Rob Pike best eulogized his work, copied below for posterity. An amazing legacy.

I was warmly surprised to see how many people responded to my Google+ post about Dennis Ritchie’s untimely passing. His influence on the technical community was vast, and it’s gratifying to see it recognized. When Steve Jobs died there was a wide lament – and well-deserved it was – but it’s worth noting that the resurgence of Apple depended a great deal on Dennis’s work with C and Unix.

The C programming language is quite old now, but still active and still very much in use. The Unix and Linux (and Mac OS X and I think even Windows) kernels are all C programs. The web browsers and major web servers are all in C or C++, and almost all of the rest of the Internet ecosystem is in C or a C-derived language (C++, Java), or a language whose implementation is in C or a C-derived language (Python, Ruby, etc.). C is also a common implementation language for network firmware. And on and on.

And that’s just C.

Dennis was also half of the team that created Unix (the other half being Ken Thompson), which in some form or other (I include Linux) runs all the machines at Google’s data centers and probably at most other server farms. Most web servers run above Unix kernels; most non-Microsoft web browsers run above Unix kernels in some form, even in many phones.

And speaking of phones, the software that runs the phone network is largely written in C.

But wait, there’s more.

In the late 1970s, Dennis joined with Steve Johnson to port Unix to the Interdata. From this remove it’s hard to see how radical the idea of a portable operating system was; back then OSes were mostly written in assembly language and were tightly coupled, both technically and by marketing, to specific computer brands. Unix, in the unusual (although not unique) position of being written in a “high-level language”, could be made to run on a machine other than the PDP-11. Dennis and Steve seized the opportunity, and by the early 1980s, Unix had been ported by the not-yet-so-called open source community to essentially every mini-computer out there. That meant that if I wrote my program in C, it could run on almost every mini-computer out there. All of a sudden, the coupling between hardware and operating system was broken. Unix was the great equalizer, the driving force of the Nerd Spring that liberated programming from the grip of hardware manufacturers.

The hardware didn’t matter any more, since it all ran Unix. And since it didn’t matter, hardware fought with other hardware for dominance; the software was a given. Windows obviously played a role in the rise of the x86, but the Unix folks just capitalized on that. Cheap hardware meant cheap Unix installations; we all won. All that network development that started in the mid-80s happened on Unix, because that was the environment where the stuff that really mattered was done. If Unix hadn’t been ported to the Interdata, the Internet, if it even existed, would be a very different place today.

I read in an obituary of Steve Jobs that Tim Berners-Lee did the first WWW development on a NeXT box, created by Jobs’s company at the time. Well, you know what operating system ran on NeXTs, and what language.

Even in his modest way, I believe Dennis was very proud of his legacy. And rightfully so: few achieve a fraction as much.

So long, Dennis, and thanks for all the magic.

As a sidenote, on Friday April 13, 2029 99942 Apophis will have a close encounter with earth.

Yea it’s superstition, but it sure is fun .

[Via Slashdot]

Unfortunately the build directions for Mac OS X are lacking (they don’t really exist). Building the dependencies didn’t really work for me. For anyone who wants to follow this, note that these are changes to the instructions, not replacements. It doesn’t discuss everything. I have only done this on Mac OS X 10.4.11. I have no idea if this works on any other version, though I suspect 10.5 will work fine.

For starters I used the following LDFLAGS:

LDFLAGS="-Wl,-blibpath:${INSTALL_DIR}/lib"

I’m not sure if -Wl is necessary or not, but I don’t think it’s harmful.

In general the directions listed on the build page are pretty strait forward and work fine on Mac OS X but I did encounter an issue once I started to compile Pango 1.17.5:

 gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -DG_LOG_DOMAIN=\"Pango\" -DPANGO_ENABLE_BACKEND -DPANGO_ENABLE_ENGINE -DSYSCONFDIR=\"/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/etc\" -DLIBDIR=\"/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/lib\" -I.. -DPANGO_ENABLE_DEBUG -D_REENTRANT -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/cairo -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/freetype2 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/libpng12 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/pixman-1 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/freetype2 -I/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include -xobjective-c -O3 -fPIC -Wall -MT libpangocairo_1_0_la-pangocairo-fontmap.lo -MD -MP -MF .deps/libpangocairo_1_0_la-pangocairo-fontmap.Tpo -c pangocairo-fontmap.c  -fno-common -DPIC -o .libs/libpangocairo_1_0_la-pangocairo-fontmap.o
In file included from pangocairo-fontmap.c:29:
pangocairo-atsui.h:27:25: error: cairo-atsui.h: No such file or directory
make[4]: *** [libpangocairo_1_0_la-pangocairo-fontmap.lo] Error 1
make[3]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

After some experimentation I found that I had to update to a newer version of Pango. Which needs a newer version of GLib and Cairo. Which requires a newer version of Pixman. You’ve got to love how that cascades. Here’s what I changed:

Pixman

I ended up using Pixman 0.13.2 and doing:

tar -xzf pixman-0.13.2.tar.gz
cd pixman-0.13.2
./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC"
make
make install

Cairo

Then I installed Cairo 1.8.6 using:

tar -xzf cairo-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd cairo-1.8.6
./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR --enable-xlib=no --enable-xlib-xrender=no --enable-win32=no  --enable-quartz=yes --enable-quartz-font=yes CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC"
make
make install

I modified a few configure flags to use quartz though I left --enable-quartz-image off because it’s experimental as of 1.8.6. Also some of the flags changed slightly between versions (xlib-render is now xlib-xrender).

GLib

I then upgraded GLib to 2.18:

tar -xzf glib-2.18.tar.gz
cd glib-2.18
./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC"
make
make install

This took forever to build, but it worked fine.

Pango

I then finally installed Pango 1.22.4:

tar -xzf pango-1.22.4.tar.gz
cd pango-1.22.4
./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR --disable-tcl --disable-python
make
make install

If for some reason Pango doesn’t include Cairo as it’s backend like this when ./configure ends:

configuration:
        backends: Cairo FreeType X

Try using the following statements first:

CAIRO_CFLAGS="-I=/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/include/cairo"
CAIRO_LIBS=/usr/local/rrdtool-1.3.5/lib/

Then run ./configure again.

Then compile RRDtool itself by following the directions as normal. This worked fine for me.

Cascading dependencies suck. There may have been an easier fix to my problem, but I wasn’t able to find it. Simply updating to newer versions of these libraries seemed like the best solution. That said, these aren’t officially sanctioned versions by the RRDtool team. Be warned.

Good luck to anyone else who tries this.

Home

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
114 ls
91 cd
63 sh
41 ssh
37 sudo
14 pico
13 exit
12 ping
10 ./gl_tail
8 top

Home Server

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
68 ls
64 dig
55 cd
45 whois
27 ps
24 clear
23 sudo
14 pico
12 top
12 exit

Work

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
67 top
65 ssh
31 ls
29 sudo
26 dig
23 cd
20 ps
19 svn
17 php
8 ping

I’m curious if anyone has tracked down someone (preferably a geek) who was born on the Unix Epoch. I guess we can’t be too exact since the question would be “are you born when your head is out, or when your butt is out? Can the cord still be attached or do you need to be unplugged?” or something to that effect.

All kidding aside, it would be interesting to know if anyone has come to the realization that they are the Epoch Child. I’m not sure (any calendar scholars can help me out here), but it seems the last child to have a time standard’s origin coincide with their birth may have been Jesus (and obviously any other child born that night). In that case, it seems they likely it was rounded as best they could (see Wikipedia discussion of Jesus’s Birth Year and Date).

Remember to account for the timezone. For example if your born in New York, that’s -5:00. So anyone feel like finding him/her? Obviously some proof would be necessary to prove your the epoch child.

It would also be interesting to find some others, but this seems to be the most interesting.

¹ Yea, lame Genesis joke.

Does anyone know how to run it in the background (without the window)? I don’t want to see the window. Just have it do it’s magic.

Crontab like (no crontab ports though, don’t want to add more software).

Anyone with info on how-to, please comment or email. Neat trick in the next 24-48 hours that involves this (will post of course).