A great computer game history book about how the two Johns started a company and developed some of the epics games of my childhood, in particular: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake.

Loved John Carmacks programming dedication and legacy – what a hero!

This story is set in a Shakespearean-like era with kings and princes and swords and battles – minus the romance. Actually, it’s more like medieval Merlin and the knights of the round table because the civilization is shrouded with myths and has the equivalence of dragons because it is semi-integrated with alien cultures and alien artefacts. I didn’t find the story all that engaging but I did find the planet the story is based on well worth reading about. Banks calls it a “Shellworld”, a ancient alien construction built up from several separate layers, each effectively a world in itself, with its own planetary conditions, civilizations and even artificial suns. The tech level of the story builds and builds and the ending is true action Sci-fi.

My favourite bit of all the culture novels is reading about the ship minds and AI. Banks really captures my imagination and hits the Sci-fi sweet spot.

I suffer from hayfever and it often turns beautiful summer days toxic because of the little flakes of pollen that float through the air like poison. The big theme of this book is nano-technology and I love how the book describes the impact both big and small to humans. The idea of each house having it’s own MC (matter compiler) capable of creating food, clothes, and all sorts of other things is brilliant to think about. The danger of nano-tech is equally well demonstrated, hence the hayfever reference.

I liked the idea that because the world was so advanced, some parts of society had balanced things out by embracing Victorian ways and putting a high value on hand-made things.
I didn’t like that it all got a bit weird towards the end with the drummer tribe and the army of twelve year olds and how influential “the young ladies illustrated primer” seemed to become.

It’s strange how much you can learn when common sense concepts are explicitly pointed out. This book is short and easy to read because it uses very simple language but it taught me (a new web developer) a lot.

My favourite points:

1. Steve Krung’s Law of Usability – User’s shouldn’t have little thought bubbles poping up when looking at your site. For example, clickable things should look clickable, things should be worded as users would expect (e.g. “Search” rather than “Find”).
2. Web users Scan, Satisfice (try something and click back if not good and try again) and muddle though (don’t stop to think to make the optimal choice).Therefore, pages should be designed as bill boards and be able to be understood while passing at 70mph (i.e. built for scanning not reading).
3. Web users should be able to see exactly what your page does (i.e. no playing Animal, Vegetable, or mineral?) – They like mindless choices.
4. Keep text short – half the number of words, then do it again.
5. For a page, this is the trunk test: Hold it at arms length and squint at it and as quickly as possible, find 1) The Site ID, 2) The Page Name, 3) Sections and sub-sections, 4) Local Navigation, 5) “You are here” indicator, 6) Search.
6. After a few weeks on a site you can’t see it from a average users view anymore. So get someone (friend, family or neighbour) to sit and try to use your site and see where they get confused.

What if you could have Google hardwired into your brain? Then you would be “gridlinked” like Special Agent Ian Cormac has been for thirty years – ten over the max. The book explores what it may be like to be unplugged after being fused with machines for so long. I found the slow re-gaining of humanity after being unplugged pretty interesting. This was my first Neal Asher book and I enjoyed it a lot. In no bad way, I found the atmosphere quite similar to Ian M Bank’s culture society, for example in both worlds, AI’s run the universe “and honestly, why would you trust any one else to?”

I liked the Terminators (a.k.a robot golems) but didn’t like the incomprehensible alien that called itself Dragon. It represented too random a subject in a world that seemed so organised. So did Ian Cormacs boss who was an immortal formed from the Hiroshima nuclear blast of the 2nd world war. I wasn’t satisfied with the ending of the book – I wanted more answers. Maybe a sequel will shine more light on the situation?

The characters are bold and striking and interesting, especially Sebastian Flyte. I didn’t find the book to have a proper story in terms of a beginning, middle and end but perhaps it’s more accurate to say it has too much story. It covers faith, alcoholism, painting, the decline of English aristocracy, WWII and love. The English nobility and how they conducted life, especially at university is an interesting subject to me because it’s so odd.

I didn’t find it gripping and I did find it depressing but it had something about it which makes me recommend reading it anyway – It’s 60 years old now and a interesting window to that age.

This is basically a short diary of the thoughts of Neal Stephenson about Microsoft, Apple, Linux and user interfaces. Tech is a hard subject to write about in an interesting way but Neal can do it well and obviously has a rich history and deep understanding of technology – he is one of my favorite computer-related fiction writers. It feels a little dated and a lot of the material will already be familiar to most programmers but it’s only 150 pages and worth the few hours it’ll take to read it.

A quote from the book will demonstrate the kind of thing it’s about:
“Gnu is an acronym for Gnu’s Not Unix, but this is a joke in more ways than one, because GNU most certainly IS Unix,. Because of trademark concerns they simply could not claim that it was Unix, and so, just to be extra safe, they claimed that it wasn’t. Notwithstanding the incomparable talent and drive possessed by Mr. Stallman and other GNU adherents, their project to build a free Unix to compete against Microsoft and Apple’s OSes was a little bit like trying to dig a subway system with a teaspoon. Until, that is, the advent of Linux, which I will get to later.”