I can hear the question now: What kind of guy puts The Iliad and War and Peace on a list of things to read for fun? Well, me. I think that reading things by authors I ve never read before, people that take positions I haven t heard of before or don t agree with, or works that are challenging, will teach me something. And learning is fun.
My
entire list for 2010 is at Goodreads. I ve highlighted a few below. I don t expect to read all 34 books on the Goodreads list necessarily, but there is the chance.
The Iliad by Homer, 750BC, trans. by Alexander Pope, 704 pages. A recent
NPR story kindled my interest in this work. I m looking forward to it.
The Oxford History of the Classical World by Boardman, Griffin, and Murray, 1986, 882 pages. It covers ancient Greece and Rome up through the fall of the Roman empire.
The Fires of Heaven (Wheel of Time #5) by Robert Jordan, 1994, 912 pages. I ve read books 1 through 4 already, and would like to continue on the series.
War and Peace by Lev Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1869, 1392 pages. Been on my list for way too long. Time to get to it. Haven t read anything by Tolstoy before.
The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, 1972, 2nd ed., 270 pages. Aims to dispel the notion of Jesus as apolitical.
An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin, 1996, 496 pages. Picked this up at Powell s in Portland on a whim, and it s about time I get to it.
The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church by Gregory A. Boyd, 2007, 224 pages. An argument that the American evangelical church allowed itself to be co-opted by the political right (and some on the left) and argues this is harmful to the church. Also challenges the notion that America ever was a Christian nation.
Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire, by Jerome Carcopino, 2003, 368 pages. I ve always been fascinated with how things were on the ground rather than at the perspective of generals and kings, and this promises to be interesting.
Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Conrad Grebel Lectures) by Willard M. Swartley, 1983, 368 pages. Looking at how people have argued from different Biblical perspectives about various issues over the years.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1927, 252 pages. I can t believe I ve never read Woolf before. Yet another one I m really looking forward to.
Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922, 319 pages. Per Goodreads: This book of five confessional essays from the 1930s follows Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda from the height of their celebrity as the darlings of the 1920s to years of rapid decline leading to the self-proclaimed Crack Up in 1936.
Ulysses by James Joyce, 1922 (1961 unabridged version), 783 pages.
The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox, 2009, 256 pages. Per Goodreads, Cox explains why Christian beliefs and dogma are giving way to new grassroots movements rooted in social justice and spiritual experience. Heard about this one in an
interview with Diane Rehm.
Being There by Jerzy Kosi ski, 1970, 128 pages.
Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary by Marcus Borg, 2006, 352 pages. Whether or not you agree with Borg, this has got to be a thought-provoking title.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, 1844, 640 pages.
The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura, 1906, 154 pages. Per Goodreads: In 1906 in turn-of-the century Boston, a small, esoteric book about tea was written with the intention of being read aloud in the famous salon of Isabella Gardner. It was authored by Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese philosopher, art expert, and curator. Little known at the time, Kakuzo would emerge as one of the great thinkers of the early 20th century, a genius who was insightful, witty and greatly responsible for bridging Western and Eastern cultures. Nearly a century later, Kakuzo s The Book of Tea is still beloved the world over. Interwoven with a rich history of tea and its place in Japanese society is poignant commentary on Eastern culture and our ongoing fascination with it, as well as illuminating essays on art, spirituality, poetry, and more.
More of my list is
at Goodreads.
This has been a big decade for me.
Ten years ago, I was living in Sunnyvale, in the heart of
Silicon Valley; VA had just had its crazy
IPO; my
unvested options were worth over a million dollars on paper. I
remember sitting in first class[1] on the way out of Atlanta
after the holidays and wondering what one did with a million
dollars. Avoid working too much? Have a lot of interesting
computers? Build a distributed house[2]? Mostly I decided to
not count my chickens, which turned out to be the right choice.
Six months later, I started debian-installer, in many
ways my biggest project to date.
In spring of '01, VA was crashing; I was sick of the Valley;
gloom was everywhere. I took the hint and quit, cashed in my
options for five figures, not seven, bade forewell to the many
people I'd come to know, and moved back east.
By reading my old journal, I can tell that subconciously,
I had long before decided what to do when it was time to leave
the Bay Area. So without really thinking too much about why
I was able to do this, about how not just my own family, but
others were indirectly making it possible, I moved to a 150
acre wooded "farm", and mostly went off and did mostly my own
thing for three years.
This was such a huge life change. I lived in a building affectionatly
called "the shack". It was renovated from a chicken coop in the 70's and
leaked during heavy rain, but I preferred it to the main house (warmer). I
went back to dialup for internet. I hauled groceries and most everything
half a mile in by hand. There was an outhouse and washwater hauled from a
creek. I cut barely enough firewood and readapted my body from California
to cold.
My main tech project during this time was mooix.
In some ways my largest failed project, but it was neat
to be able to go off and do such a thing.
This was a blissful, reflective, peaceful, amazing time. Parts were a
second childhood. Somewhere in there I properly confronted my mortality.
And learned to use a chainsaw. And over the course of three years, I
dug myself into a rut, a hole. I wasn't going anywhere.
(Except for a month in Honduras, and my first DebConf in Oslo.)
In '04, I found myself talking on the phone to a cosmonaut
in a house that had been without power for days in a hard winter.
I realized I was ready to leave the farm if I could figure out how
to do it, and I almost took him up on the job working on his new
Linux distro -- but at the last minute Oslo connections suggested
I work for SkoleLinux instead, and so I did.
Soon after moving into a rented house in town, I was jaunting off to Brazil
for a month, a great time. Followed by a productive year where I got
heavily back into debian-installer, started Debian's testing
security tream, and generally worked a lot.
The next summer I fooled around with an RV, and sort of fell into
a job with ADS. But my time on the farm had changed me, I think.
I ended up going back to the farm for a year and working part time
from there. During this time I also started ikiwiki and
other smaller projects.
One day I came back from a camping trip and found the kitchen had
been torn down in my absence. Reminded unsubtly that I was not the
only one with a claim to the place, I got out, though I somehow
suspect not for good.
For the last four years, I've been more outwardly settled, buying a house
in town, continuing to work at the same job, starting little projects like
pristine-tar, mr, and etckeeper. About two years
in I began to feel antsy sometimes (and had a minor medical scare), and set
up the yurt as a relief valve so I can have
crazy adventures in the cold woods again. Still, I
sometimes feel that a big change is building up.
From here, this decade feels like it contained endless changes, important
decisions, interesting projects, strong experiences. The 90's, containing
only little things like college and moving to California, pale in comparison.
Maybe the naught's will be the decade I always remember.. or maybe not.
Anything could be around the corner.
I ve spent the last week packaging VMware Workstation 7.0.0 at work. Looking around on the net, I ve been unable to find anything helpful about packaging this new version, so it seems nobody s got around to packaging it yet.
I ve asked our customer for its approval for releasing our packaging scripts to the community and got it, so 
Shifting my life towards programming.
2009 was an year where I focused more on programming.
My day job involved coding lots of code using C++ and python and SQL and other languages,
and I started writing more code in general in my spare time as well.
I happily release 
Some quotes are in for professional SMT assembly of TeleMetrum v0.2,
and I've had to reset my expectations. The shop I thought would be
my first choice came in with a quote much higher than I
expected. Another shop we've heard good things about gave us a much
more reasonable quote, but can't get any made before LCA. So...
This morning, I ordered some bare circuit boards and a paste stencil
from the places I used quite successfully for v0.1. With any luck,
they'll be in my hands in time to load a few boards before leaving
for 
Forgetting that the product named Internet Explorer is from a certain Redmond company, and thus has to promote other products and services of the same company, I typed in a search term straight into the address bar in an IE6 window.
On the train to my parents' house for Christmas I finished up a wild run
through the book 
The book is a collection of interviews with 15 great programmers of our time,
starting with Jamie Zawinsky and ending with Donald Knuth. It's written in an
interview style each interview starts with a brief introduction to the
person being interviewed, summarizing what the person is known for and what he
or she has accomplished and a few of the highlights of the interview, and then
a transcript of the interview follows, with the author/editor, Peter Siebel,
will saying something or asking a question, and the interviewee responding. I
was skeptical about this format at first because I feel like it can be an easy
way out of good editing and make the reader have to do the work of the editor,
but on finishing I think that Siebel uses the format to his advantage in this
case.
For one, the speech format allows the reader to really form a picture of how
the person being interviewed speaks and would act in a conversation. Jamie is
somewhat bitter and pretty informal. Brad Fitzpatrick is flippant and
energetic, his speech littered with profanity and colloquialisms. Others seem
more stately and verbose Joe Armstrong's responses can go on for a page or
more. In this way, not only do readers learn something about what these greats
have learned about programming, but we also feel a bit more like we've met or
know them, and can connect to them more as people.
I always have this problem where I want to read computer books, but often
computer books seem inextricably tied to the computer, so there's this dynamic
of reading a bit and then wanting to get on a machine and try something out,
write some code, play around especially with books focused on a specific
language. Coders at Work retains some of this computer-book dynamic in that I
constantly encountered things that I want to investigate or play around with
more: Erlang, OCaml, various papers and essays, Knuth's literate programs, and
books such as Higher Order Perl and others. Siebel makes a point to ask each
person what her short-list of books and papers programmers should read are, so
this book is a great source of pointers to other reading material. Unlike a
more specific book, however, keeping a list in a notebook was enough to settle
the mind to read away-from-a-computer for chapters at a time.
It's obvious that despite the interview format, Siebel has done some serious
editing. None of the prose is boring to read, and I can't imagine that the text
is a straight transcript of how the interviews went. He also has arranged the
interviews in an order such that different interviews play off each other. In
Branden Eich's interview, for example, he disparages the book
Design Patterns:
Ouch! This is the second time I am running into this so I ll write it up this time.
I used libtool via automake for building a python module. Quite unhelpfully, libtool happens to build only the static library. It does that even though I passed the -module option, which should make it clear that a static library does not help at all. There is also no mention why it skips the shared library.
After some research, my memory came back: libtool requires to pass the -rpath option to actually build shared libraries. I did not want to pass that options, since it is 