Silverfish New Writing 1
New Writing
was published in 2001 by silverfishbooks. It is a collection of works in English by writers from around
Singapore and Malaysia.
At the time it was quite a risky business proposition. Was anyone going to buy a book like this? Mainstream
sentiment was generally quite negative towards works in English (either because the national languages held
more prestige, or a perverse expectation that local writers by definition couldn't be any good if they used
English).
Well, with six editions now in print, I think the critics have been silenced and the series has I think given
the local writing scene more self-confidence.
I
recently went back to read some of the stories in the first edition. I like the little sketches of life. Either
contemporary such as Hong Wee's The Drive Home, or reminiscing on the
past as in 14 Leech Street by Bernice Chauly.
Of course must pay homage to the local fascination with ghost and zombie stories with Kaysidayat bin Ishak's
The Last Train. Or something a little more tender and juicily
experimental like Plat du Jour by Muslin Abdul Hamid.
And much more. Pick any book in this series to try something new and different. Its a bit like nasi padang -
get to sample a whole range of small dishes with great local flavour.
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Mars
After Jupiter, I went back to start with the first
book in Ben Bova's series -
Mars.
It is a gripping page-turner of the first manned mission to Mars, and the hopes of making the most startling of
discoveries - life on another planet. The book's tension comes from a great balance of the personal story of
the astronauts, the hard-science of the mission, and the all-too-realistic dimension of earthly politics. Real
drama cloaked in a sci-fi setting.
Looks like I'll be reading the whole series now!
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Singapore wins!
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Popflying the Oracle Community
Back last year I got all excited about Yahoo Pipes ( Web 2.0
Wake-up Call for BPEL? ) and its graphical approach to building mashups. In fact I still use a Pipes mashup as my
mega-aggregated Oracle newsfeed.
Now I've discovered a new toy - Microsoft Popfly - and finally a reason to install
Silverlight! I remember popfly getting mentioned in Bex Huff's roundup of mashup
tools last year, but at the time it was still in restricted beta.
Popfly's still in beta, but now open to one and all. Put aside your biases for a minute and go play ... if you are like
me, it will blow your mind. It may not be the final word in mashup tools, but it sure opens your mind to what should be
possible.
Here's a little mashup I created 5 minutes up the learning curve. It's a cute display of the latest photos posted to
the Oracle Community site:
Edit: popfly is no more; link to http://www.popfly.com/users/tardate/Oracle%20Community%20Photos.small is defunct.
Postscript: yes, you do need Silverlight installed for this to work of course. Silverlight is available for "all
major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows". If you are not prompted automatically for the Silverlight install,
visit the Silverlight site.
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