There is some right bollocksing going on with regards to Mono and Tomboy and whether or not it should be considered part of GNOME. Regardless of whether it is, or isn't part of GNOME, it is quite useful and I use it. Today, while attempting to collect all of the notes I have on an article I am writing for GNOME Journal, I discovered something magic happens when you drag an email into Tomboy.


Simply fantastic. This is the way software should work.

Work
In other news, on Monday and Tuesday, I managed to get some long-time outstanding issues resolved in my code and I think I have a working technique to speed up my expose events. I didn't get to implement it, because I spent Wednesday and Thursday setting up our new programming machine. The idea is to use Xen to virtualize our machine into several logical machines, running different userspaces (32-bit FC5, 64-bit FC5, RHEL4) as well as a standard processing image that can handle jobs after hours. Xen and LVM were meant to be together and it was pretty easy to create a logical volume, untar our standard system image into it and get it booting:

[root@hilton ~]# xm list
Name                              ID Mem(MiB) VCPUs State  Time(s)
Domain-0                           0     4096     4 r-----    37.8
hotel12                            1    12090     4 -b----    12.7

Unfortunately it seems we're having some stability problems. Sometimes the whole thing will lock up hard when you shut down a domU and attempting to use the machine's myrinet interface inside a domU for anything more than ping seems a surefire way to crash it (with the new mx driver at least). I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, or how to debug it.

Friday morning it was discovered that the mail server had turned to mush, so I got the job of reinstalling it. It then turned out that it wasn't just the disk that was dead, but the IDE controller had some serious issues, so we had to transplant into a new machine. Just to make matters worse, the operators hadn't got a tape backup of its config more recent than October '04.

Life
Since my last blog post, I have read the first two Dune books (Dune and Dune Messiah) and haven't done much else (besides work). I will probably start on the 3rd one, as soon as I work out where it is. Our leaky roof was fixed, turns out there was a hole cut in it and nothing in the hole (huh?). I need to upgrade something to Edgy.