Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2009-06-30: Tuesday.

2009-06-30T21:00:00Z

Mini lie-in, breakfast, Richard & Clint arrived - first sign of the builders for some weeks: they set to work hammer & tongs. Mother discovered a 'tic' on E. - guzzling away - prolly from Thetford Forest - urk; took her to the Doctor; H. to school / sports day. J. starting to recover slowly.
Poked mail. It seems we have an opensuse Moblin related mailing list setup now subscribe. Hacked away happily at a taskstat based bootchart collector in C - very happily, lots of high-res goodness we can show there, in contrast to the fearful /proc/*/stat bits.

2009-06-29: Monday.

2009-06-29T21:00:00Z

Took babes to school, pre-school, J. to the doctor's; finally got to E-mail, and package pieces.
Hacked away at netlink / taskstat goodness for bootchart. Noticed that the hot weather, combined with the humidity of an adjacent 'me' is bubbling the the paint off my desk under my arms; hmm.
Parents arrived to nurse J. and look after babes - what a relief; inspected the various works with Father.

2009-06-28: Sunday.

2009-06-28T21:00:00Z

Up early, dealt with babes while J. rested for much of the day. Took the girls off to a party at Cheeky Monkey's, left J. to rest; back, bathed & put them to bed. Sleep.

2009-06-27: Saturday.

2009-06-27T21:00:00Z

It seems Dhananjay now has a blog. Up early, looked after babes while J. slept, idled around the house tending to sick wife.
Off to Thetford Forest for Benjy's party - a great time had by all, though feeling pretty exhausted & washed out myself. Drove everyone home. Alba kindly came to baby-sit; took J. to hospital - chest infection, anti-biotics and rest - poor girl.

2009-06-26: Friday.

2009-06-26T21:00:00Z

Up, J. still in a bad way, call from Sanmarie - tap broken and leaking; took H. to school - set off to fix tap - realised MOT is today - set off for Cambridge.
Sat in the car show-room, experiencing '3' 3G mobile internet, distinctly sub-optimal in terms of bandwidth it seems. Chewed through older mail at some length.
Back, lunch, successful emergency plumber impersonation - back to work.
Amused by Florian's post on API design - very true; the real problem I see with using UNO interfaces (for which read COM), is that migrating existing code to them incrementally is abominably hard and inefficient, and never gets finished. Put simply - it is easy to design the perfect API, what is more difficult is to re-work the old code into the shape of that API. If you choose as a pre-requisite an (essentially) viral technology like UNO that makes incrementalism impossible: your entire API surface has to be UNO or not at all (modulo evil 'tunnel'ing) - then you instantly turn the problem into a "all or nothing" disaster area - whereby you have to re-write "everything" all at once, and inevitably you do that either very badly ( and given the way UNO exposes concurrency issues on every single call, this is almost inevitable ), or you take a very long time to do it. By far a better way, is to design the new interfaces you want (I assume there will be more than one interface), pick them off one by one, and re-factor the code incrementally to them - testing for regressions constantly. As/when that is done (if you can be bothered), providing a way to add UNO-isation is then easy (modulo the legion concurrency hazards you don't need to care about if you don't use it).

2009-06-25: Thursday.

2009-06-25T21:00:00Z

Up early, fed the babes while J. slept, took H, to school. Did some Safety at Work survey thing. Call with JP. Finally got the image building, and installing as required based on 11.1 - whoop; nice.
Disappeared to nurse sick wife, and care for cascade of children, music lessons, school collection etc. Back to prod at image installation later. Pleased by Nat's recommendation of commandlinefu, interesting.

2009-06-24: Wednesday.

2009-06-24T21:00:00Z

Prodded mail, prodded image building. Meetings much of the afternoon, waited three hours to build three small package - most of them in the state "Finished" for the majority of the time.
J. more ill in the evening, poor dear.

2009-06-23: Tuesday.

2009-06-23T21:00:00Z

Up early; to work, installed a recent image; trotted off to Cambridge on the train - pottered about enjoying the sun. Caught up with the Collabora crowd. Pizza lunch, good to see Christian again.
Train back; dug at mail, entertained babes while J. went to a parent's evening. Dinner, Tony came over to talk - good time. Amazed by the staggering ignorance of basic accounting in this solar rave - if you spend $38000 now, and expect to get slightly less than $38000 back over twelve years, you are loosing money. Payback needs to be compared in net present value terms; still, a >10% return anually seems reasonable in today's market with ten year treasuries at sub 4%. Anyhow, despite the numbers not adding up he's hit on my new favorite solution for sustainable energy - Solar: numbers, perspective.

2009-06-22: Monday.

2009-06-22T21:00:00Z

Up early, to work; battling the build system, amazed by the under-thought Malthusian pessimism coupled with supposed eugenic solution. At least Malthus had the exuse of not having a large published literature on the subject to study first.
OPS call with Markus. Pizza with the family; read stories, put babes to bed & back to work.

2009-06-21: Sunday.

2009-06-21T21:00:00Z

Up early, tidied & cleaned a little, off to NCC - some encouraging testimonies, Tony spoke. Caught up with various people, and off to Royston with Mike for a picnic.
Fine picnic in the open air, bouncy castles, lying in the sun, playing with babes etc.

2009-06-20: Saturday.

2009-06-20T21:00:00Z

Mini lie-in, raining - so photocopied architect's drawings of our home (if only they were actually accurate) - played what turned out to be a highly popular map-reading game/race, involving finding coloured dots around the house.
Lunch; cycled out to the heath with N. H. on their bicycles - with an indominatable performance by M. on a tricycle. H. hugely improved her starting, breaking and speeding away; N. doing well, M. steering perfectly, encouraging.
Scaled the apex of the roof, and taped down / nailed the flapping weather-proofing material down, duct taped various pieces, sigh. Builders on holiday for another week.

2009-06-19: Friday.

2009-06-19T21:00:00Z

Up early; to work. Chewed mail, did some research on JavaFX - why not ? It seems that the thought of re-writing OO.o around JavaFX has a few notable problems (behind the almost insurmountable technical challenges). JavaFX is not Free software - presumably it would have to be to base OO.o on it. Of course - Jeet announced that it will be: "We will put the core runtime out in the open over time." sadly, that doesn't appear to have happened six months on; meanwhile the already open Scene Graph has (rumour has it) been re-written, and the re-write is not public either. Of course, the promised open-sourcing of the browser plugin has been somewhat glacial too. Nevertheless - that all sounds fixable (by Sun), and it would be great to get JavaFX out into the open, but it needs fixing before any real discussion happens around exclusively basing OO.o on a proprietary technology.

Lunch. Fairly appalled by the various media outlet's editing, and excerpting of the Khameni speech, on every side - from AlJazera to Fisk, to various blogs; where is a complete, un-edited translation / transcript ? and why does that not come first, with analysis later ? much as I disagree with most of what Khameni stands for - it is precisely because I disagree with him so completely, that I would like to hear him out. Finally found something here.
Poked at nbtk, found my css speedup was causing much of the grief with new nbtk, disabled that and life is good. Nice. JP pointed me at kayak which seems like a rather usable travel site, in contrast to BCD's disaster. Booked GUADEC flights (6th-12th), hotel in Italy, and did admin variously: Clarity.

2009-06-18: Thursday.

2009-06-18T21:00:00Z

Up early, half day today; my 2^5th birthday. Poked mail, caught up with happy hackers, kiwi fiddling with more success, image debugging.
Got some great presents, some fine sacred music on CD; and an interesting book Sustainable Energy without the hot air - an extremely fascinating, colorful and in (many) places droll text. Also available for free on-line as above. I believe David JC MacKay is the man behind Dasher - and as such something of a Gnome related genius; a must-read. I was particularly struck by the energy cost of a single return trip to LA, being in excess of a 1kW fire being on non-stop on all year. Though being only on chapter six myself, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Out to a violin lesson with Naomi; good to see her improving. Laura baby-sat, and out for a meal in the evening: lovely to get out, alone, with the lovely wife for once.

2009-06-17: Wednesday.

2009-06-17T21:00:00Z

Up early, prodded mail; helped out Matt, Joey with packaging, discovered a chunk of the team were lurking on #opensuse-moblin on the internal IRC server instead of freenode - and confused as to why so few were there.
Prodded at bits for GUADEC; ineffectual kiwi fiddling, prodded at trying to reduce osc build times. The compliation of mutter-moblin (on a build server, from clean) takes:

stage duration (secs)

jail setup to end SuSEconfig 402

pkg unpack 1

configure 27

make 72

install 5

files / debuginfo 6

lint / checks 3

finishing / cleanup 18

So - it seems like the clear majority of the time - 2/3rds is spent creating a chroot jail, which is (at root [sic]) just a filesystem image. Untarring that (for me) takes 125 seconds - but presumably with some cunning 'unionfs' or 'fuse' magic that could be made 'instant'; roll on btrfs. Of course mutter-moblin is higher up the stack - with 300+ build dependencies, but presumably decreasing wins could be had for pieces lower down the stack too with pre-canned file-systems.
Tony & John around in the evening to talk; interesting.

stage	duration (secs)
jail setup to end SuSEconfig	402
pkg unpack	1
configure	27
make	72
install	5
files / debuginfo	6
lint / checks	3
finishing / cleanup	18

2009-06-16: Tuesday.

2009-06-16T21:00:00Z

Up early, boggled at the Iranian news generally, prayed for them. To work somewhat late. Got stuck into unwinding some git2obs mis-feature causing me grief with package versions. Booked UKUUG conf. hotel while waiting for obs.
Finally filed all my expenses, before discovering (near mandatory) '-k' and '-p' options to osc build. Plugged away at build / packaging bits. Call with JP & team, then Paul.
Lydia over for dinner, great to hear the story of her trip to the US, and catch up - good stuff.

2009-06-15: Monday.

2009-06-15T21:00:00Z

Up early, prodded mail, caught up with Taiwanese friends, tested package builds from the weekend, back to some writing slog. Solmon over for lunch, eat with him for a bit.
Steelwork chappy arrived mid-lunch, set off with him, to chisel through the plaster-board of the roof to reveal a slightly higher apex than expected - nice. Measured this and that. Back to almost finish lunch with Solomon, before being dragged away to a conf-call; then another, and another.
Great to see the leftist's darling Chavez congratulating Ahmadinejad on his victory; now there's a real democrat. More image building and polish.