Linus Torvalds's blog

So I read Brent Weeks' Night Angel trilogy last week mostly while on planes.

Kudos to a new writer for a good debut trilogy, but also extra kudos for releasing a trilogy all at once and having a clean ending and not leaving things hanging just for the future. I guess the two are related (publisher not wanting to publish something from a new author without having the whole series in hand and being able to judge it), but I hate reading an interesting first novel in a series and then having to wait for the rest (hint: "Name of the Wind". Grrr).

So I was in Maui the last week, doing my best to spend as much time under-water as possible, given the constraint that I also had to at least occasionally meet up with my family for dinners etc.

And I got in a solid lucky thirteen tanks, with the added bonus that I don't think I had a single dive where I came up with less than 1200psi. Which means that I'm definitely no longer the person that forces other divers to come up early due to being low on air. Woot!

It's been about two years now since Randi walked away and never came back.

He was 17+ years old, and his kidneys were failing. He often woke us up (and probably the neighbours too) by being fairly loud about something in the night. But he was a good cat, and I'm surprised at how sad this post made me.

Book of the day: "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast" by Lewis Wolpert.

Ok, I really wanted to like it, since the subject matter is interesting. But in the end, I think it was too light on the science. The most interesting parts were when Wolpert talks about human mental development or about the various odd belief systems of tribes, but both of those were really not very deep. They were there to explain the arguments, nothing more.

End result: it didn't really grab me. It wasn't bad, but it also wasn't terribly intriguing.

I dunno about you guys, but I'm all for giving nature a bit of help. I've had lasik, for example, and am very happy with it.

Not that I actually ever really minded wearing glasses, but I could not recognize my own kids when in a swimming pool and they were more than six feet away. And let's face it. swimming after other peoples kids and tickling them is not socially acceptable. At least in the US.

Because he's a frosted corn-flsnake. Geddit?

So I'm pretty well-known for not exactly being a huge fan of the FSF and Richard Stallman, despite the fact that I obviously love the GPLv2 and use it as the license for all my projects that I care about.

I don't always dress in a T-shirt and jeans. Sometimes people give me awards, and I dress like a penguin instead. Here's a shout-out for the computer history museum.

So the merge window is over, and the subsequent "oops-that-needs-fixing" period is calming down, and so I get to read again.

Today's book was Dark Banquet by Bill Schutt.

Most of the time I read random fantasy or sci-fi (ie my previous books were re-reading Robin Hobb's Farseer and Tawny man trilogies), but when I read anything else it tends to be about biology or evolution. Sometimes physics, and essentially never about computers.

So, I wrote about election season in the US, without getting more than one or two "go back to where you came from" comments.

That clearly means that I need to ratchet up the controversy level, and bring up an issue near and dear to my heart - and given the times, possibly even more relevant than the election.

Yes, Halloween is almost upon us. That most holiest of holidays, when the whole country comes together, and without regards to race, religion or age, people join a common cause. Namely the gluttonous eating of candy.