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…
Red Storm Rising
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…
Rise of a Merchant Prince
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…
Wow, qemu-img is fast
I wanted to determine if its worth putting ephemeral images into the libvirt cache at all. How expensive are these images to create? They don’t need to come from the image service, so it can’t be too bad, right? It turns out that qemu-img is very very fast at creating these images, based on the…
Slow git review uploads?
jeblair was kind enough to help me debug my problem with slow “git review” uploads for Openstack projects just now. It turns out that part of my standard configuration for ssh is to enable ControlMaster and ControlPersist. I mostly do this because the machines I use at Canonical are a very long way away from…
Announcement video
I imagine that most people saw this at the conference closing. However, for completeness and because I feel that if we’re going to put videos of other speakers online then I should suffer the same fate, here is the LCA 2013 announcement from Ballarat:
Shadow of a Dark Queen
I read this book before LCA 2012, but never had a chance to mention it here. It was the first return to Midkemia for me since I read the Krondor’s Sons books. This book is set a lot later, and there is very little reuse of characters between The Riftwar Saga or even Krondor’s Sons….
Are you in a LUG? Do you want some promotional materials for LCA 2013?
Canberra was announced as the host for LCA 2013 at the close of LCA 2012. As part of that closing, we handed out postcards and laptop stickers to delegates. However, we deliberately had extra printed on the theory that groups like LUGs, university computer societies and so forth would be interested in having promotional materials…
linux.conf.au Returns to Canberra in 2013
I am incredibly pleased to announce that linux.conf.au 2013 will be hosted by Canberra, Australia between 28 January 2013 to 2 February 2013. As the director for 2013 I have been blessed with a simply incredible team who has done fantastic work during the bid process, and I am confident that we will pull off…
Its a good sign that they’re already making fun of me, right?
So, today on IRC… 16:07 <mikal> So, breakfast catering at the student accommodation… Will there be bacon? 16:07 <ctudball> mikal: You have my permission to riot if there is no bacon. 16:07 <mikal> Yay! 16:07 <mikal> Real coffee? 16:08 <ctudball> mikal: No. 16:08 <mikal> ! … 16:10 <mikal> I can still add breakfast to my…