Book – Page 5 – Made by Mikal

Wool

Post author:mikal
Post published:February 28, 2024
Post category:Book

Chet bought me this book and demanded I read it, and honestly that was a good call. The book reminds me a bit of Oryx and Crake, but perhaps that's unfair given I read that one eight years ago and have probably forgotten some important details. The book is well paced and engaging. Despite being as long as many of Neil Stephenson's books, I felt it was a much more approachable read than that. I found the second half of the book a bit harder to read that the first half, because it doesn't pull many punches in terms of the consequences of people's actions and is pretty good at building suspense. There were definitely points where I had to pause because I was pretty sure something bad was going to happen to someone I'd grown fond of. That said, it was still a great read. I've gone and bought the next two in the series because I'm confident I'm going to want to read them now too.

Understanding Compression

Post author:mikal
Post published:January 9, 2024
Post category:Book

I bought this book on a whim, because I was trying to understand a compression scheme and had trouble finding good documentation on it. The book overall is written in a quite conversational style that I find a bit distracting from the content, and the introduction is a bit repetitive -- yes I get it, there's some maths involved. Thanks. That said, the content is a solid and quite approchable introduction to the topic area. I haven't ever thought before about entropy in information theory for example, I now feel like I could give a coherent elevator description of the topic. Another example is the description of Huffman codes. Here the topic is introduced with four pages and a few diagrams and I "get it". In the random algorithms book on my shelf (Introduction to Algorithms, third edition by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein), the same content takes ten pages and includes a six page set of lemmas around the code's correctness. Both descriptions would get you there in the end, but Understanding Compression's description is definitely more approachable. Overall, its very rare for me to sit down and actually read a technical book from cover to cover, but this book…

Cult of the Dead Cow

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 29, 2023
Post category:Book

A very readable history of the early US hacking scene, including the roots of Def Con and Blackhat security conferences. The book is filled with a cast of characters many of whose names and exploits I recognize -- although I've only met one or two in person. The book is definitely US-centric in it's coverage but an interesting way to spend a summer evening or two. Menn (the author) spends a lot of time working through the moral reasoning that led a group formed out of an interest in how things worked and a sense of community among the socially awkward, to a group that made a profound difference to how we think about responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities and our obligations as technologists while at the same time trying to be funny (the hackers, not the author). The description of how cDc dragged Microsoft kicking and screaming into taking security for their software seriously is both funny and interesting, as well as the discussion of early attempts at responsible disclosure at a time where software vendors would sue instead of fixing their products. I find the descriptions of the various players "going straight" and acquiring actual jobs in order…

Project Hail Mary

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 24, 2023
Post category:Book

I enjoyed Andy Weir's two previous books, so I guess it's not a surprise that I enjoyed this one too. I feel like this one is closer to The Martian than to Artemis, so perhaps Weir is finding his sweet spot in terms of content choices. This book follows a school science teacher doing foolhardy things to save both himself and those he loves. It's a bloody good read but I don't want to ruin it for you so I'll leave it there.

Malware Analyst’s Cookbook and DVD

Post author:mikal
Post published:March 19, 2023
Post category:Book

Another technical book, this time because my employer lets me buy random technical books as long as I pinky swear to read them and this one sounded interesting and got good reviews. First off, the book is a bit dated given its from 2011 -- there are lots of references to Ubuntu 10.10 for example and they say to avoid Python 3, which has its historical charm. This is unfortunate given the first section of the book talks about setting up honeypots to collect malware to examine, but Dionaea for example had its last commit in 2021. I am left wondering if there are more modern honey pot systems that people use these days. Secondly the book is definitely a cookbook and that's on me for not noticing this about the book before buying it -- its a series of recipes / scripts that do interesting things with malware. That said, it isn't really teaching a cohesive set of skills, its more of a series of stepping stones along the path you might follow. I think that's an unintended piece of important learning -- books with "cookbook" or "recipes" in their title probably aren't very good as an overview of…

Cisco CyberOps Associate: Official Cert Guide

Post author:mikal
Post published:February 27, 2023
Post category:Book Security

I don't think I've really reviewed a technical book here before, but I read the thing so I guess I should. This book is the certification guide for a "Cisco CyberOps Associate" certification, which is what they now call the CCNA Security qualification. Its a relatively junior certification, qualifying you to be a level one operator in a Security Operations Centre (SOC). I read this book because I took a Cisco NetAcad course for the associated certification in the second half of 2022 (although it has continued to be a thing I plug away at in 2023). That was mainly motivated by a desire to more about a field that is clearly important, but hasn't been core to my personal career. This book is reasonably well written and readable -- I'd read a chapter in the evening after work and its wasn't a huge chore to churn though. I certainly learned things along the way, even if the certification seems to suffer from a desire to have everyone rote learn a lot of acronyms, which seems like a common ailment in the industry (AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, I'm looking at you). My main critism is of the qualification itself, which…

This is going to hurt

Post author:mikal
Post published:February 13, 2023
Post category:Book

This book is lots of things: honest, funny, and ultimately heart breaking. I don't remember how I came across it, but its a good read for when travelling as the diary format means you can put it down whenever you need to do something else. I'm left wondering how the Australian medical system compares to the NHS -- I know we have more patient choice and flexibility -- but I wonder what its like for those working within the system. Either way I definitely recommend this book.

Unix: a history and a memoir

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 21, 2022
Post category:Book

It was a bit surprising to me that Brian Kernighan self-published a book about Unix history with Kindle Direct publishing, but given how many other books he's published he must have his reasons for not using traditional channels for this one. The book is an engaging read, with quotes which still seem timely today popping up every so often. Certainly the decision to self-publish does not appear to have been because of a lack of effort put into the book. An example of a quote I think is still relevant today: "Stable funding was a crucial factor for research. It meant that AT&T could take a long-term view and Bell Labs researchers had the freedom to explore areas that might not have a near-term payoff and perhaps never would. That's a contrast with today's world, in which planning often seems to look ahead only a few months, and much effort is spent on speculating on financial results for the next quarter." (page 7). Kernighan covers his own early career and the general functioning of Bell Labs, before starting to delve into the history of Unix. Describing at a high level early batch processing systems and then Multics, Kernighan describes how…

The Kaiju Preservation Society

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 29, 2022
Post category:Book

This is a classic Scalzi book -- novel, fun, a little bit funny, and in sync with the time it was created in. A story set around a product manager laid off during the pandemic, and then presented with an... unusal employment option, the book moves quickly and in a way which keeps you engaged. Yet another Scalzi book I really enjoyed.

The Three-Body Problem

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 24, 2022
Post category:Book

I'm torn about this book -- the premise is interesting, the world is novel, and the book is well written. The book has a strong environmental theme, with a focus on the environmental impact of Chinese economic development during Mao's cultural revolution. However, despite all that the book didn't "grab" me. I think perhaps its because there is a lot of effort spent describing things which ultimately don't really matter -- like weather or not the desktop PC being used by one of the characters is the current model or not. Or perhaps its because I didn't actually like any of the characters -- none of them is what I would call a nice person. Or perhaps this is an artifact of the book having been translated from Chinese, and perhaps different stylisting expectations or some such? Either way, I don't think I'll finish this trilogy.