June, 23, 2001 archives

there's an ice cream truck that comes through my neighborhood every few days, playing the strangest and most beautiful music i've ever heard come from an ice cream truck. it sounds almost like the speaker is under water, which just gives it an incredible off-kilter vibe. if its customers had seen enough scary movies, there's no way they would be customers.

with my $25 amazon gift certificate (from signing up for online payment with at&t), i purchased glyn moody's rebel code: linux and the open source revolution, a history of linux and the modern open source phenomenon (as the subtitle might have suggested). it's very well researched, and a pretty good read, if kind of quote-heavy. (it gets a little wearisome bouncing between quotes and prose.)

one thing that stuck out at me was the characterization of microsoft in the second paragraph of the prologue—to the best of my knowledge, microsoft is an offices-for-everyone sort of place, not a cubicle wasteland. (it just struck me as a misapplied stereotype.)

one story missing from the book is of the first guy who tried to take linux commercial. i remember there was this guy who wanted to basically take over the reins and turn it into a business who got flamed out of existence on the early alt.os.linux newsgroup. i'm pretty sure there's at least some reference to this in the old linux-activists mailing list archives, but i can't find it now. i wish i could find old archives of the alt.os.linux newsgroup.