Daniel Keast wants to read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison -- …
This months book club pick
User Profile
Computer programmer living in Exeter, UK.
Loves open source, retro video games, food, and anxiously watching the unfolding UK political catastrophy.
This link opens in a pop-up window
User Activity
Daniel Keast started reading Echoes of the Great Song by David A. Gemmell
Echoes of the Great Song by David A. Gemmell
The new heroic fantasy from the author of The Legend of Deathwalker.The Great Bear will descend from the skies, and …
Daniel Keast finished reading The Long Walk by Stephen King
The Long Walk is a dystopian horror novel by American writer Stephen King, published in …
Content warning Plot
A dystopia where 100 boys are in a competition to walk as far as possible. If you drop below 4mph for 30 seconds you get a warning, after three warnings you get shot.
Not a huge amount happens, you never really learn what's going on or why. The entire book is from the perspective of one of the kids, and the walk is the entire book. Right at the end, after he won he carries on walking and sees someone in black which I took to be the grim reaper.
It feels a bit of a slog, like it was a short story that got stretched out maybe.
Daniel Keast finished reading I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about …
I got this from the library. It's absolutely heartbreaking, that poor girl.
Daniel Keast started reading The Long Walk by Stephen King
The Long Walk is a dystopian horror novel by American writer Stephen King, published in …
This month's book club pick.
Daniel Keast finished reading Learning Helm by Matt Butcher
Written by the maintainers of Helm, I needed some context about the templates feature.
Daniel Keast started reading Learning Helm by Matt Butcher
Daniel Keast finished reading Prime Ministers by Iain Dale
A book where each chapter is a brief summary of a uk prime minister. They're chronologically ordered from Walpole to Johnson, and each is written by a different author.
There's no way I'll remember details of half of them, but it definitely filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge and I'll remember the general thrust. Confirmed my belief that everyone remembers Churchill, but Atlee was the far better PM. I think I'll read up more on Wilson too.
I was surprised that the recent list of Tory PMs was written up pretty much how I see them as failures on their own terms seeing as most were at least seen sympathetically through the book. Doubly so since the person in charge of the project is a leave voting telegraph columnist and attempted conservative MP. People are more interesting than the boxes we put them in I guess, and …
A book where each chapter is a brief summary of a uk prime minister. They're chronologically ordered from Walpole to Johnson, and each is written by a different author.
There's no way I'll remember details of half of them, but it definitely filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge and I'll remember the general thrust. Confirmed my belief that everyone remembers Churchill, but Atlee was the far better PM. I think I'll read up more on Wilson too.
I was surprised that the recent list of Tory PMs was written up pretty much how I see them as failures on their own terms seeing as most were at least seen sympathetically through the book. Doubly so since the person in charge of the project is a leave voting telegraph columnist and attempted conservative MP. People are more interesting than the boxes we put them in I guess, and the selection of authors for each chapter seemed very good.
I'd love to see what people would write in future about Truss and Sunak.
Daniel Keast finished reading Spectrum machine language for the absolute beginner by William Tang
A lovely book, easy to read and clear. There are some typos in the code examples but that was literally always the case back then. It was a part of how you learnt I think, forced you into figuring it out.
It ends with a full game in z80 assembly which gives you routines for everything. He even goes through how you can write and test each in turn which is a more structured approach than I expected.
I'm messing around with building something on the spectrum, but after that will probably move to the gb for its hardware sprites and more sensible video memory layout.
Daniel Keast started reading Spectrum machine language for the absolute beginner by William Tang
Pretty short but clear book on Erlang. The first half consists of things I'm familiar with already (immutability, pattern matching, recursion, higher order functions). It was the last half that I was more interested in, process oriented programming and OTP. I'll have to read a more in depth book to understand it thoroughly, but it's a very interesting approach.
Alan Kay said Erlang is closer to what he meant by object oriented than Java or C++:
computinged.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/moti-asks-objects-never-well-hardly-ever/#comment-3766
Daniel Keast wants to read Spectrum machine language for the absolute beginner by William Tang
Daniel Keast finished reading I who have never known men by Jacqueline Harpman
Content warning The plot, up to the end
40 women who are locked in a cage that is patrolled by men with whips escape when the men run out after hearing a siren.
The main character is a child, and has no recollection of life before the cage. Outside is a grassy plain in all directions. The story follows the nameless main character through her life until she dies alone in a bunker she found still none the wiser about what's happening. There's a fair amount of hinting that it isn't set on Earth.
It's bleak, it's poignant, I found it really drew me into its world and the character. I'm glad it never explained what happened since it would distract from what I assume is the point. What it means to be human, the distance we feel from other people and lack of understanding of other people's perspectives.
Daniel Keast quoted Prime Ministers by Iain Dale
CUT SHORT BY his untimely death, George Canning’s 119-day stint as prime minister stands as the shortest in British history.
— Prime Ministers by Iain Dale
"Hold my beer" -- Liz Truss
Daniel Keast commented on Prime Ministers by Iain Dale
Apparently police are called bobbies because the Met was created by Sir Robert Peel.