This book is better than the Stainless Steel Rat books which insist on things like time or dimensional travel — this one sticks to the more traditional crime plot, which I think are generally better. Then again, its nowhere near the best Stainless Steel Rat book I have read. It feels a little like the…
Foundation and Chaos
This is the second book in the second Foundation trilogy, following on from Foundation’s Fear, which I didn’t enjoy. This book on the other hand is quite good. Its not the best book I’ve read recently, but its faithful to the universe that Asimov built, as well as resolving all the silly plot elements that…
Book covers
I was bored this afternoon, so I tweaked my bloxsom plugin which was already using ISBN number tags to produce links to LibraryThing. It now fetches cover art for the book (if available) and puts that into posts magically. If you’re interested in such things its really easy to fetch cover images from LibraryThing.
Magician: Master
Perhaps it would have been better if Feist had kept Magician all as one book. In the first book you hear of Guy (a bad guy!) briefly, and then nothing more. Then, hundreds of pages later in the second book he comes up again as a major plot element. If you haven’t recently read the…
Magician: Apprentice
This is the reworked version of Magician, although its split into two books and there is some content that was dropped as part of the editing process for the original version. This version was developed for the tenth anniversary of the original publication. I read the original version as a kid and was so proud…
The Stainless Steel Rat Goes To Hell
This book is weak compared to some of the best Stainless Steel Rat books. It suffers from the same almost-impossible-to-believe plot lines as The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World and The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You. Frankly, the book also jumps around a lot, and I found it hard to follow. On the other…
Iron Master
This is the third book in the Amtrak Wars series. I think this is a better book than First Family, which suffered from not having much plot development. This book on the other hand moves the plot along, whilst being interesting. You also get to learn more about the Iron Masters, as well as how…
paramiko exec_command timeout
I have a paramiko program which sshs to a large number of machines, and sometimes it hits a machine where Channel.exec_command() doesn’t return. I know this is a problem with the remote machine, because the same thing happens when I try to ssh to the machine from the command line. However, I don’t have any…
MythNetTV release 6
New things in this release: Better testing: r114: Unit tests for video.py r148: Updated unit test now that we create more tables r151: Start work on syndication unit tests r153: Unit test for bad syndication dates, as well as more flexibility in db connections needed for this unit test r157: Nicer unit test failure output,…
The Malloreon
This is the followup series to the Belgariad. Its mostly a sequel series, but is quite readable and worth the effort. 1988: Guardians of the West 1989: King of the Murgos 1989: Demon Lord of Karanda 1990: Sorceress of Darshiva 1992: Seeress of Kell