Mech

Just finished reading Mech by B.V. Larson.
I don't remember having read a book with so much bloodshed and gore! I was cringing at a couple of places as there was no pulling back from evisceration, even of women and children. Even Neal Asher doesn't usually detail a gore fest of innocents.
So the basic story is that of a planet colonised in the last few hundred years, and then the original owners owners arrive home and start a re-invasion of their territory. The aliens have a very different mindset, and take various forms having been evolved (or engineered) into castes, each optimised for their different roles. Gorefest ensues.
The human political scene is quite amusing as well, filled with corruption and assassination and power games.
This was a thouroughly enjoyable read, and I'll be going back for part two.
Oh, and check the price on this. $3 on Amazon. Sweet read, well paced and well written.

Containment

Just finished reading Containment by Christian Cantrell.
This was one of those cheap books you pick up for three dollars, and read on the off chance that it could be any good. Frankly, the cover art did it for me, and for three dollars was willing to judge a book by its cover.
With a little known author like this, I might be willing to just give it up partway through if it really sucks, and honestly, there was one chapter early on where this was the case. It seemed very unrealistic.
But then it seriously picked up. With a little bit of mystery and deception and a very dark undercurrent, I hammered through the rest of the book.
The cover art turned out to be completely misleading, but then I wasn't disappointed with the read, so that's OK I guess.

Samba in Ubuntu 10.10 very very slow

After upgrading my Ubuntu server to 10.10, I found that transferring files to it was horribly slow. As in 200kB/s slow, over a 1Gb network. There were no errors, it was just horribly horribly slow.
After some searching on the topic, I found that the socket options line that was recommended in the smb.conf file in previous versions:

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY \

               SO_KEEPALIVE SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192

was actually causing this issue. Anything specified here that is actually required seems to be default with 10.10 and the corresponding kernel, so I just commented this line out, and things were back to a reasonable speed.
I'm guessing that specifying the buffer sizes causes havoc with the current implementation.
Gah!

NASA STEREO Super Sun Day.

Today, NASA's STEREO spacecrafts, A, and B, will be on exactly opposite sides of the sun, and will be taking pictures of its entire surface at the same time. These spacecraft have been travelling round Earth's orbit in opposite directions since October 2006, providing stereo vision of the Sun. Super Sun Day! More at the main site.
Update: and here it is. Cool.