I read this anthology as a child, but when I found a copy on ebay that was cheap I couldn’t resist. This is a collection of short stories focusing on what war might be like in the future. It’s a good read, although a couple of the stories are out of place compared with the…
Calculating a SSH host key with paramiko
I needed to compare a host key from something other than a known_hosts file with what paramiko reports as part of the SSH connection today. If you must know, the host keys for these machines are retrieved a XMLRPC API… It turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. Here’s how I produced…
Bio of a Space Tyrant: Refugee
I’m not really sure what I think about this book. Its well written, and very readable, but depressing. The book starts with a sexual assault, and then moves on to describe what its like to be the minimum wage labor in a space colony. The short answer — its not much fun. Worse than that,…
Books read in December 2008
Death Bringer Earth Thunder Darkspell Polgara the Sorceress Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Cyborg Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Prodigy Daughter of the Empire
Daughter of the Empire
This is a really good book. It was a delight to find something so good that it kept me up well past my bed time several nights running. I really enjoyed this one — its set on Kelwan, the planet that invades Midkemia in the Riftwar series, and is written from the perspective of the…
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Prodigy
This is the fourth book in the Robot City series, which is based in Asimov’s Foundation universe. This one follows Odyssey, Suspicion and Cyborg. This book has quite a different style, the robot characters using quite convoluted sentences, which I found annoying. It is a little jarring in this series that each book is by…
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Cyborg
This is the third book in the Robot City series, which is based in Asimov’s Foundation universe. This one follows Odyssey and Suspicion, and is a pretty good book. Its also a very fast read. The robot-wandering-the-city subplot is very reminiscent of Caliban, which is yet another Asimov spinoff. The plot lines are different enough…
Polgara the Sorceress
This is the final continuation of the Belgariad and the Malloreon series, following on from the Belgarath the Sorcerer continuation. The two continuation books are really just the same stories told from other perspectives, yet Belgarath the Sorcerer managed to be a really interesting read. It probably helped that Belgarath’s story predates the Belgariad by…
MythBuntu 8.10 just made me sad
I figured it was time to give MythBuntu a try, so I set up a MythBuntu 8.10 instance in VirtualBox today. That was a mistake. I’m not 100% sure I understand how it happened, but MythBuntu somehow managed to delete my entire mythconverg MySQL database instance. Not pleased. I’ve restored it from last night’s backup,…
Darkspell
This is the second book in the Deverry series, and I liked it. Its a direct continuation of Daggerspell, and deals with Rodrhys and Jill’s life on the road. [isbn: 0553568884;0586200797]