The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I don't think the author of this book is the person who coined the saying 'black swan' but that isn't really important. What is important is what he's trying to say, that we tend to ignore the impact of highly improbable events, mostly because we aren't able to predict them. The saying comes from the fact that we thought all swans were white until somebody found a black one and our definition of a swan was turned on its head.

I think this book has become a commercial success due to a little bit of serendipity, it arrived on the shelves of bookshops at about the same time as the financial meltdown kicked off, arguably a black swan in itself (although I'd argue quite a few people saw this coming but not many realised how serious it would become). I think that's what they call ironic.

Anyway onto the book. For me it only really comes into itself in the last few chapters where he gets into the technical details of our failure to predict, which is mostly down to our use of the Gaussian/normal distribution where it isn't applicable. We should be using fractals instead (before reading this I thought fractals were purely used to produce pretty pictures). The earlier chapters could have been shortened more for my liking, there's only so many ways you can say we fail to take notice of the impact of the highly improbable (except after the event when we manage to produce a narrative to explain why it happened and wasn't totally unexpected). I guess I'm more interested in the hard facts, rather than the philosophical musings. But that said, it's still a very good read and certainly makes one think. I guess the important point is that we should try to increase our exposure to potential positive black swans (business opportunities etc) whilst reducing our exposure to potential negative ones.

The RPF book has a cover

Thanks to my other half, the Random Pub Finder book now has a proper cover. Unfortunately, in the mean time, Lulu has changed their publishing prices which means the cost for an A5 book is now much more than their standard sizes. Which, in these credit crunch times, may be putting off some purchasers. So now I'm busily repaginating it to fit into a US Trade size, whatever that is. Whatever it is, it's much cheaper to publish. So you still may want to hold off purchasing it for a bit, if you were planning on doing.

Sales so far - 4. Ho hum...

How we got into this mess

I read 'Liar's Poker' a few years ago and it was a fascinating insight into the people who work on Wall Street (or did during the 80s). The author of that book has written an article chronicling the insanity that has led us to the financial turmoil we find ourselves in. Most of it will be familiar to many people, mortgages being sold to people who had no hope of repaying them, this toxic debt being packaged up to look like low risk AAA rated bonds and the fallout when this debt started turning bad.

the article mostly talks about Steve Eisman, who seems to be one of the financiers to see this trouble coming and started shorting the market. Ironically this actually made things worse...

But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower.

Which may help to explain why things have got so bad. Not only have a lots of loans gone bad, but lots of fantasy loans that never actually existed have gone bad as well.

Stuart's Stories

I reviewed Stuart Maconie's book about the North some time ago and now Visit England's North West are offering a free book called "Stuart's Stories", which contains some of his writings about the North West. I'm not sure if they are straight from the book or if this is new content, but either way it can't be bad for free can it?

Capital boozing - the Random Pub Finder book

It used to be called vanity publishing. An aspiring author, having been rejected by all the standard publishers, would decide the problem wasn't with themselves and their work, but with the publishers who were clearly blind to the author's genius. So the only solution was to go out and get their work published themselves and sell hundreds of thousands of copies that way. Of course what generally happened was that, after paying out thousands to the vanity publisher, the author would be left with 2472 copies of their masterpiece sat in the loft, after giving out the other 28 copies to friends and family.

Things have changed, we can now all be published authors via the wonderful lulu.com. The beauty of this system is that a forest doesn't get destroyed to sate the author's vanity. Books are only produced if somebody is actually interested in them. And because they are published on demand, books can be updated and corrected quickly and easily.

So to take advantage of this system, we've taken the reviews from the Random Pub Finder and put them all together in one convenient book shaped package. I don't know about you but even with all the latest technologies for reading on a screen, I still much prefer a book. No power problems, no waiting to boot up, no random crashes.

Anyway, if you want to buy a copy, hop over to http://www.lulu.com/content/2003276. I'm still waiting for a design for the cover, but other than that it's all done.

Code - Charles Petzold

If he didn't have a blog, for me Charles Petzold would just be that guy who wrote the seminal book on Windows programming. But since he does have a blog, I now know he's written lots of other stuff as well. I guess that shows blogs can be pretty powerful advertising tools, and I guess I'm not the first person to say so.

Anyway, since I'm regularly reminded of his existence, I'd been thinking of purchasing "Code" for some time (or hoping somebody would buy it for me) and I eventually got round to it. To tell you the truth it wasn't really what I was expecting. Code to me is what I use to write software, but Petzold uses a much wider definition. Code in this book refers to any kind of code from Morse, Braille through telegraphs, onto machine code, ASCII and finally onto programming languages. Although it wasn't what I was expecting I certainly wasn't disappointed. Over the course of the book, Petzold explains why computers are built the way they are, starting from the basic building blocks of relays leading onto transistors, binary numbers and logic gates. This then leads onto more complex circuits finally ending up with a microprocessor. Then he adds to this to finally end up with something resembling the computer we know today.

And all the time, he is explaining why there is the need to build what we are trying to build. For instance, I remember learning abut flip-flops at Uni but I don't remember anybody ever explaining why they are useful (they're a basic form of memory if you're interested). Of course it's quite possible I just wasn't listening when that bit was explained but nevertheless "Code" was a great reminder of the things I've learnt in the past. It also helped to join the dots between different bits of technology.

The book is almost ten years old now, but due to its bias towards the history of computer technology it hasn't dated, unlike most tech books. I guess the final chapter may seem a little out of date but that isn't of major importance.

The only problem I can see with the book is that it may not be suited to non-techy people. There is nothing here that couldn't be understood by a lay-person but it would probably be pretty heavy going. But for a technical person looking for a refresher on the building blocks of computers it is perfect.

Metastorm book

If you've ever wanted to read about Metastorm BPM when you haven't got access to a computer, before now there wasn't really anything available. Now my boss and BPM guru Jerome Pearce has written the 'Metastorm BPM Developer's Guide'. So you can now read all about developing processes when you're sat on the loo.

http://www.lulu.com/content/1862471

Lulu looks like a great website for cheap book publishing, something I hope to be taking advantage of soon. I'll keep you posted.

Writing software for mutant women

For me, the best part of "Dead Ringers" (the David Cronenberg film, not the mildly amusing impressions show) is the gynaecological instruments developed by one of the freaky medical twins. He's so out of his head on drugs that he thinks the women who are coming to his surgery are all mutants so he has to produce some terrifying new instruments to deal with them.

What brought this to mind was seeing the film again for the first time in about 15 years and also reading one of my Christmas books, "Why Software Sucks". Although seemingly unrelated, I think there is some common ground. As Davis Platt points out many times in his book, the reason why software sucks is because us software developers don't understand our users. We may not be out of our minds on drugs (at least not all the time) but our lack of empathy with our users mean we continually produce software that doesn't meet their needs.

I'm mostly in agreement with him here, although I'm not sure if he's having a go at developers directly or more generally companies that produce software. As a rule, the actual developers don't always have much of a say in what gets pushed out the door. Product management, sales, marketing, CTOs, QA and a host of other people have a pretty big input into what goes into software and how it should look and feel, whereas developers are often just following orders.

There is a reason I'm not too keen on the book, it does tend to re-hash a lot of what Alan Cooper wrote in "About Face". To be fair he is aiming at a different audience, normal people, who are pretty unlikely to have read Cooper's book. Me being a geek and not a normal person have read Cooper's book and Platt's book. If you're a developer, I'd recommend "About Face", if you're just a normal person forced to use software, I'd recommend "Why Software Sucks".

And as a developer I'm trying my best to write software that is not for mutant women.

Pies and Prejudice

One of the sure signs of getting older is listening to Radio 2, not in some kind of ironic post-modern way but because, of all the options available, it seems like the best one. And if you listen to Radio 2 then it's pretty much required to like Stuart Maconie, since it seems like half their output involves him. Fortunately I fall into that category. The man's funny and it's always good to hear a Northern accent on the radio (even if it has been softened, presumably from too many years living in the South).

So when I saw his book 'Pies and Prejudice - In Search of the North' I was interested. When I read the back cover 'A northerner in exile, stateless and confused' I thought yep that's me and promptly bought it (OK I put it on my Amazon wish list and somebody bought it for me several months later).

And it's a great read. He writes like he talks, so if you like his shows you'll like the book. Any Northerner reading it will no doubt be disappointed by his lack of coverage of <insert name of place that is important to you>. I was surprised by the lack of mention of Lancaster, one of the more attractive towns in Lancashire and the Trough of Bowland, Lancashire's best kept secret. I wasn't so surprised by him avoiding Blackburn and Darwen, which even the most rabid Lancastrian would have to admit are dumps. And even when he does cover areas in some depth, anybody with some inside knowledge will probably think he's missed out some important parts.

But covering every little nook and cranny isn't really the point of the book. Maconie is attempting to redress the balance of the coverage of the North. It's not all terraced houses, grim weather, even grimmer food, unemployment and fighting, which is what you may think based on the typical drama based anywhere in the North. And he succeeds in doing that. Unfortunately he may have succeeded but I suspect the people who should read it, the people with those prejudices about the North, quite likely won't be the people buying it. And perhaps that's no bad thing. Do we really want the North to become yet another weekend escape from London, with property prices driven up by bankers who only ever visit every month? Perhaps it's best for the prejudices to remain intact, the people who matter know it's not true. Lets keep it our little secret.

High Stakes, No Prisoners

It all seems so long ago now, the days of insane valuations of internet companies. Well it did until the bubble started to inflate again recently. Although of course it's not a bubble this time, oh no... Anyway back to the subject of this post, the book I was reading over Christmas, "High Stakes, No Prisoners". It's the story of the creator of FrontPage who in the space of two years went from start-up to selling out to Microsoft for $133 million. Yes, that FrontPage, the crappy HTML editor loved by amateur website developers the world over. To be fair, from reading the book it sounds like at the time there wasn't much else around and it was fairly cutting edge. And the book is certainly a good read, if you want to learn about the ins and outs of getting a start-up financed.