000 Computer Science, Knowledge & Systems, Part 7

I have been reading a book for my professional development that happens to be classed at 004.16. It is part of Neal-Schuman Publishers' How-To-Do-It Manuals series and is written by Colleen Cuddy titled Using PDAs in Libraries.

PDAs are personal digital assistants, which are small, handheld devices that are used for organizing one's information and a whole host of other applications. This book highlights the applications that can be useful in a library setting and tells how libraries have been adapting their programs for use with patron's PDAs.

Part of the reason for me selecting this book was that I have recently begun using a PDA. I really wish I had done so earlier. I have found I prefer the calendar and to-do-list functions on the PDA to any other method of keeping a calendar or dayplanner. The device is very portable, which makes the alarm function work very nicely. The contacts function acts as a good address book. I can view PDF, Word, and Excel files on the PDA. The interface is a touchscreen that I tap with a stylus. It even recognizes my handwriting! Finally, the feature that seals the deal with PDAs is that they "sync" with your PC, or in my case my two work PCs and my home PC.

There are also some very cool add-on items I can pair with the PDA to perform more specialized tasks. One such add-on is Socket Scanner. It is a laser barcode scanner that plugs into the memory card slot on the PDA. In a library environment, this device can be used to perform an inventory of the collection or to perform circulation beyond the circ desk. At the other library where I am director, we use this device for inventory.

At the Emmetsburg Public Library, another employee, Donna, also has her own PDA. She even has the same model, the Palm Tungsten E2. We can "beam" files to one another through the infrared ports on the PDAs--very cool!

The most exciting thing I learned from the book was that I could take advantage of the Bluetooth chip in the device to sync with my PCs and even share an Internet connection with them wirelessly. The USB adapters to enable PCs to this appears to be very inexpensive and I have sent away for some. I am excited to see what browsing the Internet via the PDA is like, particularly how browse-able our libraries' online catalogs on the web are now that I have read this book. If the Bluetooth fails, a wireless adapter card is available for the PDA, though not as cheaply (Donna already has one).

At any rate, patrons of the Emmetsburg Public Library should look to see more PDAs and PDA-inspired ideas in use at the library in the near future!

000 Computer Science, Knowledge & Systems, Part 6

This week, for the sixth entry in the 000s, Books by the Numbers returns to the world of computing. Specifically, the development of the personal computer is the subject of this week's book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff (004.16 MA). As the title indicates its author has a special take on the development of the PC. In this book he contends that the psychedelic era and ethos ultimately gave rise to the development of the PC.

If you found this premise as interesting as I did, then you may want to give the book a try. It is certainly not as light reading as some of the other computer books I have read for the blog. Also, it focuses on times and events that I did not previously associate with the development of the PC. The MITS Altair, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates receive hardly any mention in the book; just in the preface and some at the end.

The era that this book describes is also not what most people would associate with the psychedelic movement. It deals instead mostly with the very early experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic phenomena. Rather than being pure recreation, this was experimentation that was aimed at augmenting human abilities. This was seen by some as going hand-in-hand with development of artificial intelligence.

Eventually, the pursuit of creating thinking machines gave way to put the power of computers-- and of course we are talking very minuscule computing power by today's standards--into the hands of everyone. And, of course, it is a long and convoluted story how this all happened. Just as throning the "father of the computer" was not done in Electronic Brains, so neither is the "father of the PC" enshrined here. Its development was the work of many actors, and Markoff takes pains to give many of them credit.

As to whether he solidly ties in the development of the PC with the psychedelic era is another matter. Even after reading the book I am not convinced that its advent was inevitable regardless of the political and social climates holding sway over the time period. To be sure, it may not have happened exactly as it did otherwise, but that goes without saying. Still, it is interesting to see the interplay of the two movements, and I think one can still see some of the reverberations today--though faintly.

One thing I did not like about the book, which I know several Amazon commenters picked up on before me was the continuity in the flow of the narrative. At several points during the book, the author hops back and forth among the late 50s, all of the 60s, and the early 70s. I found it a little annoying and thought the book could have been paced a little more chronologically. Even so, one cannot deny that this book is an outstanding work of non-fiction for telling the story of the early roots of the PC, from such a unique perspective, and in such a well-researched and thorough manner.

000 Computer Science, Knowledge & Systems, Part 5

I have some news for all my readers, and it may good news or bad news depending upon how well they like the subject of the current features. The news is that Books by the Numbers will be staying in the 000s for another month. There are a couple reasons for this:

1. There are several books in this division that I would yet like to read and blog about, and after all it is my blog. Furthermore, I did lay it out in the introduction that some divisions may take awhile to get through. Initially, I had no idea that the 000s would be one of those, but I have found it to be an extremely interesting section and a diverse one at that!

2. Behind the scenes here at the library we have been taking advantage of the activities required to research and scrutinize the area being featured to develop that same area of the collection. Since conducting all this "housekeeping" collection development activity concurrently with the blog did not occur to me when I began the project, I have had to develop the procedures as I have gone along. I should have it down pat in another division or two.

Do not, however, think that I am only buying time for me to finalize these procedures. As you will see in the weeks to come, there are plenty of subject areas within the 000s that have not yet even been broached by this blog, and there will doubtless remain a few after we move on.

May I also take this opportunity to state what a pleasure it has been thus far writing this blog, for it has caused me to read even more. I already consumed a steady diet of books, but these were nearly exclusively through audiobooks I listened to during my commute.

Now, for me, there is nothing lost in listening to a book as a sound recording. If I heard it, then I know it as sure as if I read it. Still, there is something tactile and aesthetic lost in not reading a book in the printed form. Because of time constraints, I had gotten away from much book reading. Writing this blog has changed that. I have featured 7 titles thus far, of which only one was in audiobook form, and that was because it was an older title and that was the only format the library held it in.

Now, having dispensed with these housekeeping duties, on with the blog.

I am only going to feature one title this week, and I was hard pressed to finish it in time, though not due to the nature of the book. This is a slacker week, of sorts, for the blog as I chose a title that was on the subject of something I am personally very interested in right now: open source software and specifically, Linux. So, for a fun read I chose, appropriately, a biography of the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, titled Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond (005.1 TO).

Just for Fun is written much as it is titled, which is in fact a good descriptor of how Linus Torvalds approaches life. Greed and dogged pursuit of money are not his calling card, though he neither eschews it nor lacks for it (now). His drive to create the thing that has made him famous and revered, the Linux operating system, was to do it just for fun, to solve some problems he had using the Minix operating system.

After developing it the point that he felt he could share it with others, Torvalds made it available for free on the Internet. Gradually, the OS took off, gaining more and more users. Thus began the Linux phenomenon. Through it all, Torvalds was above greed, turning down several offers for money. He did eventually accept money to help him pay off his computer.

Eventually, Torvalds was married and moved to Silicon Valley where he took a job with a secretive technology firm that allowed time to work on Linux. Torvalds maintained his control over the kernel at the heart of the operating system and continued to raise his family.

Aside from the biographical component and the story of how Linux came about, Just For Fun is primarily a book about Torvalds take on celebrity, which he has certainly become. Torvalds comes across as a thoughtful person with very noble ideals, yet he does not come across as being idealistic nor iconoclastic. In short, he seems very worthy of his celebrity.

Also, it is interesting to see how well he handles the pressures from both ends of the spectrum. As already mentioned he has turned down some pretty big offers and probably could have done Linux as a money-making enterprise to begin with if he wanted. However, it should be said, some from the other camp have wanted to mold him into some sort of open source ascetic-monk. Torvalds has rejected both extremes.

Overall, I can not understate how fun reading this book was. The language in it was very conversational, the sentences very short, just a very light read, which is refreshing when the subject is computer operating system design. Though some computer terms and jargon make their way into the book, a general reader nowadays should know somewhat what is being talked about. After all, Linux is now a household word.

000 Computer Science, Knowledge & Systems, Part 4

In this, the fourth post of books classified in the 000 section, Books by the Numbers moves away from the book and the computer to subjects of controversial knowledge. More specifically, I am going to feature two books concerning the impending end of the world: A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know by Bill McGuire (001.9 McG) and Apocalypse WOW! by James Finn Garner (AC 001.9 GA), of which the latter is on book on audio cassette in our library. This is the order I suggest one read the books in, for the first one might leave you so full of despair that you will need the humor of the sound recording to cheer you up.

Actually, both books are good, fact-based accounts of the subject, though McGuire's sets it all out in a much more scholarly fashion and matter-of-fact tone. For those of you not familiar with James Finn Garner, he is the man who brought you the popular Politically Correct Bedtime Stories and its sequels. So, as you may guess, his presentation is a pretty much to the far side of tongue-in-cheek in tone. Nonetheless, both books set the wheels in your mind turning--though perhaps not in a good way!

The first book, A Guide to the End of the World, as I have said, is written in a serious tone. It deals with events that could occur bringing about the end of our race. It could well be titled How Bad Has It Been and How Bad Can It Get, which might sum it up even better. Through it all, one gains a perspective for geological time frames, the relative probabilities of unlikely things, and the eventual probabilities of other things. The book sticks to disasters of a geological, meteorological, and astronomical nature but leaves gloomy religious portents to others.

So, I say "a serious tone," but maybe what I mean is a dry, British humor. That the book is British I can readily prove: it was published by Oxford University Press, measurements in the book are given in Celsius and kilometres, and many references and allusions to the British Isles abound within. As for the dry humor, I will leave it up to readers to determine the vein in which the section at the end of each of the chapters, "Facts to Fret Over," was meant.

All in all, I enjoyed reading this book, which is a little categorically than any of the others discussed on this blog thus far. All the others have told the story of an individual or groups of individuals. This book, on the other hand, has absolutely no biographical content. It tells the story of the planet primarily, which has had more face lifts, blow-ups, and eccentricities than any celebrity could cram into one biography.

The second read--or in the case of our library, listen--we have a book that is far less ambiguously dry humor. Written in 1997 by satirist James Finn Garner, the book focuses on the more sensationalistic aspects of eschatology. The book lampoons all the end times prophesies and prophets who gained attention in the years leading up to the turn of the millennium. Along the way you may learn a thing or two about Nostradamus, the story of Atlantis, and the Book of Revelations.

The book does spend a great deal of time spoofing many of viewpoints of Christian dispensationalism fictionalized in the runaway popular series published during the same time, the Left Behind series, of which the library owns the whole series (F LA).

One thing is for certain, this week's choices have certainly added some urgency for getting my blog post published!