Belgarath the Sorcerer Foundation’s Triumph Bill the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains A Darkness at Sethanon Foundation’s Edge Foundation and Earth Daggerspell Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Odyssey Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Suspicion Blood River
Author: mikal
Blood River
This is the fourth book in the Amtrak Wars series. Its pretty good, about the same level of writing as Cloud Warrior and Iron Master, which I guess means it was better than First Family (which was mostly a connector between the first and third books in the series). In this book we learn that…
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Suspicion
This is the second book in the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City series, and follows on directly from Odyssey. In fact, it follows so closely that it feels like it should be part of that earlier book. I preferred this book to the first in the series, I suspect because it didn’t need to use a…
PNGtools 0.4
Wow, this is a blast from the past. When I wrote the pngchunks command in 2003, I had never seen a 64 bit machine, and knew enough to check that an int was the right size, but not enough to just use the guaranteed-to-be-32-bit version from day 1. I’d pretty much forgotten about this code…
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Odyssey
This is the first in a series of robot stories endorsed by Isaac Asimov. I enjoyed the first third of the book more than the last two thirds, mainly because I found the second two thirds a little hard to believe. Interestingly they were hard to believe in a similar manner to some of the…
Packet capture in python
I’m home sick with a cold today and got bored. I wanted to play with packet capture in python, and the documentation for pcapy is a little sparse. I therefore wrote this simple little sample script: #!/usr/bin/python # A simple example of how to use pcapy. This needs to be run as root. import datetime…
Daggerspell
This is yet another book I read as a kid and liked. I must admit that I find the Celtic names used through out the book to be quite confusing, especially when there are multiple similar names in use at the same time. Despite that, I really enjoyed this book — even though its a…
Foundation and Earth
I really like how Asimov wraps up the extended Foundation series. Specifically, I’d previously complained while reading Pebble in the Sky that it was hard to believe that everyone simply forgets that they originated on Earth — this book and Foundation’s Edge go a long way to resolving that annoyance for me. Its also good…
Foundation’s Edge
I’m back to reading Foundation Series books actually written by Isaac Asimov. This one is the fourth in the Foundation Series if you count them in the order they were written, but is the second last in chronological terms. Its set 500 years after the failure of the first galactic empire, and follows the first…
Automatically creating folders for mailing lists
I’ve been using some simple procmail rules to automatically create folders for mailing lists for ages. Tony asked me for those rules today, so I figured I’d just put them online. ########################################################################## # Mailman :0: * List-Id:.*]* $MATCH :0: * List-Post: ]* $MATCH ########################################################################## # Majordomo lists (sometimes don’t have ‘s around the address :0:…