Ray Rischpater’s Blog

I have always read a ridiculous amount. Sadly, in recent years as I’ve taken greater advantage of resources such as the Association for Computing Machinery’s Digital Library, what that really means is that I print a lot.  There’s a definite advantage to paper; you can stick it in your bag, or put your feet up and lean back more so than with a laptop or desktop PC. At the same time, I don’t archive what I read on paper; I either make notes citing the papers I’ve read, or if the paper is really important to me, I archive a copy of the PDF itself. As a result, my professional reading workflow is one of researching, printing, reading, and recycling the results. This is a tremendous waste of paper.

While I’ve tried various ebook solutions on PDAs over the years, I’ve never been particularly happy with PDF handling on mobile devices.  I’ve watched with interest the growing market for ebooks on devices including the Sony eReader and the Amazon Kindle, although until recently neither has had particularly good PDF handling either.

Last month I laid hands on a Sony eReader, and really liked what I saw. PDF presentation with later firmware in the PRS 505 is much improved over previous firmware releases, and both the PRS 505 and PRS 700 support Secure Digital cards. As USB devices, these products show up as a mass storage device when mounted on Mac OS X. As an added bonus, Kovid Goyal’s Calibre application supports both format translation and automatic harvesting of Web content from RSS feeds. I have to admit that it’s pretty spiffy to get up in the morning, grab the eReader from my desk and have the latest content from both The New York Times and The Economist at my fingertips. In conjunction with the large number of freely available books from Feedbooks, it’s a leisure reader’s dream.

Although the eReader’s appearance as a mass storage device in the Mac OS X Finder is useful, I quickly tired of downloading papers and manually copying them to the device. Intuitively, it seemed that what I wanted to be able to do was to treat the eReader as another printer.

Upon reflection, this idea is quite compelling. It doesn’t require me to change my work flow at all; moreover, there is something cool about the idea of an eInk device being directly accessible as a printer.

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Installing and configuring WordPress has been on my personal to-do list for an absurdly long amount of time. Back in February 2002, I started a personal blog on LiveJournal, which I kept up-to-date on an intermittent basis. I’d always planned on using it both as a professional soapbox and a personal journal, although it quickly became more of the latter than the former. In recent years, it’s largely lain fallow, a victim of benign neglect as I tackle professional writing and engineering commitments.

With the imminent publication of my latest book, Beginning Java™ ME Platform (Beginning from Novice to Professional), it’s again apparent that I should put more effort into reaching out to both those I know and those who read my work. Not only is this an important part of publicity for me as an author, but it’s also a service to you, my readers, because it gives me an opportunity to keep you up to date. I only hope that I am more successful in keeping you up to date than I am self-publicity, something I have generally neglected. 

Hence, this blog.

I’m not certain what all I will post here, or how frequently I will post. You can certainly expect any updates or feedback on my books, of course, but I’m also planning on using this as a working notebook for other technical musings. I don’t have any plans to become a career blogger and make this a central part of my professional activities; to be frank I think there’s too much of that on the Internet already! Instead, I think this is going to fill a very narrow nice, with me posting the occasional update to a previous (probably paper) publication, various tips and tricks I’ve picked up in my engineering career, and possibly some engineering notes about things I’ve found difficult in the hopes that capturing it here will help others.

Thanks for stopping by!