AT&T created UNIX in the 60s as part of the Bell System, but they were in trouble for being a monopoly and so they couldn’t sell it as a product because it wasn’t a telephone. They had to give licenses to anyone who asked for them. Universities asked for licenses. Bell Labs shipped out tapes. The consent decree was lifted when AT&T was broken up 1983, and it immediately started trying to sell UNIX. Berkley continued to produce their own version, the Berkley System Distribution. It’s still used today as FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, NetBSD, PC-BSD, OpenBSD and more! Its userland is one of the fundamental parts of macOS.

the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication

Dennis Ritchie

A bunch of stupid shit happened for 20 years. Every company and university involved[1] sued each other over UNIX, but folks kept shipping patches on tapes. In the ’90s AT&T sold UNIX to Novell for some reason. In 2011 Novell was acquired by The Attachmate Group. In 2014 The Attachmate Group was acquired by the British multinational Micro Focus, which means that UNIX is now headquartered in Newbury, England.

Anyway, I just typed all of this so I could say “Berkshire System Distribution”. Thanks.

fn
fn
1 Some Berkley folks left the university and started a company. AT&T sued them. Novell sold its UnixWare to the Santa Cruz Operation. In 2000 SCO sold it to Caldera International. In 2002 Caldera changed its name to The SCO Group (as in Santa Cruz Operation). The SCO Group embarked on a bizarre campaign to license Linux (no relation) to businesses for profit under the claim that Linux contains UNIX source code that was added by International Business Machines. This worked out well and they filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy a few years later. yada yada yada. that ibm case didn’t close until like 2021 wtf. actually i guess everything stayed stupid forever

P.S. I would like to own the UNIX trademark. Do you think Micro Focus would sell it to me? They don’t seem to be using it.

P.P.S have you ever seen the first IBM logo from 1924? first IBM logo. looks like the logo of a newspaper from a comic book.

Hey there! It’s me, chee rabbits.

First, a little housekeeping: sofia called crackers “salad cookies” and then two days later called a taxidermy museum “a museum for dry animals”.

not much to report during the week. very busy, very sleepy!

We went out on a big walk. We were planning on going to a park but by the time our preparations[1] were done it was already dark and they closed the park. We walked down this long strange path and drank tequila and laughed.

feet on a path of black rubber geometry and tiny stones
lol my shoes are fucked

Went to a burrito place I’d misjudged and ate a rly good burrito and drank corona cubano. The bathroom floor was a slippery swamp of piss and shit but it was a lovely restaurant and I want to go back.

Today it’s international tequila day so we will make margaritas. Hopefully we can get a bottle of OCHO.

I’ve written a lot of code this week. Lots of lisp and lots of zig and some shell. I also occasionally did my job. you know i’ve been making websites for like 20 years now. it’s 2 decades since i wrote my habbo hotel hacking client and turned invisible and sabotaged some furni races (i know, absolute bobba behaviour) and was in a room (on habbo hotel) with the sonicmouse and met the hobba foohfooh was given the name “chee”.

“the alpha and the omega” in english is “the a and the z” which isn’t cool but in ASCII it’s “the NUL and the DEL” which is cool. “I am the NUL and the DEL, the beginning and the EOF. to the thirsty i will give from the fountain of life oωo.”

back on emacs

i’m back on emacs full time. my emacs config is a wild thing that has grown over a decade and a half. my whole system is configured by literate programming with org-babel. That’s right, baby: literate dotfiles. I call ’em docfiles. I’d really love to do an entire real project like this. It’s so powerful and so nice to be able to document the code write where it is, and keep bits that are relevant to each other next to each other even if they belong to different parts of the codebase. Like, you can write about the interface and use of the interface along side the code for both in the same document but output the code to lib/ and src/ during the “tangle” phase. It’s so cool. Maybe i should build a modern markdown-based literate programming tool. Maybe i already did that, did i? i started, but i don’t know if i accidentally threw that code away when i accidentally threw away a bunch of my repos last year when moving back to github :) :) :)

chee.party

I switched from chee.party to chee.party because the party gTLD has a deal where you can buy any number of years for about $5 each right now so i have chee.party until the year 2032. email me at yay@chee.party. if you see a reference to chee.party or chee.party somewhere could you tell me? so i can change it to chee.party? thank u x

kara’s rp2040 eurorack platform

check this out from kb.

fn
fn
1 Buying tequila, going to a café and secretly filling a flask with tequila while eating a sandwich.

Sometimes the only thing between you and total desolation is a fortune cookie

My first week here has been nice. Hard sometimes, mostly because I’ve been sick a lot. I had that flu then later in the week I started vomiting bile. We drank ocho tequila in a little bar and it started to rain and we had to run inside and it was a lovely afternoon. We went shopping for clothes and that was a lovely day. We keep coming home with the intention of getting drunk and having a big fun night but then we just curl up in bed and immediately fall asleep.

I made a chili con carne tonight. It’s delicious.

I looked everywhere in el supermercado for cumin and oregano and couldn’t find any.

i bought some chili powder, the only kind there was. when i got home, i learned that in fact the chili powder had cumin and oregano and sweet paprika and pimento jajaja

it’s chili con carne powder‼️ jajaja

There’s been thunder and lightning all week and rain and medium temps. It’s been lovely. Back in London the heat seems crazy. I hope everyone is keeping safe.

I’ve been enjoying the storms, I’ve recently started a new job and it’s been going good mostly though I feel frustrated that I don’t understand the data and I don’t know how to understand the data and I think everything would be a lot easier if it was easier to understand the data but I don’t know if I can change anything.

British big cats – Wikipedia

nothing much to report! just been recovering and occasionally shopping! ate some good barbacoa!!! good days, good nights, been good. been learning some Zig too! great language! really excited about it!!!

  • Thursday was fucking long
  • Friday was fucking hard
  • Saturday was really big.
  • ngl… on Friday there were moments when i wasn’t sure we were gonna make it

Over the weekend I started to develop some flu symptoms. Got real bad Monday night after many hours of meetings. Tuesday woke up dead. Almost couldn’t believe it, flying in 3 days and dead today. My throat, my head, my fever. I get sick a lot these days, and it’s mostly pretty OK, but this flu gosh almighty. Took 3 covid tests when i was at my sickest, all said no, so when the fever broke on Wed i figured I would still be OK to fly 36 hours later on Thursday night. The flight was OK. aeromexico’s a very different experience. I was dehydrated a lot, couldn’t get a hold of a flight attendant. Still now my voice is fucked and hurts, my nasal passage is dry and painful. my sinuses are so blocked, but i’ve been steaming myself dirty. every few hours i can breathe for a few minutes and it’s second to none.

it’s strange how Luke Vibert’s best album Big Soup is not available on any of the streaming platforms.

since i’ve been here we’ve mostly just hung around the apartamento and worked on stuff and stuff. at the risk of sounding incredibly gay it truly is, like, the light of my life just to be here with her. in the same room. eating maruchan, watching her work.

the apartment i’m staying in, I have to talk to security every time i leave. i don’t like that.

i slept well last night. i’ll have to remember to take notes this week, because today i’ve only been here two days and so much has happened. Saturday was weeks long.

this mind bending optical illusion is hiding two animals.

my big ambition for the next week: empty sinuses and a clear mind.

new job

ok, well i have a new job now.

owls

i’ve been looking at a lot of photos of owls

  • these fucksers are weird
  • like, i think we’ve been ignoreing them too long
  • letting them get up to all sorts of shit
  • look at a picture of an owl
    • https://duckduckgo.com/?q=owl&hps=1&iax=images&ia=images
    • like fi you found out they were really in charge , would you be surprised?
    • like can it be normal to be furious curious feathered egg?
    • if you look closely you can see that the owl is actually a mask being worn by a pretty young woman

neil young

In a 1985 interview with Melody Maker, musician Neil Young said “It is scary. You go to a supermarket and you see a faggot behind the fuckin’ cash register, you don’t want him to handle your potatoes”

In 1984 Young backed Ronald Reagan, saying: ‘I’m tired of people constantly apologising for being Americans.’

I, a Canadian, am no longer going to apologize for being from the United States

get wet

i fell asleep holding a beer and got wet

get fast

i enabled caching and Turbo Links so my blog is much faster now. zoom zoom, in fact.

police horse

watched a lady give a flower from her garden to the rider of a police horse, and the rider let the police horse sniff it before tucking it into her saddle and they rode away

duckpin bowling

let’s go bowling if you’re not busy

it can be duckpin

going

i’m going to Mexico City for 6 weeks in like 4 days time. 7 weekends. can’t wait.

CIA/remote viewing/Gateway Experience/1,000,000 year old aliens

Good advice from the CIA:

Be intellectually prepared to react to possible encounters with intelligent, non-corporal energy forms when time-space boundaries are exceeded.

Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process

good doc. i like the idea of the universe as a holograph that i pass through my personal holograph (brain/consciousness) in 3 dimensions in order to get around and get my business done (buy milk etc). also like the idea of the brain as an insulator required to keep a piece of consciousness in one place so that we (god) can experience the novelty of being at many different points in the universe at once (people).

a head with eyes closed being intersected in the middle by 3 planes (one of each dimension)
please, i am trying to think.

some time in the future we maybe we will laugh at people from now who pointed at a blob of jelly in the skull and says “the person lives in there “. “that’s where consciousness comes from, that jelly. you shouldn’t need any more info”. materialism is great for going to the shop and buying milk, materialism is great for economic theory, but for art i need something more… “clicked out”

on Friday night i thought too much about the very tall skinny million year old aliens mentioned in this CIA remote viewing experiment and i spooked myself out completely and had to close the blinds. i just don’t want to look at the window and see its eyes. i spooked myself out so hard that i could literally feel its presence and not just that, i knew we had met before and that i owed it something lmao. it felt like an ancient memory coming from my DNA and crawling in my skin. in the morning i could laugh about it, but at 2am i could only:

  1. close the blinds
  2. lie down
  3. wait for it all to be over

Jimena called around then and i talked about it so i could stop being spooked out, usually that helps, but this time i just spread the spook to her and now everybody was spooked. jajaja.

we near the halfway point of the year

  • hey, sometimes you just gotta prepare yourself to be a sacred space within which the bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat can resound with new energy and new hope
  • read from an old diary today. unrecognizable.
  • mostly at the moment i just
    1. work
    2. learn spanish
    3. plan for mexico
  • i went out on monday and sat on a bench and ate some snacks and looked at a fox and did my spanish lesson
  • on tuesday i made a packed lunch at lunch time and went and sat on a bench in the middle of some grass and did my spanish lesson
  • spent wednesday reading the apple developer documentation to make an app but it turns out you can’t actually use the iCloud APIs even in development without paying them £79 which i absolutely cannot afford, was excited for a bit.
  • thursday was another day
  • friday. well, look. america is over now.
  • saturday and sunday i just spent chatting with jime and getting ready to prepare to pack for mexico. oh i also watched some of the RMT demo on-line and it was really good
  • i didn’t post this on sunday because i fell asleep on computer
  • i fly in 10 days. 6 weeks with the one i love.