About 6 months before I graduated from college I was offered a job as an assembler programmer. If I had taken that job then, today I would likely be writing or designing code for operating systems (Windows, linux, etc.), device drivers (graphics or network adapters, printer drivers, etc.), or specialized hardware (mp3 players, cable or satellite set top boxes, robotics, etc.). I have written assembler code for process control type applications and used a bit of assemblier in DOS, but that’s pretty much it.

The job offer that I did accept about a week before I graduated was a close cousin to the assembly programmer. I became a systems programmer. My job was mostly spent keeping a small data centre and its network running. Most of the programming I did at the data centre was writing utilities, scripts and data conversion programs. Most of the utilities I wrote were for the express purpose of making my job easier. Or, as in this case, making it so that someone who wasn’t a programmer could do the routine parts of my job.

Initially the only operating system used in that data centre was VMS. Over the years I worked with MicroVMS, VMS, OpenVMS and OpenVMS AXP. OpenVMS can still be purchased on Itanium and Alpha systems from HP. Later other systems were added to the data centre including Novell Netware and variants of unix. Although it isn’t on my resume, I had a one year contract with Digital Equipment as a VMS consultant to work with 2 of their customers.

So, are you wondering what this has to do with Microsoft? Well, an engineer named Dave Cutler was one of the architects of VMS. He was also an architect of other operating systems including Windows NT. To anyone who has worked with both operating systems ‘under the hood’, the similarities are unmistakable.

Based on what I’ve said, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for someone to conclude that VMS has an associated third party industry of add-on security products like anti-virus software. But that isn’t the case. I won’t say that VMS never had any security issues. But, every version of Internet Explorer I’ve worked with has had far more security holes than VMS had in the 10+ years I worked with it. And, Windows NT (and derived versions) have had few security problems in the areas where the OS was/is similar to VMS.

About 20 years ago, I encountered a story/joke which is a bit crass, but illustrates a very valid point:

A woman was visiting her psychiatrist and says, “I’ve been married 3 times but I’m still a virgin.”
The psychiatrist asks her, “How is that possible?”
She says, “Well, my first fiance was in the military and got called to go overseas. We got married just before he left. He was killed in action before his first round of duty was up.
“My second husband was elderly. The wedding and reception put such a strain on him that he died of a heart attack on the way to the hotel.
“And, my third husband is in advertising. All he does is sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it’s going to be.”

IMO, the cornerstone of Microsoft’s success has not been writing good software, but in telling people how good it’s going to be. And, when compared to the promised and actual features of every other OS I’ve worked with, they have done an abysmal job delivering. I don’t suppose I’m really looking justify my opinion. Over the years I’ve met alot of programmers. Most of them had an unwritten priority of writing good software. Some were more skilled than others in doing that. What I think bothers me most about getting rich from bug ridden software is not the getting rich part (money is not the most important thing in the world), but in the stain said bug ridden software has on the reputation of the profession and those who practice the craft.

Once I have that problem sorted out, I’ll tell you how the techy stuff is going.

1. I’ve made a few more changes to the Spam Karma auto purge plugin. This weekend I should be able to test it. If it performs as expected, I will release it into the wild next week. I’m going to make a second version for WordPress MU which will have a feature not required in a stand-alone WP install.
2. I’ve been running gentoo linux on this computer for the last 7 months or so. I’ve decided to switch to Fedora Core 6. Hopefully, this weekend I’ll be able download the 6 cd images needed. If that goes as planned, you won’t see alot of me next week.
3. Last week I went to an official Vista launch day. For all the neat things they have done, I was quite underwhelmed. I know eventually I will be working with it. But, you can count on it never getting installed on any computer I own. More than once in the course of the day, I silently wondered how many people in the audience were familiar with the innovation of the Open Source and GNU communities. For example, Windows Vista has a sidebar on the desktop. For the sidebar you write gadgets using javascript. Extensions for Firefox which have been around for quite a while are written in javascript. I saw little innovation in which one could say the idea was original.
4. For the last couple months, signups have been disabled at Homeschool Journal. We did that because we had reached our account’s capacity. The work that I’ve done with Spam Karma has extended the window in which we had to plan what to do next. Sometime in 1-2 months we will be moving Homeschool Journal to another provider where our account will give us a bigger slice of the server. Bigger accounts cost more and we will eventually have to look at ways of funding the site.
5. After we have the account but before we move Homeschool Journal, I will be working on optimizing the code and implementing a few other features. So, for a while I may be throwing a few techy accomplishment posts at you.

I even took a couple hours out tonight to play games

Overlooking the hurdles I had in getting it running, I’m quite impressed. Installing software and keeping it current is exceptionally easy. Builds that are going on in one window do not affect the performance elsewhere in the system

In my little world, I’ve been working on getting Gentoo up and running. It does not come with an installer and it is preconfigured with a minimal configuration. It is bringing back memories from 15 years ago when I first started working with unix. I’ve been using up my evening mental energy on that. I took last night off (mostly) and went on a 2 hour drive to explore the countryside. Tonight I’m trying to catch up.

Next week I will be away from the internet for the week. I’m getting on a plane very early Monday morning and flying to Toronto. I will be there all week. I’m hoping to meet up with at least one homeschooling family while there.

Via Daryl: Homeschoolers for Open Office ! RC 2 now available for download.

A few posts back, I mentioned that I was installing linux on a spare computer I had. I hadn’t done anything with it since Monday. Today, I got it connected to the internet through a wireless connection. Tonight I updated the configuration so that it fires up all the network and wireless (including encryption) drivers on boot. Its been an educational experience. I worked with unix years ago, so in many ways it was a dusting of the cobwebs.

The version of linux I installed was vector linux. The computer is the following

P2 266 MHz
192 MB RAM
3.2+2.0 GB HD
DWL-510 Wireless card

To get the wireless running, I downloaded the code for a driver still in development and the kernel headers for the version of vector I had. I had to make a code change to the driver code to adjust for changes in the kernel code. I built the drivers and loaded them in memory. Then, using 2 configuration utilities, I established a wireless connection to the wireless hub. Next I configured the network protocol to use the wireless connection an communicate with and thru the hub. Once I had that working consistently, I added the drivers to the modules loaded on boot and added the wireless network startup to the boot sequence.