The Briar King is a better book than I expected. I ordered it on a whim from the Sci Fi book club on the basis of the blurbs in their monthly catalog, which is usually a mistake. But the book turns out to be a well-crafted piece of epic fantasy with some mildly surprising elements. per usual the story concerns the impending onset of a prophecy of doom and the central characters efforts to discover the true nature of the peril and fight it off. It’s the first book in a proposed series, and as such it lays the groundwork for what’s to come and spends a good bit of time on character development. It’s being heralded as the ‘next great epic’ and a worthy equal to George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice series, which I really like. I’m not sure it’s quite all that, but the book was definitely better than I expected and like Martin the author is not afraid to introduce empathetic characters and then do away with them in a gritty fashion. I’d give it 3 stars and I will pick up the next one when it comes out.

What’s that? You want to know something about the plot? Haven’t you noticed yet that I don’t tend to get into plots in my little capsule reviews? Go read the book, it’s epic high fantasy, they all have the same plots anyway, it’s just the details that differ 😉

Check out this uber cool photography project. The artist is stitching together a 30 mile long seamless photograph of San Francisco. Unfortunately he’s only publishing the complete project in a very limited set of 2000 or so, but the notion is excellent and there are cool sample shots on the site. Years ago a friend and I considered trying to build a ‘virtual’ downtown portland by shooting QTVR’s on the corners of all the streets, an idea that had occurred to me after remembered a Nova (or some other PBS program) I had seen while in high school about a team of scientists who were experimenting with Laser Discs back when they first came out, and they built an entire ‘virtual’ version of a city by shooting photos every ten feet or so in each direction from within a car, which they then stitched together on an interactive laserdisc so that you could ‘drive’ through the city on your television. This was like mid-80’s and cutting edge stuff at the time.

Anyway I still love the idea and so far as I know there are not a lot of projects to build this kind of stuff. There are

I stumbled across another great index of RSS readers. Mostly all the same clients listed, but variety being the spice of life and whatnot, I figured folks might be interested in checking it out.

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I’ve been on a sci-fi/fantasy kick for like a year and a half now. The annual Hugo awards are about to take place and in their honor Locus has posted a recommended reading list for books published this year. I’ve read quite a few on the list and thought some of you might find it interesting. China Mi

So I’m still obsessing on RSS aggregators, I am completely hooked on them. sourceforge started to provide software project feeds recently and they alone are worth the price of entry. Just today I found portabase, a free superhandy flat file database that runs on windows, linux and my new PDA (pics to come soon).

Anyway I promised I would say more on the subject. I can’t stress enough how handy these aggregators are. To try and help you folks get started, I found a great list of most all of the available software, most of them free. Check it out. If you’re on windows, Newsdesk is a good first choice to check it out with. On a mac, netnewswire absolutely rocks. Oh, and don’t forget that you can subscribe to daves-place too, using this url (plug it into your RSS client):

http://daves-place.dyndns.org/weblog/index.xml

Check out the aggregators – I promise you, if you give them a try you will change the way you use the web.

Just a warning – it’s possible daves-place will again go down for a period of time, possibly starting this weekend. Redhat pushed an update down to me that broke significant parts of the KDE gui that I use, so I get all kinds of application crashing going on in the gui. This sucks. It’s not a huge deal and basically has no performance impact on the server side of daves-place, which is its primary purpose, but I do use KDE occasionally and I need to get it running again. One of three things is going to happen: either I am going to bump immediately to kde 3.11 (just released), I am going to jump to redhat 8.0 (I’m currently running a heavily patched 7.3) or I am going to wait till Redhat 9 is in stable form in a month or so. It all depends on how impatient I get with my crippled GUI combined with how much time I can get out of the Topcat for assistance (he owes me some sysadmin time, we use the bartering system).

I’ll prolly post a warning right before I break everything, but just wanted to give the heads up.

Sorry for the outage. I pulled a boneheaded move and then compounded it by trying to do some networking stuff that had unintended consequences. This left daves-place down for two days, doh!

For the technically inclined, it’s actually pretty amusing. I was trying to get a second NIC going in the box remotely, played around with the networking scripts, set them as I thought was appropriate, and rebooted the box. Guess what CD I had left sitting in the machine? The Redhat 8 install CD, so the machine booted up to the installer. doh!. So I get home, discover this, pull the cd and reboot. Meanwhile though, it turns out that there is some issue prolly related to system interrupts that is causing the two NICs in the box to conflict with each other, from the OS’s perspective it thinks it is talking to one NIC when in fact the other is responding. The result of this was everything looked fine to me on my LAN, but actually the box was not responding to the outside world. Translation – no daves-place.

Anyway long story short last night I got home and shut down the second NIC so it stops grabbing an IP and the problem is temporarily solved. Now I need to dig into either routing tables or IRQ settings, not sure which yet, to solve the problem in the long run.

or whatever that thing was called (Cue Cat)? This was the device that was being given away free by everyone and his uncle, notably wired magazine and Radioshack, several years ago. It plugged into your USB port or your PS2 port, depending on which model you had, looked vaguely like a mouse laid flat out (the furry kind, not the computer kind), and let you scan bar codes into your computer. The idea behind it was everyone would start printing bar codes on everything, in ads, on your jeans, on the beans in your soup, whatever, and you could scan them with your cue cat and get useful information. Of course, of the number of problems with this concept, the chief one was, no one wanted even more marketing messages bombarding them, which was the agenda behind the device. The company died a well-deserved death, yay!

But…it turns out these cue cats can be useful on other contexts. Small mom and pop retailers, used to spending money on bar code readers, discovered that with the appropriate software, quickly kicked out by hackers, they could use them as free barcode readers, which had all kinds of uses for businesses. So a device that was for a brief period of time as common as an AOL disk disappeared. You can still buy them on ebay, but they’re a little pricey for a device that was free (about $8-9 before shipping).

Here’s where you come in. Do you have one? I have need of about 4-5 of them. It turns out they can also be turned into a recharge/source of power device for PDA’s, with a connector from Radio Shack and a little soldering. I am especially wanting USB models since I have tracked down a PS2 model already and the USB models can be used on my mac. So. If you send me your cue cat, I will paypal you $5 plus the shipping. Pretty simple deal, I save $5 or so, and you get a little lucre for that pos mouse thingy wired magazine sent you a few years ago. Or if you’re generous, you could just give it to me. Either way, I covet them. First 5 cue cat holders to apply get the cash. Speak up!