GHC’s block allocator is a pretty nifty piece of low-level infrastructure. It offers a much more flexible way of managing a heap, rather than trying to jam it all in one contiguous block of memory, and is probably something that should be of general interest to anyone who is implementing low-level code like a runtime. The core idea behind it is quite old (BIBOP: Big Bag of Pages), and is useful for any situation where you have a number of objects that are tagged with the same descriptor, and you don’t want to pay the cost of the tag on each object.
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Ubuntu continues on its rampage of breaking perfectly good software, and on my most recent upgrade to Saucy Salamander, I discovered to my dismay that my media keys (e.g. volume keys, fn (function) keys, suspend button, etc) had stopped working. Of course, it worked fine if I logged into my user using Unity, but who wants to use a silly window manager like that…
The root problem, according to these Arch Linux forum posts is that Gnome has moved media-key support out of gnome-settings-daemon (which any self-respecting Xmonad user is sure to spawn) and into their window manager proper. Which, of course, is no good because I don’t want to use their window manager!
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