This is a Scalzi book, so its clever and funny, and has possibly one of the best first sentences I have read ever. It is a light read, and I finished all of it apart from the last 50 pages or so on a single flight. Scalzi also plays again with the idea of transferring consciousness, which is something which he deals with a lot in the Old Man's War series. I liked this book. [isbn: 9780765348289]
This is the continuation from Runner, and continues the story of the attempt to re-enable the star gates. It has the comicly incompetent Technosociety once again, as well as series of genetically engineered protagonists. I am bothered by why the star gate power supplies cause people to fall ill -- you'd think in a highly advanced society capable of building star gates they might have spent some time on shielding. Or did the shielding somehow fail on all the power sources sometime over the thousands of years of decay? The has a disappointing ending, but was a fun read until then. I find it hard to suspend disbelief about how the AIs present themselves, but apart from that the book was solid. This one is probably not as good as the first. [isbn: 0441015360; 9780441015368]
I thought I should write up the dev summit sessions I am hosting now that the program is starting to look solid. This is mostly for my own benefit, so I have a solid understanding of where to start these sessions off. Both are short brainstorm sessions, so I am not intending to produce slide decks or anything like that. I just want to make sure there is something to kick discussion off. Image caching, where to from here (nova hypervisors) As of essex libvirt has an image cache to speed startup of new instances. This cache stores images direct from glance, as well as resized images. There is a periodic task which cleans up images in the cache which are no longer needed. The periodic task can also optionally detect images which have become corrupted on disk. So first off, do we want to implement this for other hypervisors as well? As mentioned in a recent blog post I'd like to see the image cache manager become common code and have all the hypervisors deal with this in exactly the same manner -- that makes it easier to document, and means that on-call operations people don't need to determine…
This post is kind of long, and a little self indulgent. However, I really wanted to spend some time thinking about what I did for the Essex release cycle, and what I want to do for the Folsom release. I spent Essex mostly hacking on things in isolation, except for when Padraig Brady and I were hacking in a similar space. I'd like to collaborate more for Folsom, and I'm hoping talking about what I'm interested in doing in public might help with that. I came relatively late to the Essex development cycle, having never even heard of OpenStack before joining Canonical. We can talk about how I'd worked in the cloud space for six years and yet wasn't aware of the open source implementations at some other time. My initial introduction to OpenStack was being paged for compute nodes which were continually running out of disk. I googled around a bit and discovered that cached images for instances were never cleaned up (to start an instance, an image is fetched from glance, possibly has its format converted, is resized, and then an instance started with that resulting image, all those images were never being cleaned up). I filed bug…
It's time to start thinking about your talk proposals, because the call for papers is only eight weeks away! For the 2013 conference, the papers committee are going to be focusing on deep technical content, and things we think are going to really matter in the future -- that might range from freedom and privacy, to open source cloud systems, or energy efficient server farms of the future. However, the conference is to a large extent what the speakers make it -- if we receive many excellent submissions on a topic, then its sure to be represented at the conference. The papers committee will be headed by the able combination of Michael Davies and Mary Gardiner, who have done an excellent job in previous years. They're currently working through the details of the call for papers announcement. I am telling you this now because I want speakers to have plenty of time to prepare for the submissions process, as I think that will produce the highest quality of submissions. I also wanted to let you know the organising for linux.conf.au 2013 is progressing well. We're currently in the process of locking in all of our venue arrangements, so we will…
I've been reading this book for ages, but finished it last night. It feels a bit trivial to be writing this now, but I tend to read more when I am stressed, and I finished this while waiting for the kids to go to bed last night, so I may as well quickly write it up. This book is the Kingdom war promised in Shadow of a Dark Queen and Rise of a Merchant Prince. I was a lot more comfortable with this book, because its mostly not about Roo wanting to shag every woman on the planet. In fact, a lot of people get their comeuppance, which is nice. However, heaps of people who don't deserve it also die. Its almost like a A Hymn Before Battle or Legion of the Damned, which are both books which stick in my mind as being ones where most everyone dies. Overall a good book, which a good ending which I think is a little rare for large scale combat novels. [isbn: 0006482988]
It seems that stickers are a gas -- they expand to occupy available space. We thought we'd ordered heaps of extra stickers to promote LCA 2013, but now we find ourselves running low. That's not a huge problem, but I do wonder if they are getting used or are just in the bottom of people's sock drawers. So here's the plan -- if you've got a LCA 2013 sticker and have stuck it somewhere, why not tweet a picture of it with the #lca2013 hashtag? If you don't use twitter, blog it or whatever and let us know at contact@lca2013.linux.org.au. The best picture will get a prize. I don't know what yet, because I just totally made this up. Perhaps a t-shirt. Perhaps a pet goat.
I bought this book on impulse, and I am glad I did. The book is very Buddhist in its outlook, and characters believe in reincarnation, which makes it ok for people to die. There sure is a lot of that happening in this book, perhaps more so than in Dietz's combat books. The underlying story is very different from the other Dietz stuff I have read, and very good. The Legion of the Damned books suffer from very one dimensional characterizations of their female characters, whereas this book has a strong female as a leading and fully developed character, which is a nice change. I enjoyed this book. [isbn: 9780441014095]
I had read this book many years ago, and remembered it fondly. I wasn't disappointed reading it again -- its certainly a classic techno-thriller, even if it is a little dated now. I imagine it would make less sense to someone who hadn't grown up with the cold war, but within that context its a good read. The worst bit is that given what we knew back then it is so completely plausible. Great book. [isbn: 0006173624;9780006173625]
I didn't really like this book, but I persisted with it because I want to keep reading the series. I thought the previous Serpent War book Shadow of a Dark Queen was weak, but this book was weaker. The book follows the rise of Roo as a merchant, and is improbable at best -- Roo's wealth is generated by cornering the food market for Krondor and I see weaknesses in the analysis there -- surely the Duke wouldn't allow such a manipulation of the market when it harms his citizens, why weren't there food riots when the cost of basic staples jumped to record levels overnight? Basically, it just doesn't seem believable to me. The sequence at the panthian lair on the other hand is much better, and the best bit of the book. Its a pity it is only about 50 pages long. [isbn: 0006497012;0071001007992;0380720876]