Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the lovely and talented folkmew!! Have a great one!

Giving one, getting one!

The One Laptop per Child Give one, get one program just started, and will end on November 26. I've ordered mine -- it's not often that you can donate to a worthy cause and get the world's most advanced educational computer system for your kids as a premium.

Not that I expect my kids to be particularly interested. MINE!!

Facehugger: 5th night

Slept much better last night: woke up, but went back to sleep. Turning the machine off for a few minutes seems to reset it so that I'm not fighting the mask leakage. Or something -- I'm not all that alert at two or three in the morning. Of course, the fact that I was falling-over sleepy must have helped.

Got up with the alarm at 6:30 feeling as though I could have used another hour's sleep, but basically OK. Need to see what my choices are for masks and pillows; I'll find out more at my appointment on Wednesday.

Blast from the past

Multics

Overview

Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was a mainframe timesharing operating system that began at MIT as a research project in 1965. It was an important influence on operating system development.
History of Multics

The plan for Multics was presented to the 1965 Fall Joint Computer Conference in a series of six papers. It was a joint project with M.I.T., General Electric, and Bell Labs. Bell Labs dropped out in 1969, and in 1970 GE's computer business, including Multics, was taken over by Honeywell (now Bull).

MIT's Multics research began in 1964, led by Professor Fernando J. Corbató at MIT Project MAC, which later became the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and then Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Starting in 1969, Multics was provided as a campus-wide information service by the MIT Information Processing Services organization, serving thousands of academic and administrative users.

Multics was conceived as a general purpose time-sharing utility. It would be a commercial product for GE, which sold time-sharing services. It became a GE and then Honeywell product. About 85 sites ran Multics. However, it had a powerful impact in the computer field, due to its many novel and valuable ideas.

Since it was designed to be a utility, such as electricity and telephone services, it had numerous features to provide high availability and security. Both the hardware and software were highly modular so that the system could grow in size by adding more of the appropriate resource even while the service was running. Since services were shared by users who might not trust each other, security was a major feature with file sharing provided at the file level via access controls. For more information, see: Wikipedia's Multics: Novel Ideas

LCS research on Multics ended in the late 1970s, and Bull ended Multics development in 1985. MIT shut down its Multics service in 1988. The last Multics system was deactivated in 2000.

Multics Source and Documentation

In order to preserve the ideas and innovations that made Multics so important in the development of computer systems, Bull HN has provided the source code for the final Multics release, MR 12.5 of November 1992 to MIT. It is a generous contribution to computer science knowledge and is provided for academic purposes. Additionally, we intend this site to become a repository for many papers and documents that were created during the Multics development as a complement to the other Multics sites.

Multics Source and Listings

That last link says it all. There are many ideas in Multics that are still being re-invented incorrectly today. If you have any interest at all in the architecture and history of computer systems, go read it.

Google's phone SDK is available for download

Android Apps are written in Java, so it comes with an Eclipse plug-in and a phone emulator to run it on.

(From Engadget, who've collected a bunch of screenshots and videos.)

Walkies

(Cross-posted to healthy_fen and mdlbear.)

The weather was cool and cloudy at lunchtime -- perfect for walking. The usual route to the pond via the back hill. I thought I was at my usual pace, but may well have been going a little faster because my heart-rate stayed up even on the downhill segments. In any case it came to an abrupt slowdown when I got some rather painful leg cramps. Promptly stretching the calf muscle in question (the right leg) seems to have kept it from staying knotted up, but it sure hurt. Several times. It seemed to want to tighten up when I got back to work and stopped walking, so I did a little more slow, careful walking indoors until it seemed to stabilize. I was still getting twinges a couple of hours later. Flexoril tonight.

Stats: time: time: 49:44; avg: 128; max: 154.