I have been planning to read some Russian classics for some time and finally chose to read Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”. It’s a huge book and took me 2 and a half months to finish.

The most remarkable thing about this book is the writing style. I read a German translation. So I cannot say anything about the original Russian text. But even in the translation, the book has a flow that I haven’t seen in many books. Even in passages that were somewhat too detailed for my taste — describing ideas and situations I didn’t deem overly interesting — the story just flows nicely and I had to keep on reading.

I liked the people this book presents — each one with their own believable personality. Although Anna Karenina gives the book its name, she doesn’t really dominate the book. The other protagonists like Ljewin and Kitty seem to get an equal share of attention. Or maybe it’s because Anna gradually withers away, that I didn’t perceive her as a spotlight character.

Actually the description of how Anna sinks deeper and deeper into her depression and finally only finds a very fatal way out is one of the very strong story telling aspects of the book. It’s really breathtaking and sad. And then the perspective changes again and you see how other people have the best times of their lives.

Besides looking at the varied lives of all those people one also gets a feeling for how living was like in 19th century Russia. Especially the problems and restrictions women had to cope with then are unbelievable nowadays.

So I fully recommend “Anna Karenina” but with the warning that it’s a long book with a rather slow but nice pace. It takes time and patience but is totally worth the effort.

Neil Gaiman isn’t really a new name to me. I watched Caroline, a film based on one of his young adult books, and liked it. His Graveyard book is on my list of books to read someday. I also enjoyed his reading of Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carole” and will probably listen to it this year again. So I always somehow thought of him as an author of children and young adult books. “American Gods” has also been on my list for quite some time now, but I didn’t really remember what it was about. Browsing my list some day I noticed that I could get it for a pretty low price and because it had been made into a show by Amazon recently I decided to get it and started reading it.

And I realized pretty fast that it’s not a book for children. It starts off with explicit language and keeps on using it regularly throughout the whole book but in a manner that fits the the subject and not like it is used in some other books that try to hide the lack of an interesting story by the usage of boisterous language.

“American Gods” is both fun and interesting. It is built on the premise that every time people come to a new place they bring their gods and myths with them. The belief of the people incarnates their gods in the new place who then move around as humans.

Gaiman tells the stories of how several different groups of people reached America and which gods they brought with them. And some of those gods take part in the action of the book. One of the main protagonists is Odin but there are several others besides him. Some of them I even don’t know anything about, but I liked the appearance of Easter who’s enjoying a picknick in a park and eats eggs.

Those old American Gods now have a problem. They’ve got enemies. There are new gods. There are the gods of the internet and of the media and they want to take the place of the old gods and get rid of them.

Odin tries to unite the old gods and to lead them into a battle against the new gods. This book is somewhat like a road movie in the form of a book. It visits various places in the United States and at every stop some nice story unfolds.

The book won several prizes for best science fiction, best fantasy and best horror book. I would place it in the field of contemporary fantasy. But the exact categorization isn’t that important anyways. It’s just a fun book worth reading.

I also watched two episodes of the show based on that book, but wasn’t really captivated by it. But that’s really no wonder. In most cases I prefer the books over the movies and shows based on those books.

When I got my iPhone X late last year, I thought “Those apps not supporting this new kind of device are really looking old”. That was also the case for my weight tracking app that I still use daily. So I started working on an update and finally released it last week. It got a new name — WeightGlance — and some other aspects were also fixed and improved. You can read some more about it here.

While working on that update, I’ve also started thinking about the separate websites I have been setting up for my apps. They seemed to communicate “I’m big business” although I neither feel nor am big business. And each new website costs some more money and requires additional maintenance. I had website for things I’ve created and abandoned years ago. They really looked old.

So I came up with the idea of closing all those separate websites and creating smaller pages for those apps and other stuff that I’ve created on this website here. And I thought it might be fun and interesting to write some kind of postmortems for the stuff I no longer maintain describing how I came to create a specific something and what I learned from it.

That’s how this website gained a new section called Creations which contains pages about stuff as old as Squareness up to new and fresh stuff like WeightGlance.

I read “MetaGame” by Sam Landstrom the first time more than 5 years ago, but somehow didn’t get around to write about it. When I don’t write about a book within two weeks after finishing it, I usually don’t write about it at all, because by that time I’m already immersed in the next book.

After reading “Ready Player One” I remembered “MetaGame” again and that back then I thought it was the coolest gaming themed book I had ever read. So I read it again and it still is the coolest gaming themed book I’ve ever read.

Usually gamers in those game related books use some kind of more or less advanced virtual reality system. They either have some VR goggles or they get the VR environment somehow projected on their eyes. They then use some kind of special gloves or jumpsuit to enable them to move around in the virtual reality.

“MetaGame” is different. The whole world and the entire life is gamified. There are no jobs as we know them nowadays. It’s all games and you need to play games to earn points which you can use to buy stuff. The somewhat tedious games like law enforcement and programming are called grinder games. You play them because they provide more points. The games played for fun are spank games.

Through a kind of nanobots which attach themselves to every surface — living or dead — the whole world is mapped by the computers. Depending on the game a player currently plays, the surfaces look different to them.

There are no more separate nations on earth and bio engineering is quite advanced. Aging has been removed from the human genom and immortality is possible but not available to everyone. You need to play to gain the privilege to become immortal.

As bio engineering is quite advanced products which have a DNA that resembles the human DNA up to 96.3 % are created. They are always build for a specific job and with an ingrained desire to do that job as good as possible. So if you buy a product that is build to keep your house clean it will happily do just that.

As to be expected this produces some philosophical and ethical issues and the author plays them out quite well.

I liked “MetaGame” five years ago and now again for it’s grandiose ideas, good story and a somewhat critical contemplation on the issues such a world would bring.

There’s actually a story there in that book. I haven’t said anything about it here except that I liked it. It’s good. It encompasses all those elements I’ve talked about here and some more. It’s about a special kind of game a group of players play. You might have guessed it, it’s a meta game. You’ll have to find out more about it yourselves, though.

When “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline was published 6 years ago all around me people started reading it and were totally excited by it “There’s so much 80s trivia in it”, “It’s about gaming in the 80s”. I didn’t read it. I didn’t want to read some kind of documentary about video games in the 80s. Although one of the first computer games I remember ever playing — Digger — is from the 80s, I’ve got fonder memories of 90s games like Commander Keen and Duke Nukem. The 80s didn’t interest me that much.

Turns out the book isn’t really a documentary and it’s not about the 80s either. It’s actually a quite suspenseful and well written story about people living and playing games in a massive virtual reality universe called OASIS in the year 2044. The protagonists of the book take part in a contest to win much money and control over OASIS.

The creator of that virtual reality universe dies and initiates this contest as a means to find his heir. The contestants need to solve puzzles and play games and because the creator loved the movies, the music and the games of the 80s those are all about the 80s.

Although it’s advantageous to know those movies and games, that’s not a requirement to have fun reading the book. I either don’t know half of the mentioned games or only by name.

I’ve read some game relatated books in the past and most don’t really get it right. Some are Ok, some are just really boring and only a few have been good so far. “Ready Player One” is one of the good ones. It has the right mix of sci fi near future technology, nerdy 80s trivia and — well — gaming in it.

Over the years I used some web statistics tools to find out who visits my website and what they access most frequently. I’ve used Google Analytics and Mint among others but some years ago I stopped using such tools.

They always slowed down loading a bit as their respective javascript scripts needed to be loaded and executed which then again called back home to record that statistics data. I didn’t feel good about using a service like Google Analytics and share who visits my website with them. More recent laws in Germany would also require me to tell my visitors about the usage of it. That wasn’t that big of a problem with Mint as it was self hosted. But anyhow I came to the conclusion that it added too much bloat and wasn’t worth the hassle.

The Apache server my hoster uses logs every access into nice log files and that doesn’t need any added scripting on the delivered pages themselves. My hoster even provides some statistics based on that log files and uses Webalizer for this, but Webalizer looks really horrible. So I didn’t use that very often.

Some days ago I got the idea, that it should be possible to transform those log files into something better looking and more useful. I played around with the idea of developing something myself, but before investing time into a new project diligent research of already existing solutions is always useful. And in my research I found GoAccess which does exactly what I had in mind.

GoAccess can read all kinds of log file formats. Strangely none of the predefined formats matched the format my log files use, but that wasn’t really that big of an issue as the format is customizable and well documented

GoAccess can run in the terminal or among others generate a static html page. I use the latter. All nice and well. I now could look at the nicely formatted statistics data for my website, but one piece was still missing. The documentation stated that I could also get data about from where in the world my website was accessed. It took some time, but finally I realized that I didn’t use the correct options to install GoAccess via Homebrew. So I reinstalled it like that:

brew uninstall goaccess
brew install goaccess --with-libmaxminddb

Nice, now the section “GEO LOCATION” showed up in my GoAccess html page, but it was empty. Ah well. Turns out you still need to install a geolocation database. A free database is available at MaxMind. More accurate databases can be purchased from the same company, but for my purposes the free one is totally sufficient and I don’t know whether GoAccess would do more with a better database anyways.

Now there are different ways to use GoAccess. Mine is a very simple one, that is probably not really efficient, but it works for me. I have a directory on my MacBook into which I copied that geolocation database and into which I copy the log files from the web server.

In the same directory I also have a file named config that looks like this:

log-format %v %h %^[%d:%t %^] "%r" %s %b "%R" "%u"
date-format %d/%b/%Y
time-format %H:%M:%S
geoip-database GeoLite2-City.mmdb

And there is also the following script that generates the html report:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
gunzip *.gz
goaccess -f beeger.net-* -p config -o rep.html --real-os

Those log files are zipped when they come from the server and they start with the domain name of my website. So I unzip them before passing them to GoAccess. I use that --real-os flag to have real names of the operating systems used by the visitors of my website instead of some internal build names.

So if you don’t need the full features of an analytics solution like Google Analytics and don’t want to bloat your website with third party javascript code just to get some simple statistics about your website, I recommend taking a look at GoAccess, which is open source by the way.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is a trilogy by Madeleine L’Engle about the time traveling adventures of Meg Murry and her brother Charles Wallace. Those adventures have science fiction and fantasy elements and are classified as young adult literature.

The first book which gives the trilogy its name is “A Wrinkle in Time”. After reading the first pages I came to the conclusion that this is an insanely cool book and I didn’t change that opinion after finishing it. The author has some really strange ideas and a great talent to pour them into a book.

Meg — also called Megatron by her father — and her brother Charles Wallace, who has some unusual telepathic capabilities, are searching for their father, a physicist who didn’t return from a secret government mission. They are helped by three elderly women called Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which, who are not really what they seem to be at first. With the help of those three the children travel to other planets, times and even other dimensions. They also shortly visit a two dimensional world, but that visit is very painful for them as they are three dimensional creatures and cannot deal with the two dimensionality.

In this first book the children get to know the Echthroi who reappear in the other two books and are the enemies of all independently living creatures. Those enemies aren’t named in the first book, but in all three books it’s a fight against the ultimate evil that wants to unmake happiness and individuality.

This first book has some nice tidbits for people with interest in mathematics and science in general like discussions about dimensionalities, tesseracts and folding space and time.

The second book “A Wind in the Door” is interesting. It has the same great story telling you get to know in the first book, but it’s not as good as the first one. At some point some repetitive parts became somewhat tedious to me and I asked myself when the author would finish that. But there was still enough fun and interesting concepts in it to keep me reading it. Much of it happens at a microscopic level inside a cell of Charles Wallace’s body who suffers from an illness his mother, who is a biologist working in her home laboratory by the way, is trying to find out more about.

I liked the third book “Swiftly Tilting Planet” best. I also think this one is more for the adult than the young in “young adult”. It’s a huge story spanning centuries. Charles Wallace is the main protagonist here. He travels through time with a unicorn called Gaudior. It’s really easy for Gaudior to travel through time but really hard and even hazardous to travel through space. So whenever the two of them reach a new destination and Charles Wallace asks “Where are we?” he is reminded by Gaudior “It’s not where but when!”. So they mostly stay in one place and relive different parts of the American history in which Charles Wallace has to use his telepathic talents to merge his mind with the minds of specific people of the time they are currently visiting and to nudge those people to do the right thing to prevent the Echthroi from manipulating the events to a bad outcome for humankind.

I really liked those glimpses into history and all those events have some kind of effect on later generations. And there’s also a nice wrap up that changes the perspective on a person introduced at the beginning of the book.

So I really recommend this trilogy for its cool ideas and the great story telling talent of its author.

In the vast multitude of fiction books, some are specifically recognised as children’s books. I guess children’s books are recognised as such because they tend to be more predictable and structurally as well as thematically simpler than books for adults. Some people take great pride in not reading children’s books once they become adults. I’m not one of those and like to read well written children’s books from time to time.

“Tom’s Midnight Garden” by Philippa Pearce is one such book. Tom, the protagonist of this book, needs to spend some days with his aunt and uncle while his brother gets rid of the measles. His uncle and aunt are a childless couple who are happy to have a child at their place for some time, but who also don’t know a thing about children. So Tom gets bored and as he wanders around the house, in which his aunt and uncle occupy one apartment, he discovers a garden that seems to only exist during the night.

So now Tom visits the garden every night where he meets a girl named Hatty. They become friends and have some adventures while playing in the garden.

At first it seems that Tom visits are linear in time but then it’s suddenly winter in the garden while it was summer the night before. He also seems to jump forward and backward in time with his visits. And Tom also has some special capabilities while in the garden.

I wouldn’t call this a fantasy book. There are no knights or kings and wizards are also not to be found here. It’s a tale for children about friendship and loss in which the world has some fantastical properties that the rational mind dismisses as highly improbable.

But if you read it as a child and just take the world like it is described without questioning it, it is a wonderfully written story.

Only the end felt somewhat disappointing to me. It felt like a rather fast and abrupt wrap up after a nice tale. Somewhat like “Well, I told you the story. That’s it and here’s the explanation of the loose ends. Get lost.” But as an adult reader you will have an inkling of what’s going to happen some time before it ends and maybe it’s the disappointment to not have been proven wrong that gives the ending a bad taste.

But even with that little stain, I recommend this book to anyone who likes to become a child from time to time and read a really nice children’s book or to anyone who’s on the search for a book for their children.

I’m a fan of Peter F. Hamilton. I just like his kind of writing. Each author has his or her own style of writing that shows in every book even if the author succeeds not to write the same story over and over again. Hamilton’s book are really grand space operas with boastful protagonists almost always showing some kind of cheeky attitude to the world around them.

I really liked The Night’s Dawn. I mean, how can you not like this insane tale were the dead force their way back into the world of the living and one of them is Al Capone.

The “Commonwealth Saga” which was expanded in the Void Trilogy didn’t disappoint either although the Void Trilogy didn’t reach the scale of inventiveness seen in the Night’t Dawn or the first two books of the Commonwealth Saga.

Now Hamilton has expanded the Commonwealth Saga once more with the “Chronicle of the Fallers”. This is a story that runs parallel to the one told in the Void Trilogy and reuses some of the mechanics introduced there. Hamilton originally planned to make it a trilogy but it ended up being a duology consisting of the books “The Abyss Beyond Dreams” and “Night Without Stars”. To show my feelings about those two books, I could say that Hamilton ran out of ideas and that’s why it’s only a duology, but as any other Hamilton book those two books are so long other authors would have made a tetralogy out of them. So that’s not really a valid proposition.

After reading the first of the two books some two years ago, I decided to not read the follow ups, but when the second was released, I somehow couldn’t resist.

So I’m not really excited about the chronicles. They are far from the best there is to have from Hamilton. I don’t recommend them. If you are new to Hamilton, don’t start with those. Take any of the other books. But if you are a seasoned Hamilton fan having read all or most of his other books, you will probably want to read this sometime. It’s a solid story, nothing revolutionary and sometimes even boring, but in the end it’s OK and even fun when Commonwealth trademark characters like Paula Myo enter the scene.

When I finished reading “To Kill a Mockingbird”, a book by Harper Lee, Amazon proposed to me other books from the category “heartwarming stories”. At first I was a bit perplexed, because being a heartwarming story is not what gained it the Pulitzer price.

The story of the book evolves around the lives of two children growing up in a rural town in southern USA. This main story arc is very well a heart warming story. A different aspect makes it interesting, though.

The father of the children is a lawyer who was given the task of defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. This adds another dimension in which the author explores the relationship between white and black people in the southern US of the 1930ies.

Today, more than 70 years later, that relationship is still a difficult one. In Europe currently a similar situation is developing with the refugees. In both cases it’s distrust, suspicion and other negative feelings towards the “others”.

The book reminds us that in the end it’s always also a “we”. That both groups are made up of human beings having the same rights – even if the way of living and being of one group feels strange or unnatural to the other.

Besides having a deeper meaning, the book is very well written and provides an engaging story. So even just as a “heartwarming story” I recommend reading it.