first one being the measures that you have to take depending how high profile a target you assess that you are. The second part presents the legal framework within which Russian and PRC agencies operate, while the third is an interesting collection of news articles about espionage stories all over the world which involve cyber activities in the process.

Fun reading, cheap, small (40 pages) and handy to show when a less technical “higher up” needs to understand stuff.

Pro Website Development and Operations

I read about “Pro Website Development and Operations” at Tom Limoncelli’s site, so I immediately marked it on my list of books to buy. A few days later Apress held a $10 ebook sale on every title they had, so I bought it. The good news first: The epub version of the book renders nicely on my BeBook Mini.

I have not written a book yet, but I know one when I read one. And this is not a book. It is a series of good long blog posts expanded to fill the size of a book (124 pages). It was not very well proof read so that it has many grammatical and syntactic errors and some others like “you might have several hundred servers in the subnet 10.10.20.0/24,”. You can have a couple hundred servers on a /24 but not three hundred so it is not some, sorry. A trivial mistake, but indicating of things that can annoy you in the book.

The word engineering and its derivatives is overused. There’s a reason that the intended audience of the book are DevOps and not engineers, or software engineers (even though there exist people who can carry all three hats). And that is that they are not. There is a great difference between engineering a solution and calling everyone on board an engineer. That is unless what you build has a direct impact on human lives (or loss of them) or is something that when failing can cause a national economy to go under or a disaster of a similar magnitude.

An interesting thing about the book is that it talks a lot about the significance of measurements in order to understand a site’s usage patterns. However there is not a single formula or methodology mentioned which the read can use in order to measure things! It is more along the lines of “you need to measure stuff because it is important” but nothing about how to measure or how to lay out a plan for a measurement infrastructure. Because forecasting performance is a must in website development and operations, I was expecting something like “Forecasting Oracle Performance“. I was also expecting hints on how to size a new server. Of course I will size a new server carefully, but I bought your book not to read generalizations, but how you actually do it. Again no formula (if you want to see some interesting mathematics on the subject, see “Mathematical Server Sizing“). We need to model stuff, so where is how I build and test a model?

Another thing I take issue with is the special projects team that the author advocates. The author is right in advising rotating roles between members of the special projects team in order to diffuse knowledge among them, but I believe that he has managed to be a member of special project teams only. Otherwise he would have described the impact on the morale of the operators who are not members of the special team that builds exciting new projects. Projects that it that get the budget, get to use new technologies and hardware to experiment on, while the rest must work on (a restricted) budget to maintain a (legacy) system that already brings money on the table. So in fact you not only have to rotate people among roles in the special projects team, you have to rotate them in and out of the team too. This also brings the advantage of avoiding the build up of IT silos or other small dominions with a single point (the operator) of failure.

Is there anything good in this book? Taking good care of your people and their health is one. Making it sure that they get proper sleep, even before launching is important. Not only for the health of the workers, but for the health of the company (and its culture) too.

The other thing I really enjoyed in the book, was the interviews the author did with Tom Limoncelli and with Santiago Suarez Ordoñez of Selenium fame.

In its effort to be technology agnostic so as to stand the test of time, the book suffers from generalizations and is disconnected from practice. Wait for the second edition.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

At my good friend’s S.B. suggestion I read “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time“. Although I am biased, this is easily one of the best books I have ever read. The main character of the book is a teenager on the autistic spectrum, who upon discovering a neighbor’s dead dog, makes it his mission to find out who killed the dog. This proves to be an adventure far more complicated than he expected and the hero is forced to deal with situations he is not accustomed to.

On the surface people may find this book entertaining, reading the narrative from the point of view of the hero and how he reacts to different stimuli (and how and why his reactions are different than what “normal” people would do). But this is not a teenage autistic version of Sheldon Cooper. This is not fun. This is not cool even though Christopher (the hero) can understand the Monty Hall problem or Conway’s Soldiers better and faster than you. This is the life of a high functioning autistic and it takes its toll on him and his supporting environment. And it shows how totally unprepared (and prejudiced) “normal” people are when needed to deal with people with slightly different wiring in the brain. It is also a story of trust, how easily it can be broken and how hard it is to build it up again.

You will enjoy the chapter numbering though.

If you have friends (or extended family) living in the problem, read the book. It will help you understand their situation. The book has been translated in Greek as “Ποιος σκότωσε το σκύλο τα μεσάνυχτα;” and it will take you a couple of days to read it. I read the English ePub version. For a shorter version in understanding what goes on in an autistic mind you may read “Ο Αυτός“.