hubertf's NetBSD Blog
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[20100413] Unixes of the world unite!
I've stumbled about this presentation by Unix (co)pioneer Robert Pike, which he gave in 2001. Some hilights:

  • ``What is UnixTM?

    [...] Those operating systems derived from or inspired by the Research Unix systems of the 1970.

    Includes [...] NetBSD [...] and others.''

  • ``1. What is the best thing about Unix?
    A: The community.

    2. What is the worst thing about Unix? A: That there are so many communities.''

Read the whole presentation for an overview of the things that Unix got right and wrong. Definitely worth reading!

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[20090205] Unix time 1234567890 on Saturday, Feb 14th, 2009
I've found this gem via Symlink (great guys, great German language geek site - check it out!): on saturday Feb 14th 2009 it's not only valentine's day, but the Unix time will switch to the 1234567890 seconds since the epoche, too!

The exact time depends on your timezone, you can use the date(1) command to find it out for your and your friends' time zone, too:

% date -r 1234567890
Sa 14 Feb 2009 00:31:30 CET
% 
% env TZ=US/Eastern date -r 1234567890
Fr 13 Feb 2009 18:31:30 EST
%
% env TZ=US/Pacific date -r 1234567890
Fr 13 Feb 2009 15:31:30 PST 

Oh and btw, for those not following recent development in NetBSD: The overflow of the Unix time in 2038 due to integer overflow in time_t won't affect NetBSD any more, as time_t was moved to a 64bit data type a few weeks ago.

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[20071113] MIT releases the sources of MULTICS
This blog posting from Jos Kirps's Popular Science and Technology Blog scrolled by on #NetBSD tonight: MIT releases the sources of MULTICS, the father of UNIX!

``This is extraordinary news for all nerds, computer scientists and the Open Source community: the source code of the MULTICS operating system (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), the father of UNIX and all modern OSes, has finally been opened.

Multics was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system started in 1964 and introduced a large number of new concepts, including dynamic linking and a hierarchical file system. It was extremely powerful, and UNIX can in fact be considered to be a "simplified" successor to MULTICS (the name "Unix" is itself a hack on "Multics"). The last running Multics installation was shut down on October 31, 2000. ''

More information is available at http://web.mit.edu/multics-history, including an overview of the system, its history, and most important, the Multics source code and documentation.

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[20070425] Things you didn't know about dd(1)
... i guess: I tried to find a way on how to create a 10MB disk image with dd(1) but found that the size specifiers for bs= are not really portable, at least as long as you don't want to give full (big) numbers. NetBSD has 'm' as size multiplier, Linux has 'M', and the Single Unix Specification has no opinion on the topic. Doh.

But reading the SUSv3 dd(1) page again and a bit closer, I found that you can use the following for "bs=" (and some others): ``Two or more positive decimal numbers (with or without k or b) separated by x, specifying the product of the indicated values''

I.e. that the following command just does the right thing in a portable, standard conforming way:

dd if=/dev/zero bs=10x1024x1024 count=1 of=empty

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[20060411] Ever hear of Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike?
This is about one of my all-time favourite books: get out your copy of "The UNIX Programming Environment", and read this. :-)

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[20050615] Un*x written in JavaScript
Funny: `` JS/UIX is an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers, written entirely in JavaScript (no plug-ins used). It comprises a virtual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and keyboard-mapping. ''

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[20050326] Unix quickies
Not directly related to NetBSD, this collection of Unix tips & tricks may still be interesting for a good reading not only to beginners. It covers topics like general shell hacking, gdb, emacs, CVS, Subversion, Postgresql, as well as a bunch od MacOS(?) specific topics. Check it out!

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[20040528] Ancient Unix Documents
Today I found a funny posting on comp.unix.internals with links to some ancient Unix documents, see Lew Pitcher's posting.

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Disclaimer: All opinion expressed here is purely my own. No responsibility is taken for anything.

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Copyright (c) Hubert Feyrer