Hero by R. A. Salvatore What this book does well? It brings to conclusion an era of Drizzt’s stories, while hinting the start of a new one. The parts I don’t like, there are some strong leaps of faith you have to make to believe the transformations of the characters involved. Drizzt’s malady and its severity is a bit hard to believe. The cure is somewhat obvious as the story progressed, but it doesn’t feel climatic (as there are still a lot more stories to tell). more »
Extremely quick read. I was surprised how tight the pacing was and I just kept reading. While I can’t relate to the main character, the situations she got herself into are funny and mostly fun to read.
After a long wait, Java 8 is finally close to release. I am going to dig through the feature list and learn about the upcoming features. First, the headliner of Java 8 - lambda expressions.
more »Recently, I read My First 5 Minutes On A Server and Automating Development Environments with Vagrant and Puppet. On the hacker news discussion of the former, someone mentioned maybe what’s needed is a starting point with a configuration management tool. I’ve been meaning to find out more Vagrant and Puppet for a while, so I thought this is a good time to dig in, learn both, and implement the “five minutes on a server” recommendations in Puppet (with some of my own twists). more »
Over Black Friday, I bought a Kindle Fire HDX. Nice little device to along an Amazon prime membership. Yesterday, I was setting up the device to match what I use on my iPad. Part of this involved buying Instapaper so that I can get my readings done. Here is how the process went. On activating the device, Amazon sent me 500 Amaozn Coins. This can be used for App store (and others) purchases. more »
I just upgraded to OS X Mavericks, but this applied equally to OS X Mountain Lion. As it turns out, in addition the default desktop wallpapers included by Apple, there are a set of images to be used by the screen saver. These are great as desktop wallpapers too! You can find where they are here: Secret Wallpapers But, that’s not what this post is about. Let’s say you want to use those pictures AND you want to use the default ones in a rotational setting. more »
As part of setting up Jekyll to run this blog, I needed to install several gems. I already have RVM installed. While installing RedCloth, I get this: Installing RedCloth (4.2.9) Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /Users/kal/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p247/bin/ruby extconf.rb checking for main() in -lc... *** extconf.rb failed *** Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more details. more »