After threatening it for a number of years, my Dad has finally set up his own web site. Find out more at Ron Jackson - Now & Then 1939-2006.

An experiment in merchandise. Thanks to spreadshirt.net.

For a while now, I've wondered what the prime numbers look like in binary, that is, if you paint the ones as white dots, and the zeros as black dots, what does the whole set look like? I finally got around to writing a program to generate the prime numbers and output them as a PNG, and you can see the results below...

I'm testing out the Lulu publishing service, as I've never had my own printed copy of my thesis, and I wanted to make a softback version.

I was trying to find out how to tell, from within a C program under GCC, what OS the code was being compiled under. I was porting RPCemu to MacOSX, and wanted to switch between big and little endian code without doing something clunky in autoconf.

I have access to a number of machine through work, and it's sometimes hard to find adequate information about the operating systems that are installed on them. The first problem is finding out what version of what operating system they are using. Usually, the uname -a command is enough to work out what's running on a UNIX machine, but sometimes (particularly with Linuxes) it does not provide quite enough info. This page contains a list examples for determining exactly what your working on.