This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit my employer
Novell which is an amazing company, and also
Dell who in days of yore provided me with a
free laptop for Gnome development / conferences.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Up lateish, J. out to meet Louise, back for lunch,
and out shopping with Mum in the afternoon: took the babes to the
park, and chatted to Emily & Robert (engaged on emptying his
room: an obligatory obligation for returning Sons it seems).
Dumbo watching action, dinner, couple of Jane Eyre
episodes in the evening with the parents, very pleasant, bed early.
Lie-in, feeling almost enthusiastic at last, lunch.
Poured over maps to identify a fun place to go, ended up going back
to a well known haunt - wandered the fields, played in the playground
then headed home.
Drove south, arrived at the parents fairly late, clapped
the babes into bed, talked a little, and watched a Jane Eyre episode:
costume drama groweth on me. Coughing for a living.
Family colds going around, M. and H. being sick too. J.
stayed at home, while I walked M. to Chris' for his birthday party.
Watched steam-engine DVD fragments, fine meal, chatted to Max wrt.
Anglican church governance: more enlightened than I had expected.
Purchased Send-a-Cow type christmas presents
( the send-a-chicken equivalent having had trouble recently with
Avian flu ). Interesting worldvision short:
though perhaps only accessible to those familiar with UK
cultural idiom.
Up to bid 'bye to Thomas and M&D. set too with Robert's
broken chair-arm, chisel, rasp etc. - and still all limbs to show for it,
we eventually got something that looked like it might work.
Boxing day: a re-run of Christmas lunch, more avid reading
of Siberian exploits. Tim & Julie over for tea in the afternoon:
good to see them; helped get Robert's chair arm back into action: an
inserted plywood panel to support the fractured plastic.
Out to see Chris in the evening, Robert had a job to
discuss with him, good to chew things over. Back, talked until late
with Robert & Thomas.
Christmas day - off to NCC for a quick meeting, early.
Back for turkey extraveganza, with Bruce & Anne arriving. Hasty
present wrapping with the brothers, followed by hasty present
un-wrapping: seemed to go well.
Watched Mary Poppins in the evening with the family.
Robert & Thomas arrived in the evening. Tom touting
his iPod touch, watched youtube movies on it amusedly; then they
headed off for drinking, returning late.
Intense reading of As far as my feet will carry me
an account of a chap (mostly) walking his way across Siberia having
escaped from a prison camp / lead mine.
Hoovered loft room / office with father for the boys, made bed.
Out to NCC christmas carol service in the evening, good
fun, some food afterwards: babes over-tired by angel impressions
(etc.)
Lots of general slugging, watched Monsters Inc. on the
wall - explained the plot to various babes incrementally. Parents
arrived in time for tea, good to catch up with them.
Meeting with Miguel, Justin & co. into Cambridge to
buy headphones for Thomas (narrowly avoided my daughter's advice to
buy the pink ones!). Back just in time for a staff-meeting
that wasn't.
Up early, more mail. Poked at configmgr profile - saved
a million or so cycles by avoiding a single gratuitous UNO use-case
for a 'readByte' type method, another few million not re-sizing
vectors we know the size of in advance: some down, 2.9 billion to go.
Lunch, Lydia came over, Christmas Private Eye arrived: nice.
Call with Rob Taylor & Mark Doffman, more mail digging.
Out with the wifelet in the evening while Janine baby-sat,
really lovely to spend some time together alone, out of the house: fine
pizza too.
Up early, mail, installed a Crossover 'bottle' RPM from
Fridrich to get Office 2003 running under wine: nice, 2 RPMs, and it's
in your main-menu: neat. More mail, team meeting, DE meeting, BU meeting:
grief - the meetings bred in a corner.
Dug at configmgr assertion, fixed the smoketest a little.
Dinner, FSG a11y call, good to hear all those friendly voices. Break,
call with Rob,Norm,Sam et. al.
Took H. to school on the bike, stopped off at Chris &
Cheryl's - good to see them. Poked mail, dug at rpmbuild to find a place
to add the BuildRequires to the RPM package format, to allow
'install-build-reqs' functionality, knocked up a small patch: no
doubt some standardisation sea to navigate there.
Dug at an a11y document. More mounds of mail: the more you send,
the more you get (worse luck). Dinner.
Back to poke at Iain's metacity bling, further perplexed by
compositing, simply not behaving as expected - tried xcompmgr: discovered
in fact the compositing extension was simply not enabled: hah ! found an
odd expose issue anyway, I suppose. Hacked up a test for that; much better.
Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept. NCC - the Staff's
volunteered for creche, Helen spoke, back for lunch.
Slept in the afternoon until late, out on a Christmas-lights
expedition (to buy coal in small bags (rather pricey that way)). Returned,
stoked fire, house-tidying with the girls, bed.
Slept until midday, call from architect - hopefully a measuring
and drawing call on Tuesday. Lunch, out to a party in the Catholic church
hall, a fine venue, bouncy castle etc. Bathed babies.
Out into Cambridge to James & Kate's for a fine Christmas
party experience - met lots of interesting people, in a context completely
disconnected from computers: so, surprised when I said I worked on OpenOffice
to a room full of people to fund that 4 out of 6 had it installed, and were
using it - and one of them had 'bought' it (whoops). Spent a while doing
tech support: particularly impress - how to get bullets onto the screen one
bullet per click (apparently a well hidden feature). Back rather late,
really good to see the Williams' and their friends.
Poked at
Ulteo's on-line OO.o - unfortunately, it requires Write once run
anywhere (TM) technology - which frankly doesn't. Battled the latest,
Sun java dependency for a while - with no joy at all, installed RPMs on the
console, what fun. The screenshots appear to suggest it's an over-hyped
Java/VNC type solution.
Mail pokeage. In attempting to debug an evolution hang,
discovered a whole slew of interesting things relating to debuggability,
debuginfo, e-d-s memory usage, and a deadlock: nice. Hopefully my e-d-s
memory usage woes are simply down to a 60second timeout adding a thread to
query the groupwise calendar: hence "Thread 196" and an inflated apparent
memory usage. The deadlock is yet more curious though, strange.
More mail, lunch. Spent a while chasing intense sqllite locking
action in zypper, re-built without the extremely verbose kernel locking,
and once again - proof that strace is not your friend wrt. performance:
not significantly faster (should believe my own presentations); bother.
Up early, to work - poked mail. Washing machine
part come in - replaced the pressure valve: bingo, apparently
everything working: seemingly wasted the 25UKP on a misdiagnosis
('might as well buy a new one'), replacement part:
12UKP. Replaced the dead wlan power-supply, apparently back
on an even keel.
Lunch, poked at Iain's bling-tastic thingit, simply
amazingly slow: how odd, interrupted by interview. Back to metacity,
blessed by an appallingly slow Xrender impl. I see all manner of
exciting race conditions that other people don't (apparently): the
joys of the ATi binary driver ? Found on expose issue.
Chewed bugs & the mail backlog some more.
Expense filing action, dunged out the @ximian.com spam-trap.
Out to christmas play, including H. as a Native American, and a
sheep (variously).
Back, created an ooo-build patch to reduce build
output churn, on Kay & Greg's advice: makes warnings easier
to grok. Call with Miguel late. Short cell group - just 4 of us.
Up, early, off to order spare part: 2 days, bother.
Cracked the back of the switch open - indeed, mechanism simply
jammed; freed it, glued it back together - now we have the
opportunity for some serious over-filling action instead.
Checked mail, lots of interest. An afternoon of
interviews, team meeting etc. Knocked off early with the babes,
J. out in the evening - more hackery.
Call with Rich, Calvin, more mail - sigh, a large
backlog / blockage.
Up early, cycled H. to school, started on the mail.
Worked on some analysis. Generated some startup performance
measurements, poked at OO.o bugs, more mail. Interviewed a chap.
More washing machine disassembly in the evening -
the pressure switch looking increasingly likely to be at fault,
played with it: no changes on the contacts as pressure changes,
nor any clicking; hmm: 12 UKP.
Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept - tackled
washing machine: removing the sump revealed an orgy of stickers,
bits of mangled cloth, and the usual clay-like muck. Apparently
(in contrast to the service-man) not filling and emptying at the
same time. Cleaned it out, re-assembled. Apparently still not
working: looks like the pressure sensor to me - should dig out
the details on-line to adjust it.
NCC - John spoke well, though so tired nearly fell
asleep; back home - slept ~all afternoon, babes out to a party.
Bathed babies, Peter Pan DVD on the wall, bed early.
Flight arrived 5am, set off to Susannah & Clive's,
arrived, slept. Up around midday. Lunch with much of the extended
Meeks / Hawkins / Griffin / Heathcote family: fun.
Out for traditional steam train journey, featuring Father
Christmas, etc. Back, fine tea - caught up with Sam; interesting.
Chatted with Clive, packed car, drove home, bed exhausted.
Up rather early, off to the airport, checked in &
met JP, had breakfast together & saw some funky new Gnome
things: conduit, *Kit etc. Met Kent Ericson on the plane to Boston,
impressed with his example - flying coach.
Finally arrived at Boston, some nice bus driver gave me
a free lift to Terminal E, usual check-in/security mayhem tested
by JP's optimized security process with some success. Failed to find
UK taxi driver to wake up early & take me to P. Risborough.
On-line, trickled a little power into the battery, poked mail etc.
Ricardo it seems is burning through more yast2-gtk
pieces - which is neat, lots to look forward to in SLED11.
Up early,breakfast, more intense meeting action all
day; great to have Guy with us.
Out in the evening for a final Mexican team meal; then
Off with Alex, Stefan, Nirav and Jared for some shopping action;
found a Christmas present for the wifelet: nice.
Early breakfast in the office; more BU meetings,
break out with Naresh and Greg - came up with ideas. Quit,
out for lunch with legal, Greg, Patrick & David: interesting.
Drove to Salt Lake City, checked in & located the
desktop team, budget, technology & fun.
Out to Park City, to Robert Redford's restaurant for
dinner; back, talked in the hotel bar, bed.
Up early, breakfast at the office, intense meeting
action all day, good to get to know the Workgroup leadership a
little better. Lunch on the job - really encouraging to see OO.o
being used, instinctively, at every level & every turn.
Pizza building in the evening, at least - table setting,
fun with the guys; got to know Wendy a little, met up with Guy
and off to a pool place with Greg, Joe & Tom. Bed late.
Up rather early, breakfast, walked to the office. Met
Roger in person for the first time, good stuff - length meeting of
all dbe,esktop management. Caught up with Guy a little afterwards,
and met Nitin.
Wandered off for lunch, ate with a load of Provo City
gardeners taking advantage of The cheapest food in town in
the cafeteria - nice guys.
Back, met Jeff Frame, Brady etc. and on to the BU
kick-off, met Greg - lots of general back-slapping, meetings, and
interesting analysis.
Out to a meat-fest in the evening, enjoyed the company
of Greg, Naresh & Loren.
Poked at the web, amazed to read about
Sun's action around OpenDS Simon's
reply and some
clarifications too. Reading things like:
Sun management has shown that ... they are willing to
resort to rather hostile tactics to preserve absolute control.
This is most certainly not in the spirit of open source and
open development that we tried to foster or that Sun claims to
embody.
Sad indeed. It is unusual to air such threats made in private,
and of course it's sad for Sun to fund problems for itself with
severance money (as has happened before). Having said that,
clearly this is a highly unattractive action, taken (I hope) against
Sun's better overall vision of open-ness. Anyhow - clearly there is
some great scope here for making bold gestures of direction around
open-ness & ownership in other large (productivity?) projects.
Up at 7am, nice, synched just in time to make tomorrow's
8am meeting unpleasant. Beautiful sunny day, snow on trees, mountains
looking georgous: wonderful. Breakfast.
Drove to the place in the
CEC 'Contact' details, to discover that in fact the church meets at
a different place: bother. Got the latter 1/2 of the service at least.
Drove back - really enjoying the scenery - it's amazingly
beautiful, and getting used to the idea of driving on the 'right' side
of the road. Poked mail,
Out to try to buy a sensibly small sandwich for lunch at
'Sizzler' (or somesuch), failed abysmally: how do any Americans stay
thin ?
Slugged, watched TV, did Christmas shopping on Amazon.
Out to Jared & Jenny's house in the evening for a lovely dinner,
great to meet the family & Alex too; back lateish, bed.
Up at 5:30, begginning to normalise timezones: phoned home,
poked mail. Amazingly got a genuine E-bay E-mail pointing out that my
registered credit card is in fact expiring: wow.
Car to the airport, and caught the plane to San-Francisco,
once again dumb-struck by the incompetence of t-mobile, after a
lengthy mobile call to the UK, they totally failed to debug the
apparent authentication federation problem keeping me from my paid-for
connectivity; sigh.
Salt Lake, car hire, GPS fiddling, driving in the snow,
good music on the radio, Holiday Inn checkin, pizza, E-mail, bed.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Novell, The
Lithuanian Gov't or Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's also important to
realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences,
bio.
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@novell.com)
