This section contains reviews of books, films, documentaries music and products. These are reviews not always recommendations. I keep seperate lists of recommendations which are also accessible below
This is a photo of a painting I commissioned from Blair Bradshaw last year. It shows the final crushing move of the
Immortal Game, circled in red. I chose Blair because I have a print of one of his other pieces and had been to his studio so was familiar with his style. I thought he would do a great job of the immortal game, which I had been thinking about getting painted for some time. The piece is 5ft square and is comprised of 64 small square mini-canvases. Blair and I spoke at length about how to visually show the history of the game. I think he did a great job and am very pleased with what I got.
One day towards the end of 2000 my wife finally lost her financial patience with me. As she threw a pile of bills and receipts at me she screamed "That's it! I'm never doing the accounts or paying the bills again. You never collect receipts, you never write a memo in the checkbook, and your work expenses are impossible to understand!" She then stormed out of the room. I was in no doubt that she meant it and she has remained free of the household accounting burden ever since. I unfortunately have not. It is true that until that day I had never balanced a checkbook in my life and habitually threw bank balances in the trash without even opening them - another contributing factor to my wife's rant. In fact the only time I ever knew my bank balance was when the ATM refused to dispense cash. So it was with great trepidation that I began my fiscally responsible life. I figured that as I had designed and built large financial software systems I ought to be able to use a small one. So after some research I selected Quicken as they had a large share of the market and had a version for Mac.
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A few months ago I had to setup a home office and decided I would take the opportunity to upgrade my home network. My Linksys BEFSR41 Etherfast Cable / DSL Router had never given me any problems and so I decided to upgrade to the Linksys BEFW11S4 Wireless-B broadband Router. I now have everything working reliably but getting to this happy state and resolving the problems took a lot of luck and in the end the solution was far from obvious. Judging by the bad reviews on Amazon and elsewhere it appears that many people have been unable to fix similar problems with this device. Below is my description of the problem and a solution that worked for me. Hopefully this will help others, but as always, your mileage may vary!
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The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod is an outstanding book. First published in 1984 it has increased in significance with the evolution of the Internet. In the book Axelrod examines how cooperation can emerge and stabilize in multi-participant environments. The book is fascinating as an analysis of the evolution of cooperation, but is of particular interest to anyone seeking to establish effective; social software systems, peer-to-peer networks, or multi-player gaming environments. Axelrod builds his thesis on the analysis of a gaming tournament he organized. He invited multiple people from many different fields; economics, computer science, evolutionary biology, etc, to submit computer programs employing well defined strategies to play a series of games of Prisoner's Dilemma. Each program played several hundred games against every other program. The results were surprising and enlightening.
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I recently had to setup a home office. The hardest decision to make was which desk to buy. Given that I will be sitting at this desk for many hours and I have lower back problems, from playing too much rugby, I wanted an adjustable desk to match the Aeron chair I already have. It's surprising that while there are plenty of adjustable chairs around there are not that many adjustable desks. In the end it came down to a choice between the AdjustaBench from Anthro and the Personal Desk from Biomorph. The Biomorph won on price and looks. It came flat-packed in a huge wooden crate, construction took an hour or so and the engineering quality was evident from the precision with which the parts snapped into place. The best features are:
I just watched Lawrence Lessig's speech, Free Culture (8.4 MB Flash 5 required) for a second time. This recording was made at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2002 where Lessig delivered the keynote. It is a superb example of a well designed and delivered power point presentation. It is also very persuasive.
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The concept of a balanced scorecard was developed by Dr. Robert S. Kaplan of the Harvard Business School, and Dr. David P. Norton, and is explain in their book Translating Strategy into Action. The Balanced Scorecard. The basic idea is that the, vision and strategy of an organization can be expressed as a set of goals and their associated objectives, measures, target values and initiatives. I covered defining goals and objectives for system design in a previous article. The Balanced Scorecard approach extends the scope of goals and objectives to the entire enterprise. Originally this approach was suggested as a business-measurement system but it has evolved into a business-management system. By continually measuring progress toward the objectives, the execution of a strategy can be monitored, corrections can be made, risks can be reduced, and the chances of success increased.
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The Assassins or Ismailis were a fascinating, enigmatic people that used assassination, and the fear of it, as a political weapon. Their influence was felt throughout the Islamic world for 2 centuries and in the 13th century extended as far as Karakorum, the capital of the Mongol empire. The Mongols targeted them for destruction in 1256 and within a year they were eradicated.
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I've been through so many airports recently I can't remember which one this happen at. But I was waiting at the gate when this huge Viking of a guy came and sat next to me with what looked like a rifle case slung over his shoulder. My curiosity was aroused and as I checked out his case he caught me looking at it, so I felt it best to ask him about his Traveler Guitar to show I wasn't just some loony staring at his baggage. He lit up with enthusiasm and proceeded to pull out the guitar and bolt on the arm support. Then he produced a digital sound processor the size of a cigarette pack, and some headphones. He plugged them all together and handed it to me. Cool! The thing was actually still in tune! He dialed in a nice funky sound and I was off, much to the amusement of the other passengers.
Some people get confused about quality. Quality is fitness for purpose it is not an absolute. This is the finest quality traveling guitar I've ever come across. But it's not a patch on my Fender Stratocaster for sound quality. The point is it doesn't need to be. The difference is all about fitness for purpose. The traveler guitar weighs in at only 4 lbs, half the weight of my Strat. It has a full scale neck with 22 frets. But the machine heads are buried inside the body so they can't get damaged or knocked out of tune. As an added benefit the neck is shorter as there is no head stock. The arm rest has two positions one for playing and one conveniently tucked away for traveling. And the whole thing looks great which is essential for an electric guitar! But best of all when packed for traveling it fits in a small bag that can be easily slung over the shoulder, unlike my fender which requires a flight case the size of a small coffin. Necessity is the mother of invention which is why this guitar could only have been invented by a pilot. But the high degree of quality coupled with the simplicity of the design makes this guitar a masterpiece in my book.
