So the UCC has 6 pretty quick Alphas, of which it is currently using one to tinderbox GNOME on. We've been trying to get them clustered into an OpenSSI machine, so they appear as a single contiguous machine, but this isn't getting anywhere.

So last night I started on a piece of software that allows someone to compile on multiple machines, farming out a module per machine. This is different to distcc, as a single machine is compiling, linking and installing a single module to a common file storage area (over say NFS). It is my intention to make the other 5 Alphas boot the same image as the first one via NFS (we've done hacks similar to this before).

The system is pretty basic so far. There is an XML-RPC server that knows the dependancy tree, and the status of each module. There is then a client that connects to the server and gets a module to build. Builds it (or pretends to at the moment) and reports back to the server.

It's looking pretty scalable. Simulating a build as 20s (haha!), I am running 8 clients without any of them being too starved for jobs. Once I start doing real builds, and one is doing Mozilla (for example) I'm sure it will work better still.

It still needs a lot of work (people should feel free to sumbit patches). It's in the GNOME CVS under the module 'jhfarmer' (http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/jhfarmer/).

It's damned primitive, and currently doesn't deal with things crashing, nodes vanishing (those items will never get built) and all sorts of other things, oh and it doesn't actually build anything yet.

Anyway, feel free to work on it.

I do not know why people are arguing over notifications again. There is actually now a flexible and easy to use specification in existance. It's a freedesktop.org specification, and something more we can share in common with KDE (although apparently they feel the spec is missing something, I didn't find out what).

Apparently the problem is that it does fit the goals of the GNOME design team. What design team... I was never made aware that we had an official design team. Don't get me wrong, I love the work that Seth and Bryan and co. do, but they do not form some magic advisory board whose word is law.

It would seem that this mysterious Redhat cabal missed the boat, and now they're sulking. Meanwhile it seems that Novell just did what they feel like.

Also, for all the hype surrounding Yarr (☠), it's really pretty boring.

That's pretty much my rant. Incidently, the compressor in my car's airconditioning is kaput.