Books I've Read This Week

Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal reminded me of an idea I was toying with implementing back when I was a software development manager. Back in those days no one liked doing their yearly review as it truly was a pain in the ass to keep track of your yearly achievements and it really didn't amount to anything as pay cuts and not raises were the order of the day. I wanted to implement an experience points system for my developers. For each bug they fixed, test case they wrote or document they reviewed they would get experience points. Then at the end of the year they would have a good record of what they had done and a quantitative number to compare against last years performance. Ideally the developers would get more points for the less desirable tasks. For instance fixing a bug would be worth less points than writing a test case. I hoped that it would incent people to pay more attention to some of the things we are no are important but are often ignored in software development. Alas, it was not to be. As a gamer and software developer I really identified with the tenants of this book. I'm supremely lucky to have a job in which the motivations for me to come to work every day are more intrinsic than extrinsic and at this point I can't ever imagine going back. During the day I tend to answer a lot of questions about PhoneGap on the Google Group or on StackOverflow. I get more satisfaction from StackOverflow as it provides me feedback on my answers. They are up voted and accepted by other users of StackOverflow. This feedback I get from other users gives me intrinsic motivation to keep going. The notion of using gaming to enhance and improve reality is fascinating one and very well articulated in this book. I will have to agree that collaboration is going to be one of the key skills of the 21st century. Without collaboration we will be unable to get past the challenges we currently face. Here is a great Ted talk by Jane McGonigal that may whet your appetite for this most excellent book:

Hellboy Volume 11: The Bride of Hell and Others is another good volume from Mike Mignola in the Hellboy ouvre. While it does not exactly move the story forward that we've seen back in Hellboy volume 9 it is a good collection of Hellboy stories and is worth reading for Hellboy and the Luchador's!

See you next Friday.

There's Nothing Like a Real Book

Books I've Read This Week

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson in a word is mesmerizing. This is a great no holds barred biography of a complicated man. Jobs was such a polarizing figure as many folks loved him while other absolutely detested him. Although the one thing you can't argue with is that he had a huge impact on technology. Jobs was the driving force behind Apple who've given us the Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad which revolutionized the computer, music and phone industries. As well he was deeply involved in Pixar which has brought us some of the best movies of the past 20 years. That's not to say that he hadn't made a number of mis-steps along the way, NeXT for instance. To Jobs things we either insanely great or shit. There was no in between for him as his opinions were of a binary nature. He was extremely hard to deal with and the book gives us an unvarnished view of his relationships with friends, family and business partners. This is one of those books released in 2011 that is a must read.

See you next Friday.

Books I've Read This Week

Keeping in line with my new years resolutions my books have taken a turn towards non-fiction

Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson is a very interesting book the details how to detect psychopath's by answering a 20 question test. As the author mentions in the book once you start detecting psychopaths you'll start seeing them everywhere which is a bit of a problems. However, it is a great insight into how some folks brains are wired incredibly different than the average.

Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All is the latest in a series of books by Jim Collins. In it Collins examines a number of companies to determine what specific choices they've made in order to become great. Some of the qualities that emerged were the great companies didn't take crazy risks, first they tested their assumptions a little at a time before deciding to jump in with both feet and when things are going well that is the time where the great companies get extremely paranoid about how it could all go wrong.

See you next Friday.

Book Review: PhoneGap Beginner's Guide

Phonegap Beginner's Guide by Andrew Lunny delivers exactly what the title promises as it is a good guide to developers just getting started with PhoneGap. The book walks you through the installation of the PhoneGap framework, shows you how to develop and debug your application in a web browser before bringing it over to the device and describes a number of HTML5/CSS3 features you can take advantage of without even needing PhoneGap. Then the book walks you through a number of areas of device functionality that the PhoneGap API like the accelerometer, camera and contacts. Plus there is a chapter devoted to extending PhoneGap functionality using the Plugin API.

The only con that I can point out is that the book does not completely describe the available PhoneGap API, nor should it really as it is targeted at beginners. I can't fault Andrew at all as a lot of the currently functionality was delivered after the books was sent to be published. One thing you should be aware of is that chapter 9 describes the navigator.service.contacts interface which is now navigator.contacts.

I do recommend this book for PhoneGap and fledgling hybrid mobile application developers. Probably the easiest way to get it is as an ebook from Packt.

Books I've Read This Week

I had to return The Children of the Sky back to the library but here are some other books I read.

For the Love of Physics is a great read that explains physics in laymen's terms by Professor Walter Lewin. It is well worth the read if only for the chapter in which he explains rainbows and how to spot the easier. As an added bonus you can get all of Professor Lewin's entertaining lectures on physics courtesy of MIT's open course ware.

Scalped Vol. 1: Indian Country by Jason Aaron is a series I've been meaning to check out for awhile. Set in a fictional Indian reservation undercover FBI agent Bad Horse returns home to take on a corrupt reservation chief and casino owner while dealing with his activist Mom and ex-girlfriend. It sounds very soap operaish but this was a great crime comic.

Kamandi Last Boy on Earth Omnibus Vol 1 by Jack "The King" Kirby is pretty amazing. Published during a time where the Planet of the Apes movies were hot properties the similarities are obvious. Kamandi is the last reasoning member of the human race. After his grandfather dies his leaves the bunker he's lived his whole life to explorer the world where he encounters Lions, Tigers, Apes, etc. that have evolved to become the dominant species on earth while humans have regressed to near unthinking animals. Each and every one of the 20 issues in this omnibus is just bursting with ideas. There is so much going on in these pages that it is too hard to get it all into one blog post. At the end of the first issue there is a map of North America so you can see Kirby had a plan for where he wanted to take this series. Also, while this comic was being published Jack Kirby was doing two other monthly books so he was producing upwards of 60 pencilled pages of art. These days, it's hard enough to get an artist to do 20 pages a month consistently. The pure draftmanship of this book is outstanding.

See you next Friday.

My New Year's Resolutions

It's about a week after new years and I've been thinking a lot about this years resolutions as I'm going to take them seriously this year. Some of them might seem pretty odd if you just read the titles. Honestly, this isn't a post for you blog readers it's much more for myself. I figure if I put it out there people will call me on it and I'll be more likely to keep my resolutions.

Read Less

Last year, according to my Shelfari account, I read 218 books. Breaking them down into genre looks like this:

The pie is dominated 68.7% by Comics and Manga. Predominantly that was taken up by some epic runs of manga like Monster, 20th Century Boys, Naruto and One Piece and graphic novels like Preacher, B.P.R.D. and Fables.

This upcoming year I'm going to read less books and change my focus to Technical and Non-Fiction books. I have a lot of eBooks I've bought from O'Reilly's Deal of the Day that are just begging to be read. I'm targeting that come the end of 2012 the technical and non-fiction portions of this pie will be about 50%.

It's not that I don't enjoy comics/manga I just need to concentrate on some different things this year.

Exterminate, Exterminate, Exterminate

With Dalek like dispassion I'm going to remove a lot of stuff from my life. The first thing I'm going to do is look at the information overload. I currently subscribe to 106 RSS feeds in Google Reader, follow 308 people on Twitter, subscribe to 38 podcasts and get an enumerable amount of emails a day. I'm going to be absolutely brutal about killing feeds, un-following, deleting podcasts and unsubscribing from email lists until I can reduce the incoming information by a minimum of 25%.

At home I'm going to get rid of a number of books, DVD's and comics that are frankly just collecting dust. There is just too much of my junk cluttering up the house and especially my office. I'd love to hear what suggestions people have for old books and comics. Right now I'm thinking about making a rather sizeable donation of used books to the amazing Ottawa Public Library and a bunch of comics to CHEO.

The extermination will not spill over into other time wasters in my life. I'm going to cut back on my TV viewing. It's not that I watch a lot of TV but I want to shift those hours spending more time reading or creating. I've already got a PVR I built myself using BeyondTV at home to that saves from commercials and appointment viewing but a few shows may not make the cut in 2012. Nathan Fillion I love you but Castle hasn't really been that good this season with the introduction of Captain Victoria Gates. That character has been poison to the show. Also, How I Met Your Mother would benefit a lot by phasing out Ted as a character. Maybe he can architect a building in Dubai or something.

The Obligatory "Get in Shape" Goal

It's not that I'm in bad shape. I play ice hockey twice a week and I'm pretty fit for a man of my advancing years. However, I could stand to lose a few pounds. I'm a bit scared that I'm developing that skinny fat guy disease. I don't think I'll ever get back to the days where I'm doing a couple of triathlons a year but I'm going to make the commitment to fitness this year one of my top priorities. To that end, the opening of the new gym in my building can't come soon enough.

One thing that I know will make a big dent is:

NO. MORE. SODA.

I've gotten back into the bad habit of drinking soda pop with meals. I blame Christmas and having the devils drink at home for people who were visiting. Unfortunately, I started drinking it again at home and then while out of the house but no more!

Look forty, I'm going to be ready for you. If you plan on hitting me hard in a couple of years I will be ready to hit back.

Publish or Perish

Recently Dean Haspiel published an article called Publish or Perish that was inspired by a tweet from comic book writer Jimmy Palmiotti. Basically Dean posits that freelancers now have the all the tools they need to publish their own work or get run out of the business. The post deals with comic book professionals it is all very germain to software developers.

While I'm not going to do anything to jeopardize my incredible day job that allows me to work on PhoneGap on a daily basis I am going to do some things that stretch the bounds of my current role.

I will publish my first application to the Android Marketplace. It will be for free and it will be open source. Beyond that I have a few other ideas for applications but at a minimum I will get this first app out early in 2012. It may not help anyone else but it will fix a problem for me.

I will write my first book. It may never get published but I will write it. Wait scratch that, it will get published as there are a couple of publishers who have expressed interest and if they don't want to release it I will self publish it. There I said it, I'm doing it.

Obviously, it will be a technical book. I don't think the world is ready for my take on Batman but hey DC Comics if you want to hear my pitch just let me know.