My Little World

I haven't written on this blog thing for a long time. It's because I really don't have much to say to the world.

I visited a bunch of friends this weekend. Just got a car so I decided to see what the rest of the world was up to. If I don't think about work I'd say it was a nice day. I have a lot of things to get done though. Still have trouble staying focused. I was thinking about build a solar powered remote controlled airplane. I would want it to have a camera so I could see the world from a bird's eye view. It would never have to land since it would be solar powered. At night I would have it on autopilot and shut the camera off to save battery power. It would be an awesome programming challenge to keep it afloat for months at a time without crashing. Also can't stop reading about all the lisp dialects. I've collected a bunch of them now. I have clisp, sbcl, cmucl, openlisp, gcl, newlisp, lush, slisp, alisp, utilisp, vslisp, elisp, ecl.

Check it out: http://www.mental-escher.net/cyberpunkradio

I love listening to this stuff for some reason. Most people would find it disturbing but I think that's precisely why I listen to it. I think the world is becoming a cyberpunk's playground. Especially when these $100 laptop's are distributed around the world. When everyone is connected to the net all kinds of crazy things are going to happen. We'll have cyber wars and virtual riots. The internet will become the new opium of the masses and people will never leave their rooms because they are trapped in this virtual...paradise maybe?

I especially think it's cool that I can listen to this and update my website and crack password and write code. All on one of the oldest, slowest computers I own. This computer was given to me for free... a 300 MHz carcass of a machine. It's in a cardboard box and the only part I have spent money on is buying a few 1 - 7 GB hard disks so that I can play with various operating systems and hardware. Today for example someone gave me a few 2 GB SCSI hard disks when I bought the SGI O2's. Well he didn't erase them, and one of them still had SUSE Linux 9.1 installed. So I proceeded to use the frankenstein (the computer in a cardboard box) to boot a live CD (DSL Linux) so I could peek inside the file system, save the shadow file on a USB flash drive, and crack the root password. This is being done on my fastest machine, and it's been a few hours. No password yet, but I'm having fun using DSL Linux and I'll probably end up installing it on the hard disk that has SUSE on it. That's only if I don't get the password though. I like customizing an operating system that can adapt to everything from supercomputers to toasters. My favorite is NetBSD, but they don't support all of the hardware I have yet. Mostly graphics cards really.

The 300 MHz pentium II isn't the slowest machine I have here though. I also have a 100 MHz Pentium with I believe 100 MB of memory. It's about as tiny a system and you could probably get Linux or BSD on and still surf the web, chat, and write programs for. The smallest memory footprint I've tinkered with is 64 MB on a 180 MHz SGI O2. I believe that little box has a 2 GB SCSI hard disk. The unfortunately I can't get a GUI on that box with NetBSD. Not yet at least. The ultimate goal would be to create a box using the 60 MHz Pentium I have at home, with only 8 MB of memory. The most bloated OS that box every had was Windows 95. Windows 95 had it swapping memory all the time. Plus that box only has a meager 500 MB hard disk. If I wanted a GUI with my Unix on that box I would probably have to use svgalib and make a custom window manager.

Well I've rambled enough about my obsession. Good night cyberspace.

Yeah it would seem strange to most with all the free webspace that is available for people these days. But I decided to pay the one time fee of $36 to this server so that I could have access to all the programming languages they have. Yes now with my ARPA membership here on SDF I have 600 MB of disk space availble for software development and rambling on this blog. I was hoping I'd have access to their lisp machine but it seems I have to be an uber patron to get access to that. That means paying $36 dollars every year. I'll wait until I use the system a little more often than I do now.

So yeah, now I can play with newlisp on yet another machine. This time an Alpha server.