Valgrind is a wonderful development tool. It's so great that I am using it pretty much all the time, and I have to wonder how I was doing before I knew about it. Valgrind tells you if your program does invalid memory accesses or leaks memory. It shows you where your program is spending its time and how functions call each other. It shows you how much memory your program is using over time. It's not only a debugging tool, it's also a very powerful optimization tool. In fact, using Valgrind improves the code quality so much if you are paying attention that developing in C without using it should be plain forbidden! I am forever grateful to Julian Seward, Josef Weidendorfer and the other contributors for their amazing work.

February 9th, 2007 Linux

I found a nice surprise in the mailbox today: a copy of Greg Kroah-Hartman's latest book, "Linux Kernel in a Nutshell". It explains in great detail how to configure, compile and install your own customized Linux kernel. What was considered a matter of specialists only is finally available to everyone. I had the opportunity to review one chapter last September while Greg and myself met in Harrachov, and the editor wanted to thank me by offering me a free copy of the book. Thanks O'Reilly!

Yesterday I was at the Solutions Linux 2007 event in Paris, France, were I gave a talk about the Linux kernel developers community. I covered the general organisation, some statistics for the year 2006, and the evolution of the development process over the last 6 years.

I just published the photographs I took when attending the Sucon'04 (Swiss Unix conference) last September.

A nice, short article by Brian L. Naylor about what not to do on IRC.

I am named in an article published on Novell's web site. Great, isn't it? :-)

Are you a geek? Take the test!

A very nice mind game. There are some more, worth having a look too.

The most useless pi algorithm, by Roy Williams.

True Type fonts now working easily with XFree86 version 4!

Have a look at Infinity, a nice visualization plug-in for XMMS.

Produce amazing animations using Burn-in, a great script for Gimp.

Fade between the songs with Fadeamp.

Need a powerful video card? Get a Voohoo 5!

Remember Heroes, this funny DOS game? A Linux version has just been announced!

Look at this enigma! Sure it's good for your brain to have some exercise.

Very nice pictures on Mike Bonnell's site. If only everything was available to everyone... What's free justifies the move anyway.

The famous Linux distribution Debian should be soon available in stores thanks to VA Linux Systems, O'Reilly Associates and SGI.

Tip of the day: rpm -qf <filename> tells you from which RPM package a given file comes.

At last! We were all waiting for it for a long time, and here it is! Heroes, the fabulous game developed by Realtech and Olympus (well-known on the international scene) is available here. Not giving a try to that jewel would be an error. High-quality graphics, talented programming, lightweight hardware requirements, everything there reminds us that we don't need a Pentium III 550, 128 Mb of memory and an accelerated 3D video card with 32 MB memory to have a good time behind our screens.

A virus attacking Linux. An older article from CERT, much more technical.

Make sure you still have a working brain, give a try to Xbomb, a minesweeper game.