tridge

The firmware is written by Tridge (of Samba fame) and the arducopter people use it heavily.

There should be luminaries to whom this does not apply, and tridge is certainly among that small pantheon.

How do you differentiate the kind of reversing that Tridge did to build Samba from the kind of reversing HD Moore's team does to build Metasploit?

But kicking, say, Fabrice Bellard or Tridge down a level purely because of what they choose to work on seems to be missing an awful lot of value...

Fantastic summary of the early days by tridge!

> Tridge also reverse engineered BitKeeper, the proprietary software that Linus foolishly used to host Linux kernel development for a while.

I think that was the first time I ever saw Tridge deliver a conference presentation and it was to a packed lecture theatre at the ANU.

Linus did a good job of coming up with a replacement tool in a hurry, but I'm also grateful to Tridge for poking a stick into the hornets' nest.

Isn't it funny to think about how, if Tridge hadn't done what he did, if all of Linus' public shaming of Tridge had done the trick and the Linux kernel had stayed on Bitkeeper, that we wouldn't have had git, or Github?

So, in typical tridge fashion, he and his friends created some, and given it is relatively simplistic, and the transmitters are quite tiny, the feature set seems pretty impressive (though I haven't had a need to use it...

> one of the Linux developers reverse engineered the protocol, breaking the licensing terms Tridge never accepted the license terms of BitKeeper and re-implemented client libraries only by observing black box behaviour of the server, so at no point did he break the terms of the license.

In his thesis, Tridge touts the fact that 'a failed transfer is equivalent to "cracking" MD4' as a reason to trust rsync; but now that we know how weak MD4 is, it's possible to create files which rsync -- and thus Duplicity -- will never manage to back up properly.

From the youtube video: "This talk is all about the technology and techniques that we have developed for building an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that can search for and find a lost bushwalker in outback Australia" Tridge is a great speaker, and discusses the nuances of this topic really well.

(But it far predates rsync -- I think it might even predate Tridge.) In many cases, a "look and skip" algorithm like KMP or BM will outperform a rolling checksum search; but of course if you've got 328MB of data on disk, nothing will make the search faster than the time it takes to read the data into RAM.

At the WiseTech office in 2006 we had a small shrine in the corner dedicated to Tridge, the patron saint of hackers.

Tridge also happily uses an earlier version of OpenTX called er9x I believe.

Rusty, Tridge, Linus, Bdale, Keith Packard, Lennart, Garret, Val Henson, Rasmus...