Touch The Devil by Jack Higgins

Posted on November 2, 2014 by Ajitabh

Touch The Devil Book CoverThis is the second book in the Liam Devlin series and the story timeline is the cold war period. The British secret service needed the services of Liam Devlin and one of the other X-IRA operative Martin Brosnan to assassinate another X-IRA operative turned terrorist. Martin Brosnan was jailed in a french prison so the first task was to get him freed from there. This part itself turned out to be a thrilling and gripping part. After Martin was freed up before he and Devlin could proceed further towards their intended target, the target found them and injured both of them before kidnapping Martin’s girlfriend, who was also a well known photographer. Then the chase followed and the target was eliminated, but by this time there was still about 10% of the book left, so I was wondering what next and was really pleased to see what comes up next (which I am not going to tell as I do not want to reveal the climax).

A very simple story line – a typical in the spy-thriller types genre, yet very effectively written. The book keeps you griped through out. 3 out of 5 is my rating for this book.

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City of Bones by by Michael Connelly

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Ajitabh

Book cover of city of bonesThis is my second book featuring detective Harry Bosch. This book is about investigation of a murder which took place close to two decades back. Harry Bosch was called to a crime scene when the bones of a child were accidentally discovered by a dog. Bosch did his due diligence and various suspects were investigated including a Hollywood set decorator, the father, sister and a childhood friend of the victim. During the course of the investigation, he had a short  affair with one of the fellow uniformed officers and tussle with his deputy chief.

The climax reveals the reason of the murder as mere greed (won’t reveal what, else the plot will be out) and the story ends with Bosch turning in his badge and walking away from his office.

This book is one of the faster book in the slow investigative books and keeps the reader interested through out the story. There are no unnecessary descriptions in the book. Overall a simple storyline and nice read.

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A Darkness More Than Night by Michael Connelly

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Ajitabh

Book Cover of A Darkness More Than NIghtThe book started with LAPD detective Jaye Winston visiting a retired FBI profiler, Terry McCaleb for his help in profiling the murderer. Initially reluctant McCaleb agreed to help and then he got involved too deep in the investigation, almost loosing his life at one point. The investigation almost threatened his peaceful personal life.

Another parallel story which was running in this book was a murder trial of a film director Storey who was accused of killing an actress and making the whole thing look like a suicide. Detective Harry Bosch to whom Storey boosted of the murder was the main witness in the trial.

Finally as predicted (by me) both the stories converge and the guilty were found and arrested.

This is the first book by Michael Connelly which I have read. As usual with most of the detective style books, there are many descriptions and its not a very fast paced book and hence need a lot of patience. I would give 3 stars (out of 5) to  this book. I am definitely going to read other books by this author.

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Raspberry Pi Wireless Device Power Off

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Ajitabh

I use my device as headless as a home server and as a jump box. From past quite some time I was noticing that my Raspberry Pi was not accessible over the network after some period of in-activity. And since it is headless, the only way to get the network back was either take out the USB Wireless adapter or Reboot the Pi (through the power switch). I chose to take out the adapter and reseat it. However, this was causing my RPi to reboot also, may be because in the process the power connector was getting disturbed. I will revisit this point later.

In order to switch off the power saving for my wireless device I tried

$ sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off
Error for wireless request "Set Power Management" (8B2C) :
    SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not permitted.

I am using NetGear USB wireless adapter and it load the kernel module 8192cu. Checking

$ cat /sys/module/8192cu/parameters/rtw_power_mgnt 
1

I realized that the power saving is still on (1 indicates minimum power saving). So I created a module config file as below to permanently set the power saving to 0 and rebooted the RPi.

$ sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/8192cu.conf 
# Disable the power management during boot - Ajitabh
options 8192cu rtw_power_mgnt=0
$ sudo reboot

Checking again confirmed that the power management has been disabled.

$ cat /sys/module/8192cu/parameters/rtw_power_mgnt 
0
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The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Ajitabh

The Eagle Has Landed Book CoverThe Eagle Has Landed is a second world war fiction written by Jack Higgins. The author has done some historical research and tried to present the story as if it has already happened. The plot is towards the end of second world war when Hitler was desperate for a victory and big blow to the allies. He wanted abduction or assassination of Winston Churchill.  The action was planned by Himmler and executed by the paratroopers of Germany. However, things started to go wrong and Churchill was saved.

I have read second world war fiction after a long long time and really liked it. The language and writing style are simple and there is no unnecessary descriptions anywhere. The story moves very fast and is able to continuously build the interest of the readers.

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