The next chapter, The Hard Way: Installing Ubuntu is now ready. This chapter took a lot longer than I wanted because I was distracted by some stuff in my personal life, but I am hoping that the authoring process is now back on track. This chapter covers how to install Ubuntu so that you can…
Drizzle Developer Day
I spent the day at the Drizzle Developer Day at Sun’s insane asylum campus. I’m not joking here, the campus was apparently a former insane asylum. First off I battled getting Drizzle to compile on Ubuntu 8.10, where the secret sauce appears to be to know about the drizzle-developer PPA. If you’re using Ubuntu 8.10,…
Make Room, Make Room!
I must have read this book a few years ago and forgotten, because I have no specific recollection of reading it, but the plot is familiar. This is a distopian novel about the dangers of over population, and was written at a time when the best available population models said that massive over population was…
Servant of the Empire
This is the sequel to Daughter of the Empire. The book is long at nearly 700 pages, and contains two basic plots, although both are related and use the same characters. They could easily have been separate books — one of the things I like about this book is that it tells more of the…
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Renegade
This book starts poorly, and isn’t as interesting as the previous one in the series (Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Changeling). The introduction uses an alien species with spending any time to describe them, and the process of trying to infer what they are and how they operate distracts from the overall plot….
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Robots and Aliens: Changeling
Despite the rather unwieldy name, and being trapped as the seventh book in a share cropping series using Asimov’s name, this is actually quite a good book. The plot explores something Asimov didn’t do much of (what happens when Asimovian robots meet aliens and define them as human), while not being self righteous about it….
Books read in March 2009
The Dragon Revenant Bio of a Space Tyrant: Mercenary A Time of Exile Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Perihelion
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Perihelion
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I haven’t previously been impressed with Wu’s work, but this book is the best of the Robot City series. The other books suffer from feeling juvenile, whereas this book tells a story without being badly written and boring. Its a shame that you have to wade through the…
A Time of Exile
This book is the fifth in the Deverry series, but focusses on a different set of characters than the other books. However, the new plot line is tied in nicely with the previous stories, so there is a nice combination of furthering the overall plot without bogging down in territory which has been covered by…
Bio of a Space Tyrant: Mercenary
This book continues the story of a poor Hispanic immigrant made good that started with Bio of a Space Tyrant: Refugee. This book is overall much more positive than the previous one, with hardly any of Hope’s friends being killed. The book revolves around Hope’s military career, and the leadership team he builds. Its basically…