In this essay, Neal Stephenson shares his personal history of computer operating systems and his views on the culture of their creators and users. His journey begins with a programming course at high school where he has to prepare the program in advance, type it into a tape puncher, feed the tape to a modem that transfers it to the university mainframe across town, and finally receive the result as a print-out.

His love affair with the Mac starts in 1984 and introduces him to graphical user interfaces, which would become his primary way to interact with computers until 1995, when his PowerBook destroys a big important file, and he turns to Debian Linux instead.

With Linux, he rediscovers the command line interface, and is also impressed by the concept of free software, especially how everyone can take a good look at all the components, and how openly bugs and problems are being discussed, which leads to issues being resolved very timely and transparently. Stephenson contrasts the Debian bug database to Microsoft and Apple's support model, where bugs cannot be publicly disclosed as it could impact sales, and users have to rely on updates and procedures without understanding what those really do.

At the time of writing, in 1999, he has moved on to BeOS, which he praises as an ideal combination of shiny interface and the power of command line and GNU tools. Interestingly, even though BeOS has disappeared in the meantime and Stephenson (at least according to a 2004 Slashdot interview) has now embraced OS X, the book does not seem outdated. It is still full of valid remarks and an entertaining read.

I am just wondering whether the comments about popular culture would have been different if the book was written after 2001. He describes the American public as ignorant masses who lead their lives in a unified amorphous culture by means of a graphical user interface (TV, Disneyland), whereas the small elite that controls them knows how to use the command line interface (books, laws) and tries to preserve their separate culture, how all this is maybe not a bad thing as it keeps people peaceful, and how this lack of culture and the drive to export it explains that members of older, richer cultures (such as France or the Islam) sometimes get so irritated about their sons coming home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways that they sometimes pop in places like Luxor and begin pumping bullets into Westerners.

thilo@h2450:~> uname -a
Linux h2450 2.4.21 #1 SMP Wed Jul 23 17:53:45 CEST 2003 i686 unknown

I just noticed that the operating system powering this server was compiled on my birthday.

After the sudden death of her husband, aerospace engineer Jodie Foster and her six year old daughter relocate from Berlin back to America. They board a flight to New York (on a plane that she helped build), Foster falls asleep, and when she awakes her daughter is nowhere to be found. In fact, she is not even listed in the passenger manifest, and no one remembers having seen her. The plot does not make too much sense, but it is engaging.

7 points

Using this Java applet you can make yourself look older, or younger, or Afro-Caribbean, or Asian, or like a Modigliani, Boticelli, or manga painting. Or like El Greco. Sometimes it creates pretty scary mutants instead. Don't take it personal.

The critics' quotes on the cover compare Mo Hayder to Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs). At the very least her psychopaths are equally repulsive, and you want to make sure your stomach can handle the grisly things contained in these pages.

Grey, a physically and mentally scarred young British woman comes to Japan to meet a Chinese guest professor at Tokyo University, who she believes possesses a film documenting the horrors committed by the Japanese army in Nanking 1937. Her story is interspersed by chapters from the professor's diary of that period, and a few flashbacks into her own past. Most of the novel is a rather slow read, seems to rely on some rather big coincidences, and you cannot really feel involved with the characters before their background and motivation is revealed. Near the end though, the pace picks up, the puzzle pieces fall into place, you get to know why Grey is so obsessed with the horrible details of the Nanking Massacre, you get to see the film, and as with any serious thriller, you wish that you had not.

This selection of (mostly) German short movies shown at Fantastic Theater in Yurakucho is part of the Deutschlandjahr series of events, and has been put together by Andreas Heidenreich, program director for the Open Air Filmfest Weiterstadt, who was friendly enough to notify the resident Filmkreis alumni (Jochen and me) about the screenings and arrange free entry for them. All films had been presented at Weiterstadt (the Woodstock of short films), did not have dialogue (and hence did not need subtitles) and were shown as DVD projections.

Kitty returned tonight from a weekend at the animal hospital, where she had her sterilisation. It order to prevent her from ripping through the bandages over her shaved belly, she has to wear a protective plastic collar. She now walks mostly backwards, which is really a strange sight to behold, and occasionally rams her shoulder into walls, door, tables, or furniture in an attempt to get rid of it.

Update: Half an hour later. We took off the collar and stuck Kitty into a knee-warmer that tightly fits over the bandages and that she hopefully cannot pry off.