Made by Mikal – Page 74

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]

Book covers

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 20, 2008
Post category:Book

I was bored this afternoon, so I tweaked my bloxsom plugin which was already using ISBN number tags to produce links to LibraryThing. It now fetches cover art for the book (if available) and puts that into posts magically. If you're interested in such things its really easy to fetch cover images from LibraryThing.

Magician: Master

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 17, 2008
Post category:Book

Perhaps it would have been better if Feist had kept Magician all as one book. In the first book you hear of Guy (a bad guy!) briefly, and then nothing more. Then, hundreds of pages later in the second book he comes up again as a major plot element. If you haven't recently read the first book, then you are at a disadvantage. Apart from that, this is a good book that I would have preferred to read faster. Unfortunately work has kept me unusually busy recently, so this one took a while to read. [isbn: 0553564935]

Magician: Apprentice

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 14, 2008
Post category:Book

This is the reworked version of Magician, although its split into two books and there is some content that was dropped as part of the editing process for the original version. This version was developed for the tenth anniversary of the original publication. I read the original version as a kid and was so proud of myself when it finished it -- it was by far the longest book I had ever read at the time. I've seen people online complain that this book is just a big ball of cliche. There are dwarves, wizards with funny hats, elves, and so on. But there are also new ideas here, such as alien invaders in a fantasy novel and so on. Overall I think the cliches don't get in the way and are largely used a sort of short hand... Feist doesn't need to explain what a dwarf is, so he can skip that bit and get on with telling the story. After rereading this as an adult, I still really like this book. [isbn: 0553564943]

The Stainless Steel Rat Goes To Hell

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 11, 2008
Post category:Book

This book is weak compared to some of the best Stainless Steel Rat books. It suffers from the same almost-impossible-to-believe plot lines as The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World and The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You. Frankly, the book also jumps around a lot, and I found it hard to follow. On the other hand, this series has never pretended to be great literature, and this book is light years better than the work of the world's most boring author. [isbn: 0812551079]

Iron Master

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 9, 2008
Post category:Book

This is the third book in the Amtrak Wars series. I think this is a better book than First Family, which suffered from not having much plot development. This book on the other hand moves the plot along, whilst being interesting. You also get to learn more about the Iron Masters, as well as how dodgy the First Family is. A good read. [isbn: 0671653385;0722185189]

paramiko exec_command timeout

Post author:mikal
Post published:October 6, 2008
Post category:Python

I have a paramiko program which sshs to a large number of machines, and sometimes it hits a machine where Channel.exec_command() doesn't return. I know this is a problem with the remote machine, because the same thing happens when I try to ssh to the machine from the command line. However, I don't have any way of determining which machines are broken beforehand. Paramiko doesn't support a timeout for exec_command(), so I am looking for a generic way of running a function call with a timeout. I can see sample code which does this using threads, but that's pretty ugly. I can't use SIGALARM because I am not running on the main thread. Can anyone think of a better way of doing this?