I’ll be reviewing a book about BizTalk

by Administrator 24. august 2011 00:25

Hi all

I was contacted by Packt Publishing asking me if I’d do a review of the Microsoft BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration book.

I have the PDF and the printed version should arrive any day now. Once I’ve read it I’ll post a review of it on my technical blog at http://blogs.eliasen.dk/technical/

BTW, you can find a sample chapter of the book at http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/1902-chapter-9-microsoft-dynamics-ax.pdf?utm_source=packtpub&utm_medium=free&utm_campaign=pdf

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eliasen

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Book review

Book review: 100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know

by Administrator 9. august 2011 21:17

Hi all

I have previously written part 1 of a book review at http://blogs.eliasen.dk/Personal/post/2011/07/10/100-Essential-things-you-didn’t-know-you-didn’t-know-part-I.aspx.

I have now finished the book and thought I’d write my thoughts about the book here.

First of all, I am not sure the 100 things are actually essential… some of them are more “Nice to know” than “Need to know”, but hey, that’s subjective, right?

Anyway, some of the things I didn’t know I didn’t know require some more-than-basic math skills to understand, which at times was rather hard to follow; I mean… for a book that is supposed to be bedtime reading, I think it requires too much. Had it been a book where you are supposed to sit and use time to study calculations, that would have been fine.

Out of the 100 things, I found these to be the most interesting;

  • Why pylons consists of triangles
  • Why it is easier to walk on a tightrope using a long pole with heavy buckets at the ends
  • Why Barbados had to score an own goal against Grenada to move on in a tournament
  • Some strategies for dividing something equally
  • Why no one has ever travelled in time
  • A new proof of Pythagoras’s theorem
  • How Calculus once saved the life of a mathematician
  • A lot of information about how to cut a diamond
  • There are no uninteresting numbers
  • Some different ways to score sports events that are more or less silly
  • Why A4/A3/A2 and so on paper formats are SO much cleverer than the US letter format and so on

It’s been a good read, but without some interest in mathematics and physics, you won’t like it.

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eliasen

Tags:

Book review

100 Essential things you didn’t know you didn’t know, part I

by eliasen 10. juli 2011 19:21

Hi all

I am currently on a camping trip and I have started reading the book called 100 essential things you didn’t know you didn’t know. Find it here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/100-Essential-Things-Didnt-Know/dp/1847920039

Basically it goes through 100 things/phenomenons/mathhematical puzzles and explains them.

I have read the first four now, which deals with:

  • Why pylons are made up of triangles
  • Why it is easier to walk on a tightrope with a pole in hands – sometimes even with buckets of sand at the ends
  • The fat that the saying that given enough time, an army of monkeys will write the entire collection of Shakespeare’s
  • How you can determine how many more error are in a book, given the number of error that are already found

All in all an interesting read until now, and also quite easy to go to – each subject takes up only 2 or 3 pages.

Go buy! Smile

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eliasen

Tags:

Book review

Book review: The BBook of Geek

by eliasen 25. juli 2010 21:33

Hi all

Just finished reading The BBook of Geek and wanted to share a short review.

The book is a sort of almanac of geek topics. It is divided into eight sections, or “pillars”, each consisting of 16 topics. The eight pillars are:

  1. Software
  2. TV
  3. Literature
  4. Gaming
  5. Movies
  6. Science
  7. Hardware
  8. Internet

Within each of the eight sections, 16 geek topics are discussed (a total of 2^8 topics) with a brief introduction, some “facts” (some of which are true, and some of which are not (the exercise of knowing which is which is left to the reader)), and a page of each topic is dedicated to something funny. This could be a list of words that you need to decide whether they are a programming language or a movie robot, a top-10 list of something or some prose which is a funny story – often with some funny details.

The page numbers of the book are in hexadecimal, meaning that there is a page 1B and so on. You will find the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on page number 42, naturally, and the book states, that there are 31 other “coincidences” between the page number and the topic of the page. That’s 32 in total, naturally - 2^6. I only discovered the one about Hitchhikers Guide, though… which is even mentioned explicitly in the introduction of the book Smile But to be fair, I wasn’t really looking…

To be honest, I am happy to announce, that there were SEVERAL topics, of which I knew absolutely nothing. Perhaps even 20% of the topics, actually. This means I am not a total geek…

The topics you know are by far the most funny to read, but there are all in all a whole lot of fun stuff to read. The book states that you don’t have to be a geek to read it, but I’d say it definitely helps Smile

So, go buy and read!

--
eliasen

Tags:

Book review

About the author

Jan Eliasen is 37 years old, divorced and has 2 sons, Andreas (July 2004) and Emil (July 2006).

Jan has a masters degree in computer science and is currently employed at CGI Denmark as an IT architect.

Jan is a 6 times Microsoft MVP in BizTalk Server, although not currently and MVP.

Jan is proud to be one of the authors of the BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed book.

BizTalk Server 2010 Unleashed


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6 times: July 2004, July 2008, July 2009, July 2010, July 2011, and July 2012. Not currently an MVP.

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