Category: Books

The World Is Flat

The World Is FlatI have just finished reading the book by Thomas Friedman “The World Is Flat“.

As you’ve probably noticed I am not a big book freak. I rarely read anything outside of very technical literature. But I felt that I absolutely had to read this one.

I ordered immediately after I saw this video, which is Thomas Friedman’s speech in MIT, in which he talks about the globalization and the flat world. Basically, what he did in MIT, was a very quick and brief overviwe of the first three chapters of the book. His speech was amazing. He was talking in very simple language about really complex things. He made a lot of stuff so much easier to understand. And he made some really interesting connections.

I have to say though, that many of the things he was talking about weren’t new to me. I was thinking about them myself. I just couldn’t possibly form them into any shape or express them in any understandable form.

Friedman did very clearly. And he introduced a lot of examples. And he added a lot of credebility to what he was saying by interviewing a whole lot of smart people.

While the book is written in a very simple language and with a lot of examples, it was difficult to read for me. It was so thought-provoking that I had to stop about every two or three pages for an hour or a day to re-think everything I read. It took me alsmot two month to read 470 pages. And I am sure I’ve missed a lot too. I’ll have to re-read it in the near future.

This is the most complete and wide view of globalization that I have come across. Ever. The book doesn’t just talk and talk about some abstract forms. It shows the very specific connections between events that happened throughout the human history, with more focus on the last 30 or so years. All events and connections are looked at from a multitude of angles – political, economical, cultural, technological. Each of those angles is futher down broken into a multitude of options. Examples from American, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African, and European cultures are given. Interviews were conducted with a whole lot of people from ex-presidents and current ministers to CEOs of international corporations to religious leaders, as well as plenty of common people from a multitude of backgrounds.

Globalization aside, this book is the best piece of journalism that I’ve read in a long long while. A job well done. Truly a bestseller. I would seriously recommend this book to anyone. Yes, to anyone. Not only people who are interested in globalization, but to all people who are interested in their own present and future. There are lots of questions, and there are lots of answers. You’ll surely understand the world better after reading this book.

I do.

The World Is Flat

This video is off a smart guy talking to MIT crowd about globalization. The speech is titled after the book he wrote – “The World Is Flat“. This is the most interesting speech on the subject of globalization that I’ve ever heard. It’s very widely scoped too – it touches on everything from Berlin wall and Netscape browser to 9/11 and open source. I’ll be ordering the book shortly too.

The speech is in Real Media format and is about one hour long, so you might want to install Real Player and find a large piece of time, if you plan on watching it.

After I saw it, I was somewhat tired. The speech is very thought provoking and it made my brains work hard. Packing it all into my head felt like dealing with a wardrobe of clothes and a tiny bag. Things were falling out of it all the time and I couldn’t manage the zipper to close.

Rarely I feel like this.

Working with named pipes in Perl

The collegue of mine came across a problem that developed into an interesting solution that I decided to share with the world. Actually, I think the world is pretty much aware of the solution, but just in case that I will ever be looking for this solution again, I’ll have it handy here.

The task at hand was to do some processing of the logs on the fly. The syslog was configured to filter the appropriate logs into a named pipe and a Perl script was written to read from the said pipe and do all the processing.

The original piece of code looked something like this:

open (SYSLOG, "<$named_pipe") 
  or die "Couldn't open $named_pipe: $!\n";

while () {
  do_processing($_);
}

close(SYSLOG);

The problem came with syslog daemon restarts. Every time the syslog was stopped, the EOF was sent to the pipe and the script stopped reading it.

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