Tag Archives: review

iPod Microphones: A Review

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On the Future Tense Podcast.

One of the other podcasts I really enjoy is American Public Media’s Future Tense. This public radio show has 3 to 5 minute segments on topics related to computing and technology. I highly recommend it for a quick dose of what’s new presented in plain English.

XtremeMac IPV-MIC-00 MicroMemo Digital Voice Recorder for iPod Video (Black)For those of you interested in recording with your iPod, the February 12 episode, iPod Microphones: a Review, should make good listening. It certainly pleased me. It confirmed that the iPod microphone I recently purchased — the XtremeMac MicroMemo — was the best of the three reviewed. The podcast also includes sample recordings with various mics under various conditions to give you an idea of what to expect if you invest in one of these gadgets for your iPod.

The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite

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Hardcore .htaccess stuff for mere mortals like me.

Somewhere along the line recently, I got this idea in my head that I wanted all subscribers for my main feed here to get the FeedBurner version of the feed. Those of you who are familiar with RSS know that a feed icon appears in the address bar of most modern Web browsers, offering visitors a quick way to get the feed URL or create a live bookmark. Other folks might know that they can enter the URL for a WordPress-based site followed by the word feed to get a feed URL. There are a few other formulas that can be used to generate a workable feed URL for subscribing to a feed, too.

While that’s all well and good, with so many methods to subscribe to feed content, it’s nearly impossible to get a real count of subscribers. How many people are subscribed to my feed? Beats me. How many hits a day does it get? I don’t know.

And those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know how much I love stats.

So a did a little poking around on the Web and found a few articles that explained how to use .htaccess to redirect hits to WordPress-generated feeds to my FeedBurner feed. One was this thread on the FeedBurner site, which has special instructions for WordPress users (scroll down on that page). Another was this article on oneafrikan.com, which offered some additional tricks I found useful.

Unfortunately, these solutions had one thing in common: they redirected all feed links to a single FeedBurner feed link. While that’s fine for most people, I’ve just gone through a lot of trouble to set up and promoted category feeds on my site. The last thing in the world I wanted was for someone to subscribe to a category feed and then get the main feed in their feed reader.

Of course, all of this redirect magic is done with .htaccess, the “invisible” file that works with your Web server to provide some last-minute instructions for your site. I’d already played a bit with .htaccess settings to make sure that outdated URLs published in some of my older books still pointed to the right thing on my current site. And, of course, WordPress uses the .htaccess mod_rewrite module to change ugly PHP URLs into something more attractive and logical (although very lengthy, if you ask me). I knew only enough about .htaccess to be dangerous with it, but since I treat it like a vial of nitroglycerin, I haven’t gotten myself in trouble yet.

So I figured I’d take the oneafrikan.com settings and modify them to meet my needs. The trouble is, when I looked at the code, I couldn’t translate them into a language I understood (such as English), so I couldn’t modify them to meet my needs or anyone else’s.

I spent some more time on the Web and found lots of documentation. Unfortunately, all of it assumed I knew the basics of what I now know are called regular expressions: those punctuation marks that mean something completely different from the punctuation I’m used to as a writer. Not knowing what they were called made it impossible for me to look them up online. When I started looking at the same apache.org page over and over and it never changed (not that it should, mind you), I realized I needed more advanced (or perhaps basic) help.

What I needed was a book.

I don’t just write books. I read them, too. Although I very seldom read a computer book cover to cover, I have a bunch of them that I consult when I need to figure something out. Oddly enough, some of them are books I’ve written; I tend to forget things I’ve written about when I don’t use them regularly. (And they call me an expert! Ha!) I have a book by another author that covers Apache, but the information I needed was not in there. In fact, I’m trying to figure out why I bought that particular book in the first place.

The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewriteSo I went on Amazon.com and I searched for .htaccess. I came up with a list of books that referenced it, but were not about it. Then I searched for mod_rewrite. And voila! I found The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite by Rich Bowen.

Not anxious to plunk down $30 for a book I might not find my answers in, I did some more research on the Web. I found a few book reviews and they were all positive. It appeared that this 160-page book covered the topic quite completely. It was definitely the book I wanted on my shelf.

Of course, I didn’t feel like waiting for Amazon.com to ship it to me. (I like immediate gratification almost as much as stats.) So when I realized that the publisher’s Web site offered the book as an eBook for only $20 (half the cover price), I bought it online and downloaded it. In five minutes, I had the answer to my question and enough information to tackle the problem. But rather than read the book on my 12″ PowerBook’s tiny (well, 12 inches, right?) screen (my G5 is still feeling sickly), I printed the whole thing out, punched holes in the pages, and put it in an old binder I had sitting around.

I realize that once again I’ve turned a short story — I found a great book about using mod_rewrite — into a long and drawn out one. (There are no short stories here.) My apologies to those of you in a hurry.

The point I wanted to make is that The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite is an extremely well organized, reader-friendly, well written, and informative book that explains exactly how to use mod_rewrite for anything you might want mod_rewrite to do: rewrite URLs, control access, set up virtual hosts, and so much more. Plenty of examples, each of which is analyzed and discussed. It’s all there.

I’m only about 30 pages into it so far, but I’m already very pleased.

The Planets

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A history of the planets.

book coverMiraz was kind enough to get me two items from my Amazon.com wish list. One of them was The Planets by Dava Sobel. It’s a kind of history of the planets — when they were discovered, how they were named, what’s important about them from a historic point of view, and more.

The book is full of fascinating details. For example, did you know that Charles Darwin traveled onboard the H.M.S. Beagle at the age of 22 to be a “gentleman’s companion” for the captain? And that the Beagle’s 1831 mission was to map the coastline of the New World?

Or that Uranus, which was discovered by Sir. William Herschel in 1781, was at first thought to be a comet?

Or that the four largest moons of Jupiter, which were discovered by Galileo in 1610, were named for Florentine Prince Cosimo de’ Medici — a ploy Galileo hoped would get him a position in the Tuscan court? (Surely you must know that Galileo was jailed by the church for his theory that the earth revolved around the sun.)

The book offers plenty of science, too. In reading it, you can learn about the composition of the Sun, planets, and important moons of the solar system (including ours). You can learn about how long it takes for each planet to rotate around its access and revolve around the sun. You can learn about exploratory fly-bys and landings and what the planets look like.

About the only thing the book doesn’t provide are photos. The author goes into great detail about how the planets look to the exploratory vehicles that have photographed them, but doesn’t include a single photograph. Yes, there’s original artwork for each body’s chapter and it’s certainly quite attractive and interesting, but there aren’t any photos to accompany the author’s descriptions. To me, that’s a major shortcoming in this book.

book coverbook coverA side note here. I’ve read two other books by Dava Sobel: Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter. The edition of Longitude I read was hardcover and richly illustrated with photos, drawings, and more. (I regret giving it away; I would like to read it again.) An excellent history of the importance of longitude for navigation and the work of a man to create a perfect timepiece for shipboard use. Galileo’s Daughter was interesting but not quite as enjoyable for me. It consisted primarily of letters from his daughter, a nun, that helped tell part of his life story.

What’s clear to me from reading three of Sobel’s books is that she has a talent for making history interesting and readable. I highly recommend her work. But whenever possible, go with illustrated editions. I really think they make the books come alive.

The Lost Painting

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History that reads like a novel.

Book CoverI saw The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr in a copy of Bookmarks, a magazine full of book reviews. I added it to my Amazon.com wish list.

The Taking of ChristThe book is an account of the finding of a painting by Caravaggio, a 17th century Italian artist. The painting, called The Taking of Christ, was found in the 1990s by a restorer.

Evidently, many paintings from that time were lost — they’d be sold by the artist or a dealer to a wealthy patron or art collector to be hung in a home. Over the years, the paintings would be moved around, handed down to descendants, sold, and resold. The records regarding these paintings were not always complete, so paintings would disappear from the records and thus “disappear” from the art world. In some cases, a painting’s value would be understated and the painting, aged, dirty, and possibly damaged would simply be discarded by an owner. Many masterpieces were lost this way.

The book tells the story of how two art history students stumbled upon some evidence that the painting had been sold to a Scotsman in 1802, who believed the painting was done by a different artist. The painting was then traced to an auction house where the trail went cold. Had it been sold? No one knew. And no one knew what had become of it.

The book is written like a novel, complete with dialog and some characterization. But all the characters are real people, many of whom were interviewed by the author during his research. This keeps the book from being a dry history tome. Instead, it has life and is quite interesting to the average reader.

The book was listed on the New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year for 2006. The edition I read included an epilogue by the author which covers the discovery of another version of the same painting.

I recommend the book to anyone interested in art, history, art history, or the process of searching for lost artwork.

Publish & Prosper: Blogging for your Business

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A brief book review.

I just got a copy of Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business by DL Byron, Steve Broback. This 200-page book is a good beginners’ guide for business blogging that starts with the basics and expands from there. For example, some questions that are answered include:

  • What is a blog?
  • Why should you blog?
  • Why shouldn’t you blog?
  • What should the focus of your blog be?
  • What does it take to start and maintain a blog?
  • What features should your blog include?
  • Should you include ads on your blog?
  • How do you monitor your blog’s usage?

Keep in mind that the book isn’t written for the average blogger. It’s written for business bloggers — people who want to use a blog to promote or otherwise market their business, products, or services.

Oddly enough, the book reminds me of one of my old titles, Putting Your Small Business on the Web. (Although I’m providing a link here, I’m not suggesting that you buy the book; it’s horribly out of date and of little value at this point.) Both books take a very basic approach, explaining how a new technology (blogging in this book; the Web in my book) can benefit a business and how to get started. Both books appeal more to business people then tech-saavy people — in fact, if you have experience with the technology, you already know half the book’s content.

Overall, I think the book is a good read for any business person who isn’t already a blogger — or perhaps one who has just gotten started and isn’t quite sure of what he or she is doing. Although there are lots of tips between its covers for all bloggers, it’s the newbies that will get the most of this book.