Archive for reading
Next book purchases
July 27th, 2007 • reading
I think the next few books I’m going to purchase and read will be as far from Python and religion as I can get. I just added Extreme Metal by Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris to my Amazon wishlist. His PhD thesis was the basis for the book and provided much of the first hand interviews he needed for the book. Who says smart people don’t like metal?! (That’d be the same people that think a social anthropologist turned field investigator can’t make a DVD about metal pretty damn interesting.)
I think I’ll also purchase Never Shower in a Thunderstorm… by Anahad O’Conner after reading Shalini’s review of it last month. I suppose one day I’ll eventually pick up another fiction novel — or the Bible — if I ever want to have something to read for escapism and fantasy.
Snakes and pomegranates
June 18th, 2007 • 2 comments blog, programming, python, reading
This week, I’m nearly 300 pages deep in Mark Lutz’s Learning Python, Second Edition and it’s still an easy to read book surprisingly. I know that technical books that I’ve read can be easy to read, or even entertaining, for the first few chapters but once you get into the real “meat” of the subject matter, it tends to dry up. I’ve started chapter 15 today and it’s now getting into the more advanced and concrete everyday use cases you’ll see: modules, module packages. I’m currently using it to rewrite a script I use at work for mass SPF record insertion in DNS zone files. I’ve skipped ahead some in the book to get an understanding of the re (regular expression) module of Python but unfortunately, Lutz doesn’t really spend a whole lot of time on it in this book or Programming Python (his other acclaimed O’Reilly book on Python). It’s really a shame because the module’s syntax is rather complex and can really take some getting used to if all you’re used to using are PCRE-types (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) and sed. But it’s extremely nice being able to create groups like the following for code re-use:
matchdate = re.compile(r'?P
matchdate.sub('CCYYMMDD', 'date', count = 1)
Now I can use `date` to match anything from 20010101 to 20091231 which can obviously be very helpful if I’m busy doing inline edits on multiple files that can have multiple dates in them in that syntax. However, my only problem now is the fact that I can read zone files into a list (an array in other languages) and change the date inline but I can’t seem to take those values and write them back into a file. In bash, it’s easy:
sed 's/200[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/CCYYMMDD/' < file1 > file2
But when I try this with production code, I either end up with an empty file2 or I get an exception raised. Do I need to pickle the files?
Also, I’ve really grown to love pomegranate juice. I buy a bottle of POM(c) about once every two weeks since I use it as a supplement in my orange juice in the morning. I also have this great pomegranate tea that also has hibiscus and pepper in it. Yum!
Reading and work
June 13th, 2007 • chatter, reading, work
So, this week begins my third week working from home and I’ve now gotten accustomed to the boringness and blandness of only leaving the house after 7PM EDT. I have my little routine of working and taking a lot more breaks in order to stretch and go outside to see if it’s daylight or not or to do chores around the house. At least now our apartment stays rather clean since I end up having a bit of free time during my work day.
This week also marks me getting a raise at work which is definitely going to help in the long run. While I may not like everything about my job — especially just about everything I have to deal with concerning spam — this bump in pay will help me forget about the horror of filling out the same Yahoo email deferment form 10 times a day. A coworker of mine is also finally helping me, and the rest of my department, embrace automation by getting tools and scripts in place that I’ve been asking to have for months. In the past, the abuse department of my company only had two or three real employees however, now we’ve got almost 10 to replace those same two or three people. While it amazes me that we need 2 to 3 times more people to do the same amount of work, things are getting done more quickly and slightly more efficiently since we do have people working around the clock versus 9AM till around 2AM. With more people working graveyard, it definitely helps us communicate effectively with providers many timezones ahead of us. My coworker and myself are the only two people in the department that want to do things quickly and efficiently versus everyone else who just wants to drag their feet and do everything by hand. We’re writing scripts and form letters so people can easily automate the dull task of emailing people because they’re sending 20,000 emails to Hotmail when they shouldn’t be.
Which brings me to my next point: reading. I’ve been doing a lot of it lately. More online than off and I’m getting tired of staring at my monitor all day, I just want to dive into my books. I’ve put off reading Satan by Jeffrey Burton Russell in favor of Learning Python
Does anyone know of any good plugins/widgets for WordPress for listing what books you’re reading? There’s only two listed at wordpress.org that I’m able to find. One has not been updated since mid 2006 (and according to the author’s site, was never released) and the other is even older than that.
Books update!
April 23rd, 2007 • education, reading
I finally received my latest batch of books on Friday! I’m still wading my way through The Devil: Perceptions… but I’ve just received three more books in the mail. One is the much anticipated Satan: The Early Christian Tradition which is the second volume of four of the same topic. I also received The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner and Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — And Doesn’t by Stephen Prothero.
I’m anxious to read the latter two as I’ve heard good things about Prothero’s book and Turner’s book should be interesting given her previous job as an editor at Playboy.
Books, books, books!
April 16th, 2007 • education, reading
I started off this year by actually reading a book, it was Gavin Baddeley’s Lucifer Rising which is named after the Kenneth Anger movie of the same name. I read this after I read the stellar book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Michael Moynihan. If you’re looking at getting either, don’t bother with Baddeley’s book, it’s just not worth a read.
Then I started reading Three Books of Occult Philosophy by HC Agrippa and I had to stop due to the text alone. It’s just hard to read. Not hard to comprehend by any means, it’s just physically hard to read a book that was written in 1630. I will pick it up again this year I’m sure.
This week I received The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. I’m only two chapters deep but I’m waiting for Russell to actually get to discussing “The Devil” and evil. So far it’s been what evil means to him “historically” and what a concept is (yes, he explains what concepts are for an entire chapter) and I’m ready to put this book up on the shelf already. I’ve heard that it’s a decent book but so far, I can’t see why or how it would be. I really hope I didn’t waste some money on what could be a pretty interesting read.
Today I received notice from Amazon that my pre-order copy of The Canon: A Whirlgig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science will be shipping earlier than expected! Woo! Early reviews are good for Natalie Angier’s newest book and I’m no stranger to science but it gets me giddy to get a book about it that I’m not required to read!
I’ve got more books on order that I’m eager to read but I have to plow through these others before I can undertake anything else interesting!