I found out about gmane today. What a great site! I have been waiting for something like this for years! They basically offer mailing lists accessible via nntp, i.e. it's a Usenet news server, just without the usual Usenet newsgroups, instead it has mailing lists.

Why is that so great? Because I hate web interfaces to mailing lists. In particular I loathe bad ones like the one for ffmpeg on Source Forge. They don't have all mailing lists, and they don't have all the articles for every mailing list, but it is possible to submit mailing list archives. To my great surprise, I found that they already include the mailing list for one of my projects, the diet libc! Wow, what an ego trip ;-)

Anyway, I mentioned this yesterday in my diary, but overwrote it when I tried to post a second diary entry, which overwrote the first one. I started working on an event notification framework. I wrote it to learn about new platform specific APIs like sigio and epoll on Linux. I am planning to add kqueue support as well, but haven't gotten around to it yet. I measured some 8000 HTTP connections per second on my desktop box with it. With HTTP keep-alive I even got over 30000 transactions per second in one benchmark.

The Economist has run a very interesting story. It's about some polls about how people see other countries. The USA approval in Europe has dropped dramatically, even in UK only 50% of the population approve! Even more dramatic: Europe's approval of Israel is only 38%, that's way down there, almost as bad as Iraq. The strangest result is that 60% of the Europeans and 80% of the Americans want the EU to be a strong leader. Is that a call to rescue the Americans from their own government? Food for thought.