More Bioinformatics

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…

Recently I had reason to get interested in process modelling.  Ultimately I ended up writing an Antlr4 grammar for Modelica (here), but in the mean time I came up with SML (Simple Modeling Language).  The Antlr4 grammar is sml.g4. The characteristics I wanted in my own modeling languages were: Ability to define models as text files…

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…

I’ve bee hacking away trying to set up Crochet-BSD to build boot images for Wandboard.  Wandboard uses Cortex A9 processor, so it’s ARM.  The linux distros for it use U-Boot, so that seemed like a likely place to start for FreeBSD. Looking at the Wandboard Wiki, there is an article on U-Boot which explains how…

Back in the dark ages (the 1980’s), people like myself coded on Apple][ computers.  If you were good you coded in Applesoft BASIC or Integer BASIC. If you were really geeky you coded in Assembly language on the 6502 processor.  The Apple][ OS was coded in assembly language, so if you really wanted to understand what…

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…