The OS-periment

To start this new series of post, I will attempt to review a programming language which I’ve had the change to try at work during this month. What, you may ask, does this have to do with OS development ? Well, two things. First, I believe that this language could be the first in a [...]

It’s been a busy month. Let’s sum it up before going back to more serious blogging subjects ! I’ve moved to a new flat, which gives me quite a bit more space to breathe for the same rent as the previous one, and is at the same time closer to my favourite districts of Grenoble. [...]

So, I just got my PhD grant and thought “phew, I’m free of blogging and writing OS code for at least two months !”. And this is when my laptop’s right hinge decided to break. Since this is my main and only normal-sized computer (I’m not doing major work on a cellphone, thank you very [...]

I start to get this feeling that my body hates me. Why am I always so tired ? Don’t I sleep well enough ? Well, I can’t do much about pollens in the air and warm nights, but improving the rest didn’t help. Is it because I am a bit hypothyroidic then ? But medicine [...]

I was just wondering today : why do we humans have to sleep ? To get our brain back in a clean state on the morning after, and perform some heavy-duty memory clean-up tasks. But in this respect, isn’t it more akin to shutting a computer down than putting it in a low-power state ? [...]

As you may have noticed, development and posting are going more slowly than usual around here, and I need more “filler” blog posts than the norm to keep the place alive. That is because I am in one of these important parts of my life where I have little spare time to dedicate to my [...]

Since I have heard that this is kind of a tradition, here are a few interesting search engine requests through which people have ended up on this website… “демотиваторы” (41 hits) — Désolé, je n’ai pas compris. “expensive computer” (11 hits) — I suggest giving Apple’s stuff a try, the company has specialized itselves in [...]

Traditionally, system services have been implemented in two ways, depending on their requirements. Either people wrote shared libraries for “light” work, or they wrote daemons that were contacted using bytestream- or message-based IPC primitives ... [More] (such as pipes, sockets, or D-BUS). With RPC, I have proposed another IPC method that would be more specifically tailored to [...] [Less]

So, now that I feel a bit more awake, I guess I can expand on the software licensing concept discussed earlier. The core idea could be summed up in one question : is it possible to combine the binary redistribution freedom that freeware licenses give with the collaborative open source model of the GPL family [...]

So, I was wondering about this : if I became fed up with the GPL at some point (and the more I read v3, the more I feel like this), could I write a software license that puts very separate constraints on source and binaries ? Binaries would basically be freewares redistributed in the public [...]