Paul McKenney's blog article inspired me to try apply his approach to kernel's memory allocation flags (gfp_flags) and how their combinations affect the decisions and actions taken during page allocation. Recent upstream development around these flags leads me to believe that the complexity is too high for me to reason about them and change the code without unintended changes in semantics. So it might be worth to let the computer do the hard work. If it works out, the approach should allow to verify that changing the code doesn't result in corner cases where some flag combinations don't work as intended. Then we can attempt to e.g. reduce the number of flags and perform other cleanups without fear of breaking everything.

Apache Maven is a build tool used by many Java projects, which is incompatible with OBS in that it tries to download binary dependencies from the Internet. Several people have in the past years tried to somehow bootstrap Maven and failed. My new proposed approach is a Maven, patched to obtain packages from a filesystem location, and packages with .jar based -bootstrap.spec variant plus source-based build for properly modeling dependencies in OBS. Unlike the SUSE Manager team's work I am trying to rebuild those .jars from sources. Where necessary I am patching dependency versions to the latest sources/jars packaged.

<p>PXE boot is a quick and easy way to install any SUSE/openSUSE product on a machine. It doesn't require any boot media and today virtually any system is capable of booting using PXE. </p> <p>The architecture team maintains a tftp server with boot loaders, boot loader configurations and installation images for a variety of architectures and products. Currently in the Nuernberg office this PXE boot service is only available in the network of the architecture team. Since tftp is unicast, the server should be reachable from anywhere in the internal network. What is missing is the information about the address of the tftp server and the image to boot from this server.

Needing to learn git, I thought it would be a good time to clean up the code and create a git project for it.

Or at least, test as many of them as possible.

Scaleway is a newly opened Cloud based in France (for now) offering ARM based servers. Those are BareMetal SSD cloud servers. They offer a range of operating systems to pick from (Debian, Ubuntu, ArchLinux...) as well as 'application images' (Docker, ownCloud...) but no openSUSE image yet.

Discourse is a really great opensource forum, written in Ruby on Rails and Ember.js. We should try to use it to complement mailing lists and IRC in internal communication, when we need persistent, searchable discussions (with helpful links to the outside world) for a broad and offtopicky subjects.

It's a tool or website for Bej employee to manage his(her) leave days, then they don't need ask HR for each time. An idea for learning Django web application framework.