Colin's Journal

I’ve finally fixed the way dates and times are displayed in my weblog. Moving from Debian to Fedora had changed the behaviour of strftime() so that I could no longer coax it into producing single digit hours and dates. The solution is a Python implementation of strftime that takes an extended format allowing me to control the padding.

In case this is useful for anyone else I’ve released it as a standalone library, and will bundle it into the next version of PubTal.

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After reading Chasm City, a reasonable but not outstanding experience, I decided to try Revelation Space. Revelation Space was written before Chasm City, although, as I found out in the first few pages, it is set afterwards. Online reviews had recommended this first book as being superior to the second, so I was hoping for something special.

Revelation Space unfortunately is one of those books that has too much in it, rather than developing and exploring a particular theme or story. The main characters in the book manage to discover three alien cultures and one character manages to die and get reincarnated. This style of science fiction doesn’t really interest me, so while there were some good points, I found I enjoyed Chasm City more.

In the hope that the writing will continue to improve, as it did from Revelation Space to Chasm City, I’m now tackling the next one in the series Redemption Ark. So far (a hundred or so pages in) it is proving an excellent read – I’m hoping it keeps up the current standard!

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