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{ Tag Archives } lca2009

Can haz kernel patches?

As it’s only a couple of weeks till another Linux.conf.au is underway, I thought I better post this draft from the last one! This year LCA is in Wellington, New Zealand, sadly I didn’t get my act together enough to make a proper holiday of it. I’m definitely looking forward to catching up with all the cool hackers at the conference.

One of the best talks I went to Linux.conf.au last year was the Ksplice talk. This is a wonderful tool which allows people to develop “hot patches” so that you never need to reboot again. The developers have done some very cool work which means for 88% of patches a hot fix can be generated automatically. The presenter was a really great speaker too, during the talk he explains some advanced concepts (like hot to fix-up memory structures) I was able to easily understand it all. I can’t watch until I never have to reboot my Linux machines again!

I also attended Rusty‘s tutorial on hacking lguest. Two years ago I submitted a very important patch to lguest which is now included in the kernel. This year I didn’t get as far as I had wanted mostly because I had not gotten enough sleep the night before. I did however submit one patch which was accepted. I guess that makes me a kernel hacker :).

Sadly, Rusty won’t be running another lguest tutorial this year, so it’s unlikely I’ll submit a third patch.

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2010 01 03 mithro linux.conf.au Comments (0)

Programmer art, it’s deadly!

So one of the other things I worked on at Linux.conf.au was a project Joel Stanley started, “Open Velociraptor Per Child, the Game!”.

The game comes out of the Open Velociraptor Per Child project’s ideas. The OVPC project aims to give every child in the world their very own Velociraptor. The game simulates what would happen if this project was ever to achieve it’s wonderful but lofty goal.

My main contribution was adding support for (very bad) collision detection, scoring and difficult levels. However, what I spent most of my time was spent making bad programmer art, that of the particularly gruesome child death animation. I like to think it was this artwork that meant we won top spot at the Gaming Miniconf competition, beating the “Shave Bdale” game.

You can download the game from the git repository. Have fun!

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2009 01 28 mithro Gaming Miniconf Comments (0)