Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2009-11-26: Thursday.

2009-11-26T11:39:57Z

Discovered my mtime setting magic has been broken for a long time, which cropped subsequent updates from the next day; bother. Poked at my time fixing script, to defeat the clever pyblossom mtime checking.
Poked at bootchart2 - merged a beautiful patch from Scott (who I discovered is Keybuk) - to add intelligent chart cropping, annotation - showing nice vertical red lines at specific points, and dumping of those times to a text file. Got Anders Norgaard commit rights.
Reviewed / merged misc. queued bits to Moblin:Factory.

2009-11-25: Wednesday.

2009-11-25T21:00:00Z

Up early; J. out to school and shop, with Grandma looking after the babies. Read some of Ralf's beautiful thesis on Spiro curves.
Read up on btrfs for a while; interesting, managed to get UML compiling, and running out of the box with the latest git kernel as well - nice.
Why is it, that whenever I get Nigerian scam spam, I think of the Phonejacker's pidgeon in the bank account ? still, makes it more fun reading mail.
Sync with Jared, then with Brad, then call with Greg & co.

2009-11-24: Tuesday.

2009-11-24T21:00:00Z

Apparently today is my 10'th anniversary at Novell/Ximian - good stuff, the time has gone rather quickly it seems, next stop the grave - the trials of the immersive world of programming.
Chat with Thorsten. Nice chap arrived to remove the old boiler outlet from the wall, and brick up the hole; good stuff. Discovered my bootchart collector was simply leaking directory handles meaning it couldn't open thread directories after a while, much better.
OO.o customer call, JP staff, Coreteam meeting; chat with Scott.
Poked at Father's airing cupboard shelving, and got it screwed to the wall. Chatted until late.

2009-11-23: Monday.

2009-11-23T21:00:00Z

Up early, parents set too carpeting here, and fixing there; Dad PAT tested Cheryl's chocolate making equipment.
Worked away at bootchart some more; got the pybootchartgui piece munged in with the bootchart-collector and some scripts, to make it rather easier to package and maintain. Pushed to bootchart2, and our Moblin repos.
Dug at why in some cases threads are not having their CPU accounted for correctly by taskstats (is this the world's worst interface for getting profiling data ?).
Cut an ancient carpet to size for the next-door room, dinner, and DE meeting late. Poked at some packaging tasks with Scott.

2009-11-22: Sunday.

2009-11-22T21:00:00Z

Poor J. feeling rather unwell; left her at home while I took the babes to church. Back - M, & D. came for lunch, admired the works, and set-to making a second desk with Father. Played with my new $25 planeing machine - which is rather good, though wet wood seems to jam it up rather.

2009-11-21: Saturday.

2009-11-21T21:00:00Z

Lie-in, J. not feeling good; wandered the house poly-fillering holes - like you do.
Played with the babes outside in the road - practising cycling of various kinds, despite the weather. Cut back some of the over-enthusiastic ivy threatening to overwhelm the side-way, even before it is roofed - sat on the lintel with H. for a while.

2009-11-20: Friday.

2009-11-20T21:00:00Z

Up, full of bounce - today I must achieve something; no meetings, and tried to avoid E-mail; failed. Poked evolution, misc. moblin bugs.
Watched some of the FY10 kick-off talks, some good balance there it seems. Lunch; installed a 2.1 test build, and prodded at a mutter hang that bothered me.
Prodded at shutdown scripts, and artwork. Out onto the ridge of the roof to add a washer to the weather vane - to stop it banging around in the high winds; greased it to stop it squeaking too - much better. Finally scraped all the pink wall-paper off Tim & Julie's door (soon to be a new desk).

2009-11-19: Thursday.

2009-11-19T21:00:00Z

An ineffectual day flailing at too many varied tasks. Managed to do a little real hacking - which was fun - a one line change; hmm.
Got stuck into reading the Chromium code, sad to see an Ubuntu base, but good to see lots of interesting technologies in there: atk, pango, gtk+, clutter, gnome bits - even orbit2. It actually looks like something real, and I'm eager to see what efficiency wins and new tricks those Googlers manage to generate for the common good.

2009-11-18: Wednesday.

2009-11-18T21:00:00Z

Slept in late, off to the Doctor's, got some antibiotics. Started to feel better, desparately tried to get my still growing E-mail / task backlog under control.

2009-11-17: Tuesday.

2009-11-17T21:00:00Z

Up before six, urgh - taxi to breakfast meeting with Rob Sinclair, good to meet him in the flesh at last.
Met Claudio & James, off to the briefing centre for much of a day of talking about accessibility of all sorts. Amused at the vituperative reserved for Google's 100% inaccessible Chrome browser - go WebKit !
I'm increasingly convinced that the world writes, (or worse - pointlessly re-writes) things frequently enough that keeping a11y up to date is a vast task. Of course, as we all know - all applications now have to move to the web (2.0) with yet another rats nest of a11y problems, developer training etc. nevermind the frequent cool-toolkit-of-the-year lurches. By the time a11y has caught up, the relentless urge to re-write - usually for 'bloat' reasons (ie. we finally got a mature product that ticks the required boxes) - kicks in, and we end up with a 31337 ultra-lean non-functional replacement (apparently).
Arrived at the Eurostar four hours early; thankfully the management genius' that run this company provide no way to pay a fee to change the time of, or upgrade to a flexible ticket. It seems they prefer to leave money sitting in their hall for hours on end. Buying a new ticket for Eur 100+ is ridiculous, but I'd happily pay the difference to a flexible ticket now. Sat around feeling horribly ill, and wishing I was at home with the wife.

2009-11-16: Monday.

2009-11-16T21:00:00Z

Up early, feeling shocking; took babes to school, poked the Surgery ineffectually; home, tried to get the laptop into shape, and got to the train, Kings Cross, Brussels etc.
Eventually arrived, gave the address of the hotel to the Taxi driver - he seemed confused; drove to the street - no hotel. It appears that pasting Foo Address\nBrussels into google maps managed to get a hit in Paris, which is where I booked the hotel; bother. Toured the city finding somewhere to stay - ended up in an airport hotel, feeling groggy.

2009-11-15: Sunday.

2009-11-15T21:00:00Z

Up early, dealt with babes, off to NCC, ran creche. Back for lunch, feeling yet worse, on to Solomon & Peace's for dinner, and then back home. Chewed over life, my lethargy and general inactivity with J.
Bed early, kidneys hurting in the night, urgh.

2009-11-14: Saturday.

2009-11-14T21:00:00Z

Lie in, off to Tesco / Homebase to buy this & that. Put up mirror cabinet in the bathroom, some door stops (to stop door handles going through walls) - neatly obsoleting some of my older hardware.
Set too making a clothes rail for N's wardrobe, interrupted by a surprisingly lengthy power-cut; unusual. Attempted to continue carpenting with hand tools, and brace & bit; sadly the chuck on the latter is shockingly bad, making life harder.
Lit candles, and a fire - spent the time burning confidential documents - which feels extremely dodgy, but just saves on buying a shredder.
J. out in the evening, feeling pretty under the weather; but managed to get some long overdue poly-filler-ing done. It's good to be minus one gaping hole in the toilet wall at least. Bed early.

2009-11-13: Friday.

2009-11-13T21:00:00Z

Played with valgrind, poked Julian. Flushed the mental list of outgoing mails to write. Chat with JP; got stuck into accessibility again, good to see what has been happening there. Chased various team members by phone to catch up with the current state of play.
Stephen helped me get the latest UIA / Silverlight setup and working, which is neat. Call with Sandy & Brad.
Put up H's new blind - screwing it to the plastic window, hopefully it will stay put, and not puncture the sealed window units. Question Time in the evening, and chalked up tasks for tomorrow.

2009-11-12: Thursday.

2009-11-12T21:00:00Z

Up lateish, paying back the sleep debt. Mail catch-up. Pete arrived to lay vinal in the bathroom. Detour via the dentists to get a mouth that feels like it's made of cold rubber.
Back, re-assembled and tidied up a bit the laptop battery test harness, grabbed new packages to test. Electrician arrived and discovered that the heat sensor that should have been in the under-floor heating mat was in fact not: the friendly tiler arrived back to start lifting the floor tiles. Pete still at it laying the floor. Lunch - Tony popped over.
Prodded at glibc wrt. the annoying gdb debugger griping around loading -lpthread late in the day, as a dependent of a dynamic module, could it just be another gdb lameness ?
Dinner with the wife; while OpenSUSE 11.2 installed; filed a few bugs - nasty problem with metacity's signal handling - it seems.

2009-11-11: Wednesday.

2009-11-11T21:00:00Z

Up early, dropped Srini at the coach stop, back to breakfast with the family & Robert, on to mail, admin, planning; and kiwi patch back-porting.
Google appear to have lost the plot, with yet-another language, at least it seems fairly simple - rock on 'gob' or was it Vala ? or Eiffel, or ... < insert vast list of obscure languages > ... The quest for balance - of incremental value vs. relevance goes on.
Pete arrived, to fit a patch to our old carpet - looks lovely, some cunning glueing thing, and a lovely hooked carpet cutting knife.
Perhaps one of the most totemic talks of OOoCon was the discussion on: "a possible future architecture for openoffice.org" - also captured on video roll, and just to irritate myself, I couldn't resist watching it and had a few thoughts.
- Since - of course, this is OpenOffice.org - neither of the two people giving the talk have ever contributed real code, or apparently intend to, which neatly avoids having a visceral understanding of the issues programmers face, or the existing overall architecture, nevermind a future architecture. Everything is necessarily re-fried second, or third hand guesswork - this is fairly usual in OO.o 'community' circles - though, at most normal conferences you tend to get laughed off the stage for this sort of thing. Some good first questions when dealing with apparently clueful OO.o-stable advocates are: "is there any code yet?" and then "Did you write any of it ?". Sometimes we have whole talks by non-coders about non-existent code. Yet, perhaps Chinese whispers, when filtered through a strategic community genius, can be woven into a fantastically compelling story - lets see.
- Indeed - for a heady mix of truism, and balderdash, it's hard to beat:
  Luis: "To load writer you have to load 85% of the code-base ... if you have a modularised version, I imagine you can just open up the UNO code, which is a core part that things are plugged into ... and then the specific module you want - load time would be much faster, it would be much lighter ... "
  The realities of creative imagination aside, it seems to me that the cult of UNO is itself, a large part of the problem, stultifying re-factoring, reducing performance, confusing concerns: such as code re-use, highly granular concurrency, and scripting bindings, and forcing an all-or-nothing nightmare on everyone. Without it, we might have more of a chance. The same kind of individual that thinks Java's synchronised keyword is the last word in concurrency just loves the UNO-for-everything attitude.
- With regard to performance, it is amusing - often a given UNO interface is sufficiently unusable that it is necessary to create a C++ helper library to be able to use it in a lean and effective way; this unfortunately tends, either to double the library count (thus reducing performance), or mean you need to link to the implementation itself anyway, reducing 'plug-ability'.
- "... this [modularisation] results in a sustainable community ... what I am interested in is making it so that ... [ many ] people are able to develop OO.o as they want ...
  Of course, creating a sustainable developer community is a great goal - and one I applaud. It is (in general) perhaps a shame that the clear advice of the existing external developers was not highlighted. Indeed, this very talk crowding out some thoughtful developer analysis, with marketing, could be seen as a powerful signpost to the emasculation, oppression and exclusion of the hacker class. Reducing the pundit count is perhaps a pre-requisite for recruiting developers, who don't easily tolerate this sort of thing. It is good to have an expert view, based seemingly on no experience, that the developer process is not bureaucratic - no doubt a great comfort in the struggle to get code included.
- The presentation of the OO.o code base as vast, and impossible to hack on is strange. To me, some of the most ghastly pieces to work with are the heavily 'UNO'ised 'designed' pieces: configmgr, toolkit, and framework code leap immediately to mind. Indeed - the simplest pieces I've worked with - eg. the calc core, or VCL happen to be the 'legacy, non-UNO-ised' bits - can that really be a co-incidence ?
- The goal of " ... make it sustainable so people can make a business out of it ... is a really nice idea, but the primary problem in this area is, surely, Sun's ownership demands which strangle corporate (and I imagine Government) investment at birth - sign here to donate to Sun Microsystems.
- A great truism: "... speculation gets us no-where without actual bucks" - though arguably, you shouldn't have to pay people to work on OO.o. If the project is structured right - making it fair, and less of a pain to interact with - then developers will slowly trickle in, feel valued, have fun, get things done, and enjoy creating great software together for the common good. At least, that is the OO.o community I want to be involved in.
In summary - it would have been entirely preferable to have some speakers with authority, programming experience and first-hand understanding of the issues to present some competing visions in such a session. It is also galling not to hear about the real structural challenges to getting developer interest and investment that the ownership and governance structure create. Finally, the hype around UNO as part of the solution, when it is a key part of the problem is discouraging.
Finally my kiwi image build finished, and I tested Marcus' nice fix, which works well for me.
Saddened to see the EU's apparent lack of understanding of the database world, in their complaints, and the recent Sun layoffs. Simply because two things are called by the same name - 'a database' - does not mean they necessarily compete: is SQLite a meaningful competitor to MySQL ? - would anyone want it if it was ? and Oracle already seem to build the preferred InnoDB storage core for MySQL. Either way, if I ever had to create a database, I would build on one using a more open model, eg. you can't 'buy' SQLite, or Postgres and thus avoid this sort of problem.