Interesting sites (by alaric)

I came across:

Guide to Zone 6 by Quin Parker on Haddock.

This guy's decided to go to every station in Zone 6 and write a little review on each. They're quite funny.

Then following random links from there, I wandered to:

Cinnamon Thoughts - Colorful Optical Illusion which is a nice visual trick.

NetBSD/cute: kitten(4) (by alaric)

Well, the latest snapshot of NetBSD/cute now supports the kitten(4) driver.

I tried to get a screenshot of kitten running with my two black and white devices, but while I was preparing it, I ran into a resource conflict with the existing baby(4) driver:

I managed to jury-rig a bus isolation mechanism, however:

Motorway Cow Bridge (by alaric)

Well, I've just ported my nice image upload to blog script to run from a Web form (rather than a script on my machine that uploads via SCP), so that Sarah can use it too (and I can use it from random locations).

As a test of it, here's some pictures of a strange phenomenon we often see when going to pick Jean up from nursery - at about 5:30pm each day, Junction 11 of the M5 is visited by a parade of cows (you have to look closely to see them - I didn't want to crop the images, so you get the full context):

Hobby OS projects (by alaric)

There are a lot of hobby OS projects out there. The Wikipedia article barely scratches the surface; I've come across projects to build Lisp-based OSes, 32-bit multitasking extensions to DOS, you name it.

Lots of people decide they want to write an OS. They look at a world dominated by Windows, with open source UNIX clones and MacOS bringing up the rear, and think: "I can do better". And they usual don't get too far. Even if you do write a full operating system, able to utilise a wide range of hardware and with all the applications home and business users need, you'll still have a hard time getting people to use it - because it's unfamiliar.

I'm proud to say that I, too, am writing my own OS. Read more »

Of Cats and Kittens (by sarah)

We have been carrying one kitten with us when we go and feed Babaras cats to try and get everybody used to the new situation. However last night Tim followed me into the Bakery, so I went and got a kitten to see how he would react to them - it was H the less agressive of the two. To mine and Als suprise TIm stood there looking a bit worried and as soon as I put H on the ground, the kitten started hissing and yoewling, back arched, fur raised.

We thought that it would be predent if H won the face off as it is the kittens territory, but we didnt have to intervine - Tim was petrafied of the kitten and as soon as we opened the door he was off like a shot.

Then Betsy, the black shy cat kept coming over and sticking her paw through our letter box - rattling it toget our attention. She kept doing this until we let her into the Mill via the door - she has arthritise and we think she was having problems climbing in the window to get her food.

Tim and Batsy also appeared to be missing Barabara - who they seemed to think we were hiding in the Bakery - this myth was dispelled earlier with heer return from holiday - the endless watering is now at an end 🙂

The kittens house training has dramatically improoved with a) a box over the litter tray to make it resemble the covered one they were used to. b) treats and rewards, plus being taken to the litter tray. c) Cleaning the litter tray out three times a day and d) feeding them specific cat milk so they dont have the squitz anymore!