Grant Allen

Philistia Grant Allen

Publisher Marketing: It was Sunday evening, and on Sundays Max Schurz, the chief of the London Socialists, always held his weekly receptions. That night his cosmopolitan refugee friends were all at liberty; his French disciples could pour in from the little lanes and courts in Soho, where, since the Commune, they had plied their peaceful trades as engravers, picture-framers, artists'-colourmen, models, pointers, and so forth-for most of them were hangers-on in one way or another of the artistic world; his German adherents could stroll round, pipe in mouth, from their printing-houses, their ham-and-beef shops, or their naturalists' chambers, where they stuffed birds or set up exotic butterflies in little cabinets-for most of them were more or less literary or scientific in their pursuits; and his few English sympathisers, chiefly dissatisfied philosophical Radicals of the upper classes, could drop in casually for a chat and a smoke, on their way home from the churches to which they had been dutifully escorting their un-emancipated wives and sisters. Max Schurz kept open house for all on Sunday evenings, and there was not a drawing-room in London better filled than his with the very advanced and not undistinguished set who alone had the much-prized entree of his exclusive salon." Contributor Bio:  Allen, Grant Grant Allen has worked in the IT field for over 20 years, as a CTO, enterprise architect, and database administrator. Grant's roles have covered private enterprise, academia and the government sector around the world, specialising in global-scale systems design, development, and performance. He is a frequent speaker at industry and academic conferences, on topics ranging from data mining to compliance, and technologies such as databases (DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL), content management, collaboration, disruptive innovation, and mobile ecosystems like Android. His first Android application was a task list to remind him to finish all his other unfinished Android projects. Grant works for Google, and in his spare time is completing a Ph. D on building innovative high-technology environments. Grant is the author of Beginning DB2, and lead author of Oracle SQL Recipes and The Definitive Guide to SQLite.