tbatchelli.org » Life in General

On e-books and why pragprog.com got it right.

tbatchelli — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:07:38 +0000

For someone like me that reads computer programming books, e-books are the way to go: they’re cheap, you can read them in your computer and they don’t take shelf space. But things are not yet too mature in this space. For example, DRM in e-books is still pretty pervasive and diminishes the value of such books in a very important way: your computer cannot index their contents and thus they won’t be taken into account when you’re searching for something. That defeats all the advantages that an e-book has over a traditional book!

The mobile e-book world is even more in flux. I bought a Kindle a year ago. I initially purchased a few books, and I tried to read them. They were mostly business strategy (borderline self-help) books, so lots of text and no graphics. Then I moved into buying books more related to software architecture and design; here is when things turned ugly. Kindle doesn’t display tables at all. Some editors turn those tables into an image, but then the image’s resolution is very low and Kindle doesn’t offer a way to zoom into images. Also, Kindle cannot correctly display code, as it mangles with the fonts and the layout of the text. Finally, I cannot read a Kindle book in my computer; that’s silly to no end.

But then comes Pragmatic Programmers and provides FOR FREE to all their customers a Kindle version of all the PDF e-books bought at their store (I have bought 10). No DRM. Now I can read their books in my computer, in my Kindle and my iPhone with Kindle for iPhone. Now my Pragmatic Programmers e-books have become 10 times more useful and thus ten times more valuable. That also means I am 10 times more likely to buy my next e-book on software development from Pragmatic Programmers than from anyone else.

To make things better, Pragmatic Programmers also offer another electronic format that lets you read their books on the iPhone that rivals and bests the Kindle book reader. Using Stanza for iPhone you can reach e-book heaven. Now when I am waiting for the train or in the train, I just whip out my iPhone and start reading a book right away.

Here is the thing: e-book publishers, please drop DRM from your books. That silly DRM is easy to crack anyway. Make your books 10 times more useful, and you’ll sell way more of them.

Sick

tbatchelli — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:02:53 +0000

I am sick. Of all these wars. Of all these people who think that wars are good. Good for what? Maybe I am being naive, but how about not building and selling more weapons and weapon technology? I’m just saying.

I am sick of how we support leaders who don’t support us.

There’s got to be a better way…

Interesting Quote

tbatchelli — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:45:11 +0000

“Tomorrow is our permanent address.” — Marshall McLuhan

At JavaOne 2007

tbatchelli — Fri, 11 May 2007 06:38:03 +0000

I won’t comment on my ability to keep this blog up to date. It’s pretty shameless.

I am at JavaOne these days. I’d say it has been disappointing so far, at least in the Java the language front. If you like scripting languages (as i do) then this is probably one of the most exciting JavaOne ever. No much word on EJB, JEE, Spring, etc… Quite a bit about JRuby, Rails and my favorite: Groovy.

Groovy is now in quite a mature state. Of course it is not Ruby, nor it wants to be. But I am really happy to see that finally people are considering using scripting languages in servers (I’ ve gotta say, Spring makes it very easy to use Groovy). Groovy is also ideal for writing unit tests and integration tests… But then, what about JRuby? Well, it rocks too! But so far it is not that integrated in Java, not like Groovy. But JRuby has a lot of potential, and the Netbeans support for it is pretty amazing. For when similar support for Groovy???

Lots of Ajax too. Lots of rich Internet applications. So more scripting languages, this time JavaScript. Ajax and Web 2.0 seem to be a nightmare when it comes to security though!

In any case, I bought a lot of books on Ruby, Rails, Ajax and Innovation. None on Java.

Java is dead from the language perspective. It won’t evolve that much. It’s pretty good as it is now and the trend seems to be to use scripting languages on the JVM when expressiveness and fast coding is needed. When speed is needed, Java seems a pretty obvious choice; unless you go to the “share nothing” architecture of Rails of course.

Tomorrow we’ll see James Gosling’s gig… see what he has to say

LA pool party

tbatchelli — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 02:39:48 +0000

So it was Mason’s birthday and we all went down to LA to a pool party that Lisa and Fonda and all the LA crew put up together for Mason. It was an awesome party, too bad I had to leave early… too bad. You can see the pictures clicking the following image:

Long time no see …

tbatchelli — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 02:22:38 +0000

Well, that was embarrassing. My previous website died on me eight months ago… It has taken me some full eight months to put together a new one. This time, instead of hosting this site in one of the servers at UCSB I am having this site totally outsourced. The blog is based on Wordpress. I haven’t done any fancy customizations, that’s why it looks so boring. The pictures are hosted on flickr, and but they’re also integrated in wordpress here.

Life is good. Things are going well for me. Found the perfect partner, Anna. I am happy! I’ll be posting updates on my life regularly now that the site is back up. I’ll be posting pictures too…