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Top 41 Must-Read Fantasy Books

rixx — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 08:00:00 GMT

It's been a while since I posted a huge book lists. I try to contain all my book posting impulses over at books.rixx.de these days, after all. (Which also has an RSS feed, for those of you following this blog and concerned about the silence). However, I took a dangerous step this year and became part of a Sci-Fi book club – a very ill-advised move, as we all fuel each other's addiction. Thankfully, my addiction was already well-fuelled, so it's not like the book club is doing anything but slightly accellerate my descent into madness. It's fine, it's fine!

Apart from the occasional ~~nearly violent~~ civil debate about the boundaries of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, we're a peaceful lot, I thought. That is, until one of us prompted the group to name our top three Sci-Fi books. Three!, dear reader, not three hundred, or at least thirty! And while grieviously wounded – and coping by posting increasingly long lists of Sci-Fi books, to reassure each other that, yes, we weren't about to run out of books, M. said:

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to craft a list of 41 Fantasy books, each of which must not only be essential reading but also be the soulmate of a Discworld novel (only one book per DW-novel - if we start accepting poligamy into our Fantasy reading list there’s no saying where we’ll end up). Go!

And here we are.

2022 in review

rixx — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 09:00:00 GMT

A year, gone, and for what? Let's see. Wrote some code, read some books, made some friends, and occasionally even had a life. A year in review:

How Django's @page_cache works

rixx — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 23:00:00 GMT

Hi, Future Me! It seems that you've forgotten once again how Django's @page_cache decorator function works. But this time, I'm here to tell you what you (or rather, I) worked out in the past. So here it is: @page_cache from the ground up.

On Running a Mastodon Instance

rixx — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 15:00:00 GMT

Together with a friend, I’m running the Mastodon/Fediverse instance chaos.social. We’ve been at it for nearly five years now, and I feel like it’s time to reflect on the good, the bad, the ugly. Please note that you'll be reading an edited version of this post with most of the cursing removed, so please be understanding of the bits that I kept – they are load-bearing.

while history: continue

rixx — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 08:00:00 GMT

This is an edited transcript of the keynote I delivered at PyCon UK in 2019. I'm still grateful to the organisers, and I still treasure my memories of visiting Cardiff for the first time that year. I've edited the transcript only to make it readable, fixing sentences and removing filler words – but the content and structure remains unchanged. I also left in audience reactions, for flair (and because I'm a bit proud to have made people laugh). See the end notes for corrections and other remarks – you can also see the full slides including speaker notes here.

December 13: Python Concurrent Execution Modules

rixx — Sat, 19 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Now we get to talk about a completely trivial topic, barely worth mentioning: Concurrent execution, including threading, multiprocessing, concurrent, subprocess, sched and queue.

Now, you might say, "wait a second, it is not December 13th!", and … you would be right. Life got in the way and I had to spend a week figuring some things out, and pushing out a blog post about concurrency in Python did not quite fit in with that. Now all the things are figured out, and I'm continuing the Traversal of the Python Standard Library Documentation.

Highlights

Oh god Popen has so many arguments.
Python ships a "general purpose event scheduler"

December 12: Context Variables

rixx — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

As part of the Python Standard Library documentation traversal, we're following up on yesterday's exhausting post about Operating System Services with probably the shortest chapter yet: the contextvars module. It's not cheating, it really is listed as its own high-level documentation section!

December 11: Python Operating System Services

rixx — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

After some restful days, today's Python Standard Library Traversal follows up yesterday's Cryptographic Service Modules with all the generic OS interaction modules. That is os (but not os.path, we did that a week ago), io, time, argparse, getopt, logging and its submodules, getpass, curses and submodules, platform, errno and ctypes. Strap in!

Highlights

On Windows, os.startfile() acts like double-clicking the file.
There are way too many ways to start new processes in Python.
"seconds since epoch" usually excludes leap seconds.
argparse is honestly not as bad as I remembered it. Stockholm syndrome?
logger.getChild() is like calling getLogger() on the full target name, very useful when you use stand-in values like __name__.
logger.handlers.TimedRotatingFileHandler and logger.handlers.RotatingFileHandler handle log file rotation, nice!
logger.handlers.HTTPHandler defaults to secure=False.
You can change the default %-style string formatting in logging formatters to str.format() or string.Template.
You can query the platform you are running on with the platform module.

December 10: Python Cryptographic Service Modules

rixx — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Shhh! 🤫 As part of the Python Standard Library traversal, after yesterday's look at file format modules, today is going to be all about secrets. Well, all about secrets and hmac and hashlib, to be precise.

Highlights

There's an awful lot of hash algorithms in hashlib.
The secrets module exists and is suitable for (reasonably) strong randomness, eg for generating long secret URLs.

December 9: Python File Format Modules

rixx — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 07:00:00 GMT

Combining the commonplace and the weirdly specific: As part of the Python Standard Library traversal, after yesterday's short post about data compression and archiving modules, today we're going to look at Python file format modules. Those include csv, configparser, netrc, xdrlib and the forgettable plistlib.

Highlights

Writing your own csv dialect is extremely easy. I wonder how cursed you can make it.
configparser has an extended interpolation mode that allows you to refer to values from other sections like %{OtherSection:other_value}
You can configure lots of things about configparser, like the delimiters, comment prefix, strict mode, enable multiline strings with empty lines, permit empty/flag values, …
Why on earth is csv in a different documentation block from json and xml?
I learnt that the netrc FTP configuration format exists, and requires its own stdlib support module.
I learnt that xdr file format exists, and at least the Python interface sounds pretty annoying.
I learnt that plist Apple format exists, and it sounds not that bad.