More Bioinformatics

Unix version 0 was written in 1963 by Ken Thompson, on a PDP-7.  Recently, the source code code Unix V0 has been discovered, and you can read it here, as pdf scans of printouts.  You can read about the discovery, and the effort to boot Unix V0 on a real PDP-7 here.  The project home…

In general, I install QEMU on my Macbook using MacPorts.  However I recently had a need to get the tip of the QEMU development tree. Getting the QEMU source tree is trivial: git clone git://git.qemu-project.org/qemu.git I needed an updated version of dtc: git submodule update –init dtc The build instructions from the README are: mkdir…

I’ve been reading lots of interesting information about iTunes and IOS, so I thought I would investigate, just what is in an iTunes backup.  Typically, on OS X, you can find your iTunes backup here, under the appropriate OS X user profile: /Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup When you look at the backup, it’s a giant list of…

Every IT geek is, to some degree, fascinated with the Apollo program which put a human on the moon for the first time.  Naturally, there is also curiosity about the computers on the Apollo moon lander, and the software that ran on them.  The source code that went to the moon is available now, and…

A typical Minecraft world, which is made of voxels, is 128 blocks high and 2048 blocks wide and deep, for a total volume of 536,870,912 blocks. We’ll call it 500 million. So now that we have LLM’s like Claude, we can get some advice on how to build bigger worlds, which I did. I asked…

I’ve recently become interested in how the i386 boot loader works.  There is an excellent example of a boot loader here, and another here.  Some simple protected-mode code which implements a kernel capable of writing a line of text, is here.  FemtoOS, is the culmination of combining code from all those, and building a simple…