Books Blog: books.elliottback.com

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket. ~ William Shatner

Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer? ~ Eileen Gunn

Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so. ~ Joss Whedon

With bloody hands, I say good-bye. ~ Frank Miller

Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth. ~ Vernor Vinge

We kissed. She melted. Mop please! ~ James Patrick Kelly

I’m dead. I’ve missed you. Kiss … ? ~ Neil Gaiman

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly. ~ Orson Scott Card

TIME MACHINE REACHES FUTURE!!! … nobody there … ~ Harry Harrison

Tick tock tick tock tick tick. ~ Neal Stephenson

Epitaph: He shouldn’t have fed it. ~ Brian Herbert

Nevertheless, he tried a third time. ~ James P. Blaylock

I saw, darling, but do lie. ~ Orson Scott Card

We crossed the border; they killed us. ~ Howard Waldrop

He read his obituary with confusion. ~ Steven Meretzky

Kudos to Wired.

I just finished reading John Grisham’s The Broker, a fast paced thriller about a man with so many secrets to hide that the CIA wants to use him as bait just to confirm which country wants him dead.

It opens slowly, starting out with some Washington politics as a lame-duck president writes his last pardons before he’s replaced. One of those goes to Joel Backman, a lawyer and lobbyist on the hill who created the political scandal that enabled him to first become president. There are conditions attached to the pardon, though, and Joel is smuggled out of America and into Italy where he is expected to live in a CIA safehouse and learn Italian.

All the while, he is being closely watched by American agents. When the time is right, they plan to leak news of his location simultaneously to all the major world powers to discover who is most interested in the intelligence information that Joel managed to obtain as a broker. The first to kill or capture him will tell the CIA what they need.

Unfortunately, the information about a secret system of satellites and the programs to control them are actually in possession of our mysterious broker. Querying him directly would probably be more efficient. As it is, he escapes the CIA custody, flees to Zurich, recovers his funds, and makes it back into the US to negotiate with the government, software in tow. The foreign nations so bent on killing him generally realize that he’s no longer a good target and back off. The CIA stops messing with him.

And, in typical Grisham style, the book ends happily, reuniting Joel with his slightly younger but very attractive Italian tutor.

Snort for Dummies, by Charlie Scott, Paul Wolfe, and Bert Hayes, teaches basic intrusion detection skills through the Snort platform. Snort is an open source intrustion detection system for computer networks. It’s a free piece of software which resides on a computer and watches all of the network traffic passing through that machine. Unusual or dangerous traffic is flagged and recorded to alert the network administrator. Basically, Snort is a sentry for your network, on the lookout for hacking, viruses, and anything else you write a rule for.

Quite frankly, the book sucks. You’ll get at least as much from the Snort users manual, which is a free 90 page introduction to Snort. It’s 1/3 as long as Snort for Dummies, and fits in more content with less cruft. The first three chapters of Snort for Dummies introduce the software and its requirements. Why not read Snort - Lightweight Intrusion Detection for Networks and the Snort FAQ? Chapters 4 and 5 cover installation for Windows and Linux–but so does Snort’s Windows and Linux guides. The remaining chapters cover basic snort usage and configuration, and by basic, I mean basic. There’s nothing in there not in the manual, and explanation is not needed–how they manage to stretch out the material for four hundred pages, I do not know.

So, Snort for Dummies gets the lowest rating I can give: :1star:. Really–just read the manual.

after seeing a beautiful mind and vaguely hearing about dh lawrence from russell crowe’s imaginary friend paul bettany… i was compelled to try to read some of lawrence. funny how i still link the author with the movie though they have nothing in common.

a quote in To the Lighthouse struck me as a good summary of that book: “a family of unrelated passions”
if that is a capsule description of TTL, then “family of connected and intertwined passions” could describe sons and lovers. people seemed to have felt more, to reacted with more force, breathed with more intensity 100 years ago than they do today. there are only several main characters: Mrs. Morel, Paul, Clara and Miriam. There is really only one plot: Paul’s struggle to realize his role as a son and as a lover (hence the title).

the best parts of the book are when lawrence turns each character inside out and dissects, traces and maps their passions. i wish i had another word for passion– a mixture of desire, force, intention and want– a craving. people in this book are human and flesh. but they seem maybe more human than we are– their every days are filled wiht color and movement, not an aritficial heightening of emotion, but a very real possession with the everyday. Its a celebration of the primitive emotions and tasks of life. but very very beautiful.

I just finished reading Out of Bounds: Inside the NBA’s Culture of Rape, Violence & Crime by Jeff Benedict. It tries to give its readers a taste of the NBA culture of crime and lawlessness. Did you know that “four out of every ten NBA players have a police record involving a serious crime?” I didn’t–until I read Out of Bounds.

The book claims to be divided into three sections: Sexual Liberties, Above the Law, and Bad Heroes. In actuality, it’s really just one continuous section. The theme of Out of Bounds never changes. It’s all about how NBA players commit sexual and physical violence due to a basketball culture that gives immature men everything they want and never says “no.” The book also explains how NBA players get preferential treatment in the US justice system, often avoiding charges or simply doing community service for crimes that would put an average citizen behind bars for life.

It’s an eye-opener for sure, but I am only giving it a three-star rating: :3star:. There are a few problems with the book. First, its material is repetitive. We see the story case by case by case, with little explanation or variance in the narrative. Hearing about NBA players committing violent crime is only interesting if it serves something higher. Second, there’s a lack of explanation for the crimes themselves. I feel as if Out of Bounds is just a photogallery of crime. I wonder why? Why do they commit crime they know they will be caught for? Why do they spurn authority and order? Why do they have a predelection for crime in the first place? Why does the NBA allow it? Instead, all I get is a picture of how these crimes go on and on. This, I think, is the most serious academic failure of the book. Otherwise, it’s an entertaining and informative read.

Another resource in evaluating this book is its own website from Harper Academic.