I have updated my department website http://www.cs.may.ie/~adelaney, which is also mirrored on http://minds.may.ie/~balor. And I’ve fixed up all my backup procedures. I now have encrypted backups written to two servers. My keys are backed up on a disk that I keep at home, whilst the servers I’ve backed up to are, themselves, backed up nightly.
I wrote a high level description of an operating system that allocates resource usage for a single user. I’m onto multiple users now.
Tom has asked me to put my website on the department server. I will but I have to make it look a bit more professional first. A good mate of mine is a web designer and he said he’d do some of it for me.
I’ve been working on some mathematical models of small operating systems recently. Stuff seems to be working out at the moment, but the question is if the models can scale to large multi-processor multi-user type systems.
I was at the sage-ie.org meeting last night and think I’m now on their working group to set up the professional body. That should be fun over the next few months. It will be fantastic to have a professional body to show manager types that system adminstration is an actual career, not somthing that someone with a 4 week MCSE can do.
On an FSF-IE side of things we’re trying a last push against the EU software patent directive. We’re trying to get MEP’s to specifically state that software cannot be patented. There’s a nice flamewar on ILUG about it at the moment.
I’ve been talking with Paul and Tom a bit lately. We’ve decided a few things.
i) leave the model we’re working with in flux untill the requirements firm up,
ii) do lots more reading – I’ve read a lot of UNIX/Linux/Plan9 papers and even some stuff on Windows,
iii) do some more abstract thinking about OS’es.
I’ve been drawing diagrams to relate abstract ideas about OS’es. I want to come up with some idea of how to catagorise OS’es with regards to certain relations. Because our final spec has to be wholly implementation independant we need to develop some safety criterion and liveness properties for the abstract system. It’s fun…