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. Während der Rückreise von einem Baum-Umwarmungs-Seminar, auf das sie ihre Mutter mitgeschleppt hat, wird sie von einem sprechenden Zweig angesprochen, der ihr mitteilt, daß sie eine germanische Seherin ist, die den Weltuntergang, Ragnarök, verhindern muß. Im Fortgang der Geschichte freundet sich Mara mit verschiedenen Personen an: dem Professor für germanische Mythologie Reinhold Weissinger, seiner Ex-Frau Stefanie Warnatzsch-Abra, SIegfried dem Drachentöter, dem nordischen Gott. Zusammen treten sie gegen Loge, den Feuerbringer, den mysteriösen Dr. Thurisaz, und den Drachen Nidhöggr. Über drei Bände entfaltet sich um Mara der Kampf der Guten gegen die Bösen im Reich der nordischen Mythologie, während sich im Weltlichen die Beziehung von Mara zu ihrer Mutter klärt und Mara zugleich lernt, sich selbst besser zu definieren.

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. Her relatives and the other members of the six clans have the unique ability of walking between worlds, which they apparently abuse to work as uncatchable drug and money couriers in our world. World walking involves looking at a specific pattern, which seems to activate a heritable genetic trait in their brains that make them shift.

“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. The story was intended as the introduction to a series of books, “World Lines”. The original novel was withdrawn in 2018, extensively reworked, and re-publshed in 2019 as a standalone book, which is the version linked in this article.

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.py .

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. Wo genau, ist unklar, und so bekommt der Finanzdetektiv Ed Dante von Hollisters Schwester den Auftrag, den verschwundenen Schatz zu identifizieren und aufzuspüren. Dante setzt dabei aus Versehen ein auf dem Computer von Hollister installiertes Script in Gang, das eine weltweite Schatzsuche inszeniert.

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. Dumas was, in a way, telling episodes from his fathers adventures, toned down to become more believable, in some of his stories.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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. This works well for me.

On older versions of Windows, you would start the old control panel and then go to “Clock, Language and Region”, and then set up things from there:

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. Both ships are mostly destroyed in the crash, but the inhabitants survive: A criminal, and a kind of headhunter/policeman. They are part of formless species that has much smaller cells than humans and that need a host from normal sized cells with which they live in symbiosis - at least those of the species that are not criminals.