Over the past few days I’ve been working on The Eudyptula Challenge. For those keeping score at home, this is a momentary break from working on skillbook which, in turn, was a diversion from working on Taliesin (I just noticed that GitHub has a woefully out of date copy). In any case, Eudyptula is a genus containing two species of penguins that are commonly found in Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand and the Chatham Islands. On the other hand, the Eudyptula Challenge is “a series of programming exercises for the Linux kernel, that start from a very basic “Hello world” kernel module, moving on up in complexity to getting patches accepted into the main Linux kernel source tree.”

Sounds fun, right?

With two tasks under my belt, I can say that it is. Completing the first task also necessitated setting up msmtp+fetchmail+mutt as the grading script doesn’t accept either html email or non-plaintext attachments (web-based Gmail defaults to html bodies and sends all attachments as base64 encoded). One of the challenge rules is to not talk about the solutions or the tasks, so I won’t go into any more detail here.

And with that, the email for task 3 just appeared in my inbox.