Category: Burningbird

Categories
Books Technology

Amazon S3 and Kindle

It’s not just SmugMug and other client applications that aren’t working because of Amazon’s S3 failure. You can purchase a book on Amazon, and it shows among your books in Content Manager, but the book won’t download. The same holds for any subscriptions you try to download.

You don’t get an error or a message. You just don’t get the book. I’ve been back and forth with Amazon trying to figure out why my new purchases weren’t downloading, until I saw the posts about S3. I’m assuming that the book files are stored in S3 storage. Understandable. What’s less understandable is the absolute lack of communication about why a book is not downloading.

I have to wonder if this isn’t related to Amazon’s new video download service. If so, then we may be in for some interesting times.

Amazon also put out a Whispernet upgrade today, and several people have been told this is the problem. However, if the issue was networking, we wouldn’t be able to access the store. We can access the store, but we can’t get our purchases to download. That strikes me as a storage access problem, not a Whispernet problem. Since the timing on this is identical with the down time on S3, I would say these two items are related. Either that, or Amazon is having a system wide failure.

Just received from Amazon:

I apologize for the difficulties you have experienced while trying to download from the Amazon Kindle Store. We are currently performing upgrades on some of our systems that handle file downloads like yours and this is responsible for the error you encountered. Please retry your download again in a few hours and let us know if this problem persists.

That’s the first time I’ve heard a system failure called an upgrade. Amazon is not handling this incident well.

Amazon is all better now and we’re able to download our books. One of the books I purchased was my own, Painting the Web. I just couldn’t resist seeing the whole thing in Kindle.

However, you can forget the “enough room to store 300 books” if you buy my book on the Kindle. The largest book I’ve had to date was 6MB. Painting the Web took a whopping seventeen MB of space. I’m not sure if it’s the heaviest Kindle book there is, but it certainly has to be up there with any others.

Categories
Writing

The life of a tech book writer

I read Baron Schwartz’s recounting of his experience authoring O’Reilly’s High Performance MySQL with interest, and no little fascination. Having authored 17 computer books (or so, I begin to lose count), I can both empathize with some of the challenges he’s faced, while also wondering if I shouldn’t have been more demanding, at times. Wait a sec: I have been demanding, at times.

I worked with DocBook with one book, and didn’t really care for it. Now, I use NeoOffice, which is the Mac OS front-end to OpenOffice, but I don’t seem to have quite the same number of problems that Baron had. However, since I write only one author books now, cross-referencing issues are not as critical as they are with multiple authors.

I also have had the same editor, Simon St. Laurent, for my last several books. Having the same editor can make your job immeasurably easier. Simon knows my weaknesses and strengths and can help me minimize the first, while maximizing the second.

Tech reviewing can be a challenge, at times. Tech reviewers doing copy editing isn’t unusual, and can help, but can also hurt because what you need from tech reviewers is not for them to correct the writing— O’Reilly has copy editors to do the grammar editing—but to focus on the technology and look for errors, omissions, and problems. It’s hard, though, for people to separate the two in their mind when they tech review. They want to help.

Baron also mentions about the writing quirks like the use of passive voice. It’s almost impossible to avoid writing with passive voice when you’re writing about technology. I have this theory that tech is a left brain activity, as is the use of words, but it is the right brain that takes the medium, the words, and creatively puts them together in a pleasing, flowing whole. Since tech books force us to focus on left brain activity, our right brains are starved out of the process, and the writing becomes more an act of efficiency rather than creativity.

Well, I said it was just a theory. I use a variation of Baron’s regular expressions in order to find my own uses of passive voice, but again, I’m also dependent on both my main editor and my copy editor.

Last but not least in the writing process is the schedule. I’ve had books run the gamut from being a fast-track three months (first edition of Learning JavaScript) to almost two years (Practical RDF). I’ve found that I don’t do well with an intense, short schedule, especially with a new book series. At the same time, anything over a year is too long. Not only do you miss your publication slot, you also run the risk of book burn out. Adding Ajax and Painting the Web had optimum schedules for the book sizes and topic, and I think the less stressful schedule shows with both books.

I digress, though. Baron has provided an interesting perspective on writing a tech book, and has covered many of the issues, not to mention tasks. His recounting is invaluable, and should be required reading for every dewy-eyed author wannabe. However, I think that Baron also brought on some of the problems, himself, first by focusing too strongly on the technology used, and perhaps not having enough faith in the process, as well as other people associated with the book. Writing is work, true, but writing is also a leap of faith.

Regardless, it sounds like a good book and I look forward to reading it.

(Andy Oram, Baron’s editor, has posted a response, which is also good reading.)

(Thanks to Simon for pointing to initial story.)

Categories
Books Writing

PTW on Kindle

Painting the Web is now live on Kindle, and I downloaded a sample chapter. I ended up being pleasantly surprised at the figures. Though they are in grays, they’re large enough to be easily viewable, and nicely integrated into the text.

It’s fun seeing your work in a new medium. Reminds me of the thrill I felt when seeing my first book in print.

update The URLs I included in the book are also converted into working links, and if the wireless connection is turned on, clicking one of the links opens the page in Kindle’s built-in browser. Tough to do that with a paper book. The spacing for the code samples is off, but this isn’t too much of a problem since examples can be downloaded from O’Reilly.

PTW on Kindle

Categories
Just Shelley

This week in Missouri

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

For this week’s recap of Missouri news, I’m going to focus on one event that is both trivial and profound: the closure of 16 Starbucks in the St. Louis area.

First, some context. Bob Sutor provides a link to a PDF listing all of the closures, nationally. Bill Greer at Off the Map has taken this data and mapped the location, as well as providing analysis of most impacted areas. As you can see from his list, though we didn’t have the most closures, we’re probably one of the most impacted per capita.

One of the Starbucks being closed in this area is also the closest to where I live. However, I go to another store anyway, because it’s closer to where I walk. Of course, I stopped going to Starbucks, and therein lies the profound nature of this event.

It’s not surprising that the Starbucks stores haven’t been doing as well in St. Louis. We don’t have the highest unemployment rate, but we do have unemployment beyond the national average: we’re now at over 6% unemployed and rising, aided and abetted by the closure of these stores.

However, high unemployment doesn’t necessarily mean that a luxury food store like Starbucks is going to be impacted. After all, when a people have little money for new TVs or cars, they can still escape the circumstances of their lives with the illusion of wealth by buying a tiny box of chocolates at Godiva, or a Starbuck’s White Mocha.

This year, though, even the few dollars that might go for these small luxuries are being eaten up by food prices that shock every time we go to the store, as well as gas prices that leave all quiet and subdued at the pumps.

Instead of Starbucks, we’re going to McDonald’s for a hot cup of coffee, or bringing our own home brewed, as we head to the Zoo, Art Museum, Arch, or other free, and most importantly, local spot; to spend time with family or friends, or our own thoughts. To find comfort in things that don’t require credit cards.

It’s difficult to hear of yet more closures in St. Louis. Will the last person leaving St. Louis, please remember to pull the plug on the Mississippi. However, there is a sanity to the lifestyle changes we’re having to make. Someday, when this is all behind us, forgive me if I hope these closed Starbucks stores never return.

Categories
Burningbird

More simplifications and Atom feed issues

The recent small Drupal upgrade convinced me to simplifying my site structure. It only took me about ten minutes, all total, but having to do the same thing with five sites becomes a bit of a bore. I’m creating shell scripts that will manage updates for Drupal minor releases and Drupal modules, but you still have to run updates. So, one more site bites the dust: Painting the Web.

I originally split Painting the Web off because I wanted to use the site to hopefully market the book. I also wanted to separate the site from my more opinionated writings, so I don’t lose sales. However, book sites rarely help sales, and if people aren’t going to buy a book because of my opinions, they probably wouldn’t like the book, anyway.

This won’t impact on any of you because I don’t think anyone has subscribed to the site directly. However, I may be moving some of the writings over to this weblog, so forgive the duplications in your feeds.

Speaking of feeds, since the Drupal upgrade, my Atom feed seems to be marking old posts as newly updated, and it looks like my feeds are being refreshed so they show up as active in readers again. When I have the time after the first of August, I’ll look through the code and see if I can figure out what’s happening. In the meantime, I’ll try to minimize the feed pinging as much as possible.