Sun, 06 Jul 2008
Sound Mixing
Eddie Bazil, Sound Mixing Tips and Tricks,
PC Publishing
No matter how knowledgable you are, there is usually always
something new to be found in these sorts of books - ways of getting
a balance, small technical details, or even ways of looking at a
problem.
Eddie Bazil takes us through his way of doing things by first looking
at what he thinks is good; then the listening environment; personal
preparation; tools; headphones and speakers; noise; and then a whole
bunch of things to do with the mix.
The rub comes when we consider where he's coming from which is basicly
that of an engineer who's being paid to capture whatever's going as best
he can. This constitutes a certain way of looking at things and a certain
way of judging things that might not be helpful for home studio people for
example, or for project studio people involved with working bands. The
first rule, or anti-rule, for such situations is ... make a virtue of
necessity! In other words if you have gear that produces distortion, use it!
That sort of creativity is hard to teach but it's the product of attitude and
an open mind... and good ears and instincts.
Also in that line is a pronouncement about genres - does the recording
actually fit?! This kind of thinking is quite valid at times for a certain
sort of band but completely antithetical to the great hordes of artists who
don't want to fit at all!
And then there's the use of Cubase for examples. Well, hmmm, who uses
Cubase in a pro environment?
Having said all that, there's plenty to take on board here, but, as with
any book of this sort, or perhaps any factual book, slavish copying just makes
you ... a slave.
(John Littler)
[]
permanent link
h4ckert33n!
Various, Hackerteen: Internet Blackout Vol 1
O'Reilly
This is the start of a series of manga-style graphic novels
that is aimed at kids and hopes to make them aware of various
online issues including malware and the potential theft of
democracy by corrupt voting machine manufacturers in conjunction
with sleazy politicians.
The drawing style is simple and effective and the message
pretty obvious but the names!! These really are super-lame: hackerteen?
Hackerrip?? Ugren? Yago might have been clever if ...
And is US19.99 a little expensive for a fairly incomplete
story (continued in vol 2)? It is nicely produced though - certainly
not a cheap comic book.
[]
permanent link
My New Mac
Wallace Wang, My New Mac: 52 Simple projects to get you started,
No Starch Press
We have an excerpt from this book here.
This book is actually a little bit more than just a list of tricks.
It is a fully-fledged guide to getting around and doing most of the
things you might need to do. As such, it's a fairly ideal guide for
someone who has just fled Vista land to try something new - and there
are a heck of a lot people doing just that.
The book starts with turning the machine on and progresses through
various time-saving shortcuts, all sorts of things you might like to do
(playing and burning digital media for example), getting on the internet
and using it, and maintaining your machine.
There are some nice tips and tricks along the way such as how to
eject a CD that the machine hasn't recognised. Quite a lot of it is
basic but there are a few things that aren't all that well-known. As such
it is perfect for the people it's intended for.
[]
permanent link
Google Apps
Phillip Lenssen, Google Apps Hacks,
O'Reilly
This book could be useful for Google app users to get a little more
out of them but it's also useful for website publishers particularly
as far as embedding is concerned. Here at Mstation, for example, we
decided we'd make a calendar mash-up of music dates and the result is
here. And that
prompted us to make another one, which might be more useful as an actual
calendar, that collected geek events around the world ... here
The book first introduces the Google docs family and then goes through
Gmail, Google homepage, the calendar, News, Google reader, maps, and even
analytics. The approach of the book, as in the past with this series, is
to outline a number of hacks under each sub heading. There are also a
number of screenshots to help things along.
Yes, there's some fun to be had here.
[]
permanent link
Thu, 19 Jun 2008
Hacking Vim
Kim Schulz, Hacking Vim, Packt Publishing
Pact Vim book page
This is the newest book on Vim and right now the only one that
deals with Vim 7. In case you were wondering, Vim is a text and
code editor that is available on most every platform. It is a
development of the venerable Vi editor and has featured in the Vi vs
Emacs religious wars.
In fact I was a keen Emacs user myself but these days, on my
tiny weird Linux machine, I use Vim because it is useful and
extensible and Emacs is not. I've become quite a fan as well and this
book is aimed precisely at the likes of me - someone who knows their
way around but is not a guru and is interested in new tricks and
better ways to get things done.
The book starts off with a history of Vi and Vi-alikes, then goes
on to personalisation - changing fonts, colours, highlighting, the
status line, and more. Then we're onto better navigation - moving by
paragraph and sentence and the like and ways of movement in code
files - which includes a key mapping for solving the long line
problem. There's heaps more - dealing with tags; macro recording;
folding; using vimdiff; scripting; games; and an index to make random
access easier.
My only complaint about the book is that a couple of the code
examples didn't work for me. The first was part of the status line
code and the second had to do with folding.
Anyway, if all that sounds like fun, then this book is certainly for you and
as a plus, there is a donation made to Ugandan orphans for each book
sold.
[]
permanent link
Tue, 03 Jun 2008
Rimbaud: Wyatt Mason
Wyatt Mason, translator and editor, various Rimbaud titles,
The Modern Library Classics website
Arthur Rimbaud is well-known to lit students and sundry other people
as a wild boy-poet from 19th century France. He kicked over the traces
more than somewhat and scandalised Paris with lots of drinking, rowdy
behavior, and an interesting love life which included taking up with
Paul Verlaine, who had a pregnant wife at the time. He stopped writing
poetry (mostly) at 21 and went on, after a few wanders, to live and work in
Aden. He died aged 37 in Marseilles from a nasty unidentified disease.
But his name hasn't stayed alive just because he had an interesting
and short life, but rather because of the quality of his work which
is vibrant, exciting, and a little scary in parts - as well as being
abundantly louche in others (if you get the references). But beauty is
certainly in the eye of the beholder and in his time not too many saw
it at all, Now, though, is different and some regard him as the father
of modern poetry.
Wyatt Mason is the newest translator of Rimbaud and experts say he
has injected an extra jolt of vibrancy and has tuned the English more
to modern usage. He's also a Rimbaud scholar in other ways as well and
has studied his life as completely as records will allow. His
introductions make very interesting reading and his arrangement of the
last volume of letters shows his wide scholarship well.
Moderately
advanced French language scholars might quibble with some of the
translation as "modern" can sometimes be just ungracious and the
occasional dumbing-down of tenses just plain ignorant. Let's get
away from the idea that the lowest common denominator is the valid
way ... please.
Still, there are mysteries - in the Season of Hell, written while he
was healing a bullet wound inflicted upon him by Paul Verlaine (and
which resulted in Verlaine going to prison) it is widely suggested
that here are the whinings of a willful and most unapologetic young
hell-raiser, and yet the references to redemption are many, and the
wish for the tranquility of that state also seems clear, even though
the author clearly thought it out of reach - then, anyway.
Whichever way you look at it (and the literal and utilitarian is not
the path to joy or wisdom here) there is still lots to set an
imagination along a path never travelled. And if you're reading in
English then perhaps you have a new guide.
[]
permanent link
Bohemia visited?
Herbert Gold, Bohemia: Where Art, Angst, Love
and Strong Coffee Meet, Axios
Is this really Bohemia? Or is it a rather dreary sub-set of
semi-seedy post-hippies who while setting their sights on
macro-thought, rarely get farther than me, me, me? It is in
parts, and there are lots of pre-hippies as well.
The author has been around some, starting off in Ohio
and then setting up base in San Francisco and travelling far
and wide seemingly the whole time. He was in San Francisco for
the beatnik thing and, of course, for the hippies. He was in
Paris when it was important, Israel during the Six Day Wzr,
and many other places besides.
We gather people and anecdotes along the way - snippets of
lives lived on the move. In the Paris of the past we meet
some famous figures including Genet, Burroughs, and Picasso
(a flash) ... whatever happened to Paris? And now you can't
even smoke in cafes there.
Gold himself makes some nice observations along the way and
involves us in some pleasantly convoluted examples of French
philosopher speak. His tone is generally non-judgemental (as
you'd expect) and his spread is inclusive in that anyone who's
a bit different might well be included - particularly if they
had made a name for themselves and particularly if they're a
writer of some sort.
You could use the book as a kind of guidebook, particularly
of the US, as all sorts of areas get a mention - no surprise at
all that most are in California.
Hmm, Henry Robbins of Black Flag? Rollins, we think.
In a way, the whole thing is like postcards from an
ethereal edge that can't quite be seen, and which if you focus
on too closely, you can't see.
[]
permanent link
Wed, 30 Apr 2008
Mystics
Fr. Murray Bodo, Mystics: Ten who show us the way of God,
St. Anthony Messenger Press
Mystics are rather a hot topic in some circles, especially pagan ones.
People looking for meaning or even a new life, or style of life, look
back to see what might be found, look back for clues.
Needless to say, Fr. Murray Bodo is not looking at pagan mystics at all.
He is a Franciscan priest, has written many books related to religion, as
well as three books of poetry. In addition to that he has, for some years,
organised summer pilgrimages to Assisi, where St. Francis was from.
And, of course, St. Francis gets a mention here, along with the likes of
Jacopone da Todi, Julian of Norwich, Therese of Lisieux, Gerald Manley Hopkins,
Simone Weil, and Robert Lax. Quite often these lives are not happy at all,
beset as they are with all manner of visions, and being who they were, and humans
being what they are, some degree of persecution - at least amongst the earlier
of these people.
In the end though, it is a picture of goodness, both of the people
surveyed and the author himself.
[]
permanent link
LA: Heart of Darkness
Mike Davis, City of Quartz, Vintage
This is not a new book but such has been its popularity that there have been
reprints as well as a new edition coming up soon or out now. What the book is about,
is a history of LA told mostly from the losers point of view ... which is to say,
vast swathes of the population who happen to be Black or Hispanic, or even white and from
the wrong suburb or county.
The book isn't a mere fulmination: it has a lot of fairly dazzling scholarship
even if some of the long lists of names can make one's eyes glaze over. Davis starts with
the early Spanish and then goes on to the days of Colonel Otis and his "Open Shop" -
meaning, no unions here on pain of death. And it continues in much that way. The
cast of venal, corrupt, and extremely nasty people is virtually unending - from Otis
himself to the execrable Chief Parker, and onwards.
Two striking aspects of the book are the bottom lines that Ayn Rand style capitalism
doesn't work very well (aside from any moral considerations, or even the Constitution
of the US) and that its revival, first under Reagan and then the Bushes worked equally
badly. The second aspect is the role of fear in creating something close to a police
state. The activities of the gangs were used to both terrify ordinary folk in the
suburbs, and justify certain lapses in civil liberties as well as huge budget
increases for the police.
The results of this social unwillingness to give people a hand-up resulted in
desperate hard-core groups of people who hated their oppressors with a passion and who
were and are willing to do virtually anything to escape their situation, including the
dealing and taking of very nasty substances as well as the taking of people's lives who
get in their way. The road away from this complete brutalisation will be a long one.
Davis finishes the book with a history of a place called Fontana in the San
Bernardino valley. The story starts out with one of those larger than life characters
with big ideas and big gumption who transforms a near-dessert region into a happy
bunch of small scale farmers who feed into an enormous and clever agribusiness. His
reign is succeeded by none other than Henry J. Kaiser who had some utopian ideas himself,
insisted on unions in his workplaces, and set up a giant steel making facility there.
Uh-oh, you say. It actually went quite well for some years - into the 1980's in fact.
But then the tides of globalisation came in and the mill was washed away... but not
its great polluted slag heaps. A further cast of villains then appears who try their
best to pick the last meat off the bones. Dystopic is the word.
Of course all this doesn't explain why so many people have chosen to go to live in LA.
Even now they are going despite a White flight to places like Nevada and New Mexico
where their presence has been largely unwelcomed. If you're a poor Salvadorean or Mexican,
it could be like buying a lottery ticket... long odds, but you could win big. If you're
more affluent there's the climate, the sea and the mountains, a rich cultural scene
("high" or "low") and maybe, from time to time, a little magic in the air.
[]
permanent link
Mon, 24 Mar 2008
Tokyo
Crowell, Morimura, Tokyo: city on the edge, Asia 2000
Possibly not in print anymore but an interesting wander through
various aspects of Tokyo and the Japanese from a slightly jaded
viewpoint.
The book actually starts out by discussing disasters - great
fires and earthquakes and the subway terrorist attack and then goes
on to look at everything from super-organised dating, to eating and
art. Well, that will be that 'edge' thing.
It's quite a slim book so sometimes it feels a bit like a list but
there are, nevertheless, quite a few interesting snippets that you won't find elsewhere, for those
interested in Tokyo.
[]
permanent link
Make: the book
Various, The Best of Make, O'Reilly
In the past we've looked at a few issues of Make
magazine. They're always fun and usually there's one or
two projects we wouldn't mind having a try at.
The Best Of has 75 projects culled from the past and
there are quite a few fun ones there. There's even a
music section with projects like making a cereal box amp
or a cigar box guitar. Another has you fiddling with the
circuits of old battery-powered synths to create new
sounds.
Our favorite of the bigger projects was a complete
wind generated electricity outfit - propeller, stand,
generator, circuits, as well as a lot of helpful
safety and other pointers.
This brings us to the whole attitude of the thing - You
Can Do It! Don't let other people convince you that you're
ignorant and powerless.
[]
permanent link
Conscience of a Liberal
Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal:
reclaiming America from the Right, Allen Lane
Princeton economist Paul Krugman has a few cogent
words to say about the USA and the soon to be departing
George W. Bush along with the anti-social members of his
group. Inequality, woeful social services, cronyism,
corruption, dishonesty - all these and more make up a
picture comparable to the 1920's.
Krugman spends some time looking at how it all came to
be, and along the way shows how the US health system
came to be the way it is, and who wants to keep it that
way (Southern conservatives for one, drug companies for
two, and health insurance companies to make up the triad).
But it looks like America is finally waking up so
perhaps there were will be a happy ending yet.
[]
permanent link
Food book!
James and Kay Salter, Life is Meals: a food lover's book of days, Knopf
A book of days for food with unrelated different entries for
each day of the year and mostly with an historical reference. If
you are a foodie or even a little above the level of the eating
Macdonalds walking down the street people then, if you are given
to use words like "lovely!" or "delightful", you will use them for
this book.
The whole thing has been lovingly put together with little
anecdotes, factlets, ideas, and lore. I suppose the idea is that
you'd consult it on a daily basis but I gobbled it up and will keep
it by my bedside for a while and dip into it randomly.
Where else, under one cover, can you simultaneously discover
Duma's salad dressing recipe and which Chateau d'Yqem to order if
you've just won the lottery (the 1975)?
(Baron K)
[]
permanent link
Ajax
Anthony T. Holdener III, Ajax: the definitive guide, O'Reilly
If your eyes have begun to glaze over at the mention of
Web 2.0 by the money, money crowd then you're in good
company but that's because the money, money crowd
rarely have an interesting idea of their own rather than
Web 2.0 being boring. The idea is basically Web
Applications - full scale programs like word processors
that will run in your browser.
Java was supposed to do this kind of thing but there
was the JVM to be dealt with and also the whole program
needed to be downloaded before anything would happen. It
was all quite slow.
Ajax is what's happening now and the key to the
success of the whole thing is the asynchronous nature of
its communication with the server - in other words, little
segments of a webpage can be updated - the whole page
doesn't have to be reloaded for every new piece of
information.
This book is not only the definitive guide to Ajax, it
is also a pretty good guide to web technology right now,
in terms of browsers, standards, and scripting languages.
The 957 pages with index start off with this
background material and proceeds into issues such as
planning and accessibility, functionality, and the rest,
and then gets on with various examples of how to do
things. All in all, the word 'definitive' is aptly
used in the title.
[]
permanent link
Fri, 29 Feb 2008
Through the Children's Gate
Adam Gopnik, Through the Children's Gate, Vintage
You might have heard of Adam Gopnik already. He's worked for the New
Yorker and the International Herald Tribune and while the Paris correspondent
for the latter, he wrote Paris to the Moon, which the publishers say is a
bestseller.
The children's gate in the title refers to one of the gates into Central
Park in NYC. Gopnik recently returned to NYC to live after his decade long
assignment in Paris. He and his wife and two children returned with some
delight and this book, a collection of stories, looks at aspects of NYC,
including Gopnik's relationship to it, with great fondness and quite a lot of
humour.
If the mention of the New Yorker and the IHT suggests to you lovely
crafted prose in the polite idiom, that's exactly what you get here and
fans of NYC will spend a nice few evenings chuckling and shaking their heads
at different aspects of the place - the eternal change, the gentrification
and ridiculous rents, the largely successful war on criminals, and the
effective banishment of the odd to the outer boroughs - all this plus a
small feature on being (not very) Jewish today in NYC. There's a hilarious
tale of his understanding of what LOL means and a nice short Jack Benny
joke - 'Your money or your life!' the robber says to Benny. 'I'm thinking it
over' is his reply.
In all of this he is a fond yet unsentimental observer - things change.
It's almost an opposite to Plus ca la meme change, plus ca la meme chose -
something that might be said often in his last hometown.
[]
permanent link
| 
pre Dec 04 reviews are here
