Book Review – Starship Troopers

Posted on 28/03/2012 by

Just finished reading Starship Troopers, another great book by Robert A. Heinlein. I saw the movie a couple of years ago, but the book is very different from the movie, and as expected, a lot better. Like Stranger in a Strange Land, the author toys with a the idea of a new world society, this time one based on citizenship that is gained by doing voluntary army service. An unlike in Stranger in a Strange Land, here the system seems to work because there is a working world federation that has survived for long… So I guess Heinlein thinks that a world based on responsibility for your actions is more possible than a world based on love. I agree with him.

It was good to have read this two books together, to analyze the differences and the similarities. First of all, there almost no women in Starship Troopers, except from an occasional appearance. In Stranger in a Strange Land they are a central part of the story. But in both cases Heinlein shows how he considers women a beautiful thing, how we (men) do so many things because of them, how the interactions between men and women are so special. Completely against the theory that men and women are equal. Secondly, both books show us how we are so dumb that we don’t make the right choices even though they are obviously correct. In Starship Troopers the main character is enrolled by a mutilated man (wheelchair and others), telling him that this can happen to him if he goes to the army, how hard it is, how in can kill you in so many ways. But does this change his mind? Noooo sir, because that won’t happen to him, it will happen to somebody else. How stupid. Stranger in a Strange Land is more subtle, but present all the time in the monologues done by Jubal Harshaw.

All in all a great book, and worth every minute of reading (or listening in the car, as I lately do a lot). You can buy the book from amazon (and from now on I’ll stop saying that his contributes to this and that and that you are helping me and all of that stuff).

Enhanced by Zemanta

Posted in Thoughts | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Code Generation is Not Agile

Posted on 26/03/2012 by

I am a great advocate of software modeling, which provides a higher abstraction of software artifacts that allow us easier work with them. For my current project (OPM Editor and Interpreter) I use a model based on the eclipse modeling framework (EMF). Until now I had only a model for the editor, and when I started to implement the interpreter the names of the packages that I set for the editor model didn’t seem good enough, so I decided to refactor them. Oh what a headache. I changed the name of the package in the genmodel file and regenerated everything… but now I have to manually update and remove all the old files, trying to remember which files has manual changes (with @generated NOT annotations).

What is the problem here? that the current MDE methodologies (Model Driven Engineering) or any of its names (MDA, MDD…) support mostly forward transformations (from model to code) but if the code is modified the model does know this. Furthermore, the model is not aware of the code, and like in my case this can create duplicate files (if you changed the name of the package for example) and other strange stuff.

So take this into account when you are using model driven methodologies and code generation. At my previous job we NEVER mixed manual code with mixed code, so changes to the generated code did not alter the manual code, and we could always plug the manual code into any generated code changes (with manual hooks). This is a good practice that should be followed. And if you don’t know if your generated code can be refactored, spend more time thinking on how you will name things, because they will be hard (and expensive) to change later.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Book Review – Fahrenheit 451

Posted on 18/03/2012 by

Fahrenheit  is a strange book. Not so much science fiction, more of social fiction. It tells of social fiction, of a world were “happiness” (fun) is the only value and it is forbidden to read (maybe even own) books, because they make you think and in doing this they make you sad. There is a bit of science fiction in the book, like the mechanical dog which can “smell” a specific person’s scent with expert accuracy, find him and kill (or maybe only paralyze him) which a needle which he has on his mouth. And then there are interactive TVs the size of walls, for which you can also buy extra components so that when the speaker talks, he talks your name and acts as if he is talking only to you. But these are minor things.

The major topic of the book are the Firefighters, which don’t extinguish fires, but light them. They are the ones in charge of burning the books. The main character, Montague, is a firefighter who turns against the establishment after having met a girl who seduces him with her vision of the world. And then he finds a book and reads. And this changes him forever.

I didn’t enjoy the book much. The author describes too many things too many times. Long uses of adjectives to describe what Montague feels just get a boring and while the story is already short it could be reduced even more. And reading the Wikipedia entry on the novel, I saw the in truth the book is an expansion of a short novel called “The Fireman”, which itself is a longer version of a short story called “Bright Phoenix”.

Anyway, but it is one of the must-reads for every science fiction fan, and there are some interesting things in the book, so if you want to buy it, do so from amazon and this will pay for some 0.00005% percent of my web hosting (I’m exaggerating, but not by much).

Enhanced by Zemanta


Posted in Thoughts | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Book Review – The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Trilogy

Posted on 17/03/2012 by

This is the second time I have read the full Hitchhiker’s trilogy (in four parts), and the third time reading the first book of the trilogy – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And I have enjoyed all of them very much. Douglas Adams was a completely insane guy, and it is a very sad thing he died so young.

There is so much to say about this book (or more correctly, books) that I don’t know where to start… First of all, if you haven’t read them go ahead and do this. Right now. Stop reading this and start reading the books!

Ah, you’re still here… well, I’ll continue. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (not the book you are reading, the other one) is a very popular book in the whole universe basically for two reasons: it is a lot cheaper than the Encyclopedia Galactica and it also has the words “don’t panic” written in friendly letters on the cover. The term was usually used with the following picture (which was very popular in 1995 web sites from what I remember):

Anyway, the book(s) tell the story of how two galactic hitchhikers (one human Arthur Dent and one Betelgeusian Ford Prefect) get mixed up in the quest to answer the ultimate question to life, the universe and everything, accompanied by a crazy two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox (who happens to be the president of the galaxy), another human girl (Trillian) and a very, but very depressive robot called Marvin. The story is simply too complex to be explained in less than a couple of pages, and if you want to spoil the fun before you read it, check the book’s entry in the Wikipedia, which now that I think of it, is either becoming the Encyclopedia Galactica or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a funny idea from XKCD).

Like Terry Pratchett, Adams understood how people think and how the world is run. For example, Zaphod may be the president of the galaxy but he has absolutely no power, and was actually screened before being selected to be sure that he could not do anything harmful. Some quotes from the book show this even better:

“This planet (earth) has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It’s a nice day, or You’re very tall, orOh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months’ consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don’t keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn’t know about.”

And there are millions, millions more. But why spoil it for you? Buy the book from amazon, and by doing this you’ll give me a very, very, tiny percentage of the sale. But if you find it cheaper somewhere else buy it there.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted in Thoughts | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Book Review – Stranger In A Strange Land

Posted on 08/03/2012 by

The classic science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land started pretty good, moved partly into a cheap soft porn mini-novel of the 70′s and in between provided interesting views on religion, life and may other things.

While the book shows many ideas that may bother the reader, like free sex, lots of sexism and stuff like that (many comments about this in the reviews in goodreads), there is a lot very interesting material in the views displayed by Jubal, one of the two main characters of the book (the second one being the man from mars, Mike). But what made the most impact in me was the way Mike understood why we laugh. Just one day after finishing the book I happened to go to a stand-up comedy show and was impressed on how correct he was. Mike says (SPOILER ALERT): “I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts so much… because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.”. How fascinatingly true, and how incredibly sad.

Anyway, makes for good bedtime reading or listening while driving. And as always, you can buy this book from amazon (use the link) and I will get a teeny weeny percentage of your purchase (I plan to be rich… but this is surely not going to help :-) . But still, every bit counts)

Enhanced by Zemanta


Posted in Thoughts | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment