Tomorrow I’m jumping on a JAL flight to Tokyo. I will be in Tokyo for a week, mostly for work meetings. I’m hoping to fit some sightseeing in on the weekend. Let me know if you have any recommendations.
Naked Sun
Bill Clarke was kind enough to lend me a compendium of Asimov that contained the next book in the series I’m reading at the moment. I’ve had to skip over some of the earlier collections of robot short stories, because they’re quite hard to find. Specifically, I haven’t been able to find anyone with a…
Caves of Steel
Caves of Steel is interesting because it is a murder mystery set in the future, which at the time this book was written was a novel concept. It also presents an interesting almost-communist view of the future, where individual liberties are surrendered one by one in order to improve economic efficiency in order to support…
I, Robot
The 1950s must have been a great time to be a science fiction author. WW2 was finally over, and seemingly massively stupid ideas like mutually assured destruction, nuclear rifles so powerful that they were as much a danger to those firing them as those who were on the receiving end, and Brylcreem were all the…
Bill The Galactic Hero
This book is an interesting read, but for unusual reasons. Its as if Harrison sets out to write a terrible book, and learns new techniques to achieve this terrible along the way. An example of his mastery of the art: A hundred bucks a month was good money, though, and Bill saved every bit of…
Estimating the progress of queries on MySQL
I’ve been doing a lot of batch updates on one of my databases at home recently. show processlist says something like this: mysql> show processlist; +——-+——+—————+————–+———+——-+———-+——————————————+ | Id | User | Host | db | Command | Time | State | Info | +——-+——+—————+————–+———+——-+———-+——————————————| | 18354 | root | maui:37403 | smtp_servers | Query |…
The Complete Hammer’s Slammers Volume 2
This book is as good as The first volume. This book comes highly recommended. Stories included: At Any Price Counting the Cost Rolling Hot The Warrior The Day of Glory [isbn: 1892389738]
The Complete Hammer’s Slammers Volume 1
It occurred to me over the weekend that it was odd that I was updating books I had recently read on a book site like goodreads, given that all I’m doing by entering data on their site is blogging someplace that not even I remember to read. I’m therefore going to move all of that…
A Stainless Steel Rat is Born
This was another book I read as a kid and had fond memories of. When I found it at Powell’s books for under $4 I just had to pick it up. Harrison seems to focus on “pulp science fiction” — all of the stuff I have seen from him has been short and easy reading,…
init script
Jake Graft pointed out in a comment that I had forgotten to put the init script from the MythTV book online. My apologies. #! /bin/sh # # mythbackend # PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin BACKEND=/usr/local/bin/mythbackend BACKEND_NAME=mythbackend MYTHUSER=”myth” test -x $BACKEND || exit 0 set -e case “$1” in start) echo -n “Starting MythTV: $BACKEND_NAME” su ${MYTHUSER} -c “$BACKEND -v…