Operating Systems

I am an OS enthusiast.  That means while I might be partial to one or two operating systems over others, I see the beauty and elegance in every operating system and enjoy them all.

At home we own all Apple products and Mac OS X is the primary operating system.  At work I use Windows XP and RedHat for development.  In the past I have used OS/2 as well.  My FAVORITE operating systems are VAX/VMS (OpenVMS these days) and BeOS. 

VMS is a mainframe operating system, really, but the DEC Vice President of VMS many years ago is the same person who founded the "Windows NT" operating system group at Microsoft.  While NT/XP/Vista is its own OS, you can understand that it shares some features with my old favorite VMS.  Windows NT is, in effect, VMS for the personal computer.

BeOS was an OS written from scratch by Be, inc. initially to show off their hardware.  The Operating System itself became more popular than the hardware but due to competition with Microsoft and bad executive decisions, Be, inc. went away and the BeOS has languished for years.  There IS a project called Haiku that seeks to faithfully reproduce the BeOS as open source software.  It is in an Alpha state and every BeOS user in the world is on the edge of their seat in the hopes that THIS year a Beta version will be released.  If that comes to pass, Mac OS X will no longer be my primary operating system.

The forums and web logs out in cyberspace are chock full of articles denouncing various operating systems for various reasons.  The biggest target over the past year has been Windows Vista.  I recently found this article on OSNews.com (a site I frequent).  It is an excellent article and I recommend that anyone who has fallen into the trap of repeating the same, tired Vista complaints read it.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Politics and Artwork

A fellow dA-er recently created several posters for a college class (in Greece) depicting how many foreign people/nations view the USA. Apparently she caught some flack for it and posted a note explaining the project and assuaging people by noting that it is our government and not the people that the posters depict, etc.

She received strong support on the other spectrum as well because freedom of expression, freedom of speech, free exchange of ideas, etc. are all very important and should always be upheld and encouraged. These are the engines of (hopefully positive) social change.

It is always interesting to see the reaction people have when political or religious statements are made through the wonderfully communicative method of visual art.

Tattoos and Tarantulas

Finally got my tattoo!

My tattoo is of a Mexican Red Knee Tarantula and it is positioned on my right shoulder.  The artist did a fantastic job with the detail, color and shading.  It is, however, still in the painful healing process.

I have added 4 new Tarantulas and a Scorpion to my collection of beasties.  I had to beg my wife to let me keep the scorpion (she really does not like them).  I won a Salmon Pink Birdeater sling in a raffle.  Real cute one with attitude.  I purchased an Ornamental Indian Tarantula (a pokie), a Trinidad Chevron Tarantula, a Curly Hair Tarantula and an OBT (Orange Baboon Tarantula, or Orange Bitey Thing).

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Busy Times

Last week was the ATS Conference, this week (and next) is work back East.

The conference was a blast. Found tons of cool invertebrates, only kept one: a Diplocentrus scorpion. She is SO CUTE, like a miniature emperor. I also won a Salmon Pink Birdeater sling in a raffle, and purchased a Trinidad Chevron and ... drum roll ... my FIRST POKIE!

Yes, I bought a regalis and she is gorgeous. I had quite a time getting her into her new cage, it was very amusing. My wife made me do it outside while she watched behind the sliding glass doors. Everytime the pokie (haven't named her yet) zipped in, then out of her cage my wife jumped and screamed. It was very amusing. I was laughing too. I would like to note that despite her zipping about (I understand the reference to teleporting now) she never once acted aggressively.

The Trinidad Chevron (a beautiful, olive green arboreal Tarantula) acted a bit defensively at the conference but once she was out of her container she was nice enough. She was not defensive at all moving her into her new cage. She dutifully marched out of the old into the new.

I will take some pictures for my gallery next week or the week after. But I am still excited about owning a pokie. It was a big step for me.

Sensationalism in Science

Today I was reminded about what is wrong with science:  Sensationalism.  I understand that magazines geared toward the lay person are trying to sell subscriptions and keep science interesting, but it also damages the very nature of what science should be.

The particular article that caught my eye was titled "What would Earth look like to alien astronomers?"  I thought, "well this sounds interesting."  Fortunately this particular article did not waste too much of my time because it noted in the very second sentence that pictures taken by an Earth probe show the Earth as it *might* appear to aliens who had "telescopes far more powerful than our own."

This sort of sensationalist reporting is rampant in science.  The article itself was not a bad one, but the fact that they provide a title that really has nothing to do with the underlying science is irritating and misleading.

The title, by the way, should have been "Telescopic filters could help map extrasolar planetary surfaces."

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Development woes

Coding on VMS was a wonderful experience.  Writing simple utilities was as easy as pie.

Not so on UNIX-like systems.  For example, I wrote a program that I called "to" on VMS.  It was sort of like a super-duper "chdir" on UNIX.  It had short term memory (remembered the last couple places you defaulted to) and long term memory (you could create aliases on the fly, shortcuts).  When you said "$to disk:[dir]" you were there.  You could add aliases like "$to add home sys$login" and from then on you could say "$to home" to get there.

In UNIX every program runs in its own process space (as it did in VMS) but does not have direct access to the environment variables of the shell from which the application was executed, at least not in a simple, callable method that I have yet to find.

I really want to write my own "to" program for mac os x, since I do a lot of bopping around via terminal.  It would be nice to have it contained in an app with a little SQLite db instead of creating a billion bash aliases.

Oh well.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Just a quickie about Flock

I've blogged about it before but I just wanted to spout the good news that Flock 2 beta 1 is out!

Flock 2 is based on Firefox 3.0.  Very very very much improved browsing experience.  Still in beta but it is working well for me so far.

Blogged with the Flock Browser