1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Sticking with the Alan Moore theme (the original creator of V), I finished reading The Watchme today. The Watchmen is the first graphic novel/comic book series that I have ever read. It was fairly entertaining, though I don’t picture myself reading much in the genre.

int links = rand(linkage);

Fiddler: Some people at work pointed me to a HTTP debugger named Fiddler. It will watch all HTTP traffic on your computer and it will allow you to more or less pause the traffic and modify it to your hearts desire. Sorry, Windows only.

Colibri: There is an app for Mac OS X called Quicksilver, which I absolutely can’t live without. Basically it is an application launcher which is invoked with a configurable keystroke. By default is it CTRL + Space, but on Windows, when running Visual Studio, CTRL + Space is mapped to Intellisence. Colibri is not a fully functional as Quicksilver is, and it is still in development, but for common tasks, such as running commands or launching applications, or browsing folders, it works very well. Details on how it determines it’s set of commands are sketchy, but I found out that it will scan your Start Menu items for applications to launch. So, I created a new folder called Colibri Actions there and placed shortcuts to the most commonly used applications or locations which I visit. Now, if I need to call up Visual Source Safe, I no longer have to navigate my mouse to the Start Menu to find it, I simply press CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE and then start typing the word Visual. Colibri will autocomplete the command for you and a simple press of the ENTER key launches the app. To make things simpler for myself, I renamed the shortcut to VSS so that CTRL + SHIFT + SPACE + VS + SPACE opens Visual Source Safe.

Ad-Blocking the Gnome Way: Use a proxy setting in Gnome to help rid yourself of annoying advertisements.

Upcomming outage

I have been contemplating switching web hosts to 1and1.com. They have Python support, which I am looking for so that I can run an instance of Planet to gather my web news and display them in a single page index.