I finished reading Brasyl by Ian Macdonald a few weeks back and have been meaning to scrape together a bit of a review. The first book I read of Ian’s was River of Gods which was totally awesome. That made me buy The Ares Express which was ok but not as good.
When I saw the cover of Brasyl I thought it would be a lot more like River of Gods so I got pretty excited about it. However, I found Brasyl a lot harder to get into than River of Gods and I suspect part of the reason is having never travelled to Brasil or anywhere in South America so maybe I didn’t get it as much as reading River of Gods having done a few stints in India for work.
Like River of Gods, Brasyl is set (at least partly) in the near future – about fifty years from now. However it also has storylines in the present day and in the past that inevitably link up (but I won’t say how).
Where River of Gods focussed much of it’s attention on AIs and singularity, Brasyl looks at Quantum computing. While books about singularities and highly powerful AIs seem to crowd my bookshelves, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that does the quantum computing thing so to me Brasyl is ground breaking in this realm and I must say it totally blew my mind.
For some reason I didn’t develop any feelings for the characters in this book, their lives just seemed so alien to me. I had the most resonance with the 18th century Jesuit and his unlikely friendship with the French scientist, possibly because I related to the familiar subject matter of science versus religion in their dialog. The other characters: the shady “grey market” businessman and the reality TV producer were funny and wacky but I didn’t really care what happened to them (ok well I guess I wanted them to live so that’s something).
I think the setting of the book would be much more appreciated by someone who has been to a country like Brasil. There were lots of Spanish (or Portugese?) terms used in the book which took awhile to get a feel for and also it was hard for me to imagine what it all looked like.
Gadget spoilers: As far as gadgets go (and don’t we all read scifi for the gadgets?), the weapon of choice was the quantum blade (similar to the one in Johnny Mnemonic only more like a dagger). It popped up in some unusual places and provided a strong level of menace (as well as carnage). The iShades were a pretty cool accessory – like an iPhone in your sunglasses I guess and our favorite bugs RFIDs had been taken to the next level with satellite tracking. The two quantum computers seemed pretty large, needing a whole room of equipment and they had blue LEDs which are so hot right now. The tech was not neglected in the 18th century end of things with the invention of wooden cannons and the use of … actually I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot so I’ll just say that Clarke’s law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic comes into play.
[tags]book review, Brasyl, Ian Macdonald, science fiction[/tags]
books
You know how sometimes when you’re up late at night, you hear weird things outside (or even inside) and you think probably just a possum or just the house cooling down. Well, I was up at about 11pm a week or so ago and I swear I hear footsteps going down the side of the house. But I know it’s just my senses playing tricks and it’s probably a cat or dog or possum or whatever. So I keep hacking on my mythtv upgrade. Then I hear a bit of noise at one of the windows and I think that’s one big mofo possum out there scratching at the window. So I get up and go to have a look but I don’t see anything. So I go back to trying to figure out how to get mythbuntu installed over the top of an already installed ubuntu. But then I hear the footsteps again coming back out to the front and not that I’m fully awake, I’m sure it is a person scrunching through the leaves on that side of the house.
I didn’t think too much of it until I was in the back yard on the weekend and noticed that the outside screen on the window had been taken off and leant against the house. It felt a bit spooky to see that and I’m sure the guy must have seen me looking out trying to see him.
So after a bit of discussion about it, we’ve decided a dog might be a good help to feel a bit more secure about at least knowing when intruders are about and letting them know that we know etc… (We’ve also put the number of the local police station on the fridge and gotten a quote for a security screen on one of the doors that I think has a weak lock).
[tags]prowler, security, home life[/tags]
Uncategorized
Here is my solution to the problem of Premature end of script headers: awstats.pl (which sounds like something you might need nasal spray for doesn’t it?). This seems to be an issue for systems using virtualmin but maybe other web hosts can have trouble with running cgi but will allow php.
File: awstats.php
<?php
$cmd = "export QUERY_STRING=\"{$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']}\"; "
."export GATEWAY_INTERFACE=\"CGI/1.1\"; "
."export HTTP_USER_AGENT=\"{$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']}\"; "
."export SCRIPT_NAME=\"{$_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']}\"; "
."/usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl";
$res = `$cmd`;
$res = str_replace('awstats.pl','awstats.php', $res);
$res = substr($res, strpos($res, '<!DOCTYPE'));
echo $res;
?>
It’s a wrapper script that calls awstats itself and then passes the results back to the browser. Note it clobbers any headers awstats sends back and replaces references to awstats.pl to awstats.php in a rather brute force way.
[tags]awstats, cgi, web hosting, wrapper[/tags]
Linux
I use a comment filter on this blog called spam karma. A few people have hinted that it is difficult to get their comments onto the blog and perhaps it is spam karma causing trouble. There are a few things it does like making it harder to comment on old posts, treating you with suspicion if you haven’t commented before (and it keeps a score of your previous karma so once it gets into it’s head that you’re a spammer it can be hard to convince it otherwise) as well as the usual checks for spammy words, super fast commenting etc…
If you have trouble with the spam filter, drop me an email so I know about it yo.checkit awithacirclearoundit gmail.com.
Also an apology to those of you who have been in comment moderation and I haven’t gotten around to approving it for a week or two. I really like comments!
Uncategorized
