Dead or Alive?
My last post dated from a while back now, October 17 to be exactly. A lot of things have happend and they kept me busy ever since. So no, I’m not dead. I just happened to have a lot on my mind. Following are my 2 months in a nutshell.
Let’s start with the things that didn’t change. Yes, I still use Arch Linux and it’s rock solid as ever. I said I would definetely switch from Gnome to XMonad but I reconsidered. Now I’m using both, depending on the specific task I have in mind. In my experience there simply is no perfect window manager/desktop environment. With Gnome I’m trying to accomplish a complete desktop setup, an environment a regular user could expect. With XMonad I’m trying to realize a lightweight, command-line centric desktop. And no, it’s not for showing off. It leads to funny situations however, having a desktop nobody can use except you.
In my quest for a lightweight XMonad desktop, I went ahead and built a hal-less system. Something that is bound to happen as X Server 1.8 will be without it anyways. This caused a chain of application rebuilds that seemingly relied on hal. I’m not fully updated on the matter and it makes me unqualified to make any bold statement but it makes me wonder as to why they all use hal when they can use udev instead. The again, extracting hal from the system doesn’t really improve anything, performance wise that is. It merely removes a layer of abstraction. It’s more a purist kind of thing.
The best memory usage improvement came from uzbl, a browser that tries to adhere to the unix philosofy:
“Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface”.
I’m happy to see uzbl uses webkit instead of gecko, whether it is from a development point of view or simply for performance improvements I do not care. It also shows that Firefox uses an insane amount of memory, far beyond what should be necessary to view a plain website.
On a whole different subject, the last weekend of November I accompanied 3 friends on a trip to visit another friend in Barcelona. It was good seeing him again and we had a great time together even though he had an exam that very next monday. I guess studying medicine in a foreign language isn’t that hard after all :) We stayed in a not too bad and cheap hostel near the Ramblas, unfortunately some English football hooligans seemed to think alike and resided there as well. I’ll close this topic with a “cullinary tip”: try a tripple whopper. Or if you want to freak out the burger king personel, order four of them at the same time.
Now let’s get back to the things that really kept me from posting on my site: university assignments. Among other things I had to write a paper on process scheduling in the linux kernel,version 2.6.9. It didn’t come as a surprise the code itself was not documented at all (usually considered bad practice), even the commonly used “what lunatic came up with this shit”, Torvalds fucked this up” or “2,191 lines of complete and utter shit coming up” were nowhere to be found in sched.c and sched.h, the two files that take care of the scheduling. The assigment itself pretty much came down to reading up about scheduling and rephrasing what was already written on the subject, with a few personal opinions here and there.
To close with, I’m sorry to say that things aren’t really looking good for my posting frequency in the next 2 months. Tomorrow I’ll have to study non-stop for the upcoming exams in January. I also wanted to thank all of you readers for still following this blog. Apparantly I still do have readers after 2 months of no posts.