Just noticed in my email that Nine Inch Nails‘ “The Slip” is now available as a real CD. It’s been available for free since May 5th I believe, and well worth the download time (or the purchase price, to be honest). There’s also a tour EP for free download as well.

Also available is the music from Sim City 3000 and Sim City 4: Rush Hour. If you haven’t played the games the Sim City 3000 one is a basically jazzy style soundtrack, quite mellow laidback and jaunty. I suspect SC4 is the same but as I can’t play it at the moment I don’t know (no computer I own that currently works will run it and the download hasn’t finished yet…)

Anyway, must dash. Download and enjoy!

Sorry for being late this week. A plethora of problems, networks that not work, kaput hardware and self-corrupting operating systems seem to have been bugging me this last week. So, a bit late, but here we are:

Professor Andrew S Tanenbaum has had a significant impact on the world of operating systems as we know it today. In order to teach operating systems, he wrote his own clone of Unix, using the most modern design techniques he could think of. (He called it Minix, and that’ll be my OS for next Thursday). This OS in turn was used by a student to start a hobby project. That hobby project became known as Linux.

What he went on to do next is potentially far more interesting and exciting than that.

The main idea of Amoeba will be familiar to you if you run any of the BOINC projects like Seti@Home. The idea is to turn multiple, inexpensive computers into one single transparent system. Imagine it this way - add a hundred thousand Commodore 64s together and you get Deep Thought.

People have been playing around with distributed programming like this for ages - witness the language Occam, for example - but this didn’t really hold enough scope for the Amoeba system. So they designed and wrote their own programming language - Orca (which I’ll talk about later in the week) - designed to make this task easy (well, easier than in Occam anyway).

It’s basically a research OS (which for those of us not researching parallel operating systems essentially means nobody’s ported Firefox to it yet), although the interface is a standard X window interface (X11R6, basically). However it can be used with a wide variety of POSIX based utilities through a library called Ajax (POSIX, if you’re not aware, is the name of the ISO standard for the behaviour of Unix-like operating systems).

The Amoeba site hasn’t been updated in a while, so if you happen to have a few old 486 machines lying around it might be fun to play with. It’s another one on my to-look-at list, so if I make any progress I’ll let you all know…

The new search engine Cuil looks great. It’s created by a number of ex-Google engineers, and returns search results in kind of a more newspaper style.

It’s intriguing that it seems to search as many, or more, pages than Google already. It looks rather cute, and even has its own “add to firefox” plugin (in Firefox 3, drop down the list of search engines and at the bottom you’ll see “add ‘Cuil’” on the list.)

Did a search on my own name and found what I expected - the British ambassador to Qatar and the editor of Motor Boat Monthly - and it looks pretty clever. I note that esotechnica doesn’t find this blog, but references to it. Well, maybe they’ve still got some crawling left to do, after all.

Well, that’s the view this lunchtime. Back to work…

Accidentally, I’ve discovered another comic gem on the web.

I can’t quite remember how I came across it - because I’ve been reading it for about the last 4 hours, have nearly gone blind, and forgotten to do the Thursday O/S (now that I’m back online after a week of sucky computer problems which include the amazing dead laptop, Windows XP overwriting NTLDR on another computer, a wireless network card that keeps signal for all of 5 seconds and…  okay, deep breath, calm calm…  Okay, I’m better now…)

Anyway, it’s called Dustinland, and if you liked Bill Hicks’ philosophy (and the quote on the front page sums it up nicely), you’ll love this.  There’s elements of Ruben Bolling’s wonderful Tom The Dancing Bug about it, as well, but it’s mainly stand up in a strip, with the occasional Herriman-esque panel full of words too.  Like Tom The Dancing Bug (next time can I say TTDB?) he sometimes does political, sometimes observational, but unlike TTDB (toldja) rarely goes off into surrealistic fancy, preferring to stick with observational humour based around relationships, everyday life, people watching and commenting on what’s happening in the world.

Quick tip: due to the site design, if you’re planning to read the archives, start at the latest and work backwards.  (At least it’s easier than the TTDB archive, although I’m glad that exists at all!)

Yes, okay, I like comics.  User Friendly is the only one I still read on a daily basis*, although at the peak of my habit I used to do Rose is Rose, Robotman, Over The Hedge (round about 1996 I emailed them to say something about a strip, and they emailed back to ask how I thought Hedge humour works in the UK. Well, makes me laugh), Dilbert and about 2 or 3 others whose names escape me as well.

Free OS and free app of the week tomorrow, okay?  Nighty night.

* TTDB and Dustinland are weekly.

Given Linus Torvalds‘ recent quote that the OpenBSD team’s approach to security made them look like a gang of masturbating monkeys, I thought it might be a good time to start up an idea I’ve been considering for a while: operating system of the week.

BSD, in case you don’t already know, was developed at the University of California, Berkeley from 1977 until the mid-90s. It started on the classic DEC PDP-11 as an add on to Sixth Edition Unix, and in its second release added my favourite text editor, good old vi (well, vim’s actually the one I use, but that’s a side issue.)

In June 1994 came the first truly “open” version of BSD: 4.4 BSD-Lite, which contained no code from AT&T, and therefore wasn’t “encumbered” (which was the name of the version that did include AT&T code). A final release - 4.4BSDLite-2 - was made in 1995, and since then, development has continued with various distributions diverging from it since then: DragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD being the most common today (I’ll cover them at a later date).

You can still get hold of 4.4BSD-Lite release 2, however, despite its long being discontinued as a maintained system (well, by the University of California, anyway). So, for your delectation and delight, here is the download link (to Japan):

• ftp://ftp.sra.co.jp/pub/os/4.4BSD-Lite/

I’ve downloaded it myself, and might well be covering running it in a virtual machine at some later date.

For the mean time, enjoy this little look back at the way things used to be.