Octopodial Chrome

Todd Seavey has a top-notch review of Jonah Goldberg’s new book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. It covers the connexion between progressivism and statist authoritarianism, detailing the fundamental similarity between Wilson, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. It sounds like an absolutely fascinating book.

Late this summer I purchased Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food.

Bittman first gives one a tour of the various cooking techniques (e.g. roasting, frying, boiling &c.) and details how they affect food; he covers essential equipment (there’s really not that much); he covers the basic theory of cooking meats & vegetables. That done, he proceeds to give lots and lots of recipes, many with a number of variations.

His recipe for fruit jam is simplicity itself, but it works wonderfully. His recipe for pheasant braised with apricots and prunes is delicious. His procedure for pre-cooking grains is simple yet tasty.

This could very well be the only cookbook you’ll ever need. If you don’t have a copy, get one. If you know someone who’s just started living on his own, get him a copy. It’s a good book.

Those of us who read a lot accumulate a great deal of books (according to LibraryThing I have 438); how does one categorise and shelve them? My own system is rather esoteric (deliberately so); one man and his wife had 3,500 books and came up with a cool solution to the problem utilising off-the-shelf software, a barcode scanner, new shelving and other nifty stuff.

John Derbyshire reviews the strangest travel book ever written: the account of an African tribesman who became enamoured of Eskimos and so went to Greenland in the 1960s.

I’ve just finished reading O’Reilly’s latest GNU/Linux title, Linux System Administration (full disclosure: I was sent a reviewer’s copy). Bottom line up front: it’s a handy introduction for the beginner GNU/Linux sysadmin, and a useful addition to an experienced sysadmin’s bookshelf.

The book is essentially a survey of various Linux system-administration tasks: installing Debian; setting up LAMP; configuring a load-balancing, high-availability environment; working with virtualisation. None of the chapters are in-depth examinations of their subjects; rather, they’re enough to get you started and familiar with the concepts involved, and headed in the right direction. I like this approach, as it increases the likelihood that any particular admin will be able to use the material presented. I’ve been working with Apache for almost a decade now, but I’ve not done any virtualisation; some other fellow may have played with Linux for supercomputing, but never done any web serving with it; we both can use the chapters which cover subjects new to us.

I really like some of the choices the authors made. A lot of GNU/Linux ’administration’ books focus on GUI tools—I’ve seen some which don’t even bother addressing the command line! I’ve long said that if one isn’t intimately familiar with the shell—if one cannot get one’s job done with it—then one isn’t really a sysadmin. Linux System Administration approaches nearly everything from the CLI, right from the get-go. Kudos!

The authors also deserve praise for showing, early on, how to replace Sendmail with Postfix. In 2007, there’s very, very little reason to use Sendmail: unless you know why you need it, you almost certainly don’t. Postfix is more stable and far more secure.

Another nice thing is how many alternatives are showcased: Xen & VMware; Debian, Fedora & Xandros; CIFS/SMB & NFS; shell, Perl, PHP & Python and so forth. One really great advantage of Unix in general and GNU/Linux in particular is choice—it’s good to see a reference work which implicitly acknowledges that.

The authors are also pretty good about calling out common pitfalls—several got me, once upon a time. It’d have been nice to have had a book like this when I was cutting my teeth…

Lastly, I liked that the authors & their editor weren’t afraid to refer readers to books from other publishers, in addition to O’Reilly’s (uniformly excellent) offerings. Not all publishers would be so forthright; O’Reilly merits recognition for their openness.

The book’s not quite perfect, though. I wish that PostgreSQL had at least been mentioned as a more powerful, more stable (and often faster in practice) alternative to MySQL, and one doesn’t actually need to register a domain in order to set up static IP addressing. Still, these are pretty minor quibbles.

I’d say that the ideal audience for this book is a small-to-medium business admin who’d like to start using Linux, or who already is but doesn’t really feel confident yet. It covers enough categories that at least a few are likely to be relevant. Even an experienced admin will probably find some useful stuff in here.

I missed this last Veteran’s Day: Bæn books is offering a free pass to all cripples, as well as the blind, paralysed, dyslexic and those with amputated limbs. Many of the books available at webscription.net are top-notch; I can especially recommend David Weber & Lois McMaster Bujold.

This is a fine gesture towards disabled military veterans as well as those who are congenitally disabled; Bæn should be lauded.

Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a CD full of free textbooks that a professor could use instead of assigning $50–$100 dollar books? Fortunately, there is just such a CD. The LibertyTextbooks project is doing exactly that. Their next step is to offer printed books on a non-profit basis.

Andrew McCarthy reviews The Truth about Muhammad, a new book by Robert Spencer which closely examines the life of the supposed prophet and what it implies for his modern-day followers. An excellent review filled with disturbing facts.

Countryman’s Cooking is back in print, but I’ve thus far been unable to find a source for it here in the States. It looks just wonderfully excellent.

Seen on the profile of bookstopshere, a LibraryThing user with whom I share a number of books:

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again… The truth is that in the end, the size of a library does matter. We lay the books out for inspection like a huge exposed brain, offering miserable excuses and feigned modesty… There is a moment, however, when we have accumulated so many books that they cross an invisible line, and what was once a sense of pride becomes a burden, because from now on space will always be a problem.

Carlos Maria Dominguez, The House of Paper

Very true. Don Aslett once pointed out that books are really clutter, read a few times but taking up space forever. What he failed to note is that books reveal who someone is. Also, a smoking room unlined in books is hardly a smoking room at all.

Well, I’ve gotten all but one of my bookcases into my LibraryThing book catalogue—435 books so far. I’ve one bookcase, several boxes and a few loose books and I’ll have a complete list of all the books I own (and so will anyone who visits my LibraryThing profile. It gives a pretty good idea of who I am & what I’m interested in.

Ever wanted to keep track of all your books? Every wondered who out there has similar tastes in reading material? Ever thought that a massive-enough database should be able to give you some reading suggestions? Well, LibraryThing does all that. I started using it yesterday, and bought a lifetime account today (it’s free for 200 books, $10/year or $25/life for an unlimited account). Only have 169 books in there, but that’s only two bookshelves and the books lying around my bedroom.

I just read an interview with Jacques Barzun, the author of From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present, and I feel that I simply must read his work. He grew up in pre-Great War France; he started teaching in 1927; he retired from the professoriate three years before my birth: his perspective is one which will soon vanish from the world, and which deserves to be known whether it be right or wrong.

For those I number amongst family and friends, I’ve a birthday coming up in May…

I’ve no idea if his ideas are any good, but Ovid’s books on love have been around for quite a long time, so they are probably not wholly incorrect. The man was a poet, after all—and we all know what sort of reputation poets have; on the other hand the very first book of his Art of Love goes on at length about the capture of the Sabine women, so perhaps his ideas are just a touch too old-fashioned…

Jeffrey Carver has put up Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy, a nice guide to writing that most enjoyable form of fiction. Seen on jackdied.com.

Just discovered Bookcrossing. The idea is that you label a book and release it into the wild—that is, leave it on a bench, or at a coffeeshop, or give it away. Then you can track its progress as different readers find it, read it and pass it on. Kinda cool little idea.

Æons ago C.S. Lewis wrote the wonderful Chronicles of Narnia: fantastic adventure fiction for children. They’re really quite good and, as is typical of English children’s fiction of the time, enjoyable for adults as well. They are also not shy about the realities of life: Peter must clean his sword of a foe’s blood, lest it stick in its sheath; Eustace gets hungover from mead and so on.

My mother has a nice set; my brother Thomas has a nice set; someday I should like a nice leather-bound edition of the Chronicle of Narnia, preferably with the illustrations (all of them) by Pauline Baines. Something to Google about for—perhaps I can find something on Amazon or somesuch.

Fowler’s 1908 classic The King’s English is now online at Bartleby. It’s the definitive guide to proper style, written at a time whose pronouncements on the matter may be safely trusted. Now I just need to read it and take its lessons to heart.

Matthew Thomas has recently translated Some Account of Myself, which I noticed in and old blog entry of his. It’s a fascinating account of a man’s professional life, and quite valuable for giving a hint of how religious even Regency England could be. Read it.

Well, I just finished re-reading the Chronicles of Prydain, and they brought to mind several things: the girl who gave them to me; a fall in which the dreariest of days was full of sunshine; a winter which was gloriously golden summer. I rather hoped she might be my Eilonwy and I her Taran. And then came that black day just over four years ago (27 Feb. ’00) when all those hopes came crashing down about me, and my striving came to naught and that was, as it’s said, that.