MacMacmillan is pulling ALL of its books from Amazon - traditional and eBooks both.
MacMillan and most ofthe other big publishing houses are all cutting deals with Apple to get their books into the newly announced bookstore for the iPad.
Apple ships the Macintosh computer with tons of ways to program it.
While my favorite is probably still Java - it is certainly no longer C - the scripting languages always seem very warm and friendly to me.
In addition to Python, the one I have the most experience with - having started to use it professionally way back in the 1990s - one of my favorites on the Macintosh platform is Applescript.
AppleScript is based on HyperTalk, the internal scripting language of The Apple HyperCard utility that the company introduced two decades ago. Hypercard was the first "killer app" for the Macintosh computer.
Apple has a couple of nice home pages for AppleScript. The one that is probably the handiest starting point for developers and curious Mac-user is here http://developer.apple.com/applescript/
The readability of AppleScript code is pretty good.
What is even more amazing is how much power is built into it. Today, it comes with built-in support for doing data structures, web services, application automation, logging, iteration, containers, records, and so on. It comes with a framework that already understands: GUIs, applications in general, databases, web browsers, and word processors.
It is a Mac-savvy, worldly language that is really user-friendly.
Some of my favorite ways to manipulate data on computers do not involve programming at all, per se.
The W3 has created not one but several standards - based on the innovative DSSSL standard that was used from the 1990s on to apply presentation styling to portable documents.
The standards that were spawned by DSSSL are:
1. XSLT - DSSSL transformation rules represented as XML rather than scheme
2. XSL-FO - DSSSL styling properties and layout placement/content-flow model expressed in XML rather than scheme
3. CSS - DSSL styling properties, along with a syntax for defining where to put them, described using its own concise rule-based representation
You can read about all of these here: http://www.w3.org/Style/
Often, programming is overkill. Recognizing this, the DSSSL author defined a declarative model for applying styling rules to SGML documents. He also created an impressive transformation engine to convert the styled SGML content into popular document formats.
Although the Scheme language served was as the programming language used to host this clever invention, Scheme is not the most popular programming language - or representation on the planet.
XML and HTML were very popular in the late 1990s, when the problem of how to use the DSSSL technology in conjunction with web documents was being studied.
Today, every major browser has: CSS, XML, XSLT, HTML, and XHTML support - built into them.
Since the mid-1990s, web developers, programmers, document gurus have been striving to separate "content from presentation".
Thanks to these standards, although these folks are not required to do that, they know have not just one - but several - very practical ways to do that.
One of the handiest pages I have found in months is the Mozilla Developer Center home - at http://developer.mozilla.org/.
Ever since I got my first web browser, back in the early 1990s, I have bookmarked many hundreds - probably thousands - of pages that describe various standards and how to use them over the years.
Some are pages with quick reference cards, some are really good tutorials, some are bona fide standards specifications.
And sometimes, you come across a real treasure like this one. It has links to all sorts of these things. It covers the ones that matter most these days to a lot of people.
All the standard document formats and programming resources that are supported by the Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird programs are listed on this page. Clicking a the link for the subject you are interested in will bring you to a host of excellent sources of information about it.
In college, back in the 1980s, I got introduced by one of the guys who worked for the computer science department to a series of science fiction books by Jack L. Chalker that was called The Well World Series.
The books were fantastic.
He came up with a somewhat scientifically plausible artificial world, controlled by computers and incredibly advanced physics+mathematics - that was populated by lots of very different intelligent species. The world was divided up into hexagon shaped plots of land. Each species had its own home hex.
Each hex had its own properties. In some hexes, you could not use anything based on technology - it simply would not work there. In other hexes, technology based on stuff say up to the level of advancement of steam engines would work. Nothing more advanced would work there though. In other hexes, you might have magic. Certain types of magic would work in them.
It was very interesting.
He populated his world with creatures from mythology - such as centaurs and pegasus - as well as those of his own devising.
The hero, unwilling and sometimes even unwitting, was Nathan Brazil. Each book also had some other characters that were also the leading protagonists. Who they were varied with each story. Often, for much of the book, Nathan Brazil would just lurk around. For reasons that are revealed in some of the books, he really does not like to interfere.
There was also a terrific series that I think anyone involved in advanced physics, computers, operating systems programming, networking, security, or user interface design should read. It is completely fiction, albeit again, with a very good suspension of disbelief by way of scientific explanations worked into the stories.
The other series had books with titles like Sprits of Flux and Anchor and Soul Rider.
It was set on a world that had been colonized by earthlings, hundreds or thousands of years ago. It was terraformed using a form of energy with almost magical abilities to create and transform matter. The energy was controlled by computers. The computers were in turn instructed by human operators.
Since the computers could affect anything, including human beings and even the computers themselves, this posed a number of risks.
In order to protect the human operators and everyone else, there was a guard mechanism - and an override. The guard's role was to insure that the computer did not try to coopt or control the human in any way. The overrider's role was to detect if, despite the other measure, the human had been affected by the computer - to immediately kill that human operator. Thus, it was assured that the safety and freedom of everyone living in that world could not be compromised.
If only it were that simple. As everyone in 2005 knows, what you want the computer to never do still manages to somehow get done by them, somehow.
It is a very exciting series and like the Well World series, it blends science with fantasy very well.
One other series he did was called something like the Four Lords of the Diamond. It was about four worlds where, once again, highly advanced technology not unlike magic in some ways, dominated daily life.
As was the case in the series I just mentioned, the magic-like powers were not distributed evenly among the population. Some on each world were really blessed with the power. Others were jealous, or frightened, of their power. This tended to lead to totalitarian empires - where the need survival and control sort of waged a never ending battle. Kind of at a standstill. The worlds were not exactly stagnant. On the other hand, there was a sort of stalemate on them.
A secret agent is dispatched to each of these worlds. I will not say what he does on any of them. I will say that he does affect things.
He has also written some other series and books too numerous to list that I also liked, to varying degrees. Off-hand, I seem to recall that Del Rey and TOR were his major publishers. You can find all of his books, hopefully, at Amazon. Some are no longer in print, or at least were not the last time I checked. This is a shame. This man was one terrific author. And, thankfully - he was a prolific one as well.
Anyway, it seems that on Friday, February 11, 2005, Jack L. Chalker passed away at the age of 60 years old.
I have to say this saddens me because I have been a huge fan of this man's writing for over half my life. He is undoubtably one of my favorite science fiction authors. In fact, one of my favorite authors of all time, of any genre. In my book, he is tops. I say is because old authors never die. They live on in print forever.
So Jack L. Chalker joins those other literary greats of his field: Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and so many others.
I encourage you to go look at his web site - http://www.jackchalker.com/ - and have a look around. You can learn of his books, the worlds he created for them, and about his life and a bit about his family. You can tell he will be missed by them and his fans alike.
Jack L. Chalker loved Baltimore and I believe he used to be a teacher there. He loved sea food and was a big fan on the fresh Maryland crab that was available there. So, the next time you eat some seafood, especially crab - think of this guy and the magical stories that he used to write that were a delicious blend of science and magic.
As long as people remember him and enjoy the fantastic books he wrote, he will never really die.
Just bought my Koss KS 5190 digital dolby home theater system tonight.
This thing is amazing. And only $180 at Best Buy.
It came with 6 small speakers plus a subwoofer the size of a mini tower PC. A total of 7 speakers!
It plays all kinds of media: CD, DVD, and Secure Digital cards that have MP3 or WMA music on them or pictures.
In addition to all of its video and movie capabilities, it also has an AM/FM tuner inside of it.
It comes with a remote that runs off 2 AAA batteries (included). It includes the standard 3 way RCA video/right/left cable as well as all 7 speaker wires.
Took me about an hour to hook everything up, most of which was figuring where to put it. If you were in a hurry, you could do it in 15 minutes, easily. If you have read the installation instructions before; probably 5 minutes.
That is not counting turning the thing on and going through all the configuration menus. I am going to do that in a few minutes. After I update the software in my Mac for my El Gato EyeTV.
This is the perfect combination of features for a college student who would has a small room and perhaps a small TV already - and wants to be able to play his MP3 CDs, listen to the radio, play the audio CDs he buys from Amazon or at the mall, watch DVDs on Friday nights with his girlfriend and on Saturday afternoons with his buddies.
This does everything that a whole shelf of stuff in my living room does. I have this one set up in my dining room for now. It looks like a low profile DVD player. Since it is so compact I have it sitting on my old video tape cabinet. It doesn't require a lot of space.
Amazing considering how much equipment it takes the place of! Stereo receiver, DVD player, CD player, MP3 player, digital camera photo player, home theater sound system - it does it all!
I will probably run the video to my Mac, initially - via the EyeTV video device. Eventually I might get a small TV for it.
I have an Airport Express that is going to be used to stream music from iTunes on my Mac to this thing, so I can listen to my CD collection on all its speakers. I won't even have to get up to change a CD. I have a week's worth of music. Been buying CDs since the late 1980s.
Things are not as simple as they seems at first. - Edward Thorp
