Monday, May 16, 2005

Bill Joy

Most of my close friends know that I am a HUGE fan of Bill Joy : what he has accomplished , and more so created an environment to be accomplished in breathtaking ("Innovation happens elsewhere").
Came across a nice set of pages while going clicketty click this weekend .... brought joy to my life :)
Ok , puns apart : really nice read !

http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/index.html Interesting article - part of a book : should get it someday... I have read Rebel Code in the past and was very disappointed with the book - hope this is different.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/billjoy.html cool ! (read the part about Linux ;-) )

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html Whoa ! The "controversial" article.

I keep hearing a lot about JINI from BillJoy , James Gosling , et al ... should try to understand more about it - I just have a vague idea that it is an ultracool network based code and services.

Came across this book - "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System by Marshall Kirk McKusick, George V. Neville-Neil" , need to buy and read it too ...
When in 2nd year in college , I remember reading a book by Tanenbaum about the Minix operating system - what I enjoyed about the book were the code walkthroughs - made it look so easy to author an operating system ! ( Give the Minix book a whirl if you are not yet initiated into this world : a really nice read - one of the design goals of minix is precisely that : make it easy to teach OS).

Ok , other news/rants :

* AJ is doing great in his college. Results are out and as usual he is "top" :) Congrats buddy , you rock !

* Aparup is back in Bangalore - and getting married in July end ... Shireen has already agreed to let me "test" her cooking during the weekends :-D (or has she ?! ;-) ). Aparup vouches for her cooking and says it is excellent though she denies that - atleast it will be 1000x better than what I can dish out :-P.
So /me gonna be one happy guy when I get back to Bangalore - now only to get a house close to his and I can have late night card games , some heated tech discussions , food and all round great time :-)
And before I forget to mention it publically - "Congratulations Shireen and Aparup" ! (note : higher priority to Shireen ;-) ).
July end ... around the same time I came there 4 years back - I feel soooo old :-(

* Wont be making it to Bangalore this month ... manager might turn up there mid next month , so will reschedule trip for then.

* I think I have Alok's Emperor's New mind with me ! (Just found it while searching for "An Eternal Golden Braid" - a book I bought and never read ...). Should return when I get there ... how did I miss this one while moving ? More importantly , how did he miss it ?! :)

* The fire is back - getting highly irritable nowadays : should immerse myself into something in my freetime else will go nuts !
Rajesh is after me for documentation (which I am keeping on forgetting : note to self - complete them !) and most probably will shoot down any project idea before I deliver those. So should try my hand at some other task. Now where was the opengl book I was reading ? .... GURU need help with ideas here !

* I am getting irritated with people who go ga-ga over any and every open source software just 'cos it is open source.
If two competing products with functionally similar feature sets were presented to me , I might prefer the opensource version - but the operative word is functionally similar : UI is a part of the app and a functional requirement (if it is not , re-prioritize) .
Being all religious about opensource just 'cos it is opensource (btw, open source does not mean "free" : read fine print in license) is plain stupid - use what is best , and if you have choice among the best - choose wisely.
There is absolutely no point in reinventing the wheel (unless abnormal circumstances exist) - that being said : I do it all the time - but for fun , not to "solve world hunger problem".

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for pointing to "Why the future doesn't need us" article. Was a wonderful read.

Hey susk, lucky you did not join us for elephanta. Was extremely hot.

5/17/2005 10:03:00 AM  
Blogger Noufal said...

Bill Joy is fun to read/listen to. I have my reservations about /some/ of the stuff he wrote though (csh comes to mind).

Have you heard his lectures at technetcast.ddj.com? Quite good.

I do wish he'd start using a comb though. ;)

5/17/2005 11:54:00 AM  
Blogger Mridul said...

@NY
Its an old article - just put it up since it was in one of the tabs :)
Hope you enjoyed the trip ! Pics , we need PICS !!

@Noufal
I have seen some of the lectures sometime back .... should listen to them again and again and again :)
The way some people think is at such a different plane that one can only wonder whether we will even udnerstand the design considerations which go into such things !

5/18/2005 12:15:00 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home