Planet TLLTS

The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall by Edgar Allan Poe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a mouthful of a story, very wordy, yet at the same time hysterical. The science involved in this while ludicrous is utterly imaginative on Poe’s part. I could only imagine people reading this during his time period and being duped into believing this adventure to be true. Avery enjoyed it and so did I!



View all my reviews

The Forest Monster of Oz by Robert Evans

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am torn about this book. It is an Oz book, but it is not written by Baum, and that is plainly evident. It is not badly written, just differently. The story takes place soon after the second book of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, and starts to fill in some of the story on how Ozma settled into her tenure as Queen. There are a handful of new characters and peoples that are met along the way, who are at the outset very typical of Oz denizens and very fascinating. But still, you can readily tell it is not Baum.

First, the book tends to be very morals based, almost to the point of preaching. At times, the ethics posited can be very heavy handed and almost feel like a wrap on the knuckles warning or a lecture.

The period is off compared to the other books having been written at some time around the end of the 20th century, or could be early 21st; I cannot seem to find an accurate date. But this surprises me anyway as it seems to have been written around the 1950′s or 60′s. Regardless, there are references to technologies and even some political events, that are a far cry away from Baum’s period.

Towards the latter third of the book is a long story about baseball. While an interesting segue I do not see how it fit into the rest of the story and the character is merely a vehicle for this story, leaving upon the continuation of the quest when they arrive at their destination.

There was a point in the story where it felt like a chapter had mystically disappeared. One minute the party (Ozma and the animals) is fighting the land sharks and the next minute a major arc of the quest is resolved. Somehow their long journey took them in a complete circle both story wise and geographically. Avery and myself were a bit perplexed.

While a fun read, it was definitely not a Baum book. If you have read all the Oz books by Baum and want to continue the journey, The Forest Monster Of Oz is a decent jaunt.



View all my reviews

Sometimes I get lucky and something cool happens to fall in my lap. This happened last week when I ran across a G5 tower dual 1Ghz /8Gb ram that was getting tossed. I decided ti rescue it as I hate to see useful hardware go to waste. As the version of OS X that runs on such beasts is getting long in the tooth AND I happen to be a Linux enthusiast, I decided quickly that this would be a great box to look at the recent offerings of PPC Linux. Here are my thoughts:

Debian:
This happened completely by accident, but Debian was the first distro I tried. You see, the Mint PPC installer will install Debian PPC by default if you don’t specify to install Mint, which I completely forgot to do on my first try. Debian is, well, Debian. I wish I had the foresight to actually get a screenshot, but the installed version on PPC is what I expect it looks like anywhere else as well. Debian is fantastically consistent about that. That being said, Debian and I differ in opinion on what software I generally want to have available under Linux. The Debian folks are very staunch on the “free software only” thing and *I* am one of the guys who thinks I should have the “freedom” to actually enjoy proprietary and non-free software if I want to. As I really wasn’t looking to do a Debian install anyhow, I played for a few minutes and then moved along.

Mint PPC 11:
Now *this* is what I really wanted to try. As a long time admirer and user of Linux Mint, I was thrilled to try it out on the PPC too. Unfortunately I was slightly disappointed. You see, Mint PPC is not an “official” port, per se, so it’s not quite the same. First thing I noticed is it is obviously built straight off Debian, and uses their software “choices”, which I have previously described. Secondly, the default desktop is an LXDE with nautilus. Ok, but a little clunky feeling to me. It wasn’t long before I was wanting to check out what else was out there, and so I did.

YellowDog 6.2:
Years ago, when Dann and I first started the Lehigh Valley Linux User Group, YellowDog Linux was quite a contender. Shortly thereafter, they made their presence really big in Japan and I sort of didn’t hear much from them anymore. Well, it appears they are still going strong and offering what turns out to be a really nice and robust PPC Linux distribution. Honestly, in retrospect, this is the one I would settle on as my second choice. There is plenty of support and plenty of packages available and it runs rock solid stable. If you are at all familiar with RedHat, CentOS or Scientific Linux this would be an no-brainer for you to use. The *only* thing I didn’t really like about it was the default DE was Enlightenment. It worked fine and was completely functional, just not to my tastes. I am sure I could change it to suit my needs better, but there were more PPC Distros to try!

Fedora 16 PPC:
Now THIS one I was SURE would be the one for me as soon as I got it running. The install went really smooth, especially for a Fedora install, which has a really bad historical habit of being broken in one way or another. Once I had the desktop up I was greeted by a standard Gnome3 DE, which is completely familiar to work with for me, even though it was minus the desktop icon support available in Mint. No matter, I was excited to use it and it was FAST and really responsive. Unfortunately, as is the habit of my ventures into Fedora land, it was hopelessly broken, and there is not a lot of package support. Here are a few for-instances: EPEL repo will not install. Flite makes the core dump. Worst was nautilus refuses to prompt for user/password on any shares (ssh, smb, webdav, etc.). It just says you must enter the password and then doesn’t afford you any way to do so. Nice try guys.

Ubuntu 11.10 PPC:
Saving the best for last, I *finally* hit on one that’s a keeper, otherwise I was going straight back to YDL. Ubuntu, as it turns out, ends up being a very polished product for PPC. Sure there are some issues, such as Unity completely rots on this machine, but they are easily overcome and then you have a nice solid worker with good package support. In my case, like I mentioned, I had an issue with Unity. It seems that the Unity 3D doesn’t like this mac. I am not sure why as Gnome-Shell works great with the 3D stuff. Unity 2D was fine, but not only do I prefer Gnome-shell over Unity, but I was working on a 4×3 screen, which nobody should ever use Unity with. Once I switched to Gnome-shell, I was set. I installed my standard set of packages I use. All of them installed without crabbing about anything and everything worked, even user/pass in nautilus

If you have an old PPC machine you want to keep in service or press into service, Linux PPC is surely the way to go. You just cannot go wrong with either YellowDog or Ubuntu on these machines. No sense in wasting or chucking good computer equipment right! Stuff Linux on there and make it useful once again!

I know, I know. I have been really busy lately and have not posted anything. You wouldn’t even believe how much so.

Last night, right before I passed out from another long week I was reading my email (in mutt, the best email client btw) and I decided I was going to take a little nap. Well, as a hold over from the old days when you had to worry about screen burn-in, I wanted to start a screensaver, but something different.

As a cli addict, in the old days I remember using a couple terminal savers, worms and rain. I decided to start up worms for nostalgia sake. Well, it wasn’t installed. AHH THE HORROR! As it turns out, most distributions do not automatically include these anymore and they are normally in a package called “bsdgames”. Once that was installed I was ready to go. Simply running a maximized terminal session with worms -d 60 (a switch to delay the worms a bit), was enough to make things right once more.

I bet that many new Linux/unix users have missed out on the wonders of such simple things and decided that today I would make a little post to try and encourage you to try them out. Please do so! (and remember rain too.)

The bsdgames have a lot of those kinds of little gems and you just cannot go wrong playing around with them. There are greats in there like hack and tetris and snake and on and on. You might be surprised how entertained you can be while enjoying some of the old-school stuff that gives you some great unix creds

Free Will by Sam Harris

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a very thought provoking book. Free Will has had me thinking very hard the past few days. Sam Harris provides a short, concise essay on the the fallacy of Free Will. His words are compelling and challenge many of the established concepts we as a society take for granted each and every day. While this book is not thorough review of the current research, it’s a fantastic starting point with many references for further inquiry.

I was rather surprised about how short this book is. Harris does a great job of presenting his argument in so few pages. A good third of it is notes so there is plenty to move on to for the interested reader.



View all my reviews

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It had been relayed to me by a close friend that John Carter is to be considered one of the first “super heroes” and to this I agree. Having been written over a century ago I can see how his amazing feats set the stage for the many heroic figures rising out the of mid 20th century to grace the pages of comic books and both the silver and television screens.

I admit I had determined to read this book solidly after seeing the movie, John Carter, and wanting to get a feel for how true to the story Disney made the movie. Now I enjoyed the movie, I did, and the first fifth of the book was matched pretty well, but the similarities stopped there. What was so sorely missed was the rich history presented of the Martian races and the further development of their barbaric and sensitive customs.

John Carter himself remained a compelling character. While dashing is his own day I am sure, he is now more and archetype we are all too familiar with. But this does not diminish the enjoyment of the story.

For the time, I find the ideas and technology presented very compelling and futuristic. One could almost lend credence to the possibility of life on Mars at some point even with the results of our current exploration.

Regarding the story, though, the pace was perfect and the characters well written. I am surly compelled to continue reading the rest of the series and to check out more of Burroughs’ work.



View all my reviews

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I believe I enjoyed this book a bit more than my daughter, that I do. I suspect her enjoyments was a bit impaired by my ability to phrase the voices of some of the characters properly, especially the dialect of Jim and many of the more “Southern” folk. Still, the ride was great and never boring.

The racist language aside, I felt it was an interesting reflection of how slaves were treated in the South and the attitudes of the main characters towards Blacks. Still some of this was rough to read, that it was.

This book piqued my interest to take a raft down the Mississippi!



View all my reviews

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow, what an awesome book. I love Vonnegut. His writing style is always engrossing and his tales suck me in and leave me thinking with a tear in my eye. There is such beautiful sadness in this book and many others I have read by him.

I believe this is his second published novel and you can see many of the themes he carries on in future works being established here: Destiny, futility, loss, regret, and longing.

The story is broken into three parts and I must say the transition between the first and second parts rather jarring, but necessary. Reflecting back upon this in the third part revealed the effect to be perfect.

I do strongly recommend reading this novel early on in any Vonnegut experience so as to enjoy the early establishment of universe.



View all my reviews

escape into reality by Anthony Souza

My rating: 0 of 5 stars

I really do dig the Essean philosophy and this book came at a time when I really needed to hear what it said. The idea of handling negative thoughts and stress through an escape to reality; well more of a focus on the reality in front of you has been an excellent coping mechanism through some recent stressful times.

Like the two books before, this is an extremely quick and simple read but do not let that detract you from the important message delivered.



View all my reviews

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is another work of literature that I somehow bypassed in my studies growing up. I cannot recall how so many others have read this book yet it remained untouched for me. I read to this Avery over the span of a few weeks and we absolutely loved the novel. While it was a bit wordy at times, and the dialogue difficult for me to master, it was a delightful romp.

The characters were so colorful and exciting. The racism at times risque for today’s ears but a good reminder of how things used to be. If you have not read this novel you better do so and the rest of his novels.



View all my reviews