dragonquest

I think Manning/NoStarch/Pragmatic generally have good quality books, but O'Reilly is not too far behind. They just publish a lot many books, so some are bound to be mediocre and some of them absolute gems.

I really like the wiby.me version of this. It displays results only from early web style pages; a great throwback to an era where not everything was "corporate".

LWN.net (mentioned elsewhere on the thread) is quite good for finding FOSS related content.

This is a massive achievement. Being able to run a modern browser and an Office Suite makes it a viable desktop alternative in the coming future. I'm happy to see variety in the desktop OS space once again!

Cleartrip was indeed written in Common Lisp but moved to Java some years ago.

Surely, not SuSe. Novell didn't really handle that well.

A lot of Perl before Java came along.

IIRC I think the name is because they allow a lot of content that other hosts may shy away from.

Learning Lisp, more specifically Scheme. I became curious about it after reading ESR's "How to Become a Hacker". When homoiconicity and other Lisp goodies gradually permeated my brain, the computing world seemed different.

I saw every config file differently, trying to see how the lines between config and code blurred. Method abstractions and bottom up design became much easier. I appreciated all those prefix-evaluation assignments in college. I found a new respect for languages with good REPL's. And finally, it opened my eyes to computing history, where I discovered newer is not always better. The elders of old really got many things right.

This is why you should always create something, even if you think it will never be accepted by a large audience. It is worth it for the journey itself.

Reading this post made me wish I had spent more time with 'gcj'. Though in all honesty I know I gave up on it because I didn't want to go the tougher way - the the normal JDK was just there. Creation is beautiful, and its ending bittersweet for the creator and the witnesses.