I am Jack’s raging anger

I find myself studying in the Kimmel Center for my Linear Algebra final, which is this Thursday. There I am, minding my own business on the second-floor study lounge.

But then, a group of three girls shows up in the seating area right near me, and starts chatting about whatever inane topic comes to mind. They are then followed by a German foreign student whom they know, who asks them if they know words like blitzkrieg and rammstein. They respond with blank stares and Southern accents conceding they never heard the terms. The German boy responds, “Surely you must know blitzkrieg, I heard you use the term when you study German military history.” Indeed, they probably know the words, but have never heard them pronounced properly by a German, and thus cannot make the connection.

Well enough, however, slowly more and more girls file in. A few guys show up as well. They ask to have the extra chairs around the desk at which I’m working, and make a lot of noise chatting and chatting. After a few minutes, there are probably twenty people, 15 girls and five guys. And they begin their club meeting. What’s the club? Bible study.

Is there a floor dedicated to clubs at Kimmel? Yes, floor seven. Is the second floor meant for study? Yes. Could I possibly focus on Linear Algebra with talk of Leviticus and Genesis in the air? Certainly not. What the hell is wrong with these people?

Xorg goes modular, is now approachable

It seems that Xorg, as of the 7.0 release, has been split into monolithic and modular development trees. The modular model allows you to compile individual components related to Xorg separately from the whole X server, so that you don’t need to do a two-hour compilation just to work on this or that driver or this or that library.

This is good news for me. My biggest craving lately was to put my C skills to use by diving into a big project that has effects on the Linux desktop, and Xorg is certainly the biggest in that sense. However, in the past I was always put off by the huge amount of groking one needs to do just to understand the Xorg compilation process. After class is over, I’m gonna start diving in.