I use my laptop in some non-traditional environments, such as outdoors in direct sunlight. Almost all laptops are abysmal in a scenario like this. E-Ink screens are a natural response to this requirement. Unlike traditional TFT-LCD screens, E-Ink panels are meant to be viewed with an abundance of natural light. As a human, I too enjoy natural light.
Besides my fantasies of hacking on the beach, these would be very useful to combat the raster burn that seems to be so common among regular computer users.
Joining me at the sprint were two of my colleagues Gregory Szorc (gps) and Mike Hommey (glandium). They took part in some of the serious discussions about core bugfixes and features that will help Mozilla scale its use of Mercurial. Impressively, glandium had only been working on the project for mere weeks, but was able to make serious contributions to the bundle2 format (an upcoming feature of Mercurial). Specifically, we talked to Mercurial developers about some of the difficulties and bugs we’ve encountered with Mozilla’s “try” repository due to the “tens of thousands of heads” and the events that cause a serving request to spin forever.
Recently (the past few years actually) we’ve been experiencing that Mercurial has problems scaling to it’s activity. Here are some statistics for example:
24550 Mercurial heads (this is reset every few months) Head count correlated with the degraded performance 4.3 GB in size, 203509 files without a working copy One of the methods we’re attempting is to modify try so that each push is not a head, but is instead a bundle that can be applied cleanly to any [mozilla-central](https://hg.
For the next week (and the previous week) I’m spending time in Paris. This turned out to be largely a convenient set of circumstances, since I had an excellent experience when I was here two weeks ago, and I wished I could spend more time here.
I was fortunate enough to be here for two concerts I wanted to attend, namely Morcheeba and Parov Stelar. Both were at the excellent venue L’Olympia.
Some of the OSUOSL employees attended the recent DefCon 18 conference. One of the more uncommon features was the conference badge.
In addition to being a ticket for entry into the conference, it’s also a hackable piece of hardware complete with 128×32 LCD screen, and microprocessor. The source code for the badge is available online.
Corbin Simpson, a developer at the OSU Open Source Lab spent a large portion of his time at the conference developing and uploading new software onto his badge.