I’ve used a lot of awful consumer electronics products, but the ASUS AiGuru SV1T wins the “Worst Consumer Electronics Product of 2011″ Award. Oh, wait, you could buy one in 2010; maybe even in 2009. So it sweeps the award for three years running.

This is supposed to be an “appliance” Skype VideoPhone that makes it easy to make a call. We were told in the movie 2001 that this would be implemented in payphones by now. So payphones are obsolete, but we’re still waiting for a no-brainer video phone that your grandma can use.

We acquired this for office use, and found it lacking. I took it home and tried to dump it on Craig’s List – no takers. Then it languished in my home office, and just recently I decided to give it another assessment. It still sucks.

Before I begin, let me say that this is a prime example of a product that should be a one-button interface: Call my favorite number. Would that be asking too much?

But everything about this product is wrong.

When I tap the green “phone” icon, it does what? Suggests that I enter a phone number. Hello! I want to use Skype! Remember? Phone numbers are great, but secondary. Please let me just browse my Skype contacts. To be sure, I can tap the right arrow to get to my contacts, but then I have to select that user, then tap “Video call.” Tap tap tap. This is wrong.

Call quality: Terrible. The video is always grainy and the updates are slow. Additionally, I have this thing plugged in with an Ethernet cable to avoid the vagaries of wireless. It constantly (really: always) tells me that the network connection is lost and/or that the network connection has “changed” (no it hasn’t), and I lose my call or have to interact with the machine.

There are no options in the “Advanced” settings to probe connection quality, insist that the Ethernet connection be favored over wireless (or used alone).

Finally: The greatest sin: Some of these issues could be fixed with updated software. As of this writing (14-Dec-2011) I have the latest software, dated . . . well, I’d like to tell you, but to do that, the phone has to connect, and as of right now it’s “attempting” to connect. But not succeeding. Sheesh. Anyway, the date of last update was October, 2010. There is nothing I can find at ASUS Support with guidelines for troubleshooting, etc.

It is hard for me to imagine how ASUS screwed this up as badly as it did. All this thing is, is a repackaged laptop. The user interface gaffes I can forgive if the performance was great. But it isn’t.

Do not buy this product.

Meanwhile, someone should introduce an awesome Skype VideoPhone. I am sure you are saying: Use an iPad. But there are great use cases for a dedicated device, the chief one being that you want to use your iPad while on a call, or you want to share the call with others. Perhaps you’ll tell me just to buy a 2nd iPad. Yeah, I could do that, but where’s my “call my most frequently used number” button? And so on.

So I’m reading Chad Pytel and Tammer Saleh’s book Rails AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring, and it’s a good one. Oops, but I got the title wrong: It’s Rails^TM AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails^TM Refactoring. (I don’t want to get sued for leaving out those TMs.)

I’ve been writing Rails^TM code for a long time, and this book is embarrassing to read. Honestly, after reading a couple of chapters I cranked up my editor and made some tweaks to my code. Whew. Truly, this book has the goods on any number of things you’re doing wrong with your Rails^TM app, and I would advise you to take seriously their advice.

There are chapters that teach things you should already know (on Models, Views, and Controllers), but also chapters that go beyond (those on using third-party code and services), and some where I think these guys know more than just about anyone (the chapter on testing). I kinda wish the testing chapter didn’t use Shoulda, but I guess it’s OK, since they invented it.

It’s hard to find things to gripe about. One oddity is that they recommend HTTP 401 for application-level (i.e., controller) authorization errors (p. 205): But I thought 401 was reserved for specifically HTTP-related auth (e.g., basic or digest – see the RFC). I guess you can use it like this. They also talk about denormalization, and replacing joins with column constants (pp. 79-82). I guess so. (To be sure, they say that if there’s going to be a UI, you do want the table.) I think increasingly we need to look at our schemas as though a non-Rails application will be using it, sooner rather than later: In which case, such constants really do need to be in a separate table, even if there is no UI. So I would advocate sucking in a table with the right codes, putting the key values into the table, and just leaving out the association if you want to avoid the joins. Also in this area, they put their constant values into an Array (p. 81). Dudes, use a Set. Please.

These manufactured gripes aside, it’s a lovely book. Now let me get back to my editor and my Rails^TM app so I can remove some more embarrassments. Sheesh, Law of Demeter AGAIN!?

Russ Olsen has just come out with a wonderful book on Ruby called Eloquent Ruby. If you’re a Rubyist, you should get it. What’s great about it is that it combines a breezy, even sometimes funny, style that is “teacherly” but also accurate in matter of detail.

There are a couple of things that really make the book work. First, there’s a nice little Document class that Olsen bends this way and that, using it as the vehicle for explaining subclassing, modules, mixins, and metaprogramming. My first impression was that it was a little lame, but by the end of the book I was very impressed with the range of examples. Indeed, the use of a Document class reminded me of some of the class examples from the Gang of Four book.

A second fine feature is that there are many sections devoted to a particular topic “In the Wild.” We have needed this in Ruby books for a long time — a coupling between Ruby as we know it in a textbook, and Ruby in the real world. These are really quite different “Rubies,” but Olsen is adept at showing through sometimes-simplified examples that the occasionally imponderable real-world Ruby really does share an idea of code with what learners start with.

I also like the chapter near the end of the book on the various Ruby interpreters, and how you can get something out of reading the code, be it in C, Java, or Ruby.

Now, about teaching Ruby.

Ruby is a tough teach. Students plateau at an average level of competence quickly, but the real power of Ruby comes after a stiff hike up the mountain to enlightenment.

I used to think that one could use the Programming Ruby book alone, and this would do the job. But it’s long, and in its new edition somewhat hobbled by not discussing Ruby 1.8.x. In a number of places there is discussion that seems aimed at Java developers (see how easy it is in Ruby!) that feels out-of-date to me now.

But having read Olsen’s book, I’m now thinking that a better sequence is to pair Cooper’s Beginning Ruby with Eloquent Ruby, supplemented, perhaps, with the Flanagan/Matz The Ruby Programming Language. This way, you get to be effective and productive quickly (via Cooper), wade into the depths and improve your style (Olsen), and get the final word on syntax and semantics (Flanagan/Matz). A place where I think Programming Ruby may still have the edge is in some of the metaprogramming discussion, but here I think the best resource out there is Thomas’s video series.

So with this move to St. Paul, Minnesota, and the requisite unpacking, I’ve had the opportunity to review the various books about rock and roll I’ve acquired over the years.

Here are the ones I consider personal favorites (and I’ll leave out the Guralnicks, Marcuses, etc., etc.). Maybe not actually the best, but I’ll leave the title as is to capture more links

Best rock book overall: Pamela Des Barres, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. This is awesome because the account is from the present, but it’s punctuated (or maybe I should say perforated) by unvarnished journal entries from the period, and teaches well how absurd adolescent hero worship can be. Des Barres does a great job of critiquing yet acknowledging her younger, stupider, and more hormonal self.

Best history by way of interviews: McNeil and McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Everything in this book has to be read with a grain of salt, because the subjects tend to play around with their memories. Still, quite a read.

Best book on routine rock depravity: [Tie] Rawlings and Diggle, Steve Diggle’s Harmony in My Head; Bonomo, Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. Great bands, questionable choices.

Best roman-a-clef: Thomas, The Big Wheel [about Elvis Costello and the Attractions, by the bassist]. Could have been subtitled: The Ego and the Id. This one was out of print for quite awhile: No doubt they were laying low fearing lawsuits from Declan MacManus.

Best book about a style: Davidson, We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988-2001.

Best reference: Robbins, The Trouser Guide to New Wave Records (first edition). Until this came out, it was impossible to figure out anything. Here and there are odd little mistakes that don’t exist nowadays in the era of Wikipedia, making the book all the more charming if you read it today or tomorrow.

Best book about collector scum: Milano, Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting.

Best scene book: Gordon, It Came from Memphis.

Best book about obscurities: Unterberger, Unknown Legends of Rock and Roll. Someone reading this today would probably deny that a lot of these are “unknowns,” but that is partly due to the impact of this book.

Best coffee-table book: Matheu and Bowe, Creem: America’s Only Rock & Roll Magazine.

Best serious memoir: Wareham, Black Postcards. From the Galaxy 500 / Luna front man.

Best serious biography: Ravenscroft, John Peel: Margrave of the Marshes. This began as Peel’s memoir, but was so ably completed by his wife, I’ll count it as a biography.

I’ve been trying to educate myself on the recent economic slide, and was given for my birthday two books that have received a lot of notice: John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay [amazon], and Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy [amazon]. Both came out at the beginning of 2010.

I’m no economist, but I am (I hope) a non-stupid reader of the news and someone who tries to pay attention. So as an everyday educated reader, I think I can plausibly assess these books for other similar readers. Basically, I can recommend Lanchester’s I.O.U., and I have a couple of things to say about Stiglitz, but can’t really recommend it.

Lanchester’s also a novelist, and boy can he tell a story. Each chapter has villians (mostly) and heroes (some), and a bit of a plot, especially in the first half and the last chapter (the middle sections flag a bit). The best parts of the book come in the first half where Lanchester provides humble parables that get to what such instruments as “credit default swaps” are all about. Here and there are little gaffes (I remember a mistake about statistics somewhere in there), but for the most part, it’s compelling. Having read around in Stiglitz (who is a Nobel winner), who has a similar account but more aimed at policy, it would seem that for the most part Lanchester is telling the truth. His overall conclusion about the state of the economy is extremely dire, and in the last chapter he goes a bit berserk, explaining our doom. Basically as a society we Americans have shot our credit cards. Now we have to pay. And it’s going to take decades. Sorry. Now really is the time to move to Canada.

Stiglitz’s book is more about policy, with a heavy dose of “I told you so.” It is highly repetitive. The basic message seems to be that the rewards structure in the American/European economies massively over-rewards finance, and especially short-term gain. Stiglitz firmly believe that the way out is to make massive investment in people via the educational system and other mechanisms. He likes to point out that for all of the praise of market-self-regulation and privatization, all of the best universities and colleges in the United States are not-for-profit. He uses this fact as a counter-argument about the merits of unfettered profit-driven capitalism.

Here’s the bit I want to pick out: One interesting aspect of the book is that for Stiglitz, a real culprit in the overall imbalance in capitalistic rewards is the underpricing of natural resources. Infuriatingly, this point does not seem to be broken out as a separate section, and the book has no index (!). But here’s a representative bit:

[We need a new economic model] — sustainability will require less emphasis on material goods for those who are overconsuming and a shift in the direction of innovative activity. At a global level, too much of the world’s innovation has been directed at saving labor and too little at saving natural resources and protecting the environment — hardly surprising given that prices do not reflect the scarcity of these natural resources. There has been so much success at saving labor that in much of the world there is a problem of persistent unemployment. But there has been so little success at saving natural resources that we are risking environmental collapse. (p. 192)

The other place where this comes up is in a remarkable section called “What You Measure is What You Value, and Vice Versa” (pp. 283-285) which takes square aim at the inability of GDP to measure what is really important about the health of economies (in Stiglitz’s view, it would be a measure of sustainability or even “happiness”). Here he talks more about the depletion of the natural resources, but the point about prices is to say that GDP is too high because the real costs of energy aren’t taken into consideration.

I would love to read a review of Stiglitz that breaks out his position on energy more schematically.

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. [Amazon]

I paid attention to the Presidential primary and general elections like everyone else, and even drove up to New Hampshire to see one candidate in person. I kept up enough to know that during one period, Hillary Clinton was said to be a “sure thing,” while later, it was rumored that her campaign was totally disorganized.

This book sorts all that stuff out, with significant “deep background” quotes from almost all of the players. It’s a good read. At Amazon, there are a lot of complaints that the book is slanted towards Obama, but I don’t think that’s really the case. If anything, there’s not enough about Sarah Palin.

By far, the most compelling chapter is the one on John and Elizabeth Edwards. It’s even more shocking and depressing that what you might have read in reviews. If even 25% of it is true, they are both do for some serious psychological counseling.

The book reminded me how much promise there was for these candidates.

Dave Thompson, London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Front Lines of Punk, 1976-1977 (2009). $18.95. [Amazon]

The history of UK punk has been told so many times, and so well, that it’s hard to believe that the story can be told again. But it can. Dave Thompson’s London’s Burning is a recollection of his mid to late teenage years, when he saw all of the groups in their earliest gigs: The Sex Pistols, of course, but also those a bit more afield, such as the Adverts, and the ones you haven’t heard of who were in the orbit of punk but didn’t get much attention — such as Masterswitch.

There are a few things that really stand out in this memoir. The first is the radical importance of reggae. English music was in a dead period, and white kids needed their revolution. The music at hand in 1974 and 1975 with the revolutionary message was reggae. Each chapter starts with a list of tunes in “heavy rotation” in the author’s mind, and until we get well into the 1976, it’s dominated by reggae. The lists are very interesting as well, because it is a distinctly “street” collection of reggae tunes. I think you’d have a hard time finding all of these as downloads.

Thompson is always well aware of the circumambient economic situation. Of course, all of the other books talk about how there were no jobs and workers were miserable under Maggie. But Thompson remembers that in the late 70s, no one had a theory; they just had misery:

[F]or anybody looking to draw conclusions from the events which ultimately cause 1976 to shape the landscape of the decades to come, it is only the sweet fortunes of hindsight that sllow even a vague hypothesis to take shape. For the people on the ground, in the frontline, at the sticky end of the pointed stick, 1976 was the same as 1975 was the same as 1974 was the same as 1973 and so on ad infinitum.

There were still no more than three channels on the telly; the programming still ended around midnight with the rousing chords of the national anthem. Some shows were still being broadcast in black and white. The pubs closed at eleven . . . [However, hindsight] might view the mid-1970s through a monochrome lens, but life was not gray, it was not flat, and it was not grim. A lot of people had a lotof fun in the 1970s . . . The big difference between “then” and “now” was that people were making their own fun then, as opposed to waiting for some multimedia conglomerate to package it up and deliver it to their door. (pp. 102-103)

Thompson is also good at pinpointing how 1976 was different from 1982: In 1976, Thompson says, the situation of the miserable economy “was not merely without precedent, it seemed to be without remedy as well” (p. 98). By 1982, punks had a pattern. So . . . 1976 becomes all the more interesting because it was all improvisation and invention.

The last thing I would say about this nifty book is that it’s great on the bands that got lost: Roogalator, the Rumour (who had a great album without Graham Parker), Tom Robinson Band — they’re all here, and will compel you to dust off the old singles and LP’s, if you have them.

Tom Davis, Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who was There (2009). $24.00. [Amazon]

I read a fair number of showbiz memories (for reasons I know not), usually with a bit of a rock-and-roll cast, and this is one of the worst. Tom Davis was half of the Franken and Davis comedy team; I would guess that the publication of this book was delayed to come out after the Senate race in Minnesota was confirmed, because there is little here that would reflect very well on Franken, except, I suppose, that he managed to get sober. There are indications that Davis cleaned up, too, but not many. For the most part, he lived his teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, etc., on drugs and listening to the Grateful Dead. I had a hard time finding evidence that he had contributed much actual “funny” to Franken and Davis or to SNL.

I did learn hat Al Franken perfected his trick of drawing the outline of the 48 states long ago. I also found out that Jerry Garcia slept in a chair.

Aside from those tidbits, this is more or less just a list of hijinks and travel stories, punctuated with brief vignettes of the various people Davis knew. At the end of the book there’s a random list of books Davis read while writing his memoir, and an incongruous list of his top 50 movies. Also pathetic is that Davis conceives himself as some kind of thinker: “I had a conscious philosophy that celebrity, money, and power were ephemeral and were important only as they figured into the world of ideas in which I lived” (p. 178). Well, I couldn’t find an idea after 300-odd pages.

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (2009) $25.99. [Amazon]

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is about a cult musician, his fans, and his legacy. Tucker Crowe recorded what fanboys seem to think is the greatest break-up album of all time, “Juliet.” Then Crowe dropped out of the music business. One of his biggest fans is a musical trainspotter in a sleepy seaside town in England. When the demos of Crowe’s great album are released as “Juliet, Naked,” the fan writes a celebratory review, motivated largely by the fact that he is one of the first to hear the CD. Then his girlfriend reviews it — and pans it — and, miraculously, the elusive Crowe begins to re-emerge from his obscurity.

All of the musical “notes” in this book are pretty much perfect, from the fake Wikipedia entries to the self-regard of the fanboy. Meanwhile, the musical Crowe is immediately recognizable as something like an early Alex Chilton; after his “retirement” from music, Hornby takes the character a little further into obscurity than most cult figures go.

Where the book is pretty weak is around the relationships. Hornby can lay down a nice streak of almost weepy sentimentality. The book practically ends in a group hug. I liked the book, but, really, the music bits are the best bits. Even a brief appearance by a couple of the last Northern Soul fanatics has more life than some of the romance material.

Michelle Wildgen, But Not For Long (2009). $24.99. [Amazon]

I’m a sucker for a good “end times” novel (see my review of World Made by Hand). This book is about three housemates in a funky Madison, Wisconsin co-op dedicated to localism (as in local foods). 30-something Hal leads the house, with the help of 20-something Karen. Meanwhile, 30-something Greta has moved in, trying to escape her alcoholic husband Will. The thing is, though, that gas prices have shot up, and there have been power outages. Part-way through the book, a lengthy power-outage kicks in that seems like it might be the permanent one. Hinted at is a general ecological decline: yield from community farms is low, chicken eggs from a farm have malformed shells. All is not right in the world.

All of these ecological aspects of the novel are soft-pedaled. In fact, no one really knows why the power has been going off. It is noted briefly that there is still a war going on, so perhaps power is expensive because of that. I would guess that Wildgen’s point is that this is the problem with people nowadays: No one really knows why our engagement with the natural world is in such decline; even those of us who try to use fewer resources and think locally, she would seem to claim, can’t really get beyond our personal issues.

Towards the end of the novel, the alcoholic Will emerges as a central character. It would seem that Wildgen is drawing a very broad parallel between society’s drunkenness on taken-for-granted resources, and Will’s grotesquely selfish boozing. (Indeed, if this is a so-so ecological novel, it’s a fine novel of alcoholism.) This makes me think that the novel is something of a parable. Having said that, the parabolic nature of the story is so light that it is hard to really care. There are some characters who have managed to escape: Hal’s father lives in a cabin in northern Wisconsin, and allows that if the power went out up there, nothing much would change. Karin has a lovely episode visiting a boutique cheese maker (chapter 9), but it doesn’t motivate her to get out of Madison. That seems to be the case for all of the characters: They’re too frail to break their own habits, and, like Will, their addiction is strangely what keeps them (barely) alive.