Joe Abercrombie: The Blade Itself

Joe Abercrombie: The Blade Itself
Story:
3/5
Characters:
5/5
World:
4/5
Humor:
4/5
Action:
4/5

Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself is the fist book in his acclaimed series The First Law. Tree main point of view characters stand out from the impressive cast: Logen Ninefingers, infamous warrior from the North, Sand dan Glotka, prodigy swordsman turned crippled torturer and Jezal dan Luthar, complacent army officer training for the yearly fencing contest.

Logen barely survives a vicious attack by a pack of Shanka, barely sentient and ever hungry creatures from another age. Certain that his mates are dead he moves south. He gets tangled in the schemes of ancient First Magus Bayaz who has special plans for the barbarian, including using his muscle and special fighting talents on their trip south to the city of Adua, capital of the Union.

Glotka used to be the army’s rising star in his time. Then he was captured by the Gurkish Emperor and broken during two years of brutal torture. When he returned home both his spirit and his body are disfigured beyond repair. His friends have abandoned him since so he has joined the Inquisition where he can put his cruel experience to use. His superior Arch Lector Sult uses the bitter cripple to advance his very own schemes for power, all too sure that Glotka will always get the desired answers out of prisoners unlucky enough to end up in his chair.

Noble son Jezal dan Luthar spends his time drinking, gambling and admiring himself. He regards his training with legendary swordsman Varuz as general nuisance if not torture and wonders whether the prospect of the honors he can achieve by winning the Contest is really worth the trouble. Only when he meets his friend’s unconventional sister does he start reflecting what he does and thinks and applying himself. Read more »

Spread Out List Items With LaTeX beamer

Everybody tells you that presentation slides should contain only as few pieces of information as possible. If you need more than one word or picture you better have at most three to five items. If you try to do exactly that using beamer for \(\LaTeX\), this is what you get:

Three items huddled together in the middle of the page

Aesthetics aside, item placement is just bad. You would want the items to fill the available space somewhat. In normal documents, package enumitem allows you to control such things both globally and per environment. It seems to conflict with beamer, though. I headed over to tex.SE and got good answers; Werner suggests to add this to the preamble:

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\makeatletter
\patchcmd{\@listI}{\itemsep3\p@}{\itemsep3em}{}{}
\makeatother

With this, your beamer slides do way better:

Three items using the whole page

Note that you can adjust spacing by changing number and unit in \itemsep3em.

Computer Science StackExchange Upcoming

A screenshot of the current proposal for a computer science site in the StackExchange network.

I have posted about Stackexchange before. Helpful folks on various sites have solved many a problem I have had since then. I have posted a bunch of answers which—hopefully—helped out others in return. To say the least, I am convinced of the StackExchange model and am continually amazed at its effectiveness.

The wealth of knowledge saved on the StackExchange network1 has become so extensive that if you google for programming or LaTeX related problem almost certainly a question on Stackoverflow or tex.SE comes up. If not, asking there is often faster than searching the webs and/or trying around. Especially on tex.SE you can expect great answers in a matter of hours.

Now an exciting thing has happened: A proposal for a computer science site has reached commitment phase! That means that a number of people have to vote for the site in order to move it to a beta phase after which it will be a full-fledged member of the network2. The new site is to complement Stackoverflow and its derivates on one and cstheory.SE on the other side, filling the massive gap in between. I am very excited about this; if the community on cs.SE can be only half as good as on some other sites we are about to create the best resource for computer science students, researchers and users the web has seen so far.

But we are not there yet! First we have to have enough people commit to using the new site, then we need a successful beta. If you want this to happen, head over to area51, commit and be part of the community from the start!


  1. Licensed under Creative Commons, mind!
  2. Find more information about the process here.

Kathy Tyers: The Truce at Bakura

Kathy Tyers: The Truce at Bakura

Story:
3/5
Characters:
3/5
Humor:
2/5
Action:
3/5

Mysterious aliens that enslave humans in order to power their odd technology attack backwater world Bakura. Because the Imperial Navy is busy reforming after the disaster over Endor, the Rebellion decides to help. Literally one day after his battle with Vader and the Emperor, Luke is to commandeer a rescue force with Leia, Han and Chewbacca tagging along. They arrive at Bakura just in time to fend of the latest alien attack and are confronted with natives who are less than eager to accept help from declared traitors.

If you accept the premise of a vile species that wants to conquer the galaxy and happens to begin with it just now, the general plot is enjoyable. Our main characters deal with the effects of the latest battle and revelations; in particular, Luke still has yet to find his place as a Jedi while Leia has to come to terms with Vader being her father. Other than that, The Truce at Bakura is a truly average book. Fans will want to read it as the depicted events are mentioned later.

New Plugin: The Bug Genie for WordPress

Example of TBG issue screen

The Bug Genie is an open-source browser-based bugtracker I have been using for some time. It beats most trackers I tried in terms of features and usability and is also quite easy to install and administrate. Not saying it has no quirks, but I like it.

So why would I want to write links to bugs I fixed or manage lists of known bugs manually? That would only ensure work and pain should the TBG folks decide to change URL structures in the future. So I wrote that small plugin The Bug Genie for WP to do that for me. It is not the most impressive plugin under the sun but does the job. So if you use TBG and WordPress go and have a try!