Steve Jobs Biography

Steve Jobs was not a particularly nice person by all accounts. I’ve never had much time for folks who are horrible to other people and then claim they do this  “just because they are that way”. But he did make a lot of things. I’ve been working my way through his biography over the last few weeks and it is fascinating.

For me the best bits are at the beginning, when he and Steve Wozniak rode the personal computer wave and built a huge company from nothing. Towards the end the story turns into a succession of product meetings and multi-million dollar deals but it is a great read nonetheless.

Linux Format Coding Academy 2013

Computing is currently a bit fashionable, which is nice because there are loads of magazines of all flavours out there. And quite often a magazine will lump together a bunch of articles from previous issues and make a kind of “Greatest Hits” compilation. Linux Format has just done that and produced an edition it calls “Coding Academy 2013”.

It seems a bit expensive at 12.99 for what looks like a magazine, but when you consider that there are no advertisements it starts to look better value. There are introductions to Python, Ruby on Rails, Haskell, Scheme and Lisp along with features on Android development. It is all pretty well written, with examples and links to sample code.

If you have C# skills and are looking to find out the meaning behind some of the other words you hear bandied about when people talk computers you could do a lot worse than take a look. If you are complete beginner you might find the range of information a bit wide, but remember that you only have to learn one of these languages at a time.

I found my copy in the local newsagents, you can buy it online here.

You must meet Henrietta Lacks–in fact you may already have done

Read. This. Book. It is not about computers (at least so far, I’m just past half way through). It is about medicine, race and human nature. Anyone proposing a work of fiction that followed the story in this book would be dismissed as being fanciful and having ideas that were just too far fetched. And yet it is all true.

It tells the story of how the death of one woman led to the establishment of a whole branch of science. It will also tell you how cells work, how they go wrong and how we found out about a lot of this, just because of Henrietta Lacks.

You can track down a copy from here. It is also available for Kindle at a very good price.

Century 21 Comic Strips

As well as the Pacific Rim book (Pacific Rim? Sunday’s Post. You mean you’ve not been to see the movie yet. Shame) I also got a collection of Century 21 comic strips. We used to get TV21 magazine every week, and after dad had finished reading it I was allowed to take a look.

Anhyoo, the Thunderbirds strips were always the best. They were illustrated by Frank Bellamy who was the only one who seemed to be allowed to put his name on the strip. With good cause. I still reckon this was some of the best comic art ever. Don’t believe me? Grab a copy of the book and take a look. There are actually only a couple of Thunderbirds strips in the book, but the other ones are a good bunch too.

And I’ve just found out that there are lots more available too, which could prove expensive…

Thunderbirds are Go

When I was a kid in the sixties (yes I am very old) a must view TV program was Thunderbirds. We first watched it on our old black and white telly which took ages to warm up. It wasn’t until we saw some magazines pictures that we actually found out the colours of the Thunderbird craft. I’ve never really understood why Thunderbird 2 is green, but I digress. The franchise has been round a few times since, with a major revival in the nineties. (At this point I shall gloss over the awful film from 2004).

Anyhoo, one of my birthday presents was a copy of the Hayes Thunderbirds Manual, which gives a detailed breakdown of the International Rescue organisation and their craft. I like this as much now as I would have done nearly fifty years ago. At first I thought it was a reprint of magazine articles of the time, but there is a lot more to it than that. The authors have made use of the wealth of resources gathered by Thunderbirds aficionados over the years and put them together into a very comprehensive and will written exposition of the Thunderbirds universe. There is even an episode guide right at the end of the book. If you have any interest in this fantastic series, then it is well worth a look.