The author is clearly very pro-gun, and uses the book to push the common justification of “if everyone has guns, we need mo’ guns”. Only one of the myriad interactions between the group and others completes with the exchange as agreed and everyone standing, the more usual outcome is complete carnage with the justification of “the mission” (to find a cure) being paramount. Those in the group with a more sensitive disposition all meet sticky ends, and only the “warriors” survive.

All this wouldn’t matter so much if the story had solid, consistent sci-fi underpinnings, but that’s not the case. The concept of a contagion with an element which rapidly corrodes common metals is a good one. However that is then elaborated past the point of believability, with almost the whole of mankind infected overnight by a cocktail of our deadliest diseases, which have somehow been engineered to produce almost no human symptoms but to destroy any nearby metal with not much more than a nasty look. The fact that we already protect ferrous metals in particular with coatings, by alloying or plating them with less reactive elements, or embedding them in bodies of glass, rubber and concrete is quietly ignored. This results in a situation where a gun can be protected despite repeated handing by wiping it with disinfectant, but someone obviously licked the Golden Gate Bridge and it collapsed.

A corollary of the in-credible science is very little discussion of possible solutions.  What there is, is inconsistent: there’s a list of the viral components and their metal targets, but a few pages later the priorities include one not on the list, and the list of “likely” vaccines ignores the fact vaccines for coronaviruses like COVID-19 have literally been developed within weeks of the viruses being identified. There appear to be other editing errors too: a note from the villain includes a hidden message, but the following discussion refers to elements which are not in the text, at least in the Kindle edition.

If you want a good fast-paced romp with lots of people being shot, this may be for you, but if you want a more measured thoughtful sci-fi thriller look elsewhere.

In 1948 the Allies have the atomic bomb, and Germany is making substantial efforts to create their own. When an unexpected contact provides the opportunity for MI6 to sabotage that programme they have to take it.

The story reflects reality in clever ways. Britain really did attack the German nuclear weapons programme, most famously through the Telemark raids on the Norwegian heavy water plant. In this story, however, a more subtle approach is required, and the author cleverly adapts an attack vector actually used against a rogue atomic programme in our own century. While this is a work of fiction the technical elements are largely correct and clearly explained.

At one side of this tale are a group of British spies, operating under the cover of building trade relationships with Germany. Although not infallible they are dedicated and capable. On the other side are several officers of the Kriminalpolizei, the German police’s detective force. They are also honest and competent, the author avoiding the trope of the indolent or dishonest police officer and building some genuine sympathy. You want the British spies to succeed, but you also want this group of police officers to survive and thrive.

Between these poles sits a mixed cast of other characters each with their own agendas, developing rivalries different from, but not unlike those in the real cold war.

This is a relatively short book and the story rips along quite quickly, action and investigation developing quickly side by side. The Italianate denouement when it comes would fit right into an episode of Zen, with the agreed explanation and resulting punishments and rewards bearing a limited relationship to the truth, but given your ambivalent feelings for many of the German characters it feels quite satisfactory.

Amazon now labels this “A David Brook Novel”, and it is quite possible that the surviving central characters on both sides could re-appear. I would very much enjoy that.

In the interests of full disclosure I note that the author approached me to request a review, and provided a free copy of the book for that purpose, however the review above is very much my own.

The author seems to have a very poor grasp of mechanics, and the course of the asteroid is such that early on it’s “a little closer than the moon”, because the author doesn’t want something as prosaic as the speed of light getting in the way of chatty dialogue between the two central female characters, yet rather later on it’s “about four times further away”. Hang on, doesn’t that mean it’s moving away from Earth?

Other numbers and concepts seem to be equally confused. There’s a good thread about “moonborn” characters being demonised on Earth, similar to current Hispanic and Muslim immigrants to the US, but no explanation of how these amount to any significant numbers, especially given the acknowledged challenges of making the journey back if you were born in 1/6 g. There’s a comparison between the projected impact and the largest H Bomb, but a factor of 1000 goes missing somewhere, and you can’t help thinking that real scientists would use terms like “Giga” and “Tera”, and SI units, which have a well-defined, internationally-invariant value.

I finished the book because I wanted to write a review, but this is really one that wasn’t worth completing.

The central part of the book (between the commando raid and sinking the ferry) is almost entirely fictional, involving “Kurt Nordstrom” in not one but two love affairs. Now I get that “Kurt spent the summer of 1943 on the plateau eating reindeer and dodging the Germans” isn’t going to fill a lot of pages, but  a shorter more focused tale would have been fine. Once you realise that this section is what it is, it calls into question how much of the remainder is historic.

The irony is that a lot of this is unnecessary. By Gross’ own admission, the dramatic chase which separated one of the escaping Gunnerside team from the others actually happened, just to another character not the invented American, and the true story of how the plant’s night watchman interrupted the commandos setting the explosives not once but twice in search of his glasses is both funny and more dramatic than the way it’s told here.

Beyond that, the story has been told well, with less fictionalisation, several times in recent years. The BBC documentary accompanying Ray Mears’ excellent 2003 book was superb, with interviews of many of the real players. I thoroughly enjoyed the tri-partisan 2015 TV series The Saboteurs which succeeded in portraying the perspectives of not only the Norwegian commandos and their supporters, but also the British and Norwegian commanders, and key participants on the German side. Even the still enjoyable 1965 film sticks to the truth at least as much as Gross’ book.

The book was originally  published under the title The Saboteur, which makes perfect sense, but then got re-titled The Spy, which makes none, as there’s very little spying involved, and a lot of sabotage. Maybe this was to avoid an obvious clash with the international TV series, but it raises another “why?”.

If you want to read an enjoyable wartime romp with some real key events, then this book is fine. If you’d prefer to understand the background, achievement and the real players, track down one of the TV series.

The basic plot is a simple one: advanced gene therapy being developed as a cancer cure is surreptitiously diverted into potential military applications, and both the medical and military uses generate very dangerous side-effects, which have to be contained or reversed. The story romps along at a good pace, the “techno” elements are well developed and fairly believable, and you come to like the competent, well-meaning central characters, turning pages enthusiastically to see if they can avert the apocalypse.

The writing is perhaps a bit weaker on the conspiracy side of the thriller.  There are lots of secondary characters with varying motivation: good, bad, and those doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. However these motivations are readily revealed and rarely change, and it lacks the sheer murk of a good conspiracy. Also whereas the technical elements are either tidied up neatly or left hanging deliberately, that’s not so true of the darker plot elements, and several key aspects are left unexplained.

That said, these are minor complaints. I did enjoy this book and I’ll definitely read Rothman’s other techno-thriller(s).

In an afterword the author explains that it’s very difficult to get traditional publishers interested in such material, despite the success of Crichton, Kerr and others.  That’s a shame, because it’s a genre which continues to intrigue me, and does have an audience. However it looks like we have to continue to go hunting to find the good ones, even before trying to discern the plots of the stories themselves.

The book should be valuable to many: If you want to be an expert software designer, this book provides an overview of the skills and knowledge you need to develop. If you want to recruit such a person, this provides a set of key indicators and interview prompts. If you are in one of those software development organisations which believes that quality architecture can somehow emerge by magic from the unguided work of undifferentiated coders, this might make you think again.

If you are, or think you are, a software architect, this book should act in the same way as a good sermon: it will remind you of what already know you should be doing, and act as a prompt against which you can measure your own performance and identify areas for improvement. It reminded me that I can sometimes be slow to listen to the views of others, or evidence which may change a design, and slow to engage with new technologies, and I will try to act on those prompts.

This book resolutely promotes the value of modelling in software design. Formal models and analysis have their place, but so do informal models, sketches, and ad-hoc notation. The key point is to externalise ideas so that they can be shared, refined and “tested” in the cheapest and most effective of ways, on paper or a whiteboard. We are reminded that all these are hallmarks of true expert software designers. Code has its place, to prove the solution or explore technicalities, but it is not the design.

The book also promotes the value of richness in these representations. Experts should explore and constantly be aware of alternatives, and model the solution at different levels of abstraction, in terms of both static and dynamic behaviours. Continuous assessment means not only testing, but simulation. If required, the expert should build his or her own tools. While solving simple problems first is a good way to get started, deep, early understanding of the problem space is essential, and experts must understand the whole context and landscape well enough to make and articulate design prioritisations and trade-offs.

I thoroughly recommend this book. It may seem slight, but it delivers a powerful reminder on the process of design, and the necessary, different thought processes to succeed with it.

However our two visits to the cinema in the last couple of days certainly challenge this interpretation. Although the two films are at opposite ends of almost any cinematic spectrum, there was an odd and unexpected common thread in our viewing which bears a bit of introspection.

On Sunday, we went to see Assassin’s Creed. This is an energetic sci-fi and action movie based on the video game of the same name. While it’s not a great film, some of the parkour "chase and fight" sequences are amazing. Apparently it was done under "Bond" rules: if they could find someone mad enough to do a stunt for real, they went for it. There are also some pretty impressive sets, backdrops and costumes. The core action takes place in Andalucía in time of the Spanish Inquisition, Columbus and the Moor withdrawal from Spain. Without giving too much away, the plot revolves around a long running war between the Catholic church, in the form of The Templars, seeking ways to suppress human free will, which they see as driving the excesses of human violence, and The Assassins, who oppose them in the name of freedom. The Templars’ position, paving the road to hell with the best of intentions, is a clever plot device, and leads to some surprisingly insightful discussions of the human condition, such as an exchange between two senior modern-day Templars debating whether they need further methods of mass control when Materialism seems to be working very well…

Yesterday, we went to see Silence. I suspect few people will see both films, and probably not very many middle-aged couples, but hey, we have "a catholic taste", don’t we? By any objective measure this is the complete opposite of Assassin’s Creed: a thoughtful historical piece rather than a game-inspired action fest, slow and considered rather than frenetic, emotional and psychological rather than active, arguably a bit too long and indulgent rather than arguably a bit curt at the end, Oscar-worthy rather than one for the Razzies. However, we then get an unexpected thematic resonance. Silence portrays the attempts of the Catholic church to introduce Christianity to Japan, and how after some initial success this was met by a brutal backlash under the the Japanese establishment’s own inquisition. While the Christians are portrayed as the heroes of the piece, they are shown as arrogant and wilfully ignorant of the Japanese religion, culture, language and institutions. While the Japanese inquisitors are shown to be brutal at times, they are also shown to be capable of subtlety, humanity, humour and leniency. By the end of the film, while you may be impressed by the strength of the Christians’ faith, you ultimately admire and have some sympathy for the Japanese establishment’s psychological as much as physical defence of its own culture. And that is basically the same plot line as Assassin’s Creed.

Neither of these films will become favourites of ours, but I’m glad we saw them both and I find the odd thematic similarities fascinating and thought provoking. In particular, both challenge the conceit of any religion which sets itself up as the "universal" moral guide. In this particular case, a "catholic taste in film" has turned out to have something of an "anti-Catholic" theme, with two films both challenging the very concept of universal catholicism. Go figure…

Both the set up of the situation and key players in the first half of the book and the suspenseful execution in the second ploy keep hold your attention turning pages right until the conclusion. The core material seems to have been well researched and is based on some well-documented history including Neils Bohr’s daring escape from the Nazis, and Denis Avey’s extraordinary excursion from the Auschwitz POW camp into the death camp to establish a first-hand record of the horrors.

It’s therefore a great shame that this is to some extent spoiled by a number of frustrating and wholly unnecessary errors in the timeline. Other reviewers have observed how the timelines for the key characters don’t quite “add up”. Beyond that there are completely incorrect factual references. The camp commandment goes to a meeting in May or June 1944 with Heinrich Himmler, fair enough, and Reinhard Heydrich, which would be a bit more of a challenge as he was assassinated in June 1942. The central character observes preparations for D-Day, counting the Stirling bombers out and back in again, and is pleased to benefit from the “newly introduced” Mosquito for the mission. The Mosquito was introduced in late 1940, and the Stirling was almost entirely eclipsed by the Lancaster and Halifax after 1943. Why add these incorrect references, when the book would have been fine without those details altogether?

I enjoyed this story, and will probably read some more of the author’s work, but it did leave me feeling a bit annoyed, and for no good reason.

This style of comedy writing is difficult to pull off, and can mis-fire, but Alex Cay seems to have it off pat. The body count continues to be high, but sometimes (not always) with a slapstick element which invokes a lighter cartoonish tone. The sex scenes are moderately graphic, but provide both the prime driver for several of the female characters and a fair element of the humour. However as long as you are comfortable with a fairly adult style then you will enjoy and frequently laugh out loud at this outlandish tale.

It’s always encouraging when someone takes note and acts on a review. The author personally asked me to review his first book, and I happily did so noting that I’d like to see a change of location, fewer detailed American sports references, and a couple of stylistic tweaks. He has delivered on all those requests, and that makes the book all the more readable. Thanks for listening, Alex!

A great holiday read. I look forward to the next instalment.

The early part of the book is focused on the current evidence for other forms of intelligent life, considering what we know of its genesis, the evidence (or rather profound lack thereof) for any second start either on earth or in the solar system, and whether evolution will naturally or regularly produce intelligent, scientific and technical species. Here Davies takes a fairly negative view, although he acknowledges that we have simply failed to uncover evidence from our earth-based viewpoint, and that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

The latter part looks at the potential forms of a “galactic diaspora”, accounting for our vastly increased knowledge of alternative information carriers, information systems, machines  and engineered probes including the conventional, the biological and those based on nano-technology. Again there’s no evidence yet, but this section explains that alien signals or probes might just be too different, or too small, for us to detect. The conclusion is that we need SETI to avoid being athropocentric, and especially not “1960s radio astronomer centric”.

The final chapters explain the current state of preparation for First Contact (which seems to consist mainly of international committees sending telegrams to each other, and may not be up to the arrival of city-sized spaceships over the capital cities of the UN Security Council :)). The author also discusses what form of messages we should choose if and when we do send any ourselves. The assertion that only key mathematical and physical theorems are guaranteed to bridge all scientific species is a sound one, but maybe misses the point that the Pioneer plaques and similar are just as much an expression of our humanity to ourselves as a serious attempt to communicate with minimum ambiguity.

While the book is inspiring and thought-provoking, it’s also a bit frustrating in places. Davies asserts correctly that the Earth is progressively becoming “radio silent” to long-distance observers, but blames this entirely on the move to put major long distance communication channels into cables. A more complete explanation is that our world is full of vastly more wireless communication that 50 years ago, but as we adopt spread-spectrum and encryption technologies and get better at using low power and highly directed signals the “overspill” into space is much more difficult to detect. Similarly he presents an explanation of Galactic Inflation I haven’t read before (the absence of magnetic monopoles), but fails to present the more common justifications.

In considering alterative technologies Davies binds himself with our current science, despite the fact that there is significant evidence (the failure to unify General Relativity and Quantum Physics, the lack of any real explanation for Dark Matter and Dark Energy) that there are things about the Cosmos we just don’t understand, and which an alien civilisation (or a future humanity) may exploit. While Davies correctly advises against wishful thinking, it would be prudent to accept that just as our own understanding has changed vastly in the last 100 years, it will likely change again in the future, perhaps opening up valid options for, for example, super-light speeds.

However, those criticisms aside, this is an enjoyable, intriguing and well worth-while book. In the final few pages Davies himself observes that there is a contention between the official views of Davies the relatively cautious scientist and Davies the philosopher, human being and SETI enthusiast, and some of the challenges come from presenting and navigating those different viewpoints, which overall is done very well. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and recommend it.

The basic precept is this: imagine that many of the key inventions we have been patiently awaiting for the last 50 years – controlled fusion, quantum computing, reliable cloning, a generic cure for cancer – have actually been found, but are hidden from the world at large. What warped power and societal structures would that drive? It’s a great precept, although here it’s turned into a recognisable and predictable plot, with a heroic inventor on the run, while dark forces try to suppress inventions on behalf of the status quo. In some ways it’s reminiscent of Chain Reaction, and by pure coincidence I had also just read Catalyst by Boyd Morrison, which while markedly less futuristic tells a similar tale.

My other slight gripe is that this suffers in a few places from “techno-babble”, short sections which appear to just be a dumping-ground for a large number of technical terms, which just about boil down to “magic”. I know the author is trying to establish the BTC’s technological superiority, but that’s adequately done by the more detailed examples in the main flow of the text.

That said, this is a clever piece, challenging preconceptions and frequently, even literally, turning them on their heads. As a techno-thriller it’s well written, keeping the reader’s attention fully engaged from the first page, and I will certainly be reading more of Suarez’s books.

Amazon have been pushing this book hard recently, and I downloaded the book in Kindle format in the expectation that it was a relatively new work, with an apparent publication date of 2009. However reading the opening chapter I got a strange sense of deja vu, and realised I had read it before, but evidently long before the advent of either e-reading or publishing and cataloguing my own reviews. I reckon I last read this not long after its original publication in 1990, so about a generation ago! It has rewarded a re-read, but has left me thinking how much better a book it might be for an refresh.

A lot has changed in the last 25 years which directly affects our use of language, and particularly English. Foremost in my mind are the end of the Cold War, the rise of the Asian economic powerhouses presenting relatively direct services to the rest of the world, and, above all, the development of the Internet and mobile technologies. The latter have brought the expectation that pretty much any two humans, anywhere, may have both the wish and the technical means to communicate, and across national boundaries will usually use English to do so. Technology has both led and enabled big changes to how we use language, and we increasingly design our messages and evolve our language around the constraints and possibilities of the transmission and consumption platforms. “Thanx”, “R U OK” and “GR8” don’t appear in this book, but they belong there.

It would be great to understand whether the wider use of English is driving greater homogenisation of usage and acceptance of obvious simplifications, or whether we are just further “baking in” the idiosyncrasies, and adding a new layer on top. Does the availability of online resources such as dictionaries and thesauruses drive the wider adoption of correct usage, or is this outweighed by the need for simplification of the message? Do tools such as spell checking,  predictive text and automated translation increase or decrease individual language skills?

In fairness to Bill Bryson, he does recognise some of these challenges in his final chapter, and makes many of the right calls on general direction, but the book itself is now a period piece the other side of major technological and geopolitical changes.

Despite the fact that Bryson wrote this book when he had been living in Yorkshire for many years, it has a bit of an American focus, typically assuming that the reader knows the American usage but needs the British explaining. Once you’ve tuned into this it’s fine, but it can throw British (and I suspect other) readers slightly at first. Other slight downsides are that like some of Bryson’s other books it’s arguably a bit too long, and in the last third some of the examples get a bit repetitive, and also some other reviewers suggest that the fact checking, especially around non-English languages, is perhaps a bit suspect.

Having said all that, the books remains highly readable, full of wonderful anecdotes and nuggets of knowledge, and if you accept its horizon, well fills a role which I don’t think is met by any other book which I have read. Enjoy it, but acknowledge and forgive that it’s slightly showing its age.

Part of the challenge is that the dramatic conventions of such films force their screen renderings to be quite similar. In reality the situations were somewhat different. Until the wheels (or at least the runners) literally came off the Jamaicans had built up a real prospect of a good place, powered by a team three of whom could run 100m in less than 10s. Eddie Edwards had his utter determination to take part, and had built up a decent competition record on skis, but was only ever likely to come last. The new film acknowledges this, but otherwise echoes the earlier one in many ways, with the same drunk and disgraced former athlete as coach, the condescending officials who see the outsiders as challenging the dignity of their sport, parents who are split on whether to support their sons or not, fellow athletes who are initially rude but who come to respect the outsiders’ determination, and so on.

When two films, by co-incidence , tackle the same subject at the same time it’s inevitable that they are compared and one (Deep Impact, Olympus Has Fallen) falls into the shadow of the other (Armageddon, White House Down). While I get the impression that the makers of the new film didn’t want to wait nearly a generation to make it, maybe by doing so they have both reduced this effect (except from old codgers like yours truly), and will perpetuate these great sporting tales into a new audience who might not otherwise have been aware of them.

Comparisons and conventions aside, Eddie the Eagle is an excellent film. It captures both the flights and thumps of ski jumping, and modern filming techniques allow you to be there on the skis with the jumpers. However it excels in telling the human stories, with Edward’s determination against the odds beautifully portrayed, as is the growing admiration of those who both supported and opposed him. I have two abiding memories of the Calgary Olympics. One is of four black guys carrying their broken bobsleigh over the finish line, and the other is of an interview about Eddie with the slightly cold and aloof Finnish ski-jumping champion Matti Nykänen who the reporter was expecting to be rude and dismissive. Instead the young Finn was warm and supportive of Edward’s right to be there, and pretty much put the seal of approval on his attempt at the 90m hill. In the film that same support is portrayed in an elevator conversation between the two men, and brought my memories flooding back.

The film is also very funny, and that triggered another personal element. We went to see it yesterday in Guildford, and a large extended family had clearly block-booked the central seats next to ourselves. I noticed that when the same writer’s name was shown twice in the credits, there was a little Mexican wave by the kids, and thought "oh, that Simon Kelton must have someone in", but then sat down to enjoy the film and laughed as loud as I normally do when so entertained. Afterwards, one of the family group came up to me and asked "was it you who was laughing so loudly?" I confirmed that it was, and he introduced himself as the writer. It’s not often I can personally express my thanks to an entertainer, and it was great on this occasion to get the chance.

It’s a good film. Go and see it. And afterwards, try and catch up with Cool Runnings.

So far so good. However although the Microsoft Azure information may come in handy for my next role, what I really need is some good quality, easy to read guidance on how current generic guidance relates to the Oracle SOA/Fusion Suite. I identified four candidates, but none of them seem worth completing:

• Thomas Erl’s SOA Design Patterns. This is very expensive (more than £40 even in Kindle format), gets a lot of relatively poor reviews, and I didn’t much like the last book I read by the same author.
• Sergey Popov’s Applied SOA Patterns on the Oracle Platform. This is another expensive book, but at least you can read a decent-length Kindle sample. However doing so has somewhat put me off. There are pages upon pages upon pages of front-matter. Do I really want to read about reviewers thanking their mothers for having them before I get to the first real content? Fortunately even with that issue the sample gets as far as an introductory chapter, but this makes two things apparent. Firstly, the author has quite a wordy and academic style, but more importantly he has re-defined the well-established term "pattern" to mean either "design rule" or "Oracle example", neither of which works for me. However I really parted company when I got to a section which states "… security … is nothing more than pure money, as almost no one these days seeks fun in simple informational vandalism", and then went off into a discussion of development costs. If this "expert" has such a poor understanding of cyber-security it doesn’t bode well…
• Harish Gaur’s Oracle Fusion Middleware Patterns. Again, this appears to have redefined "pattern" as "Opportunity to show a good Oracle example", but that might be valid in my current position. Unfortunately I can’t tell you much more as the Kindle sample finished in the middle of "about the co-authors", before we get to any substantive content at all. As it’s another relatively expensive book with quite a few poor reviews I’m not sure whether it’s worth proceeding.
• Kathiravan Udayakumar’s Oracle SOA Patterns. Although only published in 2012, this appears to already be out of print. It has two reviews on Amazon, one at one-star (from someone who did try and read it) and one at three stars (from someone who didn’t!).

In the meantime I’ve started what looks like a much more promising book, David Chappell’s Enterprise Service Bus. This appears to be well-written, well-reviewed and reasonably priced. What really attracts me is that he’s attempted to extend the "Gregorgram" visual design language invented for Enterprise Integration Patterns to service bus architectures, which was in many ways the missing piece from the Service Design Patterns book. Unfortunately the book may be a bit out of date and Java-focused to give me an up-to-date technical briefing, but as it’s fairly short that’s not an issue.

After that it’s back to trying to find a decent book which links all this to the Oracle platform. If anyone would like to recommend one please let me know.

The book starts with a good introduction and list of the patterns and supporting "guidance" sections, and is then followed first by the patterns, and then the guidance sections (useful technology primers). This is where things break down a bit, as the patterns are presented in alphabetical order, which means a somewhat random mix of topics, followed by the same again for the guidance sections. I attempted to read the book cover to cover over about a week and I found the constant jumping about between topics extremely confusing, and the constant repetition of common content very wearing. In addition by presenting the guidance material at the end it is arguably of less value as most of the concepts have already been covered in related patterns. Ultimately the differentiation between the two is very arbitrary and not helpful. For example is "throttling" really a pattern or a core concept? If "throttling" is a pattern why is "autoscaling" not described as a pattern?

The book would be about 10 times better if it were re-organised into half a dozen "topics" (for example data management, compute resource management, integration, security…), with the relevant guidance and overviews first in each topic, followed by the related patterns which could then be stripped of a lot of repetitive content, and topped off with common cross-reference and further reading material.

This is not just a book about cloud specifics. A lot of the material reflects general good practice building and integrating large systems, even for on-premise deployment, and reinforces my view that "Cloud" is just a special case of this established body of practice. As a result there’s quite a lot of overlap with older pattern books especially Enterprise Integration Patterns, which is also directly referenced. The surprisingly substantial content related to message-based integration, confirms my view that this is still the best model for loosely coupled extended portfolios, but I would have appreciated more on the overlap with service technologies.

The overlap with other standard pattern books might have been managed just by referencing them, but this would play against Microsoft’s objective of making this material readily available to all readers at low cost.

The book is spectacularly good value for money, especially as you can download it free from Microsoft if you are prepared to do a bit of juggling with document formats. That it forms part of a series also available under similar options is even better. This perpetuates Microsoft’s tradition of providing cheap, high-quality guidance to developers and sits in sharp contrast with the high costs of comparable works from not only independent publishers (which may be understandable) but other technology vendors.

The book does assume some familiarity with Windows Server concepts, for example worker roles vs machine or application instances, and doesn’t always explain these terms. A glossary or an clear reference to a suitable external source would have been useful.

At a practical level I’m pleased to see that the Kindle version works well, with internal links hyperlinked and clear diagrams, plus access to each pattern directly from the menu in the Android Kindle app. Offset against this are a few cases of poor proofreading related to problems with document format conversions, in particular with characters like apostrophes turned into garbage character strings.

Overall I found this a useful book, and I’m sure it will become a valuable reference work, but I just wish the authors and editors had paid more attention to the high-level structure for those trying to read it like a traditional book.

The Service Design Patterns is in the same series as the EIP book (and the closely related Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture), and overtly takes the earlier books as a baseline to build an additional set of patterns more directly related to Service-oriented integration. Where the earlier books’ content is relevant, it is just referred to. This helps to build a strong library of patterns, but also actively reinforces the important message that designers of newer integration architectures will do well to heed the lessons of previous generations.

The pattern structure is very similar to the one used in the EIP book, which is helpful. The "Headline" context description is occasionally a bit cryptic, but is usually followed by a very comprehensive section which describes the problem in sufficient detail, with an explanation of why and when alternative approaches may or may not work, and the role of other patterns in the solution. The text can be a little repetitive, especially as the authors try to deliver the specifics of each pattern explicitly for each of three key web service styles, but it’s well written and easily readable.

This is not a very graphical book. Each pattern usually has one or two explanatory diagrams, but they vary in style and usefulness. I was rather sad that the book didn’t try to extend the original EIP concept and try to show the more complex patterns as assemblies of icons representing the simpler ones. I think there may be value in exploring this in later work.

One complaint is the difficulty of navigating within the Kindle edition, or in future using it as a reference work. Internal references to patterns are identified by their page number in the physical book, which is of precisely zero use in the Kindle context. In addition the contents structure which is directly accessible via the Kindle menu only goes to chapter level, not to individual patterns. If you can remember which chapter a pattern is in you can get there via the contents section of index, but this is much more difficult than it should be. In other pattern books any internal references in the Kindle edition are hyperlinked, and I don’t understand why this has not been done here.

To add a further annoyance, the only summary listings of the patterns are presented as multiple small bitmapped graphics, so not easily searchable or extractable for external reference. An early hyperlinked text listing with a summary would be much more useful. Please could the publishers have a look at the Kindle versions of recent pattern books from Microsoft Press to see how this should be done?

A final moan is that the book is quite expensive! I want to get all three books in the series in Kindle format (as well as having the hardcover versions of the two earlier books, purchased before ebooks were a practical reality), and it will cost over £70. This may put less pecunious readers off, especially as there’s so much front matter that the Kindle sample ends before you get to the first real pattern. That would be a  shame, as the industry needs less experienced designers to read and absorb these messages.

These practical niggles aside, this is a very good book, and I can recommend it.

I’ve noticed before how Edge of Darkness has such an unforced pace, with space for the actors just to act. This time I consciously observed the phenomenon. In the first episode, after Emma’s death, there’s a period of about 20 minutes where Craven is grieving and the other policemen trying to help him deal with it. There are perhaps half a dozen lines of dialogue. In the 5th episode, where Craven and Jedburgh break into Northmoor, there are no more than a couple of hundred lines of dialogue in total. In over 50 minutes. Yet in both cases your attention is held completely, and there’s never a sense that the pace should be even slightly quicker.

This was also the first time I had watched it on a big screen, but at its original 3×4 aspect ratio. Now 3×4, especially with 1980s slightly grainy video, doesn’t suit expansive vistas or dramatic special effects. It does suit portraits, much better than wider presentations. What I noticed on this viewing was how Martin Campbell and his team really exploit this, filling the screen from corner to corner with one or two faces. It was powerful in the days of 20" TVs, but really punches through on a 50" set.

Yet again our understanding of the politics and personalities deepened. When I first saw the series, I wasn’t sure that Harcourt and Pendleton were the good guys. This time, I started to appreciate some glimmers of humanity in Grogan, the chief villain. Maybe by the 20th viewing we’ll understand him as well.

It’s slightly odd that the BBC chose to repeat the series last year rather than on this anniversary. 30 years on Edge of Darkness is still unmatched as a conspiracy thriller,  and deserves some celebration.

The authors and editors have clearly set themselves the admirable aim of producing a short and concise overview of the field. Unfortunately in the quest for brevity they have ended up with a terse, dry and dense writing style which is very difficult to read. At times it feels almost like a game of "buzzword bingo". I frequently had to re-read sentences several times to understand the authors’ intended relationships between the elements, and I’m a very experienced integration architect.

At the same time, for a book on architecture there are very few explanatory diagrams, wordy descriptions being used instead. To add insult to injury a few low-value diagrams such as one depicting the cycle of interaction between business and IT change drivers are used repeatedly, when once would be enough.

The first chapter provide a overview of service orientation and its key principles, characteristics, goals and organisational implications.  This is followed by a chapter on service definition and composition. Ironically this part of the book is is quite repetitive, but manages to omit some key concepts. There’s no real concrete explanation of what a service is or does – maybe that’s taken as read, but a formal definition and some examples would go a long way. Likewise there’s nothing at this point on basic concepts such as service contracts and self-description, synchronous vs asynchronous operation or security. The second chapter goes into some detail on the idea of service composition but only really deals with the ideal green-field case where functionality can be developed new aligned exactly to business functions.

The following chapter on the SOA manifesto is better, but again doesn’t recognise the realities of real enterprise portfolios, with legacy systems, package solutions and external elements which must be maintained and exploited, and non-functional priorities which must be met.

Chapter 5 deals with service-related technologies and their potential interactions. This is good, and for me represented the core value of the book, but is crying out for some diagrams to supplement the lengthy text. There are good notes on service definition under Model Driven Service Design, but this key topic should really have been a major section in Chapter 3 in its own right. The statements about technical architecture are rather simplistic, with an overall position of "this is expensive and difficult, or just use the cloud" which is not necessarily right for all organisations.

The next chapter, on business models, is very prescriptive. It is also slightly misleading in some places about the role of IT in transactional services – such services are delivered by a business unit, possibly but not necessarily enabled by and carried through an IT service. It would be perfectly viable in some cases for specific services to have a manual implementation. This is well explained in the case study, but not here or in the Business Process Management section of the previous chapter.

The final chapter of the main text is a "case study" describing the wholesale transformation of a car rental company through adoption of service, agile and cloud approaches. It feels slightly contrived, especially in terms of its timeline, the preponderance of successes, and the surprising lack of resistance to CIO-led business change. However it fills a useful gap by explaining much better than the technologies chapter how the different technologies and approaches fit together and build on one another.

Appendix A is a taster for the other books in the series. Unfortunately the content is presented as small images which cannot be resized and are almost unreadable in the Kindle version. It has also been "summarized", with the result that it appears to add very little meaningful detail to what has already been said.

Appendix B is a useful expansion of the main text regarding organisational preparation, maturity levels and governance for SOA. I would personally have been tempted to merge the first two parts to the main text rather than positioning them as an appendix, where they are necessarily repetitive of some material which has already been read.

Appendix C is another taster for one of the other books in the series, this time with an overview of cloud computing. While this is at a fairly high level, it’s a useful and well-written overview for those unfamiliar with the concepts.

Overall this is a frustrating book. There is some good material, but missing key "reality checks" and presented in a terse, text-heavy style which makes it harder to read than it should be.

Hopefully you should see everything working properly now, but let me know if not.

AgileArchitect.org has had the most significant makeover, and is now fully responsive and mobile-friendly, just like our other sites.

Happy browsing!

If you did have an email bounced, please feel free to re-send. And if you do meet someone who hacks other people’s servers, feel free to give him a kick for me.

Today we subjected ourselves to the rambling mess which is Interstellar. I was really looking forward to this film. The premise was an interesting one, the trailers intriguing, and the Daily Mail’s critique encouraging.

What a disappointment. The concept may be interesting, but the execution is atrocious. For a start the diction is awful, making Jamaica Inn sound like a Radio 4 news bulletin in comparison. If you are going to tell a complex story of galactic scope, don’t allow your actors to mumble inaudibly, and don’t mask important dialogue with music or sound effects which completely drowns it out.

The story-telling is clumsy, so that Frances and I were frequently leaning over to one another and asking “what’s going on?”. We didn’t have to do that with Nolan’s even more complex Inception, but that fine, if complex film, feels like the work of a completely different director.

While we are great fans of several films with a time travel element, this one breaks the fundamental covenant that in return for suspension of disbelief the story must resolve itself neatly. The plot has major failures of causality, with the survival of the human race depending on a future invention by the survivors’ distant descendants, essentially magic. Other plot holes were equally evident.

The film is far too long. Like the other examples above, it seems as if no one was brave enough to say to Nolan in the light of his recent successes, “you must edit this down”.

It’s not even rescued by great effects, stunts or cinematography. Such effects as there are, are relatively simple, and very repetitive. There was simply no “wow” moment.

Interstellar is inaudible,  interminable, incomprehensible and implausible.

That said, Man Up! is a good example of the genre, and well worth a read. It zips along at a good pace, with enough plot intrigue to keep the reader entertained, even if some twists are rather predictable, and is regularly punctuated with almost slapstick comedy which made me laugh out loud on several occasions.

The central character is a sports agent, and in this case was dealing with ice hockey. In Britain this is very much a minority sport, and the copious ice hockey references and terminology in the first couple of chapters put off at least one reader I know. Keep going and once the real action starts the sports context is no longer such an issue, but if the author wants the widest readership this is something to watch in the future.

I liked the writing style, and was impressed by how Alex Cay had captured the nuances of dialogue for the English characters versus the American ones very well. On a slightly more negative note he has adopted a habit of writing for emphasis One. Word. At. A. Time., which is rather off-putting, and I’d suggest trying to find a smoother alternative.

The book is populated with a range of interesting characters, but in many cases you don’t get to learn much about who they are, or how they have got to where they are, and a bit more background would work well. There are no “supermen”, and a number with very real mental limitations, but almost all the men are enormously well provided in the trouser department, which seems to destroy the good judgement of several otherwise single-minded female characters. I did like the animal characters, including two homosexual bull mastiffs and a shark nick-named Elvis!

This is a tale of stupid wealthy people, corrupt spies and incompetent hitmen, and a large helping of sex and violence more explicit than some other books in this genre is unavoidable. The high body count is actually quite comical, but be prepared for some writing which is not exactly “family friendly”.

Overall I enjoyed the book, and I look forward to reading some more of Patrick Finn’s adventures in the future.

Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to the author Alex Cay for providing a review copy of this book in Kindle format. I do most of my fiction reading when travelling, and it’s really annoying that most publishers and review commissioners, notably and inexplicably including Amazon themselves, still insist on providing review copies in hardcopy form. Thanks to Alec for doing the right thing.

At one level, this is a masterful and almost believable re-telling of the progress of the Second World War with a completely different outcome, reminding us how many of the key points individually turned on the narrowest of margins provided either by blind fortune or inexplicably poor German decision-making, both of which could easily have been reversed. How, for example, D-Day could have been scuppered by poor weather, or a single effective German spy operating on the right part of Britain’s South Coast. With only a couple of such reversals the Britain of the story leaves itself open to a successful German invasion in 1944.

The bulk of the story is then a study of how war-weary British communities and German soldiers progress, as much through pragmatic accommodation and grudging acceptance as overt surrender or collaboration, to some form of settlement. As a study of human behaviours in hard times it’s excellent, but it’s empathically not a stirring tale of derring-do. The book also ends with the disposition of most of the central characters left open – I would have preferred a more definite outcome, but that would perhaps have closed things down where the book deliberately tries to portray sources of ambiguity.

The story focuses on a small farming community in the Brecon Beacons, between Abergavenny and Hereford, an area with which I have strong family connections, including a great Aunt and Uncle who farmed in a small valley in the Beacons, very like the central community. As such I very much enjoyed the portrayal of so many places I know. I have even drunk in the only pub which gets mentioned by name!

The author, Sheers, is primarily a poet, and his writing paints a very expressive verbal picture of the land, the events and the people of the story. My usual taste in fiction is more focused on action, but accept the style of the book and you will be fully absorbed by this story, even though it is not a comfortable one.

The book takes the simple concept of “a plague of zombies”, and tries to tell the story of a modern, global human struggle to first survive and then fight back and retake the world. To do this the author, Max Brooks, adopts the unusual but highly effective device of a series of interviews with key witnesses: soldiers, survivors, leaders, administrators and political or social commentators.

The book is as much about the socio-economic upheaval of such a happening as it is about how zombies behave. Given the concept of “flesh eating zombie”, the emerging story then reflects a very modern understanding of virology, military capabilities, human behaviour and geopolitics.

The interview-based structure really resonated with me, although initially I was slightly puzzled why. Then the penny dropped. This is “The World at War”, adapted for science fiction. I am a great fan of that 1970s epic documentary, told largely through interviews with soldiers, survivors, leaders… The author doesn’t explicitly acknowledge that influence, but once you see it, it’s obvious.

I haven’t seen the film yet, but based on the trailer and reviews it sounds like the screenwriters have thrown away this wonderful structure in favour of a much more simplistic linear narrative focused on a few central characters. If so, that’s an enormous shame.

For an intelligent, inspiring tale which will keep you turning the pages you won’t do much better.

Thereafter the story becomes a tale of rich and unscrupulous dealers and collectors trying to get control of the treasure, with a few reasonably honest characters caught in the middle. It’s neither a very long story nor a very complicated one, but it’s quite fun.

I liked the new unpleasant characters, and welcomed the return of the same “good guys” from Wahoo Rhapsody. I just hope Morey has done his legal homework creating a wealthy collector with an ill-fitting toupee called Ronald Stump!

My only complaint about the first book was that it felt a bit too obviously a copy of a Carl Hiaasen, and there’s still some truth in that criticism. In particular Atticus Fish does feel like an echo of Hiassen’s character Skink. However, that’s a minor complaint, and I look forward to the next book in the series.

For many years now if there’s been the prospect of either snorkelling or diving on holiday I’ve taken a Canon PowerShot S-series or G-series camera with its waterproof housing. I’ve had at least three generations of that solution, which have been utterly reliable and produced some good results. However they are a bulky solution in these days of reducing baggage allowances, and somewhat slow and clumsy in operation.

This year, therefore, I decided to try a different solution, and opted after some deliberation for one of the new “ultra tough compacts”. While Canon and Panasonic both have a comparable solution, after some deliberation I went for the Olympus TG2, based on a combination of its looks and spec.

This is supposedly a very tough piece of kit – waterproof to 15m, drop-proof to 2m, crush-proof to 100kg and with a large operating temperature range. The downside is that this is a market where the competition is intense but based on point for point feature matching, with a focus on improving things like nominal depth protection rather than the photographic features.

That meant that even before use in anger there were some compromises: none of the cameras in this class do RAW, even though Canon, for example, support this fully on their smaller high-end compacts like the S95. to make things worse the TG2 also lacks many of the some other fundamental tools to control exposure such as automatic bracketing (despite a very high frame rate which would support it well), or shutter priority.

The lack of these features is a complete mystery to me, when these cameras are allegedly designed to be used in conditions where the lighting as well as the environment will be challenging…

Early trials did suggested that the camera does have accurate, fast autofocus (which was something I particularly wanted), and makes a decent job of auto exposure in most cases. Picture quality is OK, but the noise levels rise rapidly at ISO 800 and above, the JPEGs have a somewhat “overprocessed” look, and there’s some noticeable pincushion distortion on underwater shots, even at medium zoom. These are presumably all the result of the tiny sensor, which is significantly smaller than in compacts like the Canon S95.

So, off to Barbados and into the water with the turtles. One immediate observation was that the display is very difficult to use at snorkelling depths (where there may be quite a lot of ambient light from above/behind you), and the tiny font becomes illegible for a user like me with ageing eyes. A “high contrast” option on the display, and a large-font “quick menu” option (like on all my Canon and Panasonic cameras) would be useful.

However, a few minutes into the snorkelling session I noticed a much more serious problem: the camera kept on switching itself off, and the battery level was dropping almost as I watched. I managed to snatch a couple of shots, but the camera was really misbehaving, and I had to give up.

Back on the boat the problem was immediately apparent – the camera had sprung a leak presumably through the cover for the USB port, as that had evidence of water inside it. However, instead of being limited just to the port section, the water had spread rapidly through the camera with the result that the lens was misting up and the electrical problems were getting rapidly worse. Although I tried drying the camera out and recharging it, it’s now completely dead. Fortunately I had invested in a waterproof SD card, so I managed to rescue a few decent shots, but otherwise it’s a write-off.

This is an extremely poor design. As you have to charge the battery in camera (using the proprietary USB cable – another peeve), there’s no option of just sealing the camera for a complete trip. You would also think that the camera would have some measure of “double sealing” so that in the event of a leak into the port or battery/card openings the water wouldn’t permeate quickly into the rest of the electronics, but this is clearly not the case.

This camera is completely inadequate for its intended use. Fortunately my suppliers (the excellent Wex Photographic) have promised me a full refund. I will not be spending it on Olympus equipment.

Following in the best tradition of Winston Churchill and T E Lawrence, Stewart is evidently not just a administrator, but also both a leader and do-er, an entertaining writer, and an insightful analyst. His memoir is, by turns:

• Inspiring, describing those who strove to improve and reform Iraq, in many cases risking and even losing their lives in the process,
• Shocking, describing acts of repression and violence, and also when describing the atrocious incompetence and cowardice of the Italian military,
• Intriguing, as Stewart describes scheming Iraqi politicians who could have given lessons to Nicolo Machiavelli,
• Thought-provoking, particularly in the final reflections about which interventions succeeded, and how many failed,
• Exciting, for example when describing the protracted siege of their office in Nasiriyah,
• Highly amusing. My favourite was the Islamist militant who publicly compared Stewart to Hitler, and then immediately asked him for help with an injury to the militant’s penis. Stewart’s descriptions of his interactions with the Bhagdad bureaucracy, with their management consultancy and PowerPoint “solutions”, also made me laugh out loud.

This is a strong analysis of an important piece of the world’s recent history, the latter acts of which are still playing out. It’s also an insightful study into the reality of politics in an environment as complex as post-invasion Iraq, which may genuinely have no peers. The book is eminently readable, and I strongly recommend it.

As before, Orzel sets out a clear account of the field, working in many cases from first principles, but continuously framed by very funny exchanges between him and his dog, who, like any of her kind, is constantly looking for ways to increase her food intake, and her success in hunting bunnies and squirrels.

The quantum physics volume introduced me to a lot of relatively new thinking and experimental evidence, and I was hoping for the same this time, but relativity is obviously a more mature field, and there was less that was new to me in this book. That said, the teaching of this field has obviously moved on since my student days, and I was surprised to find, for example, the concept of relativistic mass increase referred to as an “old” model, with the book focusing much more on momentum calculations. Similarly the basics of special relativity are presented using a range of geometrical models, with a heavy emphasis on the spacetime diagram, which is a different approach to some previous books I’ve read.

I had some complaints about the Kindle edition of the quantum physics volume separating diagrams and footnotes too far from the relevant text. On this occasion I received a physical copy of the book and was looking forward to that being less of an issue. The physical book layout is definitely better, but could still be improved, as diagrams are often a page or more away from the descriptive text.

However, that’s a minor niggle, and really my only one. If you want to learn more about relativity and also have a good laugh, this is a strong recommendation.

Like Morris, Llewellyn’s vision is deliberately utopian: mankind has not had to experience near destruction at the hands of asteroids, mechanical warriors, zombies, plagues, intelligent apes and/or aliens (delete as applicable), and has averted the worst effects of more gradually acting causes, such as overpopulation, pollution, global warming, corporate greed and rabid bankers.

Llewellyn has cleverly constructed a composite Utopia, with different regions of the world finding different solutions and being at different points in the cycle of economic, political and population development. Overall the message is positive, as the author openly intends, although there is the suggestion that communities such as the Gardenians (British) who have reverted to a largely rural “non-economy” may be sowing the seeds of their own decay, with limited ability to maintain older technology and innovate new solutions. It is not impossible to see them becoming the Eloi of The Time Machine – pretty, charming, but useless.

Unfortunately as a modern novel the book does have several weaknesses. Few short-term problems mean there’s almost no drama in the story. There are tantalising glimpses of some things, such as a new communal game, but no real description, and some of the text is in danger of dating rapidly, such as references to Apple and their current products. The ending comes suddenly and the story just stops. The author’s intention may be to use this as a springboard for another tale in the series, but that’s not clear.

There are also numerous “schoolboy errors”, such as a space elevator system which is not equatorial and somehow manages to complete a rotation in less than 24 hours, or a solar power system with output many thousands of time greater than it could possibly have. Given Llewellyn’s credentials as a technical presenter, I found these disappointing.

This is a relatively short book, and worth a quick read for some of the ideas, but ultimately a more complete development might have worked better.

In the first chapter, he explains how little we can now assume about how people will consume content, and the challenges of making sure that your web site will work across the range of different devices and connectivity environments. He also dismisses the concept of a “mobile ghetto” – one or more separate sites dedicated to a particular class of device – and establishes the concept of a fully responsive site. The following chapters explain how to achieve it.

Chapters 2-4 are the book’s core. In chapter 2 the author steps through the process of creating a web page as a flexible or “fluid” grid, avoiding any fixed sizing or relationship between the separate elements. This delivers a framework which is resilient to browser size changes, and should also be fairly browser independent. Chapter 3 focuses on ensuring that images and similar elements within that layout are also flexible, so they will resize with the others.

Chapter 4 takes this design and adds CSS media queries, enabling the browser to resize and move the page’s elements to better suit the needs of different shapes and sizes of device, the result being a fully “responsive” design, using just standard HTML and CSS. This is a longer chapter than the others, and goes on to explore some of the specific challenges of the approach, and some elegant examples of how to apply the principles presented.

The final chapter takes a slightly different stance, first exploring how the sample design will degrade in less complete browsers, and also considering the specific needs of mobile users. This leads into a discussion of the “mobile first” concept, in which website designs should focus on the essential content and progressively add features rather than subtracting them from the desktop design. Whether this approach will work for you depends a lot on context, but there are important concepts relating to focusing on the core content which apply to all designers.

And that’s it. I read the book in a couple of sessions, and then got stuck into updating my web site with all the key concepts well established. Ethan’s book is clear, well written and commendably short, and I’m happy to recommend it.

The book is not available from Amazon (except in French!!), but can be purchased and downloaded in multiple formats (including .mobi for the Kindle) from A Book Apart.

To reveal much more would risk spoiling the story, but rest assured this will keep you turning the pages and frequently laughing out loud.

If you mourn the passing of Sharpe’s best work, and are frustrated by the way so many purported “comedies” import of this genre fail to amuse, then you will enjoy this.

You should now be able to get the full experience of “Thoughts on the World” on all devices

Please bear with me if there’s the odd foible as I complete the changes. Also please let me know if you spot any problem – but don’t forget to let me know what device you’re using.

My blog now supports multiple views, with the default being an “abstract”, giving an experience a bit like Google Currents. Use the icons at the top of the page, just below my title bar, to switch between them. Please let me know what you think.

There were some touches of genius. The plot, based on A Very English Coup cleverly wove in all our current bogeymen in a bang up to date tale featuring drone warfare, Islamic terrorists, toxic bankers, careless and callous petrochemical companies, electronic surveillance and the rest. Technology was exploited to help tell the tale, not as an end in itself. I also admired some of the direction, especially those scenes which placed Charles Dance’s Machiavellian character deliberately lurking in the background.

But ultimately it was all a bit unsatisfying. I’ve identified several reasons why, but the main reason was simply that it was too rushed. There’s clearly an optimum length for a conspiracy thriller on TV, and it’s about 6 hours run time. Edge of Darkness was 6 hour-long episodes, and so was State of Play. The first series of Homeland, was 10 episodes of about 40 minutes each (about 6.5 hours). There’s an upper limit as well: at around 8 hours Hunted was just too bloody complicated, and while a series of 24 runs much longer, at about 17 hours, they religiously change villains and threats twice a day, so we’re back to roughly the 6 hours duration for each “segment”.

By contrast, Secret State ran for less than 3 hours (ignoring adverts and the now mandatory review and preview segments), and it just wasn’t enough to properly develop the story. Instead of slowly developing understanding, you had key plot elements revealed as almost throw-away sound bites. Watching an off-air recording with Channel 4’s longer-than-American commercial breaks just increased the frustration.

In Edge of Darkness there’s a fascinating scene in which three senior policemen are waiting in a hospital for news of a suspect who chose to throw himself out of a window rather than face arrest. It runs for about 2 minutes, but the suspect’s condition, the police officers’ frustration, and the growing despair of the central character are all communicated with almost no dialogue. They act. Secret State had no time for such luxuries.

Secret State also had precious little time for character development. The central characters were all wonderfully cast, but most went nowhere – we learned nothing about them as people and little about their drivers, beliefs and agendas. Most also behaved true to the initial impression, rather than surprising us with unexpected heroism or villainy. Apart from the brilliant opening episode Charles Dance was particularly under-used.

I’m not convinced you need “Previously” segments in a four episode show. If you can’t follow something for four weeks, that’s a rather poor lookout. However it’s the “Next time” segments which really wound me up. These were full of spoilers, and totally un-necessary when the drama was already sufficiently suspenseful to make sure viewers returned. Surely the time would have been better devoted to addressing at least some of the hurried treatment?

A conspiracy thriller doesn’t need a happy ending, but it does need a satisfactory one, in which the dispositions of the main parties and issues is clearly portrayed. Secret State failed in this, with a hurried ending which left a lot of questions unanswered.

By contrast, the BBC’s best effort this year, Line of Duty followed the rules, and while it had a few annoying plot and character flaws, it ended up more satisfactory than the better plotted Secret State.

And finally, Of . It may be just coincidence, it may be the sincerest form of flattery, or an attempt to gain praise by association, but I’ve noticed that the best conspiracy thrillers all seem to have three word titles with a common middle word. I await State of Secrets or Secrets of State with anticipation – remember, you read it here first.

Highly recommended. Now about those 5 virtual machines I want to run at once…

Ultimately this is a conspiracy plot which involves almost everyone in the White House except the central character, and feels like a tired reworking as a result. Furthermore that conspiracy is not really credible, with Aryan supremacists who have presumably just quietly ignored Barack Obama, Colin Powell and the many Jewish members of recent US administrations. Many characters know much more than would be realistic in a successful conspiracy, which fundamentally requires secrecy.

Although the book inhabits the real world of current Middle Eastern politics and players, other realities are ignored. For example early on there are several misogynistic “a woman can’t do this job” challenges to the new president, but no one thinks to mention Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel or any of the US’s successful female Secretaries of State.

The writing fails to be either intriguing or suspenseful. With only one main exception the main characters remain true to the new president’s initial assessment of their personalities and loyalties. The chief of staff and housekeeper behave suspiciously, but the reason is immediately disclosed, rather than the disclosure being deferred for a page or two.

Many of the details are simply laughable. Apparently the head of the Secret Service is a dwarf of 4ft 10. The villain is a Nazi who refers to “Capitalist Pigs”. The president is a long-standing career politician, but apparently has no advisors except those inherited from her predecessor, and although she has a country to run, the president is worrying about her biological clock, despite being about 50.

On a practical level my pre-release review copy of the book had a number of oddities of grammar, typography and layout. While these may be rectified before publication and were not critical, they were suggestive that the work has not received a great deal of review before printing.

It’s a shame, because the premise of this book is a good one, but the execution does not deliver a worthy read.

• Go wandering helmetless on your first visit to an alien location, especially after you’ve seen the evidence that the aliens were killed by some sort of pathogen?
• Have an emergency medical system in the captain’s quarters which doesn’t understand female anatomy, and the captain’s a woman?
• Leave the charred body of a colleague, which has been infected by the aliens, on the doorstep of your spaceship without any attempt to “lock it down”?
• Not check that the ship’s geologist and colleague, who said “we’re just going back to the ship”, had actually done so?
• Pin a note to the wall warning said geologist & colleague not to sleep in the room with all the alien creepy crawlies?
• Bunk off for nooky with the captain when you’re the officer on watch, without at least deputising someone else?
• Etc, etc.

It’s said that Red Dwarf took their inspiration from the Alien films, rather than Star Trek. Based on this showing I’d say some of the DNA has gone the other way, too, only the Red Dwarf mob would be better prepared and disciplined.

I wanted to enjoy this film, but ended up plain annoyed. Not impressed.

That said, the equations are used more as milestones than intensively studied subjects. This is not a “book full of maths”, and each chapter is largely a textual exploration around the subject starring the featured equation, explaining what it means, and what it led to.

The scope is vast, from Pythagoras through to the underpinnings of quantum theory, chaos and derivatives trading, taking in key scientific developments and their mathematical explanations along the way. Stewart does a remarkable job of compacting this scope into just 17 chapters and about 300 pages.

If you’re a skilled mathematician you will gloss over the maths and still take value from the following discussions. If, however, your maths is more limited or, like mine, rather rusty, you’ll find you don’t need to follow all the mathematical details. You don’t need to really understand about grads, divs and curls, for example, to appreciate the similarity in “shape” between the key equations in several different areas of science. The author does a very fine job of both explaining this structure, and also where the reader must understand, and where detailed understanding is less important.

Some of the explanations are quite complex, especially where Stewart is exploring the most recent applications of older ideas. I did get lost a couple of times and had to re-read short sections, but overall I came away thinking that I had built a decent grasp.

The book has an admirable focus on the practical applications of science, but some of this is presented with such limited detail that in a couple of places it devolves into lists of applications rather than real explanations. As well as positive stories, Stewart is not afraid to show where mis-interpretation of the mathematics or its limitations has failed us, most notably in the last chapter on financial derivatives and how their abuse has caused the current crises.

Although eminently readable and often amusing, this book is best read in chunks of a couple of chapters at a time, allowing the ideas to sink in. Do so, and invest a little effort, and you’ll be well rewarded.

The idea of making a real historical figure the detective in a historical mystery is not unique (arguably Philip Kerr makes an even better choice with Isaac Newton in Dark Matter) but it is very effective. We know these characters had considerable intellect, the right political connections to advance investigations, and were in interesting places at interesting times.

However unlike Kerr’s Newton, Leoni’s Dante is initially very ill-prepared for his task, and is annoyingly gullible until right at the end of the tale. Given that this is his fourth outing in such a role, you’d think he’d be getting a bit better at it! The novel also struck me as very similar to S J Parris’ tales featuring Giordano Bruno, but with the difference that at least Dante does at least realise the truth for himself, albeit right at the end.

The story is well written, with action which advances very steadily and got me involved quite quickly. There’s a distinctly Italian focus on the political relationships between the players, but Leoni avoids the mistake of creating a cast of thousands, and focuses on a relatively small group of core characters. The very distinctive writing style is usually easy to read – whether this is the author’s skill or the translator’s is not clear, and arguably unimportant. There are occasional wordy patches, especially when trying to describe Dante’s state of mind or his ideas about his poetry, but these give way fairly quickly to the main action.

The book creates a brilliant depiction of mediaeval Rome, complete with crumbling Roman buildings not yet supplemented by Renaissance replacements, complex power politics and downtrodden lower orders of society. However, I did find the repetitive details of the routes around Rome, described without benefit of a map or some sort of overview, a bit hard to follow. Fortunately it’s not critical to do so for the plot. On a lighter note, I now understand the inspiration for Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork…

The fact that this book is fourth in a series doesn’t seem to be a barrier to reading it first, as the small amount of necessary background is simply explained at the right time. However, as noted, you do wonder how much practice Dante needs to get any good at detection.

This book is not a “light”read, but rewards the reader with a rich, captivating tale well worth the effort.

On the upside, however, Morey has done a fine job of creating a compelling and highly amusing story which rips along at a great pace, from the first evil practical joke to the final complicated dénouement. The plot, although relatively simple, winds and unwinds steadily and you won’t want to put the book down once engaged. Although the overall outcome is never really in doubt, there are enough surprises in respect of which characters receive satisfaction, which rehabituation and which a well-deserved sticky end.

The best writing of this style has me laughing out loud, whether in company or not. This didn’t quite achieve those heights, being read with more of a constant wry grin. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read and I’m happy to recommend it, but here’s hoping the author’s next novel will be even better.

The concept is simple: Chad Orzel’s dog, Emmy, may be a typical mutt obsessed with walks, squirrels and discarded food, but she’s also intelligent enough to have a basic grasp of quantum concepts, and a view to how they might be exploited in her favour, for example by passing simultaneously around both sides of a tree to catch a squirrel. Each chapter starts with Chad explaining why “it’s not quite like that”, and going on to explain the real physics to her in some detail. This works well, breaking up some quite complex discussions with amusing dialogue between master and hound, and makes the book eminently readable.

The books scores because it’s bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex areas like decoherence, entanglement and quantum teleportation, supplementing explanations of the basic concepts and “thought experiments” with the details and outcomes of relatively recent experimental verification. Similarly “quantum” is the current buzzword beloved of pseudo-scientific charlatans, and the last chapter is a timely effort to debunk those who abuse it for get-rich-quick schemes and medical quackery.

I also particularly liked the way that the author is not afraid to embrace the concepts of measurement errors and accuracy. These are vital tools to understand how well, or badly, something has been established, and I was very pleased to see such an accessible book using them well.

The explanations themselves are a mixed bunch, some being very complicated and taking me a couple of goes to read and absorb. Given that I probably have rather more background that the target demographic (I do have a good Physics degree, albeit a few years old) this may mean that some readers could struggle with the most complex parts. I suspect a few more diagrams in these areas might have helped. However overall the book succeeds, and will probably prompt keen readers to re-read or seek out secondary explanations where they don’t understand first time.

In the Kindle edition some of the graphics are a page or two adrift of the relevant text, and the footnotes (which often contain important or amusing asides) are presented in a bunch at the end of each chapter, which is not very reader friendly. I suspect the paper version of the book is better in this respect.

This books is well worth reading, and has certainly helped to refresh and update my understanding of a complex field, while giving me a welcome laugh at the dog’s antics. I look forward to reading the relativity volume later this year.

At the core is the old idea that the achievements of the ancient Egyptian 4th Dynasty were created by and for visiting aliens, and that much of Egyptian mythology stems from that encounter. However, unlike the disappointing, distorted and disingenuous pseudo-science of Erich von Daniken and Graham Hancock this book just sets out to spin a great yarn, and succeeds admirably.

The author paints on a grand canvas, covering three worlds and five millennia, but keeps the story at a human level, by focusing on a number of well-developed central characters: be they good, evil or simply misguided. While throughout the book historical and current stories proceed in parallel, a believable contextual and technical explanation is developed for their linkage.

The science is clever, focusing mainly on the achievements of one of the races who have developed technology several hundred years beyond ours, but based almost entirely on organic solutions. Interstellar travel is handled realistically, with sub-light journeys based on long periods of hibernation, and the quest to recover a lost faster-than-light solution a key part of the plot. However, at no time does the science dominate or become superfluous to the plot.

I had a few minor niggles: The cover notes don’t do the story justice, and won’t help sales. The character, race and place names are arguably too Americanised and insufficiently “alien”. Also my pre-release copy of the book contained a number of odd spelling errors, which suggested that it had been typed without the benefit of a spell checker. However, these are very minor complaints about a very good book.

I enjoyed this thoroughly, and it’s restored my faith that it is still possible to write new science fiction work which bears inspection against the old masters. Highly recommended.

On the face of it, this is a classic Pitt story: maritime mysteries, strong male and female characters, the gradual disrobing of byzantine plots, heinous villainy committed mainly by an evil family firm, and the side of right held up by Pitt, his NUMA colleagues, and a handful of other worthies. At the climax Pitt and Giodano ride to the rescue against a heavily armed force of Korean villains, who have just destroyed a SEAL taskforce, transported on a confederate paddle-steamer! The book’s a real page-turner, and you won’t want to put it down.

But maybe the most interesting facet of this book, and why I’ve decided it deserves a review, is as a historical snapshot of the world and America’s assessment of it. Some authors deal with contemporary issues and seem to have a remarkable ability to predict real events. Others, Cussler usually among them, avoid the current in order to avoid becoming “dated”. Unusually in this book he’s tried to paint a picture of the near future, and it’s interesting to see what he got right, and what wrong.

The main villains (who have their offices on the 100th floor of the World Trade Centre – some things no-one could have predicted) are motivated mainly by money. The other evil force is a very cold war Soviet Union leadership, even though the cracks were starting to appear by 1984, and in reality by 1989 it was all over bar the shouting. Mere “terrorists” are despatched as possible players early on by the rather dismissive statement “[it’s] Too elaborate. This operation took an immense amount of planning and money. The ingenuity is incredible. It goes far beyond the capabilities of any terrorist organisation.”

Remarkably Cussler does predict a middle eastern war triggered by an invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but he has it happening in 1985, by Iran. However as a counterpoint, at one point the idea of American forces ever fighting in Afghanistan is treated as an example of the impossible. How times change.

The book is a revealing period piece, and interesting for the references which have been overtaken by history. Ultimately, however, it’s a good story and deserves to be read in the spirit in which it was written. Do so and you won’t be disappointed.

A sequence of short chapters each explores a topic, usually identifying a stream of words stemming from a common source, whether that be a Greek, Latin or proto-Indo-European root, a language which has been partially adopted into the English tapestry, or a fount of linguistic innovation such as the writings of Milton. In many cases he threads a route through time, geography and lexical space to words which have dramatically different or even opposite meanings to their antecedents.

While each chapter can be read alone, Forsyth cunningly links them together, with each feeding the next, and the last linking back to the first like Ouroboros swallowing its tail.

The writing is always amusing, and occasionally funny enough to stimulate a laugh out loud. Forsyth reserves particular cruelty for poets, and other specialists in the use and abuse of words. My favourite quote: “[we] should devote a chapter to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. So we won’t.” Myles Coverdale, editor of an early English Bible, is characterised by “[he] didn’t let the tiny detail that he knew no Latin, Greek or Hebrew get in his way. This is the kind of can-do attitude that is sadly lacking in modern biblical scholarship.”

This isn’t a learned book, and its structure and style preclude any deep exploration of a particular topic. But it will convey a broad appreciation of the mixing of the rich Jambalaya which is the English language, and will certainly pique your interest at understanding where words come from, as well as their immediate meaning.

The first third of the book deals mainly with the evolution and nature of scientific “laws”, and the meaning of reality relative to our various mental models. This is very interesting, but perhaps a little ironic given the authors’ statement on the first page that “philosophy is dead”. What other label should be attributed to this discussion?

The next section explains key aspects of quantum theory, in particular wave/particle duality, probabilistic rather than deterministic behaviour, and the effects of observation on the system. That we can now demonstrate this behaviour for relatively large objects, and affect the observed outcome from behaviour originating some considerable time before the observation, is fascinating.

Since Newton science has developed a series of theories describing the workings of our universe, and has then attempted to combine or extend them to provide an ever more comprehensive description. The next section of the book describes this progression. The descriptions of classical physics, relativity and quantum theory are fine, and don’t suffer too much from relative brevity as the older theories will be broadly familiar to most readers. However the pages on M-theory are really too brief, and don’t adequately explain it. Finishing that section with the fact that M-theory admits 10^500 solutions makes it sound very far from the elegant theories espoused earlier in the book.

The final section of the book attempts to describe and explain some of the most problematical aspects of current cosmology, but in my view doesn’t make a very convincing job of it. Cosmological problems include both the fact that universal expansion is still accelerating, and that our current model requires the young universe to have spontaneously “inflated” from coin-sized to many times galaxy sized in less than a second. Neither of these are well explained by current theories as I understand them, and this book doesn’t bridge the gap. Earlier in the book the authors pooh-pooh theories relying on “then a miracle occurs”, but don’t seem to be proposing something much better.

Instead of proposing a theory which explains the observations, the authors seem to be saying that under M-theory all things are possible, and we choose the set of outcomes which matches our measurements. To my mind this is perilously close to saying “God created the Universe as it is”, even though the authors are at pains to refute precisely that interpretation.

It feels to me that Physics is on a threshold similar to its position in the late 19th Century, where we are creating progressively more arcane versions of existing theories in an attempt to prop them up, but what is really required is fresh new ideas – the 21st Century equivalents of Relativity and Quantum Theory. This book confirms that need, but its suggested resolution does not convince me.

Refreshingly Khoury avoids making his heroes into supermen, but the same is not quite true of his villains, all of whom seem to be well-resourced single-minded psychopaths one step ahead of the good guys. A bit more variety there would also help.

Khoury writes well, much better than Dan Brown or some of his other competitors, and the book never lost my focus or interest. The action is well paced, with occasional explosive sequences of high drama. These feel slightly like the the author has an eye on the future film script, but are plausible and reasonably easy to follow. However as much as the action I enjoyed his observations on the formalisation of Christianity by the Romans under Constantine, and the extension of these ideas into yet more possible roles for the mysterious Knights Templar.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable book, with a bit more depth than some others of its genre. I just hope that the author now has the courage to develop a bit more subject matter variety for his excellent writing.

I knew before going in that the film portrays espionage without action, an “inaction thriller” if you like. What I didn’t expect was that it also lacks humour, intrigue and to a surprisingly large extent, dialogue. So much time is allocated to the menacing glances and thoughtful fiddling that some sections might as well be silent. It’s as if the screenwriters and director got to points where Le Carre was describing characters’ internal thoughts, and decided that we could just be left to guess them.

What this also means is that the film lacks the complex plot twists which one might expect. If the characters don’t engage in conversation, then there’s little opportunity to dissemble. Problems like a damaged log book are resolved by simply finding the man who was on duty and asking him to recount his memories, not by any complex act of detection. When a key character who is supposedly dead resurfaces later in the film, there’s no explanation of the timeline, or how he has just been allowed to go back to his cover job with no explanation of his absence.

While the film has a stellar cast, most are sadly underused. The senior spies other than Smiley and the mole have maybe a few lines each and almost no interactions between each other – completely wasting the talents of some of our most senior actors.

The film is shot in a dull brown monotone, carefully stripped of any variation in colour, or tone, or subject, with the single exception of scenes at a key office party. The colour scheme goes well with an accurate portrayal of the dullness of ordinary lives in the 1970s. There’s one very good sequence where Benedict Cumberbatch has to exploit the weaknesses of the low tech environment to extract a key piece of evidence, but most of the period detail is treated as simple background rather than context, a crucial difference.

A spy film without explosions or chases is one thing, but when there’s no attempt to substitute intricate detection, verbal jousting or witty banter then it rapidly becomes a very dull thing indeed.

A few weeks ago the excellent Page Eight with Bill Nighy and Michael Gambon showed exactly how this sort of thing should be done. This much vaunted “film of the year” fails badly.

Location:Southern Ln,Stratford-Upon-Avon,United Kingdom

However, even had she fulfilled her role, I would probably have come away feeling short-changed. Keeley Hawes was “the draw” on the advertising, with her image alone on all the posters, yet her character was on stage for less than ten minutes in over two hours. The lead role was that of Cleo Singer, played competently and enthusiastically by Jessica Raine, who I can only image is very frustrated at her marginalisation by the bigger name.

To emphasise the insult with injury, I didn’t care much for the play anyway. The plot can be summed up simply: “Frustrated dentist has short affair with air-headed assistant. Various other men try it on with her. Eventually the girl sees sense.”. Lots of angst, and I don’t do angst. Worse, the Depression-era New York setting was completely wasted. There were characters making lots of money, and others not making enough to survive, but this was mere background, like the Manhattan street sounds filtering in through the back window of the stark set.

This play was a wasted opportunity, and a poor use of a big name.

The area of concern, an unfortunate one for an action film, was the fight scenes. The camera was right in with the whirring blades, and this led to two problems. The first, which several reviewers have commented upon, was that it became impossible to follow the sequence of events, or the “big picture” view of the battle’s progress. You just couldn’t work out who had done what to whom. A key Roman character is killed in the final battle, yet neither Frances nor myself could work out when, or at whose hands. This stands in contrast to, say, Ridley Scott’s direction in “Gladiator”, when you are never in doubt about what has happened.

The other problem is more personal, and I don’t know how many people it affects. My brain obviously process visual information quite quickly, and at a certain point the world’s most popular optical illusion breaks down. If, say, a sword scythes across a large cinema screen in less than a second, I see it as a series of distinct jumps as my brain discerns the movement between successive frames. While at one level I follow movement, at another I’m distracted by “spotting the jumps”. This only happens in relatively extreme circumstances, with quick movements across large screens, but it’s consistent under those circumstances.

“The Eagle” is not the only film I’ve recently seen which demonstrated these problems. This excessive closeness to the action seems to be a developing trend. directors and cinematographers need to test their work by seeing whether someone sitting towards the front of a large cinema can follow it. If not, a step back might improve things considerably.

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Location:Bookham Rd,,United Kingdom

Where it differs from Cussler is that most of the protagonists are troubled, damaged people, and Adams takes pains to explain their state of mind and how they arrived there. This makes a refreshing change from the two dimensional “supermen” heroes too common nowadays, but takes a little getting used to in an otherwise quite lightweight yarn.

The novel also has a very refreshing British feel, with several English characters and background elements. In particular the cultural references, banter and even the swearing are distinctly British rather than American, which makes a welcome change!

I liked the structure in which the stories of the central characters progress in parallel with each getting time in each chapter, at least until their paths converge. Coupled with good but eminently readable writing, well paced, it makes the book a real page-turner. Towards the end I found the book impossible to put down, and – I hope this doesn’t give too much away – I loved the final plot twist and uplifting ending.

This is a great yarn. As long as you can treat it on it’s own merits you’ll have an enjoyable read.

The real meat of the tale, however, is an exploration of how religion interacts with science, politics and society, and how religious extremism of any kind can sponsor the very worst in human hatred and violence, just as much as more moderate spirituality can drive good behaviour. For a change the religious extremists are not Muslims, but American extreme right-wing “Christians”, while the moderates are mainly Navajos, both Christians and those who follow the old ways. I haven’t previously seen this portrayed in the same way in other fiction.

Although the story also features key characters speaking to God, and the creation of a new world religion, as this is a Whyman Ford tale everything is eventually resolved without recourse to the supernatural, with most driven by much more human causes.

The story rips along at a good rate, keeping you engaged right to the last. The hard science background is well presented and credible, as are the personalities and actions of the key players. It’s eminently readable, well up to Preston’s usual standard.

I enjoyed this book, and can recommend both it and the others in the series.

In this story the heretical monk, Giordano Bruno, is back at the French Embassy in Elizabethan London, where he is drawn rapidly into both a catholic conspiracy to invade England, and a related murder mystery when two of the queen’s ladies in waiting meet very sticky ends.

The style is very similar to the first book, with Bruno trying to both uncover the truths about the murders, and navigate complex relationships with the other characters. The tale is again told in the first person, but here it makes a bit more sense as you get to understand Bruno’s concerns, guilt and frustrations, and the motivation for some of his deeds.

I loved the period detail, particularly the descriptions of Elizabethan versions of well-known London locations. In this book Parris also makes much more use of actual events and personalities, such as Francis Walsingham, William Cecil and John Dee. I could almost hear some of the dialogue being spoken by Geoffrey Rush and Richard Attenborough.

The story is a real page-turner with a steady pace which kept my attention right to the end. However, if I have a slight criticism, it’s that some plot twists, such as the murderer’s identity, seemed to be signalled very early, while at other times key actions were taken by characters who had not been introduced.

These are minor failings, and overall this is a very enjoyable romp. I look forwards to Bruno’s next outing.

Update 13th May: the restructuring is complete, and you should see new reviews more fully integrated than previously. The process was non-trivial, and may spawn a blog post at some stage.
Thanks
Andrew

If you’ve seen the film “Young Winston”, based on this book, you will be familiar with some of the events. Other programmes and books have adequately explained his war leadership and his contribution to many serious political issues. However, the films and documentaries I have seen fail to capture the mischievous spirit communicated through this book.

This a fascinating study of a bygone age, when Britain maintained a great empire, when most politicians took the title Lord, and when politics and army officership were sports for those of independent means. Interestingly despite his aristocratic bloodline Churchill’s family was not particularly wealthy and some of the most poignant lessons stem from this.

Sometimes the sentiments in the book appear bloodthirsty or imperialistic, but you have to realise that at least part of the time Churchill is writing satirically, reflecting common values which you suspect he did not always share himself. When he is sincerely expressing his own serious ideals it is usually easy to detect.

These beliefs link both his skilful analysis of historical events, and Churchill’s account of his own development. For example he explains the British government’s failure to be magnanimous after the early victories of the Boer war as the reason that a relatively fast-moving and honourable conflict descended into “shocking evils” on both sides. The same failing is shown as a prime force in the leftward drift of Churchill’s own politics.

Churchill was a great writer, but it’s instructive to learn that his facility with English developed largely because he was judged early on to be too dim to cope with Latin and Greek. The classics loss was our gain, the legacy including both Churchill’s great deeds and great writing.

The last chapter is slightly disappointing, with Churchill’s early parliamentary career an anticlimax, and the story stops rather than ending on a major event. That apart, the pace, interest and humour are consistent throughout.

This book was written in 1930, when Churchill was already 56, but in the “wilderness years” before he regained high office and led Britain through the Second World War. It is interesting to speculate whether the book would have been very different if it were written either much earlier or later.

If you want adventure, read this book. If you want to understand a great man, read this book. If you want to do both and have a good laugh, read this book.

When this book came up on the Amazon Vine review system, I had hopes that it might offer something akin to the Foundation stories, or even Star Trek DS9. Sadly although there might be superficial resemblances to both, this book is just not well enough structured to engage my imagination the way they do.

The background is very Foundation-like: a stagnant galactic empire with rebellion brewing at its edges; human domination (although there are other sentient species); and technology which, faster than light interstellar travel and communications aside, looks remarkably like ours. The ships even “jump” between locations.

The major characters are well drawn, and the core idea, of a mutant seeking revenge on those who created him by illegal scientific experimentation is sound enough (although arguably done better by Mary Shelley in 1815). The problem is that the plot just doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s very difficult to tell who’s on which side, or even the state of play at the book’s end. In some ways it’s not unlike a very complicated “Spanish Prisoner” tale, but it doesn’t work. By halfway through I got very frustrated trying to understand the bigger picture, and I ended up unconvinced the author really has one himself.

One specific problem is that there’s no sense of scale: are the different locations adjacent solar systems, or galactic quadrants? Do the battles take place within the confines of planetary systems, or over a much wider range? It’s impossible to tell.

It doesn’t help that the jacket notes seem to have been written by someone other than the author, who in attempting to address the lack of a big picture introduces ideas not actually expressed in the book. The book could disappoint a reader who expects the story to match them.

I wanted to enjoy this book, but it frustrated me. The author writes the detailed stuff well, but next time needs to make sure his plot takes the reader somewhere.

OK? Now imagine that your brother is one of your country’s top military and political leaders. He’s Hermann Goering, and you are his younger brother Albert.

Thirty Four is the remarkable story of how Albert Goering protected and saved the threatened and dispossessed throughout the duration of the Third Reich. He also led acts of anti-Nazi defiance and even sabotage. His innumerable exploits ranged from moving people round the Skoda empire to places where they would be less vulnerable, through remarkable political interventions such as persuading Goebbels to classify Franz Lehar’s Jewish wife as an “honorary Aryan”, to acts of almost unbelievable audacity like driving a convoy to a concentration camp, demanding that it be filled with “workers” for Skoda, and then freeing those supplied in a nearby forest. What’s even more impressive is that through a combination of the protection afforded by his brother’s name, his own charm and political skill, and Hermann’s occasional protective or helpful interventions, he survived to tell the tale.

I’m always captivated by these “edge” stories from history, of those who didn’t fit the mould, and this is a fascinating, uplifting and inspiring tale. It’s not a hagiography – Albert’s personal weaknesses and his difficult post-war years are fully acknowledged – but throughout there’s a strong sense of his moral compass and his need to do something.

Although almost forgotten by history, Albert Goering needs to be remembered alongside Schindler and Wallenberg, and this book attempts to make that a possibility.

William Hastings Burke has made a decent job of telling the story, although by his own admission it should probably have been researched and told twenty years earlier, when it might have been possible to talk to those who knew Albert Goering themselves, rather than their descendants. The style of the book is deliberately chatty, mixing historical findings, dialogue from interviews and the author’s own wry observations from travelling around Europe with limited support and an even more limited budget.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the book is a bit short (maybe reflecting the difficulty of researching very personal stories at this distance), and it would have been great to include a few photographs of the central characters. However, these are minor niggles.

This is a good read, and very inspiring. Recommended.

However, to date I’m extremely frustrated by the quality of the tools available to capitalise on this opportunity. Most are, at best, OK for plain text blog entries, and none really delivers what I have come to expect, based on what’s available free on the PC platform.

My benchmark is Microsoft’s LiveWriter. This “free” software does exactly what I want: it provides a WYSIWYG preview as I write, using the stylesheet of my blog, provides style-based formatting (so I can create lists, headings and emphasise text, but otherwise add an absolute minimum of markup clutter), and provides the ability to manage all the post metadata, including things like hand-written post excerpts. It even has a plug-in architecture against which some kind soul has written a little plugin to manage custom fields, so I can easily add linkage to other articles or images in my photo albums.

Now maybe Microsoft have done their usual trick of hiding a lot of clever code behind a simple facade, but the above features don’t seem to be “rocket science”. There are several shareware packages on the PC (e.g. BlogJet) which have very similar capabilities. I therefore hoped that the iPad could deliver similar capabilities.

Nothing doing. For a start, all the available apps are strictly plain-text only. A couple have the ability to insert some HTML, but you need to know what you’re doing, and you have to visualise the result. If the available tags are not sufficient, then it becomes really painful. Just typing < p > on an iPad takes a grand total of 9, yes 9 keystrokes.

Some apps just don’t appear to work. MacJournal is a case in point: only when you’ve paid for it do you get a “read me” screen listing the limitations, and I couldn’t get it to connect at all. This is where I try to explore the “refund” option in iTunes… Worse, others succeed in corrupting existing entries. The worst offender, to my horror, is WordPress’ own app, which succeeded in filling my nicely formatted text with a load of random markup and line breaks. Deleted.

Beyond that, there are a couple which are trying, but not there yet. The best I have found to date is BlogPress, which seems to be reliable, handles basic metadata OK and at least has the concept of “select text and apply an HTML tag to the selection”. If I can engage the developers to extend this then it may become workable.

I did wonder if I could just post the flat text and then use the web-based editor in WordPress. However while this works fine on the PC, on the iPad the browser doesn’t seem to recognise the editor as a text area, so you can’t select text within in it. Foiled again.

I’ll keep you posted, but don’t be surprised if I can’t do so just from my iPad.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Leatherhead,United Kingdom

However, some of the supporting cast decisions were odd, to say the least. Most strange was the decision that while Victor Frankenstein and his brother William were both white, his father was played by a black actor, George Harris. Now Harris is a fine actor, and I have no problem with him playing a rich, powerful man in the right context – 2010 Britain, for example. But to cast him as Frankenstein senior, a Baron in early 1800s Switzerland, and in a story where one of the key themes is the inability of humans to see past The Creature’s physical difference from themselves to his inner abilities, that’s just plain wrong. It grated with me, and from comments I heard it grated with others too.

If that casting decision was PC tokenism, it was misplaced. If Danny Boyle was deliberately trying to contrast the loathing for the creature with our modern acceptance of people of different appearances, then it backfired. Sometimes the obvious route is the right one.

Personally, I’ve never got on reviewing significant text on a PC screen, and tend to work instead on printouts. The iPad has already proven itself an excellent reading tool, so much so that I will now download any lengthy document from my PC at work, and read it on the iPad, rather than just print it out.

Three third party applications make this much easier: DiskAid runs alongside or in place of iTunes to make managing iPad documents from the PC much easier, providing many of the functions missing from the Apple software, like folder views and drag/drop file operations. Full two-way folder-level synchronisation is promised for the next version. It also works well over USB – this, combined with the fact it’s not iTunes, makes it a good bet for corporate environments.

The companion iPad app, FileApp, is the best file management and general-purpose viewer I’ve found. And if you want to annotate a PDF document I can strongly recommend iAnnotate, which produces fully Acrobat-compatible markup, and you can either export the result via DiskAid, or simply email it to yourself.

MS Office documents are a bit more of a challenge. For example, there are many apps which view or edit Word documents. They vary from acceptable to poor. None, as far as I can see, supports embedded files, embedded objects, or style-based formatting. More critically for document reviewing, there’s almost no support for change tracking. Most apps just ignore Word markup. The only current exception is Documents To Go, which at least displays the markup and preserves it in exported documents, but doesn’t allow you to add to it. The work-around is to just type your comments into the main text, email the document to yourself, and use “compare” against the original on the PC, but that’s just plain crude.

Support for other MS Office documents is even more patchy. There are lots of apps which will read an Excel spreadsheet, but most can’t export back to the same format. And there are plenty of PowerPoint viewers, but they all present the slides as a long scrolling document. None of them have the ability to effectively show a presentation full screen on the iPad with a simple “tap to advance” model. Surely I can’t be the only person in the world who recognises the potential power of iPad+PowerPoint for presenting ideas to people in small meetings, so why have all the developers ignored this opportunity?

I await the iPad version of SoftMaker Office with hope, because the SoftMaker guys have successfully delivered full Word compatibility to Pocket PCs for years. It can be done…

The iPad should also be an ideal note-taking device, but several things mitigate against it. Firstly, the applications seem universally crude, with no rich text or outlining support, and limited or no hierarchical arrangement features. Some are quite “flashy”, with good support for doing things like pasting in pictures from the photo album, but what I need is more structured. The standard, of course, is Microsoft OneNote, which has transformed my general note-taking and list management on the PC, but Apple and most developers seem to be studiously it’s example. The one ray of light is MobileNoter, which aims to be a partner application to OneNote. At the moment it’s incomplete – it does quite a good job of synchronising your OneNote notebooks from the PC, and displaying them faithfully, but input is a bit iffy and you can’t create new sections or pages on the iPad. The “quick notes”, which can be freely manipulated, are plain text only. That said, the developers promise that the abilities to take notes in OneNote format and add them into your synchronised notebooks are coming, so maybe this omission will be fixed.

Creating content is generally a bit painful because of the restricted text input model Apple have imposed. For a start, the multi-modal keyboard is very annoying. The main screen just has the basic letters, and you have to switch modes two or three times for anything else. This is OK for bulk text, rubbish for anything with numbers or “special” characters such as the dash or the colon! No wonder the youth of today are losing touch with punctuation…

I do wonder if Apple were influenced by this wonderful video of the “laptop with no keyboard” from the Onion News Network, and didn’t get that it’s meant to be satirical?

If you make a mistake while typing, it’s quite painful to have to roughly point with a finger, then steer the insertion point exactly with the magnifier, then make your corrections. There are no arrow keys to quickly navigate a few letters back, no reversible “undo”. I also find the lack of drag and drop very frustrating.

The predictive text / dynamic spelling is rubbish compared with other platforms, offering only a single option and then usually only when you’ve typed almost the whole word. Worse, if it corrects incorrectly, and you delete the text and type your version again, it just changes it again unless you manually over-ride it. The Microsoft version is much more intelligent, and gives you a “stop changing…” option after the first time.

Some of these restrictions and crudities make no sense at all. Others might make sense on the iPhone, but on a full screen tablet device they are just plain frustrating. But what really bugs me is that the pocket PC, despite originating in an even smaller form factor than the iPhone, gets all this right.

The iPad is a great tool for some purposes, but it’s potential for business use is thwarted by Apple’s inability to recognise good ideas in the non-Mac world, and a young application ecosystem where key capabilities are still developing. Getting business value feels like a bit of a battle, even if it is far and away the best platform for Angry Birds!

The trouble is that for every St. Paul’s there must be a Bletchley Park – an architectural mish-mash which while possibly important, successful or even revered is inherently inelegant, or even downright ugly.
My analysis is that behind the glossy facade, the iPad software architecture has to be the best current example of “Ugly Architecture”.

In many ways it’s strongly reminiscent of PCs in the days of DOS, or maybe Windows 3.0, before the emergence of strong component-based architectures and unifying design standards in Windows 95 and NT.
The fundamental problem is the application-centric model, in which each application is a stand-alone combination of code and data, with very few shared services or components. This naturally leads each application developer to “do their own thing”, implementing separate, widely varying solutions for communications, document storage, printing support and so on. Apart from a token “open in another app…” supported by some applications, there’s effectively no cross-application linking, leading to massive duplication of functionality and data, and some significant functional limitations, for example the inability to directly open a URL embedded in a document.

Each application has its own data area, which may or may not interact with iTunes, web sites or a PC via FTP, websites via WebDAV or various different cloud storage services. Data which should arguably be general visible just isn’t – you can upload video files to the photos area, but they won’t be visible in the videos list. To test a variety of editors with a document you need to deliver a different copy of the document to each app.

Each application supports different models for document exchange, and different cloud stores, so a user potentially has to have multiple separate cloud accounts. While “public” cloud storage may be fine for individuals’ personal data (although individuals may still have valid security and privacy concerns), it is a real concern if used for corporate information. In corporate contexts, connectivity, security, copyright, access rights, service levels, data protection and privacy obligations, regulatory and legal constraints may all be compromised or complicated by cloud use, and become significant issues.

There’s also an interesting security implication to this which you don’t often see discussed. Because there’s no accessible file system, and no extensibility model for the application filing model, there’s nowhere for anti-virus solutions to run, and as of today iPhones and iPads are effectively unprotected devices. There are probably numerous iPads in the wild acting as festering reservoirs of infected documents. Those who are security conscious can’t be happy about this, and I know that many corporate security departments are making moves to ban connectivity to corporate services for that reason.

Even if an application interacts with the host PC more directly, you get multiple copies of documents, typically the original, a copy in iTunes and one on the device, with no mechanism to synchronise them or compare version information. Apple’s own applications such as Pages are even worse, with a completely separate iTunes space from their own “My Documents” spaces, and an additional copy step in each direction. This is a version control and management nightmare!

Why could the iPad not support a simple shared filing area with proper two-way synchronisation to the host PC, as the Pocket PC has had from day 1?

The communications architecture is a similar mess. The only application which can communicate with the host PC over USB is iTunes, but iTunes can’t use WiFi. All other apps have to use WiFi, but there’s no real shared comms application infrastructure, so the result is another diverse and fragmented “roll your own” free for all. The most obvious way for a companion device to talk to its host PC, BlueTooth, isn’t supported at all!

The WiFi only design works fine in the confines of, say, a small home office. Elsewhere it’s problematic at best. Paid WiFi (e.g. in a hotel) is typically limited to a single device, so you’ll end up paying twice if you want to connect both devices. Corporate WiFi systems are typically similar, and you may not be allowed to connect the iPad directly. Even if you do get connectivity, these networks are often set up to prevent routing between devices, as a security measure, so that’s that, then.

The alternative is to set up either the PC or iPad as a hot-spot itself. On the iPad, this is only possible on jailbroken devices. On the PC, it can be complicated and opens up potential security issues. Neither is ideal.

Apple’s policies effectively put software development back in the Stone Age, in the particular sense that “monolithic” means “single lump of rock”. Each application has to be “stand alone”, implementing many things which should arguably be shared. For example, each file management application implements its own storage management dialogs, its own comms model, its own browser, its own PDF and Word file viewers, each with their own subset of functionality, dialogs and gesture support, and so forth. There simply doesn’t seem to be any real concept of shared components or companion applications. Let’s be clear: I’m not criticising the application developers for trying their best to provide a comprehensive solution – my criticism is directed squarely at the crass architecture through which Apple force such an approach.

Even those applications which implement the “open in another app…” capability to open documents in other viewers suffer two common problems: you frequently have to open the document natively before you can send it elsewhere, and the act of doing so usually creates yet another copy of the document to manage separately!

Ironically, where there are shared components they impose significant constraints and limitations. The most obvious is the keyboard. Essentially there’s only one way to get text directly into any application, and that’s to use the on-screen keyboard configured exactly as the application developer decides. It’s “my way or the highway”. This is a dramatic contrast with the Microsoft world, where even a humble 2003-era Pocket PC supports not only a variety of built-in and third-party on-screen keyboards, but also handwriting recognition, character recognition (like the Palm Pilot), Swype, and even limited voice recognition. Importantly, these are all user-selectable at any time text input is required. On the iPad you can buy an app with a different keyboard layout, or dictation capability, but you have to cut and paste the raw text into your target application and typically reformat it to suit. This is simply primitive.

What makes all this worse is that the iPad application approval/delivery model makes it unlikely that anyone will innovate a better solution. No approved application can have legal access to another app’s or central iTunes data. Without approval, you won’t appear in the App Store or run on non-jailbroken devices, so Apple simply impose their will, whether good or bad.

OK. I am starting to love my iPad, but the software architect within me is incredibly frustrated. This great hardware is hamstrung by a clumsy, unimaginative, software architecture and oppressive centralist control by those who worship according to The Book of Jobs. It could be so much better.

</rant>

For several years in the mid-noughties, my main laptop was a convertible Tablet PC (actually a succession of Toshiba M-series tablets). I liked these devices with their dual ability to function as a subtle note-taking device in meetings or on the move, and as a fully-fledged laptop most of the time. Ultimately, though, such devices are too great a compromise: too heavy, battery-hungry and stylus-dependent for use as an eReader or travel companion, not powerful enough to meet my demands for a laptop capable of supporting virtualisation, multiple development platforms and heavy duty image processing. My main laptop is now a 15″ Toshiba, and it does the main jobs very well, but I’ve lost my subtle note-taker, unless I want to lug an old tablet PC as well.

Also, since 1999 I’ve always carried a Pocket PC, for the last 5 years a succession of HP iPaq 4700s (sadly, they don’t last forever). My PDA is brilliant for checking my diary, playing games, as a music player and for a variety of other uses. Thanks to the German company SoftMaker I even have a fully-fledged office suite which is absolutely compatible with Office 2003, right down to the menu and options dialog structures. I have composed some quite large documents using it, but unfortunately the screen size makes it just too fiddly for heavy-duty use.

It’s also unfortunate that HP set the bar so high with the iPaq 4700. I should really have been able to update it with a device including a phone, mobile internet connectivity and GPS, but two attempts to do so have ended in frustration (see “Digital Convergence – Still Waiting” and “Annoyance-Based Technology Selection” for details). Even HP haven’t really managed to replace it – their nearest current equivalent is much chunkier and has a much inferior low-contrast screen.

Enter the iPad. Before I start complaining, let’s acknowledge that this is a great piece of hardware design which does some things really well. For a start, it’s a brilliant eReader: clear, light and an ideal size. When I print documents for off-line reading, I usually print two pages to an A4 side. The iPad screen almost exactly matches this A5 preference, but with the great advantage that I can easily zoom in or change fonts and text orientation if required. To read web pages I can either exploit the mobile capabilities, or save them to PDFs on my PC.

As a mobile web browser it generally looks very promising. Again, the size is just right, with none of the compromises of phone/PDA solutions. Apple’s lack of Flash support is an occasional pain, but otherwise no problems so far.

It’s also going to make an excellent portable photographic portfolio. The screen is widely acknowledged as one of the best on any portable device, with wide viewing angles and good colour fidelity, and my photos look great on it. Getting iTunes to show a sensible album structure is a bit of a challenge (of which more later), but I’m now fairly satisfied, although I may end up using third party software which doesn’t insist on renaming my files and hiding the filenames!

Battery life is great when measured by the standards of fully-fledged laptops: at least two days fairly steady use on tasks like document reading, note taking and web browsing. Of course strictly speaking we should measure by the standard of a monotasking PDA  (I assume that “monotasking” is the opposite of “multitasking”, but I may have just made that up :)), and on that basis it’s not so good, but still acceptable.

So the hardware is great, and everyone loves the glossy touch interface. The problem is that, as the saying goes, beauty is only skin deep. The elegant facade hides an astonishingly crude and restrictive software architecture, which puts me strongly in mind of a 1990 DOS computer (albeit with a glossy graphical skin). The problems of that architecture will be the topic of my next post…

The story romps along with a pace and complexity reminiscent of “24”, and I mean that as a great compliment. It’s enjoyable, and you won’t want to put it down.

But…, and it’s a big but, you may also find this book a bit frustrating. Too many of the details are clumsy, or just plain wrong.

For example, one of the characters is supposed to be a Mancunian ex-DCI, but instead of making him sound like Gene Hunt the author has him tacking “innit” on every sentence, like the dimmest illiterate London hoody. Worse, the author thinks that DCI stands for Deputy Chief Inspector! Elsewhere the villain uses Apple Mac control sequences to initiate events, but on a laptop which is variously described as “homemade” and an IBM T43.

And is it really credible that a top air crash investigation team would be taken in by fake flight data records inconsistent with all their other findings, and take almost a day to start trying to cross-check them?

The book also suffers from the increasingly common American fiction malady of stereotypical good guys and bad guys. The former are a politically correct cross section of races, ages and sexes, but all portrayed as handsome, wholesome and beyond reproach. The villains are a bunch of Ulster thugs, the one gay guy, and an overweight, bespectacled computer nerd called Dennis. That’s so, well, Jurassic Park!

This is still a good yarn, but more focus on the details and more rounded characters would have made it a better one.

I recently converted my blog from an old bespoke (= “custom”, for my American friends) solution to one based on WordPress. However, this created a problem, in that the WordPress model is to hold all content in the database, and that wasn’t the right model for me.

Firstly, I have a number of articles which are very long for a blog post, and I had no interest in restructuring them. I also didn’t want to break external links to the existing articles.

Next, I decided that I wanted the freedom to continue to write in that style. Some of my writing takes several weeks, and it works for me to draft it as separate HTML pages. I also sometimes want to include active content or multiple images, and I don’t want to create a large and unwieldy WordPress database full of such stuff.

Finally, my online photo galleries are managed and generated using Jalbum, and I wanted to find a way of neatly integrating single images into my blog, complete with the watermarks and metadata extraction which Jalbum manages so well, without duplicating that functionality in WordPress.

This is probably typical of many older web sites, but WordPress doesn’t really embrace the integration of external content. This article describes how I solved this problem, and a WordPress plugin I have developed to make my solution reusable.

I have therefore now created a number of new “views” of my blog, and a number of specialist feeds, as follows:

• Thoughts on the World. This is the original and complete blog and feed, and will give you access to all my content, in chronological order. Expect a mix of articles including my observations of the world of software development and architecture, humorous observations, photography and personal announcements.
• The blog address is www.andrewj.com/blog
• The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromAndrewJohnston
• The Professional Blog. This will focus on professional articles based around my observations of the world of software development and architecture. Articles for AgileArchitect.org will appear here, as will updates on my products and publications, and I may cross-post relevant reviews. You’ll also see any practical announcements relating to my websites and feeds.
• The blog address is www.andrewj.com/blog/pro
• The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/StructureOfTheWorld
• The Photo Blog. This will focus on my photos, and photography-related articles and reviews. You’ll also see any practical announcements relating to my websites and feeds. There’s also a separate feed for updates to my gallery.
• The blog address is www.andrewj.com/blog/photo
• The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ImagesOfTheWorld
• The feed for my gallery is http://feeds.feedburner.com/GalleryOfTheWorld
• The Review Pages. This presents my reviews of books, films and music. You’ll also see any practical announcements relating to my websites and feeds.
• The blog address is www.andrewj.com/blog/reviews
• The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReviewsOfTheWorld

For more details, visit my Blog Views and Feeds page.

My new blog is now live. This allows a lot more flexibility, including commenting etc.

Please can you make sure you are taking your RSS feed from one of the following:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromAndrewJohnston (preferred)

https://www.andrewj.com/blog/index.php/feed/ (straight from my site)

I still need to update some of the links to longer old articles, so please bear with me if these are a bit odd over the next few days. Also you may see some duplicate items in the Feedburner feed – if so, please ignore these, and they should clear shortly.

Thanks, and enjoy the new blog.

Andrew

Migration of our web sites and email to the new hosting server is almost complete. See previous article/rant for some of my findings. After some initial frustration with my hosting provider (WebFusion) when I discovered the
limitations of their new Linux shared hosting services compared with the old one, I have to say a big “Thank You” for their efficiency in finding a better solution for me, and providing me with effective technical support to get it up and running.

If you do have any problems with our sites or email, let me know…

I’m currently developing a new blog, based on WordPress. This will make it easier to post “on the fly” than with the current solution, hand-carved from XML and ASP (now PHP).

When the new blog is running, I’m going to have a regular post for fans of my photography, so you can see what I’ve been working on. In the meantime, I’ve updated my gallery pages so they are a bit easier to navigate, bookmark and search.

And talking about my photography, I’ve recently been accepted by the Alamy stock agency. So please all rush at once and spend lots of money licensing my pictures for all those uses you’ve dreamed of but were too polite to mention

See you soon,

Andrew

The new book  has a very broad scope – trying to understand the economics and human psychology which drive aspects of human existence as disparate as female oppression and prostitution, terrorism, effective medical treatment, altruism, vehicle safety, and global problems such as climate change.

As before, Levitt and Dubner spend a lot of time challenging received wisdom, citing detailed research and comprehensive data which prove that in many cases our common understanding of how things work "just ain’t so". Typically the underlying research is not their own, but they have done a wonderful job of bringing together a larger number of different findings into a set of readily readable chapters, each of which have a strong unifying theme in the form of a key question. My favourite: "What Do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo Have In Common?"

Towards the end of the book, they also make an interesting proposition, that a large number of human problems can be resolved with relatively simple solutions, if we have the will to make it happen. The adoption of seat belts is cited as a major previous success, and the idea is then developed to explore several possible relatively low-cost geo-engineering solutions to global warming. Views may differ on how humanity must balance behavioural and technical solutions to its current challenges, but their argument is a strong one, based on a frank and realistic assessment of typical behaviour.

As a counterpoint, the final chapter recounts an experiment which proved that much of human economic behaviour can be replicated in other animals. I just loved the story of the monkeys who were introduced to the concept of money, and promptly invented prostitution!

Despite the range and depth of the subject matter, the book is always readable, with frequent "laugh out loud" moments. Anyone can pick up this book, enjoy it and take away an improved understanding of the underlying drivers for human (and monkey) behaviour. I freely recommend it to anybody interested in doing so.

After a good general introduction, the second chapter is on photographic technology. This starts with a discussion on analog vs digital photography which rather annoyed me, with its gross over-simplification of digital processing and generalisations on digital camera characteristics, with some confusion between dynamic range and aperture settings. In fairness many of the omissions (such as RAW workflows) are dealt with at length later in the book, but this section sets a simplistic tone which is not representative of the rest. The section proceeds with a reasonably fair comparison of different camera formats, albeit slightly hung up on pixel size, and a good, even-handed discussion and recommendations on lenses and additional equipment, but contains nothing of great value to the reasonably experienced photographer.

The chapter on shooting techniques is the core of the book. This starts with a discussion on the various objectives of architectural photography, and moves on to consider how to extract very different images from the same basic subject. After that the book leads the reader through perspective and its relationship to camera position, and the various ways to correct perspective distortions such as converging verticals. All this is done with clear examples, showing the effects by comparison of two or more shots of the same subject.

The various sections on composition are excellent, with good advice on how to emphasise different aspects, or make an image more inclusive, but I found the section on panoramas a bit basic, with no real advice on how to avoid common stitching distortions. A similar complaint might be levelled at the sections on exposure and shooting interiors, which are very dry and concise, although I can’t find fault with anything which is said. The author does make the positive recommendation of using naturalistic HDR to address extreme dynamic range, and provides good exterior and interior examples, plus a comparitive example of the technique overdone.

A following section on lighting considerations, including shadows, reflections, weather and seasons is short, but has some good recommendations, including how to exploit different conditions for different moods. The chapter then finishes with a short section on photographing buildings creatively, which contains a number of simple yet powerful suggestions.

The third chapter is a slight oddity – a "commentary" by experienced architectural photographer Marcus Bredt. This summarises a lot of the main chapter’s themes, but with a different photographer’s words and examples. In another book this would be the guest forward, but I rather like this "tell them what you have told them" positioning.

The final chapter is on image processing. It starts with quite a detailed discussion on RAW vs JPEG, and a rather mechanical account of setting up a RAW conversion in Adobe Camera Raw. There’s nothing wrong with these, but they feel slightly out of place. A useful but short section on perspective correction is followed by a long worked example of general image adjustment in PhotoShop, which has nothing to do with the book’s main topic. Worked examples on panoramas and HDR are more relevant, but still have too much image-specific blow by blow detail and insufficient discussion of the general issues which arise when applying these techniques to architectural photography.

The book finishes with a short and very basic section on creative adjustments, but there’s no overall conclusion. I was hoping for more detail on things like perspective correction techniques, but that’s missing.

This book is rather like a sandwich with too much boring bread, and a tasty filling which isn’t quite thick enough. The processing section feels like filler, and detracts from the excellent core on composing and shooting architectural photographs. The latter is good enough for me to recommend the book, but I must warn you that some topics will leave you wanting more. This is a good book, but could have been better.

Not only are the victims a series of Oxford University academics, who meet progressively stickier ends, but the central character is a lonely polymath with an ambivalent attitude to authority, and his own intellectual obsessions. That and the Oxford locations are both reminiscent of Dexter’s stories, but this is very much its own historic tale, focused on the turmoil caused by the multiple violent shifts in English religion between the reigns of Henry and Elizabeth.

This is a well-written and captivating story, which kept me turning the pages. The characters are all well-drawn, whether heroes, victims or villains. A few are well-established historical personages, like Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, and these are portrayed very much as we might expect. Similarly the practical aspects of Elizabethan life and the physical details of the Oxford and London locations are brought clearly and colourfully to life by Parris’ descriptions.

The decision to tell the story in the first person, from the standpoint of the central character, is a slightly odd one, in that it allows for no uncertainty in respect of his motives or progress. His own ambivalence on certain moral issues, and some self-doubt, are well portrayed, but overall I think I prefer a slightly more neutral viewpoint in stories of this nature.

Another minor complaint is that my pre-publication copy of the book had a few errors of typography and grammar, but I hope these will be eliminated in the fully proof-read published version.

Those niggles aside, this is an excellent read, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who fancies a good mediaeval murder mystery.

This is a great shame, because multishot techniques such as panoramic stitching and HDR are areas in which smaller software vendors have frequently produced powerful, innovative, inexpensive software solutions. Also, it makes the book less relevant to anyone who cannot afford (or does not want to invest in) full-blown Photoshop CS3.

The introductory sections are quite good, introducing the reader to basic multishot workflow techniques. However, there’s not much here for the more advanced reader. For example, the book explains how RAW files differ from processed files, but doesn’t really explore the pros and cons of feeding RAW files straight into multishot processing vs pre-processing them in a separate RAW convertor.

Surprisingly, the authors decide to start their exploration of multishot techniques with super-resolution, combining very similar shots to increase resolution or decrease noise. This is an odd choice, partly because it’s a relatively rare requirement, and partly because the only effective software support appears to be from PhotoAcute, which makes this a "one solution" chapter. Given that there’s another section at the end dealing with issues like sharpening and local contrast enhancement, it might have made more sense in that position.

The next section turns the attention to focus stacking. This is at least a balanced chapter, exploring techniques with Phtoshop, PhotoAcute, CombineZM and Helicon Focus. However, rather than exploring the options within the stacking tools, the authors seem happier to take the default output, and then extensively post-process it in Photoshop.

The section on panoramic stitching is particularly disappointing. Although there are a wealth of alternatives available, some of which are absolutely excellent, the authors don’t do a single worked example using anything other than Photoshop ‘s Photomerge command. They also use some very poor examples: some are just bad photography, like the wedding group with a number of people facing away from the camera, but others simply emphasise the limitations of the Photoshop focus. In one example the authors show a first-cut panorama which Photoshop has distorted wildly and stitched badly, but there is no "corrected" version.

HDR gets a better treatment, but again very much "Photoshop first". After a good introduction to the general subject, the first worked example uses manual blending of layers in Photoshop, then there’s a brief but effective example with PhotoAcute, then it’s back to Photoshop again! Finally they get to the clear leader in this space, Photomatix Pro, but again there’s very little attempt to explore the options of this powerful software. One key function is simply described by comparison to a Photoshop CS3 function, which is meaningless if you don’t have that software. FDRTools gets a surprisingly detailed review, given that the authors were working with a beta release of the software which was clearly not fully functional.

The final section is about improving image micro-contrast. While of interest, it’s not really a multishot technique, being more about various post-processing options in Photoshop. This is another missed opportunity to explore the trade-offs between pre-processing and post-processing component images, which would have perhaps been more useful.

Overall this book left me frustrated, as an opportunity lost. I did learn things from it, but instead of a balanced overview and keen insights into technique, this is just too much about fiddling in Photoshop.

A few years ago I toyed with replacing my trusty PDA, phone and digital camera with a combined unit. That was not a success, and I ended up with a second hand SmartPhone, an iPaq 4700 PDA, and the T-Mobile MDA as my car satnav (a job it does acceptably). You can read an analysis of my trials and tribulations, entitled “Annoyance-Based Technology Selection”.

Last year, with my old mobile phone wearing out, I tried again, with depressingly similar results. Someone once said “Those who do not learn from History are condemned to repeat it.” Why didn’t I follow this excellent advice?

In the introduction, Barr suggests you shouldn’t read the book if you can’t relate to his images, but that’s wrong. If your photographic interests are sweeping landscapes, stunning action or unambiguous portraits then you may well be puzzled by the images, as Barr focuses strongly on abstract details, usually of faded industrial objects. However, rejecting the book on that basis would cause a great many readers to unjustly ignore this work.

After an introductory chapter in which Barr analyses some of his own work in detail, the core of the book focuses on success and failure in photography: what photographs well; how photographs, and photographers, may succeed or fail; and what to do if you are dissatisfied with your ability to find images, capture and render them, or present them to others.

Where this book really scores is in the numerous "how to" bullet lists, of things to do and processes to follow in order to both find an image, and then ensure you have the best possible composition of it.

George Barr is obviously, as a project manager once described herself to me, a "very listy sort of person". Sometimes this works very well, but at other times it feels a little like things are being analysed past the point of usefulness.

In the final chapter Barr presents a pair of five-level capability models, of the form much loved by management methodologists, against which a photographer’s technical skill and artistic achievement can be measured. After guides to assessing one’s level, there are then suggested steps to progress between levels, encapsulating the book’s earlier advice. This has to be the most scientific way to present "taking your art to the next level", but it works well.

The book is not perfect. In particular some sections where Barr analyses individual images are poorly laid out, with the discussion two pages or more adrift from the relevant photos. In the middle of the book the analytical approach gets taken to an extreme, listing multiple variants of corner and frame structure, and I confess to hurrying through this.

Ultimately, however, such criticisms are relatively minor, if you focus on the book’s core strengths. I would heartily recommend this book to any photographer seeking inspiration for those times, which we all experience, when photography becomes difficult, disappointing or frustrating. Plus, of course, anyone wanting to move up to the next level.

Basically this is a book about a grim and serious subject – the kidnapping of children by organised peadophiles – and as a result it demands a rather grim and serious treatment. At the end there is hope for the boy’s parents and the detective, but therwise this is an unleavened slog which does not make you feel good about the world.

That said, the book is quite well written, and held my attention with its steady pace and well-drawn characters. I expect that readers who prefer their crime novels straight, rather than with Hiaasen-like comic twists, will enjoy it more than I did.

However, I can’t agree with the fulsome praise heaped on the book by other writers such as Lincoln Child and Harlan Coben. It isn’t that well written. The protagonists always get the information they require for the next stage of the trail before the appropriate baddy comes to a well-flagged sticky end, and a bit more obfuscation might have been better. The central characters are reasonably well drawn, but many of the others are very stereotypical.

The hero of the piece is himself a stereotype retired cop become private detective, blessed with both prodigious physical talents and well-honed police skills. While he has suffered a great tragedy, he doesn’t seem to have any real weaknesses. Homer knew that a real hero needs his "Achilles Heel", but Behr is like Sherlock Holmes and Casey Ryback (from "Under Siege") rolled into one. I realised part way through the book that I had been mentally pronouncing his name "Bayer", but was probably meant to pronounce it "Bear". Come on, we can try harder than this!

While I’m on a critical note, I was also annoyed by the cover artwork! One of the plot’s turning points is where Behr works out exactly where the child was snatched, with careful description of the street names. The cover does indeed show an abandoned bicycle at a suburban US road junction, but the street name is clearly wrong, and in the book the bicycle is stolen, not abandoned. I wish publishers would show a bit more attention to detail!

If you want to read a solid, serious crime drama then this may be a good choice, but don’t expect humour or challenge from this book.

My photography zone has been updated with images from my trip to Maine, Vermont and New York last autumn, and from the dramatic Winter weather in the UK. Photos from my trip to the Venice carnivale should start to follow shortly.

I’ve just completed a photographic holiday following roughly the traditional “grand circle” route, and I couldn’t have got some of my most successful shots without these books.

The author provides consistent, detailed instructions for each location, including guidance on lenses and timing. Sometimes he even tells you which rock to stand on! Follow his instructions carefully, and you’ll usually get good results, although some instructions require careful interpretation.

It’s also great fun shouting “snap!” when you realise the only other souls in some lonely location are also clutching a copy of the same book.

All three volumes have recently been updated, with high quality colour photos throughout, and a comprehensive index of locations including ratings for accessibility and scenic and photographic value, invaluable if a tight schedule means making difficult choices.

I’m already planning my next trip using volume 3! Highly recommended.

This isn’t a Bond film, it’s like a bad entry in the Bourne series. Where is the elegance, the charm we should expect of Bond? Bond films have always traditionally leavened the action with humour and beauty. Both were spectacularly missing from this episode.