This is quite a different book from most of the recent Pern books because of its leisurely pace. Its a nice read, although it feels like not much actually happens in the book. Unfortunately the plot is pretty much a cliche at this point — child has special affinity for animal X, parents don’t understand,…
Buying Time
This book isn’t Haldeman’s best work (checkout The Forever War, The Forever Peace, or Marsbound for examples of his really good stuff). I found the characters largely unsympathetic, and the plot quite slow. The book is also odd in that it was written in 1989, but is full of stuff you’d expect to see from…
A Hymn Before Battle
This is an interesting book in that it lays down a reasonably believable scenario and then doesn’t really resolve it. Its obviously setting up for a series, and while the local micro plot is resolved, there is clearly a larger story arc that wants telling here. The book isn’t happy or uplifting, it is downright…
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
I sympathize with the other LibraryThing reviewer who had trouble finding characters to like in this novel. This book isn’t very long, but took me ages to read because the main character is so whiney. The whole story seems to revolve around how he’s never happy, and that didn’t work for me. I think the…
Why Can’t Elephants Jump?
This is another fun book from New Scientist’s Last Word column and I enjoyed it. A good read, and I actually learnt some stuff (some of it possibly true) along the way. Title: Why Can't Elephants Jump? Author: New Scientist Genre: Science Publisher: Profile Books Release Date: October 7, 2010 Pages: 240 Well, why not?…
Books read in November 2010
Breakfast of Champions Old Man’s War The Ghost Brigades The Last Colony Ender’s Game Snow Crash The Sagan Diary Zoe’s Tale Broken Angels
Multiple file support with scp
Paramiko doesn’t provide a scp implementation, so I’ve been using my own for a while. http://blogs.sun.com/janp/entry/how_the_scp_protocol_works (link now unfortunately dead) provides good documentation about the scp protocol, but it missed out on one detail I needed — how to send more than one file in a given session. In the end I implemented a simple…
Broken Angels
This book is very different from Altered Carbon, as noted by many other online reviews. I found it very slow going, for a few reasons: it is quite long; it is very different from Altered Carbon in a way that almost feel like a bait and switch (Altered Carbon is a film noir detective novel,…
The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat
This is an omnibus edition, containing: The Stainless Steel Rat, The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge, and The Stainless Steel Rats Revenge. [isbn: 0425095312]
Zoe’s Tale
This is a retelling of the events of The Last Colony from the perspective of Zoe, the teenaged adopted daughter of the colony leaders. The story makes the teenaged female narrator quite believable, although that is a little annoying at times. There is a lot of introductory material, and then a relatively rapid wrap up…