Books, Movies, and TV series

Smackdown! The worst computer book

published: Thu, 28-Feb-2008

So, a couple of days ago, when I gravely pronounced Data Structures and Algorithms Using C# by Michael McMillan as the worst computer book I'd ever read (or, more accurately, partially read, for I no longer have the spare neurons to destroy in reading it all), a friend swiftly came back with, are you sure? Well, duh, nitwit, yes I am, didn't you read the three previous posts? He then sent me a PDF of another book, smacked me across the face with a virtual gauntlet, and challenged me. SMACKDOWN! Read more...

Car accident? Or train wreck?

published: Mon, 25-Feb-2008

...what's the difference?

Last night I read some more of Data Structures and Algorithms Using C# by Michael McMillan, but this time I wasn't reading in depth, instead just skimming over the material. Through it all, my emotions veered from a horrified awe (the old "look at that car accident" syndrome) to anger. Read more...

Look! Car accident!

published: Sun, 24-Feb-2008

Let me apologize in advance, but I just couldn't help it. You know the way traffic slows down to look at the aftermath of an accident in the other lane? Well, that's me with Data Structures and Algorithms in C#: I just had to go read another chapter last night. Well, my reasoning went, that  chapter on basic sorting could have been the exception, not the rule. Surely I should just check another chapter to make sure? It would be the honorable thing to do, right? So, I got my flashlight, made a tent under the bed covers so no one could see me, and started reading. Read more...

C# Algorithms Book Review

published: Sat, 23-Feb-2008

This week Amazon delivered to me two new algorithms and data structures books. The first, Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki, is going to take some in-depth perusing, because I'm still not very familiar with functional programming (I'm following Dustin Campbell's series on F# avidly, though). But the second, Data Structures and Algorithms Using C# by Michael McMillan is a different kettle of fish: it's in C#, which I know very well — along with the .NET Framework — and it's about some very familiar data structures and algorithms. Read more..

Lewis

published: Sat, 16-Feb-2008

Last night I finished watching the first series of Lewis, a continuation (or perhaps offshoot) of the Inspector Morse series. It is five years after Morse died and Sergeant Lewis is now an Inspector in his own right and has returned to Oxford to take up his duties again. Read more...

Inspector Morse

published: Thu, 3-Jan-2008

Over the past three months or so I've been working my way through all 33 episodes of Inspector Morse, a series of "police procedurals" or "murder mysteries" from the late 80s and early 90s, with some one-off specials all the way up to 2000. The interesting thing about Morse was that each episode was two hours long (including commercial breaks), when the standard for the time was one hour episodes. Read more...

The Prestige (the movie)

published: Mon, 13-Nov-2006

As I promised myself a while back, I went to see the movie version of The Prestige by Christopher Priest today. The flight back from Barcelona yesterday (I was there with Developer Express for TechEd Europe) was very long — three legs and 22 hours of travel — so I took the day off today to relax and catch up. Read more...

The Prestige

published: Tue, 24-Oct-2006

Last weekend we went to Chicago so that my wife could run the Chicago Marathon. When I booked the plane tickets online I neglected to see the little "1" under the "Number of Stops" column (or maybe I assumed that the plane was stopping once, in Chicago). So we had in fact two flights on the way there, one from Denver to Dallas and one from Dallas to Chicago and on the way back there was just the one flight. I decided to pick up The Prestige by Christopher Priest to reread on the lengthy journey, especially as last Friday, 20 October, the long-anticipated movie by Christopher Nolan, loosely based on the book, was released. Getting a good feel for the book again before seeing the movie was my goal. Read more...

Review of two Design Patterns books

published: Tue, 27-Jun-2006

I've just finished a couple of Design Pattern-related books, both of which are good in their respective and very different ways. The first is Holub on Patterns by Allen Holub, and the second Head First Design Patterns by Eric & Elisabeth Freeman. Read more...