A Toy OS
Imagine the scene: trying to get a 5-yr old boy to use a computer which has an all singing all dancing graphical user multi-threaded interface experience installed. Really, just try to imagine. It's... It's... It's indescribable agony (I've heard girls actually listen so it's less frustrating). I'm fucked if I know how I learnt to use this damn thing. There it was, I learned. So I've no idea how to teach a chuld how to use a PC. But when you see a child single handedly manage to reduce a dead PC to a pile of rubble in a matter of hours you can't help but wonder just how amusing it would be to let him loose on a fully functional PC with nothing but strict instructions that it was not to be dismantled (or otherwise physically molested).
And there's the rub. Modern GUIs suck for kids. For kids it would be much better to have some simple login instructions; a command or two; then something they'd actually want to do and limited scope to do anything else. In fact keeping it simple would probably make the whole experience educational without the need for all that rather lame educational software. Simple also means low danger of serious OS damage, minimising reinstalls by the in house techie.
I'd like to use FreeBSD, really I would. Only, well, DOS was so much more fun. Well no, DOS wasn't - DOS was less fun than pulling your own teeth - I just didn't know better. But the games... the games were... I've still got the original Duke Nukem platform games somewhere... And Tetris... And Battle Chess... And Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. And I do seem to remember Windows 3.11 being easy enough to bombproof (and backup) whilst being clunky enough that a child could master the basics easily enough. So I could relent and install a GUI - I'm sure I've got a nice implementation of Logo somewhere.
A low spec machine would do. There's a Celery 400 knocking about somewhere in the attic. And I've got an old 486DX4-100 with an as much damn RAM as the motherboard will take. And a 486SX2-50. All of it 100% functional obsolete gear which I can't bring myself to throw on the grounds that it could be useful one day. Back when a 386SX-16 was my desktop PC I'd have wept to get my hands on any of this stuff. Hell I used to aspire to a graphics card that could do 800x600 and a 15" monitor.
So this weekend I think I'll go retro.
Oooh... and I get to play Y2K too. Ace.
Tropical Fish
It's probably the correlation between my mood and the full-moon which has something to do with my lifelong fascination with the moon. It's true that correlation does not imply causation. However, as diaries and calenders usually show when the full-moon, it's a correlation I've found fairly handy. So when I discovered a moon phase module I could add to my blogsite I thought I'd give it a try.
There were, however, a few problems. It's a bit light on useful data. I don't like javascript (or any client-side processing) and I certainly do not like pulling scripts and images from a server I don't own. But the main reason I decided that the moon phase module was not for my site was that it's wrong. Really. It's wrong.
But when the idea simply would not go away I got to work with my trusty copy of Perl. All the hard calculation work is handled by Astro::MoonPhase and graphics manipulation is handled by GD The images of the moon were downloaded (lifted) in gif format from the U.S. Naval Observatory (originally created by R. Schmidt from ray-traced images of the Moon). However, for some mysterious reason, when I told GD to read a file as a gif it tried to read as a jpeg and barfed - a quick bit of CLI foo turned everything into png format which GD seems to like.
So if you now look in the sidebar you can see the results of my efforts. Cool, eh?