2011-10-11: Vacation haul
I really should have bought fewer books, particularly with shipping to get
them all back home, but there are such wonderful book stores here. So I
can't ever refrain. Even though this is almost enough reading for a full
year.
Brian W. Aldiss — Harm (sff)
Brian W. Aldiss — Helliconia Summer (sff)
Jon Armstrong — Grey (sff)
Kage Baker — Gods and Pawns (sff)
John Barnes — Mother of Storms (sff)
Trudi Canavan — The Magicians' Guild (sff)
Michael Chabon — Gentlemen of the Road (mainstream)
C.J. Cherryh — Finity's End (sff)
C.J. Cherryh — Heavy Time (sff)
Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald — The Price of the Stars
(sff)
Doris Egan — Guilt-Edged Ivory (sff)
Doris Egan — Two-Bit Heroes (sff)
Kate Elliot — Jaran (sff)
Raymond E. Fiest — Magician: Master (sff)
Raymond E. Fiest — Silverthorn (sff)
Barbara Hambly — The Rainbow Abyss (sff)
Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory — The Outstretched Shadow
(sff)
Sharon Lee & Steve Miller — Conflict of Honors (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin — The Birthday of the World (sff)
Megan Lindholm — Alien Earth (sff)
Holly Lisle — Memory of Fire (sff)
Karin Lowachee — Burndive (sff)
Karin Lowachee — Cagebird (sff)
Elizabeth A. Lynn — A Different Light (sff)
Jack McDevitt — Cauldron (sff)
Michael Moorcock — Gloriana (sff)
Linda Nagata — Deception Well (sff)
Edward Pangborn — A Mirror for Observers (sff)
Robert V.S. Redick — The Red Wolf Conspiracy (sff)
Alastair Reynolds — Absolution Gap (sff)
Alastair Reynolds — Redemption Ark (sff)
Mary Rosenblum — Horizons (sff)
Brandon Sanderson — Mistborn (sff)
Robert Sawyer — Mindscan (sff)
John Scalzi — Agent to the Stars (sff)
Ken Scholes — Canticle (sff)
Ken Scholes — Lamentation (sff)
Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett — Point of Hopes (sff)
Mike Shepherd — Mutineer (sff)
Midori Snyder — The Innamorati (sff)
Bruce Sterling — Distraction (sff)
Caroline Stevermer — When the King Comes Home (sff)
Charlie Stross — The Fuller Memorandum (sff)
Greg van Eekhout — Norse Code (sff)
John Varley — Millennium (sff)
Liz Williams — Snake Agent (sff)
Walter Jon Williams — Implied Spaces (sff)
Robert Charles Wilson — Axis (sff)
Pretty much all over the map, that. But the real finds of yesterday were
lots of books for my mother. (This would all be much more efficient if we
all lived together and just traded books back and forth, but it's nice to
support bookstores and authors.)
2011-10-20: Vacation
Taken two nights ago by simply walking outside from the restaurant where
we were eating dinner and across a bit of grass and then pointing my
camera at the scene. I admit I got a bit lucky on catching the wave just
right. (The sunset got even more spectacular than this later.)
I've been on a much-needed vacation for the past couple of weeks, and am
now getting into the part of the vacation where I try to figure out how to
restructure things when I get back so that I'm not under as much stress as
I was before I left. That seems particularly critical this year; I think
it's been close to my worst working year for stress, and that needs to
stop. I now have a list of things I want to tackle first off when I get
back and have started sorting them into a prioritized list, and I've
started pondering time allocations to try to keep from getting
overwhelmed. We'll see how it goes; the vacation should at least keep me
going until Christmas.
One truly excellent thing about this vacation is that I've managed to
settle in, relax, and get lost in books. I've finished 10 so far, and
will probably be around 13 or 14 for the whole vacation, which has
recharged my imagination and helped greatly with relaxation. I've posted
a few reviews here and there over the past couple of weeks, but there will
be a flood of them coming once I get back.
2011-10-29: BestSFBooks
I've been keeping track of the books that
win SF awards for a while, along with my ratings and including the
books that won multiple awards. But
I've not yet had the patience to include all of the short list, even
though it often includes books as good or better than the winners. There
are a few other sites, notably Locus's
Index to Science Fiction Awards,
that try to be more comprehensive, but usually they don't present the
results in the most obvious format.
Enter BestSFBooks. The author
sent me a note about it in e-mail, which I appreciate since it's pretty
cool. It's the same basic idea as my pages (and somewhat like the more
comprehensive indices, although only tackles novels and some related books
and not the giant mass of short fiction), but it's more comprehensive and
quite a bit prettier. The basic idea is a list of books across various
time intervals ranked by how many awards they've received, including
nominations as well as wins (which is a good decision).
Best SF books is a bit lofty of a claim, since the award consensus misses
a lot of great stuff (and rewards some questionable books). But it is, at
least, a snapshot of the books that show up in the current zeitgeist and
are getting the most press and discussion, and that alone is an
interesting picture.
Anyway, take a look, and hopefully it will continue to grow and develop.
2011-10-31: rra-c-util 3.10
Various bug fixes in this release.
A discussion on some Usenet groups led to fixes to vector_join and
cvector_join in handling empty vectors. There was a syntax error in the
previous release in handling missing socklen_t and sig_atomic_t (probably
only seen on Windows). The stripping of -I/usr/include from the output of
krb5-config wasn't previously working properly. And the optional versions
of RRA_LIB_KRB5 and RRA_LIB_REMCTL weren't properly optional in all cases.
Also in this release is some additional portability for Windows, which
doesn't define ssize_t.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2011-10-31: remctl 3.0
The major change in this version is a new protocol version that adds a
NOOP message. Clients can send this (and get a NOOP reply from the
server) to keep a remctl connection alive despite a connection timeout
while waiting to send additional commands.
Connection handling has, in general, been cleaned up. The server now
keeps the connection open by default for all replies, including error and
version replies, other than a command message that doesn't have keepalive
set. There is also more error checking around continuation commands in
the server and a new error code for out-of-sequence messages.
New APIs remctl_noop (to send the NOOP message), remctl_set_ccache (to set
the GSS-API credential cache), and remctl_set_source_ip (to set the client
outgoing source IP) have been added to the libremctl library and to all
the language bindings. The remctl command-line client has a new -b option
to set the outgoing source IP.
Bug fixes include fixing the order of checking of GSS-API context flags in
the client so that it works properly with Heimdal libraries (on, for
example, Mac OS X Lion), closing a client memory leak, and sending QUIT to
the server when reopening a client connection. There are also a variety
of build system fixes.
You can get the latest version from the remctl distribution page.
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