It was one of those books you start reading and only stop to go to sleep or eat something. It had it all: a gripping story, characters you could identify with and a cool setting. Although I nearly never reread books since there are so many interesting ones I haven’t read yet, I just thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be cool to read it again” and bought it in the kindle store. And as before I read through it until I finished it.

Nowadays books like “Ender’s Game” are categorized as “Young Adult” books. It’s not a hard science science fiction book. The plot isn’t overly complicated, but it has it’s fill of philosophy. It’s also a book that is easy to read. But despite being like that or perhaps because of it, it’s a recommendable book even for the no longer quite so young adult.

In the nearly 30 years since it’s publication Orson Scott Card has written some sequels  and prequels and stories taking place at the same time as the original book.

There are some reoccurring elements in those books, but nonetheless they are all at least entertaining and definitely good reads. In my opinion the best of the Ender books is “Children of the Mind”. It comes with several new ideas not seen in the other books and the story is as gripping as the original one.

There are rumors about a movie based on “Ender’s Game” and I wonder what it will be like. Most movies based on science fiction novels are just action movies in a science fictional setting. There’s much action in that book that can make an action movie, but I hope they won’t cut out the profound parts.

I downloaded it and started writing my first tests. I didn’t like that it used a style that I perceived as being inspired by JUnit 3, though. It also has a nice grouping feature, but groups looked a bit to unspecific to me.

At it-agile, the company I work for, everyone gets 30 slack days per year we can use however we want — as long as it has some connection to agile software development. So I decided to invest some slack days and try to implement my own testing framework. I wanted it to use matchers like the ones provided by Hamcrest. I liked that grouping feature of the existing testing framework but wanted to give it more meaning. As I pondered this I remembered that my colleague Sebastian Sanitz once introduced me to a JavaScript testing framework named Jasmine and upon revisiting it, I decided to build something similar for Dart.

As it is inspired by Jasmine and is implemented in and for the Dart programming language, I named it “dahlia”. Like “jasmine”, “dahlia” is the name of a kind of plant and its name start with the same two characters as “dart”.

A dahlia test looks like this

describe('two equal strings', () {
 it('should be equal', () => expect('test').to(equal('test')));
});

Like in other BDD testing frameworks (the most widely known being RSpec), the describe-part describes something that will be tested and the it-part specifies and tests the behavior of the tested object. So you read this text “two equal strings should be equal”.

The parameter to expect() is the actual value, the one you want to test. Typically you call a method on the tested object here and test whether it mets your expectation. The testing part is the parameter of the to method. It is a matcher. Here an equal matcher is used that simply tests whether the actual value equals the expected value which is passed as a parameter to the matcher. Currently there are only a few basic matchers but the number of available matchers will be expanded in the near future. It’s fairly easy to implement your own matchers should the need arise. You just need to implement the Matcher inferface and provide a convenient function like the equal-function in this example to provide a new matcher.

The expect-part is – similar to the describe- and it-parts — meant to be easily readable. In the example this leads to “expect ‘test’ to equal ‘test’”. The it-function takes a function as its second parameter. In many cases those will be simple one line functions like the one in the example, but if some setup code is necessary, a full multi-statement function can be passed here. The it-call is also called a specification as it defines a behavior and a test for it. Every it-call is therefore counted as a “spec”. The total number of specs, of failures — failed expectations – and crashes — any other exceptions that may occur — is displayed at the end of a testrun.

Currently there is only one reporter that prints the test run results to the console — be it the Dart VM console in DartEditor or Dartium or the script console in any browser –, but other reporters that  create HTML and other formats will be added later. As dahlia is currently ment to be used for unit testing, the output to the console is the kind of output one needs the most.

dahlia is available at GitHub. If you are interested in Dart or are already developing with Dart, please take a look at it.

Several features of Closure made me take some time to dive into it:

• The closure library contains many small useful frameworks that fit together. So there is no need to mix and match different frameworks for functional programming, ui composition etc.
• There is a working module concept. You can separate your application into different parts and specify which of the many frameworks in the closure library you really need.
• You can use static typing and there is a compiler that checks it. So many errors can be found by the compiler. You don’t have to find them while running the app in the browser.
• Since the compiler knows what is used from the huge closure library and your own code, it can delete unused code from the compiled application and run some other advanced optimizations that make the resulting code much smaller and faster.

Especially the static typing and having a compiler that checks the code before it is executed, appealed to me. Debugging in a browser is quite comfortable nowadays but if there is a chance to get rid of bugs without having to debug, I’ll take it. As someone having developed in Java for over a decade now, using an IDE and a compiler feels natural to me.

But there is a downside. The static type information for Closure has to be typed in into comments since JavaScript itself as a dynamically typed language doesn’t provide any constructs for this. Having to put type annotations into comments is quite cumbersome and after some time my initial enthusiasm for Google Closure somehow waned. Was it really worth the additional effort?

Dart seems to be the answer for all those loving Closures’ features while disliking the notation needed to get them. Dart is a new class-based language by Google created for the development of client-side web applications.

Dart has optional static typing. You can provide static typing information and if you do, the compiler that generates JavaScript from your Dart code, will check it. If you choose not to provide that information, it will obviously not be checked.

Static typing in Dart only affects compilation. It isn’t used while running a Dart based application.

Dart also comes with real classes and inheritance among them. The notation for classes and inheritance is much simpler than the prototype-based notation in Closure. It all just looks cleaner and more readable in Dart than it does in a Closure class.

The Dart team provides an Eclipse-based IDE for Dart called Dart-Editor. It’s still in the alpha phase and lacks many features that simply belong to a good IDE like refactoring support, but even in this very early stage it’s useful for the development of Dart applications and the exploration of the Dart libraries.

Currently much is happening in the Dart universe. The language is far from fixed. Frequently new proposals or changes that will break code from a month before are announced. Some weeks ago for example a change of the meaning of the == operator was proposed. Currently Dart is not for the faint of heart but it’s fun.

My initial enthusiasm for it melted away after half a year. I haven’t read a single chapter since June or maybe even May. Serial novels don’t seem to work for me. I prefer to read a book at my own pace. I just cannot stand to have to wait for the next chapter for a week or maybe even two or three weeks.

It’s the same with tv series. I watch the first episode and maybe the next two. Then I get impatient and if the series isn’t really gripping or otherwise fascinating, I don’t watch it anymore.

I had expected that The Mongoliad would keep me reading longer because Neal Stephenson is part of it, but somehow it isn’t like any other book from him.

I suspect that either he doesn’t participate in the writing of the book or that the serial character of the book isn’t doing it any good.

Though I don’t know anything about writing fiction books, I can imagine, that it’s quite hard to write a book if you cannot return to an earlier chapter and fix a part or add something to make the whole book work better. The Mongoliad looks — at least to the point where I left it — like a cronologically sorted collection of stories about some people. The stories themselves are OK, but somehow there is something missing, something that makes me want to read on.

Then Delicious wasn’t shut down. It only got sold to another company. So somehow I returned to Delicious. I don’t have many bookmarks. I collected 350 of them and sometimes there are weeks when I really don’t add a new one. So it’s not as if the bookmark manager were a vital tool for me.

Anyways Delicious started to irritate me a bit recently. It looks bloated and they seem to add features I don’t really need. So I returned to Pinboard recently and will probably stay there. It still has the clean and nice interface and a useful mobile variant of it. The feature set  hasn’t changed for ages, but as it’s good as it is it doesn’t need to.

There’s one difference to Delicious that will matter to some people. For a Pinboard-account you have to pay a one time sign up fee of currently 9,51 $. The fee is getting increased by one cent for each new account.

In case of being interested you can browse my public bookmarks at Pinboard.

As in his former books, in the Void trilogy there’s a conflict that threatens a whole galaxy. People travel faster than light in space ships to prevent the catastrophe and some nice political and religious games are played out on a great stage.

This time around a singularity — the void — is the cause of great concern. Science fiction has seen some books about singularities — great artificial or somehow otherwise strange intelligences — in the past and many of them probably with scientifically better theories, but Hamilton’s take on the subject is nevertheless a good read.

Actually there are two stories told alternately. One takes place inside the void, where people have some amazing psychic abilities. The other one takes place outside the void, where people view the inside story while dreaming. Naturally some of the outsiders want to get into the void while others try to prevent them from getting inside.

Both stories provide lots of suspense  and fun and merge in a nice final.

Time to change it again. This time a lot of things change.

Naturally the design is the most apparent change. It’s very minimalistic now. There are no images in the header and the footer and no boxes around the individual posts. I’m using a webfont from Google’s font directory to give the headings a somewhat distinctive look. The HTML is html5 with all the new shiny tags like article and header, but that’s something nearly no reader of this blog will ever notice. I have also put some work into making it readable on mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads and Android phones.

The biggest change is in the backend though. I’ve moved the blog from Movable Type to WordPress.

With the move to WordPress I also decided to deactivate commenting and trackbacks on this blog. Comments and trackbacks have mostly been spam in the last few years and a pain to sort out. I have included tweet and flattr buttons on each post. So you can comment on my posts via twitter or if the comment doesn’t fit into 140 characters on your own blogs. If you like a post you can flattr it.

As the title – The Mongoliad – suggests mongols play an important role in this book. It’s 1241 and the mongols are on their way to conquer the world. They have already reached Poland. Here’s Neal Stephenson talking about the setup:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE9bg62Oews

The Mongoliad is different from those earlier books in one important aspect. It’s not a book in the classical sense. You cannot buy the finished product printed on paper or as an ebook. It’s published on its own website one chapter each week. And beside Neal Stephenson there are 6 other writers and even more people who are somehow involved in the whole thing.

The Mongoliad is not the first book of its kind. Some years ago Tad Williams tried the same approach with Shadowmarch. Shadowmarch was canceled 2002 after one year because it didn’t attract enough subscribers to pay the bills. It was published as a printed book sometime later.

I think this time around it could work. You don’t need a desktop computer or notebook to read it. You can read it on an iPad or any other of the forthcoming tablets. There’s said to be an iPad app waiting for approval by Apple that will improve the reading experience.

There are also some kinds of social features. You can rate and discuss each chapter with your fellow subscribers and with the writers. There’s also a forum. Those features are rather unimportant for me and till now I haven’t partaken in any of the discussions.

As with classical books, the content is the one and only thing that interests me. The already released four chapters present a gripping and well written story. So I think the 10$ for the yearly subscription fee is well invested money.

The advantage of having more text on a page is simply a reduced amount of page turnings. It’s the same with ebooks as it is with normal books. Each need to turn a page introduces a brief distraction in the reading flow. This becomes very apparent when reading on a small screen like the one of an iPhone.

On the iPad there are many different apps for reading different kinds of ebooks. Since starting reading ebooks in 2003 – on a Palm Tungsten T – I’ve been buying ebooks on ereader.com and reading them with the ereader app, which was called PalmReader back in 2003. Unfortunately ereader was not updated for the iPad, but fortunately Stanza is a nice alternative to the original ereader app. It can read DRM-protected ereader ebooks. It also provides a simple access to the free books from Project Gutenberg.

Apple’s iBooks app also looks nice and you can read any ePub book with it. It’s not limited to ebooks bought in Apple’s iBook store. I haven’t tried it with any DRM or otherwise protected ebooks, though. O’Reilly and The Pragmatic Bookshelf among others sell their ebooks without any such protection. Reading ePub books from those publishers works without any problems in the iBooks app. iBooks is a beautiful app with nice page turning animations. It looks nice and works great. It’s perfect for reading novellas and other kinds of books that mainly contain just text with an occasional image without any layout specialities. You can change the font style and font size and the text will be laid out in a way that it perfectly fills the screen. But that’s also the biggest problem with ePub when used for technical books. As a software developer I often read books with code listings and tables and images in them. I’ve never tried to read those kinds of books on an iPhone. The screen is just too small, but with an iPad there is enough room for listings, images and tables. It doesn’t work with ePub versions of this kind of ebooks. Listings just look weird. Probably reducing the font-size would fix it, but then there is a ton of other problems with ePub such as syntax hightligthing and special symbols pointing out interesting parts of a listing. And footnotes are displayed on the last page of a chapter.

So, the only solution seems to read the PDF variants of those ebooks, which are also available. PDFs are laid out with a specific font at a specific font size for a specific page size. It’s perfect for technical books although it takes away the possibility to change the font-size to one’s liking.

iBooks was recently updated with the ability to show PDF ebooks, but PDF-reading isn’t as good an experience as with other apps.

My current favorite is GoodReader. Earlier versions of this app were quite slow and changing from one page to the next was rather sluggish, but that got fixed in a recent update. So now it works fine. One of the greatest features of GoodReader is its crop tool. Pages in technical PDF-ebooks have normally big margins and and footers and headers containing information about the current chapter and page number that aren’t necessary when reading a book. With the crop tool you can crop away the parts that you don’t need and zoom into the content of interest. With a bit of cropping the books by the mentioned publisher are pleasant to read on the iPad.

Fast PDF has a similar feature but with an unnerving characteristic. Every time you change from one page to the next it zooms out of the currently zoomed in page, changes to the next page and then zooms in again to the desired portion of the page. That makes the app totally unusable for me.

Both PDF viewers have support for password protected files and both lack the support for word definition lookup, a feature nicely implemented in iBooks., where to just tap on a word, select “dictionary” from the appearing menu and are presented with a definition of the word from the dictionary included in iOS.

Currently I prefer buying ebook versions of technical books over their paper variant. It’s easy to take a dozen of them with you when travelling. So I have them available wherever I am whenever I have a need to look something up in them.

Reading ebooks just became lots better with the iPad.

Once I bought the book and read a few pages, I realized that, as odd as it may sound, the title was really “Rainbows End”. It still amazes me how the absence of a simple symbol – the apostrophe in this case – changes the whole meaning and mood of the title.

The book is a near-future science fiction novel. It takes place in 2025. People are using wearable computers all the time and augmented reality is used by everyone. Well actually some people don’t use those new technologies. Some of them live in a retirement home called “Rainbows End” – a zone free of those new technologies. Some live in the normal world but try to make a stand against the new things by sticking to notebook computers and printed books. There’s a pretty funny scene when one of them tries to prove that all you can do with wearable computers can also be achieved with a notebook and that the new technologies are so much more insecure than the old ones.

There are much similarities to our own times. We laugh at people who are scared by the internet and by computers in general but how will it look like when our generation is the old generation. Will we be flexible enough to adapt or will we stick to what we learned to accept and love now.

The book is much more than that. There’s a a crime of international scale, love and friendship and well thought out protagonists. I enjoyed reading the book very much.