nikolai bezroukov: portraits of open source pioneers. with a bunch of controversial references (e.g. "the circus midget and the fossilized dinosaur turd" or "a second look at the cathedral and the bazaar").

funny that these portraits start with donald e. knuth. he should be mentioned more often. knuth's books probably taught me more about layout and typography than those of jan tschichold. nevertheless, tschichold is essential knowledge. and a humble dadaist, btw.

april 1998: microsoft buys tex! knuth sells out!

there was a time i was so much "into tex" that i created most of my papers with it. and certainly some pages of the book "an exploration of chaos" when being a trainee at the institute for computer applications at the university of stuttgart. i can hardly believe that i once really did this...

and that reminds me of shaking hands with the author, a person who holds more titles than i could imagine in my wildest parodies: prof. em. dr. dr. h. c. mult. john argyris, f.eng., frs (just to name a few). he also got the golden prince philip medal "in recognition of [...] outstanding contribution to engineering design through the formulation and development of the finite element method of analysis".

as always, i introduced myself with my first name only which was honoured with taunting remarks by the colleagues who planned their careers from the cradle. unfortunately, this did not help them to fulfill their dreams of becoming popular musicians, tv entertainers or creative directors either.