Can you do Rocket Science?

I'm cross-posting this to my 'technical' blog, because I think that it might attract a few people who write non-fiction, and that while most of those will be a 'computery' people, a few might be rocket scientists.

Can you write non-fiction on technical space-related matters, or on aspects of 'Hard SF'? Would you like to be published in an upcoming anthology?

Ian Sales' Rocket Science anthology coming out from Mutation Press (that's the award-winning Mutation Press) hasn't had enough non-fiction submissions, he says he's "Desperate" for them.

He's also had nothing like as many submissions from women as he'd like, either of fiction or non-fiction.

'Call for Submissions' is here

Know something about rockets/space/hard sf? Want to tell the world about it? This is your chance.

New release of my 'getlock' program

A new version of my 'getlock' locking program is out. I use this to ensure that scripts and programs running out of 'cron' don't start running multiple copies that 'fight' each other. getlock creates a lock file and locks it with fcntrl locking, and then runs the program or script, keeping the file locked for the whole time that program runs. The advantage of this scheme over other locking programs is that if the 'getlock' process is killed or otherwise stops the lock is released automatically.

'getlock' has all sorts of 'timeout' features regarding how long it waits for a lock, and whether it 'steals' a lock from a program that's currently holding it, etc, etc.

The new version has the added feature of an 'abandon timeout', this is a timeout that applies to the running program. If the program has 'frozen' for some reason, then the 'abandon timeout' can be used so that getlock can detect the program is taking too long, and kill it off and exit. I use this, for instance, in situations where a script or program connects to hosts or websites that might become unresponsive, leaving the program waiting for network data that will never come. This can result in a 'hung' program that's holding the lock file and preventing another instance of the process (which will reconnect and start from scratch, and may thus succeed) from starting up.

Get it here:

http://sites.google.com/site/columscode/files/getlock-0.2.tar.gz?attredirects=0