“The Elephants of Style” by Bill Walsh is a style guide for written English. The title is a play on the title of that classic book on style by Strunk and White, “The Elements of Style”.

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Now that I have my own weblog, the “News” items on this website are simply about updates to the website. For example, newly-added articles or book reviews, software releases, website redesign or restructuring, etc. are announced via “News” items on this website, while my usually inane ramblings on sundry topics appear as posts on my weblog.

“The Best of Rumpole” is a collection of seven Rumpole stories personally selected by the author John Mortimer and considered by him to be the best among those he has written so far.

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“Watchmen”, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, has been widely hailed as one of the best graphic novels ever written. In fact, Time magazine even went to the extent of putting it in its list of the 100 best English-language novels of “all time” published since 1923. It is also the only graphic novel to have ever been awarded the Hugo Award (given every year to the best work in science fiction and fantasy). It has also won numerous other awards for its creators.

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“Programming Languages: Concepts and Constructs” (Second Edition) by Ravi Sethi is a book desgined to be used as one of the text books in a “Principles of Programming Languages” CS course. To that end, it covers all the major programming styles (imperative, functional and declarative) and variants (object-oriented and concurrent), basic lambda calculus, a short tour of a representative programming language or two for each of the covered styles, numerous exercises for the students to work out, extensive bibliography, etc.

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“How to Solve it by Computer” by R. G. Dromey is inspired by George Polya's classic book on problem-solving “How to Solve it”. This book explores how good problem-solving techniques can be applied in computer programming to come up with efficient algorithms for many problems.

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“Batman: The Dark Knight Returns”, written by Frank Miller and published in 1986, presents a Batman that is completely different from the stupid television series of the 1960s. If you liked Tim Burton's “Batman” and “Batman Returns” movies, you will love this graphic novel.

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“Year's Best Graphic Novels, Comics, and Manga”, edited by Byron Preiss and Howard Zimmerman, is a collection of short snippets from graphic novels, comics and manga published between May 2003 and December 2004.

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“V for Vendetta” by Alan Moore and Dave Lloyd is the graphic novel that was the inspiration for the eponymous movie by the Wachowski brothers. I was quite impressed by the movie and was eager to read the book. The book did not disappoint me at all. I found out that the movie and the book had many differences in the plot and the characters, but for once I did not mind it - in fact, I quite liked each of the forks in both the media.

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I did not want to read “Softwar” by Matthew Symonds at first. I thought it would be just like the numerous other biographies endorsed by their subjects that are so common these days and that are utterly banal and filled with nauseating flattery of their subjects. I also felt a bit weird for some reason reading about the company (and its CEO) that employed me.

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“A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson is the kind of book everyone who is even remotely interested in science, or even slightly intrigued by it, should read.

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Our cable operator has switched over to Hathway for the feed and this means that we can now opt for digital cable TV. Hathway has given us a Humax ND-1000C as a set-top box to receive the digital signals on a trial basis.

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“Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary” is a book about the life of Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, till the year 2001. It has been written by Linus and David Diamond.

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“Writers and Their Tall Tales” is the second book I have read in the “Dead Famous” series of books (the first one was on William Shakespeare). It is a light book written in a humourous manner and is loaded with comic illustrations.

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I wanted to read “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner since the time I read a review of the book in The Economist. For some reason or the other I kept postponing it, though I could not help but notice how rapidly popular it was becoming. Now that I have finally read it, I wholeheartedly agree with almost every praise showered on this book.

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After several years, I have finally redesigned the entire website making it far more standards-compliant. All the pages should now have strictly valid HTML 4.01. The presentation is driven by stylesheets, allowing me to change the look-and-feel of the entire website very easily. I have also implemented a simple system for expandable/collapsible news entries that should make it easier to read the main page. I expect a few glitches from a site redesign of this magnitude, so please let me know if you encounter any problems.

I am pleased to announce the release of ZINC. ZINC is a variant of the game of Core War in which programmes fight for the control of a virtual computer.

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I have registered the domain name “rmathew.com” for myself. The canonical URL for my website is now http://rmathew.com/.