The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook: 33 Ways To Cook Grasshoppers, Ants, Waterbugs, Spiders, Centipedes, And Their Kin by David George Gordon (review)

332 Leonardo Reviews work, but more importantly, it is a beacon to those of us who follow the development of computing, who prognosticate and wonder what the Internet will be and who hope to leverage the stunning power of networked computers to qualitatively new uses. Among the lessons here is how very hard it is to make a true network of particles of every shape and size. Because we will not tear down the present infrastructure for a new one, inconsistent systems must be harnessed, and these are inconsistent in so many ways—different architecture , languages, operating systems, security systems, memory usage, data structures and on and on. The challenge is to smoothly flow data and operations from massively parallel supercomputing systems all the way down to hand-held machines, all the while maintaining data integrity and security, speed of access, seamless environments and fault tolerance , and solving performance bottlenecks and so on. The authors here do not shy away from the issues: the chapters here outline potential solutions, citing existing architectures and applications , operational high bandwidth, very high-speed wide-area networks and the development of the Globus Toolkit, which provides basic grid services. The book describes applications that use grids, such as weather forecasting and database management that uses complex, high-dimensional data, modeling complex systems such as stars and ocean systems. These applications do not, however, address the promise of the Grid: such applications are already available to a significant degree at present supercomputer sites, but do not leverage distributed computing power for the individual. One chapter of The Grid, devoted to the subject of teleimmersion, does, however, signal that promise. To be sure, scientific (including medical) visualization, architecture review and scenario simulation are furthered by teleimmersion, but so are art and human contact. The computing power, enormous throughput and communications infrastructure contemplated by The Grid are essential to what we fondly used to call virtual reality; a reality that, if the authors are right, will seamlessly augment this one. It is no surprise that the new cannot be predicted. Technology does not only fulfill needs, it makes them; “we cannot image” the applications emerging from “reliability and location independence among personal digital assistants and networked computers” (p. 534). Of particular interest to those interested in distributed autonomous computing is one author’s confirmation that an agent-based approach will likely be needed to manage complex, highspeed , widely distributed networks. In an operational grid, “when we observe that something has gone wrong, it is generally too late to react” (p. 93). Agents with adaptive behavior must be trusted to manage and fix the Grid, and I expect that human supervisory control will be of an increasingly high level. Predictable performance will become an increasing challenge—I hope the system treats us well. This volume treads lightly or not at all on the social implications of the Grid, but it does provide the unvarnished detail of the Grid’s slow eruption , protocol-by-protocol, tool-by-tool and program-by-program. Its detail conspires to make us believe the Grid will happen. THE XML & SGML COOKBOOK: RECIPES FOR STRUCTURED INFORMATION by Rick Jelliffe, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, U.S.A., 1998. ISBN: 0-13-614223-0. Reviewed by Kasey Rios Asberry, International Communications, 301 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94105, U.S.A. E-mail: . This book is a detailed, comprehensive reference on SGML (Structured General Markup Language) and its subset XML(Extensible Markup Language). It is the most recent title in the Charles F. Goldfarb series on Open Information Management. In the tradition of self-evidencing works (see Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information), this effort exemplifies fine information design. It is a cookbook of biblical proportions, organized as a continuum ranging from the structures of systems of documents, through document patterns and down to the level of characters and glyphs. Each entry is deeply referenced by other authors’ approaches to the same element. Jelliffe pays significant (and gratifying) attention to the difficult area of East Asian characters and mapping. I found the appendices nearly as exciting as the text: together, they provide an effective Rosetta Stone of special characters and their international standards definitions. Jelliffe explores the interaction...