I saw Talib Kweli play for free at Ben Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia yesterday. It was really great – no frills presentation, just great music. Unfortunately some idiot local morning DJ had to patronizingly introduced him as a “conscientious and intelligent” hip-hop artist, saying nothing of his musical talent. Reminds me of some lyrics in one of my favorite Talib Kweli songs:

“Yo, I speak at schools a lot cause they say I’m intelligent
No, it’s cause I’m dope, if I was wack I’d be irrelevant”

KernelTrap is a really great website to read if you’re at least passively interested in OS kernels. For a couple years it was rarely updated and appeared to be largely unmaintained, but they are back with frequent, timely updates and a new UI. They follow Linux kernel development most closely but they also do a bunch of stories about other kernels like the various BSD kernels. This is especially good news since Kernel Traffic is on indefinite hiatus now. KernelTrap isn’t a detailed summary of weekly lkml (linux kernel mailing list) traffic but they do report on certain interesting lkml discussions as they are happening.

Gecko 1.9M8 is coming soon, here is a summary of the most significant Mac OS X improvements in this release:

• Focus issues have been sorted out, the annoying can’t-type-in-textfields bug is gone.
• Native form control improvements. Forms look and function better than ever. Fixes to CSS-stylabity as well.
• Performance improvements in various areas (including launch time, the menu bar, and graphics/drawing).
• Lots of text rendering fixes.
• Windows, tooltips, and context menus should behave better on multiple-monitor systems.

For Gecko1.9M9 on Mac OS X we will be focusing on the following areas in particular:

• Key handling (menu shortcuts, event propagation, event targeting)
• Browser responsiveness, perceived performance. Bug 395397 in particular will hopefully lead to a much smoother experience for our users. We won’t pause pageloads whenever users click or open menus, we won’t stop plugins from playing/updating (think YouTube) when users are clicking elsewhere or interacting with menus.
• More work on rendering native form controls, particularly under transformations such as transparency, rotation, and scaling.
• Dependent/modal window behavior.