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.
Wir hatten hier in den Reviews schon eine ganze Menge Tom Hillenbrand: Drachenväter, Drohnenland, und Die Drohnen des Monsieur Leclerq.
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.”
I never wrote this up, and the information online is all referring to older versions of Windows, so let’s fix this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Terry Jones’ Barbarians: An Alternative Roman History by Alan Ereira is the writeup to the BBC series “Terry Jones’ Barbarians”.
Conan, The Barbarian by Robert E. Howard is a collection of all Conan stories.
Heaven’s River is the fourth part of the Bobiverse Trilogy, in which the original Bob finds a decaying alien megastructure, and investigates.
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.
Children of Ruin is the second part of Children of Time by english Sci-Fi author Adrian Tchaikovsky.
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.
The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin analyzes the economical and political structure of the USA. Temin does this through the lens of the “Dual Economy” Model.
In ALTER TABLE for UUID we discuss currently proper way to store and handle UUID in MySQL. Currently it works, even in a performant way, but it still hurts. It should not.
(based on a find by Ruud van Tol, and several Twitter contributions)
(based on a conversation with a colleague, and a bit of Twitter)
