Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Download your Gmail and Google Calendar data … soon or now

I am a well known Google fan.  But even those who call it an Evil Corporation and a Global Spy, can’t argue with the awesomeness of these news:

Starting today we’re rolling out the ability to export a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data, making it easy to back up your data or move to another service.

You can download all of your mail and calendars or choose a subset of labels and calendars. You can also download a single archive file for multiple products with a copy of your Gmail, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, Drive, and other Google data.

gmail data export

Most of the 20 GB of data I store on Google Drive is actually my email archive.  I’ve imported email into my Gmail from as early as 1998 – much, much earlier than Gmail was even born.  Having a way to export them all out in one go, without using clunky POP or IMAP is much appreciated.

How many lines of code have survived to the current day from the original Linux kernel

Here is a excellent Quora question: how many lines of code, if any, from Linux 1.0 are still in the modern Linux kernel, and what is it?  And an evenly excellent answer:

According to git diff, 21228 of the 176250 lines from Linux 1.0 (1994-03-14) are still present in Linux 3.12 (2013-11-03):

$ empty_tree="$(git mktree < /dev/null)"
$ git diff --shortstat "$empty_tree" 1.0
561 files changed, 176250 insertions(+)
$ git diff --shortstat -M -l99999 1.0 v3.12
44905 files changed, 17702349 insertions(+), 155022 deletions(-)

Over half of these lines are blank or consist entirely of punctuation; only 10419 of them have at least one letter or number.

We can go back even farther to the very first public release, Linux 0.01 (1991-09-17). Of the 10239 lines in Linux 0.01, 954 survive in Linux 3.12, of which just 242 have at least one letter or number. 123 of them were structs and constants in include/a.out.h (now include/uapi/linux/a.out.h), and 26 of them were the S_* macros in include/sys/stat.h (now include/uapi/linux/stat.h). The rest were scattered through 24 other files with at most 9 lines each.

It might appear that not much.   But it is in fact impressive.  How much code have you written that survived for over 20 years in a project that has changed so much – from a hobby experiment to a dominant operating system across servers, mobiles, and embedded devices?