Fading Memories

About

Ramblings about books and other things that will soon fade from my memory.

Boudewijn Rempt

index | rss1.0

There's more...

Creative Commons License
The original artwork is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Roundabout through identi.ca

    follow me on Identi.ca

    Categories, too

    Find


    Archives

    Other things here at valdyas.org

    2002-12-31

    Nothing Serious

    By P.G. Wodehouse on Tuesday December 31, @04:29PM
    It's getting harder and harder to add a new book to my Wodehouse collection — I must have about seventy of his novels and story collections by now. Still, sometimes one gets lucky, and happen upon a new one. Nothing Serious, in this case, and even if most of the stories are golf stories (not my favourite), there's a Lord Emsworth in it that's a genuine gem.
    • Author: P.G. Wodehouse
    • Publisher: Herbert Jenkins
    • Published: No date, but first edition, so 1950
    • Place: London & Glasgow
    • Pages: 254

    This volume contains the following stories: The Shadow Passes, Bramley is So Bracing, Up from the Depths, Feet of Clay, Excelsior, Rodney has a Relaps, Tangled Hearts, Birth of Salesman, How's that Umpire and Success Story.

    Read more ...


    2002-12-29

    The Marshall and the Madwoman

    By Magdalen Nabb on Sunday December 29, @11:43PM
    I want more! This is the sixth mystery featuring Marshall Guarnaccia of the Pitti station in Florence , and comparison with Death of an Englishman shows Magdalen Nabbs development as an author. The immensely sympathetic characters are still there, but gone is all the fumbling stiltedness that made some scenes in her first book hard to get through.
    • Author: Magdalen Nabb
    • Publisher: Penguin
    • Published: 1989
    • ISBN: 0-14-011881-0
    • Pages: 223

    I've been thinking lately about what it is that makes me read books, hunt out the complete works of authors and so on — not surprising if you've just started reviewing fiction. (I've been reviewing non-fiction, to be precise, linguistics books for Language for some time,)

    Read more ...


    2002-12-21

    Death of an Englishman

    By Magdalen Nabb on Saturday December 21, @09:46PM
    "It's just a complaint I have, an allergy. It's the sunshine starts it off." If you can stand reading this remark between five and perhaps ten times, then you might very well like this book. I did, the remark did get a payoff, but I'm not unreservedly enthousiastic about this book. A mystery novel set in Florence, with a marshall of the carabinieri (spelling?) in the leading role, it appears to be Magdalen Nabb's debut novel.
    • Author: Magdalen Nabb
    • Publisher: Collins Crime
    • Published: 1988 (1981)
    • ISBN: 0-00-6167760-4
    • Pages: 203

    Let's start with the things I really liked about this book: lots of sympathetic engaging characters, colour locale in spades (and the certainty that the author knows the locale she's writing about), an interesting plot and a perfect length.

    Read more ...


    2002-12-19

    Wandelingen door ROME

    By Godfried Bomans on Thursday December 19, @10:13PM
    Het is vrij eenvoudig om van een losbol te houden en inderdaad ontmoeten zij ook overal sympathie. Maar om een heilige aardig te vinden, betaalt u de prijs van zelfverwijt.
    • Author: Godfried Bomans
    • Publisher: Elsevier
    • Published: MCMLVII
    • Pages: 216

    On the basis of this quote alone one would be justified to style the great Dutch author Godfried Bomans the Chesterton of the Low Countries.

    Read more ...


    SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems

    By Eric Rescorla on Thursday December 19, @03:30PM
    Yes.SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems is exactly what the title promises. If I had already coded a rating system, I'd probably expand it for this this book.
    • Author: Eric Rescorla
    • Publisher: Addison-Wesley
    • ISBN: 0-201-61598-3
    • Published: 2000
    • Pages: 499

    If you have to code an application that uses SSL or TLS -- or if you have to code an SSL or TLS library, then this is the book you need. It certainly was the book I needed, and I needed it badly, when I was working on the secure messaging layer over JXTA for Tryllian's ADK -- agent development kit.

    Read more ...


    2002-12-14

    Piramus en Thisbe -- Twee Rederijkersspelen uit de zestiende eeuw

    By Dr. G.A. van Es on Saturday December 14, @10:57AM
    A Bronnenstudie en tekstuitgave by Dr. G.A. van Es. This 2002 Sinterklaas present brings together the two oldest Dutch plays based on Ovid's immortal Piramus and Thisbe story. Notes, reprints of illustrations and manuscript and of course the delightful story material combine to form a very pleasant package.

    Author: Dr. G.A. van Es
    Publisher: Zwolse Drukken en Herdrukken voor de Maatschappij der Nederlands Letterkunde te Leiden
    Published:1964

    Read more ...


    Mastering Regular Expressions

    By Jeffrey E.F. Friedl on Saturday December 14, @02:44PM
    The first edition of Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl tries to explain the way regular expressions work, and how you can work with them. In this edition he focuses on Perl; the second edition is said to pay more attention to Python. Not a very useful book, I'm afraid.

    I consider this book rather a -- what's the English for 'miskoop'?. Well, I shouldn't have bought it. Not just because the moment Amazon delivered it to my doorstep, the second edition that offers more Python converage, but because the text itself is flawed.

    Read more ...


    Introduction

    By Boudewijn Rempt on Saturday December 14, @12:25AM
    Both in order to finally learn Zope, and to keep track of what I've read (I reached a state of acute shame when I discovered I had bought a new Chaucer when I already had two copies), I thought it would be a good idea to transmute Squishdot (see the nice logo at the bottom of these pages) into a book-review and comment thingy. So there.

    I'm not quite done: I've managed to learn to find my way around Zope and Squishdot, and I think I now know where I should start working to add book cover snapshots and links to Amazon (if I get around to applying for that silly affiliate program that's so much like MLM it's almost spam) and so on. And I wonder whether my old articles will still work if I do so...

    Read more ...