Category Archives: Books

Broken Fiction

Here a point is made that I find is becoming a problem (for me, anyway) in movies and books. The problem comes when the author (or scriptwriter, or whoever) tries to be realistic in a field they don’t really know. If it happens that this field is something that I know about, and the author… Read More »

Coding with a LISP

A few years ago, I learnt LISP at university. Just for a semester, write a poetry generator, things like that. All pretty simple. I didn’t get into it much at the time, beyond what I had to, but I do remember thinking that it looked like quite a powerful and fun language. A while ago,… Read More »

My review of Going Postal

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett is a good layman’s introduction to network security. It only covers a few points, although they are significant ones, some of which are not often discussed: Social engineering Authentication Redundancy Robustness The book itself teaches about these from an unusual point of view, that of looking at things from the… Read More »

The Unmaking of IBM

I’ve just finished reading Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, by Paul Carroll. Published in 1993, it’s a bit out of date now, but it provides an interesting look into the mid-80’s to early-90’s IBM. This was a time when it went from being the largest US company, to posting a loss greater than the… Read More »