This is the first book in a trilogy about the colonization of Mars.  The first book itself is enormous in scope, from the departure from Earth, the landing, building of settlements, commercialization, and finally Revolution.  Perhaps too large in scope.  The whole series was recommended to me by GP, whose judgment I respect.

Red Mars is the story of a handful of the "First Hundred" colonists on Mars.  They are the pioneers of the new frontier, braving the journey out, surviving planet-side and establishing the first settlement for permanent habitation.  We are treated to Love Triangles, political maneuvering, interpersonal conflict, and clique groups.  Surely some of my favorite themes.  And once the de facto leader of the First Hundred is murdered, we get political intrigue added too.  No investigation, just intrigue.

Technically, this was a brilliant work.  Narratively, not so much.  I found that I really didn't care about the characters and frequently lost track of what was going on.  I don't think it was that there were too many characters, because Red Storm Rising had more and was an incredible story.  Many times I would be reading a segment and have completely forgotten why they were doing some action.  It may be that as a dad of two very small ones, it was natural to fall asleep reading this book every night:  It was definitely a long read;  I purchased this book in July and only finished it this weekend.  My personal opinion is that this would have made a great prequel to an established series; the author tried to put way too much into this book causing it to be flat.  I am disappointed in this book, and despite owning the other two books, I am not sure I will read them. 

When you are looking at someone else's code, at what point can you definitively know it is bad code?  I'm sure everyone has their metrics.  Here's mine and so simple too:

Server Timeouts

Yep, real simple.  Here's the thing:  Nothing else, in my mind, shows a greater lack of understanding of the basic architecture of a system than poorly set timeouts.  For instance.  while not a bad idea to adjust the timeout of the SQL connection to fit what you are doing, setting it to 1200 means you don't realize that it means seconds and you just told your application to wait 20 minutes before doing any damage control.  I don't know about you, but ANY application that makes me wait 20 minutes for anything (without showing me real progress) is broken; I am impatient after 20 seconds!  Another example:  setting an ASP.NET app to use a session timeout of 300 minutes means you don't care about your server at all.  Why not store user specific information (full DATASETS!) in memory for 5 hours after the user has left the page.  5 hours!

These are real examples of code I am working on today.  I don't care how elegant your architecture is, Server Timeout abuse has always been a very simple indicator of developer incompetance.  Oh, and it seems to be in direct proportion of scale too.  I have actually seen an ASP session set to 3000000.  Yes 3 MILLION minutes.  That is 50,000 hours.  5 years, 8 months, 14 days, 13+ hours.  Yeah, that'll work.  I was not well loved because I wouldn't allow crap like that to run on my servers.

BTW, 3M minutes was by the same coder who thought LastName is a good primary key on a DB.  And when that didn't work, how about a composite key on LastName, FirstName.  Yep, World Class programmer.

Congrats to GP for his new change of status.  Sorry I missed the party, I bet it was memorable.

It took nearly two months, but I finally posted the review of the Foundation Series today.  The post date, however, is set to the date I originally started it, and ATOM sets the update date to the date finished or last edited.  Enjoy.

You may have noticed two things on my blog of late.  First is a Comment link that is simply a mailto: tag.  I have decided to use TC's method of comments for the time being until I can get a real system up.  Anybody have a problem with a port22 address?  Yeah, thought so.

Second is a hit counter.  I don't really like them myself, but I wanted to get some idea of the (really low) traffic coming here.  I know a couple people occasion, but I am a bit curious.  Honestly, I miss the traffic logs from my last job enough to want to do some of my own.  Kind of crazy, I know.  Anyway, it's just a little image that loads from a remote site in order for me to get an idea of views regardless of viewing from an aggregator or direct page views.

If you don't like either one, drop a comment!!

While I'd like to believe that I know at least the general principles of stock market investing, two events have happened in the last couple weeks that leave me stymied.

First, when I decided to leave Amerigroup, I sold off all of my stock.  I did so for many reasons, not the least of which was capital for the disruption of cash flow due to the job switch.  Also, I had planned to sell last year at 45 but eventually only got 32.  Then a couple weeks ago, AGP gets hit with a $144M verdict for fraud in IL, which, of course, I never heard anything about.  The stock price dropped ~$7 to $28.  But within 3 trading days, the price is back up to $32, which it had been hovering around for months.  Every analyst I've read says that AGP was foolish to allow the case to go to court, speculates that the top end damages could reach $500M+, and the devalued the price to mid $20s.  What's going on?

Second, last month, Airbus lost the contract with FedEx for 10 of their new A380 super-jumbo jets, because Airbus keeps delaying the delivery of the finalized airframe.  Several of their other customers have also expressed concern and threaten to pull their contracts.  This comes after a few CEO changes and an enormous loss statement for the last fiscal quarter.  And what happens to the stock price?  Nothing. 

So I obviously know less about the market than I though I did, which wasn't much beyond the fundamentals of buy low - sell high.  The DotCom VC games confused me too, but I was right in the end there.  The housing market is bizarro, but is correcting the way I thought too.  But these two examples are beyond my understanding.  Personally, I would have jumped ship immediately on both, but I would have been wrong.

Go Figure...