El Tramo | Reviews

The Myths of Innovation (Scott Berkun)

2010-12-30T00:00:00+01:00

By taking some of the great past and present innovations off the divine pedestal they have been put on, Scott Berkun illustrates what innovating is really about in his Myths of Innovation. And although the subject sounds negative, this classic by Scott Berkun is strangely empowering, inspires everyone to be innovative, and does all this in the extremely pleasant, entertaining, and easy to read style we’re used to from Berkun. Highly recommended! I always thought that the great innovations in history were mostly about having a great deal of luck and epiphamies, making it demotivating to even try to put my own ideas to work. However, this is one of the first myths that are debunked in the book. By stripping innovations from these inaccurate perfect perceptions, and showing the other forces that drive innovation (hard work, curiosity, motivation, failure, earlier innovations, etc.), this book gives you the exhilerating feeling that it could actually be worthwhile exploring your own ideas. The book also makes your aware of the “filters” that you put on your own (and others’) crazy ideas, encouraging you to open your mind more, and taking away the fear of having ideas in the first place. And without analyzing innovations to death or claiming that there is a magical formula for innovating, you get some handy tips on how to succesfully convert these ideas into real products: creative thinking hacks, motivational techniques, pitching, management, etc. I found the book to be a very interesting and pleasant (even as an eBook on an iPhone) read. It changed my perception about ideas and innovations quite a bit!

Confessions of a Public Speaker

2009-12-21T00:00:00+01:00

Although I love the thrill of speaking in public, I unfortunately don’t get to do it as often as I used to (once, maybe twice a year lately). The few times I do speak, though, I’ld like it to be as good as possible. That’s why I was very interested in O’Reilly’s announcement of Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker, and so I put the book on my shopping list right away. Not having heard of the author before, I was hoping for the best (light, interesting, with a touch of “funny”), but expecting the worst (“I am your presentation God; people sell their own mother to hear my voice; although you are not worthy, I will lower myself to your level and give some insight in why I am so fantastic.”). After receiving the book in the mail, I read it from the first page to the last in merely one day (a new personal record). Needless to say the book exceeded my expectations. The book talks about many aspects of public speaking: why are we affraid of talking in public, and how can we avoid this? How is it to earn a living of public speaking? How do you work a tough room? How can you attract people to your talk? How do you keep people from falling asleep? How should you get and interpret feedback? What to do if your talk sucks? What to do when things go wrong? What are the little things pros do? The list just goes on and on. Not only is this book packed with handy tips and anecdotes, it’s also written in a very light and funny way, making this book both extremely pleasant and interesting to read. A must-read for virtually anyone, especially those who sometimes speak in front of an audience (even small ones)!

The Watch

2009-09-04T00:00:00+02:00

When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by Swiss clocks and watches (actually, mostly anything that was made in Switzerland). However, my attention in watches seems to have faded shortly after I got my very own black & red strapped Swatch: only a few years later, I replaced the Swatch with a digital Casio with built-in calculator, because it looked flashy and cool. I have to admit that the watches I wore (if any) haven’t really improved much since then. However, since I recently came to be without a timepiece again, I took the opportunity to read up on watches before buying a new one. I ordered the first well-rated book on the subject I could find, which happened to be Gene Stone's The Watch. It turns out that this book was one of the most entertaining books I recently read, and I must admit I have become a watch fanatic ever since I read it. The Watch begins with a history of time, covering all kinds of timekeeping tools, from the pyramids of ancient egypt, up to the cell phones of today. After this brief history, the author motivates his choice of 50 brands that he describes in detail in the remainder of the book. He concludes the introduction with an entertaining comparison of the watch manufacturer scene with an old European court, consisting of a king, a queen, a prime minister, a knight, and so on. The main part of the book consists of an in-depth description of 50 of the most notable and famous historical watch brands out there, old and new, literally ranging from A (Lange & Söhne) to Z(enith). The book tells the (often very extended) history behind each brand, the multitude of relations between the different watchmakers, and the most famous watches of each brand. These stories are a very interesting read, and serve as an excellent crash course into the world of watches for newcomers like me (whose knowledge of brands is limited to the obvious Rolex, Swatch, and Omega). However, what really puts the cherry on the cake are undoubtedly the 500 gorgeous high-quality pictures of watches and their movements, depicted in extremely high detail. On any given day, I find it fascinating to pick up the book, flip through the pages, and enjoy just looking at these photos for a while. After the theory behind the watches and their history, the last part of the book focuses on the actual owning, exploring, and collecting of watches. Besides a handful of tips from the author, this part comes with several testimonies from different people, talking about how they got interested in watches, why they are so fascinated about them, and which one is their ultimate favorite. On top of this, the author created a few top 10s of watches, including “models that everybody should know”, “models that are fun to look at”, “models that look good”, and “brands to look out for”. Again, very valuable information for the uninitated like me. You can feel that the author has a passion for watches, knows what he’s talking about, and put a lot of love into this book to share his passion and knowledge with the rest of the world. All this makes The Watch both a fascinating and entertaining to read, or, if you don’t feel like reading, a nice way to feast your eyes on pretty shiny pictures. If, like me, you're interested in reading even more about watches after finishing The Watch, I can recommend Cult Watches: The World's Enduring Classics by Michael Balfour. Where The Watch discusses the history of many brands and a variety of their collections, Cult Watches picks out 30 specific “cult” watches (including my favorite, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso), and tells the detailed story behind each watch and its manufacturer, also accompanied by a lot (though not nearly as many) of high-quality photographs of the insides and outsides of these timepieces. And although most of the watches in this book are mentioned in The Watch as well, some brands that are only mentioned briefly in that book (such as Longines) are mentioned in more detail in Cult Watches. All this makes Cult Watches a nice addition to Gene Stone’s broad reference book.

Refactor Your Wetware (Beta)

2008-03-04T00:00:00+01:00

At the occasion of `Read an eBook week', I thought I'ld do something you can't actually do with real books: buy (and read) a version of a book before it is released. Andy Hunt, author of the excellent book `The Pragmatic Programmer' (a must read for every developer!), recently announced the availability of a `beta' version of his new book, `Refactor your wetware'. This beta version is an early electronic version of the book, which gives the reader the opportunity to get a sneak peek at the book, and give feedback for the final version (which, as a beta book owner, you can also download when it is released). So, I went over to the `Pragmatic Bookshelf' store, ordered my copy, and got an e-mail with my personalized copy only a few seconds later. As the subtitle of the book (`Pragmatic Thinking & Learning') hints, the main subject of this book is our brain: how we learn things, how we become experts in a certain field, how we get new (innovative) ideas, how we solve problems, ... The goal is to use these understandings to become more effective in our learning process, to make it easier to get ideas and to solve hard problems. The book has a lot of the feel of `The Pragmatic Programmer' to it: easy to read, very pleasantly written, a lot of descriptions of situations and experiences that sound very familiar, and a written description of some thoughts and theories that somehow were already floating around somewhere in your brain, but which you never really paid attention to; and, of course, mainly written from the perspective of a software developer. The book is filled with quite interesting statements and useful tips that will probably keep lingering on in your brain for quite a while. The insights into the human brain that the book provides seem to make a lot of sense, and explain a lot of real-life experiences. Reading this (beta) book was fun and very learnful. Unfortunately, there is also a downside with a beta book. Not the occasional typo, not the layout that goes slightly wrong in a place or 2, but the fact that, just when you're hanging on every word of the text, you end up with a few chapters that have nothing but `Coming soon'. Then again, this might be the perfect book for this to happen: while waiting for the second half of the book to appear, my R-brain will have a chance to index the raw data it recorded from the book in the background, and I might be able to read the remainder of the book with more context-awareness. Hey, I think I learned something!

User Interface Design for Programmers

2007-10-29T00:00:00+01:00

User interfaces: every piece of software needs one, but no programmer likes to write one. According to Joel Spolsky (host of the popular Joel on Software), the root cause of the problem is the (unnecessary) fear of being incapable of designing user interfaces. He claims that UI design actually is fun, challenging, and doesn't require any artistic talent whatsoever (as opposed to what many programmers think). Since I have to write quite some UI code myself, and always thought it was the most boring and frustrating aspect of software development, I thought I'ld pick up Spolsky's book `User Interface Design for Programmers', and let him try to convince me otherwise. In his book, Spolsky goes through many aspects of user interface design through real-world examples of popular software, showing some do's and dont's, and generally making it sound like a fun and challenging job. I had a lot of fun reading his book, since it is well written, funny, easy to read, and very light (130 pages, including many illustrations). The nice thing about the examples is that he doesn't limit himself to one part of the OS spectrum, but comments (both negatively and positively) on Windows, Mac OS, and even software from the DOS era. And although the examples are a slightly dated (the book is over half a decade old), I still felt like his views applied to all the UIs I'm writing or using today. I would recommend the book to everyone who comes in contact with user interfaces when programming. If you haven't agreed with anything he wrote, at least you'll have had a fun read. And if you do share his point of views, you'll probably end up with having some personal findings confirmed (like `Pull up the Tools→Options dialog box, and you will see a history of the heated arguments that the software designers had about the design of the product'), come off with some new interesting views, and maybe, like me, feel like UI design can actually be fun and interesting.

Sampling away with the SPD-S

2006-03-18T00:00:00+01:00

Lately, I have been searching for ways to trigger loops and samples from behind my drum kit. After playing around with a less than ideal setup involving many cables and devices (see below), I decided to buy myself a Roland SPD-S sampling pad. Turned out to be a pretty good move ! About a year ago, I bought myself a Roland SPD-6 to start experimenting with loops. I connected it via MIDI to my Edirol UA-25 interface, which in turn was connected to my laptop. On the laptop, I used Ableton Live to trigger the loops. To stay in sync with the loops, I started one measure of cowbell hits on my Roland DR-770 rhythm box, sent it to one channel of my mini Behringer UB502 mixer, and connected the monitor mix of all other instruments (including the UA-25) to another channel, outputting the UB502's output to my headphones. Although this setup worked for rehearsals, it should be obvious by now that this wasn't very handy. Not only did this require a lot of connections and devices, it was also very hard to keep the tempo in sync. Syncing the tempo between the DR-770 and Ableton (with another MIDI cable) at least gave me a central point where i could manage my tempo, but because of the way the MIDI sync worked, it was hard to control just the rhythm box without interfering with the loops. The SPD-6 also gave me a bit of trouble, in that it was hard to program, and that it sometimes triggers if you hit its rim. On top of these major inconveniences, I was a bit reluctant to start gigging with my PowerBook, fearing that it probably wouldn't take long until some guy spilled beer all over it, and of course that things would start crashing mid-gig (I have faith in OS X, but not in Ableton and/or the UA-25 drivers). I considered buying a Roland SP-404 rhythm sampler as a replacement for the Laptop/Ableton/UA-25 combo. After some testing, this seemed like a very cool device indeed, but the on-screen display didn't seem enough (I like to see preset names on my display), it had a sequencer i didn't really need, and I still would be left with an extra device I had to drag around and connect. At just the extra 100 euros over the SP-404, I decided to buy an SPD-S. After unpacking, the first thing I did was reset the memory. The few sounds I heard sounded pretty decent, but you don't buy a sampling pad to play someone else's samples ;) Importing my existing sample wave files through the CompactFlash interface of the SPD-S was a breeze. I imported them directly to CompactFlash memory, because the internal memory was full after importing the samples of 3 songs. I also had to experiment with the three resolution settings (long, standard, fine) to find out that long suffers from a good deal of quality loss, whereas standard is nearly as good as fine (at half the space requirements). The SPD-S gave me all the control I wanted to make performances using the samples. I could even pan all the samples/loops to the left and pan a metronome loop completely to the right, such that I could send one channel to my headphones and the other to the mixing table. So, no need for an external metronome anymore, nor entering the tempo manually (it's saved with the performance). On top of that, I could create a 'panic' pad, which turns off all the loops except the metronome, resulting in a perfect situation for live performance. If you try this at home, don't forget to turn the ambience off, or your metronome will leak through to your other channel. The sampling process itself also seems decent. Using the 'auto-record' function (which starts recording based on input level) and the ability to synchronize the end of the recording by entering the tempo in advance, it gives a pretty handy interface to record loops. One thing I am missing though is the ability to enter the number of measures to record, to have full automatic stop. I'm also not able to stop recording with a foot switch (although you can do it for phrase recording). I don't really use the begin/end marking features (yet): for more complex sampling, I use software, and upload the loops afterwards. In conclusion of this review, the SPD-S gives me all the features I need to trigger loops from behind my drums, perfect for on stage performance, and it brings them all in one device. With some pan trickery, I even obsoleted my external metronome (although I lost the ability to use stereo samples this way, but this doesn't seem like a problem on stage). Two thumbs up !