NabaTech

Ebooks Ideal for Just-In-Time Tech Information

Computer books get outdated quickly and often you need technical information on a narrow topic, just in time for some upcoming project. I think ebooks (or e-docs as Amazon calls the technical documents) are the best way to deliver this type of information. When you need technical information in a hurry, you probably don't have the time to run to the bookstore or the library (and who says the bookstore even has a book with the information you need) or wait for a print book shipment from an online store. When you need it fast, electronic delivery is the best way. Even if you have the time to wait, what you need might be just 50 pages of detailed information on a specific technology (or the detailed steps to perform a specific task) and it's doubtful that any publisher would want to print and distribute a 50-page or even a 100-page book. For this type of tech information, ebooks are ideal.

As for the rapid aging problem of print computer books, ebooks would make it possible to keep the content up to date, correct any errors easily, and, best of all, not expend resources printing lots of copies. That should lower the upfront costs of publishing and enable authors/publishers to sell content at lower prices in many different formats such as a whole book, one or more chapters, or selected sections from multiple books. Of course ebooks can and should be more than just an electronic version of print books; ebooks can include multimedia content (for example, simple animation that illustrates concepts and steps with annotated text or even audio narration), better navigation within the book, and links to online resources related to the topics covered in the book.

There is the question of the ebook format. I hope the ongoing work by the OpenReader Consortium will give us a universal distribution format for digital publications. In the meanwhile, unencrypted PDF files would have to do. In fact most of the Amazon e-docs—the ones that cover technical topics— are offered as downloadable PDF files (take a look at the E-Books & E-Docs category in Amazon).

Tags: books ebooks epublishing edocs amazon openreader PDF

Diet—Leha's Chicken Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes and Walnuts

Over the past year or so we have often had a salad at dinner. The salad recipe is something my wife, Leha, whipped up. With the ingredients ready in the fridge, the salad takes only a few minutes to prepare, so it's ideal for the busy individual or family. I want to share the recipe so you can try it and also write it down for myself and our daughters so they easily can get it off this blog :-) Here's the recipe:

Ingredients (serves 2):

• A third of a head of lettuce
• Some roast chicken or turkey
• 5 or 6 slices of red beet (from a can)
• About a quarter cup of sun-dried tomatoes preserved in olive oil and herbs—along with some of the oil (we buy it in a jar from a warehouse store)
• One teaspoon of ground parmesan cheese
• One teaspoon of balsamic vinegar
• Some raisins
• Handful of walnuts

Steps:

1. Wash a third of the lettuce head, shake off the water, and then tear up the leaves in a plate.
2. Sprinkle the raisins on the lettuce. For variety, you can replace the raisins with other fruit such as grapes or chopped apples.
3. Cut the beet slices and spread them on the salad.
4. Tear some roast chicken and spread them on the salad (add as much as you like). By the way, we roast the chicken during the weekend and use it from the fridge as and when we need. You can also use leftover roast turkey.
5. Assuming that the sun-dried tomatoes were in a jar in the refrigerator, warm them up for 20 seconds in a microwave oven. Then chop the sun-dried tomatoes and spread them on the salad (keep the oil).
6. Put a teaspoon of parmesan cheese on the olive oil left over from the sun-dried tomatoes and then add the teapoon of balsamic vinegar into the olive oil and mix them up with a spoon. This is going to be your salad dressing—drizzle it on the salad.
7. Crumble the walnuts and sprinkle them on the salad.

That's it! Pour a glass of wine and dig into the salad :-)

Tags: diet chicken salad sundried tomatoes walnuts beet raisins healthy

Fiction Ebooks

Since I have no experience writing fiction, I refrain from commenting on prospects of fiction ebooks, but I do like to read what others have to say about that market. Unlike computer ebooks that could be read on a laptop or a desktop PC (while you use whatever information the computer book offers), I thought that you'd need a handy ebook reader to read fiction ebooks. To me, computer ebooks just seemed to have more potential than fiction ebooks. Then I read a recent post—In Our Continuing Series of Electronic Publishing Rants, Episode IV—where Booksquare mentions that ebook fiction seems to be thriving. Although the conclusion is based on anecdotal evidence of ebook authors reporting increasing sales, I found it reassuring that fiction ebooks are doing well.

Booksquare acknowledges that ebooks will not replace paper books, but many people do like to download and read ebooks, so ebooks are attracting an ever-growing audience. Booksquare suggests that authors with book rights can consider making their titles available as ebooks and publishers with out-of-print titles, for which they have the copyrights, can offer them as ebooks or in POD format. These seem to be sensible suggestions for both authors and publishers. By the way, on the subject of piracy, Booksquare suggests that we look at the Project Gutenberg model and stop fearing piracy so much.

Tags: books ebooks epublishing fiction booksquare gutenberg POD

Enterprise Architecture—Part #8: Technology Architecture

By now you have worked on the business, data, and application architectures. Next comes the technology architecture that describes the computing infrastructure—the computer hardware, software, and networking platforms—that would support the applications, that, in turn, enable the business activities. Undoubtedly, the technology architecture would be influenced by the latest IT trends, but the goal is not to focus solely on the technology, but to select technical solutions that can support secure and robust applications in a timely and cost-effective manner. In today's internetworked world, the enterprise network is at the heart of the technical infrastructure. Other elements of the technology architecture include hardware (mainframe, servers, storage systems, desktop PCs) and associated system software such as operating systems and databases. The technology architecture serves as the blueprint for the infrastructure and it puts forth the standards and specifications for its components.

At the highest level, you can document the technology architecture with diagrams and narrative descriptions. The diagrams invariably look like network diagrams. For example, here is a typical example:

This sample diagram shows a generic mainframe reservation system and some internal servers on a LAN that connects to the Internet and a WAN through a firewall. Users access the reservation system over the Internet. The internal systems access other partners' systems over a wide area network (WAN). When you draw the technology architecture diagrams for your organization, you should annotate the diagram with specific geographical locations of various systems as well as indicate the hardware and software details of different platforms.

Tags: enterprise architecture EA technology network LAN WAN IT

NPR Interview with Carl Tanner, the (Bounty Hunter, Truck Driver) Tenor

One of my cousins in England, Biraj Barkakaty, happens to be a counter-tenor; currently an alto lay clerk at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, so my ears perked up at the recent NPR broadcast about tenor Carl Tanner who hails from nearby Arlington, Virginia. The interesting part of the NPR interview was the story of how Carl Tanner got into singing. He used to play football and sing high school choir, but he wasn't thinking about singing even after he graduated from the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music in Winchester, Virginia. He said that he thought he wasn't good at it and he lacked the confidence and the drive, so he took a job driving truck, but found that it paid very little. Then, because of his physique, a bounty hunter hired him as a backup and he hunted down suspects for a while. He was quite good at too, having successfully captured 169 out of 178 suspects, but after getting shot at, he decided it was enough and, finally got into singing. And now he's a famous tenor, highly in demand at various opera houses around the world. Amazing story, isn't it!

Currently Carl Tanner is singing the role of Samson in the Washington National Opera's production of Samson et Dalila—they have seven performances during May 14 through June 4, 2005. I mentioned the Carl Tanner story and the Samson et Dalila opera to my violinist daughter Emily. She asked me if we could go see the opera and, guess what, I was able to get tickets to this Sunday's performance. The opera is sung in French with English supertitles; that'll be a chance to brush up on my non-existent French :-)

Tags: classical opera tenor countertenor Carl Tanner Samson et Dalila alto NPR

Lamenting the Size of Computer Books

I still have my copy of Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language that I bought around 1980 when I first learned C (transitioning from FORTRAN), on a VAX-11/780 running Berkeley Unix that we installed following instructions outlined by Bill Joy (Sun Microsystems wasn't incorporated yet). Kernighan and Ritchie's paperback book, published by Prentice-Hall, was all of 225 pages or so, yet it was packed with everything I needed to learn C. Kernighan and Ritchie subsequently had a second edition of the book in 1988, updated to ANSI C, and it's still only about 275 pages long. I continued from C to C++ and when Addison-Wesley published Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language in 1985, it too was only about 325 pages. Then something happened and computer book sizes jumped. In fact I was part of that trend—I wrote the 800-page The Waite Group's Microsoft C Bible in 1988. Of course, today the majority of computer books (at least the ones dealing with programming languages or operating systems) are typically close to a thousand pages in size!

I think I know the reasons why computer books end up so large. First, the subject matter has grown in complexity, so we need more book pages. For example, C relies on libraries to do all the hard work and once you start describing the libraries, it's hard to keep the book's size down. C++ also has standard libraries and when you describe them, guess what, the book gets larger. Even Stroustrup's third edition of The C++ Programming Language grew to 920 pages. The second reason is that it's not economical to sell smaller books at lower prices—I am not an expert on this, but it seems the numbers just don't work out. A third reason is the book buyer's expectation of getting a certain number of pages at a certain price. This is related to the reason that smaller print books are not economical. If there are a whole bunch of books on the same subject and all priced at $49.99, the feeling—right or wrong—is that the book with most pages would be perceived to be a better value. Even with all these reasons for selling the huge tomes, I still wish we could move to 300-page computer books that focus on narrow topics and offer good value to the book buyer. Perhaps computer ebooks will help us reduce the size and offer better value than print books.

Tags: books ebooks epublishing trends size C C++ Kernighan Ritchie Stroustrup Joy billjoy

Thomas L. Friedman on "The World Is Flat"

This past weekend my wife and I attended the iit05 conference where Thomas L. Friedman was one of the keynote speakers and he gave a captivating talk summarizing his recent book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. As you might have heard or read by now, in his new book Tom Friedman is talking about how the world has shrunk and technology has leveled the playing field for everyone around the world to compete in the global marketplace. You might say "I knew that already," but Tom Friedman has a casual and engaging way of explaining what he means and how it affects us, which made us sit up and listen to his talk.

Friedman began his talk recounting how, for a long while, he has been going back and forth between the Lexus and the Olive Tree issues (based on his previous book The Lexus and the Olive Tree). Then last year, when outsourcing became a topic in the U.S. presidential election campaign, he decided to go to the land of outsourcing (India, China) and interview people who were doing the outsourced jobs. That's when it hit him that while we were busy with other things, the world had quietly changed—in his words, it had become flat (I assume he meant the playing field is leveled). He decided to take a few months off to put down his thoughts on paper and the result was the new book. For the benefit of the audience, he went through the key historical and technological events—the fall of the Berlin Wall, release of Microsoft Windows 3.0 (a universal GUI for everyone), the 1995 Netscape IPO and the release of the Netscape Web browser, the fiber optic networks installed in the heyday of Internet boom that now provides us low-cost communications, interoperability of software applications, and ubiquitous wireless communication—that, in his opinion, collectively brought about the current state of affairs where any capable individual can participate in the global economy regardless of geographic location. He calls this "Globalization 3.0" and he outlined six new ways that people can now collaborate in the flat world: outsourcing, offshoring, open-sourcing, insourcing, supply-chaining, and informing (by which he means unlimited access to information). He gave interesting examples of each of these new ways of working, including how terrorists are also exploiting the flat world tools (you can find all the examples in his book).

So what does this all mean? Friedman says the horizontal collaboration among individuals and companies in the flat world is shaping global economics and politics now. He acknowledges that not everyone can participate in the flat world, but even if a small percentage of the world's population can collaborate and compete, the impact is still going to be huge. Friedman suggests that we better hone our science and engineering skills so we can be ready to compete in the flat world. He said this is what he tells his daughters nowadays: "Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.'' All in all, it was a great keynote speech that got us thinking about the new world order and also concerned about what the future holds for our daughters.

Tags: friedman flat outsourcing offshoring insourcing supplychaining informing iit IIT iit05

Diet—Breakfast is a Must

We are all so busy nowadays that in our rush to get to school or work, breakfast is often a casualty. You might think: good riddance! After all, if you are trying to keep to a diet and eat less, missing breakfast can seem like an easy way to cut some calories. I used to think that way too and typically skipped breakfast, but that has all changed since I modified my diet. Now I think of the body as an "eating and calorie burning machine" that needs to be jump started with a good breakfast in the morning. Breakfast is the fuel to fire up the body's machinery for the day, so I don't dare skip breakfast. Otherwise, I fear the body would bend my will and get me to take that donut in the morning meeting, or worse, overindulge at some other meal during the day.

What do I eat for breakfast? Earlier I used to settle for milk and cereal plus a cup of coffee. After I switched to a low-carb diet, I now go for a bowl of soup and black tea for breakfast. And I take along a handful of nuts—almonds or walnuts—to munch on the way to work.

For your breakfast, pick whatever suits your diet, but don't skip breakfast—your body will behave itself and, best of all, you won't have to deal with a growling stomach at your 10:00 AM staff meeting!

Tags: diet breakfast lowcarb nuts

Microsoft's Online RSS Aggregator/Reader

Soon after I starting subscribing to RSS feeds, I thought eventually all Web browsers would include built-in RSS/Atom feed reader/aggregator, just as some browsers such as Safari RSS and Opera 8 already do. I was thinking that Microsoft would add RSS capability to IE7, but I forgot about the online RSS aggregator/reader, something Microsoft is already working on. Recently I tried out the first version of Microsoft's experimental http://www.start.com/1/ and I found the user interface to be quite useful. Initially, it looks like MSN Search, but once you click the Show link on upper left part of the window, you get the RSS feeds. You can click the category tabs to view lists of feeds organized by categories and click any feed to see the topics and click a topic to expand the topic inline and read the first few lines of that topic (clicking the topic again collapses it). To add feeds, click to open the Add Content (refer to the figure below) and type in the URL of the RSS feed. The feed then appears in the My Feeds section on the tab. Here's a typical view of the relevant area of the IE window for http://www.start.com/1/:

I found the collapsible view of the topics and contents very convenient. One thing I did not like was that clicking more... to view the full topic opens that topic in a new browser window, but I guess there was no easy way to show it in the same window. Turns out Microsoft had another version as well—yes, you guessed it: http://www.start.com/2/—with a different view of the feeds. You can try it out and see what you think of the version 2 interface, but I liked the first version better. According to the Start.com news, the development team is moving on to version 3 that would meld versions 1 and 3 based on user feedback. I can't wait to see what version 3 looks like!

Tags: RSS aggregators Microsoft trends safari opera IE7

EBook Formats and Standards

Recently I wrote about using animations in computer ebooks and mentioned PDF as the ebook format. As a computer book author, I am considering ebooks as an easy way to package and distribute digital content. I would like to avoid the waste of unsold paper copies (not to mention the cost of printing and storing those copies) and instead deal with relatively cheap digital bits. Being new to the world of ebooks, I didn't realize that there are so many competing formats for ebooks—Adobe, Microsoft, Palm, Gemstar, Mobipocket, Plucker, and more—vying for dominance. All these competing ebook formats—reminiscent of VHS vs. Betamax (but with more choices)—is probably a good sign; that must mean there is a market out there and everyone with a viable format wants to lock in their customer base. Along with the ebook formats, there is the issue of digital rights management—DRM—that publishers want and consumers resist, for valid reasons from both perspectives.

As you might guess, the ebook format becomes a factor when you want to distribute the book. In other words, the same book that you wrote using your favorite word processor could be packaged and distributed in many different ebook formats. That's the idea behind the Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) from the Open eBook Forum—a standards organization for the electronic publishing industries. According to the OEBPS FAQ, the publication structure "is an XML-based specification for the content, structure, and presentation of electronic books.... OEBPS enables you to create a single electronic representation of a publication that can be rendered by many devices." This means that I could put a book in OEBPS files and they can then be used by many different epublishing and ebook reading devices. OEBPS sounds good for the future, but what do I do until OEBPS catches on. I was hoping I could just use PDF without any encryption for computer books meant to be read on desktop or laptop computers. If the PDF ebook is priced low enough ($5 to $7.50), I think the lack of DRM should not pose a problem.

By the way, there is a relatively new project—OpenReader—aimed at creating a platform-independent open standard format for distributing digital publications. The project plans to develop an OpenReader system for reading ebooks. The OpenReader system will support OEBPS, XHTML, MathML, CSS, SVG, and much more. I can't wait to try it out, once the first version of OpenReader is released!

Note: The Teleread blog as well as the Yahoo Group eBook Community discusses OpenReader (as well as ebooks in general).

Tags: books ebooks epublishing trends OpenReader OEBPS PDF XHTML CSS MathML SVG