"Under-appreciated" is a hard word. Most of what I've seen posted above are authors who were pretty well appreciated.

I think Walter Jon Williams' book "Aristoi" counts as under-appreciated because it was in the running for a Hugo award- but wasn't selected. The ideas and concepts put forth in that novel, and the clarity and believability of the universe/society that he created made it one of the best sci-fi books I have ever read. I understand that that year had a lot of other good candidates for the award, but I've always felt his was still head and shoulders above the rest of the field. He really should have won.

I can't promote him as an under-appreciated author, though. His other books, while mildly entertaining, simply did not reach the level that Aristoi did. If that had been his only novel, he'd have been on my list of "shoulda-beens." As it stands, he's a one-hit wonder. But WHAT a wonder. Man, if his other stuff had been even half as good as Aristoi, I'd have cleared him a whole shelf in my library. Good author. Great book.

(I've often wondered if he feels the same way about the comparative merit of his other works)

///sorry - that's "Create New Theme Color..."

The new slogan: "Microsoft- You'll Get Used to It!"

/still not used to ribbon interface
//seriously?  I have to click "new color" on the "design" tab/ribbon/whatever to change the hyperlink underline color in PowerPoint?

Apple's formula for success under iOS:
1. Control the hardware
2. Control the software
3. Make others do the work and because (1) and (2), you get to take a BIG cut of their business. No, not BIG... HUGE.

Part of (2) is to not allow any development that might result in GOOD write-once/run-anywhere software. Backing HTML5 is a perfect example. The amount of effort required to produce a decent product is just plain insane. Even big companies like Facebook can't do it. Little companies don't even try. In the end, damn near everybody who tries to deploy an application that runs on an iOS device comes to the same sad realization: cough up the dough or go home.

Products that actually worked, and worked well (e.g. Flash, Silverlight, etc.) were killed with feeble excuses like battery consumption and quality control. How the DoJ didn't launch an investigation into anti-competitive practices is a mystery to me. The "browser included in OS" investigation of Microsoft seems a pale shadow of the "you don't run software on iOS devices- despite the fact that their OWNERS want you to- unless you pay us a shiatload of money." /Bitter? You betcha.

The Phoenix Guard, 500 Years After, and The Viscount of Adrilankha (series) are a homage to Alexandre Dumas' d'Artangan romances: (Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After. Viscount of Bragelonne) but set in the Dragaera "universe." They also set the stage and provide a rich backstory for the Jhereg novels.

I love that the Phoenix Guard/Adrilankha books are completely separate in tone and style from the Jhereg novels. The former is very much in Dumas' style. When I first started reading it, I got a few pages in and started laughing as I realized that Brust had "rebooted" The Three Musketeers- but in pre-interregnum Dragaera.

Caveat on the Pern books: be careful when selecting them. You are right to recommend the earlier ones. Some of the later ones are NOT written by Ms. MacCaffery and/or are products of one-sided collaborations (i.e. prop gramma up in her hospice bed and if she complains about the jello try to turn it into a Pern novel). Her grandson Todd went on to butcher the series with authorization from the estate and (sadly) her permission.

Mervyn Peake - Gormenghast (and sequels). HARD to get into, but rewarding if you understand that they are very experimental.

F.M.Busby - The Demu Trilogy. Nothing ground-breaking, but it is well written escapist fiction.

James Blish - Cities in Flight. Ditto the previous.

John Crowley - Little, Big. Please please please DO read this. It is the single best book in the English language. Each chapter is like a gem. Another of his books "Engine Summer" is also jaw-droppingly lovely and has a "reveal" at the end that makes M.Night Shamylam seem like a moron. You WILL weep unashamedly. His later stuff is hard to digest, but worth the read if you stick with it.

Lin Carter - The Martian books (The Valley Where Time Stood Still, The City Outside the World, Down to a Sunless Sea, and The Man Who Loved Mars). Thinking man's pulp fiction.

James H. Schmitz - The Witches of Karres. So fun to read. It's a novelization of a series of short stories (or it reads that way, anyway) concerning a trio of underage witches and the space captain they "adopt" and whose life they make miserable but in a good way.

Apologies for spelling/grammar/mispronunciation/

Some of the common leap year bugs that I've seen over the years:

1. A matrix with the number of days per month:
e.g. smallint dayspermonth[12]={31,28,31,30,31,30,31,31,30,31,30,31};
Indexing into the matrix for February (index 1) ignores leap years.

1. A matrix with 365 elements to represent a year's worth of something:
e.g. smallint hightemps[365];
This usually doesn't fail until Dec 31, when hightemp[mydate.dayofyear()-1] points to a non-existent element.
Of course, if dayofyear is calculated using the matrix in the prior bug, it will fail invisibly since that will be incorrect
as well.

2. Quck-n-dirty subtract one year math:
e.g. Convert date to char in YYYYDDMM format, convert char to int, subtract 10000, convert back to a char and then date.
Why people do this when you can dateadd(year,mydate,-1) is that easy, I have no clue. But it breaks horridly when
you use it to determine "one year ago today" from Feb 29.

Second (or apparently third) that opinion. Here is a tip to make queries based on distance MUCH faster:

First, divide your territory into equally-sized "squares" based on the maximum "within N miles of" distance or some other convenient size. Give each an X and Y coordinate starting at 0,0=westernmost,northernmost and continuing Eastward,and Southward with incrementally larger values of X and Y. Store them as individual columns with a bitmap index.

When joining the table to find records within N miles of a set of given lat/long coordinates, you only have to determine which X,Y square the lat/long coordinates fall into and query just those records that are within X+/-2 and Y+/-2. This will make use of the indexes on X and Y and greatly reduce the number of records that you need to perform the (CPU costly) distance calculation upon.

This method increases the efficiency of questions that require a join (e.g. "records within N miles of each other") because the X and Y coordinate join, although not an equi-join, can still use the indexes.

It also helps with figure-based queries (e.g. "records inside a circle of radius R miles" and "records inside complex polygon with vertices P1,P2,P3...") because the squares that the figure fully or partially encompasses can be pre-calculated and used in the WHERE clause of the query.

Libraries could just take the easy way out and not purchase ANY books (real OR imaginary) from publishers whose eBook library licensing terms they consider to be unreasonable. When people stop seeing real the publishers' real books at the library, the loss of free advertising will hurt more than the loss of revenue from sales of imaginary books. Libraries need to wise up and realize that they are the ONLY showrooms for publishers now that real book stores are going out of business left and right. In a couple of years, they will have the power to put individual publishers out of business.

And to everybody who said "eBooks won't fuck up the whole world of reading," a big hearty "I told you so."

MESSENGER revealed an unexpected class of landform on Mercury and suggest that a previously unrecognized geological process is responsible for its formation. I'm not an astrophysicist. Doesn't "Geological" refer specifically to Earth? The "Geo" comes from "Gaea," the Greek personification of Earth. Mercury would be something like "Hermeticological" I would think. I got this from a sci-fi book (one of Heinlien's, if I recall correctly), so don't jump on me if it's incorrect.

In other news, software giant Bethesda Softworks LLC has go ahead with its pending lawsuit against Bethesda Elder Care in Bethesda, MD. The software corporation claims that the patients of the assisted care facility are at risk of confusing their residence for an open-ended role playing environment, citing such similarities as both having features in common like "air" and "ground."

Bethesda Softworks, LLC President and CEO Vlatko Andonov said the following in a press release last Thursday:

Andonov went on to explain that his corporation is the clear and undisputed trademark holder for the term "elder" and warns that other infringing parties such as the Box Elder School District in Utah will be facing similar litigation in the near future.

This is no different from iOS devices not supporting Flash, or allowing any app that does support Flash or other embedded programming environment.

Microsoft has already said they will not allow non-validated Metro applications and won't allow distribution via any method other than their app store.

Sound familiar? By not supporting Flash (or other plug-ins), they make sure nobody can develop for their platform without them getting a cut. It's weird how Microsoft jumped on that bandwagon, especially after all the digs at Apple for doing exactly the same thing.

Comment of the day! You, Sir, have teh funnay.

This is a stupid idea. It was a stupid idea on the i-whatever devices that Apple sells, and it will be a stupid idea on Windows. Say I want to develop and use an application that I write myself. For myself. On my computer and nobody else's. Now I have to get Windows' approval to "sell" it to myself? I'm heading out to buy a couple of copies of Windows 7 (which I actually kinda like) in case I get a new PC sometime in the future and it comes with Windows 8. That way, I can wipe the disks clean and do a fresh install of a slightly less crippled OS.