 I love David Sedaris (translation, my reviews are very biased). I've heard he is ridiculously funny when he does readings, but I've never had the chance to see him...damn it! In the second book I read of his, Naked, he provides the reader with insights to his childhood through teenage years as perceived by his funny, tainted, and feminine perspective. What made the book a funny read was picturing a little, unknowingly gay 10 year old thinking and saying what I was reading.
Here is a brief snip-it of David at home after a day at school where he watched the drama teacher act as a mime:
"I went home and demonstrated the invisible wall for my two-year-old brother, who pounded on the very real wall beside his playpen, shrieking and wailing in disgust. When my mother asked what I'd done to provoke him, I threw up my hands in mock innocence before lowering them to retrieve the imaginary baby that lay fussing at my feet. I patted the back of my little ghost to induce gas and was investigating its soiled diaper when I noticed my mother's face assume an expression she reserved for unspeakable horror. I had seen this look only twice before: once when she was caught in the path of a charging, rabid pig and then again when I told her I wanted a peach-colored velveteen blazer with matching slacks."
The book itself is darker than what I have come to expect with Sedaris. I believe in the book Naked, he is revealing more of the hardships he encountered in his life, taking a more raw approach, hence being naked; putting everything out there for everyone to see who you really are. Surprisingly, some of the chapters leaving you feeling sad. The title of the book is based off the last chapter where D. Sedaris lives in a nudist colony for a few weeks. My interpretation of this closing chapter is that he compares cloths to personalities. After not living in them for weeks, he could look at fully clothed people and know what there body really looked like, what they were trying to hide, and what image they were trying to convey. Realizing that much like personalities clothing portrays a portrait that people want you to see, when in reality the true you is something different.
 Augusten Burroughs, sounds familiar, oh yeah that's right, William Burroughs. Did Augusta choose to use a nom de plume because his real name has a direct correlation to Winnie-The-Pooh? Let me guess, he choose Burroughs because he too is gay and wrote a shock novel similar to Naked Lunch like Willy B.?
Augusten isn't quite as revolutionary for his time as William nor is his best friend Jack Kerouac, but then again Running With Scissors has a clear story line, a welcome difference from Naked Lunch. Running with Scissors is a memoir of Augusten Burroughs ( Christopher Robison). It intimately describes his life growing up and how far it fell from the norm. It is a fun read if you really enjoy setting the book down every 20 minutes, looking up at the sky in retrospect at what you just read and saying "what the fuck!" Would I recommend reading it -- maybe. I would classify it as the Jersey Shore of novels; nothing revolutionary or mind bending, but you just can't turn away from watching the characters with their skewed sense of reality and themselves.
 If Scott Hanselman lives and die's by unit tests, why don't we all just fall in line? It seems the nerd community, has an uncanny ability to adopt silly things quickly. Things like xkcd.com or the idea of ninja's. I have yet to laugh at one xkcd or understand how ninja's are relative in any shape or form, because of this I felt I needed to read up on unit tests, specifically for C#, to find out if it's just hype or this is something development shops with a strong QA team really need to look at.
I read two books that covered the topic of unit testing. The first book was Foundations of Programming (recommended by Scottie H. himself and is free) and the second is Pragmatic Unit Testing In C# with NUnit. Both of them start off with the same old song and dance on how you might have up front costs of introducing unit tests to your code, but the stability these tests provide over the duration of your codes lifetime will cause such dramatic cost savings for the company, it would be foolish not to explore the idea. What a compelling sales pitch, a pitch salesmen, for just about any technology, have used since the beginning of technology in businesses. I'll cut all the used car salesman tactics out and state the most intriguing argument to unit test. It increases code stability and it's easy.
The next question I asked myself: What do I exactly test in the code-base I am working on? In Pragmatic Unit Testing (PUT) they give us an acronym to use in order to answer this question. BICEP.
BICEP, breaks down as such.
Boundary Tests
Inversion Tests
Cross Check Tests
Error Tests
Performance Tests
These are the 5 major aspects one should test, according to PUT and it provides unit testers with a place to start. The next major topic in discussing how to test code is decoupling one piece of code to another. Does your code talk to a middleware? How do you test if middleware is not done creating your service to consume or if middleware is down? In steps NUnit Mocks, NMock2, and DotNetMock. These 3 mock frameworks provide the developer with the ability to feed your tests predefined values, values decided by you. Without going into how to use these mock frameworks, I believe that outside of a few isolated situations they should not be used. The entire purpose of testing your code is to test that you are getting information back that fits the criteria you are looking for. If this information, that is beyond your control, changes on whatever level for whatever reason, you as a developer need to know. Putting in mock objects hides this.
Since I work for a web shop, the topic of web UI unit tests interested me. PUT recommend using Selenium. This makes sense because it still uses the nunit style of testing keeping all your tests to one testing style. Selenium seems a bit cumbersome in comparison to WaitN or iMacro, but I feel keeping all your testing in the same style outweighs the cons of not using Selenium. The more desperate testing sources you introduce, the more confusing it is for an outsider to step in and see the whole picture when learning the code, especially when it's not contained in a single solution.
Finally, I recommend reading both of the books mentioned, but lets be honest most of us care so little about unit testing we'll be lucky to read all of 1 of these books let alone all of both. If this is the case I recommend PUT, while the first few chapters read like the high school teacher striving to gain his students social acceptance, it's an easy read and you can jump into the book at nearly any chapter and get the exact information you are looking for on unit testing. This is something I wish all programming books could achieve.
 In Predictably Irrational Dr. Ariely discusses how even irrational behavior is predictable. More specifically how irrational economic behavior is predictable. He calls his study of irrational economic decisions behavior economics. Many facets of the irrational behavior in humans is covered in the book. I'll pick a few of my favorites, relativity and pricing and apply them to interests in my life, girls and coding.
Many books have been written for people on the best way of attracting the opposite sex. In his book Dr. Ariely boils this art form down to an easy notion, relativity. Humans need a direct basis of comparison for everything in their life. This means, when a person is looking for a mate they should make sure their wing person is uglier than them. Dr. Ariely conveys that every human basis's worth using comparisons, not on the function the object offers to their life, but on the function the object offers in comparison to a comparable object, in this instance another person. A great example of this is pointed out in the first chapter "The Truth About Relativity." He uses the $275 bread maker made by William- Sonoma (W.S.) to assist his case. The bread maker sales were lower than expected. The problem being consumers didn't have a basis for comparison. How did consumers know what a quality bread maker was? Worse yet, consumer were comparing W.S. bread makers against coffee machines. W.S. wants consumers to buy both products and not view one as a substitute for another. After deliberation W.S. decided not to discontinue the bread maker, but to introduce a second larger and more expensive model. Thus, giving customers a basis for comparison. As a result the less expensive bread maker flew off the shelves. Having another bread maker to compare against consumers were no longer confused if they wanted a bread maker or the coffee machine, they knew they wanted a bread maker and could easily make a decision on quality based on comparing the two products. Bread makers are not humans, is what most will think. Wrong. Humans base beauty off comparison, don't believe me, walk into a bar with a model, see who gets more attention, then try walking in with a weight watchers "point counter" put an appetizer in front of them and watch how much attention you get while your wing person forgets to breath as they devour the spin dip.
Now offering nerds an insight to the book. Let's say a programmer has written the next killer application (app). This app will change the world, but how does one price an app? In chapter ten "The Power of Price." Dr. Ariely covers this dilemma quite well. Dr. Ariely states two mechanisms shape the expectations on the price we pay for things. One is belief and the other is conditioning. An example of belief is provided with a humorous viral video which has a man following around the now famous "free hug" people carrying a sign that states "deluxe hugs." Watching the deluxe hug video from an outside perspective it's apparent there is no difference from one hug to the other, but the deluxe hug huckster makes people believe there is a big enough difference they pay him $2 for what should cost nothing. Examining the second mechanism, conditioning, Starbucks provides insight. Starbucks made people comfortable with the idea of a $4 coffee, when they were used to paying $.80. Starbucks conditioned the customer with incremental price steps into finally accepting that a $4 coffee was indeed worth $4's. Now looking at the developers app, the developer should ask themselves if there are similar apps. If so, does the developer want the consumers to view the app as the premiere expensive app, or a cheaper competitor? Does the developer believe that people will value the app enough to pay for it? Will the developer have to condition the consumer to the cost by gradually working the consumer to accept the price the developer wants to charge?
As cliche as it sounds, once I picked up the book I couldn't set it down nor could I stop thinking of the application it has. I realized I had fallen victim to the marketing ideas portrayed in the book. Oh well, now I know.
The Kindle --
 My thoughts: I'm sold, I'm in love and if
everything keeps on the right pace the Kindle should entirely change the way collegiate
educational systems sell books. Jeff Bezos (Amazon's founder), come here and give
me hug. Let's look at the device, then discuss how the Kindle could
be one aspect that will push Amazon right through the economic downturn
and how the Kindle has the potential to affect the educational system.
The
Kindle is an electronic reading device that uses a technology called
e-ink. E-ink makes reading an electronic device easy on your eyes. The
battery on the Kindle will let it run for two weeks without a charge.
It also allows you to download a book nearly anywhere, by using the
Sprint PCS network (a possible saving grace for a slowly dying Sprint).
On the Kindle one can email pdf's to the device for reading, surf wikipedia, and browse
most of their favorite blogs. It also allows you
to add annotations to pages, search through entire books (a favorite
feature of mine) and with the Kindle 2.0 you can have it read to you. From
a nerd perspective it's the little things. When I'm reading in the
morning eating my Coco Puffs, I continually find myself fighting to
keep the book open to the page I'm reading. New books always seem to
want to shut. With the Kindle, the book is always open and a page turn
is one quick button push. I also appreciate when I'm discussing a book
to a friend; I'm able to run a quick search and pull up the exact
excerpt from the book. Finally, when I see a book I want, I download
it in little over a minute. No driving to the book store (assuming
they have it in stock), no waiting for the book in the mail and best of
all it was considerably cheaper than buying the book new, in most cases
half price. What excites me most are the possibilities for the
Kindle. If universities start to adopt the Kindle (UPDATE: After the release of the Kindle DX Jeff B. has announced they will be working with universities as early as this fall), it could be
revolutionary. Since most books purchased on the Kindle are half off,
the device will pay for itself in two semesters under normal course
load, possibly one. Students will not have to carry 3 or 4 books along
with a laptop to various classes throughout the day simply a laptop and
a Kindle. No more waiting in long lines at the book store. 1 click for
each book you want and you're done. Being a grad student
and working full time means I have to step out during lunch to get my
books, a one click option would be a nice time savings for me. Examining
the Kindle from a financial perspective gives Amazon a positive
outlook. Imagine every university adopting the Kindle in the same way
every college student adopted iPods. Amazon.com would be the iTunes music store of
the book industry. Setting the bar for digital distribution and
providing the platform for Amazon to break into the hardware industry.
All these aspects build upon Amazon's core competences while staying
with it's strategy of delivering books cheaply and easily. Wallstreet
felt the same way I did and Amazon saw a 10 point stock jump when
rumors of the new Kindle started to circulate a week before it's
release.
With Amazon's latest release of
the Kindle it is posed to establish a " lock-in" for digital book
distribution. They're a company to keep your eye on, the next couple of
years could make or break the Kindle and redefine how American's and
American students read and buy books.
 There are too many damn bloggers. Thomas Friedman a 3 time Pulitzer Prize winner, eludes to this in his book "The World is Flat." As I write in my blog, I can't help but agree, but I'll ignore this idea so I can deliver how this book is applicable to technologists like myself.
Friedman starts the book out discussing the "10 flatteners" of the world and how these flatteners lead to the "triple convergence" (For a brief description of these ideas check Wikipedia). For most of us nerds, the technologies he discusses are nothing new. Using a big picture approach he wraps up these ideas with the triple convergence, provided points of view that, at the very least, will challenge you to think. It’s after he discusses triple convergence when the book really starts to get interesting. Friedman begins to discuss the affects these ideas are having and will have on societies, politics, outsourcing, wealth, schooling, and religion. He covers these ideas quite extensively, so I'll just cover a few of my favorites (which happen to be very touchy topics): politics and religion.
In discussing the effects of the triple convergence, Friedman refers to Karl Marx's manifesto which, in part, says in a purely capitalistic society, there will be no wars over religion or politics because those will affect business. Friedman then looks at how companies with global supply chains in two countries will work together, because, despite their differing political or religious views it will be in their best financial interest to maintain peace, in fear the company's who's supply chain is in their country, might pull out. This in turn causes the country to loose large revenue generators. Losing these generators would cause a loss in funding for schooling, technology, home grown business and the silly religious or political wars they would like to engage. Intriguing concepts...I think so.
For technologists this book should light a fire under your ass. Friedman reiterates how we have lead the race on technology, but as technology is becoming cheaper and other countries are focusing more on education in science and technology, we the American technologists, are not just competing with our fellow American's for a job or for the race to the next big idea. We are now competing with many other countries in the world. This also means we are collaborating with many other countries.
Overall the first half of the book was pretty boring, but as he started into the application of the topics he covers in the first half the book, the book became very interesting. I recommend this book to any techie who is interested in how tech fits in the big picture.
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