Posted: March 28th, 2010 | Author: Clay McCauley | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
During the last Lowcountry Computer Camp session, we discovered to our surprise that MIT’s Scratch program only supports the 32-bit version of Ubuntu Linux. Since x86_64 is backwards compatible, it’s possible to get the software to install with a little extra effort.
First you’ll need to install the 32-bit compatibility support libraries. To do this, open the package manager and search for “ia32-libs” and install it. After installing 32-bit support, download the Debian/Ubuntu package from the Scratch site at MIT. (By default the package will end up in your Downloads folder) Open a terminal window, change directory to Downloads and run the following command:
sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture ./scratch_1.4.0-0ubuntu2_i386.deb
(you may need to make changes to the above if you’ve downloaded a newer version) If all goes well, you’ll have a new copy of Scratch listed in the Programming subfolder of the Applications menu.
Posted: March 11th, 2010 | Author: Clay McCauley | Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off
With so many layers of abstraction in modern computer systems and programming languages it’s easy to take the inner workings of our machines for granted. Earlier this week I stumbled across a video someone posted of a “hacking tool” called ICU64. It’s a piece of software that hooks into a Commodore 64 emulator and allows the user to both view and modify data down to the individual bit on a running system. It’s one thing to understand the effects of flipping a bit here or there, but to see the beauty in patterns of data inside a running program… that’s something else all together.
Posted: September 7th, 2009 | Author: Clay McCauley | Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off
Apple recently released the latest version of their operating system called Snow Leopard. If you’ve already installed it, you might be asking yourself, “What’s the big deal?” It doesn’t really look all that different compared with Leopard, (their previous release) but that’s exactly the point. Apple is as obsessed with perfection inside their OS as they are with the look and feel of their products. John Siracusa of Ars Technica recently published an in-depth, 23-page article on Apple’s new OS. He doesn’t just cover the obvious feature enhancements. He takes the reader on an in-depth tour of the underpinnings of OS 10.6, it’s history and why Apple has made many of the changes in this release. The article also gives you a glimpse of where Apple and MacOS are headed in the future. Whether you’re interested subjects like compilers, threading and filesystem internals or just curious about some of the features and history of the OS, there’s something here for everyone.
