Good Math, Bad Math

As I've mentioned before, I've been spending a lot of time working on a book. Initially, I was working on a book made up of a collection of material from blog posts; along the way, I got diverted, and ended up writing a book about cloud computing using Google's AppEngine tools. The book isn't finished, but my publisher, the Pragmatic Programmers, have a program that they call beta books. Once a book is roughly 60% done, you can buy it at a discount, and download drafts electronically immediately. As more sections get done, you can download each new version. And when the book is finally finished, you get a final copy.

We released the first beta version of the book today. You can look at excerpts, or buy a copy, by going to the books page at Pragmatic's website.

If you're interested in what cloud computing is, and how to build cloud applications - or if you just feel like doing something to support you friendly local math-blogger - please take a look, and consider getting a copy. I'm not going to harp about the book a lot on the blog; you're not going to see a ton of posts that are thinly veiled advertisements, or updates tracking sales, or anything like that. If there's something that I would have written about anyway, and it's appropriate to mention the book, then I'll feel free to mention it, but I won't waste your time hyping it.

In other news, here's the main reason that things have been dead on this blog since the weekend:

That's the view from my driveway as of monday morning. Over the weekend, we had one of the worst windstorms to hit New York in about thirty years. That mess is two oak trees, each close to 2 meters in diameter, which came down on our street on saturday. (If you look closely towards the right hand side, you can see the remains of my neighbors car.) The telephone pole in the picture was snapped not by getting hit by a tree, but simply by the wind. Since that pole had our electrical transformer, and those trees took out the wiring that fed that transformer, we are (obviously) without electricity, internet, or (most importantly) heat.

Con-ed is promising to restore our electricity by friday. I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway, back to the happy stuff. The book exists in electronic form! Buy a copy for yourself, your friends, your neighbors, and your dog! We've got lots of wonderful new expenses to deal with recovering from that storm! :-)