Book reviews

I 'ate' a lot of Jerry-books lately. I decided to write something about them.


They are all recommendable and in the following I will tell you why. Overall I enjoyed reading them very much.

Becoming a Technical Leader, by Gerald Weinberg

This is a great book because it tells the reader a lot about what leadership is, how to work towards it and what to be observant about on that road. It's clearly closely connected to the PSL workshop, though being on PSL greatly enhances the experience of reading this book.
As in most of Jerry's books there's some questions for the reader along the way, some of them quite hard. One of the toughest is to start a personal log, a diary. I'm personally succeeding (this far) in my third attempt. It's a book which will dig into the reader and reveal things you either weren't aware of, or don't want to know about. It easily becomes very personal, but I like that. As a professional guide to elaborating on your own self, I think it's a must. As a nice, interesting read, I would say: yes. As something to read and toss away and forget all about, I'd say: I wonder if you can do that. Somethings are bound to touch you.

Introduction to General Systems Thinking, by Gerald Weinberg

This is, I think, the most referred-to book of Jerry's. A lot of people praise it. I found it perhaps the most difficult of his books to read this far. I crashed after the first few chapters in my first attempt, and left it on the shelf for months. Not that I didn't like what I read, but somehow I found it hard to concentrate and perhaps find all the time needed to really work with the text. The second attempt was better, knowing that I should put some effort into it and taking the time to do it.
One of the things I particular like is how it asks questions like 'it's an XXX - how do you know ? what do you understand by "XXX" '. So it sort of starts off from the basics and put things into perspective.

Often it works on the english semantics and words and I at least really feels that english is not my first language. I think I do well on average, but some of the stuff in this book is over my abilities.

Upon finishing the book I have to admit to myself: maybe I didn't quite grasp it all. I intend to give it a second (third) try next year.

Are your lights on ?, by Don Gause and Gerald Weinberg

This is quite a different book. It's smaller and has fewer words per page than the other books. But the content is in top. Everybody can readily identify themselves with the 'hero' in each situation and probably also the villain(s). It takes you through some very ordinary situations and asks simple questions like: whose problem is it ? Questions, which are simple to ask, but very difficult sometimes to answer. And isn't that so in most situations we get ourselves into.

I enjoyed this book a lot, perhaps mostly because it made me think a lot.

Exploring Requirements, by Don Gause and Gerald Weinberg

I actually avoided this book for some time, thinking that 'requirements' - I know that and anyway, isn't it a bit boring ? Well, - no. This is a wonderful read, which gives you a lot of tools, hints and tricks when you try to describe to yourself or others what you want done. It's obviously really applicable if you're writing requirements, but also if you just want to be very clear about what you tell people.
I found lots of gems in this book (and thank you for the recommendation, Leo).

Secrets of Consulting, by Jerry Weinberg

This is a book full of Jerry-stories. If you have ever met Jerry, you'll know that he thinks it's always time for a story. And he's got so many of them. Some got written down in this perl of a book, which tells you important stuff in a nice, informal way. Things to do, consider and remember if you're 'consulting' - which we all are from time to time.
I'm looking forward to start on 'More secrets of consulting', which is one of the new ones in my collection (although none of these books were very recently published...)

Mistress of Molecules, by Gerald Weinberg

This is a fiction book. However, I was fortunate (and fast) enough to buy it as a real book at AYE, which Jerry himself had ordered printed, because, as I heard Jerry mumble: people want real books. I agree.
It's available for a few bucks as a pdf on Jerry's online shop (try google a bit and you'll find it within minutes).
It's a fascinating story, set on distant planets in a future which seems not only foreign and strange, but also strangely familiar. Admitted, it's not completely realistic on some points, but hey, it's fiction and the story works!

I enjoyed reading it for the story, the characters, the science and the many surprises I got along the way.

All good books - get them for x-mas, birthdays or just to fill up on your shelf - but make sure you get to read them too ;-)

Exploring old skills and fun games

I've once again stumpled across a Sinclair ZX Spectrum Emulator. I have no clue as to how I got on to that, but now it's here. And I'm amazed by all I still know and remember of this magnificent machine and it's broad range of software, dating back around 27 years ago.

On www.worldofspectrum.org you can find a fine collection of both software, documentation and emulators and much more. Most of the software is regarded as 'abandonware', which I think is not legally justified, but on the other hand - if I dig hard enough I can possibly find the original cassettes on the attic along with the machine itself. And they continue to amuse and amaze me. I think that's 'quality', to me at least.

The standard spectrum game is not in itself breathtaking. I mean, some of them were and I remember some of them actually being way ahead of (their) time. Today the graphics and especially sound is crude, simple and a bit strange.
But they pertain something else: gameplay, fun and originality.

This goes along with one of my theories of software development: that if you're forced to work under severe constraints, your work will become better. One of my fanciful ideas is to restrain developers from compiling more than once a day or just have one pc with the development tool per four developers. I've yet to try and pull that off in real life, but in my mind it would work and create better software faster. More on that on another blog entry.

The 'speccy', as we who've known it for all those years often call it, has it's own restrictions. Standard memory was 48 Kb RAM. That's 48 * 1024 bytes. No megabyte here.. All program, data, system variables and stuff should be fit within this size. And your mass storage was a tape recorder. Slow and painful. I used to buy tapes of 45 mins per side, because they were cheaper. Trying to find where I had stored a program of 4 mins time somewhere was painfully tedious.
And graphics... not that many pixels either. 32 characters across the screen, each representing 8 bytes. By 'stacking' them, the bits would make it out as pixels. So you had the enourmous amount of 32 * 8 pixels across screen. But - colors were restricted to the character's size.

Still software developers of the time made fantastic measures to overcome this. For instance, some games where held in the same colors, like black and cyan, to create a certain style or atmosphere. It worked (sometimes).
Some made their own character rendering, and accomplished 45 characters across. I myself created a machine code routine that could print 64 chars across screen - by making each character maximum 3 pixels wide (and the fourth would be the space between characters).

The game play reminds me of the Wii Sports Game. It's nothing graphically compared to other games, but it's the one that's still fun to play after some time. The game play is what makes people return to it.
And originality was in top. Back then everything was made for the first time. Take one of my favorites from then: Juggernaut (see picture of cassette inlay). Steering a large truck around a small city infested with roundabouts, road work and tricky turns to accomplish a days work of collection goods is still fun. Back then I didn't know how to drive. I do now, and I'm doing better, but it's still relentlessly hard.
Another favorite is Dark Empire, which graphically is so simple noone would give it a chance. It's probably one the games I've played for the longest time ever. It's a strategic war game and you have to discover the world first. At the beginning all is clouded. As your ships and armies move around you'll discover island (or continent) after island with new cities - and enemies, of course :-)

Graphically it sucks. The sound must be turned off or you'll go crazy (and you can do that on an emulator ;-) But the game is so fun.

There. I had to get it out of my chest :-) I will always keep a special place in my heart for the speccy, my long lost companion - and now again. I find that I've actually preferred these games to modern top games, with stunning graphics and orchestral sound. They just don't have the game play, that let's you spend the tiny bit of your own imagination and which keeps these games alive and interesting.

A need to mention the MESS team, who created the free emulator, that can emulate an astounding amount of personal computers back from then.