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Calvin Cross is a successful and loyal officer in Intel Wing, the Empire’s intelligence organisation. He is so good that he has been given his own command, the stealth frigate Nighthawk, despite the fact that he is only a half-citizen and therefore stuck at a junior officer rank. His latest mission has been to track down rogue warship captain Raidan who used his position to destroy civilian alien freighters without provocation. Raidan is tried by a tribunal and found guilty, but his motives remain unknown. The prisoner escapes under suspicious circumstances—hijacking a dreadnought in the process—and Cross is again ordered to find him. Cross suspects foul play as several facts do not add up and decides to investigate the underlying situation rather than hunting down the fugitive. While he tries to keep up appearances his mysterious opponents act to stop Cross and his crew no matter what.

Phoenix Conspiracy has a solid, but not brilliant setup. The futuristic world is very similar to ours despite the fact that humanity travels across space; culture and technology appear unchanged for the most part. It works well enough for this kind of story as the reader feels comfortable from page one and can completely focus on the intriguing plot. The conspiracy is nicely set up and the characters are likeable yet complex enough to feel real, including heart-felt emotion and sometimes funny, sometimes nerve-wracking conflicts. Only the ending seemed a bit too hasty and shallow for my taste; but then, this is only part one of a series so I will give Sanders the benefit of doubt, assuming the rabbit hole is deeper than it seems. Phoenix Conspiracy managed to captivate me and I had a good time reading it. I certainly look forward to the sequels!

Get this great read in a variety of formats for free and DRM-free on Smashwords.

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Harvey Barker is on a revenge trip in modern London, killing the people he holds responsible for his sister’s death. He is a professional assassin, but an unorthodox one: he kills using feng shui, manipulating chi and karma to kill his targets without anyone the wiser. But he is not careful enough this time. Detective Amanda Morgan can not shake the feeling that a couple of apparently tragic deaths are connected. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the group Harvey hunts down try to recover and strike back.

I needed to suspend a lot of disbelief regarding the manipulation of chi and karma. The concept seems confused at times, but experienced manga readers should have no problems accepting it. Hall’s prose is not perfect but good enough so it does not distract from his decent story. He builds a good amount of tension towards the end, finishing a very entertaining and thrilling book.

Get this good read in a variety of formats for free and DRM-free on Smashwords.

\(\TeX\)-guru Martin Scharrer comes to the rescue: he wrote the package standalone for exactly this use case. Based on his explanation on tex.SE I built a small bash script that does all the repetitive work for you. With one simple command, this

%p% \usetikzlibrary{arrows,automata,positioning}
\begin{tikzpicture}[shorten >=1pt,node distance=2cm,auto]
  \node[state,initial]    (q_0)                {$q_0$};
  \node[state,accepting]  (q_1) [right of=q_0] {$q_1$};

  \path[->] (q_0) edge [bend left]  node {$a$} (q_1)
            (q_1) edge [bend left]  node {$b$} (q_0);
\end{tikzpicture}

becomes this in a matter of seconds:

Download tikz2png here and enjoy!

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The Alloy of Law is set in the world of the Mistborn trilogy, about 300 years after the original books. The heroes of that time have become figures of myth and religion. The area around the pre-industrial capital (formerly Luthadel) is fertile and wealthy, farther out in the Roughs live is like in our Wild West. This is where noble-blooded lawkeeper Wax has made it his job to hunt down criminals until personal tragedy prompts his return to the city. He tries to blend in the noble society and behave as he should but is soon intrigued by a series of seemingly impossible thefts. Instead of preparing his inevitable engagement properly he starts to investigate, supported by his friend and colleague Wayne who has come to visit in order to make sure Wax does not die in of boredom.

Alloy of Law is fast, fun and tragic, but most of all fast. Allomantic-Feruchemic gunfights are probably the most awesome, cinematic thing I have read in a while. They show how incredibly well-conceived Sanderson’s magic system is: it evolves and scales with ease. The story itself is a diverting piece in Sherlock Holmes style, nothing too deep. There is potential for follow-up stories, though, so we’ll see. The main characters are very well-developed considering the size of the book; Sanderson makes every word count¹. Besides the abundance of action, verbal exchanges between Wax, Wayne and later Marasi provide most of the fun and make the book a light read despite several tragic scenes. As a fan of the series, I enjoyed the many (religious) references—fact distorted to myth by time—to the old heroes, in particular how their way of life evolved to outright schools of philosophy².

That I recommend a Sanderson book is probably no surprise, me being a devoted fan of his. Go and read this book even if you have not read or did not like³ the trilogy, it is fun!

cs.SE in nondescript beta style

Since my post in December, Computer Science Stack Exchange has gone through private beta and is now accessible for everybody. Head over to cs.stackexchange.com and take a look! We are waiting for your questions so do not hesitate to post anything you have always wanted to know in computer science¹, be it theory, applied or even practical!

We also need more expertise: out off almost 190 questions sixteen have yet to receive a good answer. among those are one about equivalence of Büchi automata and linear μ-calculus and another about efficiently learning regular languages.

You might also want to check out our hottest questions, including why Quicksort is often considered the best sorting algorithm, encryption using NP-hard problems and connections between Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and the halting problem.

I am very excited about this site. One one hand, it gives me the opportunity to share my knowledge in computer science with a wide variety of people, and I like teaching. On the other hand, I get to learn a lot. Not only do people ask about things I know next to nothing about so I can learn from the answers, but there are also original concepts. My favorite is Patrick’s proposal of heap automata; I have spent several hours contemplating his question about their power and follow-up questions.

I hope to see you on cs.SE soon!

A simple bibliography with some citations

Finally! I have needed—and wanted to build—this WordPress plugin for a long time, and now it is done. Because I am so bad at making up names, I called it Cite & List because that is what you can do with it: cite articles and list your publications. Both tasks are easily done with shortcodes; users of \(\LaTeX\) will feel right at home. You can also have everything look exactly the way you want it to, thanks to the use of bib2tpl.

Head over to the plugin repository and have a try! I like how the plugin turned out; hopefully I will have ample opportunity of using it, that is get to writing more sciencey posts.

• Entry filtering now works on all fields.
• Templates can contain multiple occurrences of group and entry subtemplates now.
• Condition tags can perform more detailed comparisons now.
• Improved control over entry ordering.
• Grouping tags are no longer necessary if grouping is turned off.
• It is now possible to reuse parsed BibTeX for multiple conversions.
• @entryid@ has been removed; use @entrykey@ instead, which is now guaranteed to be unique.

You can find a more complete list of changes here, and more information on bib2tpl here.

A typical search result

Several weeks ago, certain channels announced that Linux Mint changed their default search engine in Firefox to DuckDuckGo. I do not care much for Linux Mint but decided give DuckDuckGo a try.

What is the matter, you might ask? I used to use ubiquitous Google for everything related to web searches (if nothing else). Whenever I would search for something, I would type some keywords in Firefox’ address bar, hit enter and pick promising Google results. For instance, instead of visiting Wikipedia by hand I would Google wiki Murphy's Law and hit the first link. Combined with bookmark completion, this worked so well that I almost never typed in a proper URL anymore.

The big issue is privacy. It is well-known that Google saves search results and tracks users for their own purposes and to set up their filter bubble¹.

DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, claims to do nothing of that: No tracking, no result saving, no filter bubble. Of course I have no way to check this but their site looks reasonably clear and transparent. Also, they offer Javascript-free and SSL encrypted versions.

I have used DuckDuckGo for some time now. Its results are generally helpful²; you have to search slightly differently than you are used to from Google, probably because there is no filter bubble. But what really changed my experience is their so-called Bang! syntax. The flashy name describes a feature as simple as search forwarding. For instance, !wiki Murphy's Law takes you directly to the desired Wikipedia article. There are lots of useful Bangs, for instance !maps, !yt, !scholar, !img, !java, !amazon and many more³.

If you like what you read and want to surf wherever you want using only your Firefox address bar, go to about:config and set keyword.URL to https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=⁴. Similar instructions can be found for other major (free) browsers.

All happy about my new Kobo Touch, I went and downloaded a couple of short stories for free at Smashwords.

Richard L. Sanders: Betraying Nexus — Jason is a mind bender of Nexus, a global, secret organisation that prevents crime by changing the intentions of potential criminals with them non the wiser. Jason has just brought down a former friend and colleague gone rogue; now he is to be promoted. When he discovers why Nexus works at all, his loyalty falters.
The story has an interesting setup and a good conflict. It may have worked even better in a longer format, I think; as it is, the amount of progress made feels too much for the timeframe. If you liked the movie Minority Report, you like this story.

David Sartof: Gloria — Oliver finds himself inside a remote cabin deep in the woods. He holds a bloody axe, standing above another man tied to a chair. He is going to kill this man, just like he just killed his own wife. Oliver just does not know why.
Fascinating short story! The amount of twists the author put in with so few words is amazing.

Mark Aragona: Vector — An alien race carefully investigates earth. Suddenly, one of their scout parties ends up in the middle of a beginning zombie apocalypse. What happened? Is there still a way to settle on earth in a peaceful way, maybe even help humanity survive?
Interesting idea and good writing, but the twist came too soon; the ending seemed more like an afterthought. Reversing the answers to “what” and “why” would have worked better. There is potential for much more in this one!

I have never really read short fiction before but I know see that it has its appeals. Maybe I will go back for more, but first I have to read some free classics and gratis novels.