So beautiful, yet so violent. The full-size image is available at the NASA Earth Observatory.

While most people will read this book to learn about the fight against al Qaeda, it leaves me curious about two other areas. Firstly, after seeing the entertaining movie „Charlie Wilson’s War“ about the USA’s arming of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, -and noticing that the facts of the movie are generally not disputed- this book paints a rather different picture. Instead of the origin being a congressman who gets the CIA involved, Clarke talks about Morton Abramowitz of the State Dept., Richard Perle of the Dept. of Defense and himself (of course, he talks about himself and his achievements a lot in the book). The two accounts seem rather incompatible, so whom to believe?

The second point is the response to the bombing of US Army barracks in Khobar in Saudi Arabia, carried out by Iranian intelligence agents in 1996. Clarke is very shy about what the response entailed, only talking about a „worldwide choreographed intelligence action“, later adding that it was directed at the Iranian intelligence service. He’s open about the response to an earlier assassination plot against President Bush Sr. by the Iraqi intelligence service -a bombing of the intelligence service‘s headquarter-, and notes that both retaliations served in deterring the respective countries from carrying out further acts of terror against the USA. So what was the response? Anybody care to speculate?

More info at amazon.com

His Pentagon-appointed lawyer stayed silent during the trial, refusing to even answer questions from the judge.

Read it at Gitmo jury: Life sentence for bin Laden videomaker and weep.

More info at imdb.com

I hate twitter. I hate the idea of twitter. I don’t want to read about how some friend of mine just returned from his/her trip to bathroom and how it all went. And most of us aren’t visited by great ideas worth to be shared with the rest of mankind every 30 minutes. I know I am not. The only thing I am interested to know every 30 minutes is what my friends are reading, what page they are on and what they think about the book at this very moment.

GoodReads’ online book warehouse got it pretty close to what my dream book warehouse looks like. It comes with pre-installed “read”, “currently reading” and “to read” shelves, which is how I naturally sort my books. It allows you to rate your books and to post quick comments, and here they got it right again. To write a full-blown book review is time-consuming and I often lack will power to finish mine, or even to start them. A bookshelf so inviting to “quick-and-dirty” style of book reviews instantly won me over. Sometimes the book is so uninspiring, so all I want to do is to give it 1 star and to add “I wonder why it is even written”. Sometimes I want to keep a few quotes in hope that some day I will add some profound comments to them.

Thomas Paul apparently types away a couple of pages for every book he reads, but who else can do it? For the rest of us there is GoodReads.

Kent Beck: Test Driven Development, Extreme Programming Explained and Implementation Patterns

Christopher Alexander: The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction and Nature of Order

Yourdon & Constantine: Structured Design

The Naked Cartoonist: A New Way to Enhance Your Creativity

Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

Appreciative Inquiry: Appreciative Inquiry Commons and Wikipedia

Zed Shaw: message to the Ruby and Rails communities

JavaFX Script („JavaFX“ henceforth) is a new way to develop client-side Java GUI applications, comprised of a more declarative code syntax, and some new ways to couple behavior to code. That being the case, it (and by extension, this book) has two audiences: developers proficient in Java who want to learn about JavaFX, and web developers interested in building rich client applications who may not know much (or any) Java.

Falling into the first group, this reviewer thinks neither group is well served by the book. Java developers don‘t need much introduction to basic concepts; they‘d be better served by comparisons between how things are done in plain Java, and how they are done in JavaFX, plus an overview of the new features JavaFX brings to the table. Neither is included in the book. Non-Java developers will struggle when trying to understand Java syntax and concepts, JavaFX concepts and parts of the Java class libraries all at once.

Most of the book is taken up by presenting various JavaFX concepts using a single medium-sized example GUI application (that builds word search puzzles, although that‘s really besides the point). Where some concepts don‘t fit that application, small additional examples are used. This does help in understanding what‘s going on, since the code can simply be run, and the effects of certain constructs be observed, if the text leaves something unclear.

As regards JavaFX Script itself, I think it misses the mark. The new syntax and bindings simplify some tasks, but without a solid understanding of the underlying Java concepts it‘ll be hard to pick up casually. If one is well versed in Java, on the other hand, it seems that JavaFX Script does not offer a large enough leap to make it worthwhile. Maybe upcoming members of the JavaFX family of technologies will make it clear where the journey is headed.

More info at amazon.com

The film depicts a neighborhood of Paris and its inhabitants in their pursuit of happiness, or simply their daily life. The focal point is a severely ill man who watches the people from his balcony but can’t take part any more, and his sister who helps him cope. There are some similarities to Short Cuts, although more attention is given to love and companionship here (as befits the city), sometimes in all its undignified -but all too human- glory. Imperfect people try to make the best of life in a great city, or -as the main character summarizes it- “That’s Paris – everybody complains, nobody just enjoys living.”

More info at imdb.com