No Mod Required

I have just finished reading The Baroque Cycle of Neal Stephenson, and feel like giving up writing entirely.

Twitter / Warren Ellis: I have just finished reading…

And again he mentions it on his blog, with an even better quote:

Which meant I finally got to finish reading the last of Neal Stephenson´s Baroque Cycle. I´d never normally recommend you read a 3000-page work, but the Cycle is just a towering piece of work, and I think you should read it before you die. A hundred pages from the end, I got that terrible longing sadness, the one that comes when you realise youŕe near the end of something and you´ĺl never have the joy of reading this in the same way again.

I felt the same way. I both devoured and dreaded the end. It was as satisfying an ending as Stephenson has ever managed, but there was still a part of me that was made empty by reading those last few pages. I’d been reading the books as they came out so it had been a two year journey for me- the gaps heightening my anticipation and, likely, my enjoyment. To finally say good bye to Eliza, Daniel Waterhouse and, most importantly, Jack Shaftoe felt like real loss.

Warren Ellis » And Even More Still Offline

I’ve been talking about this story to anyone who might have any interest at all in it over the past few weeks. That’s a much smaller circle than I’d like it to be, but what can I tell you. not everyone is a nut for Holmes, Gaiman’s writing and Lovecraft’s dark universe like I am.

Anyway, I just found out there’s a PDF available of the story available from Gaiman’s site. So now I can share my geeked out enjoyment of this story with the whole Internet. That expands the circle of people who might care significantly.

It lives on Neil Gaiman’s Short Stories page and is available as a PDF- A Study in Emerald.

Check it out, and if you like it, buy a volume or ten of Sandman or one of his proper novels the next time you’re in a place with words for sale.

I check in on favorite authors from time to time to see when their next work is due. Stephenson certainly qualifies as a favorite so it was with glee that I found out that his new book Anathem is due out in September.

Digging around a little bit led me to Kaedrin’s blog, which featured a quote from this Livejournal, which goes a little something like this:

He’s writing a science fiction novel unrelated to Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. It’s set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It’s really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books. He’s nearly finished writing it, and if he doesn’t finish by the end of the calendar year he’ll have to give some money back. If everything proceeds according to schedule, it should be available in stores in about a year.

My response to all of that is “sign me right up.” For full disclosure’s sake, I’ll read pretty much anything the guy writes, but that sounds ready made for me to geek out over.

Am I bummed there’s no Shaftoe or Waterhouse or appearance by Enoch Root? Sure I am (at least on some level.) I didn’t gleefully work my way through through however many pages of Cryptonimicon and the Baroque Cycle (3500?) without coming away with an affection for the inhabitants of that world. Thing is, the above sounds so damn cool I just don’t care. Platonic math meets John Carter (or, if you must, Star Wars)?

That’s the stuff.

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design Another excellent book. The ideas outlined here would be of benefit to any web application. Small or large, the idea of paring down features to only those “necessary for the users to complete the activity the site is meant to support” is a noble one. I’ve, more often than I’m comfortable admitting, worked on projects where feature bloat ruled the day and I can tell you from bitter experience, giving in to “nice to have” features can be the absolute death of a project. The biggest disaster I’ve ever worked on was mostly sunk by feature bloat and lack of focus*.

There’s plenty to take away from this well written examination of what’s right and wrong with modern web application design. I read this on vacation and while I wouldn’t have traded the hammock I was on or the excellent wine I was drinking for anything, some small part of me thought “wow, I’d love to be able to put some of this stuff to work immediately.”

One thing I don’t fully agree with is Hoekman’s admonition, later on in the book, to throw away specifications and requirement documents. While that might work for the less complication applications he outlines in his book (excellent applications all), there’s no way to do, for example, a detailed financial services application without relying on solid documentation. When there are complicated business rules in place throwing a developer and a designer in a room with a white board and having them “work it out” just isn’t going to cut it.

Still, with a smaller scale, less structured application, the techniques and approaches in Designing the Obvious will be of benefit to anyone working in field of web application design and development. This is a recommended read.

*there was also a painful stab in the chest by a web application framework from hell to help that project into its grave.

Pro JavaScript Design Patterns An excellent book. There are plenty of takeaways from this intense examination of Object Oriented programming in JavaScript. I haven’t worked on a project large enough to really benefit from OO JavaScript in the overall (classes/inheritance, etc), but even without switching over to a fully OO framework, there are optimization patterns and namespace patterns outlined in this book that can immediately prove useful no matter what scale of project you’re working on.

From a pure “oh, that’s cool!” perspective, the chapter on Chaining was a real eye opener. I’d looked at jQuery code, of course, but I’d never sat down to think about how he might have created the().ability().t0().keep().mashing().functions().together(). It’s diabolically simple in concept (return this!), but also mighty powerful. Again, it’s not one of the patterns I’m looking to adapt any time soon, but it was crazy interesting how simple it is in concept.

High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers This book? All kinds of interesting. I’ve been writing about performance a little bit here recently and this well written, concise book has really helped to expand my understanding of some of the issues involved. It also opened my eyes to a few new possibilities for performance improvement here at this site. One of which I’ll be implementing some time this week- passively caching the “next” and “previous” images in all of my gallery flows. Meaning, if you land on this page, JS will work in the background downloading the images featured on the Next and Previous links. And no, that won’t help my YSlow grade, Mr. YSlow junkie (actually there’s not much I can do beyond dropping things like Google Analytics and Google Ads), but it will definitely help my users and that’s the real point, isn’t it?

Pro JavaScript Techniques (Pro) Reading this book I finally understand why I don’t really immediately grasp JQuery code. Resig’s doesn’t use verbs for his function names. Instead of something like getElementsByClass(), he uses something like class(). I like verbs in my function names.

That aside, this is an excellent book for the serious JavaScript programmer. Resig does a great job of covering the breadth of modern JavaScript techniques and if you’ve got a reasonably solid JS foundation you can’t help but come away from this book with patterns, techniques and approaches that you can apply to your day-to-day code.

William Gibson - No Maps for These Territories

I’ve read pretty much everything William Gibson has ever published and I own signed copies of everything short of Neuromancer (some day), so…. yeah. I really enjoyed this movie. Your mileage will vary depending on how close to the above profile you are. If you’re already a fan of Gibson, then this will be a fascinating 80-something minutes. If you’re not familiar with him or are not a fan then this will be a complete snooze-fest as it’s 80 minutes of some guy talking in the back of a car. Yes, there’s a lot of interesting work done with the editing and the visuals, but the plain fact is this is an 80 minute interview with Gibson (along with cameos by Jack Womack and Bruce Sterling.)

By the way- anyone else in the mood for a new book by Jack Womack? I sure am.

Oh, and out of left field- I just saw this new Neal Stephenson site for the first time today. In case you’re keeping score at home, he’s working on a new novel and the Diamond Age adaptation for SciFi.

And there you have it.

Get in the Christmas spirit HP Lovecraft style

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fish-Men

Based on the classic:

The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft

The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out by Richard Phillips Feynman

I’m not a big audiobook guy, but I do drive to work, so it might not be a bad idea to occasionally flex my brain a little bit on the drive. Especially if it’s Feynman doing the flexing. If he were around today literally everything he published would be dugg or reddited.