Geek of the Month: Eric S. Raymond

If you ask me who's the proudest hacker in the world, I would say that it's Eric S. Raymond. ESR, as he is often called, is a computer programmer and open source software evangelist. He is also a well-known author and has been very influential in giving the term 'hacker' a positive image.

Eric S. Raymond is our "Geek of the Month" for May. In honor of this über geek, we have collected some interesting facts about him including a brief summary of his fabled life.

Eric S. Raymond was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1957. He lived on three continents before settling in Pennsylvania in 1971. Raymond says his mild form of congenital cerebral palsy motivated him to pursue a future in computing; his involvement with hacker culture began in 1976, and he contributed to his first free software project in the late 1980s. His primary contributions to open source software have been maintaining the fetchmail email client for a certain time, and gpsd. Other contributions have included Emacs editing modes and portions of libraries like GNU ncurses, giflib/libungif, and libpng. He also wrote CML2, a source code configuration system; while originally intended for the Linux kernel, kernel developers rejected it. Raymond attributed this rejection to "kernel list politics".

Hackers initially knew Raymond for his adoption of the Jargon File. Some of the changes made under his watch have been controversial; early critics accused Raymond of unfairly changing the file's focus to the Unix hacker culture instead of the older hacker cultures where the Jargon File originated. Raymond has responded by saying that the nature of hacking had changed and the Jargon File should report on hacker culture, and not attempt to enshrine it.

Raymond is the author of a number of How-to documents and FAQs, many of which are included in the Linux Documentation Project corpus. Raymond's 2003 book The Art of Unix Programming covers Unix history and culture, and modern user tools available for programming and accomplishing tasks in Unix.

Open source
Raymond coined the aphorism "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." He credits Linus Torvalds with the inspiration for this quotation, which he dubs "Linus's law". The quotation appears in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, published in 1997. Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998. He also took on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and public. The release of the Mozilla (then Netscape) source code in 1998 was an early accomplishment. He accepted stock options from VA Software to provide credibility to the company and act as a hired "corporate conscience" and has spoken in more than fifteen countries on six continents including a lecture at Microsoft.

In his open source advocacy, Raymond refused to speculate on whether the "bazaar" development model could be applied to works such as books and music, not wanting to "weaken the winning argument for open-sourcing software by tying it to a potential loser". Later, he said that it could not work for an encyclopedia; he was particularly critical of Wikipedia, calling it a "disaster", and raising concerns about the factual accuracy and neutrality of its article about him.

Raymond has had a number of public disputes with other figures in the free software movement. He has rejected what he describes as the "very seductive" moral and ethical rhetoric of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, asserting that this is "not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of language ... simply does not persuade anybody."

Raymond addressed some of his critics from the software development community in his 1999 essay "Take My Job, Please!", stating that he was willing to "back to the hilt" anyone qualified and willing to take his job and present the case for open source to the world. In February 2005, Raymond stepped down as the president of the Open Source Initiative.

Raymond was granted 150,000 share options of VA Linux that reached a value of $32 million on the day of VA's IPO. His shares vested over a four-year period contingent on him staying on the board. Twelve months later, following the Internet bubble burst, shares of VA had dropped from a high of $242.87 to $14.

Interests and politics
Other than his computing interests, Raymond is known to have strong interests in science fiction and firearms and has a black belt in "Moo Do, an eclectic martial art based on Tae Kwon Do". He is an advocate of a general right to possess and use firearms. Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan, and is an initiate witch and coven leader.

Raymond is a prolific writer of political and technical opinion pieces through his website and blog. Raymond is an avowed anarcho-capitalist and a supporter of the Libertarian Party. However, he supported the War on Iraq, and criticized the Libertarian party for perceived isolationism in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; he said that the Western world should embark on an "imperialist" military campaign to "civilize" the Muslim world. He acknowledged that some might call this plan "deliberate cultural genocide." He has also written about controversial subjects such as race and IQ, and alleged pederasty and pedophilia among homosexuals.

Famous Quotations by Eric S. Raymond:

"A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet."

"Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires."

"For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet."

"If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them."

"In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe."

"In the beginning, there were Real Programmers."

"Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet."

"The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network."

"The beginnings of the hacker culture, as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1."

"The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers."

"Traditionally, operating systems had been written in tight assembler to extract the absolute highest efficiency possible out of their host machines."

"Worse, by the early 1990s it was becoming clear that ten years of effort to commercialize proprietary Unix was ending in failure."

Learn more about ESR by visiting his personal website at www.catb.org/~esr/
Special thanks to www.wikipedia.org

Geek of the Month: Hans Reiser

For this April’s “Geek of the Month”, we will give tribute to one of the most controversial free software developer in history. His name is Hans Reiser, and he made headlines just recently.

On April 28, 2008 Hans Reiser was found guilty of first-degree murder after his wife’s disappearance. He faces a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. But who is Hans Reiser? Why is he that important?

To answer those questions, read this concise summary about his life:

Hans Reiser was born to Ramon Reiser and Beverly Palmer in December 1963. He grew up in California and dropped out of his junior high school before he was 14, citing disagreements with the conventional schooling system. He was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley at the age of 15 where he received a BA in Systematizing (an individualized major dealing with physics, math and related topics). Reiser was also one of the founding members of the Open Computing Facility at UC Berkeley. Though preferring higher education, Reiser chose not to pursue a Ph.D., citing the same reasons he had dropped out of junior high school. He was therefore unable to pursue a further career in academia and worked part to full time in the computer field while founding and building the California-based international software company Namesys Inc. Prior to founding Namesys, Reiser held positions at Synopsys, IBM Research, Premos and ARDC.

In 1999, while working in Russia, Hans Reiser met and married Nina Sharanova, a Russian-born and trained obstetrician and gynecologist who was studying to become an American licensed OB/GYN. They had two children.

The Reisers separated in May 2004. Nina Reiser filed for divorce three months later, citing irreconcilable differences and saying that their children “hardly know their father” because he was out of the country on business for most of the year, according to court records, and was granted sole legal custody of the children and shared physical custody of them with her husband. The divorce was never finalized. Nina Reiser obtained a temporary restraining order against Hans in December 2004 after he allegedly pushed her, at the height of the divorce proceedings. She dropped the temporary restraining order in late 2005 because the heat of the divorce had chilled over time. In exchange, Hans Reiser agreed to be bound by a one year civil restraining order which prohibited him from “contacting, harassing or disturbing the peace” of Nina Reiser at her home or place of work and ordered him to stay at least 100 yards away from her. In May, Nina Reiser alleged in court filings that her husband had failed to pay 50 percent medical expenses and childcare expenses as ordered by a judge.

Nina Reiser’s Disappearance:
Nina Reiser was reported missing on September 5, 2006. She had last been seen on September 3, when she dropped the couple’s two children off with Hans, at his mother's house where he was living at the time. She also failed to meet her best friend at her house later that evening.

Nina Reiser's 2001 Honda Odyssey minivan, with groceries inside, was found on September 9 on Fernwood Drive in Oakland's Montclair district, just east of the CA-13 Warren Freeway. It was reported by police that neighbors first spotted the parked minivan on September 5, the day she was supposed to pick up her children at school.

Hans Reiser's neighbors said that they saw him spraying water off something in the driveway for half an hour shortly after Nina went missing and said that his car — a 1988 Honda CRX Si hatchback — disappeared shortly after, and his mother rented a car so Hans could drive hers. Police brought cadaver dogs in to search his property, but no human remains were found.

Following Nina Reiser’s disappearance, which resulted in the removal of the Reiser children from the Reiser family, Hans Reiser attempted to obtain custody but was unsuccessful. Oakland police, who generally do not testify in juvenile court custody cases, testified against Hans Reiser at the custody hearing, though they did not reveal the evidence on which they based their concerns.

In September 2006, Oakland police briefly detained Hans Reiser, served him with a search warrant on his person, and obtained a DNA sample.

On October 10, 2006, following the second search of his home (in which Oakland police and FBI investigators removed a number of items), police announced that they were now treating the disappearance as a homicide case, and Reiser was arrested for the murder of Nina Reiser and subsequently charged.

Following his arrest, a number of people in the Free Software community expressed concern over the future of Reiser's filesystem (ReiserFS). For example, a Slashdot thread on the subject of his arrest garnered over 1,600 comments, significant numbers of which discussed the future of the filesystem. However, the employees of Namesys have said that they will continue to work and that Reiser's arrest doesn't slow down the software development in the immediate future. They confirmed that if the case expands over a longer time, they would seek solutions to ensure the long-term future of Namesys. In order to afford increasing legal fees, it was announced on December 21, 2006 that Hans Reiser was going to sell his company. As of 2008, Namesys has not been sold.

Media and blog reactions after Hans Reiser was convicted:
CNN:
Programmer guilty of wife's murder

ZDNet:
Reiser found guilty of first degree murder

ars technica:
Hans Reiser is fscked: jury delivers guilty verdict

Practical Technology:
Was Reiser really found Guilty of being a Hacker?

San Francisco Chronicle:
Reiser juror: "Never showed sympathy" for Nina

Tech Source From Bohol:

If you ask my opinion about the guilty verdict, I would say that it was a bit harsh on Hans Reiser’s part because as what I have known, the evidence was weak and Nina’s body have not been found. But, in fairness to Nina’s family and her children, I hope the verdict will finally give them peace of mind and somehow help heal the wounds caused by these unfortunate consequences.

Geek of the Month: Vint Cerf

Have you ever wondered who invented the internet? If you did, then perhaps the person that we will give tribute today will fascinate you. The Geek of the Month for March is the person most often called ‘The Father of the Internet”. He's no other than Vint Cerf.

If you want to learn more about the life of internet pioneer Vint Cerf, you might want to read these exiting facts that we have compiled about him:

Vint Cerf was in born June 23, 1943. Cerf grew up in Los Angeles. He did very well in school and showed a strong aptitude for math. He had an unusual style of dress for a school kid. He wore a jacket and tie most days. Cerf is still known for his impeccable style. He is usually seen in three-piece suits.

As a child, Cerf began to develop an interest in computers. He attended Stanford and majored in mathematics, but continued to grow more interested in computing. "There was something amazingly enticing about programming," said Cerf. "You created your own universe and you were master of it. The computer would do anything you programmed it to do. It was this unbelievable sandbox in which every grain of sand was under your control."

Career

Cerf's first job after obtaining his B.S. in Math from Stanford University was at IBM, where he worked for less than two years as a systems engineer supporting QUIKTRAN. He left IBM to become a principal programmer at UCLA, where he also "participated in development of ARPANET host protocol specifications”; he then became an assistant professor at Stanford University where he "conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Robert E. Kahn.

In 1997, Cerf joined the Board of Trustees of Gallaudet University. He is hearing impaired.

Cerf joined the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1999, and served until the end of 2007; he used to be the ICANN Chair.

Cerf is a member of the Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov's IT Advisory Council, a group created by Presidential Decree on March 8, 2002. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of Eurasia Group, the political risk consultancy.

Cerf is also working on the Interplanetary Internet, together with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It will be a new standard to communicate from planet to planet, using radio/laser communications that are highly tolerant to signal degradation.

In February 2006, Cerf testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation's Hearing on “Network Neutrality”.

Cerf currently serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government.

Cerf has worked for Google as its Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist since September 2005.

Awards and honors

Cerf has received a number of honorary degrees, including doctorates, from the University of the Balearic Islands, ETH in Switzerland, Capitol College, Gettysburg College, George Mason University, University of Pisa, University of Rovira and Virgili (Tarragona, Spain), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Lulea (Sweden), University of Twente (Netherlands), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and Brooklyn Polytechnic.

Further awards include:

* Prince of Asturias award for science and technology

* Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery

* Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award

* SIGCOMM Award for "contributions to the Internet [spanning] more than 25 years, from development of the fundamental TCP/IP protocols".

* In December 1997 he, along with his partner Robert E. Kahn, was presented with the National Medal of Technology by President Bill Clinton, "for creating and sustaining development of Internet Protocols and continuing to provide leadership in the emerging industry of internetworking."

* He received the Living Legend Medal from the Library of Congress in April 2000

* Dr. Cerf was selected as a Fellow of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) in 2000

* Cerf and Kahn were the winners of the Turing Award for 2004, for their "pioneering work on internetworking, including .. the Internet's basic communications protocols ..and for inspired leadership in networking."

* In November 2005, Vinton Cerf and Kahn were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush for their contributions to the creation of the Internet.

* He and Robert Kahn were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2006

* He and Robert Kahn were awarded the Japan Prize in January 2

Quotes
"The Internet is based on a layered, end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control. By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation."
-Vint Cerf

"They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person's life. In other words, it's evolving fast and faster."
-Vint Cerf

"Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet."
-Vint Cerf

"What's wonderful about Google is that as long as you bring ideas to the table, it doesn't matter what else is going on."
-Vint Cerf

"The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services."
-Vint Cerf

"I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices."
-Vint Cerf

Special Thanks to Ibiblio.org and Wikipedia.org

Geek of the Month: Richard M. Stallman

It’s the last day of the month once again. To our avid readers, you may already know that it is time once again to honor an über geek whose works and life changed the course of technology, particularly the field of computing. So without further a do, let’s give importance to a very famous free software evangelist, the living legend himself, Richard M. Stallman.

Here is a brief summary of his fabled life.

Richard Matthew Stallman “RMS” was born on March 16, 1953). He is an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he started the free software movement and, in October 1985, set up the Free Software Foundation.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft and is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against both software patents and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU Debugger. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

Early years
Stallman was born to Daniel Stallman and Alice Lippman in 1953 in New York City, New York. Hired by the IBM New York Scientific Center, Stallman spent the summer after his high-school graduation writing his first program, a preprocessor for the PL/I programming language on the IBM 360.

During this time, Stallman was also a volunteer laboratory assistant in the Biology Department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in mathematics or physics, his teaching professor at Rockefeller thought he would have a future as a biologist.

In June 1971, as a first year student at Harvard University, Stallman became a programmer at the AI Laboratory of MIT. There he became a regular in the hacker community, where he was usually known by his initials, "RMS" (which was the name of his computer accounts). In the first edition of the Hacker's Dictionary, he wrote, "'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'." Stallman graduated from Harvard magna cum laude earning a BA in Physics in 1974.

Stallman then enrolled as a graduate student in physics at MIT, but abandoned his graduate studies while remaining a programmer at the MIT AI Laboratory. At the end of his first year in the graduate program, Stallman suffered a knee injury that ended the main joy in his life - his participation in the folk dance troupe, and with it the opportunity it provided for socializing with the opposite sex. Stallman's ensuing despair culminated in social withdrawal from which he found solace in a heightened focus on the area in which his achievements made him most proud - programming. While his doctoral pursuits in physics became a casualty of this calling, however, Stallman has been awarded six honorary doctorates and two honorary professorships.

While a graduate student at MIT, Stallman published a paper on an AI truth maintenance system called dependency-directed backtracking with Gerald Jay Sussman. This paper was an early work on the problem of intelligent backtracking in constraint satisfaction problems. As of 2003, the technique Stallman and Sussman introduced is still the most general and powerful form of intelligent backtracking. The technique of constraint recording, wherein partial results of a search are recorded for later reuse, was also introduced in this paper.

As a hacker in MIT's AI laboratory, Stallman worked on software projects like TECO, Emacs, and the Lisp Machine Operating System. He would become an ardent critic of restricted computer access in the lab. When MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) installed a password control system in 1977, Stallman found a way to decrypt the passwords and sent users messages containing their decoded password (to demonstrate that they were not increasing security, but only hindering free access to each other's software and discouraging sharing it), with a suggestion to change it to the empty string (that is, no password) instead, to restore this free access. Around 20% of the users followed his advice. Although Stallman boasted of the success of his campaign for many years afterward, passwords ultimately prevailed.

GNU project
Stallman announced the plan for the GNU operating system in September 1983 on several ARPAnet mailing lists and USENET.

In 1985, Stallman published the GNU Manifesto, which outlined his motivation for creating a free operating system called GNU, which would be compatible with Unix. The name GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. Soon after, he started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation to employ free software programmers and provide a legal infrastructure for the free software movement. Stallman is the nonsalaried president of the FSF, which is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in Massachusetts.

In 1985, Stallman invented and popularized the concept of copyleft, a legal mechanism to protect the modification and redistribution rights for free software. It was first implemented in the GNU Emacs General Public License, and in 1989 the first program-independent GNU General Public License (GPL) was released. By then, much of the GNU system had been completed. Stallman was responsible for contributing many necessary tools, including a text editor, compiler, debugger, and a build automator. The notable exception was a kernel. In 1990, members of the GNU project began a kernel called GNU Hurd, which has yet to achieve the maturity level required for widespread usage.

In 1991, Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, used the GNU development tools to produce the Linux kernel. This could be combined with the almost-complete GNU system to make a complete operating system. Most people use the name "Linux" to refer not only to the kernel, but also for the operating system formed by adding the Linux kernel to the GNU system. This has been a longstanding naming controversy in the free software community. Stallman argues that not using "GNU" in the name of the operating system unfairly disparages the value of the GNU project and harms the sustainability of the free software movement by breaking the link between the software and the free software philosophy of the GNU project.

Stallman's influences on hacker culture include the name POSIX and the Emacs editor. On UNIX systems, GNU Emacs's popularity rivaled that of another editor vi, spawning an editor war. Stallman's take on this was to jokingly canonize himself as "St. IGNUcius" of the Church of Emacs and acknowledge that "vi vi vi is the editor of the beast," while "using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance."

A number of developers view Stallman as being difficult to work with from a political, interpersonal, or technical standpoint. Around 1992, developers at Lucid Inc. doing their own work on Emacs clashed with Stallman and ultimately forked the software. Their fork later became XEmacs. An email archive published by Jamie Zawinski documents their criticisms and Stallman's responses. Ulrich Drepper, whom Stallman had appointed to work on GNU libc for the GNU Project, published complaints against Stallman in the release notes for glibc 2.2.4. Drepper accuses Stallman of attempting a "hostile takeover" of the project, referring to him as a "control freak and raging maniac." Eric S. Raymond, who sometimes claims to speak for parts of the open source movement, has written many pieces laying out that movement's disagreement with Stallman and the free software movement, often in terms sharply critical of Stallman.

Personal life
Stallman has devoted the bulk of his life’s energies to political and software activism. Professing to care little for material wealth, he explains that he has "always lived cheaply… like a student, basically. And I like that, because it means that money is not telling me what to do."

For many years, Stallman maintained no permanent residence outside his office at MIT’s CSAIL Lab, describing himself as a “squatter” on campus. His “research affiliate” position at MIT is unpaid.

In a footnote to an article he wrote in 1999, he says “As an atheist, I don't follow any religious leaders, but I sometimes find I admire something one of them has said.” Stallman chooses not to celebrate Christmas, instead celebrating on December 25 a holiday of his own invention, "Grav-mass." The name and date are references to Isaac Newton, whose birthday falls on that day.

When asked about his influences, he replied that he admires Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ralph Nader, and Dennis Kucinich, and commented as well: “I admire Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, even though I criticize some of the things that they did.” Stallman is a Green Party supporter.
Stallman recommends not owning a mobile phone, as he believes the tracking of cell phones creates harmful privacy issues.

Stallman enjoys a wide range of musical styles from Conlon Nancarrow to folk; the Free Software Song takes the form of alternative words for the Bulgarian folk dance Sadi Moma. More recently he wrote a take-off on the Cuban folk song Guantanamera, about a prisoner in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, and recorded it in Cuba with Cuban musicians.

Stallman is a fan of science fiction, including works by the author Greg Egan. He occasionally goes to science fiction conventions and wrote the Free Software Song while awaiting his turn to sing at a convention. He has written two science fiction stories, The Right to Read and Jinnetic Engineering.

A native English speaker, Stallman is also sufficiently fluent in French and Spanish to deliver his two-hour speeches in those languages, and claims a “somewhat flawed” command of Indonesian.

Famous Quotes:
* Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.
* People get the government their behavior deserves. People deserve better than that.
* I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.
* People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
* You can use any editor you want, but remember that vi is the text editor of the beast.
* Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents; any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.
* Prior art is as effective as US soldiers in Iraq: They control the ground they stand on, and nothing more. I used to say Vietnam, but, well, you know...
* People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the world.
* Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us with politics," respond those who don't want to learn.
* I have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software.
* By the way, I hope you all know about the worldwide boycott of Coca Cola company for things like murdering union organizers in Columbia. See the site killercoke.org.
* Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance.
* When I do this, some people think that it's because I want my ego to be fed, right? Of course, I'm not asking you to call it "Stallmanix"!
* Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense.
* Would a dating service on the net be ‘frowned upon’ . . . ? I hope not. But even if it is, don’t let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.
* We need to teach people to refuse to install non-free plug-ins; we need to teach people to care more about their long-term interest of freedom than their immediate desire to view a particular site.
* Based on years of conversations, I am convinced that part of the cause of the problem is the tendency to call the system Linux rather than GNU, and describe it as open source rather than free software.
* Instead of worrying about what somebody else is going to do, which is not under your control, the important thing is, what are you going to decide about what is under your control?
* "Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it."
* Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.
* Protecting essential freedoms is always a matter of restricting the actions that would deny them.
* We promote free software as an ethical and social issue. Computer users should always have the freedom to share and change the software they use. It's wrong to try to stop someone.
* Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.

Other Interesting Links:
* Personal home page
* Stallman's blog
* Essays on the GNU philosophy pages

Special Thanks to Wikipedia.org

Geek of the Month: Donald Knuth

Since we are about to end the month, we will again honor a person or individual who made a great impact on technology. This time, we will give tribute to a man who has given so much to the open source movement, particularly in the field of computer science. Some think of him as more important than Linus Torvalds or Richard M. Stallman. But some may have never heard about him, because he is not a typical celebrity or billionaire hacker. Although, wealthy and famous programmers who have already reached the pinnacle of success definitely have high respect for this man who’s name is Donald Knuth. He is our ‘Geek of the Month’, and we are going to present to you some interesting facts about his life, or rather his legend.

Donald Ervin Knuth was born on January 10, 1938, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Author of d applied his talents by constructing a formula for the value of each player. This novel approach was covered by Newsweek and by Walter Cronkite on the CBS television network.

While doing graduate studies, Knuth worked as a consultant, writing compilers for different computers. In 1963, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics (advisor: Marshall Hall) from the California Institute of Technology, where he became a professor and began work on The Art of Computer Programming, originally planned to be a single book, and then planned as a six, and then seven-volume series. In 1968, he published the first volume.
That same year, he joined the faculty of Stanford University.

In 1971, Knuth was the recipient of the first ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. He has received various other awards including the Turing Award, the National Medal of Science, the John von Neumann Medal and the Kyoto Prize. After producing the third volume of his series in 1976, he expressed such frustration with the nascent state of the then newly developed electronic publishing tools (esp. those which provided input to phototypesetters) that he took time out to work on typesetting and created the TeX and METAFONT tools.

n recognition of Knuth's contributions to the field of computer science, in 1990 he was awarded the singular academic title of Professor of The Art of Computer Programming, which has since been revised to Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming.

In 1992 he became an associate of the French Academy of Sciences. Also that year, he retired from regular research and teaching at Stanford University in order to finish The Art of Computer Programming. In 2003 he was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society. As of 2004, the first three volumes of his series have been re-issued, and Knuth is currently working on volume four, excerpts of which are released periodically on his website. Meanwhile, Knuth gives informal lectures a few times a year at Stanford University, which he calls Computer Musings. He is also a visiting professor at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory in the United Kingdom.

In addition to his writings on computer science, Knuth is also the author of 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (1991), ISBN 0-89579-252-4, in which he attempts to examine the Bible by a process of stratified sampling, namely an analysis of chapter 3, verse 16 of each book. Each verse is accompanied by a rendering in calligraphic art, contributed by a group of calligraphers under the leadership of Hermann Zapf.

He is also the author of Surreal Numbers (1974) ISBN 0-201-03812-9, a mathematical novelette on John Conway's set theory construction of an alternate system of numbers. Instead of simply explaining the subject, the book seeks to show the development of the mathematics. Knuth wanted the book to prepare students for doing original, creative research.

On January 1, 1990, Knuth announced to his colleagues that he would no longer have an email address, so that he may concentrate on his work. Knuth is a fan of Wikipedia, but he's a bit leery of the concept, saying that he would not want to have to remain forever on guard after making technically complex contributions, lest his comments be badly reedited.


Working Environment:

Knuth uses a regular Linux-based Intel computer for most of his work. He doesn't use fancy proprietary tools. He uses Emacs as an editor and Fvwm2 as a windows manager. His fascinating configuration can be found HERE:

Famous Quotes:

A list is only as strong as its weakest link.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been sorted with the help of a computer.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

God is a challenge because there is no proof of his existence and therefore the search must continue.

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.

In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.

The manuals we got from IBM would show examples of programs and I knew I could do a heck of a lot better than that. So I thought I might have some talent.

The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.

The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language.

There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficiency.

Other Interesting Links:

* Donald Knuth's Stanford home page
* Donald Knuth: Leonard Euler of Computer Science (Softpanorama)
* The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures
* Article about Knuth on www.stanfordalumni.org

Special Thanks to Wikipedia.org

Geek of the Month: Steve Jobs

Our monthly “Geek of the Month” continues. From the humble Linus Torvalds, we will pass it over to the man who was newly named by Fortune Magazine as the most powerful person in business. He is the heart and soul of Apple Inc. and the father of what is now known as the most popular electronic gadget ever. He is Mr. Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs is a great innovator. He help popularized the use of personal computer back in the late 70’s. Since then, he developed products that are both useful and aesthetically pleasing. He is also well-loved for his good-taste and personality. His positive charisma is even described as “reality distortion field” (RDF). In essence, RDF is the idea that Steve Jobs is able to convince people to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, and marketing.

To know more about this legendary man, I have compiled some important facts that you may find interesting:

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco to American Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian Abdulfattah John Jandali, a graduate student who later became a political science professor.One week after birth, Jobs was put up for adoption by his unmarried mother, who was also in graduate school. He was adopted by Paul and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California.They gave him the name Steven Paul Jobs. His biological parents later married and gave birth to Jobs' sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, whom Jobs did not meet until they were adults.

He attended Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester,he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. "If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts," he said.

In the autumn of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India. During the 1960s, it had been discovered by phone phreakers (and popularized by John Draper) that a half taped-over toy-whistle included in every box of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal was able to reproduce the 2600 hertz supervision tone used by the AT&T long distance telephone system. After reading about it and later meeting with John Draper, Jobs and Wozniak went into business briefly in 1974 to build "blue boxes" that allowed illicit free long distance calls.

When twenty-one-year-old Jobs saw a computer that Wozniak had designed for his own use, he convinced Wozniak to assist him and started a company to market the computer. Apple Computer Co. was founded as a partnership on April 1, 1976. Though their initial plan was to sell just printed circuit boards, Jobs and Wozniak ended up creating a batch of completely assembled computers and thus entered the personal computer business. The first personal computer Jobs and Wozniak introduced, the Apple I, sold for US$666.66, a number Wozniak came up with because he liked repeating digits.Its successor, the Apple II, was introduced the following year and became a huge success, turning Apple into an important player in the nascent personal computer industry. In December 1980, with a successful IPO, Apple Computer became a publicly traded corporation, making Jobs a multi-millionaire.

In 1986, finding himself sidelined by the company he had founded, Jobs sold all but one of his shares in Apple. The single share may have been for symbolic and sentimental reasons or to ensure that he would receive stock reports (as some biography books have stated) and attend shareholder meetings.

Around the same time, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer. Like the Apple Lisa, the NeXT workstation was technologically advanced, but was never able to break into the mainstream mainly owing to its high cost. Among those who could afford it, however, the NeXT workstation garnered a strong following because of its technical strengths, chief among them its object-oriented software development system. Jobs marketed NeXT products to the scientific and academic fields because of the innovative, experimental new technologies it incorporated (such as the Mach kernel, the digital signal processor chip, and the built-in Ethernet port).

NeXT technology played a large role in catalyzing three unrelated events:
* The World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee developed the original World Wide Web system at CERN on a NeXT workstation. Jobs' insistence that average people should be able to write custom "mission-critical" applications formed the basis of Interface Builder, which Berners-Lee utilized to do just that — by writing a program entitled "WorldWideWeb 1.0".
* NeXT computers were used in the development of the computer game Doom.
* The return of Apple Computer. Apple's reliance on outdated software and internal mismanagement, particularly its inability to release a major operating system upgrade, had brought it near bankruptcy in the early-to-mid 1990s. Jobs' progressive stance on Unix underpinnings was considered overly ambitious and somewhat backward in the 1980s, but his choice ultimately became an expandable, solid foundation for an operating system. Apple would later acquire this so

In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for US$402 million. The deal was finalized in early 1997, bringing Jobs back to the company he founded. He soon became Apple's interim CEO after the directors lost confidence in and ousted then-CEO Gil Amelio in a boardroom coup. In March of 1998, in order to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to profitability, Jobs immediately terminated a number of projects such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Jobs's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company."

With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company's technology found its way into Apple products, notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X. Under Jobs's guidance the company increased sales significantly with the introduction of the iMac and other new products; since then, appealing designs and powerful branding have worked well for Apple. At the 2000 Macworld Expo, Jobs officially dropped the "interim" modifier from his title at Apple and became permanent CEO, a job he still holds today.

In recent years, the company has branched out. With the introduction of the iPod portable music player, iTunes digital music software, and the iTunes Store, the company is making forays into consumer electronics and music distribution. Most recently, Apple entered the cellular phone business with the introduction of the iPhone, a multi-touch display cell phone, iPod, and internet device. While stimulating innovation, Jobs also reminds his employees that "real artists ship",by which he means that delivering working products on time is as important as innovation and attractive design.


Some Famous Quotations of Steve Jobs:

"Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?"


"I want to put a ding in the universe."


"I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."


"To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines."


"Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?"


"Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation."


"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."


Special thanks to: wikipedia.org

Geek of the Month: Linus Torvalds

Last Month, the first ever Geek of the Month honour was given to Charles Babbage. For this month, it will go to the man who needs no introduction; but for formality sake, I will just give a short intro.

This world famous programmer provided the last piece of the free/open source operating system puzzle. He created the so-called Linux kernel, a Unix-like operating system kernel. I guess most of you already know who I’m talking about, but to those who don’t, let me introduce you to Linus Torvalds.

To know Linus better, here are some brief but important facts that I have gathered about him:

Linus Benedict Torvalds was born on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, the capital and largest city in Finland. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although he claims he was named after Linus in the Peanuts comic strip. In the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the peanut-cartoon character," noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character."

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System. From 1997 to 1999 he was involved in 86open helping to choose the standard binary format for Linux and Unix.

It was his maternal grandfather, Leo Toerngvist, a professor of statistics at the University of Helsinki, who had the greatest influence on the young Linus. In the mid-1970s, Toerngvist bought one of the first personal computers, a Commodore Vic 20.

Linus quickly developed the terminal emulation program and it was sufficient for his needs for a while. However, Linus began thinking that it would be nice to be able to do other things with it like tranferring and saving files. This is where Linux was really born. Originally, Linus wanted to name his creation 'Freax' (pronounced like the English word freaks). He changed it to Linux at the prompting of a friend. In August, 1991, Linus announced on Usenet that he was working on this operating system. This now famous announcement launched the biggest collaborative project the world has ever known. Linus uploaded the first version of Linux, version 0.01 in September of 1991. Then Linux belonged to the world.

About 2% of the current Linux kernel is written by Torvalds himself. Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the Linux kernel.

Some Famous Quotations of Linus Torvalds:

“Any program is only as good as it is useful. “

“Artists usually don't make all that much money, and they often keep their artistic hobby despite the money rather than due to it. “

“I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly. “

“I don't expect to go hungry if I decide to leave the University. Resume: Linux looks pretty good in many places. “

“I don't try to be a threat to MicroSoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows-the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.”
“Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all. “

“People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born. “

“Programmers are in the enviable position of not only getting to do what they want to, but because the end result is so important they get paid to do it. There are other professions like that, but not that many. “

“See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too. “

“Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software. “

“Software is like sex: it's better when it's free. “

“There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is. “

“What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out. “

When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows," people just stare at you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, for free."

Thanks to: wikipedia.org, linux.org, linfo.org

Geek of the Month: Charles Babbage

At the end of each month, I will honor the movers and shakers of our digital world, a supreme individual or group that made our lives better through their great innovations.

I got inspired to write about people that I look up to or aspire to be after I’ve read Bo Sanchez’s article entitled “The Missing Link Of Success: Who Are Your Mentors?”. It talked about the importance of having a mentor, and so, by recognizing my so called “tech mentors” I get to know some things about their lives and perhaps learn the secrets of their success.

A geek is a person who is fascinated by knowledge and imagination, usually electronic or virtual in nature, one who is primarily motivated by passion, somebody whose reasoning and decision making is always first and foremost based on passions rather than things like financial reward or social acceptance. Geeks do not see the typical "geeky" interests as interesting, but as objects of passionate devotion.

The first ever “Geek of the Month” honour goes to the man who originated the idea of a programmable computer. His name is Charles Babbage. This may sound boring as most of you might be expecting names like Mr. Jobs or Mr. Gates. But without Sir Charles, you will never be reading this article today as personal computers may never exist at all. Here are some important facts that I have compiled about the man:

Charles Babbage (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer. He was known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his Analytical machine. His previous Difference Engine(shown in the photo below) was a special purpose device intended for the production of tables.

Babbage originated the modern analytic computer.By 1834 he invented the principle of the analytical engine, the forerunner of the modern electronic computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum. In 1991 a perfectly functioning difference engine was constructed from Babbage's original plans. Built to tolerances achievable in the 19th century, the success of the finished engine indicated that Babbage's machine would have worked. Nine years later, the Science Museum completed the printer Babbage had designed for the difference engine, an astonishingly complex device for the 19th century.

Lady Lovelace wrote that Babbage hated music. He tolerated its more exquisite forms, but abhorred it as practiced on the street. "Those whose minds are entirely unoccupied", he wrote with some seriousness in Observations of Street Nuisances in 1864, "receive [street music] with satisfaction, as filling up the vacuum of time". He calculated that 25% of his working power had been destroyed by street nuisances, many of them intentional. Letters to the Times and the eventual enforcement of "Babbage's Act", which would squelch street nuisances, made him the target of ridicule.

Babbage has been commemorated by a number of references, as shown on this list. In particular, Babbage crater, on the Moon and the Charles Babbage Institute, an information technology archive and research center, were named after him. The large Babbage lecture theatre at Cambridge University, used for undergraduate science lectures, commemorates his time at the school.

Significant Events in His Life:
1791: Born; 1810: Entered Trinity College, Cambridge; 1814: graduated Peterhouse; 1817 received MA from Cambridge; 1820: founded the Analytical Society with Herschel and Peacock; 1823: started work on the Difference Engine through funding from the British Government; 1827: published a table of logarithms from 1 to 108000; 1828: appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (never presented a lecture); 1831: founded the British Association for the Advancement of Science; 1832: published "Economy of Manufactures and Machinery"; 1833: began work on the Analytical Engine; 1834: founded the Statistical Society of London; 1864: published Passages from the Life of a Philosopher; 1871: Died.

Other inventions:
The cowcatcher, dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, heliograph opthalmoscope. He also had an interest in cyphers and lock-picking, but abhorred street musicians.

Quotations:
Some of my critics have amused their readers with the wildness of the schemes I have occasionally thrown out; and I myself have sometimes smiled along with them. Perhaps it were wiser for present reputation to offer nothing but profoundly meditated plans, but I do not think knowledge will be most advanced by that course; such sparks may kindle the energies of other minds more favorably circumstanced for pursuing the enquiries. (On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, 1832, preface to second edition.)

Every moment dies a man/Every moment 1 1/16 is born.
(A correction to Tennyson's "Ev'ry moment a man dies/Ev'ry moment one is born".)

If unwarned by my example, any man shall undertake and shall succeed in really constructing an engine ... upon difference principles or by simpler means, I have no fear of leaving my reputation in his charge, for he alone will be fully able to appreciate the nature of my efforts and the value of their results.

---end---

Thanks to:
http://ei.cs.vt.edu
http://en.wikipedia.org