Libriomancer (Magic Ex Libris, #1)
![]() |
Review:Good I guess. Sets up a magic system but then there are exceptions to it, which is not great. Quick read. |
![]() |
Review:Good I guess. Sets up a magic system but then there are exceptions to it, which is not great. Quick read. |
I will probably never take a better picture than this one.
I found a camera today at home, and then it hit me: this was the camera we took to Istanbul, dropped on the floor, never worked again, and I never found after we came back! And it still had the SD card in it!
So, here are the pictures (not even filtered), so family can see them.
Finished reading Cloud Atlas, gave it 5 starts. Here's a quick review:
I am not going to explain this book. It's enough, I think, to say I loved it, and that it's strange, and that it's a bit of a mistery.
Imagining a universe in which all the contents of the book could be real at the same time in a way that would allow all the pieces to be written as they are and yet, be, somehow, not the novel they are, but a found artifact, is both depressing and ellusive.
At the end, I felt something I can only describe as retrospective hope, the feeling that things were supposed to end up better, but that even as terribly as they did end, were it not by that earlier hope, they would have been more grim.
The control the author has over his own style is impressive. This book feels written by half a dozen completely different writers.
Some quotes (which may only make sense once you read the book):
"The sun was deaf'nin' so high up, yay, it roared an' time streamed from it."
"In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late"
"What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To posess, as it were, an atlas of clouds."
I have just uploaded release 4 of Nikola my static blog/site generator. Here are some of the changes in this version:
Previous/Next post links
Teaser support
Support posts with HTML "sources"
Site checking script (nikola_check)
Maximum image size in galleries
Image descriptions in galleries
Image exclusion in galleries
Special "draft" tag
Pretty code listings ("code galleries")
Page descriptions
Easy theme tuning via Bootswatch
Support for WebAssets bundles
"Filters" for powerful file post-processing
Improved HTML output
Support multiple time formats in post metadata
Slugify tag names for URLs
Archive path and filename configurable
Galleries sorted by date (supports EXIF)
Rotate gallery thumbnails (EXIF)
Tag feeds in tag pages
Colorbox support in restructured text figures
Fix for content displaying too wide
Changelog
As usual, you can discuss bugs or make feature requests at the nikola-discuss group and I love to know of sites using Nikola.
Hope you like it!
It's not that I need a CDN in any way, since the traffic for this site is little and the way the site is built is light, but hey, it's free, easy to setup and easy to leave when I feel like it. And I expect to have significantly higher traffic eventually after I finish some not-so-secret projects.
What's CloudFlare's service? They take over your DNS, then put a reverse proxy between your site and the clients. That reverse proxy then uses a CDN to serve you the pages from a conveniently located server, and can rewrite the HTML/JS/CSS in some ways to make it faster/safer/nicer.
It also supposedly will protect my site from different kinds of attack (the only one that could possibly affect me was DOS attack, but thanks anyway ;-)
Also, they offer a platform so apps can provide services for me, like intruder detection, analytics, and others, which is a very cool idea.
So, I created an account at cloudflare.com and configured it so that //ralsina.me (which is this exact same site except for wrong comment counts) is served via cloudflare, and ralsina.me is served directly.
What I've seen so far:
Setup is very simple
It works, even setting up experimental features
It does seem very slightly faster, but that's not a surprise since the tiny server the site runs on has good conectivity and ample unused resources.
It does do a good job of automatically optimizing some things in ways that are generally accepted as a good idea (in other words, my pingdom and YSlow numbers moved up)
So: no pain, maybe some gain. I will probably move all sites into it tonight.