thoughts…

It’s as enjoyable as the “First Law” trilogy; he stills has that fascination for broken / crippled characters (but as every reviewer mentioned them it’s only natural he sticks to what’s been working) — and unsurprisingly this book is quite similar to his others.
2/3rds of the book along, there is some sort of plot twist (which is presented in a nifty fashion) but seems to have no basis in the motivation of the characters (i.e. they seem to act contrarian to their interior motivations only to serve the slight twist that has some repercussions later on).
Anyway, don’t let that stop you, it’s still a rather gory and dirty fantasy romp. The overall world / setting is one I quite enjoy, especially the background with the Valint & Balk vs the prophet and his eaters.

Piano-pop music (a bit similar to Ben Folds). Really like the album, but the incessant repetition of some of the lyrics goes on my nerves, as do the Hallelujahs.
Stand-outs: Dance Anthem of the 80’s, Eet, The Calculation.

Other music I’ve recently picked up:
65daysofstatic – The Fall of Math
The Tings Tings – We Started Nothing
Anna Ternheim – Seperation Road
Laura Marling – Alas I Cannot Swim

Bad example: Ghost in the Shell 2.0. The CGI just doesn’t feel right, and it feels like messing with the film just for the sake of messing with it.
Good example: Evangelion 1.0 — You are (not) alone. In contrast, really excellent.

While solid-state drives (SSDs) seem to be all the rage in net-/laptops at the moment, most of their advantages (mostly negligible access times) also make sense for a desktop system, whereas their disadvantages (price / small size) are not as constricting as you can have multiple physical discs in a desktop system.
I’ve bought a 64GB SLC SSD drive in a 3.5″ SATA version for my Mac Pro and use it solely as an OS and applications drive, while my home-directory (where the bulk of my data obviously sits) is still on a normal, spacious hard-drive. The speed-up (in spite of Mac OS X’s already quite fast boot / application start-up times) is very noticeable.
The OS migration from the HDD to the SDD was very painless. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything but my username’s home directory, rebooted from the SSD, logged in as the user with administration privileges (which your everyday user account shouldn’t have) and changed the home-directory for my non-admin user (under System Preferences – Accounts – Right-Click on the account – Advanced Options – Home Directory).
Almost all applications (baring Xcode) cold-start approximately half-way through the first Dock-icon bounce and World of Warcraft flies with this setup.
If I didn’t need more than 64GB total space on my MacBook Pro, I’d also fit it with such an SSD drive without hesitation. But as it is, I need more space. Alas, when the next laptop is on the horizon I can definitely see myself shelling out for an SSD upgrade. Maybe mainboards should come with something like 64GB of on-board flash for use as operating system and application drive…

PuzzleManiak €3.99 - includes a lot of Nikoli puzzle games (in fact most of the ones from here are in there), all are randomly generated with different difficulty levels and includes a daily Web Challenge where you compete against other’s times. Worth it alone for Slitherlink.

Vexed €0.79 - Good port of the Palm OS game including all level-packs.

I’m still looking for a version of Sherlock (Windows) or Hercule (Palm OS) for the iPhone…

WowPlot has been updated to version 0.1.3, featuring support for the new 3.0.2 combat log events (and subsequently removing support for 2.4.3 ones).
Only tested with a single Kara log, so please get in touch if you’re having trouble with new logs.

Fairly short book, and about 3 quarters of it feel like exposition (although there’s plenty of things happening) and build-up, but it covers a lot of ground; a fair amount of it in flashbacks. Nevertheless, it ends in a nice, satisfying climax. It’s fairly unflinching in both its violence and sex (homo- as well as heterosexual).
If you like Morgan’s SF books, you’ll enjoy this as well.

As I was trying to clear out the folders of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to on my mail account (Apple’s MobileMe, née .Mac), I ran into a bit of a problem: I couldn’t delete any messages from some of the folders; it always failed with a timeout error from the server. These folders were usually quite populated (e.g. ~19,000 messages from cocoa-dev). After contacting support chat, and trying many things both in Mail.app as well as MobileMe’s web-app, my case got escalated.
As it turns out, nested IMAP folders are the culprit! It doesn’t matter if the folders in question are at the top-level, just having any nested folders in the account seems to trigger the “slow path” that leads to the problem.
Now my folder structure is a mess with oddly prefixed folder names, but at least it’s flat, and I can work with my emails again.

TL;DR version: Don’t nest folders on MobileMe’s IMAP servers, stick to a flat hierarchy.

This is gonna be a bit of a rant…

• First off, it’s not as good as Ilium, but it’s still a fast-paced page turner. If you skip all the useless prose.
• It isn’t Science Fiction. It’s Future Fantasy or something. There’s no science (and that’s not just due to the “far future” timeline). Simmon’s an English major FFS.
• He (thinks he)’s well-read, and lets you know it on every single page.
• The story is rather convoluted (probably due to trying to be clever with its literary inspiration) and deus ex machina abound — how couldn’t they in a world full of “gods”? Bah.
• Anything that “creates universes via the thought / inspiration of genius” is made of FAIL. Humans aren’t special, get over it.
• Worst of all, the book is in so many ways incredibly self-centred. By that I mean, that so much of its thinking is a product of the time (and even country of origin as well as possibly religion) of the author.

Still, the Hyperion Cantos (which I enjoyed quite a lot) had similar faults.

WowPlot has been updated to version 0.1.2, featuring the following improvements:

• Added an option to automatically create new plots when splitting (by holding the Alt(⌥)-key).
• Added new 2.4.3 combat log events (at least the ones I could find).
• Removed PetFixers entries for Shaman’s summoned elementals (as 2.4.3 fixes this).
• Added Fire Bomb spell to belong to Jan’Alai.
• Updated Sparkle to 1.5b4.

As usaul, hard SF-ish. Gives a very good impression of time- and space-implications of galaxy-wide colonisation using relativistic travel. There’s a reveal about two-thirds in (complete with “sit down for this”) which on first thought is a bit “meh!”, but nevertheless has very far-reaching consequences which only become obvious a bit later. Also, I don’t quite see the point of the Palatial side-story. Nevertheless, an enjoyable and gripping read, but not quite as good as Reynolds’ other books IMO.

WowPlot has been updated to version 0.1.1, featuring the following improvements:

• loading / saving of plots
• more speed (back-end is now multi-threaded using NSOperation)
• Sparkle auto-updating
• better parsing
• some error-messages
• more consistent splitting