In day to day use, the 2.6 kernel does seem more responsive. Applications I haven’t used in a while don’t take much time to redraw; with 2.4 they used to take a few seconds — I’d assume this was waiting for the kernel to schedule them in. 2.6 kernels have a new scheduler that gives more priority to I/O bound programs.

I/O bound programs are typically found on desktops. Most desktop programs wait for user input (via I/O). As user input comes at a far slower rate than a computer works, they typically are asleep for long periods with short bursts of reactions to user input. The kernel gives these applications high priority because they are likely to be either waiting for I/O (and so not be available to run) or they are going to do a small amount of processing before going back to sleep again. This means that giving them a higher priority than other programs is very unlikely to severly impact the system as they do not require much processor time.

I’m filling quite a bit of my time, it seems, with changing aspects of dx13’s looks. All the designs have the familiar grey/white look to them; I feel that this is the dx13 look now, and one that will probably be common to all iterations.

I’ve never really tried having a photograph as part of the header on the site. I’m not sure whether I like it or not right now. The image is taken from this site and is licenced under a creative commons licence there, so I shall be mentioning: it’s a derivative work and as I am as such indebted to Jose — whose site it is from — for he is a far more skilled photographer than I am.

I have a shiny new udev managed /dev, rather than using devfs. From what I’ve read, devfs is a rather hacky and buggy system that was used because the functionallity was needed, rather than it was the best solution. At least, that’s what the udev site seemed to say!

Reading more into udev, this summary would appear correct. This is mainly because udev operates in a user environment rather than directly in the kernel. Having less code running in the kernel-space is generally a Good Thing as kernel code is where the worst things can happen.

There has been a For Sale sign lying on the corner of our street for a few days now. I would guess that some students nabbed it and then couldn’t be bothered to take it all the way home.

Today two girls pulled up, quite suddenly, in the middle of the road. They were in a fairly expensive looking convertable and looked pretty well-to-do. Not the kind of people that one might expect to grab a For Sale sign lying by the side of the road.

Speaking with various people about the idea of spatial email, I decided that perhaps it would not be the best solution for everyone. Many people seem to prefer having a single application for the purported benefits that it brings; the main one being junk mail filtering and other similar filtering.

I can see how this functionality would be useful for POP3 users, who manage their emails offline, but for IMAP users I still think that viewing emails in a similar way to files would work.