Peak Oil Survival
Yesterday we reached the so long awaited price of 100 USD per barrel for front month crude oil… could you imagine a better opportunity to publish the first, pessimistic, post/review of this snowy new year? :) Peak Oil Survival is one of the saddest books I ever read: don’t read it until you are acquainted [...]
Kaleidoscope – Tangerine Dream
Tangerine Dream is the name of a German electronic band founded in 1967 that I listened to for years. I wasn’t aware that, before them, it was also the name of the first album of Kaleidoscope (an English psychedelic band of the late 60′s) that was released in the very same year! So I discovered [...]
Family Tree
I’ve just read the short book that is shipped with Family Tree, the CD whose tracks are a selection of the amateur tapes that Nick Drake recorded in Tanworth-in-Arden and Aix-en-Provence. In the first part of the book, his sister tells us what made her decide to release them: to make a stand against the [...]
An Artist of the Floating World
In the last few months, I have been looking for a novel written by a contemporary English writer whose prose would be both easy and refined: then some days ago a British friend suggested reading “An Artist of the Floating World” written by Kazuo Ishiguro. He was born in Japan in 1954 and he left [...]
Windows Forensic Analysis
Yes, like Candide, we’ve learnt that we do not live in the “best of all possible worlds”: there are so many PCs seduced by dark sided OSes that we have to deal with them… because, as I’ve already written, customers, friends and relatives use them. This book might help you when the problem that you [...]
Vocabulary for Dummies
This informal grammar book was not written for Non-native English Speakers: the usual readers are Americans who want to enhance both their spoken and written English and their vocabulary with everyday words and specialist terminology. I had never noticed that a large number of English words have Latin roots: this is probably due to the [...]
Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development
One year ago I wrote my first Joomla 1.0.x component using com_dailymessage (the component that Joseph L. LeBlanc describes in his The Daily Message Joomla Component Tutorial): now we can read not a new tutorial but a whole book about the upcoming 1.5.x series… I’ve just started reading it but I’ve already found the precise [...]
Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1
I’ve just finished reading Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1: waiting for the release of Learning Joomla! Extension Development: Creating Modules, Components, and Plugins with PHP as far as I know it is still the only book available that discusses the 1.5 series and my quick reading was enlightening.
The Nick Drake Song Collection
After some trouble, I’ve finally got The Nick Drake Song Collection. I still haven’t read it to the end so I don’t know if it contains some transcriptions of the home recordings that, some years ago, I was so lucky to find, hear and save from a website before their disappearance (the Internet was wilder [...]
The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics
I’ve just added The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics to my library: it’s a really wonderful book with great illustrations. I got upset at first because I was not able to find Across the Universe which is one of my favourite Beatles songs but later I found it with an illustration by Alan Aldridge.
