A couple of fun things

Here are a couple of fun things I found recently that I thought were interesting:

Gist - Most people have probably heard of github, but Gist seems to be a new service they are offering that will let you post code snipits, kind of like pastebin. But with Gist, you can share, make changes, fork, add files, etc. via git! To actually modify what you put there via git, you'll have to have a free account, but sharing code and pasting via the web interface requires nothing at all.

Ohloh - I have to admit, that I just don't get social networking yet. I can't seem to bring myself to really get into all the facebook and myspace and all that. I'm probably just getting old. This is one site that actually makes me think there is hope for the concept though, as it actually provides interesting metrics and information about open source projects. It found contributions I had made from years ago, and let me tie them to my account.

Fault injection with Systemtap

A while back, I started learning and using Systemtap to help in understanding code flow, and in debugging. It's a really neat tool, but looking at it from the perspective of a tester, I immediately realized that it was going to be useful for fault injection. After some searching, the only thing I could find was a reference to the SCSI fault injection test harness. This was a good start, but obviously the same concept would be useful to apply to other areas of the kernel as well. Today, I noticed that someone else has finally started along that path.

It's fairly new, but the authors claim to have ported the SCSI fault injection test harness to their new fault injection framework. It is small, easy to understand, and they have provided some examples already. It also looks like it will have a home in the Systemtap tree fairly soon as well. This is one of those things I wish I had about 7 years ago!