Microblogging service Twitter has undeniably been a hit, with growth rates that were at times in excess of 1400%. The growth was rapid enough that the site became well know for its periodic and at times extensive downtime. Even with these issues, the service continued to grow rapidly, and with celebrities getting into the mix Twitter was quickly on the radar of mainstream media. The ubiquity of twitter and ever increasing coverage of ‘tweets’ has also brought the inevitable backlash. As with anything that gains high profile popularity there are plenty of Twitter haters out there, though the role that Twitter has played in the recent Iranian elections seems to have brought more legitimacy to Twitter in the eyes of many. With popularity come books and quite a few are already out there about and for twitter, but my favorite so far is The Twitter Book by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein.

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The end of last year I made a move from an IT shop focused on supporting the U.S. side of our business to a department that provides support to our operations outside the U.S. This was the first time I’ve worked in an international context and found myself running into long time assumptions that were no longer true on a regular basis. My first project was implementing a third party, web based HR system for medium sized offices. I found myself constantly missing important issues because I had such a narrow approach to the problem space. Sure I’ve built applications and databases that supported Unicode, but I’ve never actually implemented anything with them but the same types of systems I’d built in the past with ASCII. But a large portion of the worlds population is in Asia, and ASCII is certainly not going to cut it there. Fortunately a new edition of Ken Lunde’s classic CJKV Information Processing has become available and it has really opened my eyes.

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One thing I love about Linux is the rapid development and frequent updates that allow me to run the latest versions of all my favorite software packages. My favorite distributions make it simple to always have the latest and greatest. In fact the distros themselves roll out new version regularly and I am always excited to see what new packages and features will be included. For book publishers this must be a little less exciting. Anything tied to a specific product that is under active development is going to quickly be behind the times. Mark Sobell’s A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux managed to avoid the worst of this by providing a lot of information that is useful for any Linux user running any distro. But still things move forward and almost exactly a year later we have A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux 2nd ed.. I was very pleased with the first edition and I think they’ve managed to really improve what was already a solid resource.

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The US Army’s Future Combat Systems program calls for one third of their fighting strength to be robots by 2015. The American pilots seeing the most combat in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, do so from flight consoles in the United States, and they are controlling Predator unmanned vehicles. Every branch of the U.S. military has aggressive robotics programs in place. This is not anything unusual. Other nations are also developing and purchasing robotic systems designed to be used in combat. Advances in communications, software and hardware make it inevitable that robotics will have a profound effect on conflict in the future. The development of these systems has been rapid and while technology hurtles forward, culture and understanding seem to lag behind. Similar to the way our legal codes are playing catch up with new technologies, combat enabled robots raise questions and issues that did not even exist a short time ago. Wired for War by Dr. P. W. Singer is an excellent opportunity for anyone interested to dive into just what is going on all over the world with regards to robotics and their use by the military.

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