New in October and November 2017

Because of the practical need to make money instead of indulging research to give away for the benefit of an industry that really ought to be much better at doing such work for itself, all I found time for this in October was to tie up some loose ends from September and also from so long ago that I can’t say I know how I came to revisit them, let alone why I didn’t finish them first time round. Well, on that last point the answer may simply be that, as would be known to anyone who works at understanding something that’s large and complex and of moderately wide interest, there’s no end of stuff to look into and write up. And, of course, I don’t always have either as long an attention span as I’d like or the resources to keep plugging away!

What little work I started in October anyway got interrupted, so that I didn’t tidy it until I snatched some moments in November before attending to another pressing reality: it was long past time to update the hardware that I do this work on and to switch over to Windows 10 for my everyday use of computers. Having seriously high-end hardware for this work is a joy. Switching to Windows 10 has been anything but. The numerous inconsistencies in the Windows 10 user interface don’t quite make the thing unusable but they certainly do make for a misery of small irritations. Add Microsoft’s presumption of an entitlement to manage my computer for me, and throw in the mystery of why Windows sometimes describes itself as activated but more often tells me to connect to the Internet to activate Windows or even to visit the Microsoft Store to buy a genuine copy, and I see that I have a long road of user-mode study ahead of me. With only nights and weekends available, this study will take a few months before there’s even basic bookkeeping to tidy and publish. So, bye for a while…

Kernel