Practicing What I Preach
I've been busy with work and family, but I'm recommitting to writing in my journal. I'm exploring the LXD Linux Container Jupyter platform, which has been challenging but rewarding, and Microsoft's NT system, which has enabled the creation of protection rings and running concurrent operating systems. I'm amazed at how Microsoft is transitioning into the future, and I'm reflecting on the fundamentals of object-oriented and concurrency that remain.
Exploring the Future of Operating Systems: Reflections on LXD Linux Container Jupyter Platform and Microsoft's NT System
By Michael Levin
Saturday, October 15, 2022
Where oh where has Mike been? I’ve been a busy boy. When I am silent here and on YouTube, it means things are a poppin professional-side. See, as much as I love to write here in my public-facing MikeLev.in journal, it’s secondary to what’s going on with work and child, my two great priorities. It would not be that way if I did not love each so much. Finding what to do with myself is pretty easy because I find it easy to “find the love” in all things fatherly and… and what? A friend asked me recently what I did and answering SEO (for search engine optimization) would simply not be enough. I am a data jokey. I know how to access and pull data from all kinds of systems, dealing with all the tricky authentication issues that pop up. I then know how to… well, it’s a long story. Let’s jut start with this journal.
It’s going to get published more frequently; more consistently over time, that is for a combination of reasons. It’s the main gist of what I have to contribute to the world. Just keep writing. Just keep moving forward. Live moves on, and so must you with it. And you need a way to process your thoughts, to help achieve clarity, to flesh things out pencil-stroke by pencil-stroke through life until you’ve drawn quite a good enough picture to sum up your life. For that’s all you can really hope to do if you want to leave something behind, with the short attention-spans of our descendants, you had better sum it up quick. Who were you and why should anyone care that you were here? Well… that’s where processing your thoughts begin. Go meta only with great caution.
Every line of reasoning here, to go more abstract, thinking about thinking and such is a bottomless rabbit hole, ala Alice’s Wonderland, which is why those classic two books are referred to so much in mathematics literature. One must just back off of thinking in excessively meta-terms, even while journal-writing, or one risks a denial to the self of getting into the zone or flow states. Your internal artistic performers and lovers of whatever activities you’re getting absorbed into don’t enjoy real-time critical judging and heckling. Telling yourself things are stupid as if through the eyes of others while you’re trying to get into something you enjoy is a form of self-sabotage. It kills our invaluable child-like curiosity state over time and cuts us off from becoming dynamic, learning personalities like a child earlier in life. Don’t read the German philosophers too young. There’s time for nihilism later.
To escape bad rabbit holes, you rapel down into them rather than leap head-first. Nine out of ten rabbit holes are wonderful life experiences and are mistakes or learnings, side-adventures or whatever that you should have had. They help you grow and become a better person. You wouldn’t know how it was like on the other side if you didn’t try things. Thing is, it’s tough to know what to try. It’s tough to know if you’re dealing with that tenth rabbit-hole that’ll getcha.
Think Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn. Or of course Dorothy and Alice. I find it interesting that on the male coming-of-age literature it’s on the Mississippi River and deals with slavery, while with the female characters, it’s all in dreams and fairylands. Either way, rabbit holes are rabbit holes, and some you won’t ever come up from. This in itself is neither good nor bad. It depends on the nature of the rabbit hole, and what it brings out in you.
If the thing that’s absorbed you and become the center of your universe is a passion you can enjoy a full life through, such as mathematics, music or art then by all means, dive down that rabbit-hole and never come up. However, in the case of drug or media-consumption, come up! Come up quick! If you’re not exercising one of those special qualities it is to be human, than you might as well have been born sheep.
Ah, one of my first real beliefs. Having been born human, or existing in this world from the unique perspective such as we do, it feels like value. There is here a thing of value in living this life such as we do. We’ve been fortunate enough to be given a turn at steering a bunch of stuff in this thing we call our lives, using to do it the tool of language which is in itself inadequate to quite capture the totality of the experience. The concept of the sum somehow being greater than the parts keeps intuitively reoccurring. Somewhere I feel the assertion that life is Maxwell’s demon. There would not be unusual little corpuscles of intelligent order were matter not somehow inclined to work that way. Life is an order-generating creative force within all matter that fights to overcome the second law of thermodynamics. Life is the opposite of loss-of-information through heat. Life is smart information-preservation systems.
Okay, so my mind is in some strange places this morning. And I still need to get the grocery shopping done soon. And I want to crank out some more videos on the modern toolification movement. LPvg toolification.
Yup. I think I’ve got some keywords. Both unique and deep. If I use a domain for it, it’ll be lpvg.org, one of the best I own. Okay, now think! Next steps!
Well, a few words about the work stuff that’s kept me so off-YouTube and off-blogging is settling into the LXD Linux Container Jupyter platform. It subtly feels like a new platform, a bit more flaky like the Amiga. Lots of Python kernel restarts when RAM memory or hard drive space gets small. I’ve had to wrangle my scripts to make sure their memory-bound bottlenecks don’t cause spontaneous Python kernel reboots when running the script, which in this case is on a JupyterLab server running on an LXD Linux container under the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It’s one of the tricker tricks I’ve pulled off lately with lots of Levinux vibes.
Levinux is a respin of Linux I did over a decade ago to see if I could create a portable virtual development environment that I could instantiate (with session persistence, saved files available, etc.) on different platforms such as Mac, Windows and other Linuxes. The answer was yes, I could. It used very popular binaries of the QEMU PC Emulator, which has since become a core component for Android development, combined with an extremely tiny version of Linux called TinyCoreLinux. TCL works a tiny bit like Debian with a software repository, but in most ways, it’s like a tiny embedded Unix. While Levinux was fun to play with (even today), it ultimately got replaced by the maturing of containerization technologies.
More precisely, the realization of my hardware-independent portable development platform is only barely here today. Those following in my footsteps are still on the bleeding edge, bleeding on the edge of Microsoft’s implementation of Linux as WSL. It’s a two-edged sword and I mean to dull one of those edges by teaching everyone how to jump onto the actually significant Linux container movement (LXD vs. Docker) from the Windows platform. Providing the ability for users to have this opportunity is in my mind the purpose of NT, the Microsoft “Next Technology” upon which all modern Microsoft computers are built.
NT, which eventually replaced Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and others like it with underlying DOS (the “disk operating system” of the early Bill Gates era) with a more memory-managed and permission-aware system. Some call them protection rings, but that sounds too much like protection rackets to me and just too perfect to describe the behavior of a company like Microsoft. Anyhoo with protection rings, you can have code executing in “spaces” rigidly isolated from each other at the OS and nearly-hardware level sufficiently to run concurrent operating systems (and their kernels) safely. I was an Amiga user, which inherited its preemptive multitasking system from TRIPOS of BCPL heritage, in which such protections didn’t exist. Amiga crashed… a lot.
NT-derived OSes like the Windows 10 & 11 we’re on today are wonderful examples of OSes that are designed to multitask side-by-side on the same hardware with resources competently divvied out due to both hardware and software features designed to make precisely this possible. A modern Windows system running the Windows Subsystem for Linux is a wonderful example of the realization of this vision. Wow, what a platform migration strategy! I think Microsoft is navigating its way into the future better than IBM did when it was yanked out of the spotlight. Microsoft knows how to weave together a transition strategy. We are in the midst of it. It’s fun to watch.
Okay, tools fit you like a glove. Gloves are tools, so it only makes sense. It won’t take long before a good tool starts feeling like an extension of your body. Your ability to hold in your mind a simulation of that tool so that you no long need to consciously think about it while using it (being in the zone) makes that tool the same thing as an internal part of you. It is an internal simulation of that tool in your mind that makes that tool so extremely useful to you. There’s little more personal than tool selection and use.
Yet with the casual changing of user interfaces, both hardware and software, by manufacturers of tools, we are provided precious little chance to master the user interfaces over time, thus becoming forever more capable and valuable. The system is designed, almost rigged, for quite the opposite. Without sufficient re-training, re-learning, re-experience-acquiring, you go old and obsolete fast. Sure, it’s easy to learn a novel new thing for the first time, use that power to do a few impressive tricks, then to become unhireable after a short while because it wasn’t just-the-right trick for the new style of trickery.
Much in tech falls into these categories. There’s always some sexy new approach or methodology that changes everything. Sometimes the significance is not over-exaggerated. But there are now finally enough battle-tested time-proven tools and methodologies that can be called “fundamentals”. While it’s true, reductionism and new discoveries can always challenge fundamentals, they’re always still there working for you, as time-tested and battle-hardened as they are. Stuff like “Object-Oriented” and “Concurrency” get layered-on