The Martian – A Book Review

O.k. this is a bit out of the ordinary on this blog, but apart computers and networks I’m also interested in spaceflight. Over the weekend I’ve come come across “The Martian” by Andy Weir due to a recommendation of an online ebook store and found it so outstanding that I had to write a few words about it here…

The story is about an astronaut in the near future stranded on Mars after a mission abort has gone horribly wrong and about his quest to survive until he can be picked up. Finally a book about Mars again that is not about astronauts encountering hostile aliens that want to kill them. What stands out is not only the storyline with lots of turns, twists and surprises, but also how closely the story is weaved around NASA’s plans to send humans to Mars and the technology existing and under development. Also, the writing style and the protagonist’s character and humor make this book a page turner. I usually take my time reading books but I went through this in two days (i.e. nights) flat. I just couldn’t put it down, it’s an extraordinary piece of work. 10 thumbs up!

Book Review: Rebel Code

Rebel-code-coverBack in 2001, Glen Moody published the first edition of “Rebel Code”, a book about the early days of Open Source and Free Software in general and about the creation of Linux in particular. It might seem strange to do a book review almost 15 years later but it’s a great historic document telling the story of how things came together in the 1990’s. The first part of the book focuses on the young Linus Torvalds and how the first Linux kernel version made it to the Internet. The second part of the book then looks at how the Linux kernel evolved in the mid 1990’s and its role as the “missing link” in Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation that completed the Free Software world for the first time. The third part of the book then looks at how graphical user interfaces, web browsers and end user applications not only for nerds came to the Linux world at the end of the 1990’s. A great read and I can fully recommend it for those who would like to find out more about open source history and do so from a historic point of view. Both print and e-book editions are (still) available so the book is still easy to get.

While I knew some of the stories, the book puts all of them in context and into a bigger picture. In other words, it made a lot of things a lot clearer for me. I’ve been asking myself a lot why Linux was not part of my university life back in the mid 1990s and the book makes it quite clear as well. I have to admit I’m a GUI sort of computer guy and there simply was no usable graphical user interface for Linux before 1998 (sorry, everything before KDE and GNOME was not usable for anything else than showing xterm windows…). In contrast, Windows 3.1 and later versions were on the market since 1991, which is about the time I bought my first IBM compatible PC. In other words until 1998 there was no incentive for me whatsoever to even consider something other than Windows. After university and my first job in a small company I joined Nortel as a programmer and was given an HP Unix machine for software development development with a really ugly Motiv based GUI. Compared to Windows it was stone age and I thought I actually had an old machine. But I know realize that looking at it from a Unix world point of view it was actually state of the art then. That didn’t really encourage