Monday, December 3, 2012

Book Review: The Tombs

The Tombs
by
Why no real cover?

In the adventure novel The Tombs by Clive Cussler, the rich treasure hunting couple Sam and Remi Fargo are called to help by a friend of theirs with an excavation. What they find puts them on the trail of Attila’s long-lost tomb. But they are not the only ones interested in the treasures, and soon they find themselves in grave danger.

This is the fourth book in Clive Cussler’s Fargo adventure series. It’s my favorite series by him, though I have to say this book is not the best one of them. Still, the fast-paced action combined with very likeable characters made the book a joy to read and a pain to hear the alarm clock after way too little sleep. For me, they made up for the in parts somewhat thin story.

Again, one of the things Cussler does really well is to present a double-protagonist of male and female, including some genderized roles such as a damsel in distress scene, while balancing those out easily and giving both partners strengths and weaknesses that make neither one clearly superior. This is sadly rare in the book market.

If you like adventure stories, don’t miss out on this book.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Circe 1.0 released

Version 1.0 of Circe, the Client for IRC in Emacs, has been released.

It is always difficult to make a release, especially a major one such as 1.0, for software you develop yourself. Programs are really never done, so making that step can take a while. For us, it took over seven years.

Development on Circe began in August 2005. Since then, Circe has grown a lot, and today, a small group of developers are actively using and continuously improving it.

You can read more about it on the client homepage:

https://github.com/jorgenschaefer/circe/wiki