KernelTrap - humor

Quote: Save A Few Bytes

Jeremy — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:26:53 +0000

"Maybe we should change Andrew's name to be Adrew Norom throughout the kernel sources, that might also save a few bytes."

April First Kernel.org Upgrade

Jeremy — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:32:36 +0000

"I and the other Kernel.org admins would like to announce downtime for ALL kernel.org machines (this includes all of the mirror machines, the public machines and the backend master). The downtime is scheduled to start on or around April 2nd, 2008 on or around 0001 UTC," began a GPG signed message on the Linux kernel mailing list from John 'Warthog9' Hawley, one of the kernel.org admins. Referencing a recent Slashdot discussion that compared Linux and FreeBSD performance, he continued:

"After much deliberation, research and argument in #korg (along with screaming matches between HPA and I over dinner) we are upgrading the kernel.org machines from Fedora Core 5 to FreeBSD 7.0. This decision does not come lightly to the Kernel.org admins, and we would like to point out several key things that helped us form our decision:"

John concluded, "we feel that we can better serve our mirrors, our users and the community by making the switch, and we hope to have the transition done very shortly."

Quote: Test Post Limerick

Jeremy — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 14:46:47 +0000

"There once was a message to test; Repeated unto being a pest; While marked to ignore; It was seen more and more; Until other begged, 'Give it a rest!'"

Linux: Poetry in Documentation

Jeremy — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:22:18 +0000

"Lguest is an adventure, with you, the reader, as Hero," began some documentation for lguest recently submitted by Rusty Russell. The documentation continued, "but be warned; this is an arduous journey of several hours or more! And as we know, all true Heroes are driven by a Noble Goal. Thus I offer a Beer (or equivalent) to anyone I meet who has completed this documentation. So get comfortable and keep your wits about you (both quick and humorous). Along your way to the Noble Goal, you will also gain masterly insight into lguest, and hypervisors and x86 virtualization in general."

Andrew Morton noted that he would consider the documentation patches for inclusion in the 2.6.23 kernel, to which Rusty replied, "indeed, no code changes, and I feel strongly that it should go into 2.6.23 because it's *fun*. And (as often complained) there's not enough poetry in the kernel." Linus Torvalds quipped, "there's a reason for that," going on to rhyme, "there once was a lad from Braidwood, with a wife and a hatred for FUD, he hacked kernels for fun, couldn't get them to run, but he always felt that he should." He added, "so when you say 'there's not enough poetry', next time you'll know why. You *really* don't want want poetry." This led to numerous additional poetic submissions about which Rusty noted, "there was a poetic infection, which distorted the kernel's direction, the code got no time, as they all tried to rhyme, and it shipped needing lots of correction."

Interview: Rusty Russell

Jeremy — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 12:03:00 +0000

Rusty Russell is a Linux kernel hacker living in Australia, working for IBM's Linux Technology Center. He's also a frequent and talented speaker at Linux gatherings. When talking about Rusty in an earlier interview, Andrew Morton summarized, "he's just a really sharp and witty guy - anyone who has attended one of his sessions at a conference will attest to that!"

Well known for his packet filtering efforts, having written both ipchains and netfilter/iptables, he has continued to make an impressive number of contributions to Linux kernel development. A large sampling of his current projects have been merged into the upcoming 2.6 kernel, including futexes, per-cpu counters, hot pluggable CPU support, and a complete rewrite of the in-kernel module loading code.

For a humorous sample of Rusty's wit, one only needs to look to his email signature which reads, "Anyone who quotes me in their sig is an idiot. -- Rusty Russell." Read on for the full interview.

Linux: Flavour vs. Flavor

Jeremy — Sun, 10 Aug 2003 19:02:00 +0000

Jasper Spaans recently submitted a patch to the lkml that "changes all occurrences of 'flavour' to 'flavor' in the complete [2.6 development kernel] tree". This quickly led into a lengthy and frequently humorous discussion about the which spelling is better, and if it even matters.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds aknowledged that there are times when such consistency is beneficial, but that overall it was of little importance to him. Regarding the emails that were threatening to quickly grow into a full-fledged flame war, he noted, "I think you guys who care should have a huge free-for-all, an electronic mud-wrestling thing if you will. But not on [the] linux-kernel [mailing list]." In mock newscaster tone, he went on to describe what might happen, "I can see it now:"

".. Alan Cox gets up, and tackles Zwane, who goes down in the mud. Oops. They were on the same side. I guess Alan got caught up in the rush. Jasper tries to take advantage of the situation, but slips in the mud, and goes down in a heap with Alexander..."

Much of the discussion follows.