I just wrote a review for Amazon of The Golden Ratio : The Story of PHI, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio. I'm usually a fairly easy marker but this book bored me to tears. The guy writes a book on math and tries to keep as much math out the book as possible. Instead he talks about why the builders of the pyramids really didn't use phi. And then anyone who has even a marginal association with phi gets long, pointless biographies.
I think Livio completely missed his audience. People who are going to be interested in reading this book are not going to be afraid of a little math.
You can read the full review here: My Amazon Reviews
My article on Velocity was recently published in the JavaRanch Journal. I am slightly paranoid about my writing as I think everything I write sucks. Perhaps it says something that I continue to write articles anyway.
I've written an article for next month's Journal already. Usually I wait until the last possible moment but for some reason I felt inspired and the article came pouring out of me in just a few hours. It took longer to test all the code and make sure it worked perfectly than it did to write the article.
Anyway, I decided I like Velocity a lot. Back in the Dark Ages before JSP was invented, we were all struggling to find ways to make servlets less than horrible. My staff and I were working on a project called the Cendant Global Referral Network (CGRN) and we needed a way to get the HTML out of our servlets. We developed a methodology very similar to Velocity. Our goals were pretty simple:
- get the HTML out of the servlets
- make the HTML editable in a cool HTML editor
- have the HTML work in a browser without having to go through Java
- make it so simple that you could explain it to a web designer with no Java experience in less than 1 hour