This is a short book, and quite different from the other Asimovs I’ve read recently. Specifically it doesn’t have any robots, and isn’t a murder mystery. Its also set about 1,000 years into the future from the previous Robot Mysteries. Its a good book, with a style similar to the original Robot Mysteries (distinct from…
Author: mikal
Dealing with remote HTTP servers with buggy chunking implementations
HTTP 1.1 implements chunking as a way of servers telling clients how much content is left for a given request, which enables you to send more than one piece of content in a given HTTP connection. Unfortunately for me, the site I was trying to access has a buggy chunking implementation, and that causes the…
The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues
The underlying premise of this book is weak (a criminal forced into a band in order to find a stolen item), but like I’ve said in the past the Stainless Steel Rat books are fun, and not really intended to make you a better person. This one is along those lines too — its an…
Sydney 1, Mikal 1
I tried two more second hand bookstores yesterday. Books Buy and Sell no longer exists, it has been replaced with a sex toy store. I guess that says something about Sydney again. Gould’s books was all I had remembered (big mounds of books everywhere), and was worth the visit. Its more organised than I remember,…
Universal Feedparser and XML namespaces
I’ve always found python’s Universal Feedparser to be a bit hard to work with when using feeds with XML namespaces. Specifically, if you don’t care about the stuff in the namespaces then you’re fine, but if you want that data it gets a lot harder. In the past I’ve had to do some gross hacks….
Sydney redeems itself, if only a little
On the way home from our awesome soup dumpling dinner in Sydney we dropped into Elizabeth’s Bookshop entirely by accident. We’d deliberately walked a block offset from where we do normally to avoid boredom, and just got lucky. The second hand science fiction selection was good (not huge, but big enough to have some stuff…
On the potentially sorry state of second hand science fiction book stores in Sydney
Following a recommendation from Danny, I went and checked out Galaxy Books on York Street during one of my lunch times. The review says they have a good second hand section, and I am still hunting for some old Asimovs. Unfortunately, it was a waste of time. The second hand section must of only had…
The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted
This book is another Stainless Steel Rat prequel, although it was written well after the original book. This book takes up from where A Stainless Steel Rat is Born ends — with Jim arrested (of course), on a surprisingly low tech planet. Jim must then escape, and make his way in the universe once more….
Books read in June 2008
Robots and Empire Caliban Inferno
Raymond E Feist’s Serpentwar Saga
(I went book shopping in Canberra yesterday). C Year Title Notes 1994 Shadow of a Dark Queen Stored in Australia (Box 1). [bookstore: garagesale] 1995 Rise of a Merchant Prince 1997 Rage of a Demon King Stored in Australia (Box 1). [bookstore: garagesale] 1998 Shards of a Broken Crown