Happy birthday, Sir.
Update: One more link
Monday, December 12, 2011
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
THE 'Book of Jobs'
If you are not busy being born, you are busy dying.
-Bob Dylan (Quoted by Steve Jobs)
-Bob Dylan (Quoted by Steve Jobs)
Just finished reading the most anticipated biography of the year. I had read one Jobs biography before, iCon. Curiously it was the only one Jobs wanted banned, I later came to know. To be sure, it does portray him mostly in bad light. Probably it wanted to say 'I,con' instead of 'icon'.
Expectations from this one were high, coming as it was from Walter Isaacson, and it does fulfill them. For me, it dispelled some popular misconceptions. For example, that Apple 'imported' GUI wholesale from Xerox PARC. That is not true. Apple sure got the concept, but Mac team made significant improvements of their own, like overlapping windows and window drag-and-drop. Or that Jobs stole all the credit from Jeff Raskin, the real father of Mac. No. Raskin sure was leader of the Mac project before Jobs took it over (which forced him to leave), but under Raskin Mac was an underpowered machine with minimal graphics. It was Jobs who turned it into the phenomenon that it became. But this is not to say that Jobs was a 'Mahatma' that got vilified somehow. His was a complex personality, not of the typical hero, and the book is impressively balanced in that regard.
Jobs, not the typical CEO, made many specific product improvements. I liked this part because in what I had read earlier, his criticism was acute, but his praise very vague. To be specific, original iTunes had a search interface that required specifying the search parameter (lyrics or album, say); he wanted one where you simply type in the box. Now it has become the default on non Apple products too. And he came up with the idea of iPod shuffle, getting rid of the screen altogether, because he saw that people were heavily using the shuffle functionality on the original iPod. Let me add one last example, a less well known one. The original iPhone was supposed to have a plastic screen, but Jobs thought glass was more aesthetic. So he went searching for a solution and found a company that made 'gorilla glass'. The only problem was, the company, which had pioneered the process of making it in 1960s had found no market and stopped making it. When Jobs placed a large order, the manufacturer was unsure he could do it. Jobs convinced him he can. Gorilla glass is almost a standard on today's cellphones.
The book is full of such interesting nuggets, but there is one important thing that comes through. Jobs made great products because he focused on making great products. Sometimes that meant micromanagment, hurt egos and financial overruns, but his strong will prevailed, and the results are before us. Don't miss this book. You will learn much, but it is also plain old good reading.
Expectations from this one were high, coming as it was from Walter Isaacson, and it does fulfill them. For me, it dispelled some popular misconceptions. For example, that Apple 'imported' GUI wholesale from Xerox PARC. That is not true. Apple sure got the concept, but Mac team made significant improvements of their own, like overlapping windows and window drag-and-drop. Or that Jobs stole all the credit from Jeff Raskin, the real father of Mac. No. Raskin sure was leader of the Mac project before Jobs took it over (which forced him to leave), but under Raskin Mac was an underpowered machine with minimal graphics. It was Jobs who turned it into the phenomenon that it became. But this is not to say that Jobs was a 'Mahatma' that got vilified somehow. His was a complex personality, not of the typical hero, and the book is impressively balanced in that regard.
Jobs, not the typical CEO, made many specific product improvements. I liked this part because in what I had read earlier, his criticism was acute, but his praise very vague. To be specific, original iTunes had a search interface that required specifying the search parameter (lyrics or album, say); he wanted one where you simply type in the box. Now it has become the default on non Apple products too. And he came up with the idea of iPod shuffle, getting rid of the screen altogether, because he saw that people were heavily using the shuffle functionality on the original iPod. Let me add one last example, a less well known one. The original iPhone was supposed to have a plastic screen, but Jobs thought glass was more aesthetic. So he went searching for a solution and found a company that made 'gorilla glass'. The only problem was, the company, which had pioneered the process of making it in 1960s had found no market and stopped making it. When Jobs placed a large order, the manufacturer was unsure he could do it. Jobs convinced him he can. Gorilla glass is almost a standard on today's cellphones.
The book is full of such interesting nuggets, but there is one important thing that comes through. Jobs made great products because he focused on making great products. Sometimes that meant micromanagment, hurt egos and financial overruns, but his strong will prevailed, and the results are before us. Don't miss this book. You will learn much, but it is also plain old good reading.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Probably misplaced
Jabberwocky ⊂ 'Alice in Wonderland' the movie.
Jabberwocky ⊄ 'Alice in Wonderland' the book. (The real name is 'Alice's adventures in Wonderland').
And one might as well s/Jabberwocky/Coherence/.
Not that either is bad. Read the latter recently.
Jabberwocky ⊄ 'Alice in Wonderland' the book. (The real name is 'Alice's adventures in Wonderland').
And one might as well s/Jabberwocky/Coherence/.
Not that either is bad. Read the latter recently.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Open Sources: Then and Now
Recently finished reading Open Sources 2.0. That implies there was a 1.0 version. There was and it was published in 1999, and was subtitled 'Voices from the Revolution'. Open source was new then (and on a personal level, I was in the 9th grade, and probably had never touched a computer). On a recent landmark trip I came across the second installment. It was published in 2005, and is subtitled 'The continuing evolution'. Read the second and then reread the first (it is available online). Let me add that most of what I am going to say is well captured by the subtitles.
At the time of the first book, Open source was a new invention, and despite the technical prowess demonstrated by linux, gcc and so on, not many large corporations had embraced it. Programmers wrote most (I think all) of the essays. So we have, for example, essays by Richard Stallman, Linus Torlvalds, Larry Wall and Michael Tiemann, most of them focusing on why, as per the author, open source/free software works. By the time the second installment came out, open source software had established itself as the backbone of many organizations, and it focuses more on how that came about. One persistent theme is commoditization. Open source infrastructure components like OSs, databases and web servers reduce the overall cost of a software solution for the customer, which in turn allows corporations to expand their markets. As can be guessed, most of the essays in the second book are written by business guys. We also see discussions about open source business models (e.g. Dual licensing vs traditional support models), which may sound rather dull, but is not. While the first book focused exclusively on software, in the secod book we see open source principles being applied to law (groklaw), mass collaboration (wikipedia) and even biology. The books are a treasure trove of information. But in the interests of truth let me also add that three or four essays in the second book put me to uninterruptable sleep (none in the first did).
If I had to pick a favorite, Jeremy Allison's (a lead Samba developer) essay comparing and contrasting POSIX and Win32 is unquestionably the winner for the second book. Picking a winner for the first one is not so easy, but I would say Michael Tiemann's essay about the journey of Cygnus. I learned the most from it. Also the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate in the appendix. It is a mail thread from 1992 with Andrew Tanenbaum (creator of Minix and author of OS and Networking textbooks I am sure you read while in college) and Linus and others discussing minix/linux/portability/microkernels vs monolithic kernels and so on. Consider this, it was thought HURD/BSD would soon replace Linux, and SPARC will do the same to 386. How things turn out!
And here we are at the end, and I wonder, who will be the authors of the third version.
At the time of the first book, Open source was a new invention, and despite the technical prowess demonstrated by linux, gcc and so on, not many large corporations had embraced it. Programmers wrote most (I think all) of the essays. So we have, for example, essays by Richard Stallman, Linus Torlvalds, Larry Wall and Michael Tiemann, most of them focusing on why, as per the author, open source/free software works. By the time the second installment came out, open source software had established itself as the backbone of many organizations, and it focuses more on how that came about. One persistent theme is commoditization. Open source infrastructure components like OSs, databases and web servers reduce the overall cost of a software solution for the customer, which in turn allows corporations to expand their markets. As can be guessed, most of the essays in the second book are written by business guys. We also see discussions about open source business models (e.g. Dual licensing vs traditional support models), which may sound rather dull, but is not. While the first book focused exclusively on software, in the secod book we see open source principles being applied to law (groklaw), mass collaboration (wikipedia) and even biology. The books are a treasure trove of information. But in the interests of truth let me also add that three or four essays in the second book put me to uninterruptable sleep (none in the first did).
If I had to pick a favorite, Jeremy Allison's (a lead Samba developer) essay comparing and contrasting POSIX and Win32 is unquestionably the winner for the second book. Picking a winner for the first one is not so easy, but I would say Michael Tiemann's essay about the journey of Cygnus. I learned the most from it. Also the Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate in the appendix. It is a mail thread from 1992 with Andrew Tanenbaum (creator of Minix and author of OS and Networking textbooks I am sure you read while in college) and Linus and others discussing minix/linux/portability/microkernels vs monolithic kernels and so on. Consider this, it was thought HURD/BSD would soon replace Linux, and SPARC will do the same to 386. How things turn out!
And here we are at the end, and I wonder, who will be the authors of the third version.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Improve yourself, that is all you can do to improve the world.
I recently read the biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ray Monk. It is simple to describe who Wittgenstein was. He was to philosophy what Einstein was to Physics, at about the same time. You might have heard Talent does what it can, Genius what it must. We find the most powerful expression of that 'must' in Wittgenstein's life (another would be Ramanujan's). Consider this, he constantly contemplated suicide before Bertrand Russell convinced him that he possessed philosophical genius, and hence (to his own mind) he was worthy of living. His best known work is the Tractatus. In essence, it says the structure of a propostion is similar to the structure of the reality that it describes, that is what makes it describe that reality (of course this is an imprecise approximation, but I hope it is not entirely misleading). But in later life he became dissatisfied with it. Instead of the traditional, analytic way in which all the leading practitoners (including Russell) did philosophy, he proposed that philosophical problems arise because of our confused use of language, and a proper treatment of these problems would make philosophy itself unncessary.
There is much else remarkable about Wittgenstein's life. Having come from a very prosperous family, he abandoned all of it to live on what he himself could make. Having volunteered for service in WWI, he tried (and succeeded) in getting himself transferred to the front, reasoning that a brush with death would make him a better person. I think you see the intensity behind the opening quote now.
There are books, and then there are books that push everything else aside. This definitely belongs in the later category. But why some books have this effect and not others? I leave you with what the Tractatus has to say
Anything that can at all be said can be said clearly; whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
I recently read the biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Ray Monk. It is simple to describe who Wittgenstein was. He was to philosophy what Einstein was to Physics, at about the same time. You might have heard Talent does what it can, Genius what it must. We find the most powerful expression of that 'must' in Wittgenstein's life (another would be Ramanujan's). Consider this, he constantly contemplated suicide before Bertrand Russell convinced him that he possessed philosophical genius, and hence (to his own mind) he was worthy of living. His best known work is the Tractatus. In essence, it says the structure of a propostion is similar to the structure of the reality that it describes, that is what makes it describe that reality (of course this is an imprecise approximation, but I hope it is not entirely misleading). But in later life he became dissatisfied with it. Instead of the traditional, analytic way in which all the leading practitoners (including Russell) did philosophy, he proposed that philosophical problems arise because of our confused use of language, and a proper treatment of these problems would make philosophy itself unncessary.
There is much else remarkable about Wittgenstein's life. Having come from a very prosperous family, he abandoned all of it to live on what he himself could make. Having volunteered for service in WWI, he tried (and succeeded) in getting himself transferred to the front, reasoning that a brush with death would make him a better person. I think you see the intensity behind the opening quote now.
There are books, and then there are books that push everything else aside. This definitely belongs in the later category. But why some books have this effect and not others? I leave you with what the Tractatus has to say
Anything that can at all be said can be said clearly; whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Monday, November 21, 2011
Interview with Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum
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