The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (P. Hoffman)

2003-10-04 1 min read Books Marco

Admittedly, the life of a mathematician doesn’t quite make a likely beach reading. I was surprised by myself as I packed it in my backpack on the way to Kona, but surely do not regret it.
Mathematicians, as the book quotes, are all a bit out of their mind. Their make wonderfully eccentric characters that charm you even where the subject matter of their work bores you. That was the case with Alan Turing (Enigma), John Nash (A Beautiful Mind), and a lot of other mathematicians.
This book is about Paul Erdos (pronounced ‘Erdish’ much to my surprise) and his vagaries in number theory. Somehow number theory has become an immensely boring branch of mathematics, where the weapons at hand are so much bigger than the problems that you wonder why you would want to enter the field.
Paul Hoffmann loves Erdos the way only we lesser intellects can love those we would adore if we actually had met them. It is wonderful to feel with him how he goes through all the details of the eccentricity, but still has to admit this was a more than brilliant person. What a marvel!

Baudolino (U. Eco)

2003-09-29 2 min read Books Marco

There is something that always fascinated me about Umberto Eco: he manages to remain faithful to his main theme, to focus more and more on it, to become a better writer, to accomplish more and better things; and yet he is tied to trail his own success with his first novel.
“The Name of the Rose” was an admirable exercise in medieval crime novel, and was so successful that it spawned an enormous following of second and third (and fourth) tier colleagues. The monk-as-detective became all the rage, and the movie from the film was a huge success.
Despite all of this, the book suffered heavily from the lack of experience of the writer: descriptions would end up taking pages and pages and interrupt the flow of narration at the most inopportune times; the actors were wooden and caricatured instead of portrayed; the story was a bit predictable and too much like a classical ‘whodunit’.
So one would think, when he improves on all these elements, Eco would be more successful. Wrong guess! His second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, was no match for his audience. The third, the Island of the Day Before, was too dull even for me; and finally, Baudolino, has barely been acknowledged.
Yet Baudolino succeeds as a novel. The storyline is coherent and well orchestrated. No longer does Eco bore us with endless enumerations just when we need to know what happened to the hero; no more is the hero barely able to have a relationship with anyone – this time there are lots of aventures amoureuxes.
Should you read it? If you have an interest in late medieval history, of course. If not, not really worth it. And I can tell you for sure – I have read the book with gusto, because I am really fascinated by the period and the location (Constantinople around 1204); but somehow the book fills me with a generic: ‘so what?’ that none of the other ones did.

Hawaii the Big Island Revealed

2003-08-27 2 min read Books Marco

I am taking a week off in September to celebrate my birthday by myself and chose my favorite vacation spot: Hawaii. This time it’s going to be the Big Island herself, largest mass in the Central Pacific by far. And of course I needed a good guide book.
Wizard Publishing has a wonderful set of books, created and written with care (if with a tiny bit too much enthusiasm) on three of the major Hawaiian islands. They started out with a Kauai Guidebook that blasts any competitor away, and then followed up with a volume on Maui and the Big Island.
I haven’t been to the Big Island since I read the book, so of course I won’t be able to critique appropriately this book and the value of its information. I will still take the time and talk about the two other books, and how much they have made fact gathering and fact traveling easy.
For one, the detail of the books is incredible. If there is a hike to any place, there is very accurate description as to how to get there, and all the circumstances of the fun. Of course we were a bit disappointed as we saw that the marvelous pools in West Maui were quite stagnant and filthy, and that the famous blowhole was merely fizzing a few droolings – but all in all, it is easy to navigate with the information provided.
Just as important though is the negative criticism. Sometimes it’s mere complaining for the complaint’s sake, but most of the time, there is good reason for the disappointment. The authors will warn you not to go some place, and you better heed the advice!
Will add more info once I come back.

The C++ Programming Language (B. Stroustrup)

2003-08-12 3 min read Books Marco

Sometimes the inventor of a specific thing is the best person to explain it. There is no better way to learn about relativity than to go back to the original article written by Einstein; how better could anyone explain the value of existentialism than Sartre; Kernighan and Ritchie did a wonderful job at explaining C.
Stroustrup is not one of these. I recall the first time I read his book, back twenty years ago or so. I found it entirely unreadable, with so many exceptions added to the rule that you barely could remember either. There seemed to be no logic in the concepts, everything was very haphazard and unplanned.
Now, with twenty years of experience, a lot of programming languages in the back of my mind, I set out on a voyage of rediscovery, trying to impress myself with a book that I found cryptic and that I now would find insightful and revealing.
Not so. I read all of it for a second time, end to end, marking relevant sentences and trying to absorb the flow. There is none to speak of. The book is still cryptic. Only that now I know there are languages that are better designed, better executed and surely better described.
What made learning C++ so difficult, the astonishing number of rules and exceptions, is in hindsight poor design. Stroustrup tried to squeeze as many options into his language as possible, making C++ look and feel as bastardized as Perl would look after its 5th release.
The compiler tries to be smart, and does a lot of translation implicitly. Of course, this causes all sorts of weird errors, since it may become smarter than the programmer. To obviate, C++ allows you to override behaviors.
In general, C++ sounds like a language written at a time people still thought of memory as a precious commodity, while they were still not sure what they needed of the constructs provided by object orientation.
Take templates, for instance. Hard to tell what they are good for, if not to define collections and default operator behavior. But both cases would have been better served by a different approach, in which collections and operators are handled differently by the compiler, as native language types instead of as constructs.But aside from criticism to the language, the book itself is not well written. There is no general introduction to a concept, just an astonishing amount of rules that are listed in monotonous sequence, barely distinguished by their importance to the programmer. It somehow feels as if Stroustrup considers all rules children of his, and he doesn’t want to favor one over the other.
The book, again, suffers from a lack of structure. Headings, highlights, emphasis are not well distributed, adding to the overall impression of an amorphous entity that becomes inextricable.
C++, as it emerges from this book, is a language for the initiated that has no desire to use any different tool. It is the Perl of the eighties, the language that everyone mucks with, but that very few actually understand.
If you have ever worked in a larger engineering group that uses C++, you’ll have seen those frustrated emails come about, in which a poor chap asks why this piece of code doesn’t work, and there is always some guru that (in the most arrogant tone so typical of the Initiated in the Arcane) tell you about some rule that is on the footnote of a page in the Stroustrup.
It is no surprise that languages with more explicit approaches, like Java and C# are moving on and winning converts all over. C++ seems, in hindsight, a really bad idea.

Inside Intel

2003-08-02 2 min read Books Marco

One would have thought it quite unnecessary to read yet another book on Intel after reading “Only the Paranoid Survive”. The latter, though, is written by exactly the person that is responsible for all the odd confrontationalism that is so typical of the company, so that I needed one more voice to get clarity.
Well, as I expected to be true, Inside Intel is indeed much more objective about the company, relating very extensively how the bully nature of the CEO could mold the company into a litigious, litigant and confrontational work environment.
The author spares nothing: how Grove pushed his legal team to sue without merit, just to prevent competitors from succeeding in the market; how Grove threw people out because he thought they were no longer fit, which meant they had fallen out of grace of their managers; how Grove introduced a host of measures to make the company an annoying place to work for – late lists being the most famous.
In the end, after reading about Oracle, Sun, Intel, and of course Microsoft, it seems that you need to be an egomaniac to be successful. I have not met any of the leaders of those companies, I admit, and I am just relating what books tell me.
The author compiled a compelling set of events into a dark and unfavorable history of Intel. If you want the dish, it’s there. Successes seem to be falling out of the blue sky, while all failure is homegrown. You decide whether you want to believe that or not. The writing is good, the usual technical blunders aside. Why is it that people writing about technical companies never use a fact checker?

A Short History of Byzantium (J.J. Norwich) - 2

2003-07-04 2 min read Books Marco

I finally finished the History of Byzantium and feel compelled to add a few comments to the previous ones.
Nothing changed in my assessment of the author’s capabilities: the final chapters are as intriguing as the initial ones, and at no time was the infinite list of names confusing. Norwich succeeds in making all the parties involved come to their own life, personalizing each appearance of any of them and thus making it possible to discern the infinite list of Constantines, Michaels, Johns, etc.
While the first part of the book described an empire, the last part of it described a desperate culture trying to survive. The once powerful emperors of Byzanz find themselves required to send embassies to the rulers of the West, who will ignore them repeatedly, for centuries. The sadness of the situation is incredible, and the sympathy of the author for this lost cause is touching.Of course, from a neutral perspective the demise of the Byzantine empire just meant the ascension of the Ottoman one, which ultimately proved to be the real successor to Rome, reaching power and size that the Byzantines were able to held only for short periods of time. Neither can be forgotten that every peaceful moment of the empire’s history was spent on fairly stupid intrigues, succession rules and theological disputes. Where the West had a Pope that commanded unity, the East was very happy with being disunited.
The history of Byzantium is somehow the typical history of an empire in the middle: at times it can grow extremely rich and powerful because you have to pass through it, but in the end the pressure from all sides eventually will destroy it. Happened to Poland, happened to the Habsburg empire, will happen in the future.
And yet, as much as I rationally knew there was no chance for the empire to survive, the final fate of the little despotate that once was so great moves me profoundly. Reading how the last emperor, Constantine XI, worked on the defence of the city, how the last mass was read in St. Sophia, to be interrupted by the invader pillaging and murdering – that all fills me with an infinite sadness, not mitigated by knowing that the Byzantines would have behaved the same, to enemies and to themselves, too.
The final days of anything are sad. The final days of an empire that lasted over one thousand yeats to die a slow, hemorrhagic death… Well, there are no words to express historic sorrow.

A Short History of Byzanz

2003-06-29 2 min read Books Marco

Midway through the abbreviated version of the history of Byzanz. The author started out with a three volume history that he had to abridge for the general public – and since I am general public, that’s what I chose to read.
First things first: the history of Byzanz itself is immensely fascinating. We are talking about an empire that understands itself as the SOLE successor of Rome (with a certain appropriateness), but is actually not a real power player. Instead of expanding and conquering, this empire never reached the size and power of its predecessor. Instead, it started shrinking early on, besieged as it was by enemies on all frontiers. Still it managed to thrive and survive for over thousand years, almost beating its forebear.
This said, the book is clearly an abridged version of a much more thorough oeuvre. The casual museum stroll that is so typical of history books feels like on fast-forward, and what would otherwise be an endless recount of things and events, with footnotes sprinkled left and right to make the reader feel appropriately bored, turns into a fast-paced, exhilarating experience.
Style: maybe it’s the morbid nature of (at least this) man, but the hints to the disgusting tortures, unspeakable depravities and incredible religious finickiness in the face of overpowering forces are amazing. I am sure if there were a mini-series on the Eastern Empire, not one episode would be boring.
It stands to be asked what part of this amazement is an accomplishment of the author. Regardless, he is able to bring a dead world alive, and to make it feel real. An incredible achievement, considering how little we care any more about Byzanz, Constantinople and all that happened there until it became Istanbul.
Must read for anyone that thinks history needs to be boring.

Only the Paranoids Survive (Andy Grove)

2003-06-26 3 min read Books Marco

That’s one book that came with high praise!
Only the Paranoids Survive is the kind of book you have to have read to be able to keep up with everyone else that constantly talks about it. And like any required reading, I was a little uncomfortable with this one, trying to fend it off and push it away as long as I could.
The first chapter than did it for me. A long rant about things that I already intimately knew, with definitions of things that were absolutely obvious: PLEASE!
Turns out that what was so familiar to me actually required definition, and that from that first chapter of setting the stage, the book soon entered incredibly valuable territory. Grove charted what was tantamount to one of the most radically success stories in today’s business world, proving how there was method behind the choices that Intel had made.
All in all, the book was an amazing read. FInding out that Grove’s team thinks of conflict in meetings as a way of expressing creativity was refreshing, considering the level and ‘nice’ way of behaving in the Valley. That there actually had been a major crisis in the company BEFORE the Pentium debacle; not only had I forgotten that, I was reminded by the book that it was quite a terminal danger for the company.
Towards the end, the book starts looking at the present and past, and starts reading like Nostradamus’s prophecies. As long as they talk about the past, everything is in perfect order and logic reigns supreme; but as soon as the then present and the then future are concerned, predictions are random and arbitrary and ultimately, in hindsight, plain wrong.
The one chapter on the Internet is particularly interesting, given that the book was published in 1998. It shows, at least, that indeed Intel must accept better judgement, since the company did not follow the predictions of the chairman.
The language of the book is very narrative and gets lost only when Grove talks about abstract things or the future. As many leading business people, he is best where he is comfortable, and his passion surely comes out best when he talks about Intel and Intel’s achievements.
Oh – the title: it is meant in a much nicer way than I had interpreted first. Sounds like ‘Only the Paranoids Survive’ just means: ‘Watch Out, Or They’ll Eat You’. Nothing of the world conspiracy that it seemed to imply.
All in all a ‘must read’ for people in the computer business. Or people stuck in a culture in which consensus is a must, niceness a requirement, and hence everything needs to be dumbed down.

Frederick II (Abulafia)

2003-06-09 2 min read Books Marco

Closing in on the end of Abulafia’s famed biography of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Two Sicilies in the XIII century. Fascinating book, with all the factual accuracy that one could wish for, and a much more realistic view of the emperor than in any other book I have read so far.
Frederick and I date back very far. Turns out his home town of Waiblingen is actually just a few commuter train stops from Ludwigsburg, where I (partially) grew up. Add to this his dual nature as German and Italian, his neutral stance to religion, and you have concocted enough to make him very endearing to me.
And then there was Dante. In the Inferno, Dante places Frederick with the heretics – even in class they would tell us, though, that it was all politics of the guelfo Dante. Still, it compelled the rest of the bunch to swing all the other way around, and secular historians made Frederick a model of perfection: learned, wise, just, curious; in the end, he exemplified the Renaissance monarch more than two hundred years before the Renaissance.
Frederick’s life was one of war. He was constantly involved in campaigns against his foes, and there were foes aplenty. He participated in a crusade, battled against his lords in Sicily, against revolting communes in Lombardy, agains the German feudal establishment. Cities hated him for taking away their rights, the Church hated him for taking away its rights, the lords hated him… you guessed it.
So, although Abulafia is strongly on Frederick’s side, he can’t conceal the fact that this Emperor with a vengeance was percieved by everyone as a nuisance. I guess if we want a revisionist bio, we’ll have to wait for another twenty years.

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