(Dominic) It's natural to me that you should have an inode monitor sending updates when files change, but it's a natural, the UI needs it, we've got to do this. When you delete a file in Windows 2000, it takes a good two or three seconds before the fuckin' trash icon's updated. (Benoit) Or I'm writing a 1.5G file and halfway through it still shows "zero bytes". It's totally stupid. (Dominic) [...] It's not rocket science at all. [ Upcalls; Dominic Giampaolo and Benoit Schillings; Conversation with The Register ]

'inode monitor updates' is 'Upcall File changed' in RISC OS parlance. It's interesting to hear about such discussions. Amusing.

(Dominic) If you have something like a Zip file, why shouldn't we be able to use a file system to navigate our way through the structure. [...] Or there's something else that's interpreting (the path) and trying to make it look like a file system. [...] (Benoit) You can say give me an image, and give me an image "gif.small" and it gives you a small version of the image. [ Image file systems / ImageFS; Dominic Giampaolo and Benoit Schillings; Conversation with The Register ]

This is basic Image file system work, but with filtering for operations. Not infeasible even by RISC OS 3 standards. ImageFS was designed for and ran on RISC OS 3.

They're actually talking about database file systems, but the similarity of requirements is obvious.

The conversation is interesting (to me) and can be found at The Register.

Someone's done an implementation of XMLDSig for LibXML2. Only problem is that it requires OpenSSL. So, I guess that's my next job. Neat.

iName appear to have finally given up on their free forwarding service that they offered to the sign ups in the first few months, and so gerph@innocent.com will vanish very shortly. It seems a pity that yet another service has failed to keep up with its promises of an account for life. I had believed that iName were pretty good like that, but alas it appears not.

I could keep the account on by logging in again and only reading online, but that's no use to me and in any case, I can't actually log in because my 'hint phrase' is marked as 'na ?'. Really useful. NOT.

Pah. Simon has a girlfriend, apparently. And it's not Chloe. He's going to hate me for saying that .