And while we’re at it, there’s some things I’d like… me to know. And you too, possibly.
I used to follow the Linux Kernel development very closely (I’ve subscribe and unsubscribed to the Linux Kernel Mailing List countless times in the past, because either you follow it or you better unsubscribe considering the insane traffic) but since a couple of years ago my focus pretty much shifted. I still have a soft spot for operating system theory and implementation, though, so if you’re a major Linux distribution willing to splash, oh say a fifty grand per month, on a fairly average kernel programmer, by all means, drop me a line. 
Anyway, the point here is that somehow I got to know that Linus has put out 2.6.16-rc4 and the release email to the list is hilarious:
The bulk of it is some SCSI driver updates (have you ever seen a diffstat without the qla driver taking the top spot? No? Neither have I), with a few architectures thrown in, and a number of mostly trivial fixes for good measure. (…) It is, as we say in the business, a “perfect” release. No bugs. No sirree. But just to verify that, you should all immediately download and test it. Since, quite frankly, what else do you have to do over the weekend?
The Linux Kernel humor can be quite twisted indeed - I need to find a collection of pearls from the LKML me and a friend put together a few years back and post them here - and probably this doesn’t really strike my meager blog audience as particularly funny. No worries. This is not public service anyway, now is it?
Other pointers tonight:
- Time magazine has an interesting article on Google, which I was fortunate enough to get my hands on (thanks, honey). Early this evening I found out that the photos from that piece are up on their website, so you can take a peek at the lovely swim-in-place pool or other lovely areas that comprise the Googleplex.
- Javascript development is gearing towards version 2 (ECMAScript Edition 4) and how lovely it is to see it looking like Python.
- This is obviously legally loaded, but automatically downloading new episodes of selected TV shows via BitTorrent (pretty much like iTunes deals with podcasts) is neat.
And last, but definitely not least, it’s cool to see the birth of Tiago’s first Dashboard Widget: the GameKnot Widget. If you like playing chess but have trouble finding a challenger, GameKnot is the way to go. This widget allows you to follow your ongoing challenges from the Dashboard, see its page for more info. He also took the chance to write some lengthy but insightful documentation on coding for Dashboard. Much appreciated.