Exherbo

test

Age of Death by Michael J. Sullivan My rating: 3 of 5 stars It pains me to write this but I didn’t really like “Age of Death”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad book per se. It’s just that it feels flat and – ironically – lifeless. That’s ... [More] probably why it took me almost a month to finish it. “Age of Death” starts where Age of Legend, the previous book, left off with a huge cliffhanger. Now our heroes move on into, uh, a sort of different realm… No, this won’t do: If you haven’t read the previous book yet, stop reading this review here – afterwards spoilers for the series as a whole might lurk!So, without further ado: Our heroes waded into the pool and died. They now enter the “afterlife” and meander through the different realms of it. This is my first issue: I’m an antitheist. Even if I suspend my disbelief and my opposition to anything related to faith, I’m simply not interested in any such ideas. Michael J. Sullivan is one of my favourite authors but even his ideas on afterlife are irrelevant to me even though I found myself at one time wishing he was right: “In that world beyond the veil of death, we found that those we had thought to be lost forever had only been misplaced.” The blurb tells me: “In the tradition of Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, the most epic of tales transcend the world of the living. It’s time to see what lies in Elan’s Age of Death.” I haven’t read either Virgil, Dante or Milton and I don’t intend to. You might consider me a barbarian or uncultured – whatever: I think the “classics” have mostly outlived themselves and belong to the past from which they originated. Amusingly, it was one of those classic authors who expressed a similar thought in a way that has imprinted itself on me at least 30 years ago and has stayed with me ever since: “There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.”Voltaire, in a letter to Cardinal de Bernis (23 April 1761) Keep your truths, Dante, and explore your hell but I’m not interested in it. Similarly, I found the ideas Michael expresses somewhat alluring but not really interesting – Brin, Roan, Gifford and the others move through Rel and Nifrel and, yes, have to overcome a lot of obstacles but everything feels slightly off: The pacing is very uneven – there are long passages during which hardly anything happens and then there are huge battles but even those feel somehow anticlimactic – they’re all dead already so what danger is there?Yes, there is the danger of losing oneself by not believing enough in oneself being but instead of exploring that idea, it’s simply presented and – seemingly – forgotten about. And before I knew it, just before our friends reach their destination, the book ends with yet another cliffhanger. Ok, I half-expected that but in the previous book’s “Author’s Note” Michael explicitly warned us about it but didn’t do so this time so I was hoping… Apart from the issues I’ve already mentioned there’s the fact that a lot of characters, e. g. Persephone, hardly make an entrance. Yes, we see Persephone “in passing”, so to speak, but she isn’t really around. Nor are many others, like Suri who might have featured very prominently but only did so shortly early on.It was disappointing for me. And yet… Michael is an amazing author: Whatever he writes about, his storytelling is believable, full of warmth and, well, comforting.If Michael ever did a mystery kickstarter, I’d chime in. Even if I knew nothing and there was no information whatsoever. Because I love how and what Michael writes. “You want to create?” Nyphron said. Malcolm ignored him. “Just consider what could be done if wars were a thing of the past and everyone worked together.”Yes, “Age of Death” was a disappointment but I can’t help myself so let me go ahead and say it out loud: Hi, my name’s Wulf and I’m a “Sullifan”. Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram View all my reviews Blog GoodReads LibraryThing Facebook Twitter Instagram I am and have been working on quite a few F/OSS projects: Exherbo (Nick: Philantrop), Bedrock Linux, Gentoo (Nick: Philantrop), Calibre plugin iOS reader applications, Calibre plugin Marvin XD, chroot-manager, stuff on github, lots of other projects. If you like my work, feel free to donate. [Less]

Age of Death by Michael J. Sullivan My rating: 3 of 5 stars It pains me to write this but I didn’t really like “Age of Death”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad book per se. It’s just that it feels flat and – ironically – lifeless. That’s ... [More] probably why it took me almost a month to finish it. “Age of Death” starts where Age of Legend, the previous book, left off with a huge cliffhanger. Now our heroes move on into, uh, a sort of different realm… No, this won’t do: If you haven’t read the previous book yet, stop reading this review here – afterwards spoilers for the series as a whole might lurk!So, without further ado: Our heroes waded into the pool and died. They now enter the “afterlife” and meander through the different realms of it. This is my first issue: I’m an antitheist. Even if I suspend my disbelief and my opposition to anything related to faith, I’m simply not interested in any such ideas. Michael J. Sullivan is one of my favourite authors but even his ideas on afterlife are irrelevant to me even though I found myself at one time wishing he was right: “In that world beyond the veil of death, we found that those we had thought to be lost forever had only been misplaced.” The blurb tells me: “In the tradition of Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, the most epic of tales transcend the world of the living. It’s time to see what lies in Elan’s Age of Death.” I haven’t read either Virgil, Dante or Milton and I don’t intend to. You might consider me a barbarian or uncultured – whatever: I think the “classics” have mostly outlived themselves and belong to the past from which they originated. Amusingly, it was one of those classic authors who expressed a similar thought in a way that has imprinted itself on me at least 30 years ago and has stayed with me ever since: “There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.”Voltaire, in a letter to Cardinal de Bernis (23 April 1761) Keep your truths, Dante, and explore your hell but I’m not interested in it. Similarly, I found the ideas Michael expresses somewhat alluring but not really interesting – Brin, Roan, Gifford and the others move through Rel and Nifrel and, yes, have to overcome a lot of obstacles but everything feels slightly off: The pacing is very uneven – there are long passages during which hardly anything happens and then there are huge battles but even those feel somehow anticlimactic – they’re all dead already so what danger is there?Yes, there is the danger of losing oneself by not believing enough in oneself being but instead of exploring that idea, it’s simply presented and – seemingly – forgotten about. And before I knew it, just before our friends reach their destination, the book ends with yet another cliffhanger. Ok, I half-expected that but in the previous book’s “Author’s Note” Michael explicitly warned us about it but didn’t do so this time so I was hoping… Apart from the issues I’ve already mentioned there’s the fact that a lot of characters, e. g. Persephone, hardly make an entrance. Yes, we see Persephone “in passing”, so to speak, but she isn’t really around. Nor are many others, like Suri who might have featured very prominently but only did so shortly early on.It was disappointing for me. And yet… Michael is an amazing author: Whatever he writes about, his storytelling is believable, full of warmth and, well, comforting.If Michael ever did a mystery kickstarter, I’d chime in. Even if I knew nothing and there was no information whatsoever. Because I love how and what Michael writes. “You want to create?” Nyphron said. Malcolm ignored him. “Just consider what could be done if wars were a thing of the past and everyone worked together.”Yes, “Age of Death” was a disappointment but I can’t help myself so let me go ahead and say it out loud: Hi, my name’s Wulf and I’m a “Sullifan”. Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram View all my reviews Blog GoodReads LibraryThing Facebook Twitter Instagram I am and have been working on quite a few F/OSS projects: Exherbo (Nick: Philantrop), Bedrock Linux, Gentoo (Nick: Philantrop), Calibre plugin iOS reader applications, Calibre plugin Marvin XD, chroot-manager, stuff on github, lots of other projects. If you like my work, feel free to donate. [Less]

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of a Unix system architecture; init diversity initiative. Devember1 it’s coming and for this year (which is also my first year participating) I’ve chosen something really close to me: the init and service manager ... [More] (called init/rc for the rest of the post). Specifically I’ve chosen to rewrite 66 from scratch. Notes: In the following paragraphs there is an explanation of what led me to rewrite 66. I was planning to explain this from some time and I’ve taken to opportunity to do so now. If you are only interested in the program itself and what I’ll do in this Devember, skip to development. Why? Regardless of whatever “sytemd sucks”23 or not, I want to have an alternative to it. I want to be able to have at least some choiches for what runs on my system, especially when we talk about critic programs such as PID 1 and the service manager. The alternatives currently availables (OpenRC, runit) do not offer the advantages of systemd or have some big disadvantage that do not make their use straightforward. This does not involve the design (which have been already covered in deep by skarnet here4) but only usability. Yup, I am really picky regarding the programs to use. s6/s6-rc At the start of the 2018 I’ve learnt about s6 suite5 and s6-rc6. I wanted to try them on my newly installed Exherbo Linux system, so I have adapted the example services to run on my machine. Thanks to the help of the #s6 official IRC channel the system finally run s6/s6-rc and it was great; at boot it started all the services asynchronously and showed a working tty in the blink of an eye. I’ve liked it so much that I stared contributing to the integration of s6 into exherbo. It consisted in s6-rc services for the various packages and a sane set of starting scripts to have a working system (called s6-exherbo7). My small VPS I configured at the time even got s6 on it. With the time passing I’ve found the service writing and administration to be really time consuming. And that’s because it has not a user friendly interface, thus it was not made for what me (and some other users) were using it. And here it comes s6-frontend, the user interface not written yet. Skarnet has recently confirmed that he will write it in the 2021 so it won’t be ready any time soon. 66 Exherbo was not the only distribution adopting s6 and and among the other ones there was obarun8, developed by the omonimus creator as a fork of Arch Linux. He, too, wrote a lot of wrapper scripts to ease the use of the s6 suite, but in the end he resorted to writing his own frontend, called 669. Obarun (the distribution) was converted for 66 as soon as a working release got out. On the other hand there was me who became an early adopter the moment I looked at the documentation9: it simply resolves almost all my issues of s6/s6-rc without any major disadvantage. It is easy to use, powerful and extensible. So far, s6-exherbo got immediately forked into 66-exherbo10 and the old services converted to the new frontend format. Devuan too got his own 66-devuan11, which took me more than it should have had. If you are curious about the reason, 66’s developer did not want to support FHS12 in his general set of starting scripts, because he did not like this standard. In the end he accepted my patches and Devuan booted using 66. Service enabling on Exherbo with system version of 66 suffered from a bug (Hello SIGSEGV, long time no see) and it was unusable; to make the matter worse, the bug could not be reproduced with a local copy. The developer had something else on his schedule (writing a new command-line arguments parser, apparently) and did not want to fix the bug. “I can fix it myself”, I thought: I was wrong. 66 codebase consists of 16000 lines with little to no comments, and it makes heavy use of skalibs13 and oblibs14 libraries, greatly lowering the readability (I’d like to say it is written in skarnet’s C). Downgrade wasn’t an option neither due to a breaking change in services and the various services in Exherbo already got updated. I could not find the bug, I could not enable new services and the developer did not care to fix this fatal bug. Devuan too was failing to build 66. There was enough reasons for me to fork the project and improve it, adding unit testing and have better code quality. Now that I had the possibility, I could also rewrite it from scratch, picking different choiches from the start and avoiding the legacy code. Note: I really like 66 project but it simply isn’t what I am searching for. I wish the best to obarun with both 66 and his distribution, for which he have worked years trying to offer a valid systemd and Arch Linux alternative. tt tt (which should have been 77 or t7 but I don’t like numbers in binaries names, if not strictly necessaries) is a wrapper, or better, a frontend to s6/s6-rc. A bit about its development: Written in D The suited languages for such a project are C, C++, Rust and D. C is the fastest if used correctly; but it’s really hard to get right and requires developers to rewrite a lot of stuff (or use libs like glib or skalibs). C++ is hard and share some problem with C, I prefer to not use if I have a choiche. Rust has a microdependency ecosystem and it is hard to use C libraries as well as exposing C bindings. On the other hand, D seems suited for such a project: it is safer than C, has a GC, and it is relatively fast to write, while keeping a good performance and high flexibility. Use C or C++ libs D community is not very active, so many libraries have been abandoned and the maintained ones could still have the same ending in the future. To avoid such a possibility, I have chosen to only use C/C++ libraries (way more tested and actively maintained), since Dlang makes them easy to use. Provide external C bindings tt will have a library and a command-line interface. In the long-term there could be additional command lines interfaces, plugins or GUI programs to administrate the system from; it is important for me to expose a C interface so that any language could be used (after all almost every language permits to call C functions). Try to not reinvent the wheel To get a working service manager as soon as possible, complex tasks will be achieved using external libraries (like parsing the services files). Reinventing the wheel is good for learning purposes, but increase the development and testing time too much for my tastes. Therefore I will try to keep it to a minimum. Features These are 669’s features, which tt will keep closely to. Frontend service files declaration. Backup a complete set of services. Easy creation of a scandir. Nested supervision tree. Instance service file creation. Multiple directories service file declaration(packager,sysadmin,user). Easy change of service configuration. Automatic logger creation. Sane defaults The most important thing is to make the pc boot, whatever the conditions. The users and the distribution maintainers should do the least work possible. Providing sane defaults and sane fallback helps in this matter. For example stage1 should work regardless if the initramfs has been used or not (and this didn’t happen in 66 until recently). About the libaries used, I have to try them so I’ll problably post more details in the next weeks. https://devember.org/ ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/systemd.html ↩︎ https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/ ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/s6/why.html ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/ ↩︎ https://gitlab.exherbo.org/exherbo-misc/s6-exherbo ↩︎ https://web.obarun.org/ ↩︎ https://web.obarun.org/software/66/ ↩︎ https://gitlab.exherbo.org/exherbo-misc/66-exherbo ↩︎ https://git.devuan.org/66-devuan ↩︎ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/skalibs/ ↩︎ https://framagit.org/obarun/oblibs ↩︎ [Less]

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of a Unix system architecture; init diversity initiative. Devember1 it’s coming and for this year (which is also my first year participating) I’ve chosen something really close to me: the init and service manager ... [More] (called init/rc for the rest of the post). Specifically I’ve chosen to rewrite 66 from scratch. Notes: In the following paragraphs there is an explanation of what led me to rewrite 66. I was planning to explain this from some time and I’ve taken to opportunity to do so now. If you are only interested in the program itself and what I’ll do in this Devember, skip to development. Why? Regardless of whatever “sytemd sucks”23 or not, I want to have an alternative to it. I want to be able to have at least some choiches for what runs on my system, especially when we talk about critic programs such as PID 1 and the service manager. The alternatives currently availables (OpenRC, runit) do not offer the advantages of systemd or have some big disadvantage that do not make their use straightforward. This does not involve the design (which have been already covered in deep by skarnet here4) but only usability. Yup, I am really picky regarding the programs to use. s6/s6-rc At the start of the 2018 I’ve learnt about s6 suite5 and s6-rc6. I wanted to try them on my newly installed Exherbo Linux system, so I have adapted the example services to run on my machine. Thanks to the help of the #s6 official IRC channel the system finally run s6/s6-rc and it was great; at boot it started all the services asynchronously and showed a working tty in the blink of an eye. I’ve liked it so much that I stared contributing to the integration of s6 into exherbo. It consisted in s6-rc services for the various packages and a sane set of starting scripts to have a working system (called s6-exherbo7). My small VPS I configured at the time even got s6 on it. With the time passing I’ve found the service writing and administration to be really time consuming. And that’s because it has not a user friendly interface, thus it was not made for what me (and some other users) were using it. And here it comes s6-frontend, the user interface not written yet. Skarnet has recently confirmed that he will write it in the 2021 so it won’t be ready any time soon. 66 Exherbo was not the only distribution adopting s6 and and among the other ones there was obarun8, developed by the omonimus creator as a fork of Arch Linux. He, too, wrote a lot of wrapper scripts to ease the use of the s6 suite, but in the end he resorted to writing his own frontend, called 669. Obarun (the distribution) was converted for 66 as soon as a working release got out. On the other hand there was me who became an early adopter the moment I looked at the documentation9: it simply resolves almost all my issues of s6/s6-rc without any major disadvantage. It is easy to use, powerful and extensible. So far, s6-exherbo got immediately forked into 66-exherbo10 and the old services converted to the new frontend format. Devuan too got his own 66-devuan11, which took me more than it should have had. If you are curious about the reason, 66’s developer did not want to support FHS12 in his general set of starting scripts, because he did not like this standard. In the end he accepted my patches and Devuan booted using 66. Service enabling on Exherbo with system version of 66 suffered from a bug (Hello SIGSEGV, long time no see) and it was unusable; to make the matter worse, the bug could not be reproduced with a local copy. The developer had something else on his schedule (writing a new command-line arguments parser, apparently) and did not want to fix the bug. “I can fix it myself”, I thought: I was wrong. 66 codebase consists of 16000 lines with little to no comments, and it makes heavy use of skalibs13 and oblibs14 libraries, greatly lowering the readability (I’d like to say it is written in skarnet’s C). Downgrade wasn’t an option neither due to a breaking change in services and the various services in Exherbo already got updated. I could not find the bug, I could not enable new services and the developer did not care to fix this fatal bug. Devuan too was failing to build 66. There was enough reasons for me to fork the project and improve it, adding unit testing and have better code quality. Now that I had the possibility, I could also rewrite it from scratch, picking different choiches from the start and avoiding the legacy code. Note: I really like 66 project but it simply isn’t what I am searching for. I wish the best to obarun with both 66 and his distribution, for which he have worked years trying to offer a valid systemd and Arch Linux alternative. tt tt (which should have been 77 or t7 but I don’t like numbers in binaries names, if not strictly necessaries) is a wrapper, or better, a frontend to s6/s6-rc. A bit about its development: Written in D The suited languages for such a project are C, C++, Rust and D. C is the fastest if used correctly; but it’s really hard to get right and requires developers to rewrite a lot of stuff (or use libs like glib or skalibs). C++ is hard and share some problem with C, I prefer to not use if I have a choiche. Rust has a microdependency ecosystem and it is hard to use C libraries as well as exposing C bindings. On the other hand, D seems suited for such a project: it is safer than C, has a GC, and it is relatively fast to write, while keeping a good performance and high flexibility. Use C or C++ libs D community is not very active, so many libraries have been abandoned and the maintained ones could still have the same ending in the future. To avoid such a possibility, I have chosen to only use C/C++ libraries (way more tested and actively maintained), since Dlang makes them easy to use. Provide external C bindings tt will have a library and a command-line interface. In the long-term there could be additional command lines interfaces, plugins or GUI programs to administrate the system from; it is important for me to expose a C interface so that any language could be used (after all almost every language permits to call C functions). Try to not reinvent the wheel To get a working service manager as soon as possible, complex tasks will be achieved using external libraries (like parsing the services files). Reinventing the wheel is good for learning purposes, but increase the development and testing time too much for my tastes. Therefore I will try to keep it to a minimum. Features These are 669’s features, which tt will keep closely to. Frontend service files declaration. Backup a complete set of services. Easy creation of a scandir. Nested supervision tree. Instance service file creation. Multiple directories service file declaration(packager,sysadmin,user). Easy change of service configuration. Automatic logger creation. Sane defaults The most important thing is to make the pc boot, whatever the conditions. The users and the distribution maintainers should do the least work possible. Providing sane defaults and sane fallback helps in this matter. For example stage1 should work regardless if the initramfs has been used or not (and this didn’t happen in 66 until recently). About the libaries used, I have to try them so I’ll problably post more details in the next weeks. https://devember.org/ ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/systemd.html ↩︎ https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/ ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/s6/why.html ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/s6/ ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc/ ↩︎ https://gitlab.exherbo.org/exherbo-misc/s6-exherbo ↩︎ https://web.obarun.org/ ↩︎ https://web.obarun.org/software/66/ ↩︎ https://gitlab.exherbo.org/exherbo-misc/66-exherbo ↩︎ https://git.devuan.org/66-devuan ↩︎ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard ↩︎ https://skarnet.org/software/skalibs/ ↩︎ https://framagit.org/obarun/oblibs ↩︎ [Less]

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of a Unix system architecture; init diversity initiative. Devember1 it’s coming and for this year (which is also my first year participating) I’ve chosen something really close to me: the init and service manager ... [More] (called init/rc for the rest of the post). Specifically I’ve chosen to rewrite 66 from scratch. Notes: In the following paragraphs there is an explanation of what led me to rewrite 66. I was planning to explain this from some time and I’ve taken to opportunity to do so now. [Less]

The Darker Arts by Oscar de Muriel My rating: 1 of 5 stars I read one book at a time, always. I simply cannot just “switch” from one book to another anymore. So, if I hit a rotten tomato I tend to actually read less. I’m typing this on my ... [More] iPhone. A minute ago, I found myself wondering and thinking, “I usually read at a time like this.” – while I was playing a game. Then it began to dawn on me: ‘How much must you despise a book to fantasise about writing its review on GoodReads while actively trying to avoid reading said book?!‘ The answer in a nutshell: Very much, and the reason is that pretty much everything in this book is bland, wrong and unbalanced. Let’s start with the supernatural aspects: While I’m in no way superstitious, don’t believe in anything supernatural, I actually greatly enjoyed the ambivalence of the previous instalments in this series. For McGray pretty much everything was at least supernaturally influenced whereas Frey never really believed in anything like that. The resulting strains between both and the different approaches made things interesting. It made for a nice balance. Even better: De Muriel kept the ambivalence and we never knew for certain if there were supernatural elements or not. We, as readers, could make up our minds ourselves. In “Darker Arts”, though, Frey and his no-nonsense philosophy clearly dominate the entire book. McGray basically only features as an unhinged clown who has a good idea at times but mostly raves or broods, sometimes attacking people. Somehow, among complicated family trees, goldmines in Africa and lots of spiteful people the story meanders along, seemingly aimlessly and no progress is being made. At first, our heroes don’t worry but time passes and nothing really seems to be moving anywhere. Lots of false leads, a travesty of a trial and until the sensationalist ending during which Frey miraculously conceives the solution to the crime in a most unbelievable way, de Muriel obviously tries hard to bore us to death. The solution to the crime is so complicated that de Muriel actually has to resort to having Frey spell everything out to his superior and, thus, us. If an author has to resort to such desperate measures, they’d better gone back and revised their plot. Plus: Frey is basically constantly bemoaning his uncle’s untimely death during the previous book. The previous book, in fact, overshadows this one as it is being alluded to all the time. So often actually that I became annoyed about it. Yes, I enjoyed “The Loch of the Dead” but it’s not like it would garner de Muriel Nobel the Nobel Prize in Literature… “Darker Arts” reads like de Muriel has spent all his good ideas. If it wasn’t for certain developments at the very end, I’d say this might be a farewell to the series – McGray receives grim personal news, Frey is impaired by the events of “The Loch of the Dead”, another important character leaves the scene… Ultimately, considering the bland story, the bad writing and the fact that this book made me read less, I think that’s it for me – Oscar de Muriel just lost a reader for good. Or, to say it with McGray’s constantly repeated words: “Och nae…” View all my reviews Blog GoodReads LibraryThing Facebook Twitter Instagram I am and have been working on quite a few F/OSS projects: Exherbo (Nick: Philantrop), Bedrock Linux, Gentoo (Nick: Philantrop), Calibre plugin iOS reader applications, Calibre plugin Marvin XD, chroot-manager, stuff on github, lots of other projects. If you like my work, feel free to donate. [Less]

The Darker Arts by Oscar de Muriel My rating: 1 of 5 stars I read one book at a time, always. I simply cannot just “switch” from one book to another anymore. So, if I hit a rotten tomato I tend to actually read less. I’m typing this on my ... [More] iPhone. A minute ago, I found myself wondering and thinking, “I usually read at a time like this.” – while I was playing a game. Then it began to dawn on me: ‘How much must you despise a book to fantasise about writing its review on GoodReads while actively trying to avoid reading said book?!‘ The answer in a nutshell: Very much, and the reason is that pretty much everything in this book is bland, wrong and unbalanced. Let’s start with the supernatural aspects: While I’m in no way superstitious, don’t believe in anything supernatural, I actually greatly enjoyed the ambivalence of the previous instalments in this series. For McGray pretty much everything was at least supernaturally influenced whereas Frey never really believed in anything like that. The resulting strains between both and the different approaches made things interesting. It made for a nice balance. Even better: De Muriel kept the ambivalence and we never knew for certain if there were supernatural elements or not. We, as readers, could make up our minds ourselves. In “Darker Arts”, though, Frey and his no-nonsense philosophy clearly dominate the entire book. McGray basically only features as an unhinged clown who has a good idea at times but mostly raves or broods, sometimes attacking people. Somehow, among complicated family trees, goldmines in Africa and lots of spiteful people the story meanders along, seemingly aimlessly and no progress is being made. At first, our heroes don’t worry but time passes and nothing really seems to be moving anywhere. Lots of false leads, a travesty of a trial and until the sensationalist ending during which Frey miraculously conceives the solution to the crime in a most unbelievable way, de Muriel obviously tries hard to bore us to death. The solution to the crime is so complicated that de Muriel actually has to resort to having Frey spell everything out to his superior and, thus, us. If an author has to resort to such desperate measures, they’d better gone back and revised their plot. Plus: Frey is basically constantly bemoaning his uncle’s untimely death during the previous book. The previous book, in fact, overshadows this one as it is being alluded to all the time. So often actually that I became annoyed about it. Yes, I enjoyed “The Loch of the Dead” but it’s not like it would garner de Muriel Nobel the Nobel Prize in Literature… “Darker Arts” reads like de Muriel has spent all his good ideas. If it wasn’t for certain developments at the very end, I’d say this might be a farewell to the series – McGray receives grim personal news, Frey is impaired by the events of “The Loch of the Dead”, another important character leaves the scene… Ultimately, considering the bland story, the bad writing and the fact that this book made me read less, I think that’s it for me – Oscar de Muriel just lost a reader for good. Or, to say it with McGray’s constantly repeated words: “Och nae…” View all my reviews Blog GoodReads LibraryThing Facebook Twitter Instagram I am and have been working on quite a few F/OSS projects: Exherbo (Nick: Philantrop), Bedrock Linux, Gentoo (Nick: Philantrop), Calibre plugin iOS reader applications, Calibre plugin Marvin XD, chroot-manager, stuff on github, lots of other projects. If you like my work, feel free to donate. [Less]

A Bitter Feast by Deborah Crombie My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wow, we’re already at the 18th instalment of this great series. When I picked this book up, I was slightly worried how I would like it, considering that I haven’t exactly had much ... [More] luck with long-running series this year; the latest Dupin a disappointment almost as badly as the latest Bruno (review here). Would Deborah Crombie let me down as well? Would she make me wish for Duncan and Gemma, whose exploits I’ve been following for years, to finally ride into the sunset? The answer, fortunately, is a resounding “NO!”. Set this time in the Cotswolds – and thus outside Duncan’s and Gemma’s jurisdiction – we find ourselves at Beck House, the summer house of Melody Talbot’s parents, Ivan and Addie. What was planned as a carefree weekend for Duncan, Gemma, Melody and Doug with a charity luncheon turns into something much more sinister when it comes to light that one of the victims of a car accident had already been dead at the time of the collision… The other victim of said collision is actually Duncan Kincaid himself – fortunately alone in the car at the time. The fact that I just felt compelled to mention he was alone is a strong indicator for one fact: You know you really like a series and its characters when you’re actually truly worrying about what’s going to happen to one of the main characters.During the entire book which switches perspectives frequently and naturally (meaning you don’t get confused at all!) I was wondering what might happen to Duncan. I was keeping my fingers crossed all the time and worried with Gemma about him. I’ve always liked her as well and I sympathised even more with her during this book because she constantly has a lot on her plate: She has to organise the kids, has to be a “proper” guest of the Talbots, a friend to several characters in the book and takes part in the investigation with Duncan (both being supported by Melody and Doug, of course!). It’s not only Gemma, though: Everyone – including even minor character like Kit – get a fair amount of “stage time” and, surprisingly, everyone is actually interesting. This applies to the local cop, DI Colin Booth as well: Booth, who could have reacted territorially, gladly accepts the help he’s getting from his London colleagues and they, in return, don’t try to take over his investigation. I’m not sure how realistic that actually is but it surely helped with the lively atmosphere. Booth is smart, down-to-earth and simply very congenial: ““Colin Booth, Gloucester CID. And you are?” Gemma noticed that he hadn’t used his rank, and that in the few moments since he’d arrived he had very unobtrusively loosened the knot in his tie. She was beginning to like Colin Booth.” So did I. Even the interludes – describing past events in the lives of some major characters – were actually enjoyable and helped understand current events better. One sentence, early on, reminded me strongly of the entire series and, especially, this book…“Down-to-earth food, and delicious, the sort of thing he’d grown up on in Cheshire.” … which is similarly down-to-earth and delicious. No, Crombie didn’t let me down and I’m happily awaiting the 19th book! View all my reviews Blog GoodReads LibraryThing Facebook Twitter Instagram I am and have been working on quite a few F/OSS projects: Exherbo (Nick: Philantrop), Bedrock Linux, Gentoo (Nick: Philantrop), Calibre plugin iOS reader applications, Calibre plugin Marvin XD, chroot-manager, stuff on github, lots of other projects. If you like my work, feel free to donate. [Less]

A Bitter Feast by Deborah Crombie My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wow, we’re already at the 18th instalment of this great series. When I picked this book up, I was slightly worried how I would like it, considering that I haven’t exactly had much ... [More] luck with long-running series this year; the latest Dupin a disappointment almost as badly as the latest Bruno (review here). Would Deborah Crombie let me down as well? Would she make me wish for Duncan and Gemma, whose exploits I’ve been following for years, to finally ride into the sunset? The answer, fortunately, is a resounding “NO!”. Set this time in the Cotswolds – and thus outside Duncan’s and Gemma’s jurisdiction – we find ourselves at Beck House, the summer house of Melody Talbot’s parents, Ivan and Addie. What was planned as a carefree weekend for Duncan, Gemma, Melody and Doug with a charity luncheon turns into something much more sinister when it comes to light that one of the victims of a car accident had already been dead at the time of the collision… The other victim of said collision is actually Duncan Kincaid himself – fortunately alone in the car at the time. The fact that I just felt compelled to mention he was alone is a strong indicator for one fact: You know you really like a series and its characters when you’re actually truly worrying about what’s going to happen to one of the main characters.During the entire book which switches perspectives frequently and naturally (meaning you don’t get confused at all!) I was wondering what might happen to Duncan. I was keeping my fingers crossed all the time and worried with Gemma about him. I’ve always liked her as well and I sympathised even more with her during this book because she constantly has a lot on her plate: She has to organise the kids, has to be a “proper” guest of the Talbots, a friend to several characters in the book and takes part in the investigation with Duncan (both being supported by Melody and Doug, of course!). It’s not only Gemma, though: Everyone – including even minor character like Kit – get a fair amount of “stage time” and, surprisingly, everyone is actually interesting. This applies to the local cop, DI Colin Booth as well: Booth, who could have reacted territorially, gladly accepts the help he’s getting from his London colleagues and they, in return, don’t try to take over his investigation. I’m not sure how realistic that actually is but it surely helped with the lively atmosphere. Booth is smart, down-to-earth and simply very congenial: ““Colin Booth, Gloucester CID. And you are?” Gemma noticed that he hadn’t used his rank, and that in the few moments since he’d arrived he had very unobtrusively loosened the knot in his tie. She was beginning to like Colin Booth.” So did I. Even the interludes – describing past events in the lives of some major characters – were actually enjoyable and helped understand current events better. One sentence, early on, reminded me strongly of the entire series and, especially, this book…“Down-to-earth food, and delicious, the sort of thing he’d grown up on in Cheshire.” … which is similarly down-to-earth and delicious. No, Crombie didn’t let me down and I’m happily awaiting the 19th book! View all my reviews Blog GoodReads LibraryThing Facebook Twitter Instagram I am and have been working on quite a few F/OSS projects: Exherbo (Nick: Philantrop), Bedrock Linux, Gentoo (Nick: Philantrop), Calibre plugin iOS reader applications, Calibre plugin Marvin XD, chroot-manager, stuff on github, lots of other projects. If you like my work, feel free to donate. [Less]