My first Katharine Kerr science fiction novel. There is a lot happening in this book: an inversion between the expected racism in our society; multiple alien species; political intrigue; murder; disease; and a first contact with a new alien species. The book could have included fewer plot elements and still have been excellent. Regardless, this book is quite good, and very unexpected from what I consider to be a fantasy author. [isbn: 0553285041]
This is the first book in the Asterix comic series which I loved as a child. I've decided I'm going to re-read them over the next little while, assuming I like the first few. This book introduces the characters, and covers the attempted infiltration of the village by a Roman spy. He learns the secret of the Gaul's strength, and tells the Romans. The Romans then of course have to capture the druid and torture him into tell them the secret. People get thumped quite a lot, an excellent read. [isbn: 9780752866055]
This is quite a different book from most of the recent Pern books because of its leisurely pace. Its a nice read, although it feels like not much actually happens in the book. Unfortunately the plot is pretty much a cliche at this point -- child has special affinity for animal X, parents don't understand, child pursues said affinity anyways, falls out with parents, ultimately proves that animal X is actually super awesome and important for Pern, group hugs. So, this book is an ok read, but lazily plotted and nothing much happens. [isbn: 0345368959]
This book isn't Haldeman's best work (checkout The Forever War, The Forever Peace, or Marsbound for examples of his really good stuff). I found the characters largely unsympathetic, and the plot quite slow. The book is also odd in that it was written in 1989, but is full of stuff you'd expect to see from a Heinlein novel like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress -- global conspiracies, Russian space colonies with vigilante law, that sort of thing. Interestingly, the plot twist is much more smoothly done than many other Haldeman novels, which is nice.
This is an interesting book in that it lays down a reasonably believable scenario and then doesn't really resolve it. Its obviously setting up for a series, and while the local micro plot is resolved, there is clearly a larger story arc that wants telling here. The book isn't happy or uplifting, it is downright depressing in places. Regardless, I still finding myself hanging out for the next one in the series. [isbn: 0671318411]
I sympathize with the other LibraryThing reviewer who had trouble finding characters to like in this novel. This book isn't very long, but took me ages to read because the main character is so whiney. The whole story seems to revolve around how he's never happy, and that didn't work for me. I think the underlying ideas are interesting, but I just hated Julius so much that I didn't enjoy the book. There is an interesting reference to Snow Crash on page 97 though. [award: nominee nebula 2004] [isbn: 076530953x]
This is another fun book from New Scientist's Last Word column and I enjoyed it. A good read, and I actually learnt some stuff (some of it possibly true) along the way.
Breakfast of Champions Old Man's War The Ghost Brigades The Last Colony Ender's Game Snow Crash The Sagan Diary Zoe's Tale Broken Angels
Paramiko doesn't provide a scp implementation, so I've been using my own for a while. http://blogs.sun.com/janp/entry/how_the_scp_protocol_works (link now unfortunately dead) provides good documentation about the scp protocol, but it missed out on one detail I needed -- how to send more than one file in a given session. In the end I implemented a simple scp logger to see what the protocol was doing during the copying of files. My logger said this: >>> New command invocation: /usr/bin/scp -d -t /tmp O: \0 I: C0644 21 a\n O: \0 I: file a file a file a\n\0 O: \0 I: C0644 21 b\n O: \0 I: file b file b file b\n\0 O: \0 >>>stdin closed >>> stdout closed >>> stderr closed It turns out its important to wait for those zeros by the way. So, here's my implementation of the protocol to send more than one file. Turning this into paramiko code is left as an exercise for the reader. #!/usr/bin/python import fcntl import os import select import string import subprocess import sys import traceback def printable(s): out = '' for c in s: if c == '\n': out += '\\n' elif c in string.printable: out += c else: out…
This book is very different from Altered Carbon, as noted by many other online reviews. I found it very slow going, for a few reasons: it is quite long; it is very different from Altered Carbon in a way that almost feel like a bait and switch (Altered Carbon is a film noir detective novel, this is a hard core combat book with an alien influence); and Morgan has an annoying habit of providing emphasis with. periods. in the middle. of sentences which makes his work sometimes hard to parse. Overall and ok book and I like the alien stuff, but not what I was expecting and not as good as Altered Carbon. [isbn: 9780575081253;0575081252]