This is my Title

20220208

Top SciFi/Fantasy Book Recommendations

I've had a couple people asking me for book recommendations recently, so here's my list of recent favorites.

* Martha Wells

I've previously reviewed her, but everything she writes is still great. The only thing I can add to my last post is her new series, Murderbot Diaries about a lovable yet emotionally damaged cyborg who works as a bodyguard. I've seen it called an "IT Thriller" because it has a lot of computer-hacking.

* Terry Mancour

Spellmonger Series: I can only describe this as Lord of the Rings meets Dune... He has somehow managed to re-invent a Tolkien-esque fantasy world from the ground up, in a way that makes it seem so fresh that I'm surprised when I recognize his creations as classical fantasy tropes halfway through. The classic story elements of Necromancers, Elves, and Dwarves are re-built and characterized from the ground-up. The present fantasy world is unified with the SciFi remnants of older civilizations in probably the best and most coherent SciFi/Fantasy blending I've ever seen. The series of chalk full of politics on the order of Dune, and every book features some level of medieval institution that gets torn down and re-constituted with an in-depth examination of how Feudalism works in practice. I feel like reading the institutional analysis and flux in this series has leveled up my understanding of institutional politics and changed the way I think about other fantasy settings.

* Christopher G. Nuttall

Schooled in Magic: This is an isekai-style magic-school series, where a girl from Earth starts introducing Earth-knowledge to revolutionize the medieval fantasy world that had previously been relying on decaying institutions maintained by magic. This is probably the best fantasy magic-school series I've ever read. He's 24 books in now, and the characters have all graduated and gotten caught-up in larger social issues. Besides the adventures, the series also examines the various social changes that take places paralleling similar historical developments on Earth like the Industrial Revolution, and how various crises formed or were averted.

The Zero Enigma: Another magic-school series (this time without an isekai) where civilization has been reconstructed from the remnants of a fallen empire. This series focuses a lot more on inter-house style politics and coming-of-age story-lines than Schooled in Magic, and the mechanics of the magic is much less of a focus. Not quite as good as Schooled in Magic in my opinion, but the story is still growing into it's larger world-changing issues.

A Learning Experience: A bunch of Libertarians on Earth get advanced technology create a Libertarian utopia in space and then end up in inter-galactic wars. It's been a long time since I read this, and the books jumped forward in time to watch how the society evolved with new characters, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I remember liking it.

* T. Kingfisher

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking: The funniest coming-of-age fantasy story I've ever read.

Minor Mage: A boy gets sent on a quest to save his town because he was all they had. Somehow he manages to use his meager abilities to great effect.

* Kanata Yanagino

The Faraway Paladin: Another isekai story, where the protagonist spends his childhood training to become a Paladin under the tutelage of undead legends. The author is clearly an Ursula K. Le Guin fan, and this series has an unusually in-depth and positive treatment of the personal side of religion and the value of dedication.

* S.J. Ryan

The Star Wizards Trilogy: A man from the post-singularity future finds himself on a primitive world fighting a remnant from his old world. This has very unique world-building, although it was at times hard for me to follow as I had to fill in some of the details. But the interplay of future technology and trying to transplant modern values across cultures was great, as well as the exploration of what a post-singularity world would look like. I blow through a lot of random one-off self-published books on Kindle and forget about them, but the first book of this intrigued me so much I kept checking back until there was a sequel.

Timesense: A novella about aliens who perceive time very differently. I can't say more without spoiling it but it blew my mind.

* Okina Baba

So I'm a Spider, So What?: A isekai light-novel where Japanese school-girl is reborn as a Spider in a dungeon, and has to level-up her abilities to survive and find a way out. There are a lot of moving parts in this novel that slowly come together to reveal a picture of how the world is broken, and honestly I wish they'd focus on the spider-girl more than the rest of the characters, but still one of my all-time favorites.

* Dojyomaru

How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: A Japanese civil-servant is isekai'ed into a fantasy kingdom and promptly made King, where he tries to salvage and modernize it's corrupt bureaucracy. I enjoy the politics more than the slice-of-life subplots, but the interplay between the individual "Great Men" and how that translates into national and international politics is great.

* J. P. Valentine

This Trilogy is Broken: Hilarious parody of classic fantasy quests.

The Nothing Mage: I have only vague memories of this series, but I remember liking the meta-magic.

* Cath fach

Erryn's world: A dungeon recreates the world after an apocalypse, and wants an isekai'ed boy to judge it.

* Becky Chambers

Wayfarers: Deep soul-searching science-fiction stories about the meaning of individuals and the bonds between them

20211218

The Gifts of the INTJ Magi

This is a parody of "The Gift of the Magi", by O. Henry.

Once upon a time, there were two INTJ's, Alice and Bob, who fell in love, and after a brief explosion of their inner INFP child, got married.

They were very poor, but like many INTJ's, had great ambition. Unfortunately, they were so poor, that their first Christmas together as a newlywed couple, they were unable to buy each other meaningful Christmas gifts. Alice and Bob talked it over, and since they already knew they loved each other very much, they really didn't need to buy each other expensive gifts to prove their love. And they were both content.

But Alice and Bob were too proud of the fact that they had so efficiently solved their Christmas conundrum, and they bragged about it to their friends, who had other Myers-Brigg's types.

"You can't do that!" they cried.

"Your first Christmas together is an important milestone for your relationship," they cried.

"Think of the memories... You'll never have another chance at a first Christmas together again!" they cried.

Alice and Bob just laughed... "We don't need memories like other Myers-Brigg's types", they said, discounting sentiment. "This is more efficient."

But privately, after they had left, their friend's words gnawed at them. What if they were right? What if this was an important first Christmas precedent? They liked setting good precedents. Sure, things might be good now, but think of the long term consequences if not getting each other gifts became the norm... Maybe one day, when hardships came, they wouldn't be quite as sure of each other's love, but by then the pattern of not buying gifts would be too entrenched to be changed. Many of their friends had been happily married longer than themselves... Maybe this was some great secret of happy marriages?

And so, being young and foolish, they heeded their friends advice. After all, they each cared more about the long-term stability of their marriage than their own happiness. Heck, if they had to choose one or the other, they each thought, they cared more about their spouse's happiness than their own.

Now, being an INTJ, Bob knew Alice would never agree to a plan where he sacrificed so that only Alice would get a nice Christmas gift, and vice-versa Alice would knew Bob would never agree to a plan where she had to sacrifice for his gift.

But, being INTJ's, they were no strangers to conspiracies and plots...

So Bob secretly sold his video-game console to buy Alice an expansion for her favorite board-game, while Alice secretly sold her favorite board-game to buy Bob a new video-game. As Christmas approached, each felt smug that they had secretly solved this relationship hurdle, and anxiously awaited Christmas to reveal their victory (and make their spouse happy).

On Christmas morning, Bob made the first move, and pulled out an uncharacteristically well-wrapped present.

"I thought we agreed we weren't getting each other anything?" she asked with an eye-brow raised.

"Well... I thought about it and figured all our friends might be right... We only have one chance to have a first Christmas."

"I guess I can't be upset... because I got you something too!" Alice replied with a twinkle in her eye, and she ran to get her present so they could open them together.

They briefly basked in the moment, feeling confident that not only had their plot succeeded, but they were each so discerning as to find the wisdom in their friends words, and so discover for themselves this secret to a happy marriage.

And then they opened their gifts, and saw with horror what they had done.

Bob's new video-game was worthless without his gaming console. And Alice's board-game couldn't be played without the base game.

By failing to coordinate, they had each acted against the maximal global happiness, and now neither could enjoy their gifts. They both burst into tears (since their Feelings-function was 3 sizes too small, and easily overwhelmed).

"I"m sorry!" they cried. "In my arrogance, I thought I could solve all our relationship problems by myself!"

They swore right then never to take unilateral action on any significant relationship concern again (unless it had to be taken in a timely manner without the ability to seek counsel). The next day, they sold the new video-game and board-game expansion, and used the money to buy themselves a nice breakfast (something they could both enjoy together).

Later, once the pain had settled, they told the story to their friends, who had other Myers-Briggs types. Their friends swooned, and tried to convince them that they had given each other the best possible gift: selfless love and devotion. But, as INTJs, Alice and Bob knew better. They already had selfless love and devotion. All they had given each other through their secrecy and plotting was a lesson in humility.

And so, with this lesson learned, they lived happily ever after til the end of their days as Utilitarians. Never again did they make sacrifices without being in coordinated agreement. But years later, they would tell the story to their grandchildren as one of the secrets to their long and happy marriage...

"Did we ever tell you about the time we made Christmas a Zero-Sum Game by discounting our own happiness and failed to achieve Pareto Efficiency?"

TL;DR The Gift of the Magi always bothered me because of it's terribly inefficient outcome, and I swore as a child never to make that mistake.

20170111

Pidgin Errors with Gmail

I discovered yesterday that my Pidgin client is refusing to connect to GMail/GoogleTalk with the error:

"SSL peer presented an invalid certificate"

After half an hour of digging, I finally found this Pidgin bug with a work-around:

https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/17118

I have no idea what's going wrong here, and I can only assume Gmail has some new cert that's not playing nice with something on my system. But seeing as it took me so long to figure out, I thought I'd help make this easier to find for anyone else who runs into the same problem find it.

UPDATED:
After a few days, this stopped working. I can only guess that gmail is rotate SSL certs faster than I can keep up.

But I found this Gentoo forums post:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1057862.html

Which pointed the problem at gnutls, and sure enough, emerging pidgin without the gnutls use-flag solved the problem.

20151129

Piwigo Thumbnails

I've been trying to find a nice way to host images on my Piwigo server... The problem I've had is that I don't have enough disk space on my server to host all of my full-size photographs, so until recently I'd been sshfs-mounting them off of an AWS instance that was connected to my Dropbox. Then my year of free AWS ran out, and I was back to searching for a solution.

I eventually ran across this post at Odd One Out who had figured out how to generate the thumbnails Piwigo needs offline. So I hacked his script up, and now I'm sshfs-mounting my photos off a much slower (and cheaper!) network connection, and pushing the thumbnail images there separately. (I figure it's very rare for someone to actually download my full images, so I can live with that being a little slower.)

20130720

Gentoo, ReadyNAS, and iSCSI

I recently bought a Netgear ReadyNAS 104 while trying to recover from a failure of my old RAID-5 enclosure. Now that it's all put together, it looks like I can pull a maximum of 50 MB/s, with typical speeds of 30-40 MB/s. I'm not sure what the limiting factor is at this point, since it doesn't seem to be network bandwidth, or CPU on either end. I think something in the system is latency bound, since it seems to pull a little faster when my desktop CPU is completely idle.

At first I was going to set it up using sshfs, but the little ARM CPU in that thing can only push about 3-4 MB/s when it has to do the encryption itself. So what I finally settled on was exporting it as iSCSI, and having my desktop do the encryption with cryptfs (LUKS).

I get the feeling that iSCSI doesn't get a lot of love on Gentoo, so I figured I'd post my troubles and what I finally got to work. This post from the Gentoo Wiki Archives was the most helpful, though I skipped all his interface setup, which I'm assuming was designed for a dedicated storage network.

iSCSI Basics:
A target is a server which is offering up a drive for clients to use.
An initiator is the client which consumes a drive to read or write it.

Init Script:
The init script for open-iscsi was kind of primitive... I had to install the unstable version (sys-block/open-iscsi-2.0.872-r2) since it hadn't been updated since modprobe stopped supporting "-l" (which still makes me sad...). At that point, I had to go redo all my kernel setup since I compiled the iSCSI stuff into my kernel, and the init script assumes that it can manually load and unload the modules. I eventually commented out all the do_modules calls to work around that.

I also installed net-libs/libiscsi although I never figured out if it was required or not.

I never did figure out how to get it to automatically connect to my drive, but I got the init script to stop complaining at me by setting AUTOSTARTTARGETS="no" in /etc/conf.d/iscsid. At this point (plus commenting out the modprobes) I could start and stop the daemon cleanly.

To manually mount a drive:

#Start a session to a target
iscsiadm -m discovery -t st -p 192.168.1.100

#Open a drive named "group1"
# on the target "iqn.1994-11.com.netgear:host:a1b2c3d4f"
# (as generated by my NAS) at IP 192.168.1.100
iscsiadm -m node --targetname iqn.1994-11.com.netgear:host:a1b2c3d4f:group1 --portal 192.168.1.100 --login

#At this point /dev/sde should appear and you can mount/format it.

#Disconnect from the target to make the drive disappear 
iscsiadm -m node --targetname iqn.1994-11.com.netgear:host:a1b2c3d4f:group1 --portal 192.168.1.100 --logout

You can add "-d 8" (with a number 1-8) for increased debug messages if things are going wrong, but I can't say I found it very helpful myself.

The drive letter it shows up at will increment as you keep connecting/disconnecting. Which was enough to convince me I wanted to manually mount the thing so I've given up trying to get the init script to autostart it anyway.

CHAP:
CHAP is the iSCSI authentication protocol, and was the biggest pain point of the whole experience. I couldn't get my NAS or open-iscsi to give me any kind of useful error message other than "it didn't work" (or more precisely "iscsiadm: discovery login to 192.168.1.100 rejected: initiator error (02/01), non-retryable, giving up" ).

There are two kinds of CHAP, one used to authenticate initiators (clients), and one used to authenticate the targets (servers). Since I was already encrypting my data on my desktop, I didn't bother setting up the server authentication, but I think it works basically the same way. Here's what finally worked:

First I had to generate an InitiatorName and tell my NAS to restrict access to only that initiator. My NAS only had a field for one "Initiator (IQN)" entry, while the Linux settings had 3 different values. I don't really know what the difference is supposed to be, but I had problems until I set them all to the same thing.

## -*- mode: Conf-space;-*-
##/etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi
## For examples, see /etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi.example

InitiatorName=iqn.2008-10.com.example.mybox:openiscsi-a1b2c3f
InitiatorAlias=iqn.2008-10.com.example.mybox:openiscsi-a1b2c3f

Uncomment the following lines in /etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf, and set them accordingly.

##/etc/iscsi/iscsid.conf 
node.session.auth.authmethod = CHAP
node.session.auth.username = iqn.2008-10.com.example.mybox:openiscsi-a1b2c3f
node.session.auth.password = ThisIsAPassword

For whatever reason, CHAP passwords have to be between 12 and 16 characters. I spent a while failing to get it to work with an 8-character password before I figured this out.

It probably goes without saying, but make sure you type the same password into your NAS. (And set it for your initiator, instead of what my NAS called the "bidirectional authentication" for letting clients know they're talking to the right server.)

There are also settings in iscsid.conf for using CHAP during discovery. You might have to set those too, but my NAS didn't seem to support it, so I left them alone.

After some trial and error, I finally figured out that my NAS was picking up password changes immediately, but my client was saving some kind of a session that was making things difficult. Eventually I determined that to actually get my new settings to take effect I had to stop my daemon, rm -rf the session folder it had created in /etc/iscsi/nodes/, start the daemon again, and then start over from the discovery phase.

And there you go! Good luck.

20121223

Alarm clock

In a sudden stroke of genius (the kind that can only occur at 1:30 in the morning), I have just invented the most annoying alarm clock ever.

while true; do beep -f `random 100 2000` -l `random 5 300`; done;

(Where random is a script I wrote that does the obvious.)

Not only is it incredibly annoying, but you can't control-c it, since the beeps are running so fast. I also had the luck (misfortune?) of running it while sudoed as root, so it ended up with some kind of weird reparenting and so it didn't even stop when I closed my terminal... I finally had to rmmod pcspkr to get it to quit while I hunted down the offending process.

I don't yet know how I will fully use this newfound power, but if nothing else I can guarantee I will be waking up tomorrow morning.

20121214

Book Reviews 2012: Martha Wells

I discovered a new fantasy author while touring a used bookstore, Martha Wells. I've since bought everything of hers I can get my hands on.

The Books of Raksura, Martha Wells
The Cloud Roads (The Books of the Raksura)
The Serpent Sea (The Books of the Raksura)
The Siren Depths (The Books of the Raksura)
I rate them as 5/5 all the way across. The series chronicles the adventures of a clan of "Raksura", sentient fantasy creatures (people?) in a realm of other sentient fantasy creatures. There was some magic here, but it was fairly subdued, and mostly taken for granted. The series was mostly about the cultural differences of the various peoples, and one misfit's attempt to assimilate, with some villains and adventure thrown in for fun.

The Books of Ile-Rien, Martha Wells
The Wizard Hunters (The Fall of Ile-Rein: Book 1)
The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein: Book 2)
The Gate of Gods (The Fall of Ile-Rein: Book 3)
The Death of the Necromancer
The Element of Fire
Also 5/5 all the way across. The first three books are trilogy, set in a fantasy world that has 1900's era technology (ie simple cars and air ships, electric lights, but not much else) and well-established schools of magic and sorcery. The country of Ile-Rien finds itself fighting a war, and the characters set off in search of a powerful magic to defeat their enemies. The world that she creates here has enough depth to it that I found even the back stories enthralling.

The last two books are stand-alone novels set in the same world but during earlier time periods. They have some familiar characters, but were essentially distant back-stories for the events in the trilogy.

Wheel of the Infinite, Martha Wells
Also 5/5. At a high level, this book follows the main characters as the restore balance to the "Deep Magics" that govern the world (my term, not hers). Magic is assumed everywhere, but not actually exhibited much by the characters. I thought this one was a little more adventure driven, with a little bit of deeper issues thrown in, and much less cultural focused than most of Wells' other works.

City of Bones, Martha Wells
I rate this at 4/5. City of Bones was a set in a post-apocalyptic world with survivors struggling to survive. The male lead (named Khat) carried this book in my opinion. He was another cultural misfit trying to survive in a foreign city, honest enough to be endearing and with enough character flaws to get himself into trouble. The world was interesting and all, but I found him fascinating.

Khat kind of reminded me of a more interesting version of the male-lead from the Ile-Rien trilogy. And the overall crisis the characters solve felt a lot like the one in Wheel of the Infinite by the end. So that's mainly why I rate this as only a 4/5. But the book might stand better on it's own if you hadn't have just read her other books. :-D

And that's all the motivation I have for the evening, so I'll stick to one author for now.