I’ve been thinking a lot lately about old-timey computer stuff, and I got a hankerin’ to play some of those old BSD games. No one had ever gotten around to getting OS X versions of the games up on the Internet, though (while some have started, no one ever seems to have finished and put their changes out there), so I spent a little time this evening and got most of them working.
Linux on a S/390 or z/Machine is pretty similar to Linux running on any other architecture, but installing Chef on one is an interesting thought experiment. One major issue, though, is that binary packages are (not surprisingly) not built for s390 by Opscode, so you’ll have to do the more manual installation. First, unless you have a mainframe laying around, set up a Linux/390 VM running under Hercules. I found these instructions to be useful, but since I’m on a Mac I had to make a few changes:
Productivity is the greatest scourge a workplace can face. You want to make sure your workers aren’t too productive, but how do you do that? Sure, you could install Dwarf Fortress, but then you’d need to keep up with all the Dwarf Fortress updates. If you have your workers do it, they might get distracted and get work done while they should be playing Dwarf Fortress. What are you going to do?
Chef the automated systems stuff is very nice, but I’ve always felt its lack of a cookbook for Chef the programming language was a serious omission. This omission has been rectified. I give you a Chef cookbook for the Chef programming language. Here’s an example program from the main Chef site: Fibonacci Numbers with Caramel Sauce. This recipe prints the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. It uses an auxiliary recipe for caramel sauce to define Fibonacci numbers recursively.