Near the end of Akademy, when it was finally short enough on talks, BoFs and whatnots to leave some time for serious hacking, after staring at the source of glcompmgr, I finally decided that this OpenGL compositing thingie cannot be that hard. And, 24 hours (with some sleep in the middle :) ) later, after staring at the glcompmgr code more, using code from it and searching in the OpenGL Redbook, I had this:

[image:2439 size=original]

This was actually supposed to be a follow-up to my tests of startup performance of various desktop environments, primarily KDE of course :).

One of bugzilla features is displaying various headlines, probably in order to cheer up the poor bugreporter or bughunter. KDE bugzilla actually doesn't seem to have this enabled, but I liked this in the old SUSE bugzilla, it had a nice collection of funny quips for the headlines. Those are gone now though after the switch to Novell bugzilla, which seems to prefer various encouraging quotes from famous people (I can't help it but sometimes they kinda remind me of the old communist times with their slogans).

This so often repeated myth is getting so old and so boring. And untrue. Linux doesn't need defragmenting, because its filesystem handling is not so stupid like when using several decades old FAT. Yadda yadda, blah blah. Now, the real question is: If Linux really doesn't need defragmenting, why does Windows boot faster and why does second startup of KDE need only roughly one quarter of time the first startup needs?

LWN has a very interesting article summing up Michael Meeks' work on improving shared libraries loading as a part of his work to improve OpenOffice.org startup times (his paper linked from the article is worth reading as well). And the dynsort and hashval optimizations that improve the data used while dynamically linking are finding their way into glibc as the --hash-style option.

As some might have noticed, KWin is supposed to get compositing support, allowing a wider range of various effects and replacing KDE3.x's separate kompmgr (developed by Thomas Lübking, based on the original xcompmgr, and according to e.g. this doing rather well for its time).

In the times of DCOP disappearing from trunk ... KDE DCOP WMIface (and of course the matching entry at b.k.o that I apparently failed to handle somehow)? What would be the best comment ... shame on me?

Every now and again you hear someone complaining about C++. You will probably also have heard that C sucks. The two statements are of course linked; the following code is valid C, but will never compile.

a.c:
#include "a.c"

gcc bails out at the 200th recursion with the error message:

In file included from a.c:1,
a.c:1:15: error: #include nested too deeply

I've omitted the two-hundred line long trace back through the other includes.

Yes, I'm paraphrasing the title of one of the claims how Klipper is an awful hack working in the most stupid way possible whose only purpose is to make sure clipboard content doesn't get lost when you close an application. What a nonsense. Klipper is a tool for keeping several last items from clipboard history, the fact that the several last items include also the very last one is just a nice side-effect.

Or at least many people apparently think so. One just has to love all these people believing that KDE could definitely perform at least as good as Windows 98 (but preferably better of course) if we developers weren't just so damn lazy and finally fixed it during one of our coffee breaks. Coffee (or tea in my case) in one hand, magically snapping fingers on the other hand, probably.