STG's

(Posting in portuguese, as the referred drive is on sale on several local merchants) Estava para comprar um Seagate Expansion Drive 1.5 TB, externo. O preço é bem razoável. Aí fui olhar as reviews... Recomendo que se você estiver pensando em comprar, leia também antes. Muita gente, mas muita gente MESMO teve problemas com o drive morrer depois de comprar. O termo click-of-death infelizmente não morreu com a Iomega e o ZIP drive. Obviamente, algo que não é muito aceitável...

Another very late post. I downloaded Everyday Genius SquareLogic Demo because of a Steam weekend sale. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to playing it until way after the weekend, because the demo is very nice. It's a variation of Sudoku, which I really like, and will no doubt remind anyone who played Kakuro (also called Cross Sums) of it. Every puzzle is a grid of numbers, which has blocks where an operation (sum, equals, minus, etc) on those numbers must equal the specified result. As usual, you can't repeat numbers inside a grid. If you like Sudoku, definitely worth trying.

I read this one quite a few weeks ago, but was too lazy to get around to posting. :-) It's another military sci-fi book featuring the Bolos, sentient super tanks. This one is a collection of short stories about Bolos, with very different styles and situations. As usual for collections, the quality varies, but there were very nice stories in this bunch. Worth reading if you like this style of military sci-fi.

Debug it! was another nice book from Pragmatic Programmers. As in any technical book, what you take as useful information depends on what you didn't know in the first place. While I was familiar with many of the practices discussed in the book (and use a few, such as the excellent EurekaLog, which is a huge help when debugging user problems), I learned quite a few new things. There is quite a bit of recommendations for teams, which seemed very useful, although they don't apply in my case. Well worth the time, specially as it is not very long.

Dexter by Design, by Jeff Lindsay, is the 4th in the Dexter series. It was pretty good, and it was the better one in the series for me so far. The one point that felt strange was the whole Cuban expedition, due to the way it developed. The ending was cute enough, but the amount of setup for a null consequence part of the story seemed excessive.

Some Golden Harbor, by David Drake, was the previous book to my preview post, When the Tide Rises. I've read it quite a while ago, but didn't get around to posting here. It was pretty good, mostly due to the crazy, commando-like stunts of the captain. The hacker/assassin is quite interesting. Of course, the hacking is all off-scene - the one time they mentioned a method that I can recall, the vulnerability involved leaving a session logged - which seems a bit forced since it'd happen all the time given the importance of universe jumping...

Yet another military SF book - I really like them. In this case, it is quite deep into a series (courtesy of a Webscriptions package - it's nicely priced if you like a few of the books, and a great way to introduce readers to authors and series they don't know). The RCN universe seems nice, even when starting from the middle. It's a military space opera, which has a nicely contrived explanation to allow the author to put sails in the story - they are actually used to move the ships between bubble universes with different constants, thus getting around that pesky light speed limit. The whole theme reminds me of Honor Harrington, of course (two star alliances fighting each other, space battles with a very competent commander, etc). It was a nice, reasonably quick read, and I discovered I already had bought another of the books in the series (Some Golden Harbor), which I'm currently reading.