Sad passing of Dennis Ritchie

Saw a tweet earlier on today and it caught my eye.

Then learnt that the creator of the C programming language and also Unix, passed away over this weekend.

RIP Dennis Ritchie.

On a more serious note, need to get this off my chest, and no dis-respect either in this regard to Apple’s Steve Jobs who also passed away last week, but…and this is what I find absolutely gob-smacked about, very little was mentioned of Dennis Ritchie (dmr). The twitter-sphere has been going on about Steve Jobs for the last week or so. The cruel twists of fate has been made… when you read on and realize…

But what the twitterers fail to grasp the concept and realization, there would have been no C language nor Unix for that matter, no applications/games that was possible in the 1980′s and 1990′s either, and no operating systems either.

When you think about it for a moment, the influx of different designs of operating systems was programmed in C, combined with assembler programming language.

Nor would the advancements  in chip design have been achieved, which is a catch-22 in this regard, some kind of a package to be able to program the logic flow of chips etc. Hell, even, there would be no mobiles/smartphones, no Android, no Apple OS….

Even in the telecommunications sector, without C, there would have been no improvements somewhat in the arena of phone switching etc, nor even a operating system to run, in the sense of to manage the telecommunications infrastructure either.

There would have been no internet (TCP/IP protocols which was formed on the backbone of the C programming language), or even would DARPA have existed only for that once when the gates to the internet world was opened up? What about web pages, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, the things that we take for granted now today in this electronic age where communication is even more emphasized.

And it was not Steve Jobs that is a legend either, for that matter, sure he pushed and raised the bar for Apple has become of today. No dis-respect to him either, without him, certainly, smartphones would not have been made possible in terms of features and raising of the bar for standards across the board.

The real legend was the quiet man who hacked away and coined the biggest revolution in his hands alongside with Brian Kernighan that totally changed the IT world forever.

You may object and say hang on… but I digress, sure it sounds a little one sided, but have you not thought of what the world would be like today without the Unix, C today.

What would have become if dmr did not pioneer  C, or Unix. What would the IT landscape be like without it, would Apple have existed, would Microsoft have existed, internet, tcp/ip protocols, Windows, you name it…

So for all people out there, I ask you to re-tweet a simple tweet of your liking to salute dmr for he totally changed and revolutionized the IT landscape right back in the late  1960′s/early 1970′s.

From me, who was a self-taught C programmer, and Linux fanatic, I salute you dmr, you’re the real legend!

Windows-free zone!

Ha! Been wanting to say this for a while!

I am now a Windows free zone – no Windows systems lying around.

Goodbye Windows

Goodbye Slackware – yes, I know, I know, was a long time fan of Slackware ever since I  acquired Walnut Creek CDROM set with kernel 1.2.13 ..

And now I welcome in open arms….(drum roll please)

Arch Linux (Ba-dum-tish!)

Well, what can I say, its a rolling release distro… put simply, updates come out and all dependencies taken care of The simple chant of the command sudo pacman -Syyu and pulls down the latest updates from the Arch Linux’s repository. Now, I have currently a testing repository selected – heh, I like to be on the bleeding edge, and so far, extremely impressive and fast!

Now for you winblows (l)users xD try shutting down and reboot back, time it, now, there’s a catch with this challenge – no SSD disks please.

Personally, I can go from Gnome 3.2 desktop to reboot and back again in under 1 minute. There’s no delay, its instant boot up – well, a lot faster than winblows that’s for sure

Yes, Gnome 3.2… Its actually quite a neat GUI system, sure there are rough edges that need smoothing out but its way better than Gnome 3.0, which caused ire among the Linux users… Will blog about that later on

And you know something, it feels good to have a non-windows system running as there’s no associated stress and frustration with applications freezing or locking up due to bloated registry size and flaky drivers.

Everything works as it is out of the box with Arch.

Windows free Zone!

Ha! Been wanting to say this for a while!

I am now a Windows free zone – no Windows systems lying around.

Goodbye Windows

Goodbye Slackware

And now I welcome in open arms….(drum roll please)

Arch Linux (Ba-dum-tish!)

Will blog about that shortly

Stay tuned!!

CEO of SCO fired

Rejoice! Remember the legal battle of SCO versus Novell and IBM regarding Unix and Linux?  SCO’s CEO Darl McBride, who banged the drums about intellectual property rights and that SCO owned Unix and threatened every Linux user to pay a IP fee to SCO?

How it happened? When Novell, sold the Unix trademarks and assets to SCO, in a deal in which SCO presumed they owned the copyrights to the Unix code. Novell stepped in and stated that in fact they owned the copyrights, in turn SCO sued Novell for slander and breaches of the deal governing Unix and the copyrights, so there was two corporate giants, IBM and Novell in one corner and SCO in the other, hammering each other over who owns the copyright.

In fact, SCO did not own the copyright. Twice by the courts over attempting to prove that SCO owns the copyright, it was found in Novell’s favour, that twice, the judge in the case, found that Novell still owns the copyright. And IBM who have sat patiently throughout the whole proceedings for 6 years, along with Novell appears to have won the case!

Right now, SCO have gone bust and Darl McBride, whom was every Linux user’s public enemy number one, is now being given the boot! Yet again, SCO are now scrounging around to raise cash even though they filed for bankruptcy and under Chapter 11…it will be interesting to see if and when, SCO turns around and sue Darl for getting themselves into a very very costly state of affairs which have costed the company so much money to try and win the case…

The whole thing was extremely messy, and brought about a cloud of fear in using Linux at the time,  for a quick rundown on how it all started, mouse over to theregister.co.uk‘s article about it…

Linux Rocks…

Quite literally it does rock indeed, the cradle that is…using only 4 lines of shell script, a linux geek actually managed to make his baby rocker rock with a piece of string and a linux box (of course indeed!)…that entry made me smile at such ingenuity…check out the youtube video on that site to see how it works visit this link (labnol.org) or more details. Incidentally, it is Ubuntu distro that is used. One word to describe this… AWESOME!!!

Unix turns 40 today…

Incredible isn’t it…Unix, of all flavours, celebrates it’s big 4-0 birthday today…All hail Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson for their creation! Hail Unix, the King of the OS! Here’s the link that explores all about how it began.

Also, here is another link showing the different flavours of Unix’s and their time-lines.

I refuse to put in a correct grammar for the plural of Unix, i.e. Unices… which doesn’t feel right…I mean, it shouldn’t apply should it?

Unix Cheat sheets…

There’s an interesting section of cheat sheets on this blog by Scott Klarr. Handy if you want a quick brush up or recap! Cheers Scott!

Also, check out another site listing the top 10 Best Cheat Sheets for Linux/Unix here.

Unix Hater’s Guide

I stumbled across this link and downloaded the PDF of the above title. Very enjoyable and still have not finished it, it makes me love Unix even more…

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf