Books on tech

A visit to the Book Thing yielded some interesting books. (The Book Thing gives away books, mostly used books from different vintages. You can find them here: http://www.bookthing.org)

I came home with a several recent books and a couple of "early vintage" books. The recent ones include:

"Mac OS X Hacks"
"Python Cookbook"
"lex and yacc"
"Practical C++ Programming"

These are all from O'Reilly, the well-known and well-respected publisher.

The early vintage books (from the pre-PC era, in my mind) include:

"The Joy of Minis and Micros" by Stein and Shapiro
"Human Performance Engineering" by Robert W. Bailey
"Programming Business Computers" by McCracken, Weiss, and Lee

"Joy" and "HPE" are from 1981 and 1982, so possibly not strictly from the pre-IBM PC era, but neither talk about IBM PCs, MS-DOS, Windows, or the internet. Indeed, "HPE" is more about psychology than technology.

"Programming Business Computers" is a very nice text and I picked it up after I saw the name "McCracken" on the spine. I have a few books by him on Fortran and I find his books both informative and readable. (More readable than many of the O'Reilly books.) I guess that is known as star power -- I picked up the book because of the author, not the content. (I find the content informative, although a bit dated. Yet I enjoy the reading of the book. Reading tech books as literature?)

Networking

I attended the "Innovate Baltimore" social this evening. It was held at Red Maple, a bar/club that is within walking distance of my apartment. (How could I not attend?)

The event saw a fair number of people (perhaps fifty?) from various tech areas of Baltimore. There were graphics designers, startup entrepreneurs, and even folks providing a physics engine for game deverlopers. I talked with a number of folks (no, not all fifty of them) and even some folks from UPS.

It's nice to see these events here in Baltimore. We need a group to pull together the startups and small technical companies.

Less is more

I accomplished a lot today, although the numbers would indicate otherwise. In truth, it really depends on the numbers you choose to examine.

I made some code changes that fixed some defects. The number of changes and the number of lines of code changed were small. I changed perhaps thirty lines of code across five modules. A manager using lines-of-code or lines-of-code-changed metrics would say that I did very little this day.

The number of defects fixed was small. You could say that it was really only one defect, which expressed itself in several scenarios. So the number-of-defects metric also indicates that I did very little today.

Yet my changes transformed the program from not-useful to useful. The defects prevented us from using the program -- the calculations were wrong -- and my changes fixed the defect. So the metric of "can we use it" went from "no" to "yes", which means a lot to people.

It's not how many lines of code one writes, its which lines of code.

My first presentation

I gave a presentation to the local Baltimore Linux User Group tonight. I think this counts as my first (public) presentation. I've given presentations for employers, so this really isn't my first presentation. But one must start somewhere!

(The presentation was about cloud computing,)

Letting them vent

Today I had lunch with two former co-workers. It was a good lunch, although it was a bit of a venting session for them. They are in tough but not impossible situations, with problems that range from staffing to managerial politics. I let them vent, and then we had some interesting conversations about outsourcing, on-shoring, talent management and retention, and staff morale.

Earlier this week-end I gained some hardware experience. I installed a second hard drive in a PC, and not only did I learn about drive configuration I also learned about Linux capabilities for partition management and file system mount points. Perhaps not something that belongs on my resume, but it is nice to know that I can still learn!

More success and a Linux meeting

At the office, I had more success with C++ and spreadsheets. Today I integrated more code into the existing spreadsheet libraries and now they can write an XLSX file. (One that Microsoft Excel opens and reads without complaint.)

After work, I attended the CALUG meeting. This is the mostly-informal group that meets once per month. Tonight saw no speaker so we talked among outselves, and sometimes about Linux!

Some modest progress

I made some progress for the client today. (Well, I like to think that I make progress every day, but today's was worth noting.)

Today I successfully integrated the new XLSX libraries into the existing system and read a Microsoft Excel XLSX spreadsheet. This is a big win for the client, who has wanted this functionality for a long time. (I've been building test cases and support scaffolding, so new features were deferred.)

I also integrated the routines to write an XLSX spreadsheet, and they work... sort of. They create an empty spreadsheet that Microsoft Excel accepts with complaints. I think it is due to the lack of content. I expect to fix that problem tomorrow.

But for a few moments, a little rejoicing. Yay! for me!