Tommmy Krappweis ist nicht nur der Schöpfer von “Bernd, das Brot”, sondern auch ein Musiker, Stuntman, Filmemacher und Autor diverser Bücher. In der Trilogie um “Mara und der Feuerbringer” nimmt er uns mit in die Geschichten um die 14-jährige Münchnerin Mara Lorbeer in der Welt der nordischen Sagen. "Mara und der Feuerbringer , Band 1", Tommy Krappweis Mara Lorbeer ist 14, Scheidungskind und lebt bei ihrer esoterisch angehauchten Mutter in München.

Charles Stross “The Merchant Princes ” series of six books is another “Sliders ” type of story, with the usual Stross-like twist. The story follows Miriam Beckstein, a woman who thinks she is a tech journalist. Miriam falls off a chair while looking at a strange pattern, and finds herself in a medival parallel earth. "The Merchant Princes Omnibus ", Charles Stross In the course of the story, Miriam learns that she is actually from this parallel earth, and really is the Countess Helge Thorold-Hjorth in the kingdom of Gruinmarkt, which sits in the place of her world lines Boston.

“Outland ” is the first book by Dennis E. Taylor, preceding the Bobiverse and also “The Singularity Trap”. It is a “Sliders ” storyline, much like Pratchett’s and Baxter’s “Long Earth” , in which our heroes discover a parallel dimension with a seemingly uninhabited earth, and then need to colonize it. Outland , Dennis E. Taylor Dennis E. Taylor is a computer programmer writing Scifi, and had problems finding a publisher for his debut novel, “Outland”, in 2015, so he self-published.

Somebody needed a job queue in Python: Multiple writers insert into it in random order, and the jobs are written into the MySQL table jobs. From the jobs table, multiple consumers claim jobs in batches of n or smaller (n=100), and process them. After processing, the consumers delete the jobs. We need concurrent job generation and consumption, with proper and efficient locking. The full source for this example can be seen in mysql-dev-examples in mysql-claim-jobs.

Wir hatten hier in den Reviews schon eine ganze Menge Tom Hillenbrand: Drachenväter , Drohnenland , und Die Drohnen des Monsieur Leclerq . Das aktuelle Buch von Tom Hillenbrand ist Montecrypto , das sich mit dem Hype um Cryptocurrencies beschäftigt und eine Art “Der Graf von Monte Cristo”-Geschichte erzählt. Montecrypto , von Tom Hillenbrand Gregory Hollister, ein reicher Investor, ist verstorben. Angeblich hat er noch eine große Menge Geld, und dieses ist in Bitcoin angelegt und irgendwo versteckt.

Another Monte-Cristo-themed book, Tom Reiss’ The Black Count nicely complements the german sci-fi novel Montecrypto by Tom Hillenbrand. It is a biography of the father of the French write Alexandere Dumas, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie. "The Black Count ", by Tom Reiss. Alexandre Dumas, the author of “The Three Musketeers”, “The Count of Monte Cristo” and many other books, is one of the most read French authors. He had it easy coming up with stories, because his father had one of the most unusual and wildest lives imaginable.

So somebody tweeted about the Seagate Mach.2 , a harddisk with two independent heads “combs”, and I commented in german : “It’s two drives in one chassis, even shown as two drives. And it still is rotating rust, so slow with seeks. Linear IO will be fine.” That quickly devolved in a discussion of RAID-0 on a single disk drive : “RAID-0 on a single physical drive. Yeah, you can do that if you do not need your data.

I never wrote this up, and the information online is all referring to older versions of Windows, so let’s fix this. The MS-DOS version of getting Umlauts on a US keyboard is to type the ASCII codes. As I can’t and won’t remember these codes, this won’t work for me. There is a deadkey way to get a “US (International Keyboard)”. On these, you type Double Quotes ", and then the letter that should form the Umlaut, for example o, for an ö.

Ian Lance Taylor is the author of a UUCP program that I have been using for a long time to connect to other USENET systems, long before I had access to the actual Internet. UUCP queues up jobs for remote execution, dials other computers with a moden, exchanges the contents of the queued up work, and after disconnect executes the jobs. The jobs are mostly invocation of “rmail” and “rnews” programs for the exchange of mail and USENET news.

Needle and Through the Eye of a Needle are books by Hal Clement. Hal Clement was a Hard Sci-Fi author born in 1922, and “Needle” was written in 1950 as his first book, for Campbell, no less, and sold to Doubleday. The followup was produced almost 30 years later, in 1978. Needle The story begins with two spaceships crashing into planet earth, some time in the 1950’s idea of a future, close to an island in the Pacific ocean.

The Antivirus Hackers Handbook by Jaxeon Koret and Elias Bachaalany is part book, part a research report, detailing the findings of Jaxeon Koret and Elias Bachaalany in how Antivirus programs work, try to protect themselves and can be attacked and exploited. The Antivirus Hackers Handbook The book assumes that you have some basic knowledge how compilers produce programs, what assembler looks like and how to map that on program statements in the code you write, and have access to IDA Pro free edition, Ghidra, Hopper or some other reverse engineering and analysis tool.

So, Netflix’ “The Witcher ” was weird, and could not decide what it wanted to be: A “Hercules Legenday Journey’s”-like half-comedy, half-camp series, or something else, darker and denser, with more story and background. It hinted at a better story, better told, that did not make it into the final product, and died somewhere between the scriptwriting and the cutting table. Investigating, I got myself the equivalent of the Witcher Boxed Set on the Kindle and started reading.

The story of Heaven’s River , stranding in and then exploring an alien megastructure, is one that has been written before: In Niven’s Ringworld , Clarke’s Rama , and Farmer’s Riverworld . John Varley’s take on this, very seventies, is Titan , Wizard , and Demon , the Gaia Trilogy. Titan , Wizard and Daemon Cirocco Jones is the Commander of the Earth science ship Ringmaster, and is right now approaching the orbit of Saturn, where she and her crew discover a new moon.

Sometimes things go wrong, and it surely would be nice if you at least knew afterwards what happened. Where I work, we are running a shell script older than time itself, once a minute. The script writes files to /var/log/mysql_pl, into a directory named after the current weekday and named after the current hour and minute. So when a box crashes on Thursday at 22:09, as long as I can login to it, I still can try to look at /var/log/mysql_pl/Thu/22_0?

Children of Ruin is the second part of Children of Time by english Sci-Fi author Adrian Tchaikovsky. In “Children of Time”, mankind reached for the stars, almost succeeded and also almost died out. They did manage to create a digital lifeform, though, and also to seed and uplift life from earth on another world - just not the intended one. And so we ended up with a race of intelligent giant jumping spiders that manage to befriend the broken artificial intelligence orbiting their world and to rescue the remnants of humankind from themselves.

Conan, The Barbarian by Robert E. Howard is a collection of all Conan stories. Imaginary Worlds Ep 114: The Man Behind the Sword (Episode Transcript PDF ) discussed Robert E. Howard, his 1930’s character Conan, The Barbarian and how Howard’s Conan is different from the Schwarzenegger character, and a much deeper and more complicated story. Go, and listen to the episode, it is well worth the time. Having seen the Schwarzenegger film, but never actually having read the book I went out and got this complete collection.

Heaven’s River is the fourth part of the Bobiverse Trilogy, in which the original Bob finds a decaying alien megastructure, and investigates. Previously in the Bobiverse: We are Legion (We are Bob) For We Are Many All These Worlds Bob Johannson is a successful software developer, and cashes out. Then he dies, becomes a sentient spaceship and von Neumann probe, and then earth is almost destroyed in a war. Bob moves on, doing the von Neumann thing, and plundering the resources of foreign star systems makes more Bobs.

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner is the story of the two Johns: Carmack and Romero, and the early video game culture and the genre of the 3D first person shooter. A lot of todays “hard core” and somewhat toxic video game culture was defined by the two Johns and the company they built, as well as the culture that followed.

Peter Godfrey-Smith writes Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life , a book about the body, the mind and the life of Octopi. Octopi are creatures that are across the tree of life about as different as can be from humans. How different are they? Their blood is not based on iron, as ours, but uses copper to transport Oxygen, and consequently is not red from hemoglobin, but blueish from hemocyanin.

Terry Jones’ Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History by Alan Ereira is the writeup to the BBC series “Terry Jones’ Barbarians ”. Terry Jones, who sadly died in early 2020, was not only a member of Monty Pythons Flying Circus, but among many other things a TV author and presenter for a number of BBC series on medieval and ancient history. In many cases, he takes the controversial position and presents a view of history that challenges the popular view.