Book Club 2025: Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold

This book is from 2009, but I bought it the other month because my Emacs book package told me I’d missed it.

And indeed, I’ve read all of Bujold’s other books, but after starting this one, I’m wondering whether I skipped this book on purpose.

I really like Bujold’s books in general, and especially her Vorkosigan series. This one, though, is the fourth book in her Sharing Knife fantasy series, and reading this volume, I sorta remembered that I wasn’t really thrilled about the first three novels.

It’s not that it’s badly written or anything — it’s Bujold, so of course it’s pretty good. I’m reading this and I’m thinking “hey, this is very enjoyable, this is very cozy… AND I”M BORED OUT OF MY SKULL hey, did I have any outstanding Github issues I could tinker with? anything is better than continuing to read this OOPS what am I saying? I’m enjoying this” and so on.

Goodreads calls this a fantasy/romance, and I guess I can see why — it’s a pretty romantic fantasy. But it’s not a romance novel at all. The book is sort of exploring how a couple people try to change how their world functions — by exploring the magic system, and persuading people. So it’s a slightly science fictioney take on fantasy, if anything.

It’s just that it’s so boring.

(But it does pick up in the last quarter of the book.)

Predictably enough, it’s the highest-rated book in the series on Goodreads — all series tend to have higher scores after the first couple of books. People who didn’t like earlier books in a series will naturally stop buying that series. The only exceptions are when a series takes a gruesome downturn, but that’s not the case here.

But there’s some higher-rated reviews that have the same frustrations that I have.

Horizon (2009) by Lois McMaster Bujold (buy new, buy used, 4.06 on Goodreads)

PHP is quite stable

In the late 90s, I wrote a PHP library to create charts. (I worked for an Internet stock broker, you see.) I was reminded of this because I found a four year old pull request to make it work under PHP 7.4.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know that “[.]” is an eccentric way to say “match one full stop”, but I can never remember whether you have to quote the backslash since it’s in a string (like in Emacs Lisp) or you don’t have to.

(Apparently the rules for backslash in PHP is that it represents itself unless the next character is a ” or a \ or something.)

But! Anyway. PHP is now at 8.4, but I only had to change three things:

1) ereg -> preg. Very annoying change, and apparently mostly pointless?

b) You can’t say $a = &$b any more (assignment by reference)?

IV) The class constructor used to be a function with the same name as the class. But now the function is called __construct, which I’m sure was a very important and vital change.

But overall… it’s pretty amazing how little the PHP people have broken over the years.

(Oh, there’s one more thing that doesn’t work, but that’s not the PHP people’s fault — by default in Debian, you can no longer use Type1 fonts in PHP under Apache, because it’s been deemed Unsafe. Because somebody can put Dangerous Fonts into the root-owned font directory and then er get er root access because of segfaults and stuff. IT”S UNSAFE!!! YOU DON”T WANT ROOT ACCESS WHEN YOU HAVE ROOT ACCESS11!)

In any case, if you want a 90s-era PHP library to chart some numbers, you can find it here. And the manual is here.

Stupid Microsoft Github Trick Of The Week

I’ve got er a few repositories on Microsoft Github. It’s mostly just teensy things that I’ve pushed out there because why not? But there’s a couple of things that are generally useful.

Anyway, I’m not really paying attention to issues being opened much. That is, I read them, and then my “notifications” tab look like this:

And so I forget about it all.

But yesterday I was extra super bored, so I wondered — didn’t I have some open issues on some of these repos?

So I clicked “issues”, and:

Nothing? Uhm. And none of those alternatives in the menu are applicable — there’s nothing to click to say “list all the open issues in all my repos”, apparently. Which seems like such an obvious thing to want to have listed.

Brilliant UX all around, Microsoft guys.

So I Googled, and other people have been asking the same, and you have to do a bit of typing:

state:open user:@me

Yes, user:@me is apparently the clue to get “issues from all my repositories”. 🤷‍♀️

So now you know. Here’s the handy link to bookmark.

What? You’re asking whether I did indeed have any open issues?

Not that many. And only going back to 2015! That’s nothing.

Sorry to the people waiting for a response for a decade. It’s all Microsoft’s fault!