Gamin

With the help of John McCutchan, the code base is being cleanup up seriously. There is still a big problem to work around involving polling when dnotify doesn't work (temporary storage, NFS or non-existing resources) and a mysterious bug.

libxml2 and libxslt

So Apple is now using libxml2 for XML parsing in Safari and working toward implementing XSLT client side with libxslt. Rather than trying to work out the transformation in a KHtml DOM they plan to use libxml2/libxslt, reserialize and reparse, it will be interesting to see the performances of such an approach, after all a from a user point of view this won't be slower than XSLT (or PHP or both) on the server (except when caching). A simpler DOM not intended to be a base for rendering is likely to prove more effective even if it means a reparsing. Well at least this will provide some feedback for libxslt on the browser. Maybe Mozilla will be able to drop Transformix after all ;-P !

While I'm focusing on gamin, William Brack has been working continuously on cleaning up the libxml2 bugs which accumulated lately. Kasimier Buchcik also provided lot of improvement to XML Schemas support lately. I shall do a new release within a few week to bring those to the masses.

64 bits

I finally ordered a 64 bit CPU, it just arrived with a motherboard, I have been toying with the idea of getting a 64bit boxes for testing for ages (for examples the old Multia Alpha), but never made the investment. Found a cheapo mobo for an Athlon64 3000+, which makes an affordable deal, I will finally be able to try Fedora Core x86_64 and run regression tests there easilly.

One of the thing I wanted to talk to AMD representative at OLS but never managed to do: get valgrind on the x86_64. If they want to make it the developper platform of choice then that's one of the key tools we want. It can be done in 2 ways:

• valgrinding 64bits apps: i.e. the common usage.
• valgrinding 32bits apps: use the extra set of registers, dedicate them to the 32bits CPU emulation, the main problem of valgrind is the execution cost, and such an approach could seriously improve the emulation speed.

This might be a bit more expensive than cloning 500 CDRoms to give away to developpers, but far more effective !