Written well after the original Foundation novels, Prelude to Foundation is one of two prequels. The book ties in nicely with Robots and Empire, as well as the other robot novels. Its a good book too, with its 460ish pages only taking a few days to read (I think I knocked it over in about…
The Stainless Steel Rat
I’ll keep this post short and sweet, like the book which took me three hours to read. This is the first Stainless Steel Rat book, and I think the best that I have read so far. Love it. [isbn: 1857984986]
Pebble in the Sky
This is Asimov’s first book, and not his best. Its set on an Earth which is radioactive (possibly because of a global nuclear war as supposed in the book, or perhaps because of events described in Robots and Empire). There is a galactic empire at this point, and overall humans have forgotten that they originated…
The Currents of Space
“The Currents of Space is a 1952 novel by the American science fiction author Isaac Asimov. It is the second of three books labelled the Galactic Empire series. Each occurs after humans have settled many worlds in the galaxy after the second wave of colonisation that went beyond the Spacer worlds and before the era…
MythNetTV release 3
New things in this release: Started work on an RSS exporter for MythTV recordings DX50 doesn’t need transcode Tweaked supported video mime types so “Tikibar TV” and “Ask a ninja” work First cut of Bittorrent support Schema upgrades Archive recordings as well as importing them Improved –list output Subtitle restrictions on download as well Make…
The Stars, Like Dust
This is a short book, and quite different from the other Asimovs I’ve read recently. Specifically it doesn’t have any robots, and isn’t a murder mystery. Its also set about 1,000 years into the future from the previous Robot Mysteries. Its a good book, with a style similar to the original Robot Mysteries (distinct from…
Dealing with remote HTTP servers with buggy chunking implementations
HTTP 1.1 implements chunking as a way of servers telling clients how much content is left for a given request, which enables you to send more than one piece of content in a given HTTP connection. Unfortunately for me, the site I was trying to access has a buggy chunking implementation, and that causes the…
The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues
The underlying premise of this book is weak (a criminal forced into a band in order to find a stolen item), but like I’ve said in the past the Stainless Steel Rat books are fun, and not really intended to make you a better person. This one is along those lines too — its an…
Sydney 1, Mikal 1
I tried two more second hand bookstores yesterday. Books Buy and Sell no longer exists, it has been replaced with a sex toy store. I guess that says something about Sydney again. Gould’s books was all I had remembered (big mounds of books everywhere), and was worth the visit. Its more organised than I remember,…
Universal Feedparser and XML namespaces
I’ve always found python’s Universal Feedparser to be a bit hard to work with when using feeds with XML namespaces. Specifically, if you don’t care about the stuff in the namespaces then you’re fine, but if you want that data it gets a lot harder. In the past I’ve had to do some gross hacks….