The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, February 08, 2001

A little diagram of Unix history

This diagram is only a very simplify unix history. There are a lot more unix like systems than those listed in this chart, maybe 10 times more ! Some years ago, every electronic company has it's own unix system. For example, my company was selling an unix, derivated from another one, and those two are not in this chart because there are too small. So this diagram is only the upper part of an iceberg, with a penguin on it ;-).

Unix History

It's simplified. It's also 9 feet in length! Three meters for those of you who are Imperially challenged. It makes a neat poster, although I'm not sure where I can hang a 9 foot poster.


“Spam, spam, spam, spam!”

Wallace said his site is being victimized by a “typo squatter,” a person or company that has registered various misspellings of Web addresses. In Wallace's case, a company called Pointcom.com has registered the name “PassThiOn.com” (missing an “s”) that also launches multiple windows when someone tries to exit the site.

“Usually these are not reputable companies … I'm about to start taking legal action,” Wallace said.

“Spam King” leads new trend in annoying promotions

First reaction: Pot. Kettle. Black.

Second reaction: Ick. He's back.

Third reaction: “I'm in browser pop-up hell!”


Linux Kernel Graphing Project

I downloaded the code to generate a graph of the Linux kernel. The code downloaded is for the 2.4.0 kernel, but I run 2.0.x at home.

So I decided to see if it would work for the 2.0.x kernel. Sure enough, a few tweaks in the makefile to remove some sections that aren't in the 2.0.x kernel and about three hours later, the analysis phase is done (I did this at work were I have some serious horse power). I then generated the postscript files.

I generated the 6x6 display, which consisted of 36 sheets of 8.5" by 11" paper. Each file was approximately 12 megabytes in size.

Oof.

Compressed.

Ouch.

Uncompressed, each file was 53 megabytes in size.

Good God Almighty!

I printed out the first two pages, and at 4'3" by 5'6" it's too small to make out any detail.

I then generated a 9x9 poster, making it 6'4.5" by 8'3" in size, and it's still too small!

Good Lord, how big do I need to make this thing?


Lily The Pink

This is a cute page. Shows what song was #1 the day you were born.

On my birthday, Marvin Gaye's I Heard it Through the Grapevine was the #1 song in the US. The Scaffold's Lily The Pink was the #1 song in the U.K. Who?

Obligatory Picture

[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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