Posts for September 2019

2019-09-01: rra-c-util 8.0

This is a roll-up of a lot of changes to my utility package for C (and increasingly for Perl). It's been more than a year since the last release, so it's long-overdue.

Most of the changes in this release are to the Perl test libraries and accompanying tests. Test::RRA now must be imported before Test::More so that it can handle the absence of Test::More (such as on Red Hat systems with perl but not perl-core installed). The is_file_contents function in Test::RRA now handles Windows and other systems without a diff program. And there are more minor improvements to the various tests written in Perl.

The Autoconf probe RRA_LIB_KRB5_OPTIONAL now correctly handles the case where Kerberos libraries are not available but libcom_err is, rather than incorrectly believing that Kerberos libraries were present.

As of this release, rra-c-util now tests the Perl test programs that it includes, which requires it to build and test a dummy Perl module. This means the build system now requires Perl 5.6.2 and the Module::Build module.

You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.

2019-09-01 17:22 — Permanent link

2019-09-29: Haul post

It's been quite a while since I made one of these, and I... may have been supporting a lot of authors financially despite my huge to-read pile.

Louisa Alcott — Little Women (mainstream)
Louisa Alcott — Good Wives (mainstream)
Louisa Alcott — Little Men (mainstream)
Louisa Alcott — Jo's Boys (mainstream)
Ilona Andrews — Sweep of the Blade (sff)
Becky Chambers — To Be Taught, If Fortunte (sff)
James Clear — Atomic Habits (nonfiction)
Michael Collins — Carrying the Fire (nonfiction)
Aliette de Bodard — In the Vanisher's Palace (sff)
Paul Dolan — Happy Ever After (nonfiction)
Benjamin Dreyer — Dreyer's English (nonfiction)
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone — This is How You Lose the Time War (sff)
Max Gladstone — Empress of Forever (sff)
Emily Guendelsberger — On the Clock (nonfiction)
Alix E. Harrow — The Ten Thousand Doors of January (sff)
Linda Hirshman — Reckoning (nonfiction)
Mike Isaac — Super Pumped (nonfiction)
Jodi Kantor — She Said (nonfiction)
Guy Gavriel Kay — A Brightness Long Ago (sff)
Sarah Kendzior — The View from Flyover Country (nonfiction)
T. Kingfisher — Minor Mage (sff)
Karoliina Korhonen — Finnish Nightmares 2 (graphic novel)
Karoliina Korhonen — Matti in the Wallet (graphic novel)
Mary Robinette Kowal — The Fated Sky (sff)
Yoon Ha Lee — Hexarchate Stories (sff)
Mark Manson — The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (nonfiction)
Laurie J. Marks — Air Logic (sff)
Randall Munroe — How To (graphic novel)
Terry Pratchett — Lords and Ladies (sff)
Karl Schroeder — Stealing Worlds (sff)
Ryk E. Spoor — Challenges of the Deeps (sff)
J. Michael Straczynski — Becoming Superman (nonfiction)
P.L. Travers — Mary Poppins (children's)
P.L. Travers — Mary Poppins Comes Back (children's)
P.L. Travers — Mary Poppins Opens the Door (children's)
P.L. Travers — Mary Poppins in the Park (children's)
Jo Walton — Lent (sff)

Phew. I'm coming up on a vacation during which I'll have tons of time to read, but I still am buying books rather faster than reading them. Oh well, money into the pockets of authors, which is always a good thing.

There's a whole mess of non-fiction in there, since I've been in a mood of queuing up a lot of interesting-looking non-fiction to read. (I've resisted grabbing even more.) You might be able to tell that I've never made the transition to getting samples and only buying the book if the sample looks good. Or, for that matter, stopping reading a book if I'm not liking it.

There are also several new releases in there, which will probably be vacation reading, and a couple of books that I've already read but haven't written reviews of yet.

2019-09-29 19:53 — Permanent link