Book Review: The Reversal, Michael Connelly

20140921-105043.jpgThe other day I watched The Lincoln Lawyer, featuring main character Micky Haller as a defence lawyer. I’d read the book long ago and hadn’t realised that Michael Connelly wrote about a second character (having read several Harry Bosch books). Better still, Haller and Bosch are half-brothers and both feature in this book.

The plot is that Haller is asked to appear as an independent prosecutor in an unusual case – a man found guilty 24 years ago faces a re-trial following some new evidence. Haller appoints his ex-wife as co-counsel (yes, really) and Harry Bosch as his investigator. I found it interesting how chapters written in the first person are told from Haller’s point of view, whereas other chapters are narrated in the third person, typically when describing action concerning Harry Bosch. Of course, in Harry Bosch thrillers, his own chapters are in the first person, so it’s clear the focus is on Micky Haller in this one.

I enjoyed this book – the blurb on the cover referred to the threat to Bosch and Haller’s own families which I didn’t think was explored as much as it could have been, but otherwise it was a good read.

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Book Review: Inferno, Dan Brown

20140921-102242.jpgThis is another in Dan Brown’s series of Robert Langdon escapades, and follows the usual formula. There’s a brilliant, female co-conspirator who seems to cast aside all her initiative and insight on meeting Langdon, becoming merely a foil for Langdon to show off his knowledge of history of art and symbology. And there’s a peculiar, driven assassin – in Da Vinci code it was an albino monk, here it’s a blond biker with spiky hair, but the character is largely the same.

Dan Brown’s books frustrate me greatly – there’s no doubt that the formula is successful and this book is a real page-turner – but there’s no depth to it. As an example, take Robert Langdon. We’re told he always wears the Harris Tweed jackets and the same make of shoe, has done for 20 years. As a wearer of Berghaus outdoor pursuits equipment, I respect that. Yet within minutes of trying an Italian suit and shoes (surely a case of product placement by the company, Brown mentions the maker so many times for no good reason) he makes a mental note to buy the new brand in the future. What?! So much for brand loyalty.

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Flow – the secret to happiness?

Interesting TED talk on “Flow”, that sometimes elusive state in which you feel incredibly productive, in which hours fly by and seem like minutes, and when the activity in which you’re engaged is a joy.

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It appears that when Sony was founded, they got the idea of flow and set up the company to best achieve it for their engineers. This slide is also interesting:

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It claims that flow is only possible for high skills, high challenge tasks. That would explain why I regularly achieve a flow state for harder development tasks that require an extensive skillset, yet a more mundane period of bug fixing is less challenging and so is unlikely to lead to flow.

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Apple Watch – the new old watch

Apple have finally announced the Apple Watch. Based on the publicity photographs and rushed reviews that have been published so far, I’m a fan and will probably buy one. But it struck me that the grand new innovation, the Digital Crown, is hardly ground-breaking – my current Tissot watch has had it for ten years!
Tissot classicApple Watch

You see, the functions on my classic Tissot watch are entirely driven by the bezel. As well as the analogue time, it has a stopwatch, timer and digital date/time display.
The bezel acts in several modes:

  • Rotate slowly to change hours
  • Rotate quickly to change minutes
  • Press to start/stop timer or stopwatch
  • Pull out to change the time

What’s really clever is that, when the digital functions are hidden, the watch looks completely analogue. And the bezel reacts according to mode – it only bleeps when you press in stopwatch/timer mode, and ignores the press otherwise.

So whilst the Apple Watch is my next watch, my classic Tissot watch was there first.

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Book Review: Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household

20140901-132534.jpgI picked up this book on holiday, a victim of the “suggested reading” table at Waterstones. Written in 1939, this novel follows the plight of an English gentleman who attempts to assassinate a leading political figure abroad (likely Hitler) and is caught. It’s a compelling read and I enjoyed the occasional humour about the gentleman and his class, alongside the grim reality of his plight whilst on the run. Apparently, a sequel has been written as if narrated by the gentleman’s friend Saul, to be published later this year – that makes me think this book was “suggested” for commercial reasons rather than its status as a classic book.

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Book Review: Flash Boys, Michael Lewis

20140901-131432.jpgMichael Lewis’s books seem to get better and better. Whilst Liar’s Poker is often cited as a classic, I think The Big Short and now Flash Boys are more interesting. Flash Boys is particularly impressive given that the topic of high-frequency trading is under so much scrutiny, yet Lewis brings to light some of the practices going on in the industry that are not widely known. On top of that, he has a gift for making heroes out of otherwise unremarkable characters.

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Book Review: The Drop, Michael Connelly

20140827-142005.jpgIn The Drop, Harry Bosch is working for the cold cases department and suddenly finds he is called on to investigate two cases at once. The first is an apparent suicide of the son of a leading politician – with all the accompanying fallout dealing with a long-term enemy of the police force could bring. The other is a puzzling murder in which the suspect matching DNA from the scene would have been a child at the time of the crime. In this book, Harry meets Hannah Stone, the therapist of one of the suspects. It also features his daughter, Maddie.

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LINQ for C++ by Steve Love

The October 2013 issue of Overload includes an article by Steve Love on building a range library that enables LINQ like syntax in C++.

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This looks pretty good and is along similar lines to the approach in cpplinq.

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Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup

Short interview with Bjarne Stroustrup where he comments briefly on Go and Swift.

Apparently, Stroustrup is currently working for Morgan Stanley – hence his interest in C++ for financial applications.

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How to investigate rebuilds in Visual Studio

You never know when this tip from Kiri Osenkov might come in handy – how to investigate why Visual Studio keeps rebuilding before running, even when you think nothing has changed.

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