Since there is absolutely nothing going on in the tech world today (really, we checked the internet), we figured some off-topic lightness might be a good idea for this Saturday night (it's night already in The Netherlands). The question we pose to you today has absolutely nothing to do with operating systems, computers, or technology: what albums are you most looking forward to in the coming one, two years? I blogged about my five most-awaited albums for 2008/2009, and this is my list (all albums are yet to be named): Fiona Apple's 4th album (I kind of really like Fiona Apple), the 7th studio album by The Cardigans, Garbage's successor to "Bleed Like Me", A Camp's coming second album, and Garbage front-woman Shirley Manson's first solo album. Post your favourites in the comments!

"When I was but a wee computer science student at New Mexico Tech, a graduate student in OS handed me an inch-thick print-out and told me that if I was really interested in operating systems, I had to read this. It was something about a completely lock-free operating system optimized using run-time code generation, written from scratch in assembly running on a homemade two-CPU SMP with a two-word compare-and-swap instruction - you know, nothing fancy. The print-out I was holding was Alexia (formerly Henry) Massalin's PhD thesis, Synthesis: An Efficient Implementation of Fundamental Operating Systems Services (html version here). Dutifully, I read the entire 158 pages. At the end, I realized that I understood not a word of it, right up to and including the cartoon of a koala saying 'QUA!' at the end. Okay, I exaggerate - lock-free algorithms had been a hobby of mine for the previous few months - but the main point I came away with was that there was a lot of cool stuff in operating systems that I had yet to learn."

"When my girlfriend visits me, she has to work on a mini PC while I use my laptop to finish whatever I postponed at the office. Her PC has a 1GHz VIA processor and 128 MB of RAM and runs Ubuntu. You can imagine how slowly it boots, even with Linux installed, and GNOME runs so slowly that it's quite irritating. I didn't want to reformat and install a lightweight Linux distribution like Fluxbuntu because the mini PC doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, and I already had 10GB of data that would have taken a long time to back up. Instead, I found and installed some lightweight software to improve her computing experience."

"Here we are at the moment of truth for the FreeBSD operating system - the 7.0 release. This is what FreeBSD users and developers have been waiting for ever since the dark days of the 5.X series when the promises of superior performance, threading, and stability fell flat. Though each release in the FreeBSD 6.X series improved markedly in quality and performance, 7.0 has been widely anticipated as the release that FreeBSD fans can have confidence in. I wish I could say that FreeBSD 7.0 lived up to the hype."

The Mac and iPhone SDK are based on the Objective-C programming language, a surprising alliance of C and Smalltalk. Features such as meta-classes, message sending, dynamism, C compatibility, etc., contribute to define the development experience on Apple's platforms. Here is a little list of things that, in Philippe Mougin's experience, contribute to make Objective-C a powerful and fun programming language.

dwm 4.8 has been released. "dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task performed."

"Apple co-founder and icon Steve Wozniak visited Australia last week to deliver a speech on how technology will continue to enhance our lives. Woz, as he is affectionately known as, is not shy in coming forward. On any topics. Here we gathered a collection of bite sized snippets that we found to be insightful and down right amusing."

The GNOME development community has announced the official release of version 2.22 after six months of development. GNOME is an open-source desktop environment that supplies a complete user interface and an assortment of programs for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. GNOME 2.22 includes some important new architectural features and a handful of significant new programs. Among the most important enhancements in GNOME 2.22 are the GVFS virtual file system framework, which brings improved network transparency to GNOME desktop applications, and the PolicyKit framework, which provides improved support for secure privilege elevation.

PC-BSD 1.5 has been released. "System Updater tool: keeps system & PBIs up to date; sound detection program! Uses XML backend to identify and load modules; amd64 build of 1.5, including PBIs that are on our auto-build server; PBI icon preview library, now a PBI file shows the embedded icon on your desktop, not the generic 'PBI' format icon; Xorg 7.3; KDE 3.5.8; FreeBSD 6.3 Release."

"On the 2008 GTK+ Hackfest in Berlin, Imendio’s GTK+ hackers presented their vision of GTK+’s future and the reasons why they think that GTK+ has to make a step forward, embrace change and break ABI compatibility. Other GTK+ developers have also voiced their opinions, listing parts of GTK+ that need serious love, but state that they don’t require breakage. Whether or not these are the things that will mark the road to GTK+ 3.0, almost all of them need attention. And give hints to the shape of things to come."

The GNU project has released version 4.3.0 of the GNU Compiler Collection. "The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 4.3.0. This release is a major release, containing new features (as well as many other improvements) relative to GCC 4.2.x."

GNOME 2.22 isn't officially released yet, but here's a first look already. "Every six months, the GNOME team prepares a new and revolutionary release of the ever popular GNOME desktop environment. Today, we are proud to introduce you to the latest and greatest features of an 100% FREE and open source desktop. Whether you are on a Solaris machine or the latest Ubuntu distribution, GNOME is there and with every new release it makes your life... Simply Beautiful! Let's have a look at the new features of GNOME 2.22."

"Last month we had measured Ubuntu's boot performance via the open-source Bootchart utility and had done this on all Ubuntu releases between Ubuntu 6.06 LTS and the latest development build at the time for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. From this testing we had found the boot time to decrease with each official release and the maximum disk throughput increasing. With Fedora 9 Sulphur due out next month, we have done this same boot performance testing on the Fedora side with Core 4, Core 5, Core 6, 7, 8, and 9 Rawhide."

Comic: "Insecurity".