The 127th Book

DRAGONSKULL: SHIELD OF THE KNIGHT Is my 127th self-published novel.

I have to admit this number is amusing to me for a very esoteric reason.

See, in TCP/IP (which is the underlying communication protocol of the Internet), specifically IP version 4, every computer is supposed to have a unique IP address. (This is simplifying it down quite a bit, but we’ll go ahead.) You’ve probably seen these a bunch of times – 192.168.1.1, 10.10.0.15, and so forth. Every time you’ve tried to get your iPad, laptop, or Xbox to connect to the wireless and you run into troubles, you’ve probably had to look up an IP address.

However, every computer also gives itself a local address, and the local address for the computer is always 127.0.0.1. In TCP/IP, 127.0.0.1 always means “localhost”, which refers to the local computer you are currently using. When diagnosing networking problems on a computer or a server, one of the first things to do is to make sure that the TCP/IP components are actually working, since some viruses tend to wreck the TCP/IP stack. A quick and easy way to do this is have the computer send traffic to itself at 127.0.0.1

So in the 2000s and the 2010s, I spent a LOT of time typing “ping 127.0.0.1” into computer terminals.

Which means I find it personally amusing to have finally reached book 127, but this is such an obscure joke that whenever I try to explain it to someone they tune out halfway through. 🙂

-JM