Am Alex

Na, das geht ja noch:

53%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

Mein erster Mac war übrigens ein Powerbook 100, mein neuester der grosse iMac.

Charles Stross: Halting State

First and foremost, the newest Stross novel, Halting State, is fun. Maybe not as much fun as the "Laundry" series, but still. Set into the very near future, and mixing the realms of finance and gaming (with some espionage thrown in), it proved to be quite un-put-downable. The end comes somewhat abruptly, but that's to be expected: reading the book feels like sitting in a car accelerating towards a brick wall; there's not a lot happing after the moment of the crash.

The scenario is believable; the book is set only 10 years in the future, so any futuristic bits are mostly linear extrapolations of current trends. The security problems described are just too realistic - after reading the book, you might think twice before switching to an IP telephony system.

Latest Coupland Books

Just read the latest Coupland Novel, The Gum Thief. Maybe I didn't get the humour, but to me it was a very boring and depressing reading experience; it took me forever to finish the (small) book. Especially the "Steve and Gloria" episodes were utterly horrid.

Maybe I had expected something comparable to his JPod, which i had finished a few weeks earlier, and which was quite good: funny, fast-paced, with interesting characters and unexpected plot, and some typographic gimmicks (to increase the page count, methinks).

Why "Fork Queue"?

It's a reference to an old story about Dave Cutler, the lead architect of VMS and (later) Windows NT. He insisted upon referring to an internal VMS data structure by the (technically correct) term "fork queue" and refused to use the "offical" terminology "fork list". I am not a native english speaker; when I first read the story, it took me quite a while to understand what could possibly be offensive about the term "fork queue" ;-)