Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Changeling Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Renegade Servant of the Empire Make Room, Make Room! Nightfall (short stories) Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Intruder
This is the third book in the second Asimov tie in series. Its one of the better ones of the nine I have read so far, and I actually enjoyed reading it (some of the others felt like a bit of a chore). This one covers a return to Robot City, where an outside force has disrupted the operation of the city for its own nefarious purposes.
The Hard Way: Installing MythTV From Source is now ready. In fact, its been ready for quite a while, but I have been trying to blog about the finished chapters in the right order, so it has been trapped in the queue. This chapter discusses how to compile MythTV from source code, which is useful if you've either had problems with a packaged version of MythTV, or want more control than you'll get from packages. The awesome Michael Carden did the review for this chapter once again.
There are four Asimov books called Nightfall. There is a two volume collection of short stories (Nightfall One and Nightfall Two), a single volume version of this collection, and a novel length version of the short story "Nightfall", which headlines the short story collections. I've previously attempted to explain the list of short stories in the various versions of the collection at http://www.stillhq.com/book/Isaac_Asimov/Nightfall_Short_Stories.html. There is also a correlation with previously published Robot short stories at http://www.stillhq.com/book/Isaac_Asimov/Robot_Short_Stories.html. I just finished reading the short story collection (in this case in a single volume). I haven't read any Asimov short stories in a few months (since September last year to be exact), and I had forgotten how much I enjoy them. One of the advantages of these short story collections is that you get to cover a lot of ground, and there is a real sense of accomplishment in finishing a short story. I think also that the shorter form keeps the author honest -- there simply isn't room to waste space on long passages which don't progress the plot. This collection is excellent, much like the others I have read from Asimov. I will note that I particularly enjoyed "The Up-to-date Sorcerer",…
I was getting quite confused about which robot short stories I had already read (many appear in more than one collection), so I built this table to help. Note that ecrosses indicate stories which aren't about robots, and are really stow aways. I, Robot 1950 The Rest of the Robots 1964 The Complete Robot 1982 Robot Dreams 1986 Robot Visions 1990 Nightfall 1971 Robbie Runaround Reason Catch That Rabbit Liar! Little Lost Robot Escape! Evidence The Evitable Conflict Robot AL-76 Goes Astray Victory Unintentional First Law Let's Get Together Satisfaction Guaranteed Risk Lenny Galley Slave A Boy's Best Friend Sally Someday Point of View Think! True Love Stranger in Paradise Light Verse Segregationist Mirror Image …
Ubuntu and Mythbuntu 9.04 have recently been released, and this makes some of the current content for the online MythTV book out of date. The way I plan on handling this is to keep going with the current version 8.10 content, and then update chapters to 9.04 later. This way I don't delay the overall book because of the new release, and people who haven't upgraded still have relevant content. For those using 9.04, the current content should be "close enough" to get you going. Please comment on this post if you see problems which are new to 9.04 so I can make a note of them.
The next chapter, The Hard Way: Installing Ubuntu is now ready. This chapter took a lot longer than I wanted because I was distracted by some stuff in my personal life, but I am hoping that the authoring process is now back on track. This chapter covers how to install Ubuntu so that you can setup your own MythTV system exactly how you'd like it. That's also the way to go if you're using an existing Ubuntu system and just adding MythTV to it. Thanks to Michael Carden for yet another excellent chapter review.
I spent the day at the Drizzle Developer Day at Sun's insane asylum campus. I'm not joking here, the campus was apparently a former insane asylum. First off I battled getting Drizzle to compile on Ubuntu 8.10, where the secret sauce appears to be to know about the drizzle-developer PPA. If you're using Ubuntu 8.10, add this to your sources.list and life will be a bit better: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/drizzle-developers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/drizzle-developers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main After that compiling drizzle was pretty easy.
I must have read this book a few years ago and forgotten, because I have no specific recollection of reading it, but the plot is familiar. This is a distopian novel about the dangers of over population, and was written at a time when the best available population models said that massive over population was going to be a problem by 1999. In the book the population of New York City is 35 million, whereas in reality its much more like 8 million at the moment. In order to support that many people the quality of life has had to radically decline, and the city spends most of its budget on welfare payments instead of maintaining its decaying infrastructure. It turns out that didn't happen, and I think that's partially why I didn't enjoy this book. The underlying story is good, but the book lacks hope, and feels preachy about population control. This book's style is quite different from the rest of Harrison's work that I've read -- there is hardly any humor. Its still an interesting read though and I managed to make it through to the end. I guess what I wanted from this book was a little…
This is the sequel to Daughter of the Empire. The book is long at nearly 700 pages, and contains two basic plots, although both are related and use the same characters. They could easily have been separate books -- one of the things I like about this book is that it tells more of the story than it absolutely has to, whilst still being continuously engaging. The events of this book run parallel to Pug's time on Kelwan from Magician (Apprentice and Master) and its also nice to see an alternate perspective on those events. The main thrust of this book is that while tradition is important, not being wasteful of the resources you're handed is important too. This book is excellent. [isbn: 0553292455]