Cruddy Day
The weekend was alright, I did very little, while enjoying good brew on the deck with the laptop. The photo is of moss on the front walkway at sunset. The camera was set to macro mode, which always results in a high depth of field.

Today was terrible. Nothing worked. At all. At work nothing would build, then Markus decided to start an IM debate about why QNX's microkernel approach is superior to Linux's much simpler design. From my point of view, it seems that microkernel is great for embedded systems, like what QNX was designed for, but not for servers and workstations like Linux. But besides that, Linux is getting more and more modular, and is moving more and more into userspace. The OS is moving from a monolithic design like classic UN*X toward a modular layout, unique to itself. Then Kyle pointed out that Exokernels are all the rage now anyway.

At lunch, the EngSoc mail server lost a drive on the RAID array, so I had to go in and try rebuilding from there. It didn't go, and the drive was swapped with one of the desktops' drives in the afternoon. Looks like there's a WD RMA to be requested: bad blocks, probably. The temporary replacement just finished rebuilding in the middle of the last paragraph.

I was determined to not go home until things started working, which resulted in a pretty late day. One of the last things I tried was the new fd.o x-server. It worked, shadows and all. Everything was good, except that I was just informed on IRC that I was using the experimental "k-drive" server, formerly Tiny-X, instead of the X.org server I had planned to use. It may be experimental, but it's pretty cool. They should definitely come up with a better naming scheme, it's to confusing. Tomorrow I will try the "monolothic" server, which is the XFree86 branch I intended to use.

Project Utopia got asked if it would consider formally proposing for inclusion in Gnome 2.8. After some debate as to the API stability, it looks like there will be an effort to get it in for the 2.7 branch. That is good news. Hopefully the distributions will not rip it out like they rip out other Gnome components. 2.8 is shaping up to be one helluva release.