Cold, kernel, KDE

After the cold I had last weekend I haven't been able to do much. I can't seem to get up in the morning and remain light-headed most of the day. So I've been dithering a bit with my coding and getting caught up in too many irrelevant details.

I got stuck contemplating the 'object' system used by libraries, and got side-tracked thinking up different approaches. I think i'll stick to what I have for now (similar to OS4's); as an 'object system' it is limited, and actually 'backwards', but as a collection of 'interfaces' it makes some sense. I still might go with something a lot simpler too (it's not like I'll really have to worry about keeping a stable api 'going forward', if it's never finished and/or never used). I've also been thinking of the user/kernel split some more. I'm liking the idea that each process will be more like a protected virtual os environment, and the 'exec' library will just run the same as any other local library. It will then have a very limited set of system calls only it can make to do things which require supervisor mode, or call a server for things which require global data. The 'supervisor' kernel code will then have its own data structures apart from the rest of the system and be quite limited in functionality.

• Processes and Tasks
• Signals
• Ports and Message Passing
• IO Port Management
• Cache Management (for DMA/etc)
• Virtual Memory Management

I thought i'd setup KDE on my old laptop for my flatmate, until now it has just had blackbox and xdm on it (xdm is rather difficult to get running on fedora too). Wow. KDE is so ... quaint. I can sort of see where they're coming from but they've missed the boat on in so many ways it is difficult to enumerate them all. The launch menu is just odd - let's put a scrolling window inside a menu? The 'shutdown' button is even more confusing than xp. And everything runs like a total pig, why is resizing windows so slow? Just bringing up kdm vs xdm is another 20 seconds on the boot time and logging in another 20 or so. The sound scheme is really annoying. It's probably better than XP. But that isn't saying much.