First-timer Josh Bazell’s novel Beat the Reaper is an unusual medical crime thriller — which is to say its protagonist, Dr. Peter Brown, is not just a doctor. He’s also a notorious criminal.

The novel opens with Brown, an overworked, sleep-deprived intern at “Manhattan’s worst hospital,” being mugged by a lone gunman. The mugger starts having second thoughts right away. Probably he should have known better than to try to rob someone with a bad attitude and a thorough knowledge of human anatomy. What he couldn’t possibly have known, however, is that Dr. Peter Brown is actually Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa, former mob assassin, recently having completed medical school while enrolled in the federal witness protection program. As it turns out, what this mugger really needs isn’t money. He needs to go to the emergency room — he just doesn’t know it yet. » More... »

I have a new article up at InfoWorld this week, and this one is a little bit of a departure from my usual beats of software development and open source. This time, I’m talking about the ever-popular netbooks, and what directions these mini-laptops might take in the near future.

My conclusions? For starters, they might not even look like mini-laptops for much longer.

Hardware vendors are naturally concerned that these low-margin devices could cut into the sales of their higher-end products, so they’re looking for ways to spin them as secondary systems and “companion devices.” Look for new chips under the hood, new form factors, and even new pricing models that could send the cost of netbooks down to nothing. Click over to InfoWorld to see what I mean, and be sure to leave feedback in the comments and forums.

My latest feature for InfoWorld is sure to raise some folks’ hackles, but that’s OK by me. For years now, pundits have been predicting that Linux would take the desktop by storm, becoming a true rival to Windows. I suspect that won’t happen anytime soon. The inertia working against it is too strong. In this article, I examine some of the reasons why enterprise customers have been slow to adopt Linux for their desktop workstations — and why they probably always will be.

Do you disagree? By all means, dive into the discussion by posting comments or striking up a conversation on InfoWorld’s new forums.

It’s been a long time since I added anything to the “Artwork” section of this site, so an update is long overdue. Recently, a friend asked me to illustrate the invitation to her son’s birthday party. He’s a big Marvel Comics fan, so she wanted something superhero-themed. As I was working on the project, I took scans of the artwork in various stages of completion, both on paper and in the computer. I post them here for anyone who might get a kick out of that sort of thing.

If there’s one thing that annoys computer geeks, it’s the portrayal of technology in the entertainment media. Hollywood writers seem determined to throw references to computers and the Internet into their stories, but their ignorance invariably leads to asinine plot twists, with Our Hero “hacking the enemy mainframe” using nothing but his IM client and a spool of copper wire.

You’ll find none of that in Daemon, the first novel by network security consultant Daniel Suarez. Daemon may be a genuine first: a techno-thriller firmly grounded in real-world technology. There’s no jabber about “mainframes” here, no “hacking systems” with pocket calculators. Suarez’ use of jargon, his understanding of the way computer systems operate, and his familiarity with information security practices are all pitch-perfect. If you thought we needed such a book, here it is. But did we? » More... »

Imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to learn that Sun Microsystems had accepted a $7.4 billion purchase offer from Oracle. Not least of all because I actually predicted the sale more than a week ago!

Click on the above link to read my InfoWorld editorial speculating on the deal before it happened, and learn what I think the two companies have in common and what each stands to gain. If nothing else, it’s going to be a very interesting year for users of Java, MySQL, and other Sun products.

For full details on Oracle’s purchase of Sun, check out InfoWorld’s news story here.

If you’ve followed my work for InfoWorld, you may have already seen the site’s brand-new design, which launched over the weekend. (If you haven’t seen my work, you can see an RSS feed in the right-hand column of this blog.) Personally, I couldn’t be happier with the relaunch.

The new version of the site brings more than just a sleek, modern new look. Beneath the hood it’s a complete rebuild. Out went the earlier, proprietary content-management system, replaced by Drupal, an open source CMS platform. The Online Publishing Group at IDG, in tandem with an outside Web development firm, created a fully customized Drupal installation that — for once — means InfoWorld has a technology platform that matches its content. Better yet, while the competition is still nervously worrying about the future of the publishing industry, InfoWorld is moving forward, better than ever.

I encourage everybody to check out the new site — and, especially, to jump in and participate. There are dozens of online discussion forums just waiting for your input, questions, feedback, and casual chat. This is a great opportunity to build an unprecedented online community focused on enterprise IT. Do me a favor, register on the site, and kick off new discussion topics of your own. I and the other InfoWorld editors and contributors will be checking in and joining the discussion as often as we’re able.

Congratulations to everyone at InfoWorld on a successful relaunch, and I’m looking forward to all our collaborations in the new era.

InfoWorld has posted the next in our ongoing series of fun quizzes to test your knowledge of all things tech. This time around, the topic is the Web itself. It’s hard to believe that it’s only about 17 years since the Web’s inception, yet we’ve come a long way from those humble beginnings. This week’s quiz tries to reflect the full breadth of topics throughout that storied history.

From browsers to the HTTP protocol, JavaScript to the history of e-commerce, there’s something here to test everyone’s knowledge of history and technical nitty-gritty. Don’t feel bad if you miss some of the answers — that’s part of the fun. There are a lot of unexpected details hidden in this one, so if you bear with it you might learn a few fun factoids for your next LAN party.

BTW, if you enjoy this one, check out our earlier IQ tests on programming and the Linux OS.

Richard Price’s novel Lush Life is the story of Eric Cash, who is having a very bad week. In fact, Eric’s life hasn’t been going all that well in general lately.

Eric is the quintessential disaffected New York thirtysomething. He fancies himself a screenwriter, but the only thing he has going is a work-for-hire project that he knows is crap. In real life he manages a hipster bar for his money, which he spends on an apartment that he shares with a girlfriend who may or may not be coming back from an overseas research trip for her master’s thesis on fringe sexuality. Each day makes Eric more aware of the rut into which he’s sunk, as he watches disaffected New Yorkers a decade his junior landing the breaks he feels he deserves. And to make matters worse, one of his coworkers has just been shot, and Eric is the only witness. Or is he the only suspect? » More... »