Author Archives: Josh

Ending the latest tryst

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My dalliance with the latest social networking fad, Google+, has come to and end even faster than normal and ended with me deleting my account on what currently seems to be another useless service.

I just haven’t found out what these services are good for yet, and google’s offering further confuses things by being a number if different offerings that are apparently related? I ended up deleting google+ because I was trying to delete buzz, which appears to be completely unrelated, right up until you try and delete it? Google reader, buzz, google+, and “+1” all appear to be completely unrelated services doing things that don’t really have value unless they work together. +1 should note an item in reader, which should let me choose which circles I want to share it with.

Another minor point about google+ was the fact that I would have the app open in firefox, I’d even have it as the front window, and something new would happen. The browser would update, I would get a push notification, I got an email, and I got the little “new unread items” badge in the open tabs for both gmail and google reader. That’s a lot of notifications. And do you think that marking any one of them as read would mark all of them as read? That would be nice wouldn’t it. I think I’ll stick with my IMAP email, at least I only have to deal with notifications once.

And for the love of almighty Zeus would you please bring back the brilliant “reply in-line to a subset of users” feature from Wave? Circles doesn’t even really help because if I post it to all my circles when someone from one of my circles replies I don’t necessarily want everyone from all my circles being introduced to each other, it sort of defeats the point?

So, aside from complete lack of integration and being unable to understand which bits do what, why did I leave? Because it doesn’t help me talk to you. Utterly useless at it. The noise level is just far too high. Everyone is talking but nobody is listening.? (Believe me, I’m aware of the irony of posting this on my “blog”. Heh. That’s another story though.)
So for now, I’m back to being found here on my website and via email. (You can also see what I find interesting on Google Reader)

Now with more sekretz

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Daedalusdreams.com is now SSL enabled for your convenience and security.Well… more for mine actually. However, it’s worth noting that you can access it at https://daedalusdreams.com/ and browse to your heart’s content with assurances that nobody aside from me knows what you’re up to.

The entire basis of security and authenticity on the internet is an amazing thing. When you make a request to daedalusdreams.com what assurances do you have that the content you’re getting is actually from me on this domain that I own? None. Anybody in the middle could be intercepting my communication to you and altering it. Which is why we have HTTPS/SSL. When you make a secure request you get this certificate that tells you “yep, we promise that anything coming from this IP is actually daedalusdreams.com”, and to help make sure nothing is modified mid-stream everything you get is also encrypted using that certificate.

So yay right? You now know that it’s me, and it’s really what I’m saying! But who ensures that? The root certificate authority that I used is basically vouching for me. It’s okay, they’re trustworthy right?! Well, sure they are, but how hard did they work to make sure that I am? They emailed me at “webmaster@daedalusdreams.com”. Theoretically since I have access to that email I’m the domain owner, and presto certificato we’re “secure”. (Well, technically I also had to buy a static IP for my domain name since you have to have a permanent address.)

Does the entire thing sound a little shifty to you? Yah, me too. At least my host offers a pretty reasonable price for certificates. The entire industry is sort of a racket, so it’s nice to be able to avoid having to shop around through that mess. The process needs to change however, in order for security on the web to become what it should be. That, however, is an entirely different blog post. For now, we’ll be happy that everything here is nice and tidy, and we’ll worry about the entire future of the internet at a later point.

Climbing Olympus – Kevin J. Anderson

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The story starts with our hero on the slopes of Mt. Olympus, the largest volcano in the solar system…

Oh wait, no it doesn’t. In fact I have a hard time recalling if the venerable mountain was even mentioned before one of the characters began to climb it in the last 10 or so pages of the book.

Ah well, what’s in a name right? Kevin J. Anderson writes a pretty reasonable novel in my experience, and this one doesn’t let you down. Sort of the typical monster-of-the-week style story with the your average characters, and no real crazy plot-twists to throw you overboard, this one is a fun read. Poul Anderson did a quote for the cover:

An exciting story… one feels that this may very well be the way the conquest of Mars will happen.

Gotta agree. Unfortunately not much more to say. I enjoyed reading it, but I’m done reading it now and it doesn’t have anything else to offer me. I don’t even have a particularly memorable quote. With a very human quality to the characters, and an arid and dead feeling to the planet, it’s a gritty and realistic tale of homesteading the martian plain. Now, off to powells we go for a trade-in!

Time Blender – Michael Dorn

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It’s WORF right? How could I possibly NOT read this book? So it’s been on my shelf for quite some time now, waiting to be read. In the first paragraph we find out that our character is black, handsome, academic, athletic, and troubled. (Several paragraphs later we discover that “troubled” comes from being an ex bomber pilot who dropped a 2000lb bomb on a building that turned out to be full of children. Also, that our academic, handsome, black, athletic hero was too much of a he-man to be able to stomach seeing a counselor for what sounds like a pretty run-of-the-mill case of PTSD.)

The best part about this book is how our character (along with several others) just manages to deal with anything. If a horde of chopstick-wielding velociraptors came parachuting out of the sky I believe our hero would take it in stride an ask them where the nearest chinese buffet was. Admittedly he does have to deal with some weird shit, but it never seems to take it’s toll.

Here’s a good example of how our intrepid little hero deals with things:

Samurai Warriors.
Samurai Warriors chasing a group of primitive Celts.
And the whole melee was headed straight at him.
There is a time to analyze and wonder, and a time to run for you life. Miller had absolutely no doubt that right now was a prime example of the second option. He turned and ran for the plane.

(It’s worth noting that shortly thereafter Bagpipes become involved. With gems like this, what’s not to love?)

A rousing tale of the adventures of archeologist Tony Miller, the first 25 pages seem a bit slow, but after that it never… stops… being… strange… If you read the cover page you find out that Dorn was only one of three credited authors for the book, something I didn’t know until I’d gotten to the end. Knowing that certainly clears things up a bit though, and I now have a reasonably good guess how the book was written: Each author took turns writing. And then they chose a schizophrenic ADD crack addict as an editor. I did find out an interesting thing about the co-authors though. From the GoodReads page for Jeff Lindsay:

Jeff Lindsay is the pen name of an American crime writer, Jeffry P. Freundlich, who lives in Cape Coral, Florida with his wife, author Hilary Hemingway, daughter of Leicester Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s brother.

Lindsay is best known for writing the Dexter series of novels. Many of his earlier published works include his wife as a co-author. Time Blender was written with Michael Dorn. He graduated from Middlebury College, Vermont, in 1975.

So this was co-written by the guy who wrote Dexter, and his wife. (Who happens to be the niece of Ernest Hemingway?!) That really surprised me. Now I really want to know what the writing process on this one looked like!

None of this is to say that I didn’t enjoy the book. I mean, in the last 25 pages the hero of this adventure finds out that the choice he has to make (allegedly to save all of the world and time itself!) isn’t nearly as simple or straightforward as he had been led to believe! New adventures await, exciting decisions are coming! The book ends! Book two was never written! Aaaargh! But what happened to Osiris the god of the dead, the giant quasi-friendly shark, the horde of druids, or the beautiful naked polynesian girl from the undiscovered island of doom? (Dr. Who would never let time get this unbalanced and rickety!)

Thanks. I can’t decide what’s worse, the mediocre execution of a really enjoyable idea, or the cliffhanger that never ends.

In the end, the novelty factor doesn’t make it worth keeping around, but if you have 2 hours to kill sometime and this book just happens to be lying in a pile somewhere there are certainly worse things you could read. I’d give it a good solid 3 out of 5 stars. Reading this book is basically be like watching the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation all smashed together, but it won’t take you nearly as long.

Moonfall – Jack McDevitt

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One sentence review: What every “scifi” action movie wants to be when it grows up.
I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested in an action/adventure space romp with just enough scifi to keep you interested and keep things realistic.

This book was an enjoyable action adventure set in a heavily science-informed setting, with enough excitement to make me want to skip work and keep reading. It’s the kind of book that would be an amazing movie, except that they never do movies like this right. The words “Lagrange Point Station” wouldn’t make it into the movie, nor would the discussion about improvising a spacesuit and how warm it is in the sunshine of space. The entire “cautionary tale” aspect of it would be utterly removed to add in a few more minutes of screen time for explosions, and they’d find a way to get some zero-g sex in there too. It’s better as a book, believe me, movies can’t be as big as your imagination.

I did include the word “realistic” there, and this one does a great job of it with a few minor exceptions that sort of make it feel a little Hollywood, but I’m willing to forgive them. For the most part the characters were believable, the events manage to be surprising (although the broad strokes were predictable, like almost any action story), and the pacing quite enjoyable. Public figures? Check. Political Intrigue? Got it. Explosions of horrific magnitude? hells yes!

So what’s the verdict for this one? It’s a great read, but I’m not certain that there’s anything to be gained from reading it a second time. I’m actually tempted to create a new category called “give it to someone who might like it” and toss it in there, but in the end I’d rather give it to powells and use the cash to by some other book that I might want. Sell, but maybe read again someday from Library or digitally.

Book Reviews, the first five…

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The cleansing begins with 5 rather abrupt reviews. I hope to be more in-depth later, but I was able to grab some things off the shelf that I already knew the answer to, so let’s get them out of the way.

The Second Coming – John Dalmas

Read about 2/3 of it a while back, was pretty bored, no interest in picking it back up. I was really interested in it based on the blurbs and such, a combination of my love of post-apocalyptic storytelling and “debates about modern faith and spiritual philosophy” seemed like it a nice prospect. In the end though I found the characters flat, the pacing not quite right, and just was generally meh. I sort of wish I’d finished it, maybe I’m missing something, but I just don’t strongly enough believe that that might be true to try. Into the “sell/donate” pile it goes.

Grunts – Mary Gentle

This book was great fun. What’s not to love about a horde of orcs magically gaining military technology like Hueys and RPG’s? Discussing a Dark Lord and a Hind gunship in the same paragraph just makes me giggle.
Ultimately though it’s a single-read book. I don’t feel like there’s much more to get out of it, and even if there was I’d be more than happy to have a digital copy, so this one is going in the sell/donate pile as well. If you like military fiction, fantasy, or just an amusing read go grab it from your local library!

Northworld Trilogy – David Drake

Started reading, got about half way, gave up. Direct to the sell/donate pile. Ponderous and slow, I couldn’t tell if it was military fiction or fantasy. In either case, despite the use of battle suits and technology it’s definitely leaning towards the fantasy side of the scifi/fantasy question. I love Norse mythology, and this book seemed to draw quite a bit from that, however it was in this weird middle-ground between retelling/re-imagining and just borrowing some of the interesting bits. Ultimately I think it just felt too fantasy for me.

Gil’s All Fright Diner – A. Lee Martinez

Another fun book, which had it’s share of good quips, one-liners and amusing concepts. “Armageddon with a side of fries” is an amusing concept, and it was well enough executed, but it just felt like it lacked depth. Definitely not something I’d read again, which is how it earned it’s place in the buy/donate pile. Probably not a good book to be in general YA, but the writing feels a lot like YA. Got a giggle or two though, I’ll certainly admit!

Lord Valentines Castle – Robert Silverberg

This series came pretty highly recommended, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of it, but this first book goes to the sell/donate pile. The pacing is slow, except in some random places where it feels like more time should have been spent but wasn’t. The lost king’s journey of re-discovery, this book is very much fluff fantasy through and through, although I am interested in the characters enough to want to know more.? I may even read it again someday, but I’ll be more than happy to do so with a digital or library copy.

Wow, those were abrupt reviews! I think it’s time to pick a more interesting or challenging book to review rather than picking the low hanging fruit.

Vimmification Part 1, upgrades!

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Setting up a nice clean vim install for myself. Tired of my vim feeling bloated and slow, so I’m rolling my own config distro with just what I need.

Step 1: I need the latest version! Snow Leopard ships with 7.2 instead of 7.3, and I just don’t find being outdated to be acceptable. Fortunately macvim to the rescue!

MacVim is a nice OSX GUI wrapper for Vim. Adds that little bit of polish on over the top. Fortunately it also comes complete with it’s own Vim 7.3 install! And its “mvim” terminal command is apparently smart enough to know that it should act like normal terminal vim if called from an alias of that name. So to get the latest macvim set up and linked, all we need to do is: (Assuming you’re using brew, which you should be.)

brew install macvim
ln -s /usr/local/bin/mvim /usr/local/bin/vim

This leaves us with one problem however. The system installed /usr/bin/vim comes first in the default $PATH. In order to get the correct version simply by typing “vim” we need to reorder /etc/paths to put /usr/local/bin ahead of /usr/bin. Once that is done and saved, reload your shell, fire up vim, and you should see version 7.3.

Alright excellent, updated version of Vim ready to roll. Now that wonderful “set relativenumber” line in my .vimrc will no longer throw errors. Time to start setting it up the way I like it.

Cleaning Up the Bookshelf

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New project! I have over 1000 books listed in my Delicious Library. Time to clean them up a bit.

“But Josh” you say! “Getting rid of BOOKS? Surely you can’t be serious!” But indeed I can be, and don’t call me Shirley.

New, before you think that I may be completely off my rocker, we’re going to take a very considered approach to this problem. Consider that there are several types of books on the shelf:

  1. Books that will be read again, or kept barring anything short of the house being on fire.
  2. Books that have been read, and might or might not be read again. These could also read/kept digitally rather than physically and it wouldn’t really be a bother.
  3. Books that haven’t been read yet.

So we can ignore books of type 1, those are staying around. Type 2 books are where the big opportunity is, and books of type 3 are going to get read and fall into either type 1 or 2.

This revolution will be bloggerized! If critical decisions must be made about books that means reviews of books. It’d be a shame for all that knowledge and decision making to go quietly into the night, so it will be recorded here, both by myself and by my lovely wife Bevin who has volunteered to help with this daunting task. This should also help prevent any future incidents of “oh look, a book by that author I like, I should get that” for books that have already been judged. Unfortunately we’re starting with the low-hanging fruit, so there will probably be mostly negative/meh reviews first, unless we find a hidden gem in the unread pile.

XARGS!

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I think I’m having some weird conflicts between installed gems and bundled gems. Well, why do we NEED installed gems really? What’s easier than wiping out your gemset in RVM? Why this of course:

gem list | awk ‘{ print $1 }’ | xargs gem uninstall -aIx

And bam, meteor-style mass gem extinction. Bye all you nasty gems.

This took me a little bit of figuring out though. Why do I never remember the xargs command? Very useful in these sorts of situations. Yeah, I loves me some command line some days.

C’mon TSA, let’s do it!

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There’s been all this hubbub about the TSA and their “Would you like the naked irradiated pictures or the free gropes?” policy. So far I haven’t had the fun of going up against either. This disappoints me.

Yes, that’s right. I said “disappoints”. I’m looking forward to it! What’s wrong with me? Why, I wear a kilt of course! The options are endless!

“We’ve got an opt out here!!“… Oh, so you want to play that game?

“Oh, don’t be coy about it. I know you just want to see what’s worn under a kilt.” might get a blush, but I want to go with something more like ? “A kilt check? Sweet, haven’t had that done in a while. Usually I only let redheads in peasant outfits lift my kilt, but you look like a cute enough fella.”
I was really hoping that the last time I flew I’d get it. “Hey, I know I haven’t seen my wife in 2 months, thanks for helping me get warmed up!” might have been fun. In the game of “how to make a government employee blush” you really have to step up your game these days.

Actually the most fun would be just to go with “We’ve got a kilt check here!!“, but you do have to be careful calling too much attention over too wide an area. I think it’s better to make just one single agent a little nutty rather than go after the whole bunch.

So c’mon TSA. I’m flying out of SJC next Friday. Gird your loins for battle, ’cause laying your hands on mine is only gonna be fun for one of us!