“Its like that legal Crack” Those are the words a friend of mine uses to describe things that are amazing, things that are so awesome they should not be legal. There are very few experiences in life that you can say are so amazing, life changing and perspective altering. In my time I have experienced very few.

I am not the type to write book reviews, I have no claims to be as credible as Oprah’s book club suggestions but I believe I know a good book when I see one and that is what “Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application” is. before writing this review I thought about the most concise way to explain how good this book is or how important it is and basically all I can say is that it is that legal crack.

Getting Real is a book written by 37 Signals. This is a the company that created Basecamp and Campfire or probably more known for publishing the famous Ruby on Rails framework. The title of the book could not be more appropriate, it a book basically about cutting the bullshit in creating web applications and actually doing the damn thing. Moving from Computer engineering to Software engineering was a huge perspective change for me but reading this book just put those “Crack” principles in concrete. Getting real takes you through a product life cycle, from how to act from the conception of the idea to the deployment and maintenance of your product. It gets you in the mindset of discovering and implementing what really matters.

The greatest aspect of the book is that it’s scope is beyond the web applications. The principles in this book can be applied in all sorts of companies and even in your life, so even if your not a code monkey or a vetran geek this book is still worth your read. Getting Real is for anyone who has an enterprenueral or creative mind and for people who are interested in making their lives more efficient. The book comes in three forms, you can buy the actual book for $25, the downloadable pdf for $20 or read it online for free. I urge you to check it out, it may work wonders for you as it did for me.

Hometown Glory

So I started thinking how do we create these powerful and intelligent servants without them taking control of us who are weaker and less intelligent. Many scientist have pondered on this for long and answers such as Asimov’s 3 laws have been offered (Which has been proven unsuccessful in iRobot). The answer may not be that far away, in fact it may be within us. If you analogize the relationship humans have with God and the relationship we have with robots, us being god (The creators) and the robot being humans (The created) you can see how we can survive.

There are three things to do.

Hide their abilities from them: The robot does not have any information about its components. It is not aware of its processing power, how much hard drive space it has or even what these things mean. So a robot has no clue if it is running on a Nintendo 64 chip or some super core 2 duo stuff. If we knew our individual capacities there would not be the Olympics or the World cup we would just check our individual abilities to see who is better. This way they are left guessing how good they are, something we spend a good amount of our lives doing.

Give them a different perspective of life: While they are cutting a steak for your delicious dinner the think they are drawing a steak. That way they do not know what a knife is and what kind of harm they can inflict on a human if they ever get the idea of taking over the world. We do not see the world the way God does hence we do not understand all the secrets of the world.

Make them have different perspectives from other robots: This will allow the robots get into arguments such as who can run faster, who has a cooler logo and what is the meaning of life. These allow the robots to occupy themselves with useless events in their idol time and prevent them from doing research on humans. The same way we distract ourselves with frivolous things in the world.

Following these three steps will ensure that the human race can eat, sleep and fight each other in peace and not worry about pesky robot intrrupting us unecessarily.

Anyway, I am back because I read a post from a obilo (Which I have stupidly deleted by installing my blog’s database over his…long story) and I also missed writing.  Well the intention of this new blog is to have no schedules (Blogging totally on impulse), I am going to say whatever tickles my fancy, from shaq asking kobe what his ass taste like to Don Imus’ racist comments. Stuff you guys with my opinions on whatever I feel like cause that what blogs are for, I might even play the devil’s advocate and argue on a side that I do not even support, cause I like doing stuff like that. So lets see as it goes.

So stay tuned and enjoy the new blog