Category: books
Secret History of Star Wars
Star Wars has always been a big thing for me. I saw all six films in the theater and can honestly say that I enjoyed most of them.
For true Star Wars geeks, The Secret History of Star Wars deserves at least a casual glance. It’s long but interesting reading. Several of the central ideas of this e-book are fascinating to me, namely:
1. Star Wars started as the telling of the tale of Luke Skywalker but ended up being about the life and times of Darth Vader.
2. George Lucas’ personal problems led to the abandonment of the originally proposed episodes XII-IX.
3. George Lucas’ propensity to rewrite history isn’t limited to his re-editing of his motion pictures.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of either the facts or the conslusions of this work, but the author has made a large effort to properly annotate and credit his sources so I suspect there is at least some truth to it.
Posted: 05.22.2008Book Archiving Projects
Many people know of Google’s efforts to archive copyrighted works for it’s Book Search project, but there are other projects that are helping to archive non-copyright works.
Wired detailed one such effort run by the University of California’s Northern Regional Library Facility. I’m fascinated by the fact that the low-tech manual scan method used by both Google and NRLF are preferable to more automated solutions “due to size variance and the delicacy of old books.”
One thing that commenters of the Wired story pointed out is that all this image data isn’t as useful as a decent OCR treatment would be. Since the data in the imaged books can’t be analyzed or annotated (at least yet), this seems to limit the scans to being little more than memories of yesterday.
Posted: 03.26.2008The Rise and Fall of Commodore
This looks like a very interesting book. Per Andrew Leigh on Slashdot:
On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of Commodore by Brian Bagnall is fodder for anyone interested in the buried history of the personal computer. Whether you owned a Commodore computer or want to hear a new angle on the early stages of computer development, you’ll find this book easy to pick up and almost impossible to put down. Bagnall has gone to a massive amount of effort in telling this tale, researching and interviewing the real personalities involved. It takes readers on an important and often emotional ride that will many times leave you shaking your head at how painfully it all went wrong.
Many old school computer geeks I know had a C64. Hell I even had one with the dog slow 1541 floppy drive (Beachhead was the coolest game evar!). It’s sad that a company that had so much going for it became a non-issue and flamed out so early. I for one am intrigued at being able to read more than what google or Wiki can offer me.
Posted: 11.22.2006CSS Cookbook, 2nd Edition
I have been a big fan of O’Reilly books since, well, a long time ago. My fascination goes beyond a fetish for collecting all the animals the books utilize on their covers, or even the fact that the books just seem cool. The books are cool, with great content and well written prose. Even better for a technical book, they are helpful and well thought out.
I’m beginning to amass a collection of CSS books as I am trying to learn all I can about how to best seperate the presentation layer from the content layer. My next CSS book purchase will be Christopher Schmitt’s CSS Cookbook, 2nd Edition, published by O’Reilly Media. The second edition has been updated for IE7 and Firefox 1.5 and is of specific interest to me as I am looking for books and guides that can help me figure out how to make pages that look appropriate in CSS compliant browsers work in IE. From what I have seen of the book (I borrowed a copy from a work associate), this book may be a welcome addition to other CSS books (like Andy Budd’s CSS Mastery) that covers issues from different perspectives.
The bear on the cover kicks ass too.
Posted: 11.21.2006