I’ve developed an addiction to Markdown after a few weeks using it here to write posts. So I want markdown for some chores on my main system, which is generally Plan 9. This means I need Perl to interpret the markdown.pl script.

Another Russ entirely, MIT and Plan 9 guy Russ Cox, has a blog new since January. His latest sees Plan 9 services supporting legacy systems with great backups on SHA1 hashes in the form of venti(8), an archival storage server with which Cox is intimately familiar.

Plan 9 - get an ISO and run Plan 9 on several hardware platforms (as usual, x86 is the initial path of least resistance), or in a virtual machine.

Trying to think of the simplest useful example I could of stringing together nifty Plan 9 features without writing any code. Simple as it gets: using the archival file system to present a browseable cache of the past of a living web site under active development.

Inferno® is a language runtime-cum-operating system from Vita Nuova®. Inferno was originally developed at Bell Labs, and shares fundamental design concepts with Plan 9®. Namely: 1) files as a basic and consistent unit of naming; 2) a unified and unifying file-oriented network protocol, and 3) the ability to customize into a useful perspective files as per-process (in turn, per-user,...