[ Aronsson Datateknik ]

Hi,

I'm Lars Aronsson and live in Sweden (in Linköping and Stockholm) where I have been playing and working with the Internet since the late 1980s. I have devoted this part of my web site to two of my primary interests: computers and networking. Here, networking means connecting with other people as well as the ways computers can be used for that. I am a UNIX, C, C++, SQL, Java programmer, primarily with Solaris, Linux, and Oracle. Even though I use this web page to share some experiences from projects that I have been involved in, I do not intend to reveal any secrets about clients I work for. Any opinions expressed here are mine alone. If you have any comments or want to know more about me, do send e-mail to lars@aronsson.se. I love getting mail. You can write in English, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, or German. Other means for reaching me can be found on www.aronsson.se.

While this is not a weblog or online diary, I have arranged the information in small chunks (for my own comfort, I seldom have the energy to write longer pieces) and ordered them as a timeline with the most recent items at the top (because they seem most important to me, that is why I have spent time on them). Many of the items are about books that I have read (or skimmed), because I like books a lot.
-- My own comments sometimes appear after a double hyphen.

19 April 2001 - Being Digital

The mobile Internet, fine. But what about mobile people? The treasures that we "lay up for ourselves upon earth" tend to bind us to a geographic place. Comprehensive digitization (scanned books, ripped MP3 music, digital photos) and widespread Internet connectivity can support human mobility by allowing access to our immaterial treasures whereever we are. Is your heart on the Net?

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,
where moth and rust doth corrupt,
and where thieves break through and steal:
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt,
and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
Matt. 6:19--21

I archive all of my e-mail (sent and incoming) on my laptop. Its harddisk also contains many MP3s ripped from my music CDs, and images from my new digital camera. Pretty soon I will run out of laptop disk space, but with increased wireless connectivity to the Internet (see Elektrosmog), I can maintain a bigger mobile memory by storing my digital life on a server. This also allows me to make parts of it public (see Project Runeberg). Privacy will stop me from sharing some of my own data. Copyright will stop me from sharing some other data. Can society do with less privacy and less copyright? Perhaps we can all benefit from that?

Here are some texts that could be worth reading on this topic.

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies. The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age,
Faber and Faber, 1994, ISBN 0-571-19849-X
Selected bits of the book are available online at http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdbirk.htm.
"This book is at least three things: the story of how Sven Birkerts became a book reviewer, a passionate defense of reading and print culture, and an attack on electronic media", says a review by Dean Blobaum.
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital,
Knopf, 1995, ISBN 0-679-43919-6 (paperback from Vintage books, 1996, ISBN 0-679-76290-6)
Selected bits of the book are available online at http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdcont.htm.
Being Nicholas, an Interview with the author in Wired 3.11, November 1995.
Johan Svedjedal, Den sista boken, (in Swedish)
Wahlström & Widstrand, 2001, ISBN 91-46-18146-6
See the publisher's presentation of the book and of the author, The author's homepage and online preface to the book.

10 March 2001 - New Technology

Is there still hope for technology and progress after the dotcom death? Perhaps we really need to rescue Prometheus this time? Ten years earlier, Sweden experienced the burst of another speculation bubble, when realty prices were soaring and housing companies were heavily overvalued. That time, nothing was wrong with the architecture or construction work, but the financial conditions for construction firms were of course affected by the downturn. A new trend towards the inner cities (from Kista to Stockholm city, from Silicon Valley to San Francisco -- sparked by an industry move from computer programming to web publishing in the late 90s) helped the inner city housing business get back on its feet. Maybe a similar shift will follow the dotcom death of 2000 and 2001, and maybe it will take five years before we see it. In the mean while, those who best understand the current technology and forthcoming trends will be best equipped to live through this crisis. The big telecom bubble (3G) is yet to burst...

Some new trends:

Here are some new tech books that I am looking at.

J. P. Frenza, Buying Web Services. A Survival Guide to Outsourcing,
John Wiley & Sons, 1999, ISBN 0-471-31289-4
An introduction to outsourcing and outhosting.
Daniel A. Menascé, Virgilio A. F. Almeida, Scaling for E-Business, foreword by Jim Gray,
Prentice-Hall PTR, 2000, ISBN 0-13-086328-9
Covers capacity planning and scalability issues of large computer systems with special respect to e-business.
Jack Shirazi, Java Performance Tuning,
O'Reilly & Associates, 2000, ISBN 0-596-00015-4
Time to get your code running, even if it was written in Java. The most important lesson: Don't optimize where it doesn't pay.

9 March 2001 - Fiction

Some recently covered fiction, listed in alphabetic order. All of these are highly recommended.

Douglas Coupland, Generation X. Tales for an Accelerated Culture,
St. Martin's Press, 1991, ISBN 0-312-05436-X (paperback)
Probably the defining novel of the 1990s, and I waited ten years before reading it. It happened like this: I was strolling along the shelves of San Francisco's main public library (I spent the winter in California), trying to understand how much information it holds and how little it is used. Being interested in bibliometrics, I cannot help being drawn to the reference sections on bibliography. From a shelf I randomly pull out a volume of Contemporary Authors or something like that and the first article is a biography of Douglas Coupland. After having read half of it, I understand that I must read at least two of his books, the ones listed here.
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs,
Regan Books (HarperCollins Publishers), 1995, ISBN 0-06-098704-9
The main characters in the beginning of the book work for Microsoft in Seattle, but move down to Palo Alto to work for a multimedia startup company. Some of them move to live in San Francisco while continuing to work in the Valley. Excellent descriptions of the environments, both physical geography and the characters' mind set. For a foreigner, being able to read this novel on site is a big bonus.
William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties,
G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1999, ISBN 0-441-00755-4 (paperback)
I have not yet started to read this new title by the author of Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Carsten Jensen, Jeg har set verden begynde,
Rosinante, 1996, ISBN
I have only begun to read this record of the author's journey around the world. This is one of the Danish novels I try to read in its original language. Carsten Jensen was born in 1952.
Carsten Jensen, Jeg har hørt et stjerneskud,
Rosinante, 1997, ISBN 87-7357204-7 (paperback)
I must admit never having started to read this book. In this continued journey, the author goes sailing under the southern cross (Cook Islands, Easter Island).
Ib Michael, Atkinsons biograf. En vandrehistorie,
Gyldendal, 1998, ISBN 87-00-46222-5 (paperback)
Lately, I have tried to read some recent Danish authors in their original language. This is a compilation of nine short stories by Ib Michael, born in 1945. The settings are Mediterranean and tropical islands, always close to the sea.
Svante Tidholm, Loser,
Wahlström & Widstrand, 1998, ISBN 91-46-17215-7
This autobiographic novel (in Swedish), in a series of e-mail messages to his friends back home in Sweden, paints a picture of the young author's journey into cyberspace and from Sweden to California.
Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine,
City Lights Books, 1997, ISBN 0-87286-332-8
This is a autobiographic novel about a 30-something female self-employed computer programming consultant living in a live-work-space loft appartment in downtown San Francisco. This is of course extremely trendy, but Ellen is an old school programmer, not (yet?) working for the dotcom companies in SF's SOMA media gulch. Of course I found the book when walking into the City Lights bookstore.

9 March 2001 - Management, History of Technology

While finish the previous step in my career, I decided I needed a better understanding of organizations and how creative minds work together in groups, with or without leadership or management. To some degree, this mindset is related to the kind of technology they are developing. Thus a mix of management theory and history of technology. These titles are listed in chronological order, because they are reflecting the state of the art when they were written. Time is the important dimension here.

The Portable Machiavelli, edited and translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa,
The Viking Portable Library, Penguin Books, 1979, ISBN 0-14-015092-7
[15th century] An excellent English translation of Machiavelli's works from the late 15th century, including The Prince, which is a handbook on how to conquer and run a country. The principles are simple: Be on site, so you can see and correct problems as the arise. It is easier to keep a country than to conquer it. Many of these principles are applicable to management of today's large organizations.
Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman. A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary,
HarperCollins Publishers, 1998, ISBN 0-06-099486-X (paperback)
[19th century] This is the fascinating story of one of the main contributors of articles to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The same person was locked up in an asylum (the madman, Dr. W. C. Minor), and the OED editor (the professor, Dr. James Murray) didn't know until he visited him to express his gratefulness for the many articles. The story gives a picture of how little the leadership of an organization sometimes knows about the creative people they try to manage. Very little has changed since the 19th century. Today the madmen are out there on the Internet, not locked up in asylums. On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, and in a development project of any significant size the management doesn't know you're really a madman.
Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State, 1973
Swedish translation by Gunnar Barklund, Världsmakten ITT, Wahlström & Widstrand, 1973, ISBN 91-46-11625-3
[mid 20th century] For me, this book bridges a gap in the history of information technology and industrial organization, the time period between 1930 and 1970. I have a fairly good understanding of what happened from the invention of the telegraph, telephone, and radio, and their early commercialization in the beginning of the 20th century, to the Kreuger crisis and the start of the 1930s depression. After 1970 I know the history of computing, the UNIX operating system, and the Internet. The International Telegraph & Telephone Corporation (ITT) was formed in 1920 by a Danish descendant in the Virgin Islands (until 1917 a Danish colony), with the goal of establishing a telephone system outside of the USA along the same monopolistic lines as Kreuger's match industry. This was very successful and ITT was active on all sides of the World War II. ITT founded and owned telephone equipment industries (competing with Ericsson) as well as telephone network operators, such as Spain's Telefonica.
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man,
Simon & Schuster, 1956
[1950s] This book was presumably relevant when published, but is the complete anti-thesis of the new management literature of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Funky Business or The Cluetrain Manifesto (find these below). Here, the ideal organization man is well-rounded and makes his bet to fit in with the organization, leaving his brain at home. The book is worth reading if you can find it.
Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos. Handbook for a Management Revolution,
Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, (Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 1988) ISBN 0-06-097184-3 (paperback)
[1980s] Rather than fixing the natural chaos in large organizations, Tom Peters suggests that we live with it. Tom Peters and the Swedish management guru Jan Carlzon often quote each other in their books.
Arthur Freeman, Rose DeWolf, The Ten Dumbest Mistakes Smart People Make and How to Avoid Them, 1992,
Swedish translation by Per Rundgren, De tio dummaste misstagen klyftiga personer gör och hur man undviker dem, Natur och Kultur, 1995, ISBN 91-27-07143-X (paperback)
[1990s] In the self-improvement genre, this is a must-read for all you madmen out there.
Åke Ortmark, Ja-sägarna. Medlöpare och nickedockor kring Gyllenhammar, Karl XII, Kreuger och andra furstar,
Wahlström & Widstrand, 1996, ISBN 91-46-18054-0
[1990s] This Swedish book's title translates to "the yes-sayers". It concentrates on three Swedish leaders whose empires went havoc because the leaders surrounded themselves with people who didn't dare question their decisions. These are the yes-sayers around Karl XII (Swedish king, 18th century), Ivar Kreuger (Swedish Match), Pehr Gyllenhammar (Volvo), and others. The author draws a map of a mental landscape that should be treaded very carefully. This book is an analysis of failure, which should be a very important discipline.
Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus. Four Monumental Projects that Changed the Modern World,
Vintage Books (A Division of Random House), 1998, ISBN 0-679-73938-6
[1990s] Prometheus is the greek hero who stole fire (a symbol for science and technology) from the gods and brought it to mankind. He in turn is a symbol for the belief in knowledge-driven progress, which has been threatened during the 20th century by world wars and environmental disasters. The author describes four huge technology development projects after 1945 that have tried to display that progress through technology is still possible. Through these projects (Sage, Atlas, Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel, and the ARPANET), the author wants to show how the management structure has changed towards a less hierarchical, more loosely organized "systems approach". (It is my opinion that he fails in this. Today's development organizations are not significantly different from those of 50 years ago. Some of the terminology has changed, but most of the creative work is done in the same way. Dilbert comics give a more correct and pessimistic account of contemporary leadership.) In any case, the description of the projects and the people involved in them is very interesting.
Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test. The Secret History of the American Meritocracy,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, ISBN 0-374-52751-2 (paperback)
[1990s] Henry Chauncey, who was born in 1905, had a vision of university admission based on standardized, nationwide testing rather than on class background, a true meritocracy replacing the old aristocracy. However, his vision was to recruit only the best few, who should then be allowed to become the nation's elite leaders. In the beginning of his career he did not foresee the expansion of college education that followed the GI Bill at the end of World War II. In this process, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and later the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) became a very important tool in forming the American society.
Kjell A Nordström, Jonas Ridderstråle, Funky Business. Talent Makes Capital Dance,
Bookhouse Publishing, 1999, ISBN 91-89388-00-3
[1999] In this pre-dotcom death book the two authors preach a hopeful gospel of the new economy, where individuals are more important than the corporations they work for. The style of writing is very special and made be write my own alphabetic index to this book.
Kevin Graham, Ralph Nader. Battling for Democracy,
Windom Publishing Company, 2000, ISBN 0-9700323-0-7
[2000] This is an easy-to-read biography of political madman, citizen rights advocate, and US presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Nader's break-through work Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) is at the center of this book, which is slightly slanted towards his boyhood and schooling. The book is for readers age 10 and up.

8 May 2000 - Everybody should read The Cluetrain Manifesto
This is one of the most important books of the last few years.

Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto,
Perseus Books, 2000, ISBN 0-7382-0244-4
See companion web site at www.cluetrain.com.

First posted on the companion web site in the fall of 1999, these "95 theses for the people of the earth" that now have grown into a full book, say things like:

-- Just like CRM and One-to-One Marketing theory (see below), this book observes that changes caused by the advances in information and telecommunications technology allow businesses to reestablish the individual, personalized, human relationship between producers and consumers that was lost when the mechanical industrial revolution brought us mass production, mass media, and mass marketing. The Internet allows us (and the urge is so strong that we are actually forced) to maintain mass dialogues and reestablish individual customization of products and services. What's new with this book is its political, propagandistic attitude (contradicting its message?) and its origin within the core of Internet culture.

Eric S. Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, is quoted on the back cover: "The Cluetrain Manifesto is to marketing and communications what the open-source movement is to software development -- anarchic, messy, rude, and vastly more powerful than the doomed bullshit that conventionally passes for wisdom."

Thanks to Erik Barkeling for hinting me to read this book.

Thanks to Leif Stensson for pointing out the parody web site www.gluetrain.com.

April 2000 - CRM, One-to-One Marketing, and Internet Communities
The Internet can essentially be used for communication (mail, chat, discussion forums, multi-user games) and publishing (web pages). While using the Internet for publishing was new with Gopher and the Web in the early and mid 1990s, the trend is now turning back to community building through the exchange of ideas and communication between people. Several important sources lead back to The WELL (Figallo, Hagel, Rheingold), but many parallel examples of early computer-mediated communities exist, such as Jacob Palme's research in Sweden.

Internet community building is still technology driven, but there are differences from ten years ago: Many more people are using the Internet today, and new business trends are contributing valuable input to the process. Two such trends are Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and One-to-One Marketing. Perhaps most important, we are realizing that markets are conversations (see above, The Cluetrain Manifesto).

Some useful and interesting books and resources on this topic are:

Cliff Allen, http://allen.com/
Besides maintaining this personal web site, where you can find facts and literature tips, Cliff is also the president of GuestTrack, Inc..
Christopher Locke, Cliff Allen, www.personalization.com
It's a web site.
Christopher Locke, Entropy Gradient Reversals, www.rageboy.com
It's a newsletter with a web site.
Jacob Palme, www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/
Jacob has done research on computer-mediated communication (CMC) since the early 1980s. He is a professor at Stockholm University.
Cliff Allen, Deborah Kania, Beth Yaeckel, Internet World Guide to One-to-One Web Marketing. Build a relationship marketing strategy one customer at a time,
Internet World, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998, ISBN 0-471-25166-6
See companion web site at www.1to1web.com
See also www.wiley.com/compbooks/catalog/25166-6.htm
-- This book has the highest concentration of buzzwords I have ever seen. By registering the 1to1web.com domain, the authors are very close to stepping on the toes of Peppers+Rogers, 1to1.com.
Michael J. A. Berry, Gordon Linoff, Data Mining Techniques : For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support,
John Wiley & Sons, June 1997, ISBN 0471179809
See companion web site www.data-miners.com
See also www.wiley.com/compbooks/catalog/17980-9.htm
Thanks to Magnus Kager for hinting me to read this book.
Ola Feurst, One-to-One Marketing,
Liber Ekonomi, 1999, ISBN 91-47-04456-X [available in Swedish only]
See www.ebokhandeln.com/ibh-bin/nph-product.pl/NOHEAD?ProdId=T18166
-- Ola is the founder of MarknadsAkademien (the Market Academy) at the Stockholm University School of Business (Företagsekonomiska institutionen vid Stockholms universitet).
Cliff Figallo, Hosting Web Communities. Building Relationships, Increasing Customer Loyalty, and Maintaining a Competitive Edge,
Internet World, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998, ISBN 0-471-28293-6
See also www.wiley.com/compbooks/catalog/28293-6.htm
-- Cliff was the general manager of The WELL (a BBS based in San Francisco, CA) since 1986.
Simson Garfinkel, Database Nation. The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century,
O'Reilly & Associates, 2nd ed., January 2000, ISBN 1-56592-653-6
See www.oreilly.com/catalog/dbnation/
-- The author, who is more wellknown for his O'Reilly book on PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, sees databases as a potential threat against privacy, which is unusual for an American.
Ian Gordon, Relationship Marketing,
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., March 1998, ISBN 0-471-64173-1
See also www.wiley.com/wileychi/strat100/cat83.htm
-- The author summarizes the history of marketing strategies since the 1960s and draws the line between relationship marketing and other disciplines, such as database marketing. A bonding staircase is defined, whereby customers can be segmented into prospects, testers, shoppers, accounts, patrons, and advocates (page 100). The author also define "11 Cs" (page 168).
Thanks to Danny Aerts for hinting me to read this book.
John Hagel III, Arthur G. Armstrong, Net Gain. Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities,
Harvard Business School Press, 1997, ISBN 0875847595
See www.hbsp.harvard.edu/products/press/books/hagel.html
-- I ignored this book when it first arrived because I wasn't much interested in commerce at the time, what a mistake! It is definitely part of the Canon, often quoted in more recent literature. Standing on Rheingold's (1993) shoulders, having the same background at The WELL, these McKinsey consultant authors state that communities can be used for commerce, and they outline a step-by-step strategy (attract members, promote participation, build loyalty, capture value, page 59), but warn that skills are more important than assets (brands, existing customer relationships, and content): "We should emphasize that by 'skills' we do not mean the technical management of communities, which can be outsourced. What is crucial is the set of skills required to recruit, interest, and serve community members." (page 129)
Crawford Kilian, Writing for the Web,
Self-Counsel Press, 1999, ISBN 1-55180-207-4
See www.selfcounselpress.com/cgi-bin/ca/order?mv_order_item=wri03038
-- This is a book of an unusual kind. It does not cover HTML, CGI, or graphic design, but the use of plain English language on the Web. This book has some obvious faults (erratic examples are displayed just like correct examples and the recommended Anglo-Saxon vocabulary is really Latin), but lacking alternatives it is still a recommendation. I wish there were more books of this kind. The Cluetrain Manifesto (see above) touches on some of these issues on a more abstract plane.
Amy Jo Kim, Community Building on the Web. Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities,
Peachpit Press, 2000, ISBN 0-201-87484-9
See also www.peachpit.com/books/catalog/87484.html
-- This is a must buy. The introduction's section on "why I wrote this book" can get anybody sold: "I've been building online communities for ten years; [...] So about five years ago, I summarized these issues into a set of design guidelines, and started using them in my consulting practice. [...] This is the book that I wish I'd had when I was first starting out." Amy Jo Kim teaches online design at Stanford. Her nine design strategies (and the chapters of her book) will teach you to:
Ralph Kimball, Richard Merz, The Data Webhouse Toolkit. Building the Web-Enabled Data Warehouse,
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000, ISBN 0-471-37680-9
See companion web site at www.webhouse-toolkit.com
See also www.wiley.com/compbooks/kimball
Don Peppers, Martha Rogers, The One to One Future. Building Relationships One Customer at a Time,
Currency Doubleday, 1993, ISBN 0-385-48566-2
See www.1to1.com/publications/books/future.html
-- Big computers can help businesses to keep track of the personal preferences and history of large numbers of individuals. While this had been a fact with tax authorities and insurance companies since the 1960s, this book introduced the term "one-to-one" and applied the thinking on marketing and sales. According to the preface, it started out with a crisis in the mass marketing business in the late 1980s. You can read more and subscribe to the authors' electronic newsletter on their web site, www.1to1.com.
The authors recommend a four step strategy: identify your customers, differentiate your customers in categories, interact with your customers to learn more about them, and customize your offerings and products to each customer.
-- Thanks to Tom Hedström for hinting me to read the books by Peppers+Rogers.
Don Peppers, Martha Rogers, Enterprise One-to-One. Tools for Building Unbreakable Relationships in the Interactive Age
Currency Doubleday, 199..., ISBN 0-385-48755-X
See www.1to1.com/publications/books/enterprise.html
Don Peppers, Martha Rogers, The One to One Manager. Real-World Lessons in Customer Relationship Management,
Currency Doubleday, 1999, ISBN 0-385-49408-4
Kristina Perez, Att träffas på nätet. Intervjuer och fakta,
Bonnier Icon, 1998, ISBN 91-7239-205-3 [available in Swedish only]
See www.bonniericon.com/book_green.htm
-- Kricke is responsible for communities at Swedish portal Passagen and Scandinavia Online. The book contains interviews with people who are active participants or maintainers of various kinds of Internet communities, including mailing lists, web chats, and MUD games. It is a guidebook for people wanting to participate in (not organize) Internet communities.
Faith Popcorn, Lys Marigold, Clicking. 17 Trends That Drive Your Business - And Your Life,
January 1998, ISBN 0-88730857-0
See author's web site www.brainreserve.com
-- I bought this book by its cover. So totally kitsch, so totally American. What is it that make people "click"? Faith Popcorn knows and this 2nd edition is new and improved with a 17th trend.
Thanks to Ladislaus Horatius for hinting me to buy this book.
Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community. Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier,
Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-60870-7, 1993
See www.rheingold.com/vc/book/
-- Referenced from Figallo and others as an important source to the notion of "community". The book is out of print, but the full text is on the web at the URL above. Rheingold is a co-founder of and active contributor to Wired magazine. Just like Figallo, Rheingold has a background at The WELL.
Patricia B. Seybold, Ronni Marshak, Customers.Com. How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and Beyond,
Times Books, November 1998, ISBN 0812930371
See also customers.com
Book review by Ralph F. Wilson
The author heads the Patricia Seybold Group consultancy.
Carl Shapiro, Hal R. Varian, Information Rules. A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy,
Harvard Business School Press, November 1998,ISBN 087584863X
See www.hbsp.harvard.edu/products/press/books/shapiro.html
See also www.inforules.com.
-- Thanks to Lotta Stoltz for hinting me to read this book.
Jim Sterne, What Makes People Click: Advertising on the Web. Bring customers to your site and keep them coming back,
Que Corporation, 1997, ISBN 0-7897-1235-0
See www.mcp.com/catalog/corp_bud.cfm?isbn=0789712350
Jim Sterne, Anthony Priore, Email Marketing. Using Email to Reach Your Target Audience and Build Customer Relationships,
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000, ISBN 0-471-38309-0
See companion web site at www.wiley.com/compbooks/permissionemail
-- No, this is not "Spamming for Dummies". Jim Sterne is just too smart for this. In fact, chapter 2 is devoted to explaining why spam is useless. The URL of the companion web site indicates the topic of the book is permission-based e-mail marketing.
Jim Sterne, World Wide Web Marketing. Integrating the Web into Your Marketing Strategy,
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2nd edition, 1999, ISBN 0-471-31561-3
See also www.wiley.com/compbooks/catalog/31561-3.htm
and www.targeting.com
Book review by Ralph F. Wilson.
Jim Sterne, Matt Cutler, E-Metrics Web Site, www.netgen.com/emetrics
This web site features a white paper, a glossary of terms, and a list of related reading on the topic of "e-metrics". Produced by Matt Cutler (matt@netgen.com), co-founder of NetGenesis (their software product Net Analysis analyzes web server log files), and Jim Sterne (jsterne@targeting.com), principal at Target Marketing and author of several books (see below) on Email and Web Marketing.
Ralph F. Wilson, Wilson Internet
A one-man (?) Internet marketing consulting business with a free newsletter (Web Marketing Today) and book reviews.

September 1999 - Implementing Spray Mail
In the fall of 1999 and winter of 2000 I was part of a small team at Spray Labs (www.spraylabs.com), that redesigned and implemented Spray Mail, the leading Swedish webmail service with hundreds of thousands of regular users. This system has later been translated and successfully deployed at Spray's sites in Germany, Norway, France, and Italy. Some major achievements of this project were:

The most important people involved in this project were Anna Åström, Thomas Hartwig, Pär Fornland, Jonas Lindskog, Jens Jonason, Patrik Stymne, Mattias Stanghed, Olow Svonni, Martin Nilsson, Jonas Stenling, Erik Barkeling.

Some reading that I found useful for this work:

Steven Feuerstein, Bill Pribyl, Oracle PL/SQL Programming,
O'Reilly & Associates, 2nd ed., September 1997, ISBN 1-56592-335-9
See www.oreilly.com/catalog/oraclep2/
David Flanagan, Java in a Nutshell,
O'Reilly & Associates, 2nd edition ("covers Java 1.1"), May 1997, ISBN 1-56592-262-X
See also www.oreilly.com/catalog/javanut3/ (3rd ed.)
-- If you already know C++ and most of Java, this is a brief reference. The introductory chapter on differences between C++ and Java is very useful. Sadly, the Java language changes over time and we are now on 1.2 which is also called 2.0. A more up-to-date source of information is the java.sun.com web site.
Watts S. Humphrey, Introduction to the Personal Software Process,
SEI Series in Software Engineering, Addison-Wesley, January 1999, ISBN 0-201-54809-7
See cseng.aw.com/bookpage.taf?ISBN=0-201-54809-7
Jason Hunter, William Crawford, Java Servlet Programming,
O'Reilly & Associates, October 1998, ISBN 1-56592-391-X
See www.oreilly.com/catalog/jservlet/
Steve McConnell, Code Complete. A Practical Handbook of Software Construction,
Microsoft Press, 1993, ISBN 1-55616-484-4
Steve McConnell, Software Project Survival Guide. How to Be Sure Your First Important Project Isn't Your Last,
Microsoft Press, 1998
-- Thanks to Patrik Stymne for hinting me about this book.
Alan Schwartz, Managing Mailing Lists,
O'Reilly & Associates, March 1998, ISBN 1-56592-259-X
See www.oreilly.com/catalog/mailing/
Book review by Ralph F. Wilson
-- Covers Majordomo, LISTSERV, Listproc, and SmartList.
Stephen Spainhour, Valerie Quercia, Webmaster in a Nutshell,
O'Reilly & Associates, 1996, ISBN 1-56592-229-8
See www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmaster2/ (2nd ed.)
-- Chapters cover HTML, CGI, HTTP, JavaScript, and Server Configuration. All you need in one book.
David Wood, Programming Internet Email,
O'Reilly & Associates, August 1999, ISBN 1-56592-479-7
See www.oreilly.com/catalog/progintemail/
-- This book certainly had this project's shortest pay off time. The timing between the appearance of the first book of this kind and our project was almost magical.

(to be continued)

See also the list of Oracle literature below under the OpenVoice project.

May 1999 - Electronic Facsimile Editions
On the Electronic Publishing '99 conference in Ronneby, Sweden, I presented a paper on Project Runeberg's Electronic Facsimile Editions of Nordic Literature, concluding that digital imaging is the solution to the quality assurance problems in web publishing of old print materials. This is not new to the industry of commercial imaging systems, but takes some time for the scholarly community to accept. Rather than their traditional early investments in textual criticism, selection and comparison of text sources, advanced OCR, and careful proofreading, making a ground level digital copy of each physical copy can be the cost-efficient basis for continued work in the digital domain. The paper outlines a low-cost procedure that I have successfully implemented in my primary hobby, Project Runeberg, which has published classic Nordic literature on the Internet since 1992. Inspiration to this work came from the Making of America project at the University of Michigan, funding from Linköping University.

Further recommended reading on this topic:
(to be included)

1995--1998 - OpenVoice Messaging Platform
For quite some time I was part of a team at Bull in Linköping, Sweden (now Teligent) developing and enhancing the highly scalable OpenVoice messaging platform which is used by Swedish telecom operator Telia for implementing the Telia Mobilsvar and Telia Telesvar voicemail systems. This platform is implemented in C++ on IBM/Groupe Bull hardware running AIX, an Oracle relational database, telephony hardware interface from Objecta / Trio, and SS/7 signalling software from Ericsson. I was involved in the C++/Oracle/AIX part of this.

While working in this long-running, well-documented (ISO 9000), high-tech, telecom, system integration, multi-level subcontractor project I found great relief in Scott Adams' books about Dilbert. Here is a list of some other literature that I found useful during this work:

Bo Bergman, Bengt Klefsjö, Kvalitet. Från behov till användning,
Studentlitteratur, 1991, ISBN 91-44-33411-7
See www.studentlitteratur.se/info/viewDetail.html?id=3341
Now also available in English, Quality. From Customer Needs to Customer Satisfaction, www.studentlitteratur.se/info/viewDetail.html?id=4633
-- Bo Bergman is a professor of Quality Technology and Management at the Dept of Mechanical Engineering at Linköping University since before ISO 9000.
Uyless Black, ISDN and SS7 Architectures for Digital Signaling Networks,
Prentice Hall, 1997, ISBN 0-13-259193-6
See vig.prenhall.com/acadbook/0,2581,0132591936,00.html
Venkat S. Devraj, Oracle 24x7. Tips & Techniques. Real-World Approaches to Ensuring Database Availability,
Oracle Press, Osborne McGraw-Hill, 2000, ISBN 0-07-211999-3
See www.osborne.com/oracle/oracle_24x7.htm
-- This is the sort of book I wish we'd had in 1995. OpenVoice was an Oracle-based 24x7 application from the start, but at the time the software industry had very poor understanding for these issues. Database applications were assumed to have a human DBA that shuts the system down from a command prompt to take backups, but this simply doesn't happen in a telephone system.
Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, Design Patterns. Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Foreword by Grady Booch,
Addison-Wesley, 1995, ISBN 0-201-63361-2
See cseng.aw.com/bookpage.taf?ISBN=0-201-63361-2
Mark Gurry, Peter Corrigan, Oracle Performance Tuning,
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 2nd edition, November 1996, ISBN 1-56592-237-9
See www.oreilly.com/catalog/oracle2/
Watts S. Humphrey, Managing the Software Process,
SEI Series in Software Engineering, Addison-Wesley, 1989, ISBN 0-201-18095-2
See cseng.aw.com/bookpage.taf?ISBN=0-201-18095-2
-- Much of the software process terminology and principles used at Bull/Teligent in Linköping is taken from this book, which has been used as textbook at the Dept of Computer Science at nearby Linköping University. This book speaks in a fresh voice about software quality assurance, unaffected by the ISO 9000 craze that broke out in the early 1990s.
George Koch, Kevin Loney, Oracle. The Complete Reference. The Single Most Comprehensive Sourcebook for the Oracle RDBMS,
Oracle Press, Osborne McGraw-Hill, 3rd edition, 1995, ISBN 0-07-882097-9
See www.osborne.com/oracle/ora8comp.htm (recent edition)
Donald Levine, POSIX Programmer's Guide. Writing Portable UNIX Programs,
O'Reilly & Associates, 1991, ISBN 0-937175-73-0
See www.oreilly.com/catalog/posix/
-- Despite numerous errors in details, this is a very useful guide to ANSI C and POSIX.1, the most basic of all standards for making simple programs run under any UNIX dialect.
Kevin Loney, Oracle DBA Handbook 7.3 Edition. What Every System Administrator Needs to Know for Effective and Efficient Database Management,
Oracle Press, Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1994, ISBN 0-07-882289-0
See www.osborne.com/oracle/oracle8i_dba_handbook.htm (recent edition)
-- More recent editions for Oracle8 exist.
Scott Meyers, Effective C++. 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Program and Designs,
Addison-Wesley, 199..., ISBN 0-201-92488-9
See cseng.aw.com/bookpage.taf?ISBN=0-201-92488-9 (recent edition)
-- This title and the next take C++ programming beyond Stroustrup's book (see below), but are still on a programming level and not as abstract as Gamma's Design Patterns (see above)
Scott Meyers, More Effective C++. 35 New Ways to Improve Your Program and Designs,
Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63371-X
See cseng.aw.com/bookpage.taf?ISBN=0-201-63371-X
Evi Nemeth, Garth Snynder, Trent R. Hein, Unix System Administration Handbook,
Prentice Hall, ..., ISBN 0-13-020601-6
See vig.prenhall.com/acadbook/0,2581,0130206016,00.html (recent edition)
W. Richard Stevens, UNIX Network Programming,
Prentice Hall, ...
See http://vig.prenhall.com/acadbook/0,2581,013490012X,00.html (recent edition)
-- Commonly known as "Stevens' book". This was the bible back in the C and Berkeley sockets era.
Bjarne Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language,
Addison-Wesley, 3rd edition, 1997, ISBN 0-201-88954-4
See cseng.aw.com/bookpage.taf?ISBN=0-201-88954-4
-- The original must have.

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