07.24.08
Posted in Books at 1:00 pm by Todd
I recently finished reading Freakanomics (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner). This means another goal completed. But more important, I really think that I learned something from the book.
The book made me think more about incentives than I ever did before. For example, when thinking about selling my house I will have to consider what type of deal I can strike with a real estate agent to ensure that I get the best price. I suppose this really is just a lesson in basic economics but I had never had it explained in this way.
The were several parts of the book that didn’t sit well with me. It wasn’t the content but rather how they presented their arguments. At times, they didn’t provide a strong enough case to completely convince me.
Overall, it was a great book that I would certainly recommend to everyone.
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02.26.08
Posted in Books, Programming, SAnToS, Technology at 1:37 pm by Todd
As mentioned before, I have been re-tasked to work on a plugin for Eclipse that supports the development of
SPARK. Therefore, I should probably learn something about the language.
I started off by trying to read through
slides prepared by Dr. Hatcliff and Dr. Robby. The slides made sense but I wasn’t able to fully comprehend the language based solely on the slides.
I then tried reading
“High Integrity Software: The SPARK Approach to Safety and Security”. The first chapter also made sense but I still didn’t get it.
I then found a
simple Ada tutorial that walked me through the basics of Ada in a step-by-step manner. This allowed me to understand little bits of Ada through simple examples. And I was able to compile and run them to validate my understanding.
Coming back to the slides made a lot more sense. And re-reading the book chapters really made more sense. I think I am finally understanding Ada and
SPARK. And I feel more confident that I can help development an
IDE in Eclipse to support the development. Now I just need to understand the technologies provided by the Sireum project that I will have to interface with before starting the
IDE implementation process.
Notes:
- “all SPARK programs are legal Ada programs.” from Introduction to SPARK
- “had only one tenth of the residual anomalies as comparable full Ada and only one hundredth of those found in parts of the system written in C.” from A Technical Overview of SPARK. I wonder how they define “residual anomalies” and how they measured them.
- “eliminate features like dynamic data creation” from Barnes Chapter 1 — Introduction.
- “SPARK does not have its own compiler suite. Rather, it leverages the use of existing Ada compilers.” from Barnes Chapter 1 — Introduction.
- .ads files contain the specification (or declaration) of a package while .adb files contain the body (or implementation). From Barnes Chapter 2 — SPARK Language Principles.
- “Ada is also case-insensitive” from Section 3.1 – Ada Lexical Elements of the Ada95 Lovelace Tutorial.
- “To make long numbers easier to read, underscores are permitted inside a numeric literal. For example, “1_000_000″ is legal.” from Section 3.3 – Numeric Literals of the Ada95 Lovelace Tutorial.
- “Ada programs usually use a starting index of 1 if there’s no particularly natural starting point; this reduces the probability of so-called “one-off” errors (people normally count from one, not zero, and can sometimes get confused when starting from zero).” from Section 6.5 – Arrays of the Ada95 Lovelace Tutorial.
Related Links:
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02.14.08
Posted in About Me, Books at 6:20 pm by Todd
This feels a little like the first day back in elementary school telling the class what I did over the break. Regardless, I wanted to brag … and if my 2 readers don’t like it, tough.
Over break I spent a lot of time watching TV, listening to music, browsing the web, watching movies, and most importantly, reading good books. Below is a quick list of the books and movies along with comments about each.
Books:
If anyone wants to borrow one of the books (or all of them), let me know. Or feel free to click through and purchase them at buy.com (not so subtle way to increase click-throughs to my affiliate program).
By Order of the President by WEB Griffin I really liked this book because of the characters and the pace. It was probably not as good as it could be since I had read the 2nd book in the series first (The Hostage). So I already knew some of the plot before it was revealed. But overall, great read. And I really like the main character, Major Carlos Castillo. My 3rd favorite book character (first is John Clark from Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse and Rainbow Six and second is John Patrick Ryan from Tom Clancy’s Ryanverse).
The Hades Factor by Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lynds I liked this book because it had a good tempo to it and the characters were very likable. The downside to this book is they didn’t give it enough suspense. Ludlum’s other books really do a good job of hiding the bad characters but this one seemed watered-down to me. By mid-way in the book, I knew who the bad people were and what was going to happen. I prefer small twists in the end that really surprise me (for example, the way M. Night Shamalan creates suspense in Signs or The Sixth Sense). But it was entertaining enough for me to want to continue reading the books in this series.
The Cassandra Compact by Robert Ludlum and Philip Shelby I liked this book for the same reason as mentioned above (The Hades Factor). It is the next book in the series and follows a similar theme, plot, and style. Again, not my favorite but I am continuing to read the series.
The Paris Option By Robert Ludlum and Gayle Lunds Again, same type of book that makes up the previous three books in the series. It was an ok book that kept my attention. But basically the same characters, style, and theme as the others.
I also spent some time watching movies with my wonderful wife.
- License to Wed with Robin Williams, John Krasinski, and Mandy Moore – Not funny at all. I suggest not seeing this movie.
- I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry with Adam Sandler and Kevin James – Pretty funny … especially compared to other “comedies” that we have rented lately. I suggest renting this movie.
- Eastern Promises with Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts – Very powerful movie. If you are into drama then you will likely enjoy this.
- The Simpsons Movie – Very funny … especially if you like the Simpsons. Might have been better if they could have shortened it.
- Superman Returns – Didn’t like this one much. I was hoping it would be like Batman Begins but it was just a re-hash of some old plot with new actors. I did like the casting choice for Lex Luther though.
So I had a rather relaxing winter break. I wish I could make more time in my normal schedule to read those types of books and see more movies. Unfortunately, I spend most of my free-time working (this blog, free-consulting, and free-manual labor take a good chunk of my non-working hours).
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11.06.07
Posted in About Me, Books at 3:07 pm by Todd
This week I will be on vacation from my job at the SAnToS Lab. I was supposed to be traveling in Spain but instead Kari and I will be hanging out at home relaxing and enjoying our time together.
But when Kari gets tired of seeing me, I have plans to read. Here are some of the books that I hope to complete this week:
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcom Gladwell – I read Blink a month or so back and liked it.
- The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin – His blog is really good so I thought his books would also be good.
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!- Adam says it is a great book that will change my perspective
- By Order of the Presidentby WEB Griffin – I loved his Brotherhood of War series and I recently read the 2nd in The Presidential Agent series, The Hostage: A Presidential Agent Novel.
And hopefully I will find time to blog about them as well. Wish me luck in cramming as much information as possible into my tiny little brain in a week.
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02.06.07
Posted in Books at 6:42 pm by Todd
I recently completed reading a good book … or rather a good collection of writing organized into book form. This book is titled The Best Software Writing I selected and introducted by Joel Spolsky. It has some of my favorite tech-authors in it (Eric Sink, Raymond Chen, and Paul Graham) as well as some new favorite tech-authors. Joel, and his readers, did a great job of finding good articles that relate to software (using as well as building).
There was one issue that I had with the book; there are many places in the book that have URLs as references and I wanted to click them (instead of type them in). I suppose that is the true downside to books now, we are all used to just clicking a word, phrase, or picture to get more information about it. What I mean is that I have not been to my local library in quite some time, I have not used a card catalog, and I have not had to read through old journals. I just do a quick google or wikipedia search and follow the links until I find what I am looking for. I know this is progress but it just reminds me how painful research used to be.
So take some time to check out The Best Software Writing I and email Joel so that he will create a The Best Software Writing II.
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02.05.07
Posted in Books, Programming at 3:14 pm by Todd
I just finished reading a great book by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt titled
Practices of an Agile Developer. I have really loved
The Pragmatic Programmers book series. Previous to this book I have also read
One of the things that I like about this book is how it is organized. Each chapter is broken down into practices. Each practice is described in the same way. First, they give “devil’s” side of the practice. This usually comes down to a quote about doing the wrong thing that is the opposite of what the good practice is. After the quote the authors provide details about what the practice is, details on how it can be applied, and often times some personal anecdote related to the practice. They finish each practice with the “angel’s” perspective and some guidance on what it feels like and how to stay balanced. This organization style makes it easy to understand. Even more, it made it easy for me to work my way through the book in small chunks of time (I read this off and on for about 1 month).
Another thing that I like about this book is that the issues they talk about being confronted with fit with my experiences. So their solutions make a great deal of sense. Even more, I use some of the practices that they mention. I just wish I could convince myself to start trying more of them on a regular basis as well as have others in the lab apply them.
Overall I think this is an excellent book and I would suggest it to anyone that is in the business of software development or anyone wishing to get into it. I would further suggest the other books from The Pragmatic Programmers because of their views as well as their writing style.
Up next, Software Product Lines, Pragmatic Unit Testing In Java with JUnit and Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion.
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11.08.06
Posted in Books at 1:53 pm by Todd
After reading Micheal Crichton’s State of Fear, I have found a new curiosity with the idea of Global Warming. I really want to understand what is fact and what is fiction.
Because of that I have been reading blogs that discuss related topics (mostly providing pointers to real sources of information like books, articles, and such), looking at news articles (which provide viewpoints but no real argument or data), and collecting book references for my reading list.
Well, those are some things that I am reading. Hopefully they help others understand the issue(s) and develop some opinion to stand on that is based in fact and less on hype (or FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). I am sure I will add to this list of sources as I locate them.
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12.22.05
Posted in Books at 2:30 am by Todd
I assume that most families behave similar to mine and celebrate multiple holidays. For example, I just had the first of (at least) 3 Christmas celebrations this weekend when we were supposed to have my sister’s family and my dad and his girlfriend over. Things did not work out as we had planned (too much snow to drive on Saturday) so Kari and I celebrated with my father and his girlfriend Jesse Ann.
So, to make that long boring paragraph meaningful, I just wanted to point out that I just received a few new books that look to be very exciting and meaningful to read from my father. I am starting off with Micheal Crichton’s State of Fear. It is amazing how his writing can cause me to change the way I view the world. In this case, it has made me look at what researchers publish and what can influence the results. Let me explain a little more.
Like a lot of people, I watch the evening news for snippets of worldly events. Sometimes they come on with stories about breakthroughs in science that come from research. The problem that I see with how they cover them is that they take a particular slant to it since: 1) it is hard to provide enough detail to provide real understanding and be interesting in a 20 second story, and 2) it is likely that the people that reported the event did not truly understand the research and the implications of that research. However, this is not my point. My point is, what if the scientist that did the work was influenced in some way to put a particular slant on the data or theory?
To provide a little more specific example, the book goes into some detail about a visit that a wealthy philanthropist, George Morton takes to visit a scientist doing research on the glaciers in Iceland. Traveling with Morton are his attorney, Mr. Evans, and an “old friend”, Mr. Drake, who runs an environmental organization (think Green Peace). When they arrive Mr. Drake starts to chat with the scientist about his current set of findings and provides some “suggestions” on how to write up the data. The book makes it seem like Mr. Drake wants the scientist to soften the data he found to help spin it to support Mr. Drake’s claims about global warming.
So, for a long time I have had the illusion that scientists publish the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But this book has changed my view because this does not seem like pure-fiction to me. I can imagine that this type of thing actually occurs in science today (and probably has happened well into the past). And this makes me wonder about the things that I read in scientific publications.
But I suppose that this is what everyone already knows and already looks at these as less than fact.
As a side note, this isn’t the first of Crichton’s books that has done this. Most of the books that he has written (or rather, those that I have read) have provided the same type of insight into the world. So thank you Mr. Crichton for writing interesting and somewhat educational books.
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