Picked up in an Amazon 99p sale, if memory serves, last year. I was in the mood for something light-hearted and this didn’t disappoint. Its certainly coming from a different angle than the usual urban fantasy genre. It cracked along at a fair pace, with some excellent wise cracking asides. I felt the author was channeling the likes of Robert Rankin, Tom Holt and the like, with aspirations to Kadrey and Aaronovitch.

Nothing from him since, so I wondered if it was self published via Amazon, but it appears not.

The last (apart from a short story in a anthology I’ve been lent and a couple on her website) in the current series of the Toby Daye novels. I hear from her blog she’s been commissioned for more and is part way through the next one, so now she’s post Mira Grant/Newsflesh, at least temporarily, its likely to appear soon.

As always, it was an enjoyable read. I did find the ending, and the way Ettienes(sp?) problem was dealt with a bit dues ex machina – its not been mentioned to my knowledge before in the series, and didn’t seem to come with any drawbacks (in fact I thought I remembered a previous book stating the other parent was usually killed, but I may be mistaken).

Otherwise, internally consistent as always, and plenty of hooks for the following books, which after borrowing all of the Toby series, I will buy, given mrs kript and myself both read them…

Oh, I;d be really interested in people’s opinions on if they would be more or less inclined to comment if they had an account..

Update: comments now turned back on again, not sure how they got turned off, TBH..

I was lent this, completely out of the blue, by Nicky, and it was a while before I was in the mood for it, but I finished it in about three nights (Yes! A three night problem!), with much enjoyment.
This is an excellent and faithful Holmes novel, that has worked hard to capture both Doyle voice and the type of plot.

Highly recommended!

The second of the prequels to the Horse Lord series (it turns out he’s aiming for three), I bought it when they were having a sale, well before the embargo, I think. I was looking forward to it, in part because I was hoping that Morwood would spend more time on Sorcery and The Art Magic – in fact, this is left to the last third, if not quarter, of the book, before things start hotting up, which left me a little frustrated.
No reflection on the author, after all, he’s not to blame for my expectations, but its an area that’s only hinted at, and I’d much enjoy a book in that world, set from the perspective of an practitioner of The Art Magic, as not much more of made of Bayard’s Talent, which I also found frustrating.

I think what fascinates the author is the interplay of honour and tradition in such a setting, which while it informs it, is not the draw for me.

I’ll purchase the last one of course, and the next in the Horse Lord series, should he actually write it (as mentioned on his books page).

The penultimate one so far! Having to resist immediately moving on to ‘Ashes of Honour‘ immediately..

Lot of respect for McGuire as an author for this one; I’m not sure, chronologically, if it was written between the Newsflesh books (her best works, IMHO), but I suspect so. The writing has jumped another notch here, both in terms of plot and characterisation. As I’ve mentioned in previous book reviews, I do get the sense that a lot of the backstory and plot has been worked out beforehand, and is coming through in a way that just appears to have been well worked out just for this book.. I particularly like the way she dealt with Connor’s character, and with Tybalt.

Really hitting its stride this series, although I do wish that she’d lay off the involvement of children in the books. I know its an emotional trigger, and that faerie is of course tied in literature with childhood, but there have been several of the stories that dealt with children as the main victims and I’d prefer fewer in the future (doesn’t look likely given the plot synopsis of ‘Ashes’ though..), simply speaking as a parent and an over-emoter…

I bought this as part of the Humble eBook Bundle; it was one of the bundle that I’d been meaning to get round to reading. It took me some time because its YA; which Doctorow seems to be writing more and more of (can’t blame him; I hear its the most lucrative market, which makes sense). The problem is, I have a low embarrassment threshold, and as I identify/emote easily with the protagonists, being reminded of teenage years is never a good thing!

Anyway, it took me some time to get into, mostly because of the YA and the fairly gut wrenching start of the protagonist ruining his family’s life by getting them cut off the internet.
Actually, even though this is the main point of the book, this law has never made much sense to me – there are just so many ways round it these days – but I’m probably missing stuff Doctorow’s seen, since he’s a smart cookie and no mistake. However, I pretty much tore through the last third

This is less of a pean to technology than, say, Little Brother (and I’m pleased to have finished this just in time for Homeland, the sequel to that, to be released), as its more about civil rights, but there is some of Doctorow’s signature technical fetishism as well, which I always enjoy. Few people write about technologies potential to do cool stuff as well or with such passion as Doctorow, and its why I always come back to his work.

On that note, I would be remiss to remind people that Cory makes his works available free to download under a creative commons license, so go and read it, as well as all his other works here, and then take advantage of the network he’s setup, to buy a copy for a library, or school or so forth that has asked for one – this is a great idea that more eBook pundits should consider!

I will add ‘For The Win’ to my to-read list, as I’d been holding off reading another YA, and am not wildly interested in MMORPG’s, both of which this features, even though it also features the economics of the same and China, both of which I *am* interested in..

I bought this when OReilly had a one of their 50% off sales on Ardiono books. Since then I’ve bought a Rasberry Pi and have been trying to work out which project to do with it, so I wanted to read up on the assorted microelectronics sensor and communications books I’d accrued.

This nicely summed up a number of different projects, all of which you could approach after just reading ‘Getting Started with Arduino” also from OReilly. I found, though, after reading it, that I was a bit puzzled. The circuits were a bit simple, which was reassuring for a novice like myself, but there was little about how the authors knew to put them together in this way, so I couldn’t do anything other than replicate. Likewise a lot of the value is in things like working out atmospheric pressure, or seiverts, or such like, and while the code was there, and commented, some notes on the approach and some background reading would have been nice. This is especially noticeably in the last project, the Geiger counter, since most of the code is taken up with posting to Pachube rather than the sensor itself, something even the authors admit will be obsolete very quickly (the instructions, hopefully not the site!).

Still, I’ll probably build at least a couple of the projects, and its given me the confidence to try, so hurrah!

I interleave the Toby Daye books by McGuire with the other fiction to both stop myself chunking through them too fast and to stop myself overdosing on Urban Fantasy too quickly. They’re also quite grim in places, so too much would be just that.

I wondered how McGuire would deal with the inevitable power creep of the protagonist in a series like this; whether she’d stay at the same abilities, or accrue powers and powerful friends. Its safe to say, without spoilers, that McGuire has managed to do that in such a way that feels engineered in, rather than responding to the Inevitable Bigger Baddies of the week syndrome that UF can be prey to.

I like the fact that I can never quite see where the book – or series – is going next. I think I can see some metaplot, but less than I’m used to, and McGuire’s faerie is always at a half turn from what I’m expecting. Which makes it good fay writing, of course. Also, since I read most of this while under the effects of a nasty flu bug, some of that could be my reduced mental capacity..

Two left to go…

I plain loved this book. The characters weren’t stereotypes, the plot wasn’t a pean to the authority of the Khalif, and the bad guy was suitably evil. It has such verisimilitude in the phrases used, the descriptions of the city and the desert, that I was immersed in the world immediately.

I love Arabic world stories, evoking the little travel I’ve done there, but most that I’ve read have been written by westerners, so its a refreshing change to read one from an Arabic American author.

I’ve blogged before on Ahmed’s works, and this is of no lesser quality – and has enough hooks left over that the end for more than one sequel, I hope.

I do prefer the US cover, though.

Bought on pre-order before my self imposed curfew, delivered after. I don’t think this voilates the letter, but it somewhat bends the spirit..

Next in the Toby Daye series, as I work through the backlog from James_. A. said that this is the book that hooks you in, and she is probably right – it definitely feels like McGuire has hit her stride with this series.

The plot is a fay twist on the missing children tale, and I found my knowledge of faerie legends lacking here – I have no idea if ‘Blind Michael’ is a creation of McGuire’s or part of the mythos.

Nonetheless, it trips along at a fair pace, with some interesting twists – its really clear in this book that McGuire has a direction for the world and characters in the series, and not always in the direction you think.

Looking forward to the next one, as soon as I finish the just released ‘Throne of the Crescent Moon’ by Saladin Ahmed – don’t want to overdose on Urban Fantasy!

I recently posted about using systool and the /sys/class special filesystem to get FC HBA information. That’s great if you use Linux, but less helpful if you run Windows. This post will take you through the ways of getting the same information from your HBA, but on a recent versions of Windows system (where recent is defined as having WMI classes, and possibly PowerShell installed). It has to be said that I learned a lot of this from Ben Wilkinson’s post on Technet’s Scriptcenter.

First, some background. It doesn’t appear that Windows makes the HBA information available unless you’ve run the fcinfo tool, so if you can’t run this (once is enough), on every system – perhaps at install time, via your automated build system (you have one of these, right? , then you’re stuck installing the proprietary toolchain (although, if you can do that, you should probably install fcinfo at the same time..).

Once you’ve done that, then Windows has two Windows Windows Management Instrumentation (hereafter WMI) classes defined and query-able via any WMI tool (in this case we’re going to use PowerShell because its got WMI baked in, but you can get to this with Perl and many other languages and methods). WMI is definitely the way to get information out of Windows systems, the more so as they move to CMI and SMI-S, WBEM etc with Windows 8/Server 2012 etc (but that’s another whole series of blog posts and covered better by others);

• MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes
• MSFC_FibrePortHbaAttributes

We’re going to concentrate on the former here since the latter has just the WWPN’s of interest (IMHO, anyway – take a look yourself to decide – I’m not the boss of you!).

The reason I’m using PowerShell here is it really is the dogs dangly bits when it comes to working with Windows objects. Take this one-liner, run from a powershell console;

Get-WmiObject -class MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes -computername MyTestServer -namespace "root\WMI" | Get-Member

This produces;


TypeName: System.Management.ManagementObject#root\WMI\MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes

Name MemberType Definition
---- ---------- ----------
Active Property System.Boolean Active {get;set;}
DriverName Property System.String DriverName {get;set;}
DriverVersion Property System.String DriverVersion {get;set;}
FirmwareVersion Property System.String FirmwareVersion {get;set;}
HardwareVersion Property System.String HardwareVersion {get;set;}
HBAStatus Property System.UInt32 HBAStatus {get;set;}
InstanceName Property System.String InstanceName {get;set;}
Manufacturer Property System.String Manufacturer {get;set;}
MfgDomain Property System.String MfgDomain {get;set;}
Model Property System.String Model {get;set;}
ModelDescription Property System.String ModelDescription {get;set;}
NodeSymbolicName Property System.String NodeSymbolicName {get;set;}
NodeWWN Property System.Byte[] NodeWWN {get;set;}
NumberOfPorts Property System.UInt32 NumberOfPorts {get;set;}
OptionROMVersion Property System.String OptionROMVersion {get;set;}
SerialNumber Property System.String SerialNumber {get;set;}
UniqueAdapterId Property System.UInt64 UniqueAdapterId {get;set;}
VendorSpecificID Property System.UInt32 VendorSpecificID {get;set;}
__CLASS Property System.String __CLASS {get;set;}
__DERIVATION Property System.String[] __DERIVATION {get;set;}
__DYNASTY Property System.String __DYNASTY {get;set;}
__GENUS Property System.Int32 __GENUS {get;set;}
__NAMESPACE Property System.String __NAMESPACE {get;set;}
__PATH Property System.String __PATH {get;set;}
__PROPERTY_COUNT Property System.Int32 __PROPERTY_COUNT {get;set;}
__RELPATH Property System.String __RELPATH {get;set;}
__SERVER Property System.String __SERVER {get;set;}
__SUPERCLASS Property System.String __SUPERCLASS {get;set;}
ConvertFromDateTime ScriptMethod System.Object ConvertFromDateTime();
ConvertToDateTime ScriptMethod System.Object ConvertToDateTime();


Which is using the Get-Member commandlet to query the object produced by Get-WmiObject -class MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes -computername MyTestComputer -namespace "root\WMI" to see what items and methods we can get out of the datastructure of that particular WMI namespace. This is about as deep as I’m going to go into WMI and Powershell, by the way; if you want more there are many, many good books on the subject, sometimes free from Microsoft (or coming bundled with your Technet subscription).

You’re probably thinking, that this is nice and all, but you actually want to know useful information about the computer, like what its WWNN’s are, who manufactured the card, what the firmware is and so forth. Well, if you look through the data structure above, or the link to the documentation for the WMI object, you’ll see that’s indeed what we can get.

Time for another one-liner;

Get-WmiObject -class MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes -computername MyTestServer -namespace "root\WMI" | ForEach-Object { $_ }

This will provide;


__GENUS : 2
__CLASS : MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes
__SUPERCLASS :
__DYNASTY : MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes
__RELPATH : MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes.InstanceName="PCI\\VEN_10DF&DEV_FD00&SUBSYS_FD0010DF&REV_01\\3&172e68dd&0&10_0"
__PROPERTY_COUNT : 18
__DERIVATION : {}
__SERVER : PCMEDSRV2
__NAMESPACE : root\WMI
__PATH : \\PCMEDSRV2\root\WMI:MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes.InstanceName="PCI\\VEN_10DF&DEV_FD00&SUBSYS_FD0010DF&REV_01\\3&172e68dd&0&10_0"
Active : True
DriverName : elxstor
DriverVersion : 5-2.00A12
FirmwareVersion : 2.10A7
HardwareVersion : 1036406D
HBAStatus : 0
InstanceName : PCI\VEN_10DF&DEV_FD00&SUBSYS_FD0010DF&REV_01\3&172e68dd&0&10_0
Manufacturer : Emulex Corporation
MfgDomain : com.emulex
Model : FC2243
ModelDescription : HP FC2243 4Gb PCI-X 2.0 DC HBA
NodeSymbolicName : Emulex FC2243 FV2.10A7 DV5-2.00A12 PCMEDSRV2
NodeWWN : {32, 0, 0, 0…}
NumberOfPorts : 1
OptionROMVersion : 5.01A8
SerialNumber : MY10634B9K
UniqueAdapterId : 4480335924126810144
VendorSpecificID : 4244639967


..and more for each port on each Fiber Channel Host Bus Adapter present on the system

Which is nice, but not very readable. So lets select just the bits we want, and format them slightly nicer;

Get-WmiObject -class MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes -computername MyTestServer -namespace "root\WMI" | Select-Object DriverVersion, FirmwareVersion, Manufacturer, Model, SerialNumber | Format-Table -AutoSize

which gives (on my system);


DriverVersion FirmwareVersion Manufacturer Model SerialNumber
------------- --------------- ------------ ----- ------------
5-2.00A12 2.10A7 Emulex Corporation FC2243 MY10734B9L
5-2.00A12 2.10A7 Emulex Corporation FC2243 MY10734B9L
9.1.7.18 3.03.25 QLogic Corporation QLA2342 L87589
9.1.7.18 3.03.25 QLogic Corporation QLA2342 L87589


Notice that I’m querying a local computer, but, firewall and user permissions permitting, I could query any system I have access to by providing a different name to the -computername parameter.

At this point, you should be in a position to understand the Get-HBA-Info function that Ben Wilkinson provided in the initial link above. Personally, I’ve got this in my .profile, so I can run it from my PowerShell prompt without having to remember the above object selections and WMI classes;


PS U:\> Get-HBA-Info MyTestServer

NodeWWN DriverVersion ModelDescription FirmwareVersion Active ComputerName SerialNumber
------- ------------- ---------------- --------------- ------ ------------ ------------
20:0:0:0:d9:69:3d:3f 5-2.00A12 HP FC2243 4Gb PCI-X 2.0 DC HBA 2.10A7 True MYTESTSERVER MY10734B10K

…and on for every fiber port in every adaptor.

Also be aware that if the computer you query doesn’t have an FC HBA or have fcinfo run at least once, you’re likely to get an error like this;

PS U:\> Get-HBA-Info MyTestNonSANServer
Get-WmiObject : Not supported
At line:9 char:22
+ Get-WmiObject <<<< -class MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes -computername $Computer -namespace $namespace |
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidOperation: (:) [Get-WmiObject], ManagementException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : GetWMIManagementException,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetWmiObjectCommand

See Also

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Management_Instrumentation
• http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Find-HBA-and-WWPN-53121140
• “Using the Get-WMiObject Cmdlet”: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee176860.aspx
• MSFC_FCAdapterHBAAttributes structure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/windows/hardware/ff562495%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
• MSFC_FibrePortHbaAttributes structure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/windows/hardware/ff562510%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Its one of those books that remind you that writing a thriller is harder than it looks, and that talent in that regard should be respected – Lee Child being a case in point here.

I came back to Child’s work after missing a few of his latest books; I’d just read too much Jack Reacher, and one event in the plot in particular struck me as unlikely, and worse, uncharacteristic; whereas his plots usually have some gritty realism to them.

This time I had been loaned the book for a while, but only got round to reading it after a few months, probably due to some reluctance from the aforementioned experience. However, I’d just finished the latest Stross ‘Laundry Files’, and didn’t fancy doing another urban fantasy style book, so didn’t fancy any of the Seanan McGuire backlog I have queued up, and Saladhim Ahmed’s ‘Throne of the Crescent Moon’ isn’t released until the 17th (yes, I pre-ordered it on Kindle before my self imposed moratorium..), so I turned to this, partly to get it off my bookshelf and back to the person who lent it to me.

It turned out to be just the kind of page-turner I fancied – I may well pick up another in the series next year.

I bought this just before my self imposed purchase curfew (such as it is), on the 31st and have been avidly munching through through it since then, and just finished.

I really enjoyed this – and judging by the way Stross wrote the sequel in four months flat last year, when he normally takes a year or so in between, so did he!

Stross has mentioned in the past that he writes each Laundry novel inspired by a different spy character. I’d not read any ‘Modesty Blaze’ books, but I liked the influence it brought this time round.

I shall be pre-ordering the next one when it comes out on Kindle, which is likely this year (wait, damnit! Er. Does pre-ordering count?).

• Listen to music more, podcasts less (music podcasts count here).
• Don’t buy any more (e)Books, and read the ones I have!
• Practice the violin at least once a week and get back to lessons by the middle of the year
• Practice Tai Chi Chuan at least one morning in the week (hopefully with the family)
• Finally clear out the loft in time to fit insulation before next winter..
• Build something (perhaps more than one something) with my Raspberry Pi
• Get out to more live events with Mrs Kript and 2.0..

I’m giving myself some exclusion on the eBooks thing already; if another Humble eBook Bundle ships (since I support the model and want to promote it), the Hugo Awards Voters Packet (might get sticky this year with other projects but..), and if any of the following release new books; Jim Butcher, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Charlie Stross, Garth Nix (but only if he releases any more ‘Mr Fitz..’ stories), David Blank-Edelman, Tom Limonchelli and possibly Cory Doctorow, Ben Aabromovitch and Peter Morwood (if her releases another in the ‘Horse Lord’ series). Oh, and any work requirements for technical books, although since we now have individual SafariOnline subscriptions, that shouldn’t be needed, right (twitch)?

Yeah, the eBooks thing doesn’t look likely does it..?

It took me two months to read it (at over 600 pages), but I finally finished! I bought it as part of an OReilly eBook sale earlier in the year, as I’d been planning to revamp the code I use for the family on-line Advent Calendar. This was perfect for that – my HTML skills were stuck in the mid-nineties, and I’d never got my head round CSS. As this was an overview of HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and image manipulation, as well as general web design principles, it fitted well.

This is a very well put together book. Its beautifully laid out, and has colour examples for almost every thing mentioned, leading to an excellent idea of what is discussed and how its implemented.

I made 57 annotations and notes – just under one every 10 pages, and I’ve used a lot of the skills I’ve learned already, with a much better understanding for the future. Can’t recommend this highly enough.

I often find I want to get information about the Fibre Channel Network a server is attached to, but don’t have the vendors tools installed, or its required before they’re available (such as with automated builds or on some configuration management systems before those tools have been installed). This hack will tell you more about what information you can get from a moderately recent (2.6.11 onwards, IIRC) Linux kernel, without any reliance on external tools.

First some history; The Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapter drivers used to store information in the /proc/scsi pseudo file system, but this was re-organised in 2.6.11 and now is much more centralised, under /sys, with a unified and consistent way of reporting information.
In /sys, each device on a system has its own directory with details about all the hardware devices present, and any information that the module for the device has chosen to expose to the kernel (this is dependent on the driver, as far as I can see, with some standards, but kernel developers, feel free to correct me!). For example, World Wide Node Names of a Fibre Channel PCI card are located in /sys/class/fc_host/host2/port_name, which, on my test Ubuntu system at least, is the first port on the first FC PCI card in the system.

Other files in this directory are equally useful; dev_loss_tmo, fabric_name, port_state, speed, and on some later versions of the driver, the entire statistics subdirectory!

Information like this, particularly the WWPN’s, is very useful for gathering into central databases, for use in SAN zoning and the like, and for general troubleshooting. I find I need it most often when setting up a new zone between a server and some storage device that haven’t communicated beforehand.

When you first discover this information in the /sys filesystem, if you’re like me, you start by cat’ing individual files, remembering or exploring the paths until you get to the ones you want. Then, you find the Emulex’s drivers put their files in one place, and Qlogic in another. However, the port_name file is called the same regardless, so perhaps using ‘find’ is the answer. Then you realise that some of the directories recurse in and..interesting fashion, so using ‘find’ is of no use, or at least, doesn’t return in a useful timescale.

At this point (and I admire your persistence if you got this far on your own) you might be tempted to use a bash script, or similar, with the paths hard coded. You then start getting into programatically determining the number of ports on the HBA, the number of PCI Fibre Channel cards on the system, and the fact that, unless you do a lot of spelunking on the /sys filesystem and comparing device slots (try comparing the output of lspci -v with a /sys device directory to see what I mean), you need to discount the first two devices in some kernels (local SCSI show up as /sys/class/fc_host{0,1}), and your script starts looking quite cumbersome. Add in worries about distribution portability and kernel versions and you start to despair (or was that just me) about writing anything which can run across a system beyond the one it was written on. Portability, of course, which when you need to manage more than one system, is a must.

Enter the systool command from the sysfsutils package.

This is a command that abstracts some of the details, and allows you to get just a subset of information back, without having to do all the tedious and error prone tree walking yourself. You can select via switches whether you want a class of devices, a particular device and so forth, and then tell it to display the contents (aka attributes) of one of the particular ‘files’

Lets get into the details with a few worked examples. First of all, a command to show basic Fibre Channel info (actually quite useful when you’re getting the hang of what’s on a system);

systool -c fc_host -v

which, on my test system (unconnected to a SAN fabric at the time of running this) gives;


john@brain:~$ systool -c fc_host -v
Class = "fc_host"

Class Device = "host2"
Class Device path = "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/0000:09:00.0/0000:0a:00.0/0000:0b:00.0/host2/fc_host/host2"
dev_loss_tmo = "16"
fabric_name = "0xffffffffffffffff"
node_name = "0x500143800133ad65"
port_name = "0x500143800133ad64"
port_state = "Online"
port_type = "Unknown"
speed = "unknown"
supported_classes = "Class 3"
supported_speeds = "1 Gbit, 2 Gbit, 4 Gbit"
symbolic_name = "HPAE312A FW:v4.04.04 DVR:v8.03.07.03-k"
system_hostname = ""
tgtid_bind_type = "wwpn (World Wide Port Name)"


..and so on. I’ve trimmed some of the output for brevity, but you get the idea. You may also want to show connected WWNN’s, which you can do with (systool -c fc_remote_ports -v -d)

Since the /sys filesystem also contains information on kernel modules currently loaded, you can also query assorted information from the FC module itself;

ssystool -m qla2xxx -v

which gives;

john@brain:~$ systool -m qla2xxx -v
Module = "qla2xxx"

Parameters:
ql2xallocfwdump = "1"
ql2xasynctmfenable = "0"
ql2xdbwr = "1"
ql2xdontresethba = "0"
ql2xenabledif = "1"
ql2xenablehba_err_chk= "0"
ql2xetsenable = "0"
ql2xextended_error_logging= "0"
ql2xfdmienable = "1"
ql2xfwloadbin = "0"
ql2xgffidenable = "0"
ql2xiidmaenable = "1"
ql2xloginretrycount = "0"
ql2xlogintimeout = "20"
ql2xmaxlun = "65535"
ql2xmaxqdepth = "32"
ql2xmaxqueues = "1"
ql2xmultique_tag = "0"
ql2xplogiabsentdevice= "0"
ql2xshiftctondsd = "6"
ql2xtargetreset = "1"
qlport_down_retry = "0"


.. and more

This is a bit of a cheat; I happened to know that the Qlogic FC module was called qla2xxx, and hence interrogated it directly, but its not hard to Google, if you didn’t know, and its not like the word is filled with a cornucopia of FC HBA manufacturers…

However, as its sometimes hard to get firmware/version numbers out of HBA’s without the vendors tools installed (and that’s not always possible, even with configuration management tools), then this is a handy trick to know.

Some other information you can get out via this method are the ql2xmaxqdepth (that’s another post on its own ) and since it also exposes values that are set by multipath, you can use it along with multipath’s debug mode (also another post), to confirm that the values you have in multipath.conf are the ones that are set in your system.

Going back to the original use case above, that of the WWNN’s of the FC PCI card, this is the command you need;

systool -c fc_host -A port_name

which shows;

john@brain:~$ systool -c fc_host -A port_name
Class = "fc_host"

Device = "host3"


Of course, the systool isn’t limited to just Fibre Channel card information, you can get some information on any device in your system this way..

You might want to take it a step further, and define the useful variants of the command as an alias like;

alias Get-HBA-Info='systool -c fc_host -A port_name'

See Also

• man systool
• man lssci
• man lspci
• /etc/sysfs.conf
• The homepage of sysfs; http://linux-diag.sourceforge.net/Sysfsutils.html

Nexsan don’t have an API, or SMI-S compatability, but they do have management capabilities via HTTP and telnet (on a non-standard port). The Telnet interface is actually a specific protocol that they’ve documented (ask your friendly Nexsan support engineer for the docs as they’re not on the website at the time of writing).

Writing a script that uploaded firmware to a SATABeast over telnet turned into writing a module that handled all the functions of the Nexsan Management Protocol (its a limited feature set, but robust for what it does do), or at least, all the ones we needed.

After some conversation, and using it in anger for a while, both $WORK and Nexsan have kindly allowed me to release the code as Open Source, thus; Storage::Nexsan::NMP and its GitHub Repository.

Next in the series – pre-ordered in hardback no less. I might switch to eBook, but since I have the entire series in dead tree so far…
I confess I anticipated this with a combination of excitement and dread, wondering what changes were going to be wrought in Dresden, how he would cope with his new position and so on, and also if the book would continue to be on a something of a downer.
As always, however it was an enjoyable romp – more so than the last two books, thinking about it. I’m pretty sure I picked up on a couple of hints as well regarding Blackstaff and how Harry might extract himself from his agreement.

Only problem is, now I have another year at least to wait… Never mind, I have a handful of Seanon McGuire left for my urban fantasy fix!

So straight onto the next in the series, with the feeling from the narrative that I’d missed a book. I don’t think I had, it was just the author showing off her world-building and character back story she’d worked out, I think.

Like the last one, I enjoyed it, but it didn’t grip me properly until the Night Haunts come (you’ll know what I mean if you read it), after which I stayed up late to finish it.

Less near death experiences in this one, but as high a body count. I like the fact that the villains are more than one dimensional, although I’m hoping Sylvester gets less ‘white night-y’ and more nuanced.

I enjoyed it and it was definitely more polished than her first. I suspect I will take a break from them for a book or two now, partly because Butcher’s ‘Cold Days’ will be released early December, and I don’t want to burn out on Urban Fantasy beforehand!

James_ lent the entire series to me after A. mentioned that she wanted to start reading them and we’ve been working our way through them since.

The first in the series and it does show – having come to her writing with the ‘Newsflesh’ series, its obvious how much her craft has improved since this has been written. While I enjoyed this, it felt a little stilted in places, and had it not been for James_ and A’s exhortations that in many ways this was the weakest of all of them, coupled with her aforementioned series, not to mention my similar feelings on Butcher’s early work, I would likely have stopped here. However, I go straight onto the next one immediately after this (in part because it was there, certainly).

I was rather amused at how many times the protagonist had a near death experience – it was like the first series of ’24′ when they were all getting kidnapped all the time..

Unlike ‘Discount Armageddon’, I’m relieved that there is a sensible portrayal of a female urban fantasy character on the cover (and yes, James and Seanan, I’m well aware that book is an accurate character portrait, but still, we have enough ‘booth babe’ covers that its nice to see the trend bucked for once..).

It did get me thinking about the ethics of this, though – should you also wear a t-shirt saying you’re recording this? There was a BBC documentary I grabbed off iPlayer but haven’t listened to yet about lifeblogging, and there are a few people in Cambridge UK doing this right now. Was talking about the process rather than how people reacted to it, from the snatches I caught of the live broadcast.

Anyway, how would you react if I turned up with a lifelogging device? Would you ask for veto? What about if you found out that I’d had one later – would you feel your privacy had been invaded?

What about personal privacy of the owner? The current kickstarter uploads all the photos to the central site when it syncs; there are discussions about a local server to tie into the image browser, but how long term is the project? What if the tools to extract your images aren’t that sophisticated and you would need to recreate the metadata from the geotagging and file names?

Interesting stuff.

Now, this system has been upgraded through about 6 versions of Ubuntu, so the fact it works at all is a bit of a win. Anyway..

Couldn’t get sound out of the HDMI from the Pulse Audio; it wasn’t disabled in alsamixer or similar, in fact I couldn’t find a reference to it. After going through a number of ask Ubuntu posts, this one finally worked for me. The solution is as follows;

Get details of your sound card with;
aplay -l

which gave me;

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: VT1708S Analog [VT1708S Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: VT1708S Digital [VT1708S Digital]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Then, test you can output to the HDMI device with (in my case)
speaker-test -c 2 -r 48000 -D hw:0,3
which should play static through each output in turn

This command will give you the current Pulse Audio setup;
pacmd list-cards

e.g. output like this;

john@myth:~$ pacmd list-cards
Welcome to PulseAudio! Use "help" for usage information.
>>> 1 card(s) available.
index: 0
name:
driver:
owner module: 4
properties:
alsa.card = "0"
alsa.card_name = "HDA NVidia"
alsa.long_card_name = "HDA NVidia at 0xfae78000 irq 21"
alsa.driver_name = "snd_hda_intel"
device.bus_path = "pci-0000:00:08.0"
sysfs.path = "/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:08.0/sound/card0"
device.bus = "pci"
device.vendor.id = "10de"
device.vendor.name = "NVIDIA Corporation"
device.product.name = "MCP79 High Definition Audio"
device.form_factor = "internal"
device.string = "0"
device.description = "Built-in Audio"
module-udev-detect.discovered = "1"
device.icon_name = "audio-card-pci"
profiles:
output:analog-stereo: Analog Stereo Output (priority 6000)
output:analog-stereo+input:analog-stereo: Analog Stereo Duplex (priority 6060)
output:analog-surround-40: Analog Surround 4.0 Output (priority 700)
output:analog-surround-40+input:analog-stereo: Analog Surround 4.0 Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 760)
output:analog-surround-41: Analog Surround 4.1 Output (priority 800)
output:analog-surround-41+input:analog-stereo: Analog Surround 4.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 860)
output:analog-surround-50: Analog Surround 5.0 Output (priority 700)
output:analog-surround-50+input:analog-stereo: Analog Surround 5.0 Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 760)
output:analog-surround-51: Analog Surround 5.1 Output (priority 800)
output:analog-surround-51+input:analog-stereo: Analog Surround 5.1 Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 860)
output:iec958-stereo: Digital Stereo (IEC958) Output (priority 5500)
output:iec958-stereo+input:analog-stereo: Digital Stereo (IEC958) Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 5560)
output:hdmi-stereo: Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output (priority 5400)
output:hdmi-stereo+input:analog-stereo: Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 5460)
output:hdmi-surround: Digital Surround 5.1 (HDMI) Output (priority 300)
output:hdmi-surround+input:analog-stereo: Digital Surround 5.1 (HDMI) Output + Analog Stereo Input (priority 360)
input:analog-stereo: Analog Stereo Input (priority 60)
off: Off (priority 0)
active profile:
sinks:
alsa_output.pci-0000_00_08.0.analog-stereo/#0: Built-in Audio Analog Stereo
sources:
alsa_output.pci-0000_00_08.0.analog-stereo.monitor/#0: Monitor of Built-in Audio Analog Stereo
alsa_input.pci-0000_00_08.0.analog-stereo/#1: Built-in Audio Analog Stereo
ports:
analog-output: Analog Output (priority 9900, available: unknown)
properties:

hdmi-output-0: HDMI / DisplayPort (priority 5900, available: unknown)
properties:

I was then able to set the correct profile, after some trial and error, with;
pactl set-card-profile 0 output:hdmi-surround
The sound quality isn’t great, but then, neither is the TV..

screencap of sample digital bookshelf

To be precise, it grabs all the ‘cover.jpg’ files that calibre creates in each eBooks sub directory, and copies them into another directory, renaming them to the title of the book as it goes.

I now use a fairly common feature of screensavers to point it at a folder and randomly display images. A kind of digital bookshelf, if you will.

…It does make me realise I have a lot of items from fictionwise (with identical covers), and magazine articles (from Hugo Awards), that don’t look as good as a book cover. Once I learn Python, a plugin to do this from tagged books would be the best option. A project for next year, perhaps, given I have to learn Python first!

The image is of the Guggenheim Museum and gallery in Bilbao, taken on our 2006 trip. Copyright me..

I pre-ordered this as soon as it was announced; in dead tree format, no less, as I was expecting to refer to it at a workbench. I ordered it partly because I thought it would be a useful get up to speed on the Pi I’d bought, but also because I wanted to put some cash the way of Upton, as he’s one of the leading lights behind the Raspberry Pi foundation, even if it had been mostly ‘ghostwritten’ by Halfacre.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t expecting it to be much; a few desultory articles on plugging things together, and a short guide to Python. It turns out that its actually a really great guide that I have and will recommend to anyone with, or planning to get, a Pi!

The authors have made a decent spread of topics of things you might want to know and do with your device. As I read through it I thought how much it would have motivated me in my CDT course at school, having one of these. Heck, I even wondered why we didn’t prototype in the electronics component of the course – was breadboard around in the 80′s? Must have been, right? Anyway, its kicked my hardware hacking interest up a notch, even with my interest in Arduino (and thanks to the book I know understand why the Pi might be good some projects, and the Arduino others), so I will be shopping for breadboard and the like this weekend to start my project!

I’d been waiting for Ahmed to release a short story collection since I was fortunate enough to get a bundle of his short stories as part of the Hugo Voters Packet last year, upon his nomination for the Cambell award.

I’d come across his work first via Podcastle, with their reading of ‘Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela‘, a disturbing, haunting tale that was very ’1001 Arabian Nights’ and its own thing – as evocative of what little Arabic culture I’d seen as Ted Cheung’s ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’. They must have bought up all his short stories at the time, because
‘Mr Hadj’s Sunset Ride‘ followed a while later, and then ‘Judgment of Swords and Souls‘, with ‘Iron-Eyes and the Watered Down World‘ getting the ‘Podcastle Giant’ treatment.

They were all excellent, and, apart from all incorporating Islam and the Arabic world in some way, completely different in style and subject. I’d already donated to Podcastle, so this collection was a chance to put some cash his way, as well as get some short stories I’d not otherwise seen. Indeed, the one that opens the collection, a prequel to his novel ‘Throne of The Crescent Moon’, got me even more interested in reading the same (and I’d heard uniformly good things), as soon as I can whittle down the to-read pile somewhat…

I always intended to pickup this novella by Scalzi, but never got round to it until Madhatter loaned it to me. I’ve not read anything more of Scalzi’s fiction than ‘Old Man’s War’, and wasn’t planning to go back, because his voice as an author was identical to his voice as a blogger, which I found disconcerting, and kept interfering with my suspension of disbelief, as much as I enjoyed that.

This book doesn’t suffer from that problem, so I may go back and read more of his work, as I certainly enjoy his blog.

All that said, its an odd piece this one, with the ending perhaps telegraphed given its written by an atheist.

Its a very nicely thought out device, it ‘just works’, and the fitbit website has a decent dashboard to graph your steps, calories, miles traveled, even sleep patterns if you use the included wrist strap at night (which I have been, mostly). There is even a Perl Module to grab the data from the website (I plan to use the sample script to download my own data; after all; if their service is free, and they’ve sold me the Fitbit, how long can it keep going (this is perhaps a flaw in the Quantified Self model, but more on that below)? They do have premium subscriptions, and regularly announce new products, so it seems likely for a while, but, anyway, its my data, so..

The only complain I would have is that the Fitbit needs a cradle to Sync and charge, and a small sync deamon. As detailed on this page, the security is a little lacking, possibly due to the decision to allow any cradle to sync any fitbit (it can do this wirelessly). I was expecting to be able to buy spare cradle’s, but, not that I can see, which precludes me having one at home and one at work. Bit annoying. Fitbit obviously realised this as they’ve launched the FitBit Zip, a version of the Fitbit that doesn’t require a cradle and can sync to phones (perhaps via NFC? Or wireless, like their scales..)

The open source community seems pretty active (particularly the OpenYou project) around the device, which means a non fitbit.com client can’t be far away, should this worry you, or require you to use tools you don’t approve of.

So, its been over three months now, so what have I learned? Well, first of all, its noticeable that time with a toddler at the weekend means I have no problems making the 10,000 step daily target, and that I struggle to do so on a work day, especially if its been one with more coding! So far so fairly obvious.
I notice that, when I do make the 10k target, I feel tired, so that if I was expecting do be doing a lot more running around, I need to be in better shape!
The sleep timer has showed me that, far from the insomniac I thought I was, I’m asleep within 5 mins, on average, and awake at least once in the night, something I’ve got no conscious memory of.

Since getting the FitBit, I’ve also found something that looks to be an open source equivalent, with even more sensors, the EZ430-Chronos watch from TI. This has accelerometers, temperature monitor, integrated wireless for heart monitor etc, and a wireless interface to a PC. There’s plenty of Open Source code for it, too, with uses from a fitbit-alike, to using the wireless as a door opener and RFID personal item finder! I’ve added it to my Gadgets list, but as I’ve not done anything with the RasberryPI I’ve got (yet), I’m not rushing out to buy it, even at the insanely cheap price of £35! I mean, you can’t buy many normal digital watches for that!

Of course, once you start getting reports on your calorie burning, you start to wonder how much you’re consuming. I tried a couple of Apps and websites, including the Fitbit one, but finally settled on MyFitnessPal.com, as it has iPhone/iPad, Android and web clients, all of which are best for different things. The Android client, for example, has a barcode scanner which makes entering purchased food easily. All of them allow you to enter meals you’ve made yourself, but that’s quite laborious. Fortunately, other people have often done something similar, so you can use that, and guess (which I also tend to do with the portion size). This means my recording is not quite as accurate as it could be, but hey, its better than nothing. MyFitnessPal also links with the FitBit site, so you can feed the movement data from the Fitbit into their site to get an accurate report of how many calories you can consume without going over your consumption ‘limit’.

I’ve found I’m a lot more aware of my eating habits since doing this, and have tended to eat slightly less, and certainly hold back on more food if I’m near my limit. Its also made me realise my portion sizes didn’t need to be as big as they were, so I’ve been able to cut back a bit. Overall, that’s lead to a weight loss of 7kg. Not huge, but hey, its in the right direction, and I think, sustainable.

All of this is a good example of ‘The Quantified Self’, something I’ve read a fair amount about in Fitness For Geeks and ‘64 Things‘.
An example of the Quantified Self approach is this OReilly conference talk summary, or you can go to QuantifiedSelf.com.

Basically, its using data about how you live your life to do more of what you want to be doing, and take better control. Lets see what I’m still doing in a year!

Been a fan of his writing for a while, even if he’s been a bit too cool at times, I find his blog writing very though provoking, and looking back, its informed a number of my approaches over the years. His OReilly book on RSS is still my go-to example of a well laid out book with all the information you need and no more.

Knew this was coming out, and leafed through the hardback in Heffers. One of the ‘things’, on the ’100 things’ ‘movement’, kept coming back to me, and I ended up buying it on Kindle over the holiday to get the meme out of my head. That only slightly worked, as I’ve been thinking about it ever since, particularly in light of Bruce Sterling’s ‘Viridian manifesto‘, which I guess inspired that. I find the challenge impractical on so many levels (not to mention example of a ‘first world problem’), but the minimalism draws me.

Good stuff, quite thought provoking, but light on detail on everything, with a conspicuous lack of footnotes or citations to back his assertions up. Not sure if it was aimed at digital policy makers, those struggling to come to terms to terms with the internet, or what.

Still, a good read, which I suspect I will be coming back to. I suspect that I shall get a lot more meat out of Stephenson’s ‘Some Remarks’, which I shall also purchase real soon, even with the offer of a loan. Then again, I have *so many* technical and non-fiction eBooks to get through, I’m having trouble justifying what I know will be a worthwhile read.

On the subject of reading on the Kindle App on the iPad, I enjoyed the experience slightly more than the other reading apps, and the note-taking was slightly easier, with the inbuilt dictionary being useful a few times. I made a load of notes and highlights, but cannot find a way to get them out of the App (edit; there are some here, but that’s not friendly.. edit[2] log into kindle.amazon.co.uk and get them from there, apparently (only at time of writing, no notes are shown, which implies my App isn’t uploading them, gr…, and of course a hardware kindle has them on its ‘usb drive’), so its back to good old faithful GoodReader.

I bought this when OReilly ran a sale based on the release of Mountain Leopard for OSX, as I was intending to upgrade forthwith (I’d skipped Lion), and then found my ancient laptop wasn’t eligible. Long story short, bought a ‘new’ one via someone at work, and upgraded, so went back to this to get up to speed on all the new stuff.

Does a fairly good job as a whistle stop tour, but felt it could have done with a bit more detail, for example, in File Vault encryption, and could have felt less like an Apple sales manual. I buy from OReilly because their books tend to treat the reader more honestly than the vendor sponsored ones, but that wasn’t my feeling here; he skipped over a lot of the privacy concerns of iCloud, and why you might want to be more reticent in using it..

Pretty much the only ones I agree with are Best Graphic Novel, Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) and sort of the Novel (Its a good book, but it was clearly going to appeal heavily to fandom in a way that overshadowed its other achievements, IMHO), the others I either don’t (which you can tell by my voting record), or I don’t feel qualified to judge..

Given how many entries Shannon McGuire had, I’m surprised she got only the Fancast win. Its the weakest out of all of them.

Nonetheless overall, I appreciate the hard work everyone put in, and as always it got me reading wider than I normally would.

Finished! I pretty much chunked through it, especially the last third. I’m impressed how well she managed to end the story, wrapping up the plot lines and providing as happy an ending as you’re going to get where the dead walk (Not a spoiler. Or is it?).

Good story, good plot. Superb treatment of Zombie genre as a series. Looking forward to reading her Urban Fantasy series now (I’d been holding off getting any until this was done).

I bought this pretty much the day it came out, if memory serves; I think there was an O Reilly ‘deal of the day’, or bundle, or some-such, and I’d been meaning to get it anyway. I got about a couple of chapters in and the Hugo Voters Packet descended, and I didn’t read much else for a while, but went back to it for something more factual every now and again. Once The Hugo season was over, I got back into it in earnest.

Initially it got off to a good start, with a roundup of some healthy lifestyles, gadgets and so forth, and it was here I was convinced to get a fitbit (this is a whole other post, TBA), and then I hit the chapter on Nutrition.

Nutrition is important, and can underlie a lot of fitness, health and so on, but it was all detail, no relevance. It took almost the rest of the book before nutrition reared its head again, and this time it came with practical advice; it would have been better structured, IMHO, to get the reader interested in all the reasons why they need to monitor their nutrition before wading through fifty pages or so of quasi organic chemistry. That being said, I’m likely to go back to it now that I’m a few months in, and review it, and I suspect it will be of more use on repeated readings. I know the books is in the ‘..for geeks’ series, but this felt like mindless, obsessive trivia rather than useful information. Again, to reiterate, it came good in the end, but it very nearly caused me to give up altogether.

The book definitely hits its stride in the last third of the text; I was genuinely sad when I finished it because I didn’t have more to read. Its also done a good job in establishing the fundamentals – I’ve got a lot to think about, and a lot of places to start looking. I’ve incorporated a lot of his suggestions into my own regime – I’ve even tried Tabata Sprints (and as a consequence I now understand more when an athlete says they exercised until they nearly threw up!).

If I have criticisms (other than the nutrition section), it would be around little emphasis on home rolled tools to monitor assorted health/fitness aspects, tie-ing the assorted websites together, open source tools to monitor the devices/get your own data out and so forth, and a lack of physiological information; if he can go on at length on nutrition, surely a section on the muscles and skeleton of the body is worth a mention – my personal biology is poor, so a guide to the assorted muscles, stretches for each and so forth would have been a useful addition and, the more I think of it, a glaring admission.

Well worth the money I paid though, and I’d definitely recommend, although I suspect its for people already convinced of the need for exercise and health, rather than a clarion call!

I’d include some notes and highlighted terms, but iBooks has decided to only forward a few on, rather than all the ones I’d made; yet another reason to read in PDF with GoodReader for decent annotation tools (can create annotated PDF files)!

Couldn’t resist, and dived straight into the next (and latest) of Aaronovitch’s ‘Peter Grant’ series. Number three into the series, and no signs of fatigue, either from me or the author! I really liked this, again, and had a few laugh out loud moments (again). I’d share them with you, but I was using iBooks on the iPad, which makes annotation sharing..painful, unlike Goodreader, so I’m likely to switch to that from now on.

I fair galloped through this; a thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and am likely to skip the other things I have on my to-read pile and go straight to the next one in the series. Didn’t take itself to seriously, some laugh out loud moments.

I honestly think this is better than the first one. Well done, Mr Aaronovitch!

If this appears twice, I’m trying out Goodread’s cross posting function. Not worked so far, so I’m typing this in. We will see…

I bought this hoping it would give me some pointers into better use of Terminal.app, tips and tricks etc, but it turned out it was basically just a guide to bash with a few OSX specfic commands in. Probably would have been useful for a newcomer. I guess I was hoping for an update to ‘Learning Unix for MacOSX’ that they brought out a while back.

Best Novel

2 Among Others Jo Walton Tor
4 A Dance With Dragons George R. R. Martin Bantam Spectra
1 Deadline Mira Grant Orbit
5 Embassytown China Miéville Macmillan / Del Rey
3 Leviathan Wakes James S. A. Corey Orbit

Best Novella

2 Countdown Mira Grant Orbit
1 “Kiss Me Twice” Mary Robinette Kowal Asimov’s, June 2011
3 “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” Kij Johnson Asimov’s, September/October 2011
4 “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” Ken Liu Panverse 3

Best Novelette

2 “The Copenhagen Interpretation” Paul Cornell Asimov’s, July 2011
1 “Ray of Light” Brad R. Torgersen Analog, December 2011

Best Short Story

1 “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” E. Lily Yu Clarkesworld, April 2011
3 “Movement” Nancy Fulda Escape Pod
2 “The Paper Menagerie” Ken Liu The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2011

Best Related Work

1 Wicked Girls Seanan McGuire

Best Graphic Story

1 Digger Ursula Vernon Sofawolf Press

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

1 Game of Thrones (Season 1) Created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss,

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

1 “The Doctor’s Wife” (Doctor Who) Written by Neil Gaiman Directed by Richard Clark BBC Wales

Best Editor (Short Form)

1 John Joseph Adams
2 Jonathan Strahan

Best Editor (Long Form)

2 Patrick Nielsen Hayden
1 Betsy Wollheim

Best Professional Artist

2 Michael Komarck
1 John Picacio

Best Fanzine

1 SF Signal John DeNardo

Best Fan Artist

1 Randall Munroe

Best Fancast

3 The Coode Street Podcast Jonathan Strahan & Gary K. Wolfe
2 SF Signal Podcast John DeNardo and JP Frantz, produced by Patrick Hester
SF Squeecast Lynne M. Thomas, Seanan McGuire, Paul Cornell, Elizabeth Bear, and Catherynne M. Valente
1 StarShipSofa Tony C. Smith

The John W. Campbell Award

2 Mur Lafferty 1st year of eligibility
3 Brad R. Torgersen 2nd year of eligibility
1 E. Lily Yu 1st year of eligibility

The biggest problem I had with reading these were that they are all (with the exception of Digger), the middle of a series, and make little sense read on their own.
I also only really liked the artistic style of The Unwritten and Digger. The former was more classic graphic novel, the latter delightfully whimsical and odd; reminding me of early TMNT. While all of Digger appears to be included in the Voters packet, making the reading a lot more comprehensive, it did make my heart sink when I started it, to see there were over 800 pages – even of art that’s a lot of reading! The rest were around 250 pages, although by that time my fatigue had well and truly set in.

I think I’m done with the Hugo’s now; I’ll review the art, but try and assemble my vote for as much as I feel I’m informed on. The Best Related Work category, for example, I’ve only reviewed two items from, but I know I won’t get the time to read the rest and I know I’m going to want to vote for the McGuire Filk, partly because I want to encourage that kind of think into the Voters Packet!

And yes, I was up early today, wasn’t I.. ;-(

So, after licensing issues with MIB’s, Debian Squeeze stopped shipping with all of them; which means that a whole metric fuckton are missing if you try and do anything.

It also means that snmpd will not honour the extend directive, as it can’t find the MIB’s, but without displaying any error messages in the logging. Fuckers.

The fix to this is to install the snmp-mibs-downloader package, which automates pulling them all down and putting them in the right places.

That’s wasted two evenings hacking, not to mention countless hours at $WORK SNMP probing kit, grumble..

Hugo Novelette Nominee 2012.

OK, so I said the last story was depressing. Reading these two in succession nearly tipped me over the edge!

Ostensibly a story about scientific discovery, this was also a story about madness and deprivation in an African family.
The two were unrelated, and could have been set separately with different characters. I’m probably missing something, but I didn’t see any parallels between the two apart from some fairly clumsy ones I can’t reveal without spoiling the plot (such as it is).

I admit, I have an issue with Authors writing about other cultures they’ve not spent a lot of time in. I read that Ryman has traveled in Africa, and the story certainly has verisimilitude and is plausible. I guess I have more time for a protagonist encountering cultures (which may be portrayed inaccurately) than I do for stories where the Author isn’t an indigenous member of the culture. Absurd, given that most sci-fi and fantasy cultures fall into that category, I know.

Anyway, that’s the last of the fiction (OK, apart from the periodicals, and I’ve already admitted to myself I wont get time to read them this year; didn;t last year either.. I don’t know how, other than making even more time for reading, which will be tricky, I can mange it next year). I’m going to give the Graphic Novels a try, but as the first one is 800 pages, I doubt I’ll read enough to be happy casting a vote..

Hugo Novelette Nominee 2012

This was an interesting exploration of precognition, but boy was it depressing! I like the setup of two people with different types of precognition meeting up, and how it might work out, even leading into questions of free will vs determinism, as I suppose all good stories dealing with knowledge of the future must.

Ultimately though, I found it so bleak I didn’t enjoy it. I know that makes me shallow, but YMMV as they say.

Hugo Novelette 2012 Nominee

This, on the other hand, sucked me in from the start, and I read it (admittedly short compared to the others so far) in one sitting.
Lots of interesting ideas here, begging to be explored further.
So far this is hands down my recommendation so far for this category.

Hugo Novelette 2012 Nominee

This might as well have been subtitled, ‘people I don’t care about and never will’.
I normally like Swirsky’ work, but this left me cold. I just couldn’t see the point; my loss, I guess!

Hugo Novelette 2012 nominee.

I have bad deja vu with this; I swear I read it years ago. The work initially annoyed me in some of the made up words and terms; of course this happens all the time, but it jarred here for some reason I can’t put my finger on. There are definitely points to recommend, but I’m hoping the other stories speak to me more, as this was too space opera-y even for me.

Hopefully onto the home stretch now; I just need to finish the novelettes to be able to put my votes together; I’ll never be able to read all the submissions but I knew that going in!

Hugo Novella 2012 Nominee.

This an excellent example of using science fiction to examine the world, the past, and to ask what if questions.
The ‘what if’ question here is more ‘who should own their past’. Its thought provoking in lots of ways, both in terms of the impact of the science but also in terms of the WWII Japanese atrocity which it uses as its real life subject matter. I wasn’t aware of this particular one, and I was deeply shocked to find out, googling after reading it, that it was based on a real event. Its still a horrifying event to think upon.

I can’t decide however if the horror and the shock of the actual atrocity (and hence the author’s own activism in reminding people of it in this way) overwhelms the story for me; if I voted for it, whether I would be voting, in part, in protest at what had happened. Its certain that it will be sticking with me for a long while.

Its certainly not an easy read, especially for someone as interested in the histories of China and Japan as I am.

I just plain, flat out, enjoyed this. It was everything I expected, I came to realise, from Necropolis. It apperas to have been written before the announcement of Google Glass, but of course references Gibson’s ‘Virtual Light’, not to mention Stross’s Accelerando. It also, for me, references Liz Williams’ ‘Detective Chen’ novels.

I had one minor world building niggle, but that turned out to be a plot point, so, as you were.

I liked the tone of this, the pacing, even the AI characterisation didn’t annoy me, as they often do. I shell be checking out more work by the author, and isn’t that part of the point of the Hugo’s?

On that note, I was feeling quite smug when I thought I had one Novella to go before the voting deadline, and then realised I’d not even started on the Novelette’s! Damnit, I’ve got a backlog building up!

On a related note, I’m going to switch to reading these mostly in PDF format, as the ePub conversions often leave page headers, numbers, etc, scattered within the text (very noticeable in this one), and the annotation features in iBooks are terrible compared to Goodreader’s (which is why there aren’t any in this; it refused to mail them to me..).

Another light touch story, but fantasy mixed with..engineering? Engineerpunk? Either way, Johnson manages to make a story of bridge building a fairly engrossing tale, with just enough fantasy to make it different. A very believable set of characters and world. I suspect that less detail oriented people may find the minutia of bridge building boring, but it was carried off well – reminded me of Stephenson’s mine building in Cryptonomicon.

A good entry, with a lot of character (in many senses). I have a eBook by the author I bought via Fictionwise years ago, and this remind me to go look it up again. When the Hugo’s are finished, of course..

Hugo Novella Nominee 2012

I liked the style of this for the most part; it reminded me at the start of Leiber, Tidhar and towards the end the Stross/Doctorow collaboration ‘Rapture Of The Nerds’. It started off with a very light touch, giving impressions of the world and history and environment, nice pencil sketches that served to enhance rather than fully flesh out the world.

As I read it, I thought it touched deftly around the Holocaust, and was going to draw parallels that were subtle enough that, like Chris Beckets short stories, leave you thinking a lot after. Unfortunately, it jumps to a sudden heavy handedness that is all the more surprising for the earlier deftness, and for me, ruined it as I was enjoying doing the work myself. If the second half had been like the first it would have easily been my recommendation for the category so far.

Well, I guess I shouldn’t have worried about the Novella’s taking too long; I blew through this one in an evening! Mind you, I’m already a fan, and it was a prequel of sorts..

That being said, I’m not sure it really qualifies for the Hugo’s; its not innovative in its own right, just well regarded by Grant’s fans. I suspect it would stand on its own, just, and be an excellent intro to the Newsflesh series. Of the two I’ve read so far, I’ll vote for this, but that’s purely on enjoyment value, and I feel (even though that’s not the criteria the books were nominated on, let alone I suspect voted), that there should be more than that.

However, Grant’s been nominated for so many things this Hugo year that I suspect its her and Walton’s year. I hope so, and I hope that this doesn’t influence people into voting for others to ‘balance the scales’.

Nonetheless, two down, three to go and 27 days to do it in. Do-able, but I want to be able to make informed votes in some of the other categories also, so busy busy!

Hugo Novella 2012 nominee.

While I admired a lot of what was done in this story, I’m afraid I just didn’t enjoy it very much. I should have done; there were shades of early Stross and Stephenson, and others I suspect if I had read more of the Singularity genre. That’s not to accuse Mss Valente of plagiarism, far from it. It was well written, but for me, none of the characters spoke to me.

Took me a week or so to work through the ninety odd-pages, so if that’s my rate for the Novella’s I’m going to be pushed to finish them by the end of July; I’ve already read reminders to vote from two authors.

Hugo Nominee for Best Short Story.

Err. Ok? I mean, its a nicely done piece of pastiche, and I’m keen to see Scalzi’s work nominated but Hugo Worthy?

Lets just say I wouldn’t have nominated it, but I am looking forward to reading Redshirts

I admit defeat. I’ve been trying to present these events with a structure. I simply don’t know how everything happened. Perhaps because I didn’t pay proper attention, perhaps because it wasn’t a narrative, but for whatever reasons, it doesn’t want to be what I want to make it.

Last of the Hugo Nominee Novels! Just as well, it took me some time to read this, that I worried I’d not make much inroads into the rest of the Nominees.. It took me some time, because, well, I just didn’t enjoy it. The above quote, taken from page 144, summed it up for me rather. I admired what he did with Language (while wondering what Chris Beckett or Iain Banks would have made of it), but I just didn’t care about any of the characters. I can see why Miéville has a following, but I suspect I didn’t enjoy this for the same reasons I didn’t enjoy ‘King Rat’ by him; no sympathetic characters, trying too hard to be clever that it got in the way of the story. Then again, to quote the author (page 34);

In the lobby was an ad for a course in The Healing Power of Story, at which I made rude noises

I suspect that I’m not the target audience for the book, and I’m fine with that. One of the things I like about the Hugo Awards is it gets me reading things I wouldn’t normally. Sometimes that gets me to challenge my views, sometimes it confirms them.

Its tricky to score this.

If I score on what I think would appeal most to the demographic, then The Coode Street Podcast will win, as its an interview with Jo Walton (Hmm, another mention of her. Could it be her year? But then, if it is, should this podcast win ‘on her coattails’ as it were?).

If I score on audio quality, Starship Sofa wins hands down; the rest are varying between obviously skype, and almost unlistenable (SF Squeecast, sad to say) because the sound is so poor over headphones.

If I score on relevance to the community, or most interesting (to me) to listen to, then its a tie between StarShip Sofa and SF Signal. Starship Sofa has a range of good ‘articles’, both fiction and fact. SF Signal had the best eBook debate I’ve heard to date, in terms of viability, piracy and so forth.

I *think* I’m going to vote for StarShip Sofa again. I’ve listened to a few more SF Signal episodes since then, and they’ve not, IMHO, hit the same high water mark. I’m probably going to try the same with Starship Sofa (I find the presenters voice annoying, which is not fair to him or his podcast, but does tend to put me off the program. Also, the knowledge that it will often be well over an hour makes me pause as well, even with the different topics. Not that the other selections in this category are anything less than that, mind).

As I say, tricky to vote on, which is, I think, a sign that they’ve been well selected. I’m a bit puzzled by the Best Related Work category, though, which also includes a podcast, but I’ll discuss that when I’ve been though that category.

So, this is my prediction for winning the Hugo this year. Not because its the best book (although it is very good), but because it couldn’t have been written more as a pean to the convention community. Its full of the history of 60s and 70′s SciFi, it mentions worldcon, and its all about a sci-fi geek not fitting in, and finding her spiritual home through fandom.

Or, to quote the book directly;

“So this is why you’ll find there’s no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red buses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though.”

There are some good lines in the book, probably my favorites are;

“Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open”

and

It isn’t a comparison anyone could make, except to say “Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.”

not to mention

Gramma liked Hardy, but I can’t. I’ve tried, but he’s too depressing and too trite at the same time.

Its so TRUE! I’d never been able to put my finger on it before!

Perhaps, most tellingly, in relation to Brunner’s ‘Stand on Zanzibar’;

I wonder what it’s like to have written your masterpiece, and to know you’ll never do it again?

I’ve picked up a number of recommendations on books to read from this book; this is certainly part of its charm. In fact, one of the Fancasts, up for nomination in their very own category this year, is an interview with Walton (another reason I think she’s tipped for the win), and this apparently came out of her series on Tor.com analysis of the Hugos from inception all the way up to 2000, which I’m intending to go back and re-read post Hugo Awards, as her perspective will be fascinating (and certainly well-informed).

Its also a timely book for the UK, as in addition to the general love letter to sci fi, its also extolling the virtues of Libraries, which the Coalition government in the UK are cutting funding to the point of desperation to.

Anyway, I think this will be a smash hit (if its not already) with fandom who read and remember 70′s Science Fiction. I do wonder what a similar book would look like covering the 90′s or even the ‘naughties’.

You may notice that I’m making a lot more reference to the text in this post; that’s because I;m taking advantage of GoodReader‘s annotation and notes feature, after I read this article on snarkmarket it got me thinking about annotations on books, and how I’d fallen out of that after A Levels. This book was just drying out for notes and highlighting the bits I liked, so thats what I did. I was able to email the annotations file to myself, and hence write a much more informed blog post. It’ll be interesting to see how I can workflow the annotated PDF’s back into my eBook library; I like the idea of loaning an eBook to someone with my notes in – they can (unlike paper books) always choose to turn the notes off! Heck, if they make their own and return it I can even compare and contrast easily – how cool is that!

I’m off to add the following to my reading list, in case you’re interested;

One book left in my list of Novels; the Meiville. I’m most of the way through the Fancasts as well. Keeping on track!

I was moving things around, so I checked the event log and system health; all drives fine, so I shut the system down, cleaned the dust out and moved it to its new home.

Where it refused to boot, with just a “|” in the top left corner (Thanks FreeBSD folks! Cos that’s not hard to google at all on failure is it?). Much mucking around with Live CD’s of both V7 and 8 to no avail; it was like the drives didn’t exist to FreeBSD. Gparted LiveCD could see them, though, and some googling brought up mention of corrupt partition tables, which I was able to find with Gparted and verify, but only on one drive out of the four.

The LiveCD’s contained a link to the IRC channels for both NAS4Free and FreeNAS, so I went to the NAS4Free folks and explained the symptoms. An hour later the only reply was someone telling me that version was EOL.

dlavigne (yes, that Dru Lavigne, one of the people behind FreeNAS v8) on the FreeNAS v8 IRC channel tried, but all the commands she gave me worked differently in V7, and refused to provide useful information. So, thanks to Ms. Lavigne (go buy her books), and a big rasberry to the V7 folks. I hope someone is as helpful to you in a data loss situation as you were to me.

More checking, this time with testdisk (helpfully on the GParted liveCD) thanks to Guy at work, who reminded me of an article he’d written on extreme data recovery. GParted partition recovery errored on libc when trying to recover the partitions on the drives, but highlighted that actually one of the SATA drives had errrors and the USB stick was likely knackered.
Testdisc allowed me to try and recover partitions, but I couldn’t find enough of the GPT partitions to recover, and again, there are no tools I can see to recover a RAID in this situation. I expect that if I had a better knowledge of BSD I might be able to use a LiveCD to get something back, but I don’t, and can’t find enough to get me started on recovery. As far as I can see, the information I needed to reconstruct the RAID died with the USB stick.

This could be just bad luck and hardware failure, but, alas, I think FreeBSD deserves the pointer here; I used software raid because I knew the limited raid in the box wouldn’t be up to much. To have a raid implementation you can’t reconstruct from the remaining non-parity disks without another disks worth of config is unforgiveable; all that info should be on the RAID’d disks, and any system capable of speaking the RAID should be able to reconstruct. IMNSHO, anyway. Worst of all, the system didn’t alert me to the disk failures. I’d got SMART monitoring on and regularly checked the logs as well the system monitors.

Alas, the Dev’s that did speak to me were talking V8 stuff, which the V7 doesn’t understand (and you cannot upgrade between V7 and 8 as they don’t appear to understand each other’s software RAID. Again, unforgiveable.

So in summary, don’t use NAS4Free because when it fails you’re on your own, and their recovery tools don’t appear well tested or reliable. Given the software RAID, I’d be very nervous of using FreeNAS of any version, unless you had hardware RAID.

I’ve moved my data (all that I could recover from other sources) onto a Ubuntu server (with hardware RAID!), and have still got the BSD box. I might have another go, but I suspect not.

Nexsan don’t provide an SNMP interface to get stats out of their boxes, but they *do* provide some hidden stats pages that you can access via the admin account. One of the pages is an XML document that provides, amongst other things, basic performance stats. With the help of a plugin from nagios-exchange, check_http_xpath, we can parse this for the information we need.

Be aware that by doing this you’ll be downloading the entire XML each time you run a plugin to check, so you might swamp the management interface. The GUI has been known to crash in earlier versions of the firmware, so I’d recommend being on a later release (that’s just good practice though, right?).

Each controller will need this information checking, of course. Yes, this is a lot of work, and it would be easier if you could get this via a management protocol or SNMP, but we have to work with whats here, so;

Define the Nagios Check commands;

First, CPU

define command{
command_name check_nexsan_cpu_c0
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http_xpath.pl -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -l ADMIN -a $ARG2$ -u /admin/opstats.asp -c '/nexsan_op_
status/nexsan_perf_status/controller[1]/cpu_percent<=95' -w'/nexsan_op_status/nexsan_perf_status/controller[1]/cpu_percent<=80'
}

This is easily modified to check c1 as well;

define command{
command_name check_nexsan_cpu_c1
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http_xpath.pl -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -l ADMIN -a $ARG2$ -u /admin/opstats.asp -c '/nexsan_op_
status/nexsan_perf_status/controller[2]/cpu_percent<=95' -w'/nexsan_op_status/nexsan_perf_status/controller[2]/cpu_percent<=80'
}

So from now on I'll only show examples for c0 and leave the rest to you..

Now memory;
define command{
command_name check_nexsan_mem_c0
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http_xpath.pl -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -l ADMIN -a $ARG2$ -u /admin/opstats.asp -c '/nexsan_op_
status/nexsan_perf_status/controller[1]/memory_percent<=90' -w'/nexsan_op_status/nexsan_perf_status/controller[1]/memory_percent<75'
}

Now it gets a bit tricky, as you define a command to check an RAID array's utilisation, but you don't know how many Arrays the Nexsan has. The way I've done this is with separate host-groups for array 1, 2 etc and add the appropriate host to each host-group until all of them are covered. Not ideal, but it works.

Arrays
define command{
command_name check_nexsan_array_1_load
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http_xpath.pl -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -l ADMIN -a $ARG2$ -u /admin/opstats.asp -c '/nexsan_op_
status/nexsan_perf_status/array[1]/load_percent<=90' -w'/nexsan_op_status/nexsan_perf_status/array[1]/load_percent<=75'
}

Again, repeat ad nauseum per number of arrays.

Thats the most you can get out of the XML. There is a fibre channel stats page likewise hidden, but thats HTML (and not included in the XML), and it varies per controller, so I'm writing a separate Nagios plugin for each model.

Now define your Nagios Service;

define service{
use generic-service ; defined in generic
hostgroup_name nexsan-c0 ; as per hostgroup
service_description Controller 0 CPU Utilisation ; give description
check_command check_nexsan_cpu_c0!MySecretADMINPassword ; defined commandline
normal_check_interval 10 ; useful time check
servicegroups storage_performance ; which servicegroup
notification_options c,r,w ; useful defaults
contact_groups storageadmins ; who to call
}

Again, lather, rinse repeat for all your Check Commands you defined, for each controller.

Voila! Nagios is now monitoring your Nexsan. Its helpful to also put NagVis on your Nagios setup and get the output being graphed. I'm going to add this to our Cacti installation at work, so will put the code for that up when I write it as well.

Best Short Story Hugo Nominee. Read or listen at Escape Pod.

Well done, especially for the portrayal of caring for an Alzheimer’s sufferer, but ultimately, for me, too heavy handed compared to the other entries so far. An interesting exploration, but not achieving the same insights or heights as the others.

On a related note; wow; that’s all the short stories bar Scalzi’s. Escape Pod rock – thank you guys! They didn’t get the rights to Scalzi’s story, but that’s OK, it means its only one short story to read instead of five. With two months to get through the rest of the Voters Packet, I’m making a good start!

Best Short Story Hugo Nominee. Listen or read at http://escapepod.org/2012/05/17/ep345-the-paper-menagerie/.

This was a heartbreaking story. The fantastical elements were part of the story, but only just. Just thinking about it now makes me slightly sad for those people who have gone through similar experiences. Very Nice work.
Not sure how it should stack up against the more fantastical but that’s a greater debate on what the Hugo is about.

Might be worth a debate next peramble (you know who you are)?

Hugo Best Short Story nominee. Read or listen to at Escape Pod.

This was fun, quirky and delightfully odd. I loved the imagery.

It didn’t have the same emotional impact of the others, so I don’t think it will win, but its definitely the quirkiest of the stories so far, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Hugo Nominee for Best Short Story. Read or listen to it via Escape Pod.

This was a moving, touching story that I was thinking about for a while after reading it. Well crafted, nicely done. All about the human consequences of cloning. One to point people at when they say science fiction is all about tech and not about people.

This is the first of the Hugo nominees I’ve read from the packet (already read Deadline by Grant).

I’d certainly not pick this out for myself; it seemed to me to be space opera/military sci fi, and I’m just not interested in that (unless Cheryh writes it, it seems). Its one of those books that you’re reading the first third, thinking, “this is OK, I guess, nothing special”, and then its 11:30pm. Again. The book definitely improves as it goes on; there was a space battle I was genuinely rooting for the crew in, and some excellent transhuman tech (I almost felt that the authors had recently read Eclipse Phase and wanted to write in that world; it would have fitted in superbly). Plus, vomit zombies, so that’s a theme this Hugo so far..

It wasn’t until I read the addendum at the end that I realised Corey was an amalgam (appropriate for the book, too); I’ve encountered Abrahams work on Podcastle and have his latest on my wishlist, so that was a nice surprise.

Its a definite challenger for Grant; doesn’t have her flair, but has her verisimilitude. I’m looking forward to the other candidates now! I have until the end of July to read as much of the packet as I can; I’m cautiously optimistic.

Note on the Hugo Voters Packet; as James_ mentioned to me, most of the Hugo Voters Packet this year comes in PDF; this works fine for me, since the iPad displays this fine in Goodreader, but sucks to convert into, say, mobi (Kindle) or ePub (most everything else), as things like page numbers break up the flow of text, assuming that the PDF converts at all using Calibre; at least two of the novels caused Calibre to go into a death spiral trying.

Hopefully the committee will be able to source other formats for the works. I’m not too upset, since I’ve already got £10 value from the $50 membership, and that’s just one book, some estimates range as high as $300 for the full voters packet if you went out and bought them all, but since last year they were all multi format, its disappointing.

I came across Tidhar’s work via Escape Pod, where he has had a couple of stories read. While none of them particularly grabbed me, they made mention of this collection of short stories based around fantastic characters from the Jewish cannon, which intrigued me enough to pick up the work on Kindle for a couple of pounds, and it was very enjoyable; I’ll be looking out for more works from him in this world.

I first read Morwood’s ‘Horse Lords’ saga in secondary school, and can remember debating them with a friend, as we were properly starting to get into fantasy fiction. Looking back, he introduced me to a lot of good fiction.

I bought this because of a fan effort on twitter highlighting the plight of Morwood and his partner Diane Duane who had had their bank account emptied by a fraudster, and while the bank would be refunding the money, it wouldn’t be in enough time to meet that months bills, so they’d organised an eBook sale to raise some cash. I’d read scads of Duane’s Star Trek franchise fiction a few years later (thanks Tomesy!), and loved Morwoods works so I bought one of each of their self published works.

Initially I’d hesitated in buying this as it was effectively a prequel, and focusing on the establishing of the Horse Lords at that, where my interest had always been in the magic of the world. It turns out I shouldn’t have doubted Mr Morwood!

It has a sequel, Widowmaker, and to be honest it appears like the two were one book split to make two (odd in eBook world), or at least it did to me. Going back to his site, it appears both of these ‘prequels’ have been pulled for editing and re-issue in October, so perhaps there’s something in that. To be frank, I’m a bit grumpy about that; if I’d have known before starting I’d have held off reading until the reissue (not that he’s under any obligation to provide that to me F.O.C. of course), now I need to decide if I’ll reread the new edition *and* I need to wait for the sequel! Its a hard life..

First of the 2012 Hugo Nominees! Listened to thanks to the fine folks at Escape Pod (I’ve finally got round to donating, too), but you can also read it online at Clarksworld Magazine.

It was a lovely, odd piece. Still thinking about it and not sure what it had to say; I suspect this will haunt me for a while, in a good way. Lovely imagery.

This is a great start to Hugo season!

Next up in my Watt-Evans binge, I thought this was next in the sequence of books I had in the Esther series, turns out I’d missed a couple, one of which I had.

This one was darker than the ones I’d read before (although the more you think about the situation of the Cyborg in ‘Cyborg and Sorcerer’s', the darker it gets..), with two main protagonists. I was expecting to get tired of his prose style, as this is the third of his I’d read in as many months, but it actually got me more more interested in reading the others. I’ll probably read another author next anyway, but with an eye on the next in the series (Blood Of A Dragon IIRC). After that I’ll actually need to buy the next one as I’ll have read my backlog of his work!

Back when eBooks first started coming out (after Project Gutenburg, but before the Sony Reader devices, I think – the early noughties perhaps?), fictionwise made quite a stir by publishing out of print works from lesser known or genre authors, and a lot of short stories (way before the Kindle shorts), at very decent prices. I went through buying works by W.T. Quick, Walter Jon Williams and Lawrence Watt Evans, for about £3 each (less with bulk buy and subscription discounts, if I recall). I even put a web page together about what devices I used and what tools (this was long before Calibre came along and made eBook conversion easy (reminds me, must donate).

I bought all the Lawrence Watt Evans books they had, but didn’t get round to reading any of them. My recent rediscovery of one of his books in the loft though, reminded me, and I’ve been working my way through them since.

I think I avoided this one originally because I didn’t fancy the premise, but it took a turn I hadn’t thought of, and got me interested in the whole Esthar world again. It turn out I’m reading them slightly out of sequence, so I get tantalising hints of back story from other characters.

I’m going to read through the others I have and then buy the rest (via fictionwise if I can buy them without DRM, via Kindle if not..

Alas, my maths just isn’t up to this. I’m horrified at how much my calculus and algebra have declined, and they weren’t exactly my strongest suite to begin with.

I have the eBook thanks to an OReilly deal, and the Library at work bought a copy for me that I can go back to if I need to, so I plan to pick up a few of his suggested remedial reading books on Calculus and see if I can get back up to speed. In the meantime, I’ll release the dead tree version back to the Library to let them lend it to people who can make better use of it!

However, as I read it, it definitely grew on me, and I found myself thinking a lot about it during and after reading. Some, for certain, is how much it speaks to me now; Japanese and Chinese culture form a major part of the book, and the interrelation between the two, especially in martial arts, is something I’m thinking a lot about at the moment.

The book deals with the invasion of Malaysia by the Japanese in 1940, and how the mixed race protagonist and his British ex-pat family deal with this, as the main character is taken on as an Aikido student.
In parts uplifting and harrowing, it reminds you of the atrocities of that regime in the second world war, and the central dichotomy of the civilized, yet brutal culture (as one of the characters points out though, this is very similar to Chinese and English past history), as well as the ennobling and empowering effects of embarking on a martial arts ‘way’.

I’ll be thinking about this book for a while to come, and I commend it to anyone interested in this period of time, and the complex interactions between China and Japan.

Amusingly, it doesn’t look like my nominations met with much synchronicity with the rest of the voting members. On the plus side, I get a load of fiction from authors I’ve not read before via the Voters Packet (hopefully), which after all, for me, is kinda the point.

The Guardian ran an offer in conjunction with AudioGo slightly less than a year ago now, I think, which offered return visitors to the Gruniad’s website a code for downloading a number of LeCarre’s audiobooks, five in total, including the Smiley’s people saga.

It was so popular that AudioGo had trouble keeping up with the demand, by their own account. I was able to download them all no trouble though, and was pleased by the fact that, as the company appears to be the consumer arm of the BBC Audio department, all the files were in MP3 format. I’ve since used them for the Pilgrim ‘Afternoon Play’ series (they only have a few, but highly recommended), and they’re reasonably priced.

Anyway, the number of podcasts I listen to means I don’t always have much time left over for more audio books, but a combination of decorating, and starting to regularly cycle into work (11 miles each way, stopped over the winter but back in the saddle again now, one day a week) meant I was able to get some time for this.

When I started I thought it was a small paperback like his famous ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ that started the series, but realised at one point I’d been listening to it for a while; checked again and found 29 MP3 files varying from 30-45mins – the book is 700 pages long in paperback!

I’ve only read two of LeCarre’s works, this and ‘Tinker’, and while the first was good, this was better, partly because of the verisimilitude of the characters and the east Asia area the protagonist is in. As a colleague says, ‘its all meetings, and detail – you’ve got to pay attention!’, so it can be dry and hard going at times, but wonderfully evocative, and never lost my interest despite that – quite the feat.

The end of the book is clearly waiting for the followup (which I also have, thank you Guardian/AudioGo), as it more pauses than ends, in a very downbeat way. My audio player (the excellent MortPlayer ) automatically started the next one once I’d finished this, but I think I’ll listen to some of the HP Literary Podcast’s readings of Lovecraft’s stories in between for a break!

Lent to me by james_, as well as very kindly gifted a signed edition by the author herself!

This is her new urban fantasy series, the basic premise being that every mythical creature you’ve ever heard about (or read about in the trashy conspiracy magazines) is real, and that an organisation exists to hunt them down. Her twist is that her protagonist has rebelled and is actually more of a protector. In between ballroom dancing contests, and working in a strip club (do judge the book by its cover, in this sense, although no sword).

I confess that I was holding off this because the initial pitch didn’t appeal, and because so many people do urban fantasy with focus on the leather coat wearing bisexual werewolf magicians who are having kinky affairs with vampires (seriously – four series I can think off of the top of my head!). I should have known better from Mira Grant.. The tone is tongue is firmly in cheek without becoming absurd or breaking disbelief (any more than the genre does you understand), and in the snarky tone of Whedon and Butcher (hard to get right, I’ve found).

Looking forward to the next one, I must admit, and will help tide me over waiting for the next Dresden novel..

He proceeded to do so, rebelling against the party line to do it. I would like to thank him publicly for doing so, and for representing me in that regard.

A few days later, I received an email from him, which explained his, and the Liberal Democrats position in more detail. As at the time he hadn’t got anything on his website and I thought the email gave a more nuanced view than some of the polarising opinions, I thought it was worth publishing here;

15 March 2012

Dear Mr Constable,

Thank you for contacting me to let me know of your concerns about the
Health and Social Care Bill.
I voted against the Bill last September, when it left the House of
Commons. Although the Bill by then was better than the version
originally proposed by Andrew Lansley, largely through the efforts of
my colleagues, I did not believe it had been improved sufficiently to
get public support and confidence.
In the months since then it has been debated in the House of Lords,
and I acknowledge that much work has been achieved, notably by Liberal
Democrat peers, to make further improvements.

I am proud of Liberal Democrat amendments to the bill that ensure that
competition is not the focus, that there is a duty to reduce health
inequality and that there is a greater priority for medical research.
We will continue to have universal health care that is free at the
point of care. I also welcome the clause in the bill that will ensure
that never again will Governments be allowed to favour private sector
contracts when there are existing NHS providers.

However, I believe that the improvements are still not enough and
crucially the bill is now opposed by the medical professionals who
would have to implement it.

I therefore voted in the House of Commons on 13th March for the
amendment tabled by some of my Liberal Democrat colleagues saying that
the House “declines to support the bill in its current form and calls
for an urgent summit of the Royal Colleges, professional bodies,
patients’ organisations and the Government to plan health reforms
based on the Coalition Agreement”. I also voted for the main motion
calling for the bill to be dropped, when the amendment was defeated,
because I believe that the NHS is too vital for the welfare of every
person in Cambridge to be broken up by unpopular reforms.

Sadly, I was not on the winning side in that debate and vote.

There has also been significant discussion of the NHS Transition Risk
Register, and whether it should be released. I welcome the ruling of
the Information Tribunal that the Government should publish the NHS
Risk Register and wrote immediately on the publication of the report
to the Secretary of State for Health asking that the register be
immediately released. I had previously written in similar terms after
the Information Commissioner’s original ruling, and signed an Early
Day Motion calling for the Risk Register to be released. I hope that
Andrew Lansley will do the right thing on this issue.

I do believe that the NHS needs improvement and reform. Everyone in
this country deserves a first class health service which protects
everyone regardless of ability to pay.

The 1997-2010 Labour government made a number of reforms that
introduced private sector providers into the health service and paid
them more than NHS providers for the same service, including £250
million for operations that were never performed. In addition a
botched computer system that never worked cost £12 billion pounds and
the Health Service was left with a bill for £60 billion from PFI
contracts. Labour’s response to these failures was to employ
management consultants, the number of in the NHS rose by eighty per
cent in the years 2008-2010. The 2010 Labour manifesto also contained
proposals for greater involvement of the private sector.

We should be under no illusion that the previous government’s reforms
left the health service with health outcomes that are below the EU
average and near bankrupt hospitals. I remain convinced that there is
a pressing need for reform.

I believe that the only way to maintain free universal health care is
through bottom-up reforms which are fully supported by clinicians on
the ground.

I hope the Government will be able to improve the NHS over the coming
years, but I believe that the current Bill will not make the changes
needed.

Thank you for writing to me about this important issue.

Yours sincerely,

Julian Huppert
Member of Parliament for Cambridge

Wow. Not sure where to start here apart from move over, Iain. m. Banks, and I don’t say that lightly.

Becket has created a society that’s completely believable, with a back story to match. Its tautly written, and very dark in many ways. Its so good I’m having problems articulating it properly, because the more I want to describe, the more plot I might give away, without doing it justice. He makes superb use of language and unreliable narrators; something you need to understand is that the characters have been inbreeding for so long they are beginning to lose the use of descriptive words.

Its an amazing first novel, and I urge you to go out and pick up a copy along with his short story collection, some of which are available for free on his website.

It certainly didn’t hurt that A. got me a signed copy at his book launch!

I should have liked this, I really should; it had lots of things I like; magic/technology hybrids, mage wars, and so forth, but I just didn’t get on with it, and gave up a third of the way in. I suspect it may have been too similar to the Watt-Evans book I read before it.

I’ve been trying to pursuade myself to read Ackroyd’s ‘London, A Biography’ ever since A. bought it, but its the size of a Stephenson novel, and I know it will be packed full of facts, so I’ve never got round to it (can’t buy it as an eBook that I could find). When I saw he’d done a similar book on underground London, in he same vein of hidden facts and history, I asked for it for Xmas.

Now that I’ve read it, I’m probably not going to read London… I loved his magic realist, almost conversationalist style, and the odd facts dripping throughout the narrative, but I’m not sure I could read a large book of it.

Very interesting book, though, well worth the read.

I found this in the loft when sorting through books to sell, and realised I couldn’t remember reading it, so I (re)read it.

I think I liked it more the second time, as I appreciated his understated style, and the assorted ways he attempts to address the impact of the situation on the protagonist. In many ways a very bleak, amoral book. I’ve got a number of his works languishing unread in my eBook library; I need to dig them out and see if they’re all as amoral as this was – I have a theory as to his early works (not read much later).

In fact, in reading his website, this was his first ever novel, which is pretty good going.

Watt-Evans has always been, I think, an under-appreciated and certainly overlooked writer; I’m looking forward to reading more of his back catalog, and seeing how his style has matured – bear in mind this book was written early in the 1980s, and he’s not stopped writing since then! Similar, I guess, to Walter Jon Williams, another of my youth favorites that have matured well..

Thanks to James_ for lending me this until I read it. Just as with her previous book, I held off a long time because of my zombie issues, but knew I would crack eventually.

As with Feed, I really liked this book. With Feed she was breaking new ground, whereas here she has to follow up, which she does rather well. There are a number of twists in the plot that I just didn’t see (and one I certainly had). If I had any criticism at all, it was that I felt the main protagonist made too much reference to his instability; after a while I was “Ok, I get it”, but I trust that, Grant being the author she is, she’ll have had good reason for this, in the next book, if not now.

Also, next book; due this year. It had better be!

Its really hard to review this without spoilers. Just go and buy it already!

Asked and received this for Xmas (another one down!), and was rather looking forward to it what with the Movie(s) and the fantastic TV reinvention (is there anything, it would appear, Gattis can’t do?). Read about it from Gaiman’s blog, and was intrigued by the idea of Lee Child writing a Holmes mystery.

I found it a bit hit and miss, to be honest. It did expose me to a new society of Holmes fan’s that I’d never known about. The author’s I’ve listed above were the only stories I really enjoyed; I suspect I didn’t actually like the premise of people writing characters in the style of Holmes, as I wanted more Holmes stories (like Gaiman’s wonderful ‘A Study in Emerald‘). Cotteril’s was particularly good at the books stated aim, though, in a very unexpected way – the art reminded me of 1980′s ‘Dragon Warrior’s – in a good way!

Work’s library got this in for me by request; I’ve done a lot of work on a module (Storage::Nexsan::NMP) that I hope to release to CPAN soon, and I’d never got my head round software testing. All the books and articles, and even courses I’d been on stressed the importance of writing them, and then showed simple applications I couldn’t see the point of. Having now written a module (my first for, what, 8 years?), and broken it while adding new functionality, this book made a lot more sense to me, especially as it lays out when and what to test.

Ignore any reviews you see saying its old, or out of date; its the only book I’ve found that actually walks you through what and how of testing from the beginning, rather than assuming you know about testing and want to know how to do it in perl.

Thanks to this book, I now have, including some ideas on how to write functional tests for a module that needs a Nexsan storage unit to connect to for all its functions!

Now I just need the time to write some tests and play around… I’m resisting buying the print and eBook bundle right now, as work have this paper copy and access to the fantastic Safari Books Online, but…..

The BBC is being forced to hand over tens of millions of pounds every year to line Murdoch’s pockets. Murdoch’s cronies in government are determined to save this scheme — but together we can stop this outrage.

These unbelievable regulations cost our public broadcasters up to £100 million a year. Rather than being paid for their great programmes, they actually have to pay BSkyB to show their programmes.

In coming days, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will decide whether to renew this dreadful deal and Murdoch’s scandals have put him on the back foot. Our pressure can stop this BBC robbery. Click here to send your message to Hunt now:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_murdochs_bbc_robbery_2/?tta

These are our millions — handed over in license fees to fund British programmes, not to boost Murdoch’s profits. But an unfair system of “retransmission fees” designed by Murdoch leaves the BBC and other broadcasters with no choice. They are forced to pay BSkyB to show their channels, even though they add huge value to the satellite platform — accounting for 41% of all shows watched on BSkyB and vastly increasing customer retention.

Amazingly, Murdoch has argued the exact opposite in the US — there, he charges cable TV companies over $250 million a year to show his programmes. With the same deal Murdoch gets in the US, our public service broadcasters would have hundreds of millions of pounds extra every year to invest in great programmes. This money would allow the BBC to reverse its cuts to BB4 and local radio overnight.

Murdoch’s cozy relationship with our politicians has won him this outrageous UK scheme — but his power is starting to crumble, and together we can end it. Labour has already come out against this deal, and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is about to make his decision in his communications review — send your message now to make sure he stops this outrage.

SOURCES

Re-transmission fees in the UK: the case for change (independent report):
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/pdf/RetransmissionandAccessChargesReview.pdf

How the BBC can stand up to parasitic Sky (The Guardian):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/02/maimed-bbc-parasitic-sky

Broadcasters union backs call for reform (BECTU):
http://www.bectu.org.uk/news/1408

Not sure how I came across this; I could have sworn it was via my usual source, Scalzi’s ‘Big Idea’ column, but I can’t find it there, so obviously not. Was given it for Xmas (book three down!), and was rather looking forward to it, following a post of ‘drabble’ style stories on, I think, subterranean press’s site, where he was features and I really liked his style.

Unfortunately, I was left with mixed feelings. I love the ideas in the book, the scope, the concepts, but I found the execution a little stilted at times. It came across to me to be something of a first novel, and perhaps in need of better editing – a case of trying to cram too much in, perhaps, and I admit to having some issues with suspension of disbelief in the macguffin.

I’ll certainly be checking out his next book, though. Very promising.

I’m doing this in the hope of a 2012 Hugo Voters Packet, I have to admit, but also in the knowledge that I could submit books and creative works myself for nomination if I got into the process early enough, so I did..

I’ll do another blog entry or update this one when I decide what to put forward. Doctorow, Stross, Grant/McGuire and Whatever have already chimed in for their areas, so its started already..

Update
My nominations are as follows;

Best Novel

Reamde Neal Stephenson Atlantic Books
Ghost Story Jim Butcher Penguin
The Wise Mans Fear Patrick Rothfuss Gollancz
Surface Detail Iain M. Banks Orbit
Rivers Of London Ben Aaronovitch Gollancz

Best Novella

A science fiction or fantasy story between 17,500 and 40,000 words that appeared for the first time in 2011.
Title Author Magazine/Publisher
Knights of the Rainbow Table Cory Doctorow Intel

Best Novelette

Clockwork Fagin Cory Doctorow Steampunk!
Balfour and Meriwether in The Vampire of Kabul Daniel Abraham Subterranean Online

Best Short Story

After October Ben Burgis Giganotosaurus
The Ghost of Christmas Possible Tim Pratt & Heather Shaw Podcastle
Rising Lion, The Lion Bows Zen Cho Strange Horizons
The Paper Menagerie Ken Liu the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Ties of Silver James L. Sutter the Beast Within 2: Predators and Prey anthology

Best Graphic Story

Fool Moon Jim Butcher, Mark Powers, and Chase Conley (Dynamite Entertainment)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

Wicked Girls seanan mcguire
The Fades BBC Three

Best Fancast
Any non-professional audio- or video-casting with at least four (4) episodes that had at least one (1) episode released in 2011.

Escape Pod
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast
The Red Panda Adventures
Podcastle
Drabblecast

Actually yes, I had read this before.. Also, actually, it turns out I hadn’t.

In conversation with the Esteemable Mrs Kript, I mentioned that I had a couple of copies, one in a childrens edition, and one in a gorgeous leather bound never-meant-to-be-read edition, and she asked me which version it was, which led to my finding out about the penguin classics versions, and why specific editions are recommended, which I’m embarrassed to say hadn’t occurred to me. Fortunately, her degree in Literature trumps my A level, and she bought me a copy of the title …and other Christmas writings for Xmas, which I just finished the titular story, and aim to read at least one more of each Xmas as a new tradition.

My reading was also informed by watching Sue Perkins ‘Mrs Dickens’ over the festive period, which I’d had some knowledge of due to, again, conversations with A. while she was reading a biography of the same a few years back.

Its safe to say the the original has been much monkeyed with (apart from the Muppet version, which I will hear nothing against!), and it was richer and more interesting in its first edition.

Its certainly worth the wait, although I’m going to have to go back and reread ‘Spook Country’ to make sense of a lot of the last third, I suspect. It had a lot of the dreamy feel to it that spook country did, unsurprising when you consider that it features Milgram, but spilling over I found into Hollis’s character as well. I wonder if this was actually the same in pattern recognition, which is my perfect read for long haul flights as it captures the slight disassociation with the world you get from jetlag, as experienced by the main protaganist. Gibson’s interest in fashion (I read a comment on Stross’s blog that he designs his own clothes as a hobby) is unashamedly revealed here, and far more integral to the plot than in Pattern Recognition.

A few niggles; the love interest appeared tacked on rather suddenly, although convincingly enough woven in from that point on. Also, there is a tech howler that is so absurd that I wonder that he didn’t ask any of his more technical friends (given that Doctorow recommended the hi tech phone for Milgram (yes, Madhatter, the Neo is officially cool!), its doubly shocking. All I’ll say is taser and networks, and leave it for the reader to get to that point and go ‘he didn’t?!’ ).

Finally, I do think that we should stop referring to Gibson as a science fiction writer (for this trilogy at least), as the books are most definitely set in the now. While he does do so excellent futuristic touches, its just regarding that tech that, in his own words, ‘isn’t evenly distributed yet’, such as the blimp drones controllable via the iPhone (big in all the gadget shops/sites this year, and which I now really fancy!). Given I’m reading this a couple of years after original publication, this is impressive, but not science fiction per se.. Discuss.

I’m amused to suspect may be falling under his definition of ‘mall ninja’ though – I enjoy reading EDC sites, and reviews of quasi-military gadgets, which are no more than upmarket versions of existing tech, and unlikely to be actually used by military/law enforcement. I wonder how much of his reading of urban fashion being driven by military design and now vice versa is true, or his opinion, rather than the background to the book.

Podcastle featured two of these, and mentioned that if we wanted more, buying this collection would help show the demand. Kindle only, as far as I can tell (no, just checked and “Now available for Kindle , ePub from the Apple iBookstore, and Nook”, so eBook only), and at £0.89, I bought it as soon as I’d finished listening.

Can’t really describe them properly except to say dark fantasy. Go listen to the Podcastle readings, and buy the download, if you have a Kindle.

More Mr Nix! Write More!

I was actually going to buy this before receiving it as part of the Hugo Voters packet for 2011, and read it in instalments. I thought I’d blogged about it, but apparently not.

I’d forgotten that books like this are a few headline acts, a few no hopers, and some in between (and invariably not what you expect). It was the same here – I loved the George R. R. Martin story, disliked the Gaiman, and found a few authors I intend to check out when I’m short of fiction.

As always, the range of what the author considered a wizard was quite wide, sometimes interestingly so.

So.. Highlights;

Mike Resnick is good, but then if you don’t know that about his short stories by now there’s no helping you. Check Podcastle, Fictionwise..
Simon R. Green is channelling both Jim Butcher and Charlie Stross, enough to make me want to check him out in the future, particularly in the featured character, if anything further has been written.
Same with Jeremiah Tolbert.
Jonathan L. Howard reignited my interest in his anti-hero Johannes Cabal the necromancer.
Ursula k. LeGuin delights with an earthsea story I’d missed ‘ The Word Of Unbinding’. I’ll have to go back and reread the Earthsea trilogy now..
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s ‘The Secret of The Blue Star’ reminded me of all I loved in Vance’s Dying Earth, and Leiber’s Lankhmar series, but was so indulgent that I was turned off her story by the end. That and I saw the plot twist early on.
Rajan Khanna was seriously channeling Deadlands with the serial numbers filed off, but that works for me.

Couldn’t get through Beagle’s ‘El Regalo’ – this makes both the reading and the Podcastle Giant episode. I know I should like his writing, but that piece I just don’t. Can’t say exactly why.

All in all, a good hall and several new authors to check out, as well as reminders of old favourites. A good hall!

Unfortunately, his tools worked for everything but Contacts – the bit I was most interested in. Further investigation showed that Google had changed the way they provided for you to export your contacts, and the old link no longer existed (but they had put up a page describing what and why). Fortunately, WWW::Contacts came to the rescue, with a working way to get at the data via the API. In retooling his script to use this, I ended up rewriting it to use my preferred command line/documentation parser, to give a consistent interface (as recommended in ‘Perl Best Practices‘, which I’ve been dipping into a lot at work), this lead to me splitting each backup into a separate function so you can choose to back up all three or just one.

The script is up at my Github page; feel free to fork, submit patches or just download and use!

On a related note, the work into this, partly to look at using App::Addex to manage my contacts data (which I’ve wanted to do since RBS blogged about it in his last year’s advent calendar), made me realise what a poor contacts system the Google Contacts is, especially for addresses – the API and the CSV export has fields for address lines 1 and 2, post code etc, but the interface, and the data, is all stored in the first address line, line breaks and all, making it painful to parse into a more useful format (such as the excel spreadsheet I used to bulk order my Christmas cards from Moonpig this year) – a project for another time perhaps, unless Google improve the way Contacts stores/manages the address data.

Bought after a tweet from @griffers convinced me to take a look via Kindle; like him, bought and started reading the same night.

It starts with a probationary constable in the Met being tasked to keep an eye on a crime scene, encountering a ghost, and being taken on, somewhat unwillingly, by the Met’s only Wizard. Its a fun urban fantasy romp, with a great deal of humour on behalf of, and aimed at, the police force, in a surprisingly positive way – think Pratchett’s ‘Guards Guards’, rather than ‘The Wire’..

It uses the location of London wonderfully, and like other books based there, makes me wish I knew more about the geo-history of the region (must get round to reading Ackroyd’s ‘London’, one day – no one makes an unabridged audiobook version that I could find, and I can’t face the mammoth tome, and its not available on Kindle (yet, I suppose)..).

I very nearly bought the second instalment as soon as I’d finished the first (and another has just come out in hardback), but managed to restrain myself – I will be doing so soon, however, just having trouble justifying it when my print ‘to read’ list is a couple of books (and more as soon as I ask james_ for his promised copies of the Seanan McGuire cannon, which I’m looking forward to), and my ebook ‘to read’ is about a dozen items.

If you like urban fantasy or The Dresden Files, or have spent some time around London, this is a worthwhile purchase.

Also; has it really been nearly two months in-between blog entries? I’ve been cathing up on the Hugo short stories, reading technically and listening to audio books more, both the LeCarre ones made available by the Guardian in a week-long offer of all his ‘smiley’ books, and ‘Big Finish’ productions of new audio only Dr Who adventures with the past few doctors (pre new TV series ones). Mostly, these have been just OK, with the exception of the Gatiss written one (as you might expect!) with Peter David.

While on this note, in researching the above book, it turns out Aaronovitch also has written a load of tie-ins for Blake’s 7! Talk about a nostalgia hit! I didn’t even know they did audio dramas for that…

As I think I say every time I read a Neal Stephenson book, this is is best yet. Not for the brilliance in retelling western philosophy from scratch while writing a science fiction book and making it consistently entertaining, as in Anathem, nor for the breadth of vision and historical coverage in the Baroque cycle, but simply because its a very good techno-thriller, a proper ‘page turner’ in the best blurb style.

It reminds me a lot of his earlier collaboration, ‘Cobweb’, only with the benefit of Stephenson’s maturing writing style, and freer rein (one assumes) to indulge his love of detail and intricate plots (although I’m listening to the audio-book of LeCarre’s ‘The Honourable Schoolboy’ at the moment, and even Stephenson’s plots don’t get that intricate!).
Its also, I suspect, his post-911 book, in that it covers Arabic terrorism (actually many kinds of fundamentalism), and I wonder if he needed to write Anathem to give himself space to write this. An idle thought.

Its probably his most readable book since ‘The Diamond Age’, and even more so than with Anathem, I found myself unwearied in reading through it, and only stopped every couple of hundred pages to let me brain catch up. Definitely a good one to start someone off with Stephenson with; if they like this they’ll have their expectations set for his other works, and be pleasantly surprised by his shorter ones.

I now know a lot more about guns, as well, particularly Marakov holsters. Who knew you pulled the gun downwards!

I came to this, I think, from the blog of the estimable Cthulhu and all round arcane scholar Kenneth Hite. The H.P. Lovercraft Literary Society do a podcast where they do readings of Lovecraft’s short stories, and read-thorough with commentary on the longer works, and a mention of this, along with an dramatisation by ‘Dark Adventure Radio Theatre‘, along with an upcoming shortness of podcasts since I was burning through them at a rate of knots while decorating the garden room, led me to purchase the dramatisation and listen along with the literary criticism and information from the hppodcraft guys.

I have to say, this was an excellent way to experience this. I’ve read a little Lovecraft in the past (but much more influenced by him, such as Stross’s Laundry series, or Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s haunting space opera Boojum, which was dramatised masterly on The Drablecast Podcast and available to download from Wired, for some reason. God she’s talented..), but this really turned me onto Lovecraft.

The 30 min podcasts I could listen to in the car, and then continue on with the story when I was decorating. That the hppodcraft guys really know their Lovecraft, as well as a lot of literary and period detail really comes through and brought the story and author to life for me. It helped that ‘Shadow’ is apparently one of Lovecraft’s best works (indeed, since then I’ve listened to their readings of ‘Cool Air’, and ‘The Cats Of Ulthar’, and found the latter much better than the former), apparently.

I can’t, unfortunately, recommend the dramatisation, which is a shame. On the plus side, its very well narrated, has excellent multt-person cast, and the music is evocative. Unfortunately, in dramatising it, they changed the ending, which is unforgivable as far as I’m concerned. It certainly made for a good ‘radio play’, but I was disappointed to hear the real ending on the hppodcraft podcast (try saying that three times fast!), and realise the production had monkeyed with it. Its the same reason I don’t buy abridged books; the author wrote it that way for a reason, and if I want to I can make my own decision on what to skip. Anyway, that spoiled the listening experience for me. The fact that they took several days to delivery the MP3 file once I bought it, and only after my chasing didn’t help. I understand, reading between the lines, that the person who runs the site was at worldcon, but these things are supposed to be automated – if you can take my money, you can deliver the file.

However, the overall experience was great, and I’ve downloaded a ‘complete works of H.P. Lovecraft’ book; since its out of copyright its available all over the place FOC – I downloaded mine from Cthulhuchick.com (great name), as she’d done the work of assembling this from Gutenberg, and will be reading through ‘The Trap’ (the next one after SOI, they’ve even moved onto ‘Dreams in the Witch House” now, also with Kenneth Hite, so full circle there) so I can listen to their LitCrit.

In the end, I listened to it in the car over the past month of so, when August meant the usual podcast crop was reduced, and I could save them for cooking and exercise. I found it slightly stilted and disconnected, partly due to the on/off listening experience, but also because, as I learned at the end of the book, it had been abridged. I loathe abridged books – I can skip myself, thanks – even if done by the author (which this wasn’t, IIRC).
That being said, you can’t fault the man’s scope or ambition – the entirety of western scientific thought in one book, distilled!

There was a lot of coverage of this when it first came out, as the author was one of the people featured/running Podcastle, IIRC, and it appeared in a lot of my fiction feeds. One of the chapters was read on Podcastle at launch and it interested me enough to add it to my wishlist, and I was given it for my birthday this year.

A rather Deadlands-ish feel (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, think wild west with magic), and it started rather well. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel it completely sustained it all the way through, since I felt it lagged a bit at the end, and really risked becoming a ‘paranormal romance’ book, with all the sparkly vampires that entails (contains no vampires though, sparkling or otherwise). I know, I know, I read Urban Fantasy, and sneer at Paranormal Romance. Vi vs Emacs…

The author has left room for a sequel, and certainly at least one of the magical traditions is left to be explored. Not sure whether I’ll pick it up, though, when the alternative is Seanan Mcguire (aka Mira Grant).. I only have so much reading time, after all..

Two dead tree books in a row! Not broken the eBook spell, but its nice to format shift.

Its safe to say that this was highly anticipated – given the lead character had been shot and was dead as far as could be ascertained, and the entire nature of the world had shifted, I (and presumably a lot of other people!) were agog to find out what happened , thirteen books into the series! Given how quickly they posted announcements of the next book, and the fact that it took an extra three months over Butcher’s normal annual publication, I’d certainly say there was a lot of interest in the followup..

Now that I’ve finished it, I spent some time thinking about it. I’m definitely going to re-read this and Changes, the last book, as I pretty much inhaled both of them (although not as much as Madhatter, by all accounts!), and they deserve a more considered reading. That said, I’m not sure how this book has advanced the overall plot any. There was a point towards the end of book, when the character bemoans ‘but it was all for nothing’ and I kind of agreed with him. I’m sure Butcher has laid all kinds of seeds, and will use things coming out of this to advance the plot in many ways, and I have faith in this, but I’m having trouble seeing how right now, to the point that I’m not actually looking forward to the next instalment. I know that Butcher has joked that his job is tormenting Dresden, but I can’t see much feel good factor coming in the next couple of books, and I’m surprised how much I had come to appreciate the ‘good guy in a bad spot’ aspect – I’m honestly not sure the character is a good person anymore, and I’m intrigued at how much that was part of the appeal for the character and the series for me. Not that I want a David Eddings like ‘everyone is a nice person underneath’ scmaltz fest, but I read enough darker fiction that I appreciate the ‘triumph over adversity’ of Dresden.

On a unrelated now, interested that this appeared to be available on Kindle and Audible, as previously the series was only iBooks.

Of course, I’ll be buying the next one. So the year long countdown begins anew..

My nominations, then;

Best Novel
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)

This was hard; and came down between this and “Dervish House”. I think the latter is a better book overall, but I’ve had far more conversations with people about Feed, so thats what swung it. Apart from one of the nominations, all solid contenders though.

Best Novella
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean) – Read Online

Ted Chiang is to short stories what Neal Stephenson is to the long novel.

Best Short Story
“The Things” by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010) – Read Online

Best by a long, long way.

Best Novellete Story

Missed this entire category, and realised with 6 days to go..

“The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010) – Read Online

Best Related Work
Writing Excuses, Season 4, by Brandon Sanderson, Jordan Sanderson, Howard Tayler, Dan Wells

Probably because its the only one I’ve had time to properly review. Although ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’ had a lot of ground to make up before it even started, although, I’m persuaded after a conversation with james_ that I’m being unfairly judgemental..

Best Graphic Story
Didn’t have time to read any of these, so following the advice of the voting page, didn’t vote. Looking forward to reading them when I get time, though.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
Crikey, I’m out of touch. I’ve only seen Inception from this list, and we turned it off 30 mins in when it failed to grab us. Also the part one of the Harry Potter, since I first drafted this blog post, so that gets the nomination… A bit naughty, really, since I’ve not seen enough of the other to be a fair vote.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
Doctor Who: “A Christmas Carol,” written by Steven Moffat; directed by Toby Haynes (BBC Wales)

Wanted to go back and rewatch the Doctor Who’s. Liked ‘Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury’, but..

Best Editor, Short Form
John Joseph Adams

As, simply put, he’s the only one I’ve heard of, and has done two anthologies I want to read.

Best Editor, Long Form
Nick Mamatas

No real opinion here, but he wrote a book I liked years ago, so..

Best Semiprozine
Interzone, edited by Andy Cox

Voting for the home team, but I suspect the other magazines have done better – most of the stories appearing on Podcastle & EscapePod I suspect came from some of the others, but don’t have the time to go back and reference.

Best Fanzine
StarShipSofa, edited by Tony C. Smith

Can’t stand the guys voice, but its one of the best podcasts around. Problem is, its over an hour each episode, so I stopped listening to it. It won last year, so voting it up again this and meaning to add it back into my schedule. Assuming I can get past my irrational dislike of his accent.

Best Fan Writer
No opinion here, so skipped.

Best Fan Artist
Randall Munroe

Apart from the obvious, his was the only art I liked, and he draws stick men..

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

What? What? Thats another five books? I give up. I can’t read all of that & the Hugos in 6 weeks.

To be fair, they added this entire category in a couple of weeks ago – how fantastic is that for the Hugo Voter’s packet – astounding value, and its lead to more conversations about speculative fiction than I’ve had in years.

Heck, this post alone has taken about cumulative three hours to write..

Hugo novelette.

This was an odd little piece. So much of the world left unexplained yet tantalisingly believable, building on Brin, Scott Card and others I’m sure I’ve missed.

Hugo novelette nominee.

Odd one, this. Very shadowrun. Interesting take on things, but not as good as the previous two I’ve just reviewed.

Hugo novelette award.

This was lovely. A real homage to old and new mars stories, and leaves you with a pleasant melancholy. Now my pick for best novelette. I wonder what’s next?

Hugo Best Novelette. Now this was fun steampunk! Science fiction steampunk at that! Characterisation wasn’t great, but very in keeping with the style, so I forgive him that.

Best novelette so far (two down, three to go)…

Last of the Hugo Novella nominees! This grew on me as I read it, but left me with too cardboard a feeling for the characters, and no real understanding why they did what they did. Not sure if this was part of a larger story, but the lack of background made them all feel cardboard. Liked the mcguffin, though.