unix

Jurassic Unix ?

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Ahh finally a little bit of rest. Been watching Jurassic Park one of my favorite movies you could say. Man it’s been a long time since I have gotten to see it. I still remember when it came out like it was yesterday, my GOD Mother said I shouldn’t see it because of the violence and gore or some thing (I didn’t notice any). I couldn’t have been older then 5 or 6 at the time. I don’t really consider JP violent or any thing but then again movies like Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and Aliens were all movies I grew up with. Yeah so what if I was a weird kid 😛

I’ve always loved Dinosaurs so I guess it’s no wonder I love the Jurassic Park films, especially part one. It’s a shame really, they took every possible precaution and I’m sure their must have been multiply redundant power supplies… But they only thing they failed to consider was betrayal from the inside.. Fat stooge couldn’t even drive would a darn and brought down the parks systems with a command hidden within a system of over 2 million lines of code (that’s big).

What shocked me, is I wondered when watching it tonight what kind of computers they were using, couldn’t tell from the camera shots of the monitors. But towards the end when the girl Lex is trying to enable the door-locks while Grant and Ellie hold off the Raptor. When she sits at the computer:

“It’s a UNIX system, I know this..”

So I guess it is probable that Jurassic Park was supposed to have been powered by Unix workstations, interestingly for some thing that started life in the 1970’s Unix lives on in a number of incarnations today, including FreeBSD 🙂

I remember thinking too, that the graphical file browser Lex uses in the movie is actually similar to a program I’ve seen before in the real world. The difference is, the real one looks a lot better graphically then the one in Jurassic Park but I doubt it has as many features as the movies FX hehe. But hey, the movie was made in the early 90’s for a largely Computer unaware audience :

Ahh, now to slither up some code for the night.

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Wow… just like when I’m sleepy I find a comment like this as I read lol

2230:         /*
2231:          * If the new process paused because it was
2232:          * swapped out, set the stack level to the last call
2233:          * to savu(u_ssav).  This means that the return
2234:          * which is executed immediately after the call to aretu
2235:          * actually returns from the last routine which did
2236:          * the savu.
2237:          *
2238:          * You are not expected to understand this.
2239:          */
2240:         if(rp->p_flag&SSWAP) {
2241:                 rp->p_flag =& ~SSWAP;
2242:                 aretu(u.u_ssav);
2243:         }

am I to young ?

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When I first read this, I figured a call to panic() would likely bring down the system or set it in motion to abort before the frag explodes . Maaaybe I’ve just lived in a world where the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD, a Microsoft copyright) is prevelent a little to long. The idea that it calls update(“which I have yet to disect”), prints an error message and calls the kernels idle() loop times infinty is neat. Rather then bringing the system to a screeching halt right then and there. At first glance I would’ve expected it to take down the system right bam’n’slam now.

/*
 * Panic is called on unresolvable
 * fatal errors.
 * It syncs, prints "panic: mesg" and
 * then loops.
 */
panic(s)
char *s;
{
        panicstr = s;
        update();
        printf("panic: %sn", s);
        for(;;)
                idle();
}

Of course from the fine book for study. It seems the only way out of a panic() attack is a restart any way, but its not an instant ‘crash, have a nice foo&ing day, rebooting now sucker’ kind of thing. Which interestingly a lot of times my Windows machines have gone down, *cough*. Its kind of been to the BSOD what the expression ‘Do not pass go, do not collect $200’ is to monopoly. It dies, you get an error, but it kills itself before you get to read it. Then tells you it was *probably* a driver issue lol.

Note that the above code snippet is probably under the this license.

It is from UNIX Version 6 as viewed from here. File is /usr/src/sys/kern/prf.c

Temptational joke

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Three Distros for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Steve Ballmer on his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the $hadow$ lie.
One distro to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One distro to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Redmond where the $hadow$ lie.

There can only be one distro and its MicrosoftSUSE !

Sorrry, I couldn’t resist doing that just for the laughs !!!

UNIX Rules & DOS Drools !

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In my cousre of trying to brush up on DOS CLI work I’ve come to a cacussion. Its a quick and dirty product that must have been written very fast or half hazardly. Because UNIX makes it look like a moronic idiot with 10bytes of RAM ! I just… can’t stand DOS give me a decent Unix any day… A real operating system.