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« Aug. 2008
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posted 16 Sep 2008 (Tue) at 2:34p.m.
from the couch
I'm right in the middle of Neal Stephenson's new tome Anathem, and it's like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy - it's making me wish I'd studied some kind of hard science or classics, and that I had a bunch of really geeky friends to hang out and trade theorems with. Anathem is novel of big ideas - science, philosophy, and religion - but it also shot through with a melancholy longing that really gets to me. I haven't finished it yet, but so far I think it's as good as, or maybe even better than Cryptonomicon, if such a thing is possible.
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posted 9 Sep 2008 (Tue) at 8:28a.m.
from Señor Fish, the kitchen table
First off, this has nothing to do with the Marvel Comics Beyonder. I'm talking about the Beyonders from Iain M. Banks' awesome space-opera The Algebraist. You can read some excellent reviews elsewhere that will describe the story better than I can. Most of these focus on the Dwellers, which are a totally anarchic civilization where everything gets done by the equivalent of Wikipedia contributors or open-source programmers or the good folk of Personal Telco. But the thing that I keep coming back to is the Beyonders.
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posted 5 Sep 2008 (Fri) at 12:13p.m.
from the office
If you're plugged into the Django universe you've probably already heard it, but in case you haven't, Django reached 1.0 the other day. If you're not plugged in, or if you don't know what this Django thing is, it's the web application framework written in Python and was used to make this site. Congrats to the Django team and everyone who participated in making this happen! You guys rawk!
UPDATE 2008-9-5 15:07: Looks like the Django site is slashdotted. A surge in interest, or are they just updating their code to 1.0?
