Cymen's Blog

I’ve been on a reading spurt lately. I’m going to jot down some quick notes avoiding getting very deep.

“Maus” by Art Spiegelman: Great.

“Spook Country” by William Gibson: Better than “Pattern Recognition” but I suspect that is due to getting used to the characters. I began to see more in “Pattern Recognition” after reading “Spook Country.” I still think Gibson must have struggled a lot with Pattern Recognition (and it shows in the book) but after reading Spook, I’m more optimistic.

“Marooned in Realtime” by Vernor Vinge: I found another favorite author and it’s Vinge. Really enjoyable. “A Fire Upon the Deep” was great but I enjoyed Marooned even more. Currently reading Vinges “A Deepness in the Sky” and finding it excellent.

“Quicksilver” by Neal Stephenson: I ran out of library time due to poor planning. Going to return to it shortly.

I wrote a hopefully generic class in PHP to proxy CGI scripts. The idea being that sometimes one wants to get the output of a CGI script and do various things with it before displaying it. In my particular case, wrap CVSWeb so the output can be put into a HTML DIV.

The code is published on github as PHPGatewayInterface.

1. Add dvb-fe-xc5000-1.6.114.fw to /lib/firmware
2. Install Mercurial (apt-get install mercurial)
3. Compile and install v4l-dvb (directions)