Repost: 10 Books You Should Read

So here they are, my top ten books (in no particular order - except for number 1 that one is just awesome):

  1. Godel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - An AWESOME book that covers philosophy, maths, music, art, programming, computer science and i'm sure there is more in there. Definitely worth at least ten reads.
  2. The Art of Intrusion - A collection of tales from the security underground as Kevin Mitnick describes some of the best hacks of the last 40 years. If you are interested in security, this should be on you're book shelf
  3. Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams - Are groups always centralised? Is there really a need for a leader. When I first read this book it was an eye opener. Five years later and it still has a place on my shelf and influences my current work.
  4. Genesis Machines - Explore the past and future of biological computation. A real eye opener into new fields of computational theory.
  5. Snow Crash - The best fiction book I have ever read! Years ahead of it's time and as relevant today as it ever was.
  6. Any of Isaac Asimov's Stories (Try to get an anthology) - From the guy who invented the modern idea of robots. His stories will make you stop, pause, think, chuckle and will shape you're ideas of humanity.
  7. Head First Design Patterns - An awesome introduction to the world of design patterns. It's light enough that you can get through it in a day, but rebust enough that it will give you a great grounding in them
  8. Real Digital Forensics - It's amazing what your computer can say about you. This book, while written for a commercial audience, provides a very nice introduction to the topic
  9. The Annotated Turing - The essay that, you could argue, started it all. This book leads you through Turing's original article as well as providing handy annotations that aid discovery. I wish I had read it earlier on my path to computer science.
  10. The Computational Beauty of Nature - An excellent guide through computation, chaos, fractals, complex systems and adaptation. One of my most well read references

Published on 06 Sep 2009. Tagged under Books, Top 10, Repost

VATS and some Site News

As you may have noticed, there are now Pages for these thought pages. Pretty soon there should be individual entry pages as well so keep tuned

[VATS]

I have also added VATS to the portfolio page after I realised I had accidentally left it out. If you are interested in VATS, my project, or even the general area of decentralised traffic management, please drop me an email.

Published on 05 Sep 2009. Tagged under VATS, Site News

Some 3D Stuff

Here is a little image of the procedural stuff I was working on at the end of last month. It evolved from some work I was doing on Ika and will probably integrate into Gin at some point

[Ika 3D]

Published on 04 Sep 2009. Tagged under Ika, 3D

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