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Belgarath the Sorcerer

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 6, 2008
Post category:Book

This book is a follow on from The Belgariad and The Malloreon written from the perspective of one of the protagonists in those two series -- Belgarath the Sorcerer. This book has quite a different style from the others. It is written in the first person as Belgarath's personal memoir. The book is really long at over 700 pages, and covers a 6,000 year (ish) period. That means that the book tends to skip around and over some things at a very high level. That's probably a good thing, as it stops you from getting bogged down in boring detail you don't care about. One problem with this book is that to people who have read the previous series, this is all old territory. You totally know what is about to happen, and that makes it a lot less fun to read. I'm also not sure I'm a big fan of the first person style either. However, I did enjoy this book more than some of the others I have read recently, despite it not being Eddings' best work. [isbn: 0345403959]

Books read in October 2008

Post author:mikal
Post published:November 3, 2008
Post category:Book

Seeress of Kell Iron Master The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell Magician: Apprentice Magician: Master Foundation and Chaos The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus Silverthorn Bill the Galactic Hero: Plant of the Robot Slaves You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat

You Can Be The Stainless Steel Rat

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 28, 2008
Post category:Book

This is a Stainless Steel Rat book, although different from the norm because it is a choose your own adventure. Its also the last of the Stainless Steel Rat books in the series, and the only one I hadn't yet read. I figured I'd document my path through the story, so here goes: 30 - 42 - 62 - 90 Well, that was a disappointment. 90 makes no sense in the context (62 talks about meeting someone and deciding to talk to them, 90 talks about someone accepting a bribe). Lame, I think I found a bug already. Let's go with the other choice then: 30 - 42 - 62 - 14 - 99 - 106 - 65 - 48 - 67 - 97 - 186 - 33 - 12 - 65 I think I hit another bug... I was meant to go back to before a fight, but ended up after it instead. I give up. [isbn: 0441949789]

Bill the Galactic Hero: The Planet of the Robot Slaves

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 28, 2008
Post category:Book

The previous Bill the Galactic Hero book was awesomely bad. This on starts out well: Bill, that's what they called him. They called him that because that was his name. I didn't realize when I started reading this series that only the previous book and this one are actually written by Harrison. The rest of them are actually farmed off to others, with Harrison editing them before publication. According to Wikipedia, Harrison later considered this approach to be a mistake. I think my confusion is at least partially because LibraryThing lists Harry Harrison as the author for the entire series. Overall I don't think this book is as good as the first one, and while its easy to read the style becomes annoying after a while. It was a quick read though. [isbn: 0380756617]

linux.conf.au domain name

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 28, 2008
Post category:Conference

It looks to me like the linux.conf.au domain name is working again. I wonder what effect that will have on registrations? It would be interesting to see a graph of registration behavior over time...

Silverthorn

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 27, 2008
Post category:Book

The characters of the Magician Books battle a new enemy in this book. The book centers around Prince Arthura's poisoned wife and the quest to find the cure. There seems to have been some criticism of this book for being a fantasy cliche (something which people seem to say about a lot of Feist's books), but that's a pretty easy accusation to make with fantasy works -- they all seem to have the same basic them. I guess that's what a genre is -- a shared theme. The book is well written and quite readable. Wikipedia page on Silverthorn has this rather startling accusation to make: Since its release, the term 'Silverthorn' has been adopted to describe any book in a series (although typically the middle book of a trilogy) that has served little purpose other than to set up a climax in the final book. This term can also be applied to a similar phenomenon in film or television series. This style of book typically has little overall substance, and is often quite poor when compared to the other books in the series. That's a pretty unfair thing to say. This book has a story that stands on its…

Mikal’s unreliable guide to buying secondhand sci fi in Mountain View

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 26, 2008
Post category:Book

My algorithm goes something like this: If I am just browsing (I tend to target complete series before I start reading them, so am often buying things I don't expect to read for months) and looking for a great deal I go to Rasputin's Books. Sometimes they have nothing, and other times I walk away with 30 books. They currently have a "10 books for $5" deal, which is hard to beat. If I want something specific, and its not too rare, I go to Book Buyers. They have an awesome collection, and have most common things. Some harder to find things might be missing though, and you need to know that not everything is filed by author (check the series section as well). If I want big lots, ebay.com. Most of the time there is nothing, but sometimes you can pick up 20 books by the same author quite cheaply.

The android and I

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 25, 2008
Post category:Android

I don't talk much on this site about what I do at work. There are a couple of reasons for that -- what I do is somewhat too specialist to describe easily (I am a member of the Site Reliability Engineering Group, who are tasked with making google.com the most reliable site on the Internet), somewhat technical (you see, if we tweak the thingie on that cluster just a little, we can decrease the doodily by 15 milliseconds!), and frankly I'd rather not spend all my time talking about work at home. On the other hand, sometimes something makes me so proud that I just have to say something. Previous examples are the open sourcing of Slack, Google open sourcing patches for MySQL, and describing how we deploy MySQL servers at the MySQL Users Conference, and the LCA 2007 MythTV tutorial that Google went out of its way to help with. This week's proud moment is the launch of Android. I've been coding on and off for the platform since August last year, and have had a Dream handset in my pocket since July this year. Frankly, I don't bother to power my blackberry on any more. However, the point…

The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 23, 2008
Post category:Book

This book is better than the Stainless Steel Rat books which insist on things like time or dimensional travel -- this one sticks to the more traditional crime plot, which I think are generally better. Then again, its nowhere near the best Stainless Steel Rat book I have read. It feels a little like the editor was lazy for this book though -- there are typographical errors which make it hard to read. There have been several times when I have had to reread a sentence to work out what was meant. One example is when a character declares himself to be a "Galactic Inspector of Texas". That should have read "Galactic Inspector of Taxes". [isbn: 0812575350]

Foundation and Chaos

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 21, 2008
Post category:Book

This is the second book in the second Foundation trilogy, following on from Foundation's Fear, which I didn't enjoy. This book on the other hand is quite good. Its not the best book I've read recently, but its faithful to the universe that Asimov built, as well as resolving all the silly plot elements that made Foundation's Fear such a bad book. It also fills in some of the gaps between the end of Asimov's robot stories and the Foundation stories, which is good. [isbn: 0061056405]