I had reason to look into the UNIX Eschaton, the time when the signed 32 bit counter of seconds since Midnight, 1970-01-01 UTC overflows. Going to Wikipedia, I learned we will die two years earlier, because in 2036-02-07, 06:28:16 UTC NTP will kill us all:
Paul Fischer writes “A Kim Jong-Il Production”, a documentary the 1978 abduction of the famous South Korean actress Madam Choi, and her ex-husband, the filmmaker Shin Sang-Ok.
It began with a tweet by Sebastian Bergmann, which made me buy “88 names” by Matt Ruff.
The book is a tour of massive multiplayer online role playing games for people who do not play, and also a discussion of identity on the Internet.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
