Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

New G5-based iMac tempts with power and elegance -- Comment()
The Display is the Computer: "Introducing the futuristic iMac G5 in 17- and 20-inch widescreen models. The entire computer, including a G5-based logic board, slot-loading optical drive, hard disk, speakers, and even the power supply - dwells inside the enchanting display."

The new system looks simple yet elegant. This system will turn some heads, and probably raise iMac sales - provided that IBM can deliver enough G5 processors.

-- Comment()
Fired for Blogging: "It seems that Friendster, who had no policy at all on employee blogging, has fired Joyce Park. You may remember her from such debates as Java vs. PHP. Or maybe her book. Or maybe mod_pubsub (blog). Take a minute. Go read her blog. See what you can find that's so offensive to the company that they had to fire her." [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Meet my heroes on the net -- Comment()
These are four writers I admire:

Doc Searls writes a lot, and I usually can't follow everything he writes. For example, I haven't read all of Cluetrain Manifesto, yet I can't help being affected by Doc's writing.
At first I didn't much note Dan Gillmor, but nowadays I read carefully what he writes. Every so often he suprises by a new topic, writing clearly about difficult matters.
Lawrence Lessig has helped to focus and sharpen my thinking about copyrights. I have written reviews (in Finnish) of his books. You have to read his weblog.
Joel Spolsky writes clearly about software development. I have read and reviewed (in Finnish) his book on user interface development. The book helped a lot.

Hot text: from trivial to useful -- Comment()
I'm reading the book Hot Text: Web Writing that Works. I amost gave up after 20 pages.

The hints were trivial ("you should write for the audience of one"). The book was too commercial for me. I don't want to play artificial roles, or get people buy products with my writing.

Yet I continued. The chapter on using XML in publishing was interesting (like what Radio Userland does for this weblog). And the chapter on cutting text by 50% when writing for the web was good. This book is not trivial after all.