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…

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…

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 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…

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…