I purchased and read "Thr3e" by Ted Dekker last weekend. The book is a psychological thriller in which a young seminary student, Kevin Parsons, is hunted by a serial killer. It all starts when Kevin is driving home from his university one evening and his cell phone rings. He is presented with a clue in the form of a riddle and is told he has 60 seconds to call the newspaper and confess his sins or his car will be blown up. He escapes the explosion of his car, but the next few days turn out to be the most difficult of his life. Being chased by a person who goes by the name of Slater makes the ensuing riddles and explosions an alluring read.
I couldn't manage to put this book down. Once I got far enough into the plot, it kept getting more and more intense. The author does a great job of keeping your interest throughout the narrative, however he could have done a little better job in wrapping up and linking in the riddles to the resolution. Overall, the twist at the end made me look like a complete clown in front of everyone else at the baggage claim in RDU airport when I actually said the words "NO WAY!" out loud. After looking up the reviews on Amazon and doing a bit of reading on the book, it turns out this is billed as "Christian fiction". I wouldn't have purchased the book had I known that in advance, however there really wasn't that big of a religious overtone that made me lose interest. One can safely ignore this misnomer if it would normally turn them off. Also of interest is the movie that was made out of this novel. It appears to have gotten horrid reviews, but we all now how accurate movie representations can be of good texts.
My advice to you? Ignore the bad movie reviews, forget the "Christian" label, and READ THIS BOOK! I believe this was one of the easiest to read, most interesting paperbacks I've read in a LOOONG time.
5 out of 5 DONKEYS!!
I've had many a client ask me what the term "fuzzing" meant. I have my pat definition on what fuzzing is and does, but I never knew where it came from.. until today!
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There are quite a few stories on how the term fuzzing came to be.. fuzzy logic? Testing electrical lines? Not quite.
I spoke with Prof. Barton Miller a while back and just got to review what was said in our conversation for something I am writing, I figured I will share:
"In the Fall of 1989, I was on a dial-up modem to my campus computer. There was a big, midwest thunderstorm that was causing noise on the phone line (this was before error-correction modems), so it was a race to type a command before a stream of nonsense characters would interfere. I was surprised that these seemingly random characters would occasionally cause Unix utilities to crash. So, as one of my suggested projects in my graduate OS class (CS736), I assigned a project of writing a random character generator and testing as many Unix utility programs as possible. I called this random stream "fuzz", named after the noise on the phone line.
It had nothing to do with fuzzy logic nor any other field. And I'm not sure why I picked the particular word fuzz."
Gadi.
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Thanks Gadi! I appreciate you clearing that up for me!
