The DVD drive in one of my MythTV machines has given up the ghost. I have to go to Fry’s tomorrow to replace a dead hard disk, so I’ll pick up a new drive while I am at it. I am surprised to discover that Blu Ray drives are now just $90. I wonder what…
Amtrak Wars
A post apocalyptic struggle between the three groups of North American survivors — a military society called “The Amtrak Federation”, the mutes (the survivors of American poor neighborhoods), and Ne Issan (former Japanese who sailed from Japan when their islands were flooded). 1983: Cloud Warrior 1985: First Family 1987: Iron Master 1988: Blood River 1989:…
Earth Thunder
This is the last book of the Amtrak Wars series. I’m much less comfortable with Steven’s character in this book — he’s always been a bit mixed up, and I don’t blame him for that given his background, but in this book he’s actively disloyal to those he loves, which is something new. That made…
Killing a blocking thread in python?
It seems that there is no way of killing a blocking thread in python? The standard way of implementing thread death seems to be to implement an exit() method on the class which is the thread, and then call that when you want the thread to die. However, if the run() method of the thread…
Death Bringer
I feel sorry for Jake Olsen. It must be hard having the ensign-in-the-red-shirt role. This book is as good as the rest of the series, and the First Family truly are bastards. I really liked this one. [isbn: 0747400016]
Books read in November 2008
Belgarath the Sorcerer Foundation’s Triumph Bill the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains A Darkness at Sethanon Foundation’s Edge Foundation and Earth Daggerspell Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Odyssey Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Suspicion Blood River
Blood River
This is the fourth book in the Amtrak Wars series. Its pretty good, about the same level of writing as Cloud Warrior and Iron Master, which I guess means it was better than First Family (which was mostly a connector between the first and third books in the series). In this book we learn that…
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Suspicion
This is the second book in the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City series, and follows on directly from Odyssey. In fact, it follows so closely that it feels like it should be part of that earlier book. I preferred this book to the first in the series, I suspect because it didn’t need to use a…
PNGtools 0.4
Wow, this is a blast from the past. When I wrote the pngchunks command in 2003, I had never seen a 64 bit machine, and knew enough to check that an int was the right size, but not enough to just use the guaranteed-to-be-32-bit version from day 1. I’d pretty much forgotten about this code…
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Odyssey
This is the first in a series of robot stories endorsed by Isaac Asimov. I enjoyed the first third of the book more than the last two thirds, mainly because I found the second two thirds a little hard to believe. Interestingly they were hard to believe in a similar manner to some of the…