The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Caryn got the day off so we could celebrate my birthday a day early. We plan on going downtown tomorrow. The original plan was to visit Kalamazoo, but I wanted to put that off a little.

I just caught up on my eng 444 homework. I still need to get my 328 homework done. I've got a few things left to do with that. Normally, it would not be a big deal but with my birthday plans its more difficult this weekend. As skullyhead used to say "Its teh suxors".

I posted an entry on my lj blog and I think Jenny might have taken it wrong. Things don't come out right online sometimes.

A certain person on the OS X Server list actually claimed I don't know much about UNIX. At first I had a bit of a Theo reaction in my head. I realized it was funny. I asserted that OS X is not very UNIX-like. At first glance, some people might look at that strangely. Basics like mounting file systems are different. launchd is very different. Apple pushes the GUI. I pointed out these items in my response. I also pointed out that I carefully used UNIX instead of unix. One is an Open Group trademark after all. I used to argue with people that OS X is unix. Then I had to administer an OS X server. Everything people love about Macs is missing in OS X server. Nothing just works. You are even more limited and must drink the kool-aid to get it working perfectly. In UNIX, you can do things almost anyway you want and still get interoperability with different components. Even counting differences between "flavors", its not safe to say that Mac OS X is as unix-like as say Linux. He actually argued that BSD is not UNIX but that OS X is. How on earth does that work out? The userland is from BSD. The reality is that the definition is not clear anymore. It hasn't been since the late 80s.

On a side note, Macs do crash. If you've never seen it in 10.4, it looks like a giant gray power button. That is the Mac equivalent to the blue screen of death. My Mac experienced that today. I had a few apps open and ran out of swap again. It sucks having 1.08GB open at boot up. Mind you, I have 640MB of ram which is the maximum for this iBook model.

This topic came up on slashdot yesterday.  I decided to share some of my experiences starting MidnightBSD. 

I could have written pages on the topic, but I think this is enough. 

I'm having frequent crashes with my iBook now.  I've got 1.08GB of disk space left on boot.  Odd thing is that this time Backup and iChat were the only processes.  Backup was doing iDisk stuff.  I'm not sure its low disk space related as originally thought.  Its getting VERY hot.  The fans are actually kicking in. 

Caryn made me a lovely cake.  My birthday is tomorrow, but we've done most of the celebrating today.  I guess my aunt is throwing a schindig tomorrow. 

I've still got a few things to do yet. 

The more we post tidbits about MidnightBSD future work, the more the FreeBSD project duplicates it.  I just read a post by someone describing a system near identical to ctriv's implementation for mport.  (minus the make package changes)