Robert Nystrom is a language developer who works at Google on the Dart programming language. In his book Crafting Interpreters he explains lexing, parsing and executing a programming language in an accessible way.

"Crafting Interpreters ", Robert Nystrom

Nystrom sets out with the (correct) observation that the matter of handling and executing code is a complex topic that is not made easier with all the theory that surrounds it. In his book, he takes the reader on a journey to implement a toy language, Lox, two times. First with a tree walker execution algorithm, not unlike PHP 3 or early Ruby. Then, again, with a bytecode executor written in C.

The Netherlands realized around 2000 that they have a problem with bike parking around train stations, and with parking around stations in general. A program was set up to fix that, assuming things would be done with in ten years. The program was a great success, and people taking the bike to use the train, and to use a bike after they arrived at their destination by train increased greatly. This created more needs, and so the program is, changed, still active today.

A book from 2017, about the Spanish Flu, which in the wake of the first world war turned into a global pandemic, killing between 50 and 100 million people on all continents.

Pale Rider , Laura Spinney

Spinney describes the situation in the world in 1918, and how the Spanish Flu came into the world, and was experienced by people in various parts of the world. The flu returned in several waves, some of which behaved unlike normal flu seasons and also had weirdly shaped killing patterns in the population.

On an alternate earth alternate biology produces beings that can grow up to 150 meters tall and that are powered by natural biological nuclear reactor: The Kaiju. Whenever anything, humans or Kaiju, uses nuclear energy, the boundary between the alternate realities is weakened and things can cross over. That happened the first time late in the second world war, and that is how the legend of Godzilla came into the world.

The subtitle of “Sid Meier’s Memoir!” is “A Life in Computer Games”. And that is exactly what we get: Sid Meier lists, chronologically and very systematically, all the games he has been working on during his lifetime. And tells us what happened to him, the game and the game development process while he worked on it. Somehow that becomes a Memoir, even if some things are only implied or appear out of order.

This is an old book, from 1998, and much of the technology referred to directly has evolved since then. But, as this a book that deals with basics, in terms of metaphor and analogy, it is still valuable. It explains how computers work, and how we make the tech that powers them.

The Pattern on the Stone , W. Daniel Hillis

Computers are really easy. There is just Zero and One, and it does not get any more complicated than that. The complexity in Computers and how they work comes instead from using simple rules, making them combinable, and then arranging them into more complicated structures by reusing previous building block.

I live in a house in a rural village somewhere in Randstad . We are paying around 70 Euro per month in electricity, and up to 380 Euro per month in gas. We are using the latter for heating and warm water, but we are already cooking with electricity.

The house has a decent energy rating and a heat exchanger in the forced ventilation system. That is to keep the warmth in when getting fresh air in.

Zum vorhergehenden Artikel bekam ich einen Leserbrief als Github Issue, das ist hier inhaltlich unverändert veröffentliche, weil ich glaube, daß es wichtige Informationen und Überlegungen enthält.

Von @typxxi :

Ich schreibe einmal auf Deutsch.

Akku Lebensdauer

Großer Speicher heißt nicht immer gut, weil der LFP Akku dann eher über kalendarische Alterung stirbt, und nicht in Folge der Zyklen. Ein LFP-Akku schafft um die 3500 bis 6000 Zyklen. Das hiesse bei Dir im Idealfall, Du schaffst so 200 Zyklen pro Jahr und damit 17 bis 30 Jahre.

Where is the Internet coming from and how and when was it built? It’s a network of tubes, or rather cables, and these days they are mostly fiber. Much of it was built during the dotcom boom, but little has been written.

The Undersea Network , Nicole Starosielski

Nicole Starosielski is a professor at New York University Steinhardt, and specializes in Internet Infrastructure, specifically underwater sea cables. In her book, she documents the history and development of the infrastructure that carries more than 99% of todays Internet data, the backbone that defines the global transport capacity of the Internet.

Where I work, the native database is MySQL. This is what the database team fully supports.

Other databases, notably Postgres, are in use mostly because external products we run require them. Internal projects should use MySQL. An external company provides limited support for running Postgres.

The recommended version of MySQL to be used is currently the latest 8.0. It has a large number of improvements over the previous version 5.7 in terms of the SQL subset supported, handling of sorts, critical character set support and join strategies. Versions of MySQL older than 5.7 are completely unsupported and contain unfixed critical CVEs. They must never be used.