The question is simple: How can a document the content of a certain directory tree and all its content. There are many possibilities in a Unix environment (perl, bash,etc.) , but in the Microsoft Windows world it is more difficult to get such informations using command line scripts.

I wrote a simple vbscript that can do the job in at least three different ways:

• It generates an xml structure which reflects all the dirctory informations
• It generates an Excel Spreadsheet, which can be used for other processes
• It generates a printout

All three possibilities are useful in different situations.
But what is the script really doing ?

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The net is full of phantasy, playgrounds and persons having the power to
do strange and very complex things. A good sample for such a play ground
is 99-bottles-of-beer.net.

The idea is simple.Take a simple task which can be solved by computers. In this case it
is a programm writing the lyrics

99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall.

98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 97 bottles of beer on the wall.

97 bottles of beer on the wall, 97 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 96 bottles of beer on the wall.

96 bottles of beer on the wall, 96 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 95 bottles of beer on the wall.

95 bottles of beer on the wall, 95 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 94 bottles of beer on the wall.

94 bottles of beer on the wall, 94 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 93 bottles of beer on the wall.

93 bottles of beer on the wall, 93 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 92 bottles of beer on the wall.

92 bottles of beer on the wall, 92 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 91 bottles of beer on the wall.

91 bottles of beer on the wall, 91 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 90 bottles of beer on the wall.

90 bottles of beer on the wall, 90 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 89 bottles of beer on the wall.

...

4 bottles of beer on the wall, 4 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 3 bottles of beer on the wall.

3 bottles of beer on the wall, 3 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 2 bottles of beer on the wall.

2 bottles of beer on the wall, 2 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 1 bottle of beer on the wall.

1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall.

to the screen. Nest ask the web community to submit code
snipplets solving this task. A special thing: The code can be written in any
language you know?

The result is phantastic. There are more than 1000 coda samples and as so often
the Perl sample is the weirdest, unreadable and most
obfuscated script, a triumph of non-sense over sense, look at it.

It i so simple. In the early 90s the young Torvalds initiated a phantastic project, developing a new operating system. The project developed very very well and is now well known as LINUX!
I’ve ever wondered how to start such a development. And today I read a short article Building your own operating system at codeproject.com on the basics of OS development.
More exactly the author describes how to rawrite a boot sector for an operating system using Assembler.

This is probably the first time I’ve seen such 10 minutes guide to OS development and it is the first time I see the chance to understand what really happens in the genesis of an OS.

I up to now have no idea, how such a sample boot loader can be used in reality, eg embedded devices, mobile phones, pda,…. Any suggestions?