Demon Lord of Karanda
I needed something to cheer me up after the previous sucky book. This one did the trick. Again its pretty standard Fantasy stuff, and there were no surprises, but its fun to read. [isbn: 0345363310]
Foundation’s Fear
This book is a solid zero stars in my mind. I got to page 372, but simply couldn't wade through the chore any longer. The plot meanders, and its not clear to me where the story is going. Worse still, basically nothing has happened yet. I am a little surprised, given the generally positive LibraryThing reviews. I should have read the Amazon reviews instead. Some examples: Normally, I do a lot of my reading on the train (BART for those of you familiar with San Francisco), getting to and from work. An engrossing book keeps me awake and I read it relatively quickly. "Foundation's Fear", especially the first half of it, set a record for putting me to sleep. There were days in when I only managed to read a couple of pages. A paragraph or two and I'd be out, even before the train started moving. As others here have pointed out, there is a lot of boring dialogue and description and much of it focuses around the Voltaire and Joan of Arc artificial entities. Hundreds of pages of philosophical noodling and descriptions of imaginary scenes conjured up in cyberspace become numbing. And another: This book is not good,…
Sticklers, Sideburns and Bikinis
This is the second book I have got from the LibraryThing early reviewer program (the previous book was The Spy Within). I'm going to have to be honest with this book and say that I haven't read all of it yet. Its basically a dictionary and I don't tend to read those cover to cover. On the other hand, I have read about 10% of this book so far, and do intend to read it all. This book is great. The content is interesting, well laid out, and excellently written. That's probably made a lot easier by how interesting the content is -- the stories behind various works tend to be short and novel, which is fun. The book is also useful -- it's already ended an office debate over the origin of the word "hooker". [isbn: 9781846033001]
Please help me test trunk
I'm getting ready to do another MythNetTV release, as I've fixed quite a few things recently. I'd appreciate people testing the new code before I do an official release. You can get the current code like this: svn co http://www.stillhq.com/mythtv/mythnettv/svn That will create a directory called mythnettv, with a subdirectory named trunk, which is the latest development version of the code. You should probably create that directory somewhere where you don't mind a new directory being created. This release has lots of small changes, which are listed in the ChangeLog which will be downloaded with the code. Thanks.
Second Foundation
I am starting to think that there is something missing in the Foundation trilogy. Specifically, there isn't much action. Most of it is just people talking at each other -- with pages and pages of dialog. This makes these three books much harder to read (and therefore less compelling) than those elsewhere in the extended Foundation Series. I did enjoy this book, I just feel that I could have done with some more action to make it less hard work. [isbn: 0345336291;0345309014]
King of the Murgos
This is book two of the Malloreon, the sequel series to the Belgariad. Some people complain that this series is just a repeat of the previous series with some of the names changed, and I certainly used to think that myself. Now that I've read this book again I think that's unfair -- the story line is actually quite different, and the characters are generally older and wiser (which makes them feel more developed). I enjoyed this book, probably more than I did Guardians of the West. [isbn: 0345358805]
The Stainless Steel Rat for President
I need a break from all this serious reading, and the Stainless Steel Rat books are always amusing. In fact, this book was much better than the previous two I have read (The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World and The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You) as it didn't suffer from the incredibly weak plot lines that books involving time travel seem to cause for Harrison. This book is back to the classic rat -- a simple criminal romp through an unsuspecting society, his hottie wife in tow, and with his two now grown kids along for the fun. I enjoyed this book a lot. [isbn: 0553227599]
Fixed LibraryThing links
I only just realized that the links to LibraryThing that I automatically insert into book posts only work if you have a LibraryThing account. I've now fixed that so that there is a link to a public page, as well as a link to your personal library if you use LibraryThing and also have a book that I mention.
Guardians of the West
I read this book as a child, and must admit I didn't like it. That's interesting to me, because it quite liked it this time. Its not the greatest literature ever written, but it is a good read. You need to have read the Belgariad first though, because this book (the first of the Mallorean) reuses the characters without spending a lot of time introducing them to you. I think I prefer it that way because it would be annoying to have to go through all that character development again as someone who has read the first series. [isbn: 0345352661]
Weird paramiko problem
I had a strange paramiko problem the other day. Sometimes executing a command through a channel (via the exec_command() call) would result in an exit code being returned, but no stdout or stderr. This was for a command I was absolutely sure always returns output, and it wasn't consistent -- I'd run batches of commands and about 10% of them would fail, but not always on the same machine and not always at the same time. I spent ages looking at my code, and the code for the command running at the other end of the channel. Then it occurred to me that this seemed a lot like a race condition. I started looking at the code for the paramiko Channel class, and ended up deciding that the answer was to check that the eof_received member variable was true before trying to close the channel. It turns out this just works. I've my code running commands for a couple of days now and have had zero more instances of the "no output, but did exit" error. So, there you go. Its a shame that member variable doesn't have accessors and isn't documented though. I guess that makes my code a…