Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Here are the Top 100 Most Popular Books on LibraryThing.
Bold what you own, italicize what you’ve read. Star what you liked. Star multiple times what you loved!

1. Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone by J.K. Rowling (32,484) *
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) by J.K. Rowling (29,939) *
3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) by J.K. Rowling (28,728) *
4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2) by J.K. Rowling (27,926) *
5. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) by J.K. Rowling (27,643) *
6. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) by J.K. Rowling (27,641) *
7. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (23,266)
8. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (21,325) *
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) by J.K. Rowling (20,485) *
10. 1984 by George Orwell (19,735)
11. Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) by Jane Austen (19,583)
12. The catcher in the rye by J.D. Salinger (19,082)
13. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (17,586)
14. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (16,210)
15. The lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (15,483) **
16. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (14,566)
17. Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics) by Charlotte Bronte (14,449)
18. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (13,946) *
19. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (13,272)
20. Animal Farm by George Orwell (13,091)
21. Angels & demons by Dan Brown (13,089)
22. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (13,005)
23. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (12,777)
24. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah’s Book Club) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (12,634)
25. The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Part 1) by J.R.R. Tolkien (12,276) *
26. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (12,147)
27. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (11,976)
28. The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, Part 2) by J.R.R. Tolkien (11,512) *
29. The Odyssey by Homer (11,483)
30. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (11,392) *
31. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut (11,360)
32. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (11,257)
33. The return of the king : being the third part of The lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (11,082) *
34. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (10,979)
35. American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman (10,823)
36. The chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (10,603)
37. The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams (10,537) *
38. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (10,435)
39. The lovely bones : a novel by Alice Sebold (10,125)
40. Ender’s Game (Ender, Book 1) by Orson Scott Card (10,092) *
41. The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman (9,827) *
42. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman (9,745) **
43. Dune by Frank Herbert (9,671)
44. Emma by Jane Austen (9,610)
45. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (9,598)
46. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bantam Classics) by Mark Twain (9,593)
47. Anna Karenina (Oprah’s Book Club) by Leo Tolstoy (9,433)
48. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (9,413)
49. Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides (9,343)
50. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (9,336)
51. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (9,274)
52. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (9,246) *
53. The Iliad by Homer (9,153)
54. The Stranger by Albert Camus (9,084)
55. Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen (9,080)
56. Great Expectations (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens (9,027)
57. The Handmaid’s Tale: A Novel by Margaret Atwood (8,960)
58. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (8,904)
59. Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt (8,813)
60. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery - (8,764)
61. The lion, the witch and the wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (8,421)
62. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (8,417)
63. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (8,368)
64. The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition) by John Steinbeck (8,255)
65. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (8,214)
66. The Name of the Rose: including Postscript to the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (8,191)
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (8,169)
68. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (8,129)
69. The complete works by William Shakespeare (8,096)
70. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (7,843)
71. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (7,834)
72. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Barbara Kingsolver (7,829)
73. Hamlet (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare (7,808)
74. Of Mice and Men (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by John Steinbeck (7,807)
75. A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens (7,793) (in the “to be read” pile)
76. The Alchemist (Plus) by Paulo Coelho (7,710)
77. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (7,648)
78. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Barnes & Noble Classics) by Oscar Wilde (7,598) *
79. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by William Strunk (7,569)
80. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (7,557)
81. The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman (7,534) *
82. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan (7,530)
83. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (7,512)
84. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (7,436)
85. Dracula by Bram Stoker (7,238)
86. Heart of Darkness (Dover Thrift Editions) by Joseph Conrad (7,153)
87. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (7,055)
88. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (7,052)
89. The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman (7,043) *
90. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) by James Joyce (6,933)
91. The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Milan Kundera (6,901)
92. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (6,899)
93. Neuromancer by William Gibson (6,890) *
94. The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics) by Geoffrey Chaucer (6,868)
95. Persuasion (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen (6,862)
96. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (6,841)
97. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (6,794)
98. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt (6,715)
99. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (6,708)
100. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (6,697)

• Another book sale last weekend. A bit light on technical books this time, but I did snag quite a quantity of old SF paperbacks, and a box set of software engineering classics.
• Of late, I’ve had some unsolicited interest in RotateAVI. There is a reported bug that causes it to hang on 0% though - I’ll have to track that one down.
• California’s hands-free cellphone law came into effect today. Another way for the cops to get their revenue quota, with a very questionable basis in science.
• Congratulations to Zach on both his latest releases.

I’ve been reading some noise on the wire lately about anti-features. Benjamin Mako Hill, who seems to have coined the term, writes: “Anti-features are sold to customers as features but are fundamental or unavoidable aspects of systems that can only be removed or withheld through technological effort.”

In other words, anti features are things that a system would do anyway, were it not for the fact that it is deliberately crippled for business reasons. Good examples are (lack of) RAW support for digital cameras, region encoding on DVDs, and connection limits on “non-server versions” of MS operating systems. These are all cases where time and effort was expended to remove or constrain features when less effort or just a natural approach to engineering would have left them functional.

A related idea is the idea of (something I also read about recently and forget the term for - some kind of “tax” I think) - where a company implements an antifeature, or deliberately refrains from developing a useful feature, because said feature would imperil the business interests of that company’s partners, or in some cases, another branch of that company. The obvious example again is MS, who must at all costs preserve the supremacy of Windows and Office. One reason why parts of IE are so ropey, I read, is that they would compete with Word if they were improved. Similarly, various well-publicised DRM mechanisms in Vista are at the behest of MS business partners in the realm of content distribution.

(Amusingly, MS unwittingly let the cat out of the bag in the don’t-ever-compete-with-Office arena when they invented XMLHttpRequest. But that’s another story for another blog. Go google it yourself.)

Of course, free software doesn’t suffer from antifeatures - if it did, one could just remove them (this often happens). But the point I really wanted to get to was concerning creeping antifeatures at Google.

Google by and large produces excellent stuff, but there are some curious holes in their lineup. I never really believed their “do no evil” motto anyway - public companies are practically the definition of amorality, but I think it’s pretty evil to drain so many talented engineers from the marketplace and make them work on serving up ads.

Anyway, Google, if you’re listening, I have two requests for you to prove your worth: one easy, one probably a real test for you.

The easy one: make Picasa work with Flickr. Picasa is absolutely awesome. For non-serious photographers like myself who just want decent photos of family and friends from their compact cameras, it’s brilliant. I’m just a little uneasy about how it takes over all my photos everywhere in the world in space, but I can forgive that just because of the insanely simple redeye reduction and cropping.

But Picasa web albums? Not so good. A long way behind the excellent Flickr, even if they are free. Flickr is so, so, SO much better. So it would be really nice to upload stuff from Picasa to Flickr. In fact, so nice that someone’s already done it. But maybe you could make it a bit easier, or something. That plugin only uses the uploadr, not things like kflickr etc. Actually, I bet Google could integrate into Picasa a best-in-class upload tool for Flickr, and it would work on Linux, too. And while you’re about it, denizens of the Googleplex, please make Picasa rotate movies too.

My second request might be harder for the Goog. Gmail is a great mail service. It redefined web mail, with its interface, its practically unlimited storage, and its built in niceties like antispam technology and offering POP3 access (unlike Hotmail and Yahoo!).

Gmail has a great opportunity now, and that is to build in encryption. Encrypted email hasn’t really taken off except among certain geeks; for a combination of reasons: lack of out-of-the-box mainstream email client support, configuration issues, no perceived need among the general email-using populace, etc. But privacy is an important issue and Google has the chance to make it ubiquitous, and take Gmail up another notch. This could do for email what Google.com did for search.

Go on, Google! Give everyone built in security in their email. You’re big enough to make it stick in a significant portion of the market, get people used to it, drive the competition to keep up, and change the world for the better. License the patents, if any. Deal with the support calls. Hire people like Bruce Schneier and Ross Anderson (and his graduate students) to figure out the system architecture for you. Do something really good for the generation who are growing up with computers as appliances, not knowing how important their online privacy is.

Or you could just cling to mining people’s emails for ad-serving opportunities. Do no evil, you say? To allow evil to prevail, all that is necessary is for the good to miss opportunities like this one.

I got an e-book reader for my birthday! It’s very shiny. Comparable to the weight of a small hardback, with an internal memory of 200MB (doesn’t sound a lot, but novels don’t take up much space), and expansion slots for SD and Memory Stick Pro Duo. The e-ink technology is impressive - I checked it out while I was at the LA Times Book Festival some weeks ago, and it’s perfectly readable even in bright sunshine. And it doesn’t use any power except when changing a page, which means long battery life.

I’m using calibre to do library management, which works well, and so far I have uploaded a few Cory Doctorow novels. It (calibre) also interfaces with LibraryThing which is a very lightweight approach to keeping ones catalogue of books online. Since I already have my print books online, I’ll probably use LibraryThing for my e-books only.

So I’m also checking out the various sources of free books on the web. There’s Project Gutenberg of course, and also the forums over at mobileread.com seem to be a great resource.

Anyway, enough writing for now. I have a lot of reading to do.

My regular gas station in West LA is running just under $4.40 a (US) gallon right now.

My dad’s regular petrol station in South London is £1.30 a litre, which is about $9.70 a gallon.

Sunday was another rest day: we went to Crystal Palace Park in the morning, and in the afternoon we had a birthday tea to celebrate the family birthday coincidence. Monday was my actual birthday, and now that half term was over, we headed back to the Natural History Museum for a much better look at the dinosaurs and other exhibits. Mini-Elbeno loved every minute of it, and fell asleep on the train on the way home. This meant I had to carry him up about a quarter mile of very steep hill.

Tuesday, my former french teacher came to lunch, up from Exeter, and we had a great few hours talking about old times and catching up. He was kind enough to bring a couple of his books along as a gift.

We did most of our packing on Tuesday night, finishing up on Wednesday morning, and we had an extra piece of baggage to bring back because of mini-Elbeno’s new rocking horse (a gift from the grandparents). The flight went as smoothly as expected, but we accidentally picked up the wrong piece of luggage from the carousel! Luckily we noticed before we left the airport, but since we’d already gone through customs and immigration, we were not allowed back to collect the right bag, and had to wait for the airline to take it through customs and bring it out.

Anyway, we got home around 7.30pm, unpacked and went to bed. Woke up at 1.30am of course because of the jet lag!

Here’s how the holiday has been so far:

Arrived Thursday afternoon after taking off Wednesday night. Spent the first evening chilling and getting over some jetlag. Friday we headed to Greenwich, walked through Greenwich park and looked around the Royal Observatory. Didn’t have time to see a planetarium show, but took a picture of mini-Elbeno standing astride the meridian. He also had fun playing in the playground in the park. Friday was also Grandad’s (my dad’s) birthday, so we spent the evening with family. Mini-E received a gift of a rocking horse which he named “Caballo” and took to immediately.

Saturday we went to Battersea Park Zoo, a small affair which was quite enjoyable for the small chap. The weather was windy, but sunny. Sunday we headed up to town again to take in the museums, although they were packed because of the wet weather and the fact that it was half term. We did get to see a few dinosaurs, but spent longer getting lunch than actually enjoying the sights. Picked up a small stuffed triceratops for mini-Elbeno which he has named “Af”.

Monday was another very wet day, and we went to the Horniman Museum which is right on our doorstep, and which has been improved over the last couple of years with a lottery grant. It’s great for kids, with a hands on area of stuff they can play with, and also an aquarium in the basement and a section with weird musical instruments they can play with.

Tuesday we went up to town on the train and met a friend for lunch at St Pancras; we went to the Zoo in the afternoon, which stayed dry. Wednesday we met another friend (Mrs Elbeno’s old boss) for lunch, this time in Pizza Express in Greek Street. In the evening a couple of friends (more old work colleagues) visited us.

Thursday we all travelled down to the Westcountry to see my grandparents, mini-Elbeno’s great-grandparents. It’s about a 3.5 hour drive down the M3 and then across Salisbury Plain, passing right by Stonehenge. They were all fine despite a slight medical scare earlier in the week. Friday was another rest day: my brother arrived home from his year out in South America, and we went to the local park in the afternoon to let the littl’un let off some steam.

Saturday (today) we headed down to Leeds Castle. Saw a jousting tournament and falconry display which were both cool; took a look at the aviary with its toucans, macaws and various other colourful birds; and made our way through the maze to the centre and then down into the grotto and through the underground passage back to the outside. It’s a very nice maze.

That’s it so far. It’s a packed schedule and we have more to do in the next few days.

Catching up with family and friends on the UK side. Weather’s not bad at the moment, and I must have a sort of reverse jet-lag because I’m up at 6.40am on a Saturday (and nobody else is yet).

Yesterday, went to a whole other hemisphere.

It’s come to my attention recently that my library of video games contains some that are now quite rare, sought-after, and therefore valuable. Many of the video games that you can’t buy new any more are available through eBay or Amazon sellers, although frequently (at least on Amazon) the items are without original manuals and packaging. N64 games are particularly commonly sold as cartridges only. All of my games are of course well cared for with all original materials, and (almost) always the original versions rather than the later-issued “greatest hits” SKUs.

The most valuable ones are the aging RPGs: most of the Squaresoft titles from the Playstation hold their value well, especially where they were excellent games with relatively short shelf lives (titles like Final Fantasy Tactics, for instance).

A few of the PS2 games are now entering collectible territory, and there are even a couple of PC games worth a bit too.

I reckon my most valuable games are:

• Masterpieces of Infocom, at $135+ used,
• Suikoden II, at $140+ used, and
• Panzer Dragoon Saga at an eye-watering $350+ used!

This weekend was another book sale, this time over at our other local library. It’s a smaller library and fairly new - I wasn’t expecting much. There were only about 10 smallish tables of books, so I was quite surprised to find quite a cache of computer science books on a chair in the corner. Of course, there were the usual “Learn VB6 with a book the size of your head” and “NT admin’s pro reference” type books, but in between those, I managed to get, at a dollar each:

• Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest)
• Computer Organization & Design (Hennessy & Patterson)
• Modern Operating Systems (Tanenbaum)
• Fundamentals of Data Structures in C (Horowitz, Sahni, Anderson-Freed)
• An Introduction to Database Systems (Date)
• Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools (Aho, Sethi & Ullman)
• Compiler Design in C (Holub)

Quite the haul there! Including several from my CS reading list of ~14 years ago. But good CS, like maths, doesn’t really date. Talking of maths, I also picked up a couple of 1950s texts: Analytical Geometry and Calculus and Trigonometry: Plane and Spherical, both by Lloyd L Smail.