Book Review: Open Government

Open Government, the book under review is a collection of articles from professionals and notable stakeholders in governance, primarily from US perspective. With thirty-four chapters, this is a fairly fat book filled with case studies and opinions of various participants.

Some of the measures of government reform in this context include the recently recognized roles of CTO and CIO as part of the government similar to major business and corporations.

One of the important points made in one of the chapters "Government as a Platform" is that any functional democracy needs to have all inclusive opinions from maximum stakeholders possible. The advantage of diverse public discourse is that wrong opinions tend to cancel each other, leaving the the best ones to be considered for implementation. In present times, with lot of the population being internet-savvy, it is definitely a step forward to include online tools and forums for determining the public opinion.

There are two interesting examples of open government in practice given in this book. These are the websitesfollowthemoney and maplight. The first of these is the website of National Institute on Money in State Politics tracking political donation data. The latter is a public domain database seeking to track money and related influence in legislatures.

To summarize, the book seems to have more chapters than necessary to bring out the perspective. Some chapters are too technical and doubtful to give insight to the targeted audience. With a strong leaning for US examples and discussions, it leaves advancements in other countries out of scope. This is however a good way to see merging of technology in administrations in different ways.

Book Review: Friends with Benefits

We are experiencing the explosive growth of internet and its impact on our lives in ways unimaginable until few decades back. The 32-bit IPv4 is forecasted by various sources to beexhausted by 2011. Technically, these kinds of forecasts have required various solutions such as the 128 bit IPv6 protocol, reclaiming unused IP space,etc. 

The large and growing usage of internet technologies of various types has required the development of newer marketing tools and strategies. That is where Friends With Benefits likely fits in. It highlights the major aspects of social media marketing and is filled with examples, tips and tricks in a good readable style.

There is some good examples and tips given to improve knowledge sharing while maintaining the authenticity of the source. In this regard, the authors explain the skillful use of creative commons license to share material online.

The authors give out some really useful tips on using online forums and following netiquette. There is also some useful suggestions to make use of popular social news sites such as Digg, Slashdot and StumbleUpon.

To summarize the review, a practically useful book for this topic very much in 'beta' state. The authors themselves acknowledge the still evolving nature of this medium. Some more positive addition to this book could be more examples similar to tubetastic and techcrunch.

Book Review: The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

Book review of

Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

For quite a few of us in India and nearby, Ramesh Gaonkar's book on microprocessors and to some extent Douglas Hall's microprocessor book had been the earliest microprocessor text. The 8085 microprocessor and its variants appear on a multitude of student lab kits and higher school, junior college and engineering college projects.

In this time of Intel i3, i5 and i7 processor and high capacity SMP machines, it is the admirable effort taken by the first pioneering microprocessor engineers which has given rise to the burgeoning IT industry of present times.

The Art of Assembly Language is primarily a similar text book for assembly language as the two books mentioned earlier. It introduces readers to writing 32-bit x86 assembly code using HLA(High Level Assembler) language. The author of this book is also the developer for HLA language.


The book comprehensively covers topics from the basic libraries of HLA to advanced arithmetic, macros and string instructions. One of the unique topic covered is the object oriented programming support given by HLA.

Some of the topics in advanced arithmetic are extended-precision arithmetic, arithmetic on operands whose sizes are different, decimal arithmetic, and computation via table lookup. There is a complete set of bit operations that forms a part of any complete assembly language. There is an entire chapter dedicated to bit operations including the basic six activites upto bit-centric algorithms and their implementations in HLA.

To conclude the review, while the book is no doubt well-written, the use of HLA is one of the requirements for this book. This could require some adaptation in universities not using HLA as the learning tool.

Earlier published in desicritics.org

Trust in God

United with me, you shall overcome all difficulties by my grace.
(Hinduism, Bhagavad Gita)

Trust in God

United with me, you shall overcome all difficulties by my grace.
(Hinduism, Bhagavad Gita)

Things to do

Seek to do brave and lovely things that are left
undone by the majority of people. Give gifts of love and
peace to those whom others pass by.
(Paramahansa Yogananda, Spiritual Diary)