Linus Torvalds doesn’t read code any more
November 20th, 2012
Who would’ve thought? He leads an organization of 100s of developers, and doesn’t do much coding anymore? Although if you read to the end, you’ll find that he still codes, just not Linux kernel stuff.
Well, the big thing is I don’t read code any more. When a patch has already gone through two people, at that point, I can either look at the patch and say: no, all your work was wasted, and micromanage at that level – and quite frankly I don’t want to do that, and I don’t have the capacity to do that.
So most of the time, when it comes to the major subsystem maintainers, I trust them because I’ve been working with them for 5, 10, 15 years, so I don’t even look at the code. They tell me these are the changes and they give me a very high-level overview. Depending on the person, it might be five lines of text saying this is roughly what has changed, and then they give me a diffstat, which just says 15 lines have changed in that file, and 25 lines have changed in that file and diffstat might be a few hundred lines because there’s a few hundred files that have changed. But I don’t even see the code itself, I just say: OK, the changes happen in these files, and by the way, I trust you to change those files, so that’s fine. And then I just say: I’ll take it.
X11 Turns 25 Years Old Today
September 15th, 2012
Happy Birthday!
It was 25 years ago today, on 15 September 1987, that Version 11 Release 1 of the X Window System (a.k.a. X11) was released. X11 has evolved a long way since then, but this 25-year-old technology out of MIT remains at the heart of every Linux desktop.
Toad for Eclipse
October 5th, 2010
In attempt to reduce its dependency on the Delphi platform, which ended up being owned by competitor Embarcadero, Quest recently released a first version of the Toad Extension for Eclipse. Functionality is severely limited, but we should see more to come. You can run this on Linux and MacOS as well, due to the Eclipse cross-platform-ness as an added benefit.
Linux for Oracle Tuning Checklist
July 26th, 2010
A quick post on a Linux for Oracle Tuning Checklist I found in Ronny Egner’s blog. If you’re doing Oracle on Linux, this is a must read (best while sitting at a Linux terminal), else just ignore this post.