13 Aug 2002 shlomif   » (Master)

Mozilla 1.1 Beta for Linux

It's much better than Mozilla 1.0.0 - that's for sure. At least as far as the Hebrew composer is concerned. I did discover a bug which I reported to the developers and received a lot of replies to. Whenever I type some text in underline and then end the underline and type a comma, it crashes. Still, I'm very pleased with it.

FCFS R/W Lock for the Linux Kernel

Shhh! Don't tell anyone, but I'm working on making sure flock and fcntl are first-come first-served. With the help of the current maintainer I looked at the code, and from what I understood, the problem was not that the lock prefers readers over writers, but rather that it was last-come first-served.

I.e: it uses a stack instead of a queue to keep track of the pending processes. Thus, if a reader takes hold of the queue after all the pending writers, than most probably the lock would be dominated by readers.

A previous attempt at fixing it failed. And now I am trying to do it more gradually, while using User-mode-linux (of course!) and the Tom's Boot Root image.

Joel on Software Translation

Fixed some bugs in "Five Worlds" and "Things you must never do, part I" (thanks to the time spent by the gracious Hackers-IL people to review it). Now I'm in the middle of translating "UI Design for Programmers - 2" and hopefully learned some things from the feedback I received from the two previous installments.

One good thing about this translation is that I am able to replenish my Hebrew skills, which have become a bit rusty lately.

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