Ilya Muromyets, a figure of Russian legend for 800 years, still lives, albeit mostly in a haze of narcotic self-pity. He is recruited to track down a mysterious artifact found by a former cos­mol­o­gist, Elena Irinonova, in Kazahkstan. Others also seek the artifact, which can open a gate to a parallel world where humans and other races live.

That world, Byelovodye, quite literally is the sum of human dreams and fears, and the dis­il­lu­sion­ment in the post-Soviet republics is desta­bi­liz­ing it.

A very unusual, well-written take on the fantasy quest.

Preloading Ajax data as JSON has helped improve the load time and perceived per­for­mance of our family software ap­pli­ca­tion. Most of the pages in our web client are dy­nam­i­cal­ly generated in the browser from a complex set of JavaScript and CSS, so we’re always looking out for ways to make them appear more quickly.

More at the Cozi Tech Blog.

Next book after Something From the Nightside.

The Unholy Grail has come to the Nightside, and the angels of both Heaven and Hell want it. The Fallen and the Elect are deadly and implacable and wholly careless of casualties.

John Taylor, the man who can find anything, must lay hands on it first and keep it from either side.

A fantasy noir with a heavy dose of black humor. Moderately en­ter­tain­ing.

In a parallel world, Roumania is a great European power and America is a barely settled wilderness. Miranda was sent to our world by her aunt, Princess Aegypta, when she was a small child, for her own safety. Now Aegypta and the Baroness each want to retrieve her, for their own reasons.

The book revolves around Miranda and her two friends, lost and confused in the primeval forests of New England, and the Baroness in Bucharest, The latter is the more in­ter­est­ing character: an impulsive former actress who climbed into high society and …continue.

Deeba and Zanna, both twelve-year-old London girls, find their way into Un Lun Dun (UnLondon). Magic works in the abcity: there’s feral rubbish, the ghosts of Wraithtown, words made flesh. Most of all, there’s the Smog, an enormous cloud of pollution that’s become sentient and wants to consume everything.

This book is aimed at a younger audience than his Bas-Lag novels, such as Iron Council. Supporting characters do die and Deeba must undergo trials, but this book is not grim. Indeed, in places, it’s positively whimsical, and Miéville owes a clear debt to …continue.

I formed a Bike to Work team at Cozi. More at the Cozi Con­nec­tions Blog

Tiffany Aching is a nine-year-old dairymaid with the First Sight and the Second Thoughts. She sees more than others do. She sees the tiny Nac Mac Feegle, the little thieving fighting pictsies, who speak with a Scottish brogue and have nae time for laird nor queen.

When the Queen of the Fairies attempts to invade the Discworld by stealing children and their dreams, it is up to Tiffany to stop them.

Ostensibly aimed at children, any adult fan of Pratchett’s Discworld novels should enjoy this book too.

Maureen O’Donnell wakes up in her Glasgow flat after passing out drunk and finds her lover tied to a chair, his throat cut. Douglas was a therapist, married to another woman. The police think she’s guilty but can’t prove it: she has a history of mental illness, her mother’s an alcoholic, and her twin brother’s a drug dealer.

Mauri is feisty but flawed, coping fairly re­al­is­ti­cal­ly. She manages to find the real murderer and uncover a nasty case of sexual abuse, against a backdrop of domestic violence, alcoholism, and poverty. Her friend Leslie is …continue.

Tomas Restrepo wrote a post about sharing dotfiles between Windows and Ubuntu, specif­i­cal­ly about sharing .vimrc (Linux) and _vimrc (Windows) and the .vim (Linux) and vimfiles (Windows) di­rec­to­ries.

I have a different solution. On Windows, my C:\AutoExec.bat includes:

set HOME=C:\gvr
set VIM=C:\Vim
set VIMDIR=%VIM%\vim71
set EDITOR=%VIMDIR%\gvim.exe
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Win32app;C:\GnuWin32\bin;C:\UnxUtils;C:\SysInternals;C:\Python25\Scripts

%HOME% (C:\gvr) contains _vimrc, vimfiles, and other stuff ac­cu­mu­lat­ed over many years. This directory is stored in a personal Subversion repository at DevjaVu. All my Vim files are stored with Unix LF endings, not Windows CR-LFs, so that they’ll work on my Mac OS X and Linux boxen. I play some games with if has("win32") and if has('gui_­macvim') to ensure that my _vimrc works cross-platform.

On my *nix boxes, the gvr folder lives …continue.

Thirty years ago, Heather and Sunny Bethany, 12 and 15, dis­ap­peared without trace from a Baltimore mall. A cold case, long forgotten by almost everyone. Now a woman, arrested after fleeing from the scene of an accident, blurts out that she’s Heather Bethany.

Is she Heather? Or someone else? She knows so much about the case, yet there’s something off about her and the police don’t trust her. Where’s she been? Where’s Sunny? And why did she never come forward before?

We learn the truth by the end of the novel, of course. The …continue.