Books — 5 comments
10
Mar 10

The Sword of Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks

I made a serious error in rereading these books. I don’t know why I picked them up — I remember devouring them as a kid — the same feeling I had when I first read The Hobbit (or later LOTR) or Ender’s Game.

Well, they say you can’t go home again, and I think that holds true for some of my favorite childhood books — reading them as an adult, they’re practically unreadable — I mean, there is so much in them that is awful. I’m still a bit of a sucker for giant mythologies, so liked that part, but man, tough to read, and I think I wish I had left the memory in place.

Sometime maybe I’ll do a post on the most influential books I read growing up — there are certain books that I can vividly remember where I was and what was happening as I read them. Some were great, some not so much. But they all contribute in some way to my world view now.

Mozilla — 3 comments
22
Feb 10

Browser Choices

On the occasion of Microsoft starting to roll out tests of the Browser Choice Screen in parts of Europe this week, Mitchell and I, along with others, have written a short letter about why choices that we make matter greatly, and why browser choice matters now more than ever.

There are a lot of things to say here, and I’ll repost the content of our letter below (you can find it as well at opentochoice.org, a mini-site we’ve set up to celebrate and explore the choices that we have and need).

But the argument we’re making boils down to this:

  • The Web browser colors the way that you see and interact with the Web — it’s an increasingly important mediating piece of technology.
  • We’ve built Firefox to reflect the values of user control and security — and we always will. There are short and long term implications of this design point of view.
  • But more important than choosing Firefox is that people make informed choices about the technology they use — it’s more important that you understand why you’re using the tools you’re using than any one specific choice.

We feel, too, like the issue of putting users, not servers, in control of their online lives will keep coming up more and more loudly in the coming months and years. Not everyone is working from the same point of view, and choices will matter in the long run.

I hope that you’ll write & blog & tweet about the important aspects of choice and user control as well, to add your voice to the conversation.

Web Browser Choice Matters

Our lives are full of choices. Where to eat? What to read? Who to spend time with?

The choices we make determine the quality of our life, and how we see the world. So many of these choices we take quite seriously, weighing the consequences, thinking about the implications, and choosing carefully and thoughtfully.

So it’s strange, then, that the majority of people in the world haven’t ever considered the Web browser on their computer or mobile phone — that so many people every day use the browser that comes by default.

It’s an important choice because the Web browser has become one of the most critical and trusted relationships of our modern lives – with nearly perfect knowledge of everything we do. It is the lens through which we look at the virtual world, and the medium by which we connect, learn, share, and collaborate. The browser you choose is responsible for providing you with the necessary tools to manage your online life, and to protect your privacy and security.

And so we’re pleased to support the European Commission and Microsoft in also recognizing how important choice is. In accordance with a landmark settlement, if you’re using a Windows PC in Europe and you’re still using the default Web browser, in the coming weeks and months you’ll see a Browser Choice screen appear. That screen will provide you the opportunity to make an active choice in the source of the software that acts on your behalf to broker your online experiences, and meet your own unique needs and interests.

As an international non-profit organization, Mozilla has always believed that the freedom to make smart choices should be central to making the Web, and the world, a better place. This shows through with Mozilla Firefox, a free, open-source Web browser that more than 350 million people around the world have chosen to use every day. Values of choice and self-determination are built into everything that we do, including Firefox.

We believe that the Browser Choice screen is an important milestone towards helping more people take control of their online lives — and we hope for the conversation to become broader and deeper. We’ve set up opentochoice.org as one place for you to discuss what this choice means to you — and we hope that you’ll add your own voice to this conversation and those to come.

Whether or not you decide to keep your current Web browser, we encourage you to learn more about your browser and the impacts it has on the way you see the world, and to make your own choice.

Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Chair & John Lilly, Mozilla CEO

Books — 2 comments
30
Jan 10

Daemon, Freedom (TM), by Daniel Suarez

  

Since I read this two book series back-to-back (in about a week and a half — have been home sick), I figure it’s okay to post about both of them together. I first read about Daemon on Joi’s blog, and it sounded interesting enough to give a try.  

[Semi-spoilers below. If you like cyberspace thrillers, you probably want to read these -- and could probably go without the following paragraphs.]

Anyway, I liked them both a lot — probably Daemon a little more than Freedom (TM). They’re sort of a mix between Fight Club and World of Warcraft, with maybe some Blade Runner thrown in — lots of great ideas, lots of real implications of the technologies we all use constantly.

I will say that Daemon is the first novel I’ve ever read that included the syntax for a SQL injection attack on a web site — but maybe that’s just me. :-)

There’s a lot of technical jargon for fiction, and lots of solid ideas about how technology works and what the future could hold — and clearly researched extremely well.

Anyway, they’re a fun couple of books — if you’re wondering what World of Warcraft grafted onto our own everyday world might look like, these are a great place to start. (That particular part gets a lot more pronounced in the second book.)

Books / Family — 2 comments
28
Jan 10

Cooper’s Virgil

I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately — obviously because of the developments of eBooks, but also because I’ve been home sick the past few days, reading as I get better, and just generally around all my books more of the time.

I happened to walk by a shelf in our living room filled with books from our family — mostly older books, and mostly from my dad’s mother (she was always “Grandmother” to me). When she died, I inherited a number of her Latin books, since I really loved learning Latin, and it was something that was important to her, too. For whatever reason, I picked one up off the shelf today — Cooper’s Virgil — an annotated collection of the writing of Virgil (who wrote The Aeneid, among other things).

Just picking it up, a million different things came up in my mind. Some reverence for how old it is. Fondness for the Latin work and friends I had in high school. Memories of Grandmother, always teaching, and pretty often whipping me in double solitaire, which I’m starting to teach SPL now.

Here’s the back cover page (you can click through to see it bigger):

Now the first thing you’ll notice is that the book is old. It looks like Gussie Raysor acquired it (or just signed it) on May 26, 1895, just about 115 years ago now.

Think of that. 1895 was when the first movie projector was patented. Queen Victoria was still alive, and Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t yet President of the United States. The Ford Motor Company wouldn’t be founded for another 8 years.

The next thing that I noticed was the name at the top — Laura Lilly — who is definitely not my grandmother, but instead was her sister-in-law — my grandfather’s sister. So that’s a little bit of humor there. I guess my grandfather stole the book from his sister (although I have to say that I can’t really imagine him giving much of a damn about Latin — unless it was some sort of prank, which I can imagine him caring about), and then the book got absorbed into Grandmother’s collection (given her love of language and learning and books, not too surprising). Gussie Raysor was my grandfather’s mother.

And so through this artifact that I’ve moved around several times over the past couple of decades, and that surely frustrated any number of Lillys as they tried to learn their declensions and conjugations and gerunds — through this simple artifact, a connection across the years was made. And with real impact and emotion in the present day.

That is a hell of a thing. It’s just really astonishing in simplicity and power.

Now, I’m not very nostalgic about books, I have to say. I thought I would be — I thought I’d miss their paper & binding shape with the advent of eBooks. But I really don’t — not at all, honestly. I prefer, in most cases, to read books on my Kindle now — which tells me, as I’ve written elsewhere, that what I really love is reading, not the physical forms themselves.

Still:

There’s something about physical artifacts that reaches across the ages. As I look around my own house and think about what objects with meaning will persist and SPL’s grandchildren will look at a hundred years from now, I’m not sure there are very many at all. There are lots of electronic artifacts, like this blog, even, if we can manage to keep them alive and safe from inevitable(?) bit-rot. But precious few things that will make it through the childhoods and moves and marriages and storms and whatever else that the next 100 years will bring.

So I’m glad to have these books of my grandmother’s with me. They mean something and they change who I am and how I experience the world because they’re here with me. And it’s probably time to think a little bit not in the backwards direction, but in the forwards direction, about what we want people to reflect over a hundred years hence.

Books — Comments Off
28
Jan 10

Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin

I think it’s a little too early to really understand the history, and certainly the implications, of the financial crisis that we’ve all been going through over the past 2 years. But I’m quite interested in the actual people who were (and are) involved, and understanding the decisions they made, and as much as I can about how those decisions felt to them.

Sorkin’s book is very useful in that regard — he clearly had outstanding access to most of the important players, and a good sense of the relationships between them. The book is a little bit too long, I think, and reads a little like a breathy soap opera in places, but seems to me that it will be the definitive contemporary accounting of the events of 2007 and 2008, if not the definitive history.

If you’re interested in this subject at all, I’d highly recommend the book — it caused me to have a number of “a ha!” moments and helped my understanding of the system. It’s also created a bit of contempt in me for the bankers and policy makers who were involved — but it’s only one accounting, so I’m inclined to learn a lot more.

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