hadess: football ain't too bad a sport, but football supporters, oh man, what a nice team you're in ... >;->

Now that I have been fooled about writing in this stupid HTML form, maybe I should try to entertain the masses bored on a Monday morning at work, fine ... Notes: 1/ I'm not drunk 2/ monday morning at work on summer must suck, I'm sure 3/ federico, I promised you to write this entry 3 weeks ago, so now you know how I handle promises on IRC or deadlines ...

I went to Linux Symposium, it was fun but heavy, (technically that is I didn't drink much this year), 4 tracks in parallel for 4 days might be a bit too much. There was some really interesting talks, very technical though and my OS knowledge is getting rusty, or simply improvements at the Linux kernel level are getting more and more difficult as the kernel matures (hint there is plenty of stuff left to do in userland !). ajh and the team ran a fine conference again, in spite of some missing wireless network equipment. It was good to see malcolm, I was quite interested by his presentation on SMIL, that's some of the part needed in userland, I feel a bit sorry for robla but it will be hard to standardize on a library which doesn't allow to build non-opensource applications. Nat's presentation was interesting too, crazy as usual, but I feel more in need of information selection than blasting more data which "might" be relevant on my screen, do we really need a "automatic FYI system", well maybe if we can make it smart. Ahum, about being smart, when an application takes over all resources WE SHOULD NOT REBOOT as the quickest way to regain control (for those who missed the demo, the data acquisition and inference processing went wild and Nat destop became totally unresponsive, rebooting the laptop was the only solution). Okay maybe this would be a desktop only setting but there should be a way to get the kernel to stop any program trashing the system for more than 15 seconds, then you send a DBus message (now that would have make another nice presentation) about it and the GUI ask "Application foo is behaving: kick the baby ? Yes / No", and acts accordingly, the kernel must stop the program activity first to even get a chance to ask. When the mouse doesn't redraw anymore, from a desktop user perspective, the machine is dead anyway ! Rik talk about VM was nice but all of this works when the constraints are linear, when you get something like an application taking over all resources and trashing it is non-linear behaviour, and usual tuning doesn't work (and ulimit stuff is simply not sufficient, I want very large application running, but I don't want them taking over the system !)

Also went to Red Hat, good to resynch with the colleagues from time to time. Interesting talks with jbj and other folks interested in metadata set and format needed for yum, apt, up2date, red-carpet and such. People interested might want to subscribe to the list, but please let keep this focused.

Made a couple of libxml2-2.5.9/libxslt-1.0.32 over the week-end, 90% of it are pure bug fixes, coming from a lot of contributors (makes me happy) and especially William Brake a serious coder in Taiwan, I hope I will have a chance to meet him one day, seems we never flight to the US at the same time <grin/>.

My little brother is getting married in 2 weeks, and my sister announced she would too in September. Must be the hot summer or something ... seriously it's really hot and dry here, some of the forest around looks like during fall, leaves are falling, fires are a disaster. If it happen to really be a consequence of our use of fossil fuel and excess of energy consumption, it's getting really worrysome ... The "good" point is that contrary to coral dying in tropical countries the weather crazyness start affecting western lifestyle, maybe with a good retroaction loop people may regulate their behaviour (or governments may force them to), but I'm dreaming loud :-( . People driving their 2 tons SUV to go to work in town simply piss me off ... you bastards !

I brough back from my US trip the South Park season 2 DVDs, and Snatch because it was cheap and the movie was excellent IIRC, I remember the sound track was colorful (like in SP, surprise :-). While rereading this entry I'm afraid SP is affecting my language, sorry, at least now I know where "1/ collect underpants 2/ ??? 3/ profits" actually comes from, I'm learning !!!