I liked it how his profile image[1] is a QR code for his site[2] and also resembles him.[3]

[1] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-DGzr5UFEIXM/AAAAAAAAAAI/A...

[2] http://goo.gl/BhXmc

[3] http://goo.gl/w5HNx

It's Russ Cox's work.

Background: http://research.swtch.com/field

Implementation: http://research.swtch.com/qart. It's all written in Go, btw.

Running code, so you can try it on yourself: http://research.swtch.com/qr/draw

QArt explained by Russ Cox: http://research.swtch.com/qart

QArt coder: http://research.swtch.com/qr/draw

No one inspired me to learn to code more than AC, have a good time with your family and thanks for everything.

Thank you for all your time and hard work Alan. I hope we see you back some time in the future. Enjoy your extra family time :)

Thank you, AC!

A huge thank you to Alan for all his work over the years. Like quite a few others who ran linux back in the old 2.2/2.4 days, the -ac kernels where the place to be.

I'm reminded of the Derek Silvers article (http://sivers.org/ff) on the importance of the second guy to a movement.

While I know that Alan wasn't the actual second developer to participate in Linux, he sure seemed that way to me and quite a few others. His work was as the "gatherer of patches" in the pre-bitkeeper days was unparalleled. I don't think Linux could have prospered without his assistance.

"for a bit" lacking in the title makes all the difference.

> I may be back at some point in the future - who knows.

This makes it sound less certain that this is only "for a bit."

or a binary digit

Back in the (2.1.x) day it seemed like I was running ac kernels more often than not. Nowadays though, I've been away from the kernel world for so long that I don't even know how big of a deal this is. Anyone care to chime in?

I don't follow the kernel nearly as closely as I used to, either. That said, here's Alan's most recent commits on the mainline (3.7) tree: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git....

That said, I too of course hope that whatever situation he is in the middle of goes well.

Not a very big deal, though I'm sad he has a family crisis. The only entry in MAINTAINERS left for Alan is drivers/tty/serial. He's been doing some kernel bugzilla triage too, that'll be missed.

There's more, this must be a disappointment to every Poulsbo user out there, he was getting that driver in shape last year.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5103271 :)

edit: I didn't mean to post this for karma or hard feelings; see my reply to daeken at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5109903 :)

While it sucks that you posted this and it didn't end up frontpaged (we all love karma), there's no good reason to link it here. When a dupe happens, threads are linked not to 'give credit' or something like that, but to show people conversations that they missed around the topic; in this case, there are none.

To be honest, I don't mind the karma much (as you can see, I don't have much, don't comment or post much, and mostly lurk around here).

I only was curious that it didn't get any attention when I posted it yesterday, and I was wondering why (Time of posting? People don't care about Alan Cox? Was there some obvious joke or prank that I was missing?).

I'd seen old-thread links posted before, so I thought this was a standard thing to do. But your point (of linking only to relevant discussion) makes perfect sense. Thanks :)

Hi! I am the submitter of the link.

I did not knew that the event has been submitted before. If I would have been aware of it I would have up-voted you instead of submitting another link.

I will up-vote your link now.

Pretty amazing how hn upvotes work :) Guess there is lot in the name(title)

Time of day matters a lot, too: http://hnpickup.appspot.com/

In case anyone gets confused between the two like I sometimes do, Alan Cox (Linux Kernel hacker) is not Russ Cox (Go language & Plan 9 from User Space hacker).

Very sorry to hear this and I genuinely hope that the canonical neckbeard's family situation improves.

Canonical? Might want to rephrase that. ;)

He was using 'canonical' in the canonical sense!

What about Alan Cox isn't canonical neckbeard?

I suspect that was a joke about him working at Intel as opposed to Canonical (the Ubuntu people).

His employer.

I believe the joke is about him complaining about Fedora, then switching to Ubuntu and now announcing that he's leaving Linux world a day later because of Canonical.

See his last few posts https://plus.google.com/111104121194250082892/posts

Alan left Linux for a few years before, to do his MBA, and he came back :-)

http://kerneltrap.org/node/759

I think Linus's asshole-ness is probably key to Linux's success. He ought to be considered the world's leading expert on running an open source project, after all.

I remember running your patched kernels circa 2000. Thanks for your hard work.

Why do people direct comments at AC assuming he will read them here? Isn't that a little self-centered? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to leave such comments at the original post?

Brilliant guy.

Thanks for your great work for linux and open source software,Alan Cox.