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Review: Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

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Slow BulletsSlow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Review based on a copy received from NetGalley and Tachyon Publications

Alastair Reynold’s Slow Bullets is a novella exploring issues of identity, memory and revenge. There are echoes of Iain Bank’s The Use of Weapons as well as some of the ideas explored in the Poseidon’s Children trilogy. The tone and setting of Slow Bullets is quite different to that of the gothic space opera (Revelation Space) or generation spanning science fiction (Poseidon’s Children).

The majority of the action is set on the prison transport Caprice as it recovers from a calamitous malfunction. The novella’s protagonist Scur and her fellow passengers awaken from hibernation to find the ship in orbit around a frozen planet and suffering from an acute case of bit rot.

Caprice’s passengers include war criminals from the two opposing religious factions. The war was over and a cease fire declared as the ship set off on it’s ill fated mission. As the ship’s systems fall apart, Scur and her fellow passengers have to deal with religious tensions, long simmering vendettas, as well as figuring out how to preserve millennia’s worth of cultural and scientific knowledge.

I quite enjoyed Slow Bullets. However, it feels more like a short story that was extended to a novella than a novel’s worth of ideas condensed to the shorter format.

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Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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Station ElevenStation Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Station Eleven is a book that cannot be categorised easily. Is it science fiction? Is is literary fiction? Is it post-apocalyptic fiction? It is all of the above, and yet it does not conform to the tropes of genre fiction.

The apocalyptic event – a pandemic caused by a highly infectious and deadly strain of flu straddles the two main plot arcs in Station Eleven. Before the end of the world as we know it, we follow the life (in reverse) of Arthur Leander, a famous actor, now in his middle ages and playing Lear on stage. The second, post collapse arc, follows Kirsten Raymonde an actor with the Travelling Symphony as it moves between small settlements on the shores of Lake Michigan performing Shakespeare, playing classical music and avoiding trouble as best as they can.

Reviews on Goodreads, and on other similar sites are full of quotes from the book, and for good reason. Emily St. John Mandel’s prose has a simple, descriptive style that manages to convey both the beauty and the desolation of her post apocalyptic world. We find beauty and grace in burnt out houses, dark forbidding forests and abandoned rust streaked airplanes parked nose to tail at the airport, going nowhere. There is danger in the form of “The Prophet” and his followers as they stalk the Travelling Symphony. Yet, this book is not like The Stand or perhaps Justin Cronin’s The Passage. The minutiae of survival and self defence are ignored as the book focuses on the emotional impact of societal collapse on those that lived through it and those that were too young to remember the world as it was but are surrounded by the decaying scaffolding of civilisation.

The book is a meditation on art and, in a sense, of mortality. Arthur Leander, in some ways the central character of this book is not remembered for his films or his wealth. He lives on through small acts of generosity, giving the eponymous “Station Eleven” comic book to Kirsten when she was a child, or through photographs and articles in decaying gossip magazines.

So why 4 out of 5 stars? Despite the beautiful writing, I found myself skimming passages. Arthur Leander was a fabulously wealthy, successful actor and serial divorcee, but not a particularly interesting character. There are almost too many characters and side plots that don’t seem to add much to the story. I found myself impatient to go back to the Travelling Symphony and to Kirsten as they made their way around post-apocalyptic Michigan.

A strong recommend from me for fans of literary fiction who want to dip their toes into the burgeoning post-apocalyptic literature genre, and for fans of science fiction curious about the tropes of literary fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed this beautiful and inspiring book.

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Review: The Martian by Andy Weir

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The MartianThe Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have a man crush on Mark Watney. There, I said it. If you think this makes my review biased, move on sir, move on.

Still here? Good. Let me tell you about my mate Mark. He is the nerd’s nerd. Not content with just being a kick-ass engineer / astronaut, he can farm, he can drive, heck he can even sew.. on Mars! He possesses a testicular fortitude and self belief not often seen in these post modern, post apocalyptic morass that calls itself modern science fiction. What a dude!

I won’t lie to you, I was dubious about this book. After much prevarication, I finally booked a ticket to Mars on the enthusiastic recommendation of a normally rather taciturn colleague.

So what is The Martian all about? Its about an astronaut stuck on Mars after a NASA mission goes horribly wrong. We follow Mark Watney as he figures out how to survive on a desolate, inhabitable and bleak planet. Most of the book is written as a series of log entries and monologues from Mark as he rolls with the punches Mars throws at him and comes up with ingenious solutions to problems that would have stumped us mere mortals. He manages all of this while listening to disco – yes, disco. Mark has it rough.

There is a lot of science and a lot of engineering in this book. We get long passages on how to extract water from rocket fuel, how to grow potatoes in space and even how to build a crude sextant to navigate on a planet that does not have a magnetic field. The book could have been tremendously boring but the main character is likeable and the writing in places is wonderfully, crudely funny.

There are passages that are set on Earth and in space that provide a bit of context around the plot. Honestly, I skimmed through some of these chapters to get back to the action on Mars.

So yes, I am a fan of The Martian. Yet, it only gets 4 / 5 stars. Why? Well, you never get a real sense of danger for Mark. Yes, the situations are difficult and bad things happen. Yet, you just know that Mark will survive. This drains some of the suspense out of the book. But hey, its a minor quibble!

If you are a fan of science fiction, you will enjoy The Martian. If you are a space nerd and you Buzz Aldrin is your hero, you will love it. If you still happily watch re-runs of McGuyver, go and buy this book now!

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Review: Poseidon’s Wake by Alastair Reynolds

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Poseidon's Wake (Poseidon's Children, #3)Poseidon’s Wake by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Poseidon’s Wake is the third volume in the Poseidon’s Children series by Alastair Reynolds. The events of this book are set a few centuries in the future from the second book – On The Steel Breeze. The main protagonists are still part of the Akinya clan. We find Mpozi, Goma and Ndege on Crucible and Kanu in the Solar System.

The book explores the results of the arrival of the Watchkeepers and the aftermath of the Mandala event at the conclusion of “Steel Breeze”.

Let me be honest – I found the book hard going, yet worthy of the four stars I have given it. There are long passages meditating on the meaning of life and the role of belief. Stay well clear if you are looking for action scenes or military science fiction. This is very much in the vein of Existence by David Brin. We have a McGuffin – vast alien artefacts on the planet Poseidon. The plot revolves around separate expeditions from the Solar System and from Crucible to the hitherto unvisited system following the receipt of a mysterious transmission.

Along the way, we find the machine civilisation explored in the first two books, we find super intelligent elephants as well as inscrutable aliens. Reading this reminded me of Rendezvous with Rama – it has the similar mix of hard science fiction as well the plot point of humans trying to figure out the motivations of an unknowable alien. It is a fitting conclusion to the series and a book that has stayed with me more than I expected it to.

SIDENOTE – There is one thing I never figured out about these books. Where are the White people? We have a future where all the conversation happens in Swahili, or Mandarin or Portugese – but no English. We have characters that are of different ethnicities, but no WASPS. Whats up with that?

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Review: The Docker Book by James Turnbull

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It is hard to avoid Docker. Hacker News has been abuzz with it for years, The Register ran an exhaustive feature about it a couple of months ago; indeed it seems to have taken over the DevOps world.

But why do I care? I am a developer, I live in the land of abstractions. The JVM is as low as I go my friends.

The problem is, all developers need to do releases.. And releases have a tendency to go very wrong..

Docker_Releases

So, I decided to educate myself. What is it about Docker that has got the cool kids on Hacker News all excited?

I took a look at some Youtube videos, tried out the tutorials and read a handful of blog posts and how-tos on Docker. I just couldn’t get my head around it! Finally I took the plunge and spent the last couple of weeks working through James Turnbull’s The Docker Book.

So, am I enlightened? The short answer is – yes, I have enjoyed working my way through the “Docker Book” and I have a much better idea on how to use Docker and the sort of use cases it is designed for.

The book is written in a tutorial format. We start with the basics about Docker and containers and move on to installing Docker on your favoured Linux(1) distribution.

Once we have Docker up and running, we learn about the basics of Docker. How containers can be created from images and how these images can layered. We learn about the Docker repository can be used to download standard images (for example, the image for ubuntu:14.04 can be used to build a base container that runs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) and how to build containers from the images that we define. The author walks us through setting up and managing some simple containers.

All the Dockerfiles and any scripts and code used in the examples is readily available from the Github repository that the author has setup for the book(2).

I suspect most readers will get the most value out of chapters 6 and 7 of the book. Here the author goes through some examples including:

  • Using Docker to build a test environment
  • Building a continous integration pipeline using Jenkins and Docker
  • Building a web application that is deployed on multiple containers

These examples are quite detailed and well designed. Most of them could be used as a basis for a Docker based application stack “in the real world”.

Chapter 8 explores the eco-system(3) that is being build up around Docker focusing on service discovery with Consul and orchestration with Fig.

The book concludes with chapters on the Docker API and how Docker can be extended.

“The Docker Book” does not go into details on how containers work beyond the introductory chapters. The focus of the book is about learning what you can do with Docker and it succeeds admirably. I deducted half a star from the review simply because the author does not delve much into things like performance implications of using Docker or on how exactly the operating system may allocate resources to applications running in containers. There are plenty of resources online on these topics4.

You can’t go wrong with “The Docker Book” if you are looking for a hand-on introduction to Docker. James Turnbull is a good tutor and the resources accompanying the book are great.

Will Docker solve my release woes? Is it actually ready to be deployed in a corporate setting? Perhaps a topic for another post..

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Notes:

  1. Instructions for use of Docker on Windows and MacOSX are provided but are skeletal. Basically you need to use Boot2Docker
  2. I worked through almost every single example from the Kindle edition and didn’t find a buggy script or typo!
  3. The eco-system is moving fast. Kubernetes from Google is also worth checking out.
  4. The Docker blog is excellent

Review: The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim et. al

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The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business WinThe Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The “Phoenix Project..” is a parable about technology, business and an introduction to the hot new buzzword of the day – “DevOps”. We follow Bill as he is promoted to be the head of IT Operations in the fictitious auto parts company “Parts Unlimited”. Bill is in for a rude shock as he leaves his comfortable middle management job behind and is thrust into the world of corporate politics, disastrous projects and a company rapidly falling behind it’s competitors and losing market share and money. The root of the problem appears to be a dysfunctional technology group and a complete breakdown in communication between the business and technology groups within the company.

The issues explored here will be familiar to anyone who has worked within technology in any sort of corporate setting. The challenges Bill faces – unclear requirements, unrealistic expectations and ever tightening budget constraints – are present everywhere. The book focuses on technology operations and we go on a journey with Bill as he tries to institute a change management procedure, keep control of production environments and tries to balance key staff who seem to spend most of their times fighting fires instead of delivering on projects.

The methods and technologies Bill and his team adapt should also be familiar to most IT folks. We have change management procedures (ITIL), Kanban boards, and continuous delivery methods. Gene Kim et. al do an excellent job of explaining how these methods work and go beyond the buzzwords in showing how these can be effectively used. The situation Bill inherits at Parts Unlimited may be extreme but its not too far off the mark.

I strongly recommend the Phoenix Project to anyone who works in technology in any domain. As a developer, I don’t have much insight or indeed interest in how IT operations work and the sort of challenges they face. This book forced me to think more about why we have change management procedures and how operating and maintaining an IT infrastructure is as (and probably more) challenging than building the applications that run on that infrastructure.

I have deducted a star simply because the writing can be clunky in parts and I feel the book would have benefited from more editing. The characters are caricatures of the type of personalities you find in most corporate settings. It can be a bit much at times (like the binder carrying manic depressive CISO), but it didn’t detract from an informative and engaging book

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Review: Daemon by Daniel Suarez

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Daemon (Daemon, #1)Daemon by Daniel Suarez
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

TLDR – Daemon starts off as a promising techno-thriller with a somewhat plausible premise but ends up being a run of the mill action roller coaster with killer robots. It’s a fun, if unsatisfying genre piece.

Daniel Suarez knows his domain – contemporary / near future technology and it’s implications. What I am also quite sure about that he has a rather pessimistic view of where things are going. Daemon starts as a crime procedural with a small town cop trying to solve two seemingly unconnected deaths that appear accidental. We quickly find out that there is a rather sinister force behind these deaths. We encounter disenchanted, anarchist-libertarian hackers, mysterious computer programmers who are not quite who they seem, and lots of sinister government types who simply know whats best for everyone.

The key character is the eponymous Daemon – a networked, non sentient computer system that is a dead computer genius’s gift to humanity. The Daemon has very specific plans (though they are never revealed – we will have to wait for the sequel) for humanity and it goes about recruiting brilliant, motivated followers through a variety of somewhat plausible means. We have entertaining descriptions of computer games and call centre software amongst other things. I really enjoyed this, the first half of the book. A particular standout was the police / FBI raid on the dead computer genius’s computerised mansion which I found most satisfyingly and gratuitously violent and explosively entertaining.

The book jumps forward a few months around the half way mark. This is where things get problematic. There are large passages that involve discussions between nameless “important” people in the FBI, CIA, NSA and other alphabet agencies as they wring their hands and try and figure out just exactly what is going on. Yes, we know government bureaucrats are clueless, thank you. The episodic, multi-character structure of the book also becomes a problem here. There are a number of characters who fade in and out. There is a particular character, a FBI special operations type fellow, who must be based on someone the author dislikes. He appears in two long passages, and appears to take a huge amount of punishment: being blown up, burnt, shot at, attacked by killer robots, being thrown off a car, etc. But it is difficult to really care too much because we don’t know anything at all about this particular, long suffering sap. The book builds up to an explosive climax involving a long car chase and,yes, more killer robots.

I enjoyed reading Daemon – just like I enjoy big budget sci-fi / action movies or playing first person shooters. There are some neat touches, cool technology, lots of explosions, and killer robots. But, in keeping with genre tropes, we also get gratuitous violence, paper thin characters, and an inconsistent plot. A strong recommendation for those who like computer games and are anarcho-techno-libertarians. An entertaining and somewhat lightweight read for the rest of us.

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The WhatsApp acquisition

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The water-cooler was abuzz this morning with news of Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, a tiny company. With the claimed 400 million users that WhatsApp brings to Facebook, the numbers involve value each user at $40. That is an astonishing amount of money for a service that is monetised through application sales, not via advertisement. There have been a number of articles and blog posts online analysing this deal. This is not one of them..

My colleagues are a quiet and taciturn lot. Office banter is limited to a “Good Morning” and a “See you later..” outside of the lunch hour. For the first time, in my admittedly short stint here, we had a bonafide conversation that was not even tangentially related to trading systems and market data feeds. We got talking about what it means to be a programmer working outside of the startup / silicon valley scene. One of my colleagues remarked that he spent half a decade in further education and a lot longer learning the ropes until he got to the point now where he is comfortable and financially secure. He wondered if that time would have been better spent writing a new chat or social network. Perhaps a new way of optimising the transmission and sharing of ribald jokes, or for improving the sexting workflow.

We carried on in a similar vein for a while when the most introverted of our lot spoke up. He said: “I was just never interested. The thought of building the next Facebook or Twitter just doesn’t excite me. It was never something that was on my radar.”

I spend way too much time on Hacker News. The Silicon Valley culture and eco-system fascinates me, but it does not inspire me. I marvel at the numbers that are thrown around. A few billion here, a few billion there, but I also wonder about the utility of it all. It is now fashionable to talk about how much of a talent drain banking has become. How so many people left promising careers in academia and engineering to cut code and make money on Wall Street and the City. In a few years I can see people talking in similar terms about Silicon Valley. “He was a promising scientist, but he joined Google to help them optimise the placement of adverts on search results.”

I find the earnest tone of discussions on Hacker News and of the job postings for these start ups deeply ironic. They talk about changing the world, wanting rockstars and working on cool new technologies. Yet, the end goal is a big payout via IPO or acquisition having built a better way of sharing food selfies. I think these headline acquisitions are a honey trap for programmers. Somebody, like my colleague, who wouldn’t really even think about working for a startup building a “trivial” app might realise that the App may be a gateway to that long dreamt of retirement on the beach.. You might get a lot more people ready to work for peanuts with the hope of striking it rich one day. Perhaps it is not a colossal waste of money after all..

Review: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

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Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering EverythingMoonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein

The tag line on the book – “The art and science of remembering everything” is misleading. There is little in the way of prescriptive material here. The book is more of a travelogue and memoir of the years that the author spent and his journey from being a journalist covering a rather nerdy subculture to becoming the somewhat unlikely Memory champion of the USA.

We join Foer as he journeys to the world memory championships and meets a variety of entertaining, eccentric and quite bizarre characters. From the ultra suave and successful memory coach Tony Buzan who runs a global memory empire and wears clothes inspired by seventeenth century sword fighters to the cane wielding English eccentric Ed Cooke who formed a secret society of memory champions whose main purpose seems drinking beer.

This is not a scientific study or a self help book. Rather it is a study of characters and of the people who spend so much time and are completely committed to a rather arcane pursuit of somewhat dubious utility. The author also goes into some detail on the techniques used by champion memorisers such as using memory palaces and associating easily remembered and recalled images to all kinds of data that needs to be memorised. The emphasis here is again on entertainment rather than instructions as we are invited to imagine Claudia Schiffer taking a luxurious bath in a giant tub of cottage cheese on the sofa of the author’s childhood home. Apparently it is easier to remember titillating images than it is to remember chaste ones (who would have thought?).

The author also takes some interesting, if anecdotal diversions into topics such as chicken sexing and an exploration of savants capable of incredible feats of memory. Foer spends time with people who can’t remember their last thought as well as those such as Kim Peek, the savant on whom Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man was based, who spends his days memorising the phone book. All of the characters are sympathetically portrayed, even those that the author is clearly ambiguous about.

The most enjoyable parts of the book are the ones where the author describes his journey towards becoming a “memory master”. The one image that I will take from this book is that of Joshua Foer sitting in the basement of his parent’s house in his underpants wearing giant industrial earmuffs and safety glasses spray painted black with tiny pinholes attempting to memorise long lists of random numbers.

Moonwalking with Einstein does come out like a mockumentary at times but it is clear that the author respects, even enjoys the company of, this strange brotherhood of unlikely athletes that he came across on his journey. I recommend this short and entertaining book to those who enjoy popular science books and as well as those who enjoy character studies and travelogues in the vein of Bill Bryson.

4 stars out of 5.

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Review: Vishnu’s Crowded Temple by Maria Misra

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Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India Since the Great RebellionVishnu’s Crowded Temple: India Since the Great Rebellion by Maria Misra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Vishnu’s Crowded Temple is an intriguing take on the history of modern India. As the title indicates, the book focuses on the politics of late British Raj in India and that of the independent Indian state after 1947. This is very much a political history. Ms. Misra offers much food for thought on the impact of caste, class and religion on political life in modern India.

The book is well written and the style is informal and anecdotal. The author tackles a topic that could be rather dull with panache and colour. The best sections of the book are those around the turn of the 20th century. We find befuddled victorian British administrators attempting to categorise and control the Indian electorate as well as a number of ambitious Indian politicians, including M.K. Gandhi, jostling for power and influence with nationhood and independence now a distinct possibility.

The book traces the dominant forces of modern Indian politics from the Hindu reform sects of the nineteenth century to the caste based “reservation politics” in the late twentieth. The period covered by the book encompasses rapid industrialisation, globalisation, two world wars and a tumultuous partition of the Indian subcontinent. The book focuses on political history at the expense of ignoring or skimming some important chapters in Indian history including the relationship with Pakistan and China, separatist movements in Kashmir and the north-eastern states and the impact of terrorism in more recent times. We also don’t get much insight into the everyday life of Indians with the focus on politics and economics.

This is not a good “first Indian history book”. If you are new to India, I would recommend “India: A History” by John Keay or the excellent “India after Gandhi” by Ramachandara Guha. With the great “Tamasha” that is the Indian elections coming up in 2014, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple is an excellent read for those who want to understand more about Indian politics and political attitudes.

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