I’m getting really into reading second hand science fiction from the 1950s onwards. I read a few (but nowhere near all) of the Foundation series as a child, and I remember liking them a lot. Stolen from Wikipedia as well as other online sources, here is a list of the books in The Foundation series…
Month: August 2008
Robot Dreams
Robot Dreams is another of the robot short story books from Asimov. It is a bit deceptive though and frankly quite annoying because only one of the stories in the book is a robot story, and its not very long.I am of course ignoring the robot stories that already appear in I, Robot and The…
MythNetTV mailing list
I get a few support requests for MythNetTV, and I must admit that I sometimes get quite behind on my personal email, especially when I’m travelling. I’ve therefore created a mailing list for announcements and discussion in the hope that people will chat and come up with great ideas, as well as being able to…
MythNetTV release 4
New things in this release: Removed gflags because people found it hard to find Bug fix patch from David Linville applied Fixed broken imports caused by refactoring Transcode not needed for avc1 and m4v Another bug fix patch from David Linville applied Store filesize in the db Removed some namespace imports I am not a…
Getting rid of cable TV?
I’m thinking of getting rid of comcast and getting a high def over the air tuner as well as a netflix subscription. I’d be interested in people’s opinions of netflix. I guess I’m just fed up with comcast’s woeful customer service, quite ordinary analog reception, and complete lack of any new programming. Its been about…
Discovering the CASE statement
In an effort to speed up my database updates, I’ve been looking for ways to batch some of my updates. CASE seems like the way to go: mysql> create table bar(a tinyint, b tinyint); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec) mysql> insert into bar(a) values(1), (2), (3), (4), (5); Query OK, 5 rows affected…
The Complete Robot
This is another of Asimov’s robot short story collections, and many of the stories appear in earlier works. In fact, I would recommend getting I, Robot and this book, and avoiding The Rest of the Robots if you’re not interested in owning a complete collection of books, but do want to have all of the…
Isaac Asimov’s Utopia
Utopia is the third and final Asimov universe book from Allen. It centers around an attempt to accellerate the terraforming of a planet by drastic measures which drive third law robots wild… The measures are so drastic that they endanger humans, whilst protecting a large number of humans. Unfortunately three law robots have trouble seeing…
The Stainless Steel Rat Series
I am increasingly becoming obsessed with science fiction from 1950s and 1960s. Again stolen from Wikipedia, here is a list of all the Stainless Steel Rat books: 1985: A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born 1987: The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted 1994: The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues 1961: The Stainless Steel Rat 1970:…
The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You
I’m helping out with SciFoo for the third year running, which is a blast. Neal Stephenson is back again, which is fun. Anyway, there is always a bit of hurry up and wait at conferences, so I got a chance to finish off this book. Its an ok read, but suffers from the hard-to-believe time…