Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of UNIX, has passed away. The work he has done was tremendous: devising a powerful operating system that was still understandable to single humans. The Unices of today have nothing in common with that. Those monsters have lost the spirit, but carry on the memory. Maybe this confusion of the simple, old, easily hackable UNIX with modern multi-million lines-of-code monolithic, bug-ridden, unsalvageable Unix-impostors was at the heart of the Unix-Haters handbook (with its Unix barf bag); and what could be more fitting to quote Dennis Ritchie’s anti-foreword to that book:

His one deed that affects me personally: he brought a full UNIX onto the laptop, and it just works. A full UNIX with the power of the command line, if needed; and with a well-integrated GUI. Even the MacOS X of 2001 was far ahead of today’s Linux in this aspect. And this was Steve Jobs’ doing. It’s astonishing to look back on Openstep and to realize, how far ahead it was of today’s monster toolkits.

HP Names Meg Whitman President and Chief Executive Officer: Ray Lane appointed executive chairman; Léo Apotheker steps down as president, chief executive officer and director. Dear HP board: Are you nuts?!? Seriously: ARE YOU NUTS?!?

Some jokes write themselves …

The funny thing about Structured Procrastination: you get a lot of things done, but not the stuff you set out to do.

Und weißt du, wie die eine königliche Hochzeit in Deutschland nennen? Die nennen sie nicht eine königliche Hochzeit? Nein Mann, die haben das metrische System, die wissen gar nicht, was ein König ist. Wie nennen die sie? Die nennen sie «Royale Hochzeit». Royale Hochzeit? So ist es!

Fifty years ago, mankind opened the door to the stars. What have you done today?

Two types of people are happy about the earthquake in Japan: anti-nuclear crusaders; and Gaddafi and his minions.

I’ve quit Twitter. Their big fuck you to independent developers really angers me, so I’m voting with my feet. I’m currently mass-deleting all my tweets. Apparently, this takes some time, Twitter isn’t known for being fast. @megalonyx is now an empty place-holder, a reminder of the old days, when people were still allowed to develop apps for Twitter without being told what those apps could do and had to look like.

We’ve always been at war with Libya. I wonder what the French dwarf is trying to compensate. Napoleon at least had the decency to accompany his troops.