The Musings of Chris Samuel

So we’ve just received the revised edition of Donna’s classic autobiography “Nobody Nowhere” from the publishers with an updated forward, some of the quotes about it on the back and one of Donna’s paintings, “Swing“, on the cover!

Donna originally wrote Nobody Nowhere was in 1990 and as it is considered a classic autobiography of a person with autism a lot of folks don’t realise that Donna never meant it to be published.

Nobody Nowhere was written in 4 weeks. I barely ate, washed or slept. I wrote the book as a goodbye and a last hope. My plan was to let just one person read it, then shred it and burn it then jump in front of a train. But life is rarely as simple as our plans. Instead of the confirmation of hopelessness I expected, I was thrown a challenge; to allow the book to help others. Instead of shredding it, it became copied and read by millions of people around the world. Instead of being burned, it spent 15 weeks on the New York times Bestseller list and shot to number 1 in US, Canada, Japan, and Norway and got translated into over 20 languages worldwide.

The book is still in print and still selling almost two decades later!

Found via Ian Fosters blog on “Free Books“, his paper book “Designing and Building Parallel Programs: Concepts and Tools for Parallel Software Engineering” is available online at ANL for reference for no cost (though you’re not allowed to archive a copy without permission).

This isn’t something new, mind you, it was done 13 years ago in 1995 - quite forward thinking!

Back in 2006 Ross Anderson (Professor of Security Engineering at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory) announced on his blog that he had published the full contents of the first edition of his book “Security Engineering” in PDF format. The book covers a whole range of security issues from creating, managing, accrediting & breaking the mechanisms themselves through security politics and into topics like DRM.

Now the second edition of Security Engineering is about to arrive (published April 14th in the US, Amazon say stock expected in 1-4 weeks) and mine is on order already (along with a copy of Linus Torvalds Just for Fun)..

Via Mark.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favourite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
6. Tag five other people to do the same.

Here we go..

The mainboard connector provides a standard PS/2 keyboard connector for attaching a PS/2 keyboard. You can plug a PS/2 keyboard directly into this connector. PS/2 Keyboard (6-pin Female)

That’s from the VIA EPIA Mini-ITX (”Dream Catalyst”) mainboard manual that happened to be sitting in front of me. Extra boring points for me I think!

People can work out themselves if they wish to be infected by this meme..

The first edition of William R. Cheswick and Steven M. Bellovin’s excellent “Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker” is now available online! According to Google Scholar this book has been cited 661 times..

The second edition is available from Amazon.

Thanks for the pointer, Rick!

Yay! Donna now has her own IMDB page as both screenwriter and appearing as herself in documentaries!

The BBC reports that Mr Justice Peter Smith encoded a message into his judgement on the “Da Vinci Code” copyright case.

Seemingly random italicised letters were included in the 71-page judgement given by Mr Justice Peter Smith, which apparently spell out a message. [...]

Italicised letters in the first few pages spell out “Smithy Code”, while the following pages also contain marked out letters.

I liked the fact he said:

I can’t discuss the judgement, but I don’t see why a judgement should not be a matter of fun,

Nice one your honour.

Hooray, it appears that the law and common sense has triumphed in the case of Baigent & Leigh versus The Random House Group Limited over the fiction work “The Da Vinci Code“. From the judgement:

2.1 Holy Blood Holy Grail does not have a Central Theme as contended by the Claimants: it was an artificial creation for the purposes of the litigation working back from the Da Vinci Code.

and

2.3 Even if the Central Themes were copied they are too general or of too low a level of abstraction to be capable of protection by copyright law.

A sad day for the arts with the loss of a Polish science fiction author and an australian painter.

Stanislaw Lem has died (Via Alec - though it’s not obvious unless you grok Unix humour or click on the link). A controversial character, he was the author of books such as The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress.

Pro Hart has also died (via ABC news) who had been ill with motor neuron disease. He was largely self taught and is famous for his “cannon art” where Christmas tree balls were filled with paint and fired at a canvas by a home made cannon.

Well the author copies of Donna’s 9th published book The Jumbled Jigsaw have arrived with a fab cover featuring a lovely painting by Donna called the Music of Beingness!

Hopefully it’ll stir up the autism field into realising that there is far more diversity in the causes of the symptoms that get labelled as “Autism” and that a diagnosis of autism confers no magic resistance to things like Tourettes, OCD, bipolar or anything else that the rest of the population gets.