Yearly Archives: 2009

Bolo Rising

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In the distant future after the Melconians have done their thing, there is a small pocket of humans and they're having a bad day. One of things I like about the Bolo books is that their consistent in their overall direction for future human history, and that future is reasonably plausible -- its a bit like Asimov's extended Foundation Series, but written by a bunch of different authors. There must have been a huge coordination effort while producing these books. This book is pretty standard Bolo fair, which is well written and entertaining. It wont make you a better person, but its a fun read and makes you think. [isbn: 0671577794]

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Forever Peace

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This a very different book to The Forever War, and not really a sequel. It covers some similar territory, but there are no characters in common, and the overall plots are unrelated (and conflicting). However, this book is as well written as The Forever War, and I enjoyed it.

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The Forever War

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I read this book mainly because multiple sites recommended it as a response to Starship Troopers. I'd actually read the start of this book already in the form of the short story "Hero", which is included in Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow. At the time, I would have described it as an ok short story, but not the best in the book. That's interesting, because the extended version in the novel is amazing. Its one of those books I had trouble putting down, and its gripping to the end. The book has a very different perspective on war from Starship Troopers and is more like some of David Drake's writing (they're both Vietnam veterans). There is also a little bit of Bill the Galactic Hero mixed in as well, without being so over the top. I strongly recommend this book.

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On Cars

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Jeremy Clarkson isn't one of those people you can read hundreds of pages of at once. That's probably why he writes articles instead of books. This book is a collection of these articles, and it is an interesting and entertaining read. However, I couldn't read it front to back. Instead I read it over a series of take offs and landings during a trip, and that worked well. Apart from Jeremy's sense of humour, and the fact that he's mostly right, the other interesting aspect of this book is that you get to see his writing style develop over time. It helps explain how we ended up with Top Gear. [isbn: 9781856131001]

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Python effective TLD library update

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The effective TLD library is now being used for a couple of projects of mine, but I've had some troubles with it being almost unusable slow. I ended up waking up this morning with the revelation that the problem is that I use regexps to match domain names, but the failure of a match occurs at the end of a string. That means that the FSA has to scan the entire string before it gets to decide that it isn't a match. That's expensive. I ran some tests on tweaks to try and fix this. Without any changes, scanning 1,000 semi-random domain names took 6.941666 seconds. I then tweaked the implementation to reverse the strings it was scanning, and that halved the run time of the test to 3.212203 seconds. That's a big improvement, but still way too slow. The next thing I tried was then adding buckets of rules on top of those reverse matches.... In other words, the code now assumes that anything after the last dot is some for of TLD approximation, and only executes rules which also have that string after the last dot. This was a massive improvement, with 1,000 domains taking only 0.026120 seconds.…

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INVOL RER DUE TO OVERSOLD LX40

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I'm not sure where to start this story. I could tell you how I've been flying around the world on a business trip, or I could tell you what I think about Swiss Air business class. Instead I'm left thinking I should mention carbon. You see, I was sitting in first class on a Swiss Air flight to New York City yesterday, and I was surrounded by tree. Big centimeter thick panels of it are all over the place. When other airlines are doing things like using lighter foam for seat cushions or asking passengers to go potty before boarding to reduce the weight of their aircraft (and therefore carbon emissions), Swiss has chosen to find a forest and cut it down to put in their brand new plane. This forest will be flying around for a couple of decades I would think. Sure, its only in first class (business class gets veneer), and I'm a bastard for being in first class at all. There's a story to that too though. I booked an ultra cheap around the world business ticket through Swiss Air. It was in fact cheaper than the same flights in economy with Qantas. This is despite…

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Triplanetary

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This is the first book in the EE Doc Smith Lensman series, a series which sweeps from pre-modern Atlantis all the way well into the future. Its pretty old, so some of the science is dangerously dated, but that's not its biggest flaw. This book suffers from uncontrolled hyperbole, which I guess isn't that unexpected for a space opera. I guess it was also more common at the time, before science fiction started taking itself seriously. The plot is also a little hard to believe, with both sides at one point murdering entire cities. They then of course forgive each other because "its logical". However, I have an emotional attachment to this book, because it is the one which interested me in reading as a young child. Despite its flaws in both science and plot, it is still an ok book. I enjoyed reading it, and it was entertaining. [isbn: 0425053830]

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Python effective TLD library

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I had a need recently for a library which would take a host name and return the domain-specific portion of the name, and the effective TLD being used. "Effective TLD" is a term coined by the Mozilla project for something which acts like a TLD. For example, .com is a TLD and has domains allocated under it. However, .au is a TLD with no domains under it. The effective TLDs for the .au domain are things like .com.au and .edu.au. Whilst there are libraries for other languages, I couldn't find anything for python. I therefore wrote one. Its very simple, and not optimal. For example, I could do most of the processing with a single regexp if python supported more than 100 match groups in a regexp, but it doesn't. I'm sure I'll end up revisiting this code sometime in the future. Additionally, the code ended up being much easier to write than I expected, mainly because the Mozilla project has gone to the trouble of building a list of rules to determine the effective TLD of a host name. This is awesome, because it saved me heaps and heaps of work. The code is at http://www.stillhq.com/python/etld/etld.py if you're interested.

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Nerilka’s Story

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This book takes place over almost exactly the same period as Moreta. However, its not a rehash of those events, as it is written from a different person's perspective. There are enough points where the two story lines meet for the books to make sense as a pair, and I'd recommend reading them back to back. This book is an incredibly fast read (I knocked it over in a few hours on a flight), and its a bit more positive than Moreta, which has a pretty sad ending. However, this book isn't the happiest book ever written either. I've seen commentary that says this book is mostly about how unattractive Nerilka is physically. I dispute that though -- the book is about how the human spirit is more important than breeding or good looks, and how Nerilka's efforts to do the right thing in a time of crisis have a lasting impact. I enjoyed this book. [isbn: 0345339495]

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