If that was not enough, he has also posted 300 pages of his working notes created as he wrote the novel. The novel is available in several formats including PDF, HTML, and PDB/PRC (Palm Pilot readers!).

Wow, that is a great question! One of my favorite answers to this question comes from the book “The Psychology of Everyday Things” (P.O.E.T.) by Donald A. Norman. Norman says that user-centered design is “a philosophy based on the needs and interests of the user, with an emphasis on making products usable and understandable.” (ch. 7, p. 188)

Norman further states that

Design should:

• Make it easy to determine what actions are possible at any moment (make use of constraints).
• Make things visible, including the conceptual model of the system.
• Make it easy to evaluate the current state of the system.
• Follow natural mappings between intentions and the required actions; between actions and the resulting effect; and between the information that is visible and the interpretation of the system state.

In other words, make sure that (1) the user can figure out what to do, and (2) the user can tell what is going on.

• Norman, D. A. (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.

The Psychology of Everyday Things is available from:

• Edmonton Public Library
• NEOS Libraries
• Chapter.ca

Note: The Psychology of Everyday Things was reprinted under the title The Design of Everyday Things. I am quoting page numbers from the 2004 edition but I believe they are the same regardless of title.

What you want is an RSS feed that lists items that your library does not have yet. You want that RSS feed to be empty until the item is available. As soon as the item is in the catalogue it will show up in your feed and you can put a hold on it.

A year or two ago, I wrote a perl program that searches a Z39.50 catalogue, and returns the newest 20 items. I made the program so I could see the latest DVDs, Videos, and CDs. I recently modified that program so that it would search for books that my library does not have but I know they will get. In particular I was interested in the new, and positively scandalous, book by Peter C. Newman about Brian Mulroney. The book was kept secret until it was released and I knew the library would be ordering it any day, and I also knew there would be a long long line up for it.

Well, my program worked perfectly. I managed to get in the hold queue in position 50 (realize, that staff get to put in holds before patrons so you can never get in position #1. I’ve never managed to be any higher than position 8 at my public library for new items).

By this afternoon, mere hours after the item was ordered and added to the catalogue, the number of holds has grown greatly. While I am in position 50, there are 33 copies on order, so I should have the book about a month after the order arrives!

The nuts and bolts of the program works like this. I have a perl program that uses the Yaz Z39.50 library and an RSS library. I connect to my libraries Z39.50 server and perform a search for the item. I then generate an RSS feed as output. It contains some of the MARC fields from the Z39.50 search results. In the case of searching for non-existent items, I generate an RSS file with no items. The program is run hourly from cron on my webserver.

I choose to configure firefox to pick up the RSS as a “live bookmark” and when the item was available, it was right there in firefox.

Now you might say, wouldn’t it be better to get these kinds of notices by email? I agree, email might be better. Instant Message or Text Message (SMS on a PCS phone) might also be better. Lots of people read RSS feeds all day so RSS is also a good candidate.

It would be interesting to have libraries start offering something like this to patrons as a service. The patron logs in and enters a list of items they want to search and when there are no hits, they can request to be informed when the library gets the item. The patron gets to choose how they want to be informed: email, RSS feed, text message or just by checking back on the web page. This would have a side-effect of letting the library see the most in-demand items.

My public library has a “request an item” form, but when you use it, you get a prompt response. Usually, the response is, “sorry, due to budget limits we will not be adding this item to our collection.” Of course that is just non-sense. Just because they are choosing not to add it at this very minute, does not mean they won’t add it. For example, I once requested that they add the video Colossus: The Forbin Project. It is an ideal compliment to many other films they have and is required viewing for some studies of philosophy, technology, embodiment, cyberphilosophy, etc. They will add this item some day, they just do not realize it yet. I’d like an automatic way to find out without having to manually search for it from time to time. I also know that someday they will offer the TV series Six Feet Under on DVD at my public library. Maybe not for a few years, but they will get it. When they do, there will be lots of holds. I’d like to be first in line.

Someday soon, before the Access 2005 conference I will clean up my perl code and release it as open-source. Subscribe to my RSS feed to find it when it is available!

Members of the Edmonton Public Library can subscribe to a special RSS feed I whipped up to find out when the book becomes available. This feed will allow you to find out as soon as they have added it to their catalogue and you can place an hold even before it arrives! The feed is generated every two hours from a Z39.50 search of the EPL catalogue and converted to RSS (for those who care about the details).

For those, not familiar with recent world leaders, Mulroney was the Prime Minister of Canada for a long time. Americans might know him for clowning around and singing “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” with Ronald Reagan. Germans might recognize him as a friend of the famous criminal Karlheinz Schreiber.

Somewhat interesting are the headlines from Canada’s major media on the subject:

• The National Post: “Mulroney tell-all book slams Trudeau“
• The Globe and Mail: “Years later, ‘he bugs us still’“
• Macleans: “Mulroney “devastated” and “betrayed” by Newman’s tell-all book“
• CBC (staff locked-out): “Mulroney says he’s tops, Trudeau’s not“

Conclusions regarding media bias are left as an exercise for the reader.

Ten Steps lives up to its title; there are ten simple steps outlined and the author does not waste time embellishing. The steps are divided into three sections: The Basic Steps, The Clarifying Steps, and The Writing Steps. For each step, Sawers defines what is needed and why, and provides practical advice for completing the steps. Practical is the operative theme here. With the exception of steps 1 and 3, the ten steps are are activities not abstract ideas (#1 is “Be Proactive” and #3 is “Come up with the right topic” but the author provides practical advice on how to achieve these goals).

The book itself is short; just 127 pages. It has small narrow format, ideal for keeping open on your desk in front of you. Most of the book is formatted so that keep activities, advice, or tips are in large print on one page and the opposite page contains details. This format works brilliantly as you can flip through easily and leave the appropriate section open as you are working. This is a true handbook: keep it close at hand because you can and will use it.

The book is not costly. The Canadian price is CA$13.95 making it affordable to its intended audience (students). I am also happy to note that it was not only written by a Canadian but is published right here in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada by The NS Group.

Ten Steps is available from many libraries including the Edmonton Public Library. Libraries in the NEOS consortium (such as the University of Alberta) have copies but they are typically in reference and thus marked NO_LOAN. EPL does lend out its copies but it is a popular resource so put a hold it on it now!

Sterling organizes the book around a quote of Shakespeare regarding the life cycle of a man and dedicates one chapter to each phase of the cycle. This approach is ineffective and confusing. For each stage he tries to pick out one or two trends in technology or society that might be molded onto the metaphor provided by the Shakespearean quote. One would think that if the metaphor of the book was stages of human individual development, from birth to death, then the author might envision the next 50 years as being divided into similar stages. Not so, each stage is used as the seed for brainstorming and not as a coherent theme for the book. Readers are thus left wondering, “where is he going with this?” at each stage.

While the title promises some serious futuristic forecasting, most of the book discusses current trends. We get more “now” than we get “tomorrow” in this 50 year forecast. I have found Sterling’s fiction to contain very interesting scenarios for future developments but I didn’t get that from this book.

Still the book is full of interesting quotable little bits and his predictions are reasonable and well informed. Some chapters provide some entertaining insight into Bruce Sterling’s personal world, so if your a big fan this would be a must-read book. I would recommend this if your looking for an easy read or if your a Sterling fan. Otherwise I would suggest the now aging Release 2.1 by Esther Dyson or Database Nation by Simson Garfinkel as similar but more interesting.

The novel begins in the middle of the story, with Art explaining his current dilemma. Art is stuck on the roof of an insane asylum in his underwear. He then flashes back to the beginning of the story where Art explains how the whole mess began. After that the novel progresses by moving these two threads forward in alternating chapter. This method works effectively enough, with only the occaisional confusing inter-chatper transition for the reader. It is especially effective because Art is a member of EST; he lives his life on eastern standard time. But Art is physically in England with a day job. He lifestyle demands that he rarely sleep for more than an hour or so and he is living in the kind of blur known only to insomniacs. The back-and-forth flashback story telling puts the reading in touch with the feeling of never ending flow of events that the protagonist must feel.

The story is very entertaining and keeps the reading involved. It has only a few rough spots. The beginning is a bit confusing because it almost reads like commentary by the author. I was sure I reading an introduction to the text for the first 10 minutes, and then realized I was reading the actual first chapter. The end seems to drag out a bit but not painfully so. There also seems to be a missing chapter (how does Art get from the English train station back to North America at the end?).

I found this a bit reminiscent of the work of William Gibson but not overly so. Gibson’s style is more sophisticated. He weaves multiple characters and plots together chapter after chapter. This novel splits one plot into two halfs and weaves them back together and focuses on a single character but the effect on the reader is similar. You get the sense that you are re-meeting the character over and over. Another similarity to Gibson’s writing is the character is a lowlife/underworld figure that is still sympathetic partly due to a “super-power.” Art considers himself a double-agent trying to ruin business outside his beloved EST time-zone. He has two super-powers the first of which is his ability to argue and the second is his ability to identify new “user experiences” that can immediately become reality (probably the biggest stretch of science fiction in the entire story).

The novel is unbalanced in the portrayal of both of Art’s most defining qualities. At the beginning Art is a great arguer and set on his double-agent lifestyle. As the novel progresses we lose, in both the past and current threads of the story, the sense that he is good at argueing and that he is determined to sabotage the GMT time-zone. Instead he becomes a savior of the end-user confounded in most argument and reduced to clumsy neurolignuistic programming. This lack of change in character is quite continuous and not at all confusing probably due to the story being told in the two threads (past and current).

Overall this was an enjoyable novel. I take away no profound lessons or insights, but I do wish people would adopt Doctorow’s single word for phone, laptop, computer, email, etc. He calls it simple “comm.” As in, “can I use your comm?” or “did you comm him?”

Eastern Standard Tribe is available from your local public library, bookstores, or for free from Cory Doctorow’s website.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is the tale of a aging spymaster, set during the cold-war, whose luck has turned bad and seeks revenge against his nemisis. The protagonist is Alec Leamas, head of Britain’s Berlin desk. He runs a ring of spies who operate out of East Berlin. But Alec has a problem: as the story begins, the last of his spies is killed off. Alec’s nemisis is a Russian/East German named Mundt who has uncovered and killed each of Alec’s assets one-by-one. Alec’s bosses give him the opportunity to get revenge by becoming a double-agent. What unfolds is an interesting plot where the reader is never quite sure who is on who’s side.

The first time I read The Spy I believed I was reading a Deighton novel, and I remember at the time thinking about how rough it was compared to his others. It lacked the details that build a rich world in which the reader can get lost. After a second reading this is true, but of course I now see that it isn’t a rough Deighton novel, it is just a different author. The Spy is a novel that is essentially narration. The characters, even the protagonist and villians, are flat. For example, to convey that the protagonist is strong, Le Carre simply states that he is strong, that he has a strong neck and body. At times it reads more like a screenplay than a novel.

The saving grace is plot. It is intriguing and worthy of this book’s reputation.

The Spy is considered by many to be Le Carre’s best novel, while I have not read his other novels, I would guess that reputation is based on two strengths. First, the plot is a great example of the type of intrigue esponiage fans expect. As a reader you are never sure who is on what side, and you develop a healthy sense of paranoia which is both rewarded and invalidated at times. Second, the novel conveys that “cold-war espionage” feeling common to dramatic works from this genre set in post-world-war-II Europe. There is a certain feeling that the reader gets about the people and politics in Europe due to the tensions surrounding the division of Germany. Overall I liked the novel but it doesn’t rank as high as similar works by Len Deighton. I’d be compelled to see the movie version.

Note: Both the novel and movie are available from the Edmonton Public Library.