Me and a couple of friends visited a friend Hamburg last weekend, and we – of course – had a
lot of fun. Arrived late friday evening we took the whole saturday to visit the
“Landungsbrücken” and a little later “Strand Pauli”, a beach bar in St.
Pauli, it was all lots of fun and relaxation. On sunday we went to a lake to go swimming but had to
return in the afternoon already due to tight working schedules.
On a more technical note, I read with much excitement an e-mail by Andrew
Morton, one of the top linux kernel hackers. He asks for some discussion about which features to
merge into Linus’ tree (the official “vanilla” linux kernel) during the 2.6.13 development
cycle. My personal favorites are:
inotify
Inotify is a kernel feature that can notify userspace programs of changes to the
filesystem. It’s especially useful for search engines that can reindex information incrementally,
i.e. only the bits that have changed, but has lots of other users aswell. Only imagining my locate
program would always use an up-to-date index every time I use it sounds really cool, but there’s a
lot more to it.FUSE
Filesystem in userspace. It makes things such as SSHfs, EncFS, GmailFS and lots of others It might at some point even become a drop-in replacement for KIO. (In
fact, there’s already a KIO-FUSE gateway.)reiser4
A new filesystem with lots of features which is also supposed to be very fast. I
did some benchmarking some time ago, it looks
promising.Xen
A virtualization layer allowing you to run different systems on the hardware of
one, sharing resources.
Things like Inotify, FUSE and Reiser4 could mean a lot to desktop-linux.
Ow, and google extended the Summer of
Code, they are now issuing 400 instead of 200 stipends, so statistically my chances have
doubled. :-)