Tridge Speaks Out

Robert McMillan from Linux Magazine posted an interview with Tridge, of Samba and Tivo fame. He's one of the most important folks in all of Linux, and this interview is worth a read. He covers a lot of good material like crap code, bonobo, and what stuff in the kernel is innovative. He also talks a bit about what he might do after Microsoft drops SMB from future versions of windows.

Comments

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[gowen]

Is here.

Hmm, you'd think a "printer friendly" version would remove JPGs of Unix-nerds. No one wants to print those out. Actually, I'd be happy if that were the only thing it did.

Re:Yet Another Unemployed Programmer (TM)?

[BacOs]

According to his home page

Until recently I was a senior engineer in VA Linux Systems. Due to the recent layoffs at VA I am now actively looking for a job.

clc

[Anonymous Coward]

comp.lang.c is your friend. It's one of the strictest newsgroups on Usenet, perhaps second only to comp.std.c ;). If you post anything on there that looks suspicious in light of the standard, even if it would cause problems on machines that don't even exist (and never will), you will get more "grumpy" responses (not to be confused with flames) than you can deal with.

Also, you'll get some pretty heavy heat on the style issue. Casting malloc(), using redundant parantheses on sizeof (i.e. treating it as a function or macro), performing micro-operations (which the compiler/interpreter does a much better job of) are all grounds for assault.

comp.lang.c will set you straight within a couple of weeks (given you're willingness to be humiliated on a regular basis), and you'll be still be learning things after years of regular reading. Again: comp.lang.c is very strict: if comp.lang.c++ is Woodstock, comp.lang.c is a Nazi concentration camp. Okay maybe I'm overselling it a bit :)

As for automatic code checkers, use lclint liberally. There's also the mythical Stanford patch for gcc (at least I think it's from Stanford; one of those pretentious schools anyway) that was used to find many Linux bugs.

Seriously, just start posting random tiny (no longer than 3 or 4 small functions, or else people will get bored of reading) snippets of code to comp.lang.c. 95% of posters can't even get a satisfactory Hello World! on their first try.

Re:All the interesting positions in Linux are take

[MaxwellStreet]

I think the problem is a little different than the project being "fun" or not.

Me? My team and I built and maintain a homegrown oracle-based solution that stitches together contact management, accounting, and production management for a little manufacturing firm here in Chicago.

I find these things... fun.

The problem is - it takes a lot of expertise and insight (garnered only through painful experience) to build applications heavy in accounting and business-logic functions . . . expertise that goes beyond what is normally taught in a CS program in school.

And recruiting people with expertise outside the computer science realm into open source development (without paying them - your point is well taken here) can be really difficult.

There just aren't that many people with cross-disciplinary expertise who aren't buried in paying-job-type work and who are willing to donate to the cause.

Re:smb-less windows file sharing is already a real

[KidSock]

ms introduced port 445, 'microsoft-ds', with win2k. one can completely disable netbios on a system and still transfer files, but network neighborhood won't work anymore - it's going to be a short amount of time before there's something to replace that.

Not quite. The 445 stuff is actually SMB. It's just not over NetBIOS. That little 4 byte header is left blank (or maybe it encodes a length, I don't remember exactly). And Network Neighborhood (aka Browsing) is replaced with similar functionality using Active Directory I beleive. Later versions of Samba support the CIFS on port 445 I beleive.