The No Starch Press Blog

I’m intrigued by a July 5 New York Times article titled “On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble.” Apparently, according to Joe Nocera’s report, there’s a bit of controversy and politicking within Google regarding day care. Google is considering raising the cost of its day care by 75 percent, and Googlers with kids don’t appear to be very happy.

I’m sure that there are multiple sides to this story but a few things stand out. For one, at least based on this writer’s report, Google has a bit of a problem with employee expectations. If I take a job at Google, expecting amazing free food all day, subsidized day care, and who knows what else, what happens when the money isn’t rolling in so quickly and benefits need to be cut? What’s Google to do? Start to cut to reduce the bleeding. That’s just business, especially when you’re a public company.

Granted, Google’s benefits are pretty amazing by any standard, but how long can the party last? And when the drinks and hors doeuvres start to run out, how long will the guests linger?

As Joe Nocera comments, Google’s stock dropped 44 percent from a high of $744 to a low of $412, though it has since recovered a bit back to $537 at Thursday’s close. Still, that’s a bit of a tumble as we continue our slide into a bear market. The bad news is coming from all sides and all sorts of companies, and money is already tight. Any business is going to need to pay close attention to their bottom line, and even more attention to that P&L when they’re public. Stockholders are pretty unforgiving and, when you’re a high flyer like Google, one slip can turn into a really bad fall.

Nocera relates a couple of comments from Sergey Brin that certainly make Brin seem arrogant and elitist. Who knows whether Brin actually made these statements, but here’s what Nocera has to say:

At a T.G.I.F. in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.)

Nocera also drew my attention to a very interesting blog by Sergey Solyanik, who writes of his return to Microsoft from Google. Granted, this is one voice (be sure to read not only his post but also the comments on his post), but it’s certainly food for thought.

Over at the Penguin blog, Nick Hornby neatly captures the uncertainty of the ebook’s future:

There is currently much consternation in the book industry about the future of the conventional book, but my suspicion is that it will prove to be more tenacious than the CD, for the following reasons:

1) Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs. Vinyl yes, CDs no. They are too small for interesting cover art and legible lyrics, the cases break easily, and despite all promises to the contrary, they are extremely easy to break and scratch. Books have remained consistently lovable for several hundred years now. For readers, a wall lined with books is as attractive as any art we could afford to put up there.

UPDATE: 8.8 million ain’t too shabby.

Get your copy of the latest, greatest, browser around, and help Firefox break a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

Catch the fever, right here.

And for newcomers to the browser, here’s a printable shortcut cheatsheet:

Baron Schwartz just posted an exhaustive summary of his experience writing High Performance MySQL for O’Reilly. He has great insight into writing well, research, and the interpersonal side of publishing. Highly recommended reading for aspiring authors and those who work in tech publishing.

On time management…

There’s a non-linear relationship between pages and work, and pages that are going into print are going to take a lot more work than your senior thesis or dissertation, believe me. Anyway, however it works for you, try to get a sense of the hours it’ll need. Now mentally visualize where you’re going to get those hours from. Really, how much time do you think you can spend in evenings and weekends? You still have to do all the ordinary things like paying bills and washing dishes, too.

On tech reviewers…

We also didn’t make it clear to the reviewers that they were supposed to be reviewing, not editing. I’d try not to make this mistake again. Some of the reviewers spent a lot of time editing grammar and style. Unfortunately, this was wasted effort — the material was nowhere near good enough quality to be editing for style and grammar (and the style is up to the author and editor, not tech reviewers).

On production editors…

The production editor was going to just check for spelling and grammar, right? I think someone told me that. Instead, she went through the book in such incredible detail I couldn’t believe it. And she proposed major changes to just about every paragraph in the whole book. She made so many changes that it took me at least a day, sometimes two or three, to review each chapter. That’s weeks of work I never saw coming — every weekend, every night, all the time — just like when I was writing. And these were necessary changes. She found every little ambiguous phrase, every contradiction between parts of the book, missing curly braces in code samples, paragraphs that belonged in other chapters, sentences that needed to be moved, commas in the wrong place, and much more. She was an absolute editing machine.

And as a bonus, he includes a killer set of regexes to catch troublesome constructions.

Nick Carr ponders the big switch in our brains in the Atlantic:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

[David Brooks’s earlier piece, “The Outsourced Brain,” makes a nice counterpoint.]

Tim Bray vents about Wikipedia’s Deletionist problem, and receives some interesting responses:

This one is obvious; _why is one of the handful of people who constitute the public face of Ruby. Some of his published code snippets make shivers run up and down my spine. Several of his libraries—most notably, I suppose, Hpricot—are very widely used. He’s written a popular online book. I’ve never met him but would very much like to.

Yes, he’s eccentric. Yes, he conceals his real name. Yes, he would almost certainly be happier if the entry were removed. So what? Wikipedia without that entry would be less accurate, less complete, and less useful.

Joel Spolsky’s unique take on workplace incentives and performance reviews (a bit old, but still good reading):

The effect of reviews on morale is lopsided: while negative reviews hurt morale a lot, positive reviews have no effect on morale or productivity. The people who get them are already working productively. For them, a positive review makes them feel like they are doing good work in order to get the positive review… as if they were Pavlovian dogs working for a treat, instead of professionals who actually care about the quality of the work that they do.

I seem to blog in spurts. OK, I don’t just seem to, I do. Waves of blogging.

Some people blog actively. They look for things to blog about. They actually do research so that they can find something interesting to blog about. That just seems odd to me. Blogging should be a bit more organic, shouldn’t it?

I just look at what I’m writing and think “who wants to read this?” I’ve never really cared for my own writing which may be why I’ve never finished any of the books that I’ve started. I do enjoy editing though.

Back to the question that I pose in the title of this post. Is blogging boring? I think it can be tedious, for sure. What were we all doing before blogging came around? Or social networking tools like Twitter? I seem to be typing more and more each day; saying less and less. Filling that void. Must fill void.

No, I don’t think blogging is boring, but it is work. And it can certainly be tiring. After you’ve spent the last couple of hours editing a technical book, it’s hard to sit down and write something brilliant. Cogent, maybe, but brilliant? Not me.

Well then. Good night from blogging land. Guess I’ll try to plant some of my summer blooming flower bulbs tomorrow. That just requires a bit of digging. You know, like blogging research.

OK, they must have used glue.

All of a sudden, every manufacturer (Asus, HP, MSI, and so on) is pumping out these amazing mini-notebooks at amazing prices. Where have they been all these years? All I ever wanted was a nice, small, portable laptop with a nice small screen, that wouldn’t break my back, and that didn’t cost $2,000. And all I ever found were 17″ behemoths with more goo-gahs than I’d ever use, and more weight than any book we’ve ever published. (Save one or two, that is. And I’m not talking about notebooks.)

How did laptops ever become luggables again, anyway? I remember picking up an old Kaypro at a thrift shop in Manhattan several years back. It was truly luggable. I left it in my friend Nelson’s apartment and I think he put it out with the trash. When did we start going from portables to luggables? And how did we suddenly make our way back?

I figure the OLPC is behind this shift. I have an OLPC and it’s cute, but I don’t enjoy using it. The keyboard is much too tiny and I don’t care for the GUI. I don’t see why a more standard GUI wouldn’t have done just fine; why reinvent the wheel? I find it hard to sort out and I don’t feel like taking the time to learn which button to press to get back to the main screen or get back to where I started. And all of those blinky hotspots are confusing. I can never quite figure out if I’m connected to some mesh or if a mesh really exists. A list would do just fine.

I’ve been shopping these ultra-portables or whatever the term-of-the-day is, and my thought is that a Thinkpad X40 is a better deal than any of these portables. Maybe I’m wrong but I used a 600X for years until it was stolen up in Montreal. (Nothing at all against Montreal, btw.) That machine was rock-solid and it ran Ubuntu 6.x beautifully. The screen was great, the keyboard was amazing, and I edited many No Starch Press books on it over the years. I wouldn’t mind having it today but I think the X40 will be even better. It’s certainly faster and lighter, and my BSD friends love theirs.

My current laptop is an Acer. I bought it because it was the cheapest laptop around at the time but it’s pretty much crapola. The paint is wearing off, the fan makes odd noises, it gets too hot, and it’s just mushy feeling. It’s got a nice screen for watching DVDs but I’ll be glad to see it go.

Yep, gotta get one of those X40s. They sound so futuristic, don’t they? Like some kind of crazy fighter plane. Woosh.

Yes, I’m going to get myself a huggable.

Sacha Chua (the charming and talented author of the forthcoming Wicked Cool Emacs) put together a fun slideshow: The Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work. It doesn’t have anything to do with Emacs, but I think you’ll like it anyway.

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Makes me want a DS!

I asked the Google AdWords people for a definition of “hacking.” Unfortunately, it’s not forthcoming. Here’s the gist of what I received in reply to my request:

Hello Bill,

Thank you for your email. I apologize for any frustration you may be

experiencing. I understand that you'd like to know more about our content

policy on hacking and cracking since your ads for promoting books that

involve content about hacking have been disapproved.

Per our policies, we do not allow ads and/or landing pages offering

products that provide instructions to hack, contain hacking techniques or

promote hacking and tools that aid in copyright infringement. At this

time, your ads and your website do not meet our policies. Please remove

this content for your ad to run.

Umm, does this mean we have to take down our website? I mean, we don’t offer any instructions on our site for hacking (I don’t think — do they mean sample chapters?). But even if we do, and maybe we do, what’s the problem? We’re not offering cracking instructions and there’s a big difference between hacking and cracking.

I’m at work on a post in response to one of our reader’s comments that Hacking: The Art of Exploitation should be called Cracking: The Art of Exploitation. That has a nice ring to it but the book isn’t about cracking.