altdotnet – Page 2 – Lost in Colonisation

How time has flied! It has been a year since I joined ThoughtWorks. In the last 12 months, I've:

Visited ThoughtWorks India in Bangalore
Worked in 3 totally different projects (.Net desktop app, build & deploy at an enterprise level, and Agile coaching) in 3 different locations (London, Connecticut, New York)
Became a committer of an Open Source project, DbDeploy.net
Attended ALT.NET conference in Seattle
Started ALT.NET NYC with a bunch of great, like-minded developers
Edited 4 ThoughtWorks IT Matters podcasts
Helped out with recruitment (code reviews, office interviews, phone interviews)

Skills and tools that I've learnt/developed that I didn't think I would otherwise:

Agile project management, planning, estimation (Mingle)
Presentation and coaching (PowerPoint!, public speaking)
Build & Deploy (CruiseControl.NET, Cruise, TeamCity, NAnt, MSBuild, PowerShell, etc.)
iPhone development
Mocking (NMock, Moq)
UI Automated testing (Selenium)

What I can't quantify is the amount of learning I've done during this time. Working with smarter people than myself drove me to self-improvement in ways that I did not think I can or would.

I don't know what would happen in the next 12 months but one thing for sure, I would definitely enjoy it.

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I met Brian Donahue at ALT.NET in Seattle a couple of months back, and earlier this evening he tweeted that he was curious how well code in PDF would display on the Kindle. So I replied and told him I'll try it out and show him the result.

The process of converting a PDF to Kindle format is very simple. Since I am at my computer I don't need to send the PDF to my Kindle wirelessly, so I emailed the PDF (5.6MB) to my 'free' Kindle email address: alexhung@free.kindle.com. I received back the converted .azw file (2.6MB) from Amazon within a couple of minutes. I copied it to my SD card, popped it into the Kindle, switched it on, and there it was right at the front page.

So here's a screenshot of the original PDF taken from Preview.app:

Original PDF

And here are how the roughly same page looks on the Kindle:

Tech book on Kindle – 1

Tech book on Kindle – 2

As you can see the colouring and the code font are gone, obviously, the line-break is off and the download links are gone too but these are to be expected. But overall, I am impressed by the quality of the conversion. The text is properly converted, i.e. not being displayed as a bitmap image. Even the table of content is navigable (it doesn't show up as in the Kindle menu though).

Despite the good quality, I am still not completely convinced the Kindle is a good way to read tech book. Simply because there is always a lot of flipping back and forth when I read tech book, especially reference books, and the Kindle page by page flipping is way too slow. But for regular PDF book, I think the Kindle works just fine.

(Note that I took the photos indoor with flash, at ISO 1600 handheld. Even with image stablizer on, there are still some handshakes.)

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