Me and some Friends were eating toasted crumpets and drinking tea at the top of Arthurs Seat last week when up popped this young lad or lass (the helmet made it hard to know which) carrying a bike who then cycled all the way down the steepest face. That’s extreame cycling.
The last part of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment
Africa was the final continent to be explored and colonised by Europeans. Malaria was the main reason why it was impossible to discover its hidden depths. Journeys up the Congo usually ended in death for most of the crew. David Livingstone was a mill worker from Strathclyde who was part of a mid-19th century religious revival in Scotland. In 1840 he went to the British colony of Cape Town to join a missionary 600 miles north in the Kalahari desert but discovered it had only found some 40 converts. The next year he travelled to any remote village he could find, learning the local languages and culture. He was the first to use a drug called quinine which kept him from malaria but not from a lion attack which stopped the use of his right arm. By 1856 he had become the first European to cross Africa and discovered that its interior had a rich rainforest, not the desert which had been supposed. He returned to Britain a hero. He made two later trips to Africa and, as had happened in India, tried to promote an attitude of imperialism for civilisation. He was strongly against the slave trade which Britain had abolished but continued with Arabs buying and selling Africans. On a trip to Egypt he went missing for two years until found by an investigative journalist who discovered him sick in a remote village. His body was brought back to Europe and buried in Westminster Abbey.
Towards the end of the 19th century the rest of the western world had caught up with Scotland’s education system. Scotlands aristocrats now had an attitude of being British and Scotland’s culture became more of a self-parody. The Edinburgh Review and similar journals died and instead publishing innovation came from tabloids, Alfred Harmsworth set up the Daily Mirror in 1896 which was followed by many imitators. Scottish industry has had successes including the Singer Sewing machine factory in Glasgow, the biggest in the world in its time. A rise in serious Scottish Nationalism politics was caused by an increase in poverty and the view that British governments were working against the interests of Scotland which led to the rise of the SNP as a serious political force and eventually devolution. Devolution was first proposed by the Liberal government of William Gladstone in 1885 but it failed in Ireland due to religious divide and after the fall of the Liberals the idea was not taken up by the new Labour party which could not afford to loose Scotland. It came eventually but how well that fares is yet to be seen.
The second last part of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment
Scots had been among the first to colonise Canada through Nova Scotia. Orcadians particularly were successful in the fur trade, they were able to suffer the cold of Canada. Alexander MacKenzie became the first person to cross North America in 1789 by following what became the MacKenzie river 3,000 miles to the pacific. Canada was united and brought to independence by Glaswegian John MacDonald, by negotiating independence with the British government he realised that given a choice Canada would rather remain loyal than completely separate. Sandford Fleming from Kircaldy was the Canadian governments chief engineer and finished the first railway across the country. In the 19th century time was measured from sun rise to sun set which ment it differed wherever you were, this did not matter in the days of horse travel but it ment chaos for railway timetabled. He divided the earth into segments each with their own time zone but not differing between, this was standardised in 1882 in a conference held in Washington and the on 17 November 1883 clocks around the world were set to the same standard for the first time.
Scots also had a large part in Australia. It was largely forgetted by the British until William Pitt decided to use it as a penal colony sending 160,000 convicts there. They were treated as slaves by the free colonists until sheep farmer John MacArthur was imprisoned by the governor and in revenge had the governor kidnapped and sent back to England. MacAurthur ran a militia rule for two years until the arrival of governor Lachlan Macquarie who brought order by treating the convicts with respect. He got them to clean up build roads and buildings in Sydney which was made of a dirt road and tents for buildings.
Many Scots emigrated to the US. In 1848 immigrant James Wilson Marshall discovered a piece of gold in California creating the gold rush and the first get rich quick hopes of the Americans. Scottish born shipbuilders created boats that could sail round the Americas to California in less than 90 days, a record until the age of trains. Samuel Morse, a Scottish ancestor, developed a system for sending signals along wires and his famous Morse code and in 10 years had covered the US in telegraph wires. These were later used for Alexander Graham Bell’s harmonic telegraph or telephone which was patented just two hours before his rival filed a patent application. Bell fought further rival patents but soon managed to become a monopoly and a millionaire. However the most successful Scottish-American businessman was Andrew Carneggie who invested in George Pullmans railway carrages to earn $400,000. He next invested in steel which he saw was about to become incredibly important in construction and through innovative production techniques his company was soon producing an amount equal to half entire British the output and discovered the principle of economies of scale. After a strike where 9 men were killed in riots he sold the company gaining $300 million, a fantastic sum in the days before income tax. He spent his money on public buildings including 2,800 libraries and 7,689 church organs.
Part six of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment
Scots played a huge part in the shaping of the British Empire. The first part of the history of the British empire died when the trade monopoly over the Atlantic was stopped by the American revolution. The second was shaped by the ideas of Charles Pasley from Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire. He wrote An Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire which changed how Britons thought their empire should relate to the rest of the world. Britain would need to fight to gain its empire and by using the colonies as a resource for soldiers and sailors it grew by an average of 100,000 square miles per year between the Battle of Waterloo and the American Civil War. One reason for the success of the Scots in the new Empire was their world leading education system, even the poorer had impressive skills.
The Black Watch, with its distinctive blue and green tartan was started by the local Stuart clans to patrol the Highlands after the Jacobite rising to put down the remaining rebels. By 1815 there were 86 Highland regiments and were a backbone to the British army. They had included many who had previously fought for the Jacobites. Military innovation included a breech loaded rifle that could fire twice as fast as the muzzle loaded models and the percussion lock which used poattium chlorate instead of flint to fire and could shoot in any weather.
In 1806 the monopoly East India Company commissioned Scotsman James Mill to write a history of the British colonisation of India. The History of British India was the first attempt to apply the four-stage theory of civilisation to a non-western culture. He concluded that Britain should colonise India to civilise it with good government. This was done largely under Scottish leaders, the followers of Edinburgh-educated governor general Lord Minto. They negotiated and fought for peace with the Sikhs, Persians and between Muslims and Hindus. James Dalhousie (Lord Ramsey) was governor-general from 1848 for 8 years and create railways and national telegraph and postal services. He increased schools and irrigation projects and pushed for woman’s rights in a country where they had none. His changes caused a revolution which lasted for two years and was put down by two Scottish generals Colin Campbell and Hugh Rose, destroying any last rules from natives. Scots were skillful merchants in India and created a smuggling trade with China of opium. The Opium wars were so successful that the Chinese had to sign a treaty to legalise that and other trade in 1842 which included the founding of a colony there, Hong Kong.
Part five of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment.
In the lowlands a revival of highland culture took place. Rabbie Burns produced his great poems and the works of a long lost Gaelic poet called Ossian were translated by McPherson into English. The Ossian poems included epic works of beauty and courage including one of 8 volumes. They caught the publics imagination and sold in huge numbers, people were surprised to learn that Gaelic culture could have produced such high art work. They turned out to be complete forgeries but remained very popular. Walter Scott, a lawyer from the borders, did go round the countryside collecting Scotland’s oral history through passed on verses and published it very successfully. He was a Tory and liked the old notions of a romantic history. His most successful works were his Waverly novels (after which the train station was named), the first of which stars an English army man called Waverly who became a Jacobite and fought for Charles Stuart. Scott had invented the historical novel and it sold in its thousands. The successors to Scott are the likes of Tolstoy, Balzac and of course Robert Luis Stevenson. Scott’s novels played on cultural conflict, highland against lowland, English against Scottish, Christian against Jew etc. The Waverly novels defined a Scottish history as being the highland history and Scottish culture as being highland culture. Scott had met and got on well with the Prince of Wales who became George IV. In 1822 George visited Scotland, the first monarch to do so since James IV had left. Scott had convinced the fat and spoilt king that he could be like the romantic Charles Stuart. He started by searching Edinburgh Castle for the ancient Scottish crown jewels which after a lengthy hunt the discovered in a cellar, untouched since 1707 when they were last used. 300,000 people turned up for his visit to Edinburgh, one in seven of the population. Scott and the city had spent months preparing processions based on those of the opening of the old Scots Parliament but including as much tartan and highland imagery as possible. Only 5 clan chiefs turned up, including the MacGregors trying to loose their old royal problems and the Sutherlands trying to loose their image as cruel highland clearance drivers. The visit was a massive success and turned the highland costume, banned until recently as the outfit of savages into the romantic traditional dress it is today. A wool manufacturers called Wilsons of Bannockburn started attaching tartans to clan names and lowland feudal areas. When the Tartan society of Edinburgh started cataloguing the tartans there were surprised when the clan chiefs had no idea which was theirs. The clan chiefs were soon caught up in the spirit and eventually two men claiming to be the illigitimate descendents of Charles Stuart published a catalogue of tartans which they claimed to have found from Queen Mary’s old collection. It was Ossian all over again.
Scotland was beginning to lead the way in the sciences. James Watt developed the steam engine from a tool used to pump water into a machine which could make a continuous motion, it started the industrial revolution and he monopolised the industry with a patent for 25 years. The field of medicine was revolutionised by the hands on approach of Edinburgh University, at Oxbridge doctors were not allowed to touch their patients. A type of doctor called the General Practitioner was developed and lectures started being given in English. Unlike in England at Scottish universities anyone could participate not just Anglicans. James Hutton studied medicine but created the field of geology by publishing a book which said the earth’s age was much older than the bible said and the layers in the rocks were sediments from past ages. Scottish engineers were became the best in the world, firstly John McAdam devised a mix of crushed stones and gravel that would develop into today’s tarmacadam and secondly Thomas Telford who created a fantastic amount of roads, bridges, aquaducts, harbours and canals. The Caledonian Canal was his greatest achievement (out of many great achievements) costing a huge sum of a million pounds. It was the model for the Suez and Panama canals (Telford wanted to build a canal in Panama at Darien where Scotland’s colonial failure had happened years before but died before he could). Glasgow’s tobacco lords gave way to textiles, ironworks and shipbuilding and the population expanded four fold from 77,000 to 275,000. Only 5% of these were highlanders, most were Irish looking for work. Glasgow also saw the first class tension with riots and trade unions.
Part four of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment
All three banches of the Scots family went to the American colonies. The Ulster Scots went in such numbers that the British parliament worried that they might be so depleated as to remove the protestant advantage in the area. The Highland Scots went with the highland clearances and the lowlanders followed the trade. Many who went were the fierce Calvinists of the old order in the Kirk who saw that they were loosing ground in their home land, their strong belief in their religion but also in personal liberty remains in the US today. The academic spirit of the Scots travelled with them. Princeton was a Scots run university ruled by the old Kirkists who did not believe in the teaching from the likes of David Hume or Adam Smith but nethertheless ensured they were studied on the understanding that you can not critisise what you have not studied. When the war of independence came Scots on both sides of the atlantic were divided. Strangly many of the Catholic Highlanders who had suffered after the fourty five under the Hannovarian government faught in their defence, relearning their warrier attitude with weapons and costume not allowed to them since the Jacobite uprising. French help won the war for the Americans (bankrupting France into its own revolution). One third of the signitories to the declaration of independence were Scots and they created a system of government based on the theories of Hume. No single entity was soverign and all branches of government were in effective competition. Only the right way of reason and common sense would be able to be passed by the government. The legal system was based on the reasoning of the Scots system and included a new feature where the supreme court could overrule the government, another check.
By the end of the 18th century the big names of the Scottish Enlightenment had died. They left behind them a legacy that would reform the English and British political system. Britain was in political crisis after loosing wars to the Americans, the Spanish and the French. A revolution was under way in France which would inspire the middle classes that they needed a political voice. Ireland was about to revolt and the Bank of England had to suspect cash payments. Scotland however had a self-confidence above that of England. Edinburgh was architecturally stunning with its Adam style new town and the new skyline on Carlton Hill by William Playfair. Less than one person in 20 in Scotland could vote. A new breed of Scottish Whigs became prevelant and restarted the Edinburgh Review, a quarterly lirerature review which mixed in opinion and bias and was very popular. Many were worried about a French style revolution (with all its terror) if the political contitution was not reformed. After 23 years of opposition and with the country in economic depression a Whig government comprised largely of Scots took office over the Tories led by the Duke of Wellington. They managed to pass the reform bill by 1 vote and later the Scottish Reform Bill. The change was not radical but it did pave the way for a second reform bill in 1867 which did let the working classes have a vote. By then the Whigs were calling themselves Liberals.
In the Highlands the clearances were taking place. Freed from the clan ties the chieftans realised they could get rid of their mounting debt by clearing most of the population of the highlands who went to work in the cities or to the new world. The highlands could not support the number of people living there, most had become dependent on tatties which could produce 4 times as much food as barley or wheat, but the tattie blight saw an end that survival means.
Part three of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment
Charles lived in Rome but left in 1744 for France to try and gain political support, including an army and supplies to try and retake the Scots and English crowns for the Jacobites. France decided instead to fight the British on the continent by attacking Germany (home of the King George). The government in London was at the time at war with Spain who became allied to the French. The result was that most of the British armies were on the continent. Charles decided to go to Scotland without an army and raise support for a rebellion. The clan chiefs knew he was mad but some agreed to fight largely out of a sense of honour. They surprised themselves to be able to march to Perth and then Edinburgh. The City Council of Edinburgh had decided not to fight, they wanted a quiet life. Instead a merchant raised a malitia of 200 volunteers who trained using what weapons they could. They marched through Edinburgh to West Bow at the top of the Grassmarket but by the time they got there everyone of the malitia had quietly slipped away. Eventually the leader gave up as well. The gates of the Nether Bow were opened to let a coach through and the Camerons charged through. Edinburgh was taken before most of its inhabitants knew it and Charles was crowned at the Mercat Cross as James VIII. The castle was not taken. The Jacobites got their battle at Prestonpans against the Black Watch and scared them into running away. Eventually Charles moved south and won another battle but eventually realised he had decreasing support as he moved south, the English did not join him and the highlanders had no interest in seeing him become an English king. The retreat went to Glasgow where he found no friends at all, the city of merchants wanted to keep their prosperous union with England. Eventually the Jacobites lost at Culloden east of Inverness where they were defeated the Hanoveran army who killed any injured or anyone looking after the injured, the battle field was kept guard for 2 days afterwards to stop anyone helping the injured. Charles hid in the Great Glen before escaping to Skye then France and finally had to go to Rome. The government in London banned the highlanders using weapons (again), kilts or tartan. They also removed much of the power of Chieftans, no longer would they be virtual kings and be able to raise an army on their own. This was not a war of highland against lowland but of a modern commerce and competition led society against an old feudal society where everyone knew their place. The Jacobites promised certainties in life and will forever be a romantic image for that.
After the fall of the Jacobites Scotland’s cultural and economic activity exploded. Glasgow became the city of commerce while Edinburgh was the city of intellectuals. The Glasgow tobacco merchants became the most successful in the world. In Edinburgh Adam Smith invented the science of economics but was also a moral philosopher who like Frances Hutcheson and Homes asked why the nature of people was as it is, not completely selfish but not completely selfless either. Instead of giving a final answer he was the first to acknowledge the confict (Tony Blair might think of him as the architect of the third way).
David Hume was one of the most important philosophers to have lived, giving a new outlook on life to western thought. He was an athiest which made him something of an outsider in society. Previous philosophers had seen human reason as a struggle to overcome our emotions, Hume’s first book said “reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions”. Overturning 2000 years of moral philosophy he realised that our habit is to follow our desired to get what we want.
Society and laws are created to channel our desires into constructive output, to make it more profitable to set up a bank than to rob one. Frances Hutcheson and the Kirk were outraged at this but that is the nature of the Scottish Englightenment, a move from a society where everyone knows and keeps to their place to a liberal society based on personal freedom and self interest but resulting in a society that ultimately creates a better quality of life.
Part two of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment
The founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment were Frances Hutcheson and Henry Home (Lord Kames was his judicial title). Frances Hutcheson managed to become the chair of moral philosphy at Glasgow university to much opposition from the Kirk which still had a lot of power over the universities. He was the first person to give lectures in England rather than Latin, broadening allowing for a much greater audience than he would otherwise have. He was Europe’s first liberal and wrote about the importance of personal freedom and natural or civil rights. Henry Home was a succesful advocate who rose to become one of the countries highest judges taking the title Lord Kames. His writings followed on from Hutcheson’s and were the first to decribe the importance of property in a succesful social system. He described how the politics of Scotland had never truly been about loyalty to a king but about royal land grants, the most important political tool available to a monarch. He also oversaw the case of Joseph Knight which ruled that there could be no slavery in Scotland.
After the union the issue of culture had to be tackled. Should Scots speak in English or Scots? Gaelic was not considered an option, by this time it was relegated to the Highlands and Islands. It’s difficult to image how at the time English and Scots were distinct languages, the words and grammer were so different and yet related that Scots found it very difficult to not slip back into the mither toungue. On arriving in London Boswell said to Johnson ‘I do indeed come from Scotland but I can not help it’. The English considered Scottish immigrants to be scroungers, ignorant and corrupt. This is a pattern many other cultures have had to contend with, up to the asylum issues in today’s tabloids. Rather than reject English culture the lowland Scots mastered and conquered it, becoming bi-lingual and writing some of the greatest works of the time such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in a foreign language. The backlash came from the highlands.
Clans were not family groupings of people, they were creations of Scotland’s feudal system which ment crofters had to get their land in return for servitude to a clan chief. The Chief had full power of law, taxes and military service over his clan. The Chiefs had to be loyal to the King to keep their lands and they were often used for political advantage. The massacre of MacDonalds by the Campbells was started as a command from the King. James IV outlawed the MacGregor clan and pardoned the murder of anyone who killed a MacGregor which led to genocide. The ban on MacGregors was not lifted until 1774 and the hope that it would be lifed was one of the reasons why Rob Roy agreed to join the Jacobite rising. Similarly many other clans joined the rising in a hope of regaining land and power. The richer clans did not join the rising.
Scotland genuinly has a history to be proud of. From a backwards nation it became a country which changed the world in many areas. First with free education and a legal system based on reason not precedent (as in England) it created thinkers who changed the world forever. The Scottish Enlightenment by Arthur Herman is what real history books should be like, not a list of Kings and Queens but of the people who moved the world forwards. The author is not Scottish as the incorrect numbering of monarchs and bad translation of Scots shows but this helps to ensure he is not biased towards national pride.
The two most important historial events which allowed for the enlightenment were the creation of the Kirk and the union with England. John Knox was a persuasive man who could revolutionise a country and bring the downfall of monarchs. The Church of Scotland he created was fundamentalist and unforgiving, unlike the Catholic church which required bibles to be in Latin in the Kirk everyone had to read the bible which was to be in modern languages. This required The Schools Act which created a school in every parish, free education to all gave Scotland the highest literary rate in the world. The Kirk was also democratic (unlike the Scottish Parliament) with elders and ministers appointed by the parishioners. People were hung for blaspheming but the strictness was eventually weakened by the education the church itself provided.
The Union with England was required because Scotland was broke after the Darien scheme. Scotland was already largly ruled by an essentially English king. Many members of the Scottish parliament received bribes to enact the Act of Union. One of the big turning points in the debates over the act came when the Kirk agreed to support the Union. This was unexpected because the Act of Union did not guarantee the independence of the Church of Scotland, however the moderator (and Principle of Edinburgh University) William Carstairs turned the general assembly arguing that if they did not agree to the Union Scotland could end up with a Catholic king. With the Kirk behind the Union the votes in the parliament for the act went through smoothly (they were deliberatly ordered with trade access to English markets and colonies first and more tricky subjects such as the joining of parliaments at the end). Rioters took to the streets causing the Lord Provost of Glasgow to flee and none of the pro-Union parliamentarians could go out without personal protection. When the act was due to be signed the parliament was besiged and the signers had to flee. Twice more they tried to sign it and were discovered by rioters. Eventually they met in a cellar opposite the Tron Kirk and sealed the end of an auld sang. The union caused the downfall of a lot of Scottish industry and a vote a few years afterwards to end it was defeated in the House of Lords by only 4 votes. Before long however the freedom given by a stable government which largly ignored Scotland together with a flourishing trade with the (now British) colonies from Glasgow gave Scotland a much needed economic boom.
to be continued….
Eilidh became an evil pirate last week when she copied some music being shared by flurble. Among them an interesting find: Journey of The Sorcerer by the Eagles which is the theme tunes to the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy radio series.
Looking forward to the fourth radio series, not looking forward to the film which is too Americanizationed.
Some very impressive street theatre at the Nicht Afore Fiesta in George Street tonight. photos.
I like this bit of public art from St John’s at the West End of Princes Street. Digging at Identity Cards, the problem of Palestine (not many visitors to Bethlehem this year I hear) and a wee bit of Christianity for good measure.
Yesterday we reinvented the legendary extream sport of cabogganing (kabogganing?). A cross between canoeing and tabogganing we squashed 4 people and a canoe into a car and took a joyride up to hillend ski centre in the dead of night to make best use of the empty slopes. It works very well and makes for a much better sport than skiing which I have never understood. More photos here.
For my birthday my family went to the Ratho Adventure Centre a very impressive and large climbing centre built on two sides of a quarry. Sadly they don’t actually let you in to do any climbing unless you can pass a test, possibly why they’re going bust. This skyride assault course is fun though.
In a piece to camera on last night’s ITV News Tony Blair said the that Turkey being a muslim country is not reason not to let it enter the EU. The only person who thinks this is a significant factor is the pope, not a big presence on the political stage these last few centuries. Maybe Turkey’s treatment of Kurds, govermental ties with the military and indepencence of the judiciary, inability to help in uniting Cyprus and woman’s rights could be a bigger factor in Tony Blair’s mind. Or maybe he just wants an EU country close enough to bomb Iran or Iraq from.
Newspapers were recently suggesting David Blunket as the next prime minister. Now he’s resigned after abusing his position to fiddle with someone’s visa. The newspapers are interested in his affair but I would say the indefinite detention of foreigners without charge or trial should be a better reason for sacking him. Fortunately the law lords seem to understand the concept of justice. The Scotsman then call this a “headache” for the new Home Secretary rather than a significant win for human rights.
I went to the new Scottish Parliament building yesterday. Very fancy building, lots of strange angles and nifty bits. Absolute nightmare to find your way around however, a few signposts wouldn’t hurt. And too much concrete, concrete walls and ceilings look unfinished, not classy. The debate was on tourism but none of the 10 members who had bothered to turn up had very much interesting to say so I went away again.
When I get bored of computer programming I like to pedal rickshaws for a living instead. I first did this when I was 17 and the rickshaws were pulled not cycled. You pay to rent the rickshaw for the evening or weekend and keep the rest of the money. It’s a night shift job, 9 in the evening until about 4 in the morning. Most of the customers are drunk people wanting to get to the next pub. Drunk people do a lot to help the economy. The old pulled rickshaws company went bust but then it was run by an absentee owner. The new company in town uses cycle rickshaws, requires training and street traiders licence and has limits defined by the council. The sensible thing to do would be to buy my own rickshaw and use that saving 100 quid rent a weekend but they cost a hefty £3000s and more and then there’s insurance and maintenance. You get a lot of hassle from schemies and the like but for the most part it’s good fun and less likely to make you short sighted than sitting behind a computer all day. Sadly I’ve had too much computery work in the last few months to be able to rickshaw but I’m feeling a craving for late nights and good exercise.
Not a single instance of the old ScotRail logo is left anywhere on the route from Haymarket to Bridge of Allan, someone has been very busy putting First logo stickers everywhere. Some of the trains have even been repainted already to a purply colour.
The easiest thing that First could do would be to put litter bins back in Waverly station. Haymarket seems to manage fine with them. Someone at Bridge of Allan keeps wrapping up the litter bins with heavy duty bags presumably in the hope that this will stop terrorists blowing up the station. A quick slice with the penknife sorts it out quickly enough.
Meanwhile the old ScotRail sent me a letter apologising several times for their sleeper train being 3 hours late. Sleeper trains are great, first class travel for the price of a standard ticket, you get to use the waiting rooms with free coffee and the seats are almost comfy enough to sleep in. Best thing to do is get there early and grab two seats together so you can lie down on them. Unfortunatly I didn’t get a refund in money but in 4 £10 rail travel vouchers from which you can’t get change, how useless.
Recently I’ve read a few books by Bill Bryson who does comical travel books. His African Diary is particularly good because it has a political edge as he describes the problems of a slum in Nairobi or a refugee camp, a whole town in the middle of a desert where generations have lived unable to return to their homes in Somalia due to war or move in Kenya outside the camp because the Kenyan government has enough problems of its own.
His current big work is A short History of Nearly Everything which is what is known as a best seller. It gives a very good overview of the state of modern science and knowledge. If this is a best seller the public obviously has better taste than they are often given credit for. Actually most of it should be old ground for anyone who did the three main sciences at higher level but it’s always worth refreshing your knowledge and many things are explained a lot better than at school. The geology parts are very interesting since I never did that at school.
For example, those cross section diagrams of the earth, just how do people know what the earth is made of? It turns out they don’t for the most part, the couple of attempts at digging thought the earths crust have failed miserably but measuring echos from earthquakes means the density of the earth at different depths can be calculated, and by measuring the contents of lava we know what’s in there. Fascinating.
Less of a best seller is The Collapse of Chaos. This also covers (in it’s first half) an overview of basic science used to demonstrate how scientists explain our complex world as being made of smaller simpler items. Complex molecules are made of about 100 basic molecules. They are made of a smaller number of sub-atomic particles. It all results in a very complex universe. Except that much of the universe isn’t complex says the second half of the book, just ignore the first 300 pages. Whole galaxies are in simple formations and the solar system is no less complex than the structure of an atom. There may be a unifying theory for physics to join together the theories of relativity and of quantum but it would be useless since objects on different scales need different rules to be understood. Yes you may be nothing more than lots of very complex chemicals to a chemist but that doesn’t help us to understand how humans work in many parts, that’s why we have Biology. Lots more fascinating incites within.
Very rough notes from the meeting last night
Started with a question and answer session because the ones at the end just mean people go to the pub.
Why is Glasgow in Lanarkshire? It hasn’t been for many a year but we don’t know which database keeps getting this wrong.
KDE t-shirts and badges were for sale. Riddell had a bunch of leaflets for the Linux Expo next week showing KDE and Gnome.
mrben says he is doing a talk next month on video editing. In November someone from the Blender conference is doing a talk. December will be a Christmas party. January is a talk on Linux from scratch. February he is hoping for a talk from a company called Linux Factory about Linux in the business world. March will have an easter quiz. Anyone with things to talk about should ask mrben.
Big Kev Talk on BSD
BSD and Linux are not quite intimate with each other. Berkeley Software Distribution. Unix started in 1970 version 4 in January 1974. AT&T were banned from selling Unix due to anti-trust issues. Bill Joy was one of the founders of Sun and later devloped Java etc but at the time was working on a Pascal compiler, the main language for applications in those days (we normally think of C just because that is what Unix was written in).
By 1977 they released a tape which was effectivly BSD 1 with Pascal and ex editor (vi without all the good things vi has!). Sent out around 30 copies including one to UCL in London. Mid 1978 2BSD was released with better Pascal and vi. About 75 copies sent out. Termcap was written by Bill Joy to learn how to progam vi. AT&T did continue to develop Unix but about 1979 they stagnated and did not do much with it because it was seen as a research tool. 3.0BSD was in March 1980.
3.0BSD and 4.0BSD were performance enhancement issues. 3 was also a Unix distribution rather than just a bunch of patches. Delivermail was in 4.0BSD, a precursor to Sendmail. 150 copies of 4.0BSD were shipped.
4.1BSD in June 1981, 400 copies shipped, tuned to win the DARPA TCP/IP contract. AT&T were realising commercial potential of this and prevented them from calling it 5.0 to prevent confusion with their System V.
BSD was first with paged memory for swapping (because of the very small memory machines had at the time), TCP/IP networking, the C shell, vi, a fast file system, still used as the primary file system on current BSDs it knows about the multiplatered nature of disks and was tuned to be optimised for this, and was freely available.
CSRG was the Computer Systems Research Group. Kev shows us a book which explains everything about how BSD works. Formed in 1980 with a contact from DARPA to implement TCP/IP. Keith Jostic was one of the people who wanted to rewrite all the Unix tools to free it from the requirements to have a System V license (RMS was first though).
Sun Microsystems formed February 1982 as an early BSD adopter. Employed Bill Joy from CSRG. Sun OS 1.0 was BSD based.
Current times, we have NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Started roughly 1992. There was a big legal dispute similar to the current SCO case. AT&T sued Berkely for giving away their source code. Berkely said everying was public domain and not trade secrets. Story is that there was 5 header files left over from AT&T Unix. What AT&T failed to mention was that they had been using BSD changes for years.
NetBSD and FreeBSD are almost siblings from the code that was released which was two sets of source code in an attempt to remove AT&T files called BSDLite.
NetBSD set as its goals to provide a well designed, stable and fast BSD system. Avoids encumbering licenses (so can be incorporated into Linux and other GPL’d projects), provides a portable system which runs on many hardware platforms (it runs on lots of platforms). It is similar to the origional BSD, quite research orientated (and quite slow too).
FreeBSD goals (taken from website) are lengthy and talks about how nice a finantial contribution is but not necessary. They want the code to be as widely used as possible and provide the widest benifit so it can be used in proprietry software.
OpenBSD goals is to be openly developed (FreeBSD and NetBSD are too). No license restrictions, GPL is acceptable as a last resort but not in the kernel. Pay attention to security problems and fix them before anyone else does, this is their most famous goal but also their third goal. Lots more goals including integration of cryptographic software. It is developed in Canada to get around the US restrictions on encryption. They aim to not let serious problems remain unresolved, the firewall software is an example of this, it had to be taken out because of license problems (restrictions on the beta versions). They also want to provide a good cross compile and development platform and sell their 6 monthly releases on CD.
NetBSD Platforms: more than I wish to copy down but it still runs on Vaxes which shows how well decended it is on origional BSD. FreeBSD has 8 platforms. OpenBSD has plenty enough, about 20. Compared with Linux for which he lists 14.
Where does Coherant fit in? It is a System V derivative that died in about 1995.
Why BSD? At home Kev runs two machines, a Slackware box and a NetBSD box. Unlike (GNU/)Linux BSD has… the ports system. Most applications are written for GNU/Linux but BSD downloads the software and the patch to make it BSD happy and puts them together. It lacks some drivers. NetBSD was the first with USB drivers though. Linux took the ATA/IDE drivers from BSD.
Which one? Firewall stuff use OpenBSD, easy to set up with PF and includes stateful connection tracking. Difficulty with OpenBSD is that lots of things don’t run on it, e.g. his e-mail server wouldn’t work. FreeBSD is desktopy, very similar to GNU/Linux capability wise. NetBSD the development one. OpenBSD lists are also fun for flames.
Any big commercial backers? Wind River, they took over FreeBSD development and found it wasn’t much use so abandoned it 6 months later. DARPA were funding OpenBSD but then had a disagreement with Theo. FreeBSD is also the code for Mac OS X.
What is DragonflyBSD. It is a micro version of FreeBSD.
What do you need to run it? Anything. Really? Well. 540Meg hard drives are fine for a NetBSD and OpenBSD install. 64Meg RAM can work depending on what you’re using it for.
What about older hardware, like Gentoo you have to spend days compiling everything. You can also download binaries of everything which is a lot faster to install.
FreeBSD is developed by a core group, NetBSD is similar, Debian takes the opposite approach.
CVSup lets you download the entire FreeBSD tree and do a Make World and everything is compiled. FreeBSD has current which has big beasties (similar to Debian unstable he recons), FreeBSD 5 series with 5 stable and current and FreeBSD 4 series stable and current.
There is no Oracle for BSDs, although you can run the Linux ABI emulation.
Does FreeBSD support distributed update with CVS updates? There is a port of distcc, he doesn’t know if you can build the kernel with that, no reason why not.
Boot loader is more like Grub than Lilo, is can understand the filesystem more.
Can we go to the pub? Yes.
Big applause for Kev.
