Review: The Gathering Storm

The Gathering Storm is book 1 of Winston Churchill's epic 6-book fantasy novel about a war that engulfed the entire world from 1939 to 1945. The 6 volumes are enormous, each weighing in at about 800 pages, including appendices, notes, and so forth.

Wait, did I say fantasy novel? Well, if you had no knowledge of history, you might well imagine it. Here, we have an unmitigated bad guy (Hitler) who wants to take over Europe. The amount of stupidity in the back story makes many fantasy stories look like shining examples of realism. You've got a guy who repeatedly breaks his word, makes promises that later turn out to be empty, yet everyone except Churchill's immediate acquaintances bend over backwards to appease him.

Moreover, even though Churchill was in his own words, "in the political wilderness" during these years, he was still given plenty of access to defense information, enough for him to put together detailed critiques of the government's strategy when dealing with Germany and Italy. That would not be conceivable in today's political climate.

Of course, Churchill had vision and clarity far beyond many of the same period, and he provides ample documentation through his letters, writings and other forms of communication. When he describes the battles of the period, it is accompanied with diagrams, order of battle, and other detail, including diagrams of ship engagements. This is an amazing amount of detail but probably too much for non-WW2 enthusiasts. Fortunately, you can skip these details without losing sight of the over-arcing plot and insanity of the people involved at the time.

The book ends with Churchill getting to be Prime Minister. At no point does he gloat over Chamberlain's mistakes, and in fact, frequently states that Hitler under-estimated Chamberlain: once he realized he'd been had, he devoted himself to fighting the war.

One cannot read this book without coming away feeling like World War 2 could have been prevented or pre-empted with a much lower cost in lives. The context, the detail, and the perspective that Churchill provides cannot be matched. I have only a few complaints: first, the diagrams are barely readable on the Kindle edition of the book (the only version I'd consider since the paper copies are unmanageable). Secondly, the Kindle formatting loses your place at times, because there's no distinction between quotations from letters and the main text. Finally, Churchill's best speeches occur in the next volume, so if that's the only thing you're looking for, you should skip this volume.

Recommended. Even if your'e not a WW2 aficionado. At the very least, unlike George R. R. Martin's books, you know that this story eventually ends, and that Churchill won't fill a book with nothing happening.

Review: Touchback

Most free kindle books are terrible, and I admit that my few reviews of them have reflected that. When I saw that Touchback had been optioned for a movie, however, I decided to leave my prejudices behind and read it.

The book reads a lot like a summer football movie. That's not a bad thing if you like the genre, but I'm afraid it leaves me cold. The idea is that Scott Murphy, a high school football quarterback star, plays his last high school game and wins... but at the cost of getting an injury which throws his future away. He loses his football scholarship, his girlfriend, and twenty years later ends up as a broken man considering suicide as a way out.

He's given one more chance to relive life through an unknown mechanism (not unlike Groundhog Day) and now goes through an agonizing 100 pages figuring out how to change his life.

It's decently written, and one wouldn't be surprised to discover that it was first written as a screen play before the author turned to writing a novel when he couldn't sell it. But the ending is trite, unbelievable, and stupid, which made reading the novel feel like as someone else once said: "Watching Lance Armstrong crash his bike 10 meters from the finish line in Paris after a grueling battle." It didn't help that you could see the ending coming from about 20 miles away.

I can neither recommend the novel nor the movie, assuming it retains the same ending.

Re-read: Altered Carbon

I first reviewed Altered Carbon 4 years ago in Munich, and I recently finished reading it again as the other book that I'm trying to finish is dense and I'm in need of light reading where I don't have to think.

4 years ago I thought this book was violent and difficult to stomach. Maybe I've gotten used to the violence of media now, but now it doesn't feel that way. What's great about this book is that even knowing the plot vaguely, I could still appreciate the story and the way Richard Morgan put it together later. In particular, there are scenes where the protagonist is set up to lose, and he does, despite his smart thinking and talking (and instinct for violence).

The plot is crystal clear and wrapped up, though unlike the standard mystery novels, I don't think Morgan plays fair with the reader: there's no easy way to deduce the story from the clues given to you. Hence, the comparison to Chandler in my previous reviews stand. The prose is great, and the world is fun. And it's quite clear that Richard Morgan is conversant with technology and able to work out all the implications of digital human storage and re-sleeving.

All in all, I'm happy to give this novel my highest recommendation: if you haven't read it, you don't know what good modern science fiction can be. And while I thought the ending was bleak on the first reading, on this second reading, it doesn't seem any worse than any of Chandler's novels.

Highly Recommended

Review: Orange Internet Max (France)

As a very cheap person and proud of it, I rarely run my Nexus One in data mode when I'm at home: I'm usually within wifi range, and I refuse to pay the exorbitant $3/day or $35/month prices that local US providers charge me for. However, when traveling, I value data plans highly and would be willing to pay that price even if asked.

Last year, I had trouble getting even regular voice SIM cards, let alone Internet capable SIM cards. This year, however, we started our trip in Paris, albeit on a weekend. On a Monday, however, I went to an Orange store and got an prepaid SIM card. It cost EUR 9.95. I bought a 10 EUR refill right away so I could subscribe to the Internet Max plan (which was 9 EUR, but the Sim card only came with 5 EUR credit, and the minimum refill was 10 EUR). It's an unlimited data subscription plan that's good for a month and automatically turns off if you don't have enough credit to resubscribe! The worst part of the experience is that part where Orange tries to pretend to be Apple. You walk into the store, and are greeted by a pretty woman dressed in Orange uniform, who will put your name in a queue (driven by an iPad) so you can browse the store until a customer service rep is ready to talk to you. Unfortunately, they did this Apple-emulation strategy wrong: they had too many pretty women, and not enough customer service rep, so I ended up cooling my heels for at least 25 minutes before being able to complete an incredibly simple transaction. I would have preferred standing in line like at a normal store.

What an awesome plan it is. Most of the time, the speed is fine. Much faster the the iPhone 4G that I got as part of the home exchange program we participated in. And of course, any Android phone runs circles around the iPhone as a matter of practicality. Being able to get turn by turn navigation saved our bacon several times while driving (or walking!) around France. We were also able to tether the phone to the laptop whenever we were at a hotel without internet. Try this with your post-paid plan in the USA for less than $25/month!

The best part about this is that while Orange will try to charge you separately for e-mail, if you're using an Android phone, there's no need to pay for the e-mail plan separately. That's because the Gmail app on Android uses http requests, so it looks like browser traffic to Orange, rather than IMAP/POP, which is what Apple products use.

As an aside, after using an iPhone side by side with a 2 year old Nexus One running Android 2.3 (no I haven't bothered to upgrade the default OS yet, and probably won't --- I'm cheap with my time as well as money), it's no contest. I'd rather have a 2 year old Android phone than an iPhone when I'm in a foreign country and in need of navigation, search, and making phone calls.

Recommended. An Orange store should be the first thing you look for when you land in France.

Review: The Curse of Chalion

I rarely re-read books, especially fiction. Yet when I was done with my last depressing review, I found myself turning to The Curse of Chalion, for some light, optimistic reading. One of the best things about Bujold is that she comes from writing a lot of science fiction, which means that the theology and magic in the world where Chalion is set in is rigorous, and explained well: at no point does the reader feel cheated in that some weird unexplained magic is used to get characters out of a situation or just to move the plot along. At every point in the plot where magic is used, the mechanism has been already explained before, usually in some conversation that the reader had no idea was important.

This explains my satisfaction in reading the book the first time: you really do get a sense of completion and satisfaction, as well as an "aha" insight every time the author puts some previously explained mechanism of the world to work. I was curious to see how it plays the second time around.

The big flaw in the book which jumps out the second time around is that the protagonist, Cazaril, is too perfect. He has unlimited integrity, is kind even when he's pushed to the limits and betrayed, and never at any moment feels sorry for himself, but works for his employers/liege lords without ambition for himself. It really detracts from the novel on the second reading in a way it didn't on the first.

But other than that, I'm very happy to report that the book holds up well on the second reading. The plot works: there are no gaping holes in it. The universe is intelligently built, and the rules of the universe aren't subject to cheating. Even the prophecy in the book is a fair one, and the reader had ample opportunity to work it out before hand (which I did on the first reading).

Some books work as great escapism for people. This is one of the ones that do it for me: a universe in which integrity, fairness, and a sense of duty is rewarded is an extremely appealing one. If that speaks to you, read the book.

Recommended

Review: The Price of Inequality

The Price of Inequality is a depressing book. It describes how American society has gotten to the point where it is today: where there's effectively a state too weak to provide protection for the poor and investment for the future, while strong enough to do transfer payments to corporations and defend tax cuts for the wealthy.

Stiglitz points out that this state of affairs did not have to be. For instance, rather than giving away broadcast frequencies to corporations for free, the government could raise revenue by auctioning them off. Rather than sell mining and oil extraction rights for pennies on the dollar and then be on the hook for cleaning up the environment after the corporations involved have boosted profits by ignoring safety and allowing oil spills to happen, those extraction rights could have been auctioned off for money. Rather than allowing banks too big to fail to bet using tax payer's monies, those banks could have been taxed to pay for an insurance fund for future bailouts.

Every one of these situations is well-described, and Stiglitz has a very convincing set of references showing how the high tax era in the US coincided with the highest economic growth. So even if you were a member of the 1%, it's still in your interest to have a society with less inequality. Furthermore, he notes that we give very little credit to the federal government for doing things right: that many republicans say things like "Keep your government hands out of my medicare" shows that people are so convinced that government can't do anything right but love their medicare that they somehow think it must be private. For instance, government R&D (basic research) has effectively a 50% higher return than R&D in the private sector. And of course, education has been steadily de-funded over the last 30 years as a result of the low-tax movement, and it has proven high returns as well, both socially as well as to individuals.

What Stiglitz does a poor job doing is offering hope. While he takes a stab at how change for the better could occur in the future, it's weak sauce compared to the historical section of the book. The US is probably headed for a 3rd-world banana republic style inequality, where the poor and the rich live in effectively different countries.

In any case, the book is highly recommended. All voters should read this book, but my guess is not too many people will.

Review: Team Geek

Full disclosure: I was paid to review and provide criticism of an early version of Team Geek. I knew Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman from my time at Google, and there was no way I wasn't going to help them out when they asked me to review a book about one of my favorite topics: the sociology and politics of software developments. Incidentally, one of my early reviewers for Startup Engineering Management told me that the book's great, but it's too late for my manager. My response is that books like the one I wrote and Team Geek are not for people who are already actively bad managers: those people wouldn't read this book unless their managers beat them over the head with it, and maybe not even then. These books are meant for people who actively don't want to be sucky managers, or want to identify sucky managers before foolishly working for them.

Both authors are engineering managers at Google. However, much of their experience pre-dates Google, and this is a good thing: they have a lot of experience with software engineers in general, and a lot of exposure in the open source community such as subversion, where they're both big shots.

A lot of the book is focused on how to deal with people in a technical environment. There's an entire chapter on how to manage people (cleverly sneaked in there even though the book claims not to be a book about how to manage people), and one on how to deal with users. A lot of the advise is on-topic, backed up with anecdotes, and well-illustrated with examples. My biggest critiques of the original version of the book have now been eliminated and the prose is relatively tight. The section on how to get your manager to love you (i.e., provide frequent updates and over-communicate) is great and everyone should take it.

While this book will not make you a better office politician directly, reading it and applying its principles will at least make you a better engineer in many ways, and more effective at getting things done. Big companies that typically don't bother training new engineering managers could do worse than hand a copy of this book (together with Peopleware) to all new engineering managers.

Recommended.

Review: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold

Fiction authors love to pretend that their craft is never obsolete, unlike those of us who write technical books. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is a spy novel, set in a world that's as obsolete and as alien as they come. The elements of that novel, the cold war, Kim Philby, and the lack of notable comparable success on the American and British side of the espionage circle form the backdrop for the book.

Yet as spy novels go, this is a book that's as likely to withstand the test of time as any. The novel is about deception, not only of self, but of country. It follows a spy, Seamus, who finding that his last field operative has been killed, takes on one last assignment. One which he is led to believe, would lead to his opposite number on the East German side to be removed.

Le Carre does a great job of in-cluing us into this world. He never tells us explicitly about trade-craft, but instead shows it as it happens. Yet in the end, all these technical deductions on the part of the reader is a red-herring. The ultimate ending depends on the protagonist being ignorant of the ultimate goals and rules of the game as it is being played by his superiors, much as many lower level engineers or managers in corporate environments end up touting the party line, ignorant of how they are being manipulated.

The ending is quite a bit of a downer, but perhaps an astute (and introspective) reader will come away with reflections on his life, and what it means to accept a goal knowing that those setting it for you might instead have other objectives.

Recommended.

Review: What's Going on In There?

What's Going On In There is a baby neurologist/brain development book. You might consider it competition for Brain Rules For Baby, except that Lise Eliot goes into depth about neurology. This is less boring than you might think, since neurons, synapses, and myelinization is all interesting stuff. However, if you're looking for a practical manual for raising children, Brain Rules For Baby is the superior book.

Part of this is that Eliot breaks apart a child's development into its multiple subskills instead of chronologically as a parent would encounter its development. That means that in one chapter, for instance, she would cover vision development from conception to 2 years, and then in the next chapter she would cover motor skills from conception to 2 years. As a result, you're never given a good timeline for how things come together, or what to watch out for when, unless you were to take notes and create one yourself out of the raw material she gives you. She tries to fix this by providing copious cross references, but those just make you annoyed, especially when you get to the cross-referenced chapter and find yet more cross references.

She covers a lot of ground, but my impression of the book is that pretty much anything you can do for your child is covered in the pre-natal pre-birth section, while she has relatively few concrete pointers for you to consider once the child is out of the womb. For instance, in a lot of places in the book she talks about high quality childcare being as good as a stay-at-home mom. But nowhere does she define what high quality childcare is, and how to find it. Sounds pretty crazy? But that's what most of the book is like.

That doesn't mean the book is useless. I found the section of why men have bigger brains than women (even after correcting for body weight) interesting. I found the discussion of gender differences interesting. I enjoyed the discussion on the impact of musical training on brain development (though it's much more sparse and less in depth than I would like). There are a few gaping holes in the book (for instance, not being bilingual herself, she says nothing about bilingual upbringing except to note that it takes longer for the child to speak), but Medina's book had similar holes.

All in all, the book's mildly recommended, but seriously, read Brain Rules For Baby first.

Review: A Dance With Dragons

After A Feast For Crows I told myself that I shouldn't read any more books in the series because of how bad and frustrating it was. But I found myself on a flight with a copy of A Dance With Dragons checked out from the library, so I read it.

The good news is, the book is much better than A Feast For Crows. The bad news is that the pace is still glacial. Much of the book could be summarized in 20 pages, and there are a bunch of irrelevant sub-plots and not very many resolved threads (though I'm sad to lose yet another one of the better characters in the series!).

Not Recommended.

Review: Kelty FC 3.0

A baby is a lot like a camera: you might have only one body, but you'll end up with a bunch of different bags and packages to stuff that body into, each one for a slightly different purpose and for different conditions.

For instance, the Chariot Cougar is the all-weather, all person strolling/cycling device. It's waterproof, and will go anywhere. Unfortunately, it's giant ass and eats up all your trunk space if you insist on buying small cars like I do. The biggest problem is that if you're going to hike single-track trails, you'll need to use palanquin mode, which is awkward.

The Kelty Wallaby is great at home for doing a few chores while carrying the baby and it leaves you hands free, but any extended carrying will cause back pain.

As the only person in the immediate family likely to use any infant carrier, I've learned that I have extremely limited patience for complicated wrapping techniques or infant loading carriers. That eliminates the Moby Wrap, and when I tried the Ergo Baby, one look at the instructions and I concluded that I would need a PhD in baby carrying before I'd successfully get my son into it.

The Kelty FC 3.0 is a welcome change from all these complicated devices. It seems almost designed for a caveman, that's how simple it is. You load your child by putting the pack down on the ground with the auto-deploy kickstand, so you can adjust all the straps and put the sunshade on. Once done, you lift the pack using the carry handle, load one shoulder, and then the other, cinch down the hip belt, clip the sternum strap together, and you're ready to go. Like any true backpacking pack, all the weight is loaded onto your hip and not your shoulder, so you have no shoulder or back pain associated with it. The nice thing about baby carriers is that they're designed for women, which means that unlike men's backpacks, the hip belt can be tightened to the point where it doesn't slip on me, which is impressive because I have next to no hips.

Bowen loves this pack. It's high, so he can see past my shoulders. He can reach out and grab things (including mom). The "drool pad" is soft and he's slept on it. Grandpa appears to like the pack as well. Grandpa is 70 years old, which means that if he has no problem carrying the pack, those of you in your child-bearing years will have no problem.

The pack comes with a changing pad, plenty of space for diapers, milk bottles, cell phone pocket, key pocket, and maybe lunch for you. I suppose you could squeeze in a SLR as well, but it'd better be padded well.

There are a few cons with the pack. First, the sunshade is not waterproof. There's no real way to windproof/bugproof or waterproof the cockpit. So if it rains, I'd better have the waterproof stroller. Second, there's no water-bottle carrier built in. This is silly, but easily rectified with a $3.50 Water Bottle Holster from REI or your favorite online provider. Finally, unlike the ErgoBaby, it won't carry a 70 pound baby. Darn it, by the time he's 40 pounds (the weight limit of the FC 3.0), he'd better be doing the hiking himself.

All in all, this is my favorite of all the baby carriers, and the only carrier where I feel like I could push myself to the limit and not be limited by the pack's limitations. Well, ok, I guess my real limit is whether mom will let me push to those limits, but hey, one can dream.

Highly Recommended

Review: Sennheiser RS120 wireless headphones

Now that I share an office with my wife and a house with a baby, keeping volume down when watching video, etc., has suddenly become important. While I've used blue-tooth headsets in the past, the quality has always been spotty, the range poor, and the amount of set up almost not worth the hassle for PCs, and of course, nearly impossible for TVs.

The Sennheiser RS120 is available in re-manufactured form for $55. By contrast, the newer technology RS 160 costs more than 2X that refurbished, at $117. It also does not come with a charging cradle. If you want a charging cradle with the newer technology, you need to shell out $186 for the RS 170. For that price, I figured I'd put up with a finicky setup and go cheap.

The big difference between the technologies is that the RS120 is analog: it's essentially a 900MHz transmitter and receiver, with a radio-like tuner and 3 channels so you can tune your headphone to receive the signal for maximum clarity. Because interference can attenuate the signal or shift the optimum frequency slightly, you need to tune the channel for best performance depending on where you sit, whether there are GSM phones nearby, or whether there's another 900 MHz channel in use. The plus is that you can tune multiple headsets to the same channel, so two of you can watch a movie, for instance, while the baby sleeps.

I wired up my Headroom Amp to my PC's port, and then wired that to the RS120. The result sounds great when properly tuned and with no interference. The no interference part is difficult because in the modern household, you have cordless phones, GSM mobile phones, Wifi, etc. But after fiddling a bit with the channels I found something that worked most of the time with great fidelity... until the wireless phone rings and you get a slight buzz. Oh well. When the phone rings I usually pause whatever it is I'm doing and take the call anyway.

The headset is powered by two rechargeable AAA batteries. The charging mechanism is ingenious: there are two metal plates on the headphones which when dropped onto the meta cradle, charge the batteries. This is very cool because the headset and cradle are designed so that when you drop the headset along any point on the cradle contact will happen and the charging starts.

The range of the headset is fantastic. I can wear them all around the house and hear music streaming from the PC. Walls, etc., are no barrier whatsoever. The annoyances are the occasional blips and cuts, and sometimes interference. If that bothers you, spend the extra money and buy the digital technology headsets.

One minor annoyance is that the transmitter automatically cuts off power when there's no input from the PC. This is not a problem for listening to music: you're probably streaming a playlist so music never cuts out. However, it's a problem for watching a movie: you'll watch a movie and then pause it to do something else. If you pause for long enough to say, feed a baby and change a diaper, the transmitter will cut off. That's not a problem. However, there's some latency before the transmitter comes back on when you resume the movie, so you might miss a few words. The headset also only hears static if the transmitter is off, which is annoying but not fatal.

Do I recommend the unit? Yes. I should have bought one ages ago when the inlaws were staying with me, because it would have reduced a few conflicts when someone wanted to watch TV during the night but it was annoying other members of the household. Is it of the highest possible audio quality? No. You'd probably get better quality (and less fiddling of the tuner) out of the digital technology models, though for a lot higher price. But as far as price/performance is concerned, these are the wireless units to beat. Recommended

Review: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Extended Edition on Kindle

I used to subscribe to science fiction magazines on paper. Pulp magazines really haven't changed for decades, though the content has changed quite a bit. In particular, the paper magazines were printed very cheaply, and as the costs of paper went up and the number of buyers (news-stand and subscriptions) went down, the magazines have gone bi-monthly.

Electronic delivery makes a lot of sense for pulp magazines: the cost of mailing and printing is gone, and the guilt of throwing away paper disappears. But most of the pulp magazines to date have been more expensive in electronic edition than in print edition. This sucks, because I don't like the fiction in them any better just because it's in electronic format.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF) is the exception to this rule. Priced at $0.99/month or $2 per issue, it's cheaper than a subscription to the print magazine would be, so I tried it. Ironically, the thing I miss most about going to electronic edition is the ads: the print edition would have full page ads for upcoming books that I might miss otherwise, and this edition does not have them.

The fiction is hit & miss, and though not always to my taste, is always of reasonable quality. I certainly feel like I get $2 worth per issue. The restriction on the format is that you only get to keep 7 back-issues at any given time, but that's well over a year's worth of fiction. Since I read nearly every issue cover to cover, this is not a problem for me.

I don't usually review short stories on this blog, so the only way to find out how much you like the magazine is to go for the free trial.

It always feels ironic to me that science fiction magazines are the last on-board the digital bandwagon, and it feels to me like science fiction writers will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into e-books. But Gordon Van Gelder of F&SF is doing a great job in this new world, and I feel like I can't pimp his forward thinking approach on pricing enough.

Recommended

Review: Scott Pilgrim

I came to Scott Pilgrim by way of the movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I could explain the plot, but you'd probably have more fun watching the trailer:

In any case, I thought the movie was unique and very enjoyable in many ways, if not exactly deep. A more literary movie, for instance, would have each of Ramona's ex-boyfriends represent something, either about love or about Ramona, but most of the exes are played for laughs.

I thought the comic book series Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Box Set might have the ability to provide more than the movie's relatively shallow plot.

The verdict: the books do a little better, but not so much better that I would recommend them over the movie. One of the best things about comic books is that they have an unlimited special effects budget, so you would expect the comic book to be even more over the top than the movie. But in many cases, the movies one-ups the books. For instance, the vegan police segment on the movie works way better than what's in the books.

You can read the books in a couple of days (they're comics, each about the size of a Japanese manga). The style is not quite manga-style, though there is a lot of negative space in use, with certain scenes told entirely via pictures rather than with words. The plot is largely the same as the movie, and the characters, while a little bit more fleshed out, aren't vastly different from that in the movie.

I would recommend either watching the movie or reading the books, but don't do both like I did. The movie's a lot shorter, and gets all the highlights of the book right.

Mildly recommended.

Two of my books are now available on Amazon!

The 3rd Edition of An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups is now available on Amazon.com. Since paper books are now a vanishingly small percentage of my sales, I'm outsourcing the production and shipping of paperbacks to Amazon whenever I run out of inventory. This comes at a price: while I was able to store and ship books at a low price of $29.95 per copy (just $5 more than the digital edition), Amazon has public shareholders and thus I have to price the book much higher to have the same profit. Fortunately, the ebook is still at the same price of $24.95.

Coincidentally, I'd finally sold out of paperback copies of Startup Engineering Management as well, and that's now also available from Amazon as a paperback. Given that this book started shipping September last year, needless to say it has outperformed my expectations for it!

The last book for which I'm still shipping copies is Independent Cycle Touring. I have 5 copies left, and once those are gone, expect the paperback prices to go up substantially, just like it has for my other books.

I'm now very close to automating my business completely. Electronic fulfillment is now done by , and integrates nicely with paypal and Google Checkout (the former better than the latter). Thanks to Gayle Laakmann McDowell for pointing me at them.

Review: Banana - The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

I love bananas. They are by far my favorite fruit, and judging from the statistics in the book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, I am not alone. Americans consume 26 million tons of banana a year, and it is a more popular snack than anything except the potato chip. (I find that amazing)

So when I read that the banana is under threat from Panama disease, I put this book on hold from the library in order to learn more about my favorite fruit. Bananas are essentially clones, since the edible bananas are all seedless. (By the way, apples are also mostly cloned, since while you can plant an apple seed, chances are, the fruit that results is unlikely to resemble the sweetness of its parent) As a result, the fruit is susceptible to disease: once a virus has figured out how to attack one banana tree, it can essentially ravage a plantation, leading to widespread decimation and even extinction of an entire banana species.

In fact, this has happened once before, when the Gros Michel was replaced by the modern Cavendish banana. The Cavendish was brought in because it resisted panama disease... until banana companies tried to plant the Cavendish in Asia and discovered that it too, succumbed to another variant of the disease. In essence, the existing banana plantations live under the threat of a time bomb - sooner or later, that disease will migrate to South/Central America where all those big plantations are and decimate that population, at which point we will have no choice but to switch to a new variety of banana or give up our favorite fruit.

Breeding a seedless plant is full of challenges, and Dan Koeppel does a good job of exploring all the avenues and detailing everything that's been tried and failed. While there are candidate successors, the cost has been high, and the taste of those bananas just different enough from the Cavendish that it would be risky for existing banana companies to try to get the market to switch over until absolutely necessary. Another interesting approach is genetic engineering, which Koeppel explains is far less dangerous with a seedless plant like the banana than with other plants. Of course, we all know about the political problems with that approach.

A large portion of the book is about the history of the banana companies in Central/South America and the politics behind it. This section was less personally interesting to me, but it is absolutely huge! Basically, the banana companies have been instrumental in various juntas and deposition of dictators in various countries (with and without the assistance of the U.S. government), and clearly this has led to the rise of the "banana republic", with the resulting degradation of worker conditions in various countries. Our favorite fruit is cheap only because it is paid for, in many cases with worker's lives and widespread land-grabs by the banana companies.

All in all, this is an entertainingly good book, and I urge everyone who has a chance to read it to do so. Especially if you like bananas. Recommended

Review: Just Ride, A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike

I've known Grant Petersen since his Bridgestone days, and have ridden with him several times, as well as contributed to his newsletter, The Rivdendell Reader. I am a fan of Petersen's bikes (my current ride is a copy of his '93 Bridgestone RB-1 geometry with a few personal tweaks), and a lifetime member of the Rivendell club. I say all this up front because try as I might, I couldn't recommend this book.

Just Ride is a guide to cycling for non-racers. That's the claim. There's a shortage of such a book, and as someone who raced his bike once in his life and decided it wasn't all that interesting, you would think I would like the book. I'm also a league cycling instructor (LCI #1040), and am always looking for good books to recommend to people who like cycling.

First of all, the book's organization is a pain. Petersen discusses bike fitting at the end of the book, for instance, rather than at the beginning, which is the natural place for people who aren't already devoted cyclists. It seems crazy to go through 7 entire sections of the book (including secionts on bike safety) before you get to making the bike fit you. I'd practically have to rewrite the table of contents for it to be a book that you can read cover to cover to decide whether cycling is for you.

Secondly, the book's a reaction to racing, but tries too hard to define itself against racing, as opposed to defining what cycling is for. As a result, it manages to offend commuters and tourists though its implied assumptions! For instance, there's a deep assumption in this book that you would only ride for fun, and you should only ride for fun, and riding for maximum speed or something like that is racing-wannabe. I know many bike commuters. Getting to work faster is a goal for many of them, just like car drivers who don't want to race might still want to minimize their time spent commuting. Eric House (who is mentioned in the book) once said something like, "Just because I'm on a bicycle doesn't mean that I can't occasionally be late for a meeting and want to go as hard as I can."

Then there are these technical errors. For instance, Grant espouses using rain ponchos (also known as rain capes), but makes no mention that if you use them, you must also use fenders. Sure, he mentions fenders later on in the book, but there's not even a cross reference. It's real obvious to an old-timer like Grant, but it might not be to his target audience. He recommends riding in the door zone, and then when someone opens a door in front of you, "hit the brakes, swerve out of the way, and hope the driver behind you saw this coming." Hope is not a plan, and it's probably a good thing that this book will most likely not be read by many newbies, because that sort of advice will get Petersen sued.

Similarly, the advice on quick release sounds good, but follows the "impression on palm" advice, which is unreliable. It seems as though Petersen did not get any other person to read this book and check it for technical accuracy before publishing it!

Then finally, there's lots of advice about not riding your bicycle: it makes you fat (yes, he says that), it causes all sorts of other health problems, and you shouldn't ride your bike too much. I'm not sure anyone reading this book who's not already a cyclist would be persuaded to become one. There's diet advice (Petersen's jumped onto the low carb bandwagon), and exercise advice (don't ride your bike, do cross fit instead), and health advice (get a blood glucose monitor!).

Is there stuff I agree with in the book? Yes. I like saddlebags and panniers over carrying stuff on your back. Petersen and I see eye to eye there. I like fenders, and I don't think carbon fiber is suitable for the kind of riding I do. I agree with Grant that helmets are not an unmitigated good thing. But all in all, there's a lot not to like about the book. One would think that Petersen was selling cross-fit sessions rather than bicycles, and I can't imagine why any cyclist would support such an anti-cycling point of view.

Not recommended. I'm going to see if I can get Amazon to give me the $9.99 I paid for the Kindle edition back.

An Inflated Sense of Risk

I was at the Berkeley alumni panel organized by Dan Wallach a week or so back, and was very fortunate to be seated next to Jon Blow when someone asked if joining a startup, or doing an indie game was risky. Jon immediately went into this rant about how in this modern world, we have an inflated sense of risk: almost all risk has been taken out of society by civilization --- if you startup fails, you don't go to debtor's prison, and you are not at risk of getting eaten by tigers or wolves. As a result, we have people who inflate the little risks in life to a ridiculous amount, to the point of not letting kids walk or bike to school because they might get abducted by strangers!

This came to me again recently when someone asked me for advice. He was about to leave his current giant employer for another employer that was much smaller, but was well on its way to being public. From a business point of view, neither company had significant risk. Yet he wavered. "I have two pre-school kids, and I can't afford to take the risk of even joining a high quality startup such as OSMeta."

Here's the deal. If you join a smaller company from a giant firm or even a tiny startup, and then face new challenges, overcome them, and work with really smart people, there's zero chance that if everything goes belly up over the next few years the giant corporation will not hire you. Zero. By contrast, if you do spend your time at a large corporation with reduced risk and perhaps a fat package that comes to you every year no matter what happens, would you push yourself as hard? (Some people might: if you're one of them, this does not apply to you, and you're probably a super star at the large corporation anyway and are not reading this) And if you don't manage to push yourself as hard and giant corporation falls onto bad times, what's going to happen? You could be pushed out of your job (by better politicians, perhaps), and now you're actually less employable than if you'd taken the small company "higher risk" job.

So what I think is that people inflate the risk of going solo, doing the startup thing, or even joining a smaller firm, and forget the risk of staying stagnant at a large corporation where you might not get a chance to stretch, and the political game is far more vicious as it's practiced by many people who have nothing better to do all day precisely because the business faces effectively no risk. Startups eliminate such behavior because if you don't pull your weight, it's very obvious and the business is at risk, and good startups fire such people.

Don't Blame The Engineer

I was talking to someone at a big company recently, and we talked about their retention problem. The person said something to the effect that "We have so many engineers that you just can't cover everyone. There's too many places to hide!" My reaction was: "Wait a minute, why is it a problem with the individual engineers! In an organization this size, your problem is not the 300 bad eggs hiding in your organization. Your problem is the 300 directors (and up) and VPs you have of whom 50% are corrupting your culture intentionally, and 90% wasn't even aware of what your original culture was because nearly every manager you have was hired from the outside!"

Here's the hard truth about organizations. It's almost never the problem of a few "bad egg" engineers that's the root of your culture problem. I've a number of very bright friends at Yahoo, and they keep telling me that Yahoo still has great people, but you couldn't tell that from the outside: the problem is that at the top, the organization is dysfunctional, and no amount of great engineering can save you when you can't get your act together: even if one engineer somewhere in the organization were to invent the next billion dollar idea, that person wouldn't get heard, and wouldn't get sufficient resources in order to execute and deliver it to the market in order to generate that value.

Yet engineers persist on blaming other engineers for the problem. I'll never forget sitting down with a very senior engineer at Google several years ago discussing G-Drive. "The tech lead wasn't any good. If he was more persistent or more forceful, G-Drive might have launched." My jaw dropped. Knowing what we now know about how G-Drive was originally killed (it's documented in great detail in Steve Levy's book, In The Plex), we now know there was no way any engineer, no matter how forceful or brilliant, could have kept the project from the chopping block no matter what. The kind of people who could have saved that project were the people who were politically savvy enough to have the ear of Larry Page. Most of them were not engineers, they were managers, directors or "executives." I have no idea why the engineers I talk to feel the need to blame the engineers: it could be that just like with family quarrels, it's easy to turn the anger on the people you know well rather than the strangers.

Yes, there are circumstances under which engineers can and should take the blame. If you chose to build an entire website on PHP, or tried to scale a web-site based on Ruby on Rails, you deserve all the derision you get from your engineering peers. But even such screw ups, by and large, do not tank the company. And as long as you don't screw up management big time, you'll get a chance to rectify those errors. And yes, if you're at a 3 person startup and the product sucks because of engineering decisions, then blame the engineer(s) involved. But seriously, at a large company (anything over 200 people), blaming the engineer simply means that the management sucks and won't take responsibility for its mistakes. If you're such an engineer in such a firm, go get yourself a new job. Waiting for management that sucks to admit its made a mistake could take a really long time.

In Startup Engineering Management, I note that peer based systems cannot scale past Dunbar's number. One of the unnoted pernicious side effects, however, is that peer based systems also make it easy for management to shirk the important management tasks: that of choosing new managers as well as promoting the right people.

Choosing between jobs

One question that occasionally comes up at the end of a Negotiation cycle is, "Ok, now I have all these offers, how do I choose?" Typically, if you end your negotiation cycles in this state, it means that you've done an amazing job in your negotiations, since frequently, there's one stand out company and it's clear which one you should go. (When I had a choice between Yahoo, Google, and Versign in 2003, the answer was pretty obvious. Similarly, in 2010, when one of my friends had a choice between Google and Facebook, the answer was also obvious, even when the compensation numbers were ostensibly close)

In An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups I mention creating a spreadsheet so you can compare the companies involved. Well, one of the contributors to the third edition, Santhosh Srinivasan, has actually gone ahead and created it and shared it on Google Docs for all to use.

Santhosh writes that the inspiration behind the spreadsheet was LAAAM, the Lightweight Architecture Alternative Assessment Method. The idea is that you create a weighting that's important to you, and then rank each job offer independent of the weightings and then the highest scoring total would be your preferred offer.

In reality, I've never actually had to use such a spreadsheet, and neither do most of my clients. The intuitive approach works for most of us because ultimately, if you do a good job with negotiating compensation, the money difference should be so minor that who you want to work with should determine where you land. Since people are the least fungible of all, that approach works well unless you end up at a company so unstable that people come and go without your having an opportunity to work with the people you joined in order to work with. (That can happen, but your interview process should weed out such companies)

I do have friends who've built compensation models using spreadsheets, and then used that to get corporations to bid up their offers by showing that spreadsheet around to various companies. That's a viable approach.