Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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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.
Older items:
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legacy html
- Poked the mail, amused by the 'translated CELL arguments'
issue we have: where Excel passes a string argument to determine
what the function can do: 'address' vs. 'adresse' (fr) eg. fun.
- Admin much of the morning. Hacked at layout. Somewhat
surprised to eventually get some review of our design, concluding that
the stupid requirements (originally from Sun) were in fact stupid: good
to know, shame it's a month in; hey ho.
- Poked mail, a frenzy of inaction occurring left &
right it seems. Admin. Lunch with Lydia, interview. Fixed another
silly intern corner-case hub found, added unit test, CWS rigmarole
etc.
- Off to visit consultant, wait not as bad as expected;
good. Discovered the existence of Gentoo live-CD's - fascinating,
presumably you need a big/fast machine to compile the system
post-boot before you use it. Cell group, another interview in
the evening.
- Poked mail, wrote up ESC minutes prototype. IM with
Michael. Poked at iogrind's file-type based coloring, looks nicer.
Lunch, team meeting, interview, call with Patrick.
Battled pension fund selection.
- To work, (floating the Bank Holiday elsewhere). Started on
the mail queue. Bits of admin. Lunch, back to layout hacking. ESC
meeting, fairly positive. Hacked iogrind before bed a litte.
- NCC, gave talk, back for lunch, out to Kesiah's party with
suitably party-dressed girls; back.
- Dinner, DVD The Pricess Bride in the evening, with
Martin, Lydia, Julie, Mike & Thea - good stuff.
- Up early, packed the car, set off for homw. Worked on talk much
of the afternoon & evening on the Exile & inter-testamental
silence etc.
- Out to Devil's Dyke to admire the (absent) hangliders etc.
Picnic on the hillside in the sun, very pleasant. Played briefly in the
castle - back home to the paddling pool.
- Out in the evening with the wife, alone - wandered along the
seafront, lovely.
- Up early, looked after babes, out to Hove Park with them,
played in the playground, back drink in the garden, put them to bed.
Poked mail, Mehran after me for a column again, hmm, wrote that.
- Slugged in the garden - errected swinging seat, filled
paddling pool for babes; dinner. Chewed over Robert's plan to place a
large, leveraged bet on house prices going down. Late-night conference
call.
- Mini lie-in, breakfast, off to Eastbourne to enjoy the
(almost empty) beach, swam in the sea etc.; on to pleasant park for
an ice-cream & back home. Poked mail briefly.
- Slugged in the evening pleasingly.
- Much cleaning of the house, checked mail - power failed;
bother the insufficiently tightened immersion heater connection got
hot & shorted to an adjacent neutral wire: bang. Re-wired that,
hmm.
- Packed everyone & set off to Hove, arrived late, caught
up with the parents & Robert, bed late.
- Up, a week of holiday starts today: nice; dunged out
the inbox & started research for a talk next Sunday on the
New Testament.
- Up early, fed babes etc. off to NCC - family service.
Off to Tony & Janice's new home for house-warming lunch: lots
of good nosh.
- Back late, fed babes & put them to bed, re-wired
lounge light to be somewhat higher. Gordon sermon on Genesis 5,
bed early.
- Lie in; house cleaning, lunch. Out with Hannah on the
new articulated bike extension to the park. Back, showed babes a
movie, watched Life is Beautiful in a mix of Italian + subtitles
and dubbed English: an extremely good movie; bed.
- Up early, good news the main YaST repo is
now public,
though the gtk+ front-end has yet to be migrated there from the
old public repo.
- Reviewed Travis' changes to run OO.o unit tests more
easily. Reviewed more nice Kendy data; tried to install 10.3Alpha3
on my Geode, no joy with the USB network card.
- Back to toolkit hacking; various conf calls; the
xmlscript and toolkit code is just incredible. Instead of a nice
hirearchy matching the XML format, the perception of hierarchy is
(apparently) created by eg. remembering all the 'names' of child
nodes in custom lists on special containers (eg. 'radiogroup')
and re-constructing these on output; quite extraordinary.
- Louise arrived in the evening for dinner, good to
see her again.
- Poked mail, reviewed Kendy's (nice) presentation,
added some slides. Synched repositories with Ricardo. Pension
advisor arrived to suck the marrow - these people make a living
by stealing $2000 up-front commissions from pensioners (worth
way more in 35 years.
- Lunch, the wife commented You're so good looking
..., was further convinced of my concerns for her sanity
until the rest of the sentence: ... after us arrived,
phew.
- Long talk with Jody; bother. Back to layout, got my
VCLXLayout view to at least instantiate and get it's properties:
good.
- Poked at bugs; eventually caught my gnome-screensaver
crash in the wild; looks like heap corruption, valgrinded it and
dispatched a report.
- Got Ricardo setup with git, and poked at that. Lunch.
Hacked with the toolkit and xmlscript code a little - fun. Got the
parser parsing a VBox, a sane-ish back-compat XML structure in-place,
and the data through to the toolkit/ peer construction: toolkit seems
to contain the result of a cut/paste coding orgy in several places.
- Cell group in the evening, a good showing - watching some
Mathias press dvd with questions; good stuff.
- Up, poked light mail, tried SP1 install on x86_64 from
hard-disk, no joy. Tried to get an ultra-cheap Trust WB-3400T to work,
detected & setup /dev/video0 on hot-plug, but no joy; did NFS
install of SP1 - much more joy; neat.
- Team meeting, poked Nat, , some paper work,
action items write-up etc. Quick catch-up with Ricardo.
- To work, mail chew / bug pokeage. It's slightly
disappointing to note that apparently Schwartz
appreciates eg. IBM more than the tens of thousands of man hours
Novell has dedicated to OO.o.
- Did a little QA on ka009's images.zip sorting code,
which should improve OO.o startup times for Ause. Lunch.
- Poked at iogrind a little after lunch, wrote up a
paper, more iogrind bits, interesting ESC meeting, and knocked off.
Played with, and put the kids to bed, hacking in the evening while
J. did PCC supervision.
- Up early, dealt with babes; off to NCC - missed Thea
speak; doing creche. Back for lunch, tried to sleep - J. out to
see Alba.
- Out in the afternoon to the 80th birthday party of
the Brighty's Steam Roller - cooked sausages in the fire-box,
and tried (unsuccessfully) to get potatoes to cook. Good fun,
bed late for the kids.
- Lie in until midday; wow. Lunch, set too tidying the
house: plnety of scope for that, into town to buy a stereo lead
extension (at some length), ended up with the cheapest of the
cheap webcam instead.
- Back, setup movie for the kids, dinner, watched Bhorat
in the evening - certainly a unique film; amazed to read that
Zimbabwe's credentials on Sustainable Development are finally being
recognised by the UN; or am I still watching a twisted movie ? A
sad day for those who in general think building up multilateral
institutions is the way to go.
- Gave J. a little lie-in, poked mail. Looked at yast2.
Lunch, interview. Chased yast-gtk issues for Marcus for some time,
tested various things on SL10.3. Tried to auto-build things, but
it didn't like me today, hal missing libparted too much.
- Cleaned fluff from the inbox; to work; re-created git repo.
Bert over for lunch.
- Lots of hacking on iogrind-gui - built a nice histogram
renderer for stack traces; now back to the valgrind core to extract the
stack (and working set) information in more detail.
- More mail backlogging. Burned DVD / mini-CD of latest SP1
release candidate to install / test. Hacked happily the iogrind GUI
using mono on 64bit SL10.1. Upgraded machines, filed bugs. Impressed
that my gnarly old Intel 865G works with compiz/Xgl now.
- Eventually got to some iogrind hacking, dithered over the
git repo that worked with 1.4 but not with 1.5 - prolly my fault for
manually poking in ~/.git at some stage. Talked to Federico.
- Mail chew, a weeks worth, wrote some bits up for LXF.
Read about the Teleflex lawsuit in The Economist from
silicon.com, gratis legal opinion from Sterne Kessler Goldstein
& Fox: "I think it's very fair to say that it's going to be harder, more
costly and more time-consuming for inventors to obtain US patents in
all areas of technology, and particularly in areas with predictable
art, as we call them, such as mechanical inventions and software and
methods of doing business." - cue general cheering etc.
- Lunch, call with JP, team meeting, poked Christian Lipka.
Dug at the PRD. Enjoyed the new sense of peace & quiet having
dis-connected the old switch fan (clearly sourced from a chain-saw).
- Discovered (to my cost), that if your VPN dies, you manually
delete a downloaded file, then set-off a new download, before hitting
'cancel' on the (old / stale / duplicate) download - you end up with no
data (after some hours) - bother.
- Marveled at the news speculation wrt. the next Sun coup -
(apparently) making the underlying operating-system transparent. After
Sun's self-defeating victory of abstracting the cpu away with Java -
Sparc sales took a massive hit: buy your AMD server here!. It would of
course take a more strategic mind than mine to guess what happens when
you abstract away the operating system: will people use Solaris ? or
something that runs well on their hardware ?, something that is owned
and managed by Sun, or by everyone ? - since of course it would no
longer actually matter. Clearly, there must be a better plan than
that, looking forward to hearing what it is.
- Chatted with Guy, bed.
- J. lie-in, to work on a projector stand: planed / cut up
various bits of timber rescued from a skip some years ago, bolts,
re-used hinges etc. made an interesting bracket / catch from some
bent-up aluminium : riveting (literally). Everything collapses to
some smallish form factor, with nothing to undo.
- M. started to say 'da da da' in earnest today; must be
the unfeasible rewards of doing so that encourage her - still not
that convinced that she is really aware that she is making the noise,
but we'll see.
- Finally got it erected; tested it with 'Jonah' on the
kids - seems to work really well; out to buy emergency stores; watched
Cheaper by the Dozen bed early.
- Ruth (someone) preaching at NCC - did a good job, back for
chicken dinner; exhausted babes to bed. J. played in the garden; knocked
up an invite for 30th birthday party.
- Mini lie-in, breakfast, out for run while babes slept, lunch.
Prepared house for film afternoon rotated sofa, re-organised room, painted
picture-hooks cream etc.
- People arrived, babes watched Madaline, then some tap-dancing
penguin movie, with pop-corn etc. while the adults chatted, good fun.
- Up early, J. lie-in. Did some plumbing after that - it seems
the evil push-fit fittings are holding up quite-well, apart from the
nasty plastic lock-valve which siezed. Replaced that, removed the rate
limiter so the toilet re-fills in less than 5minutes.
- Bewilderingly cross-purposed talk with Jeff & Nat,
disappointingly inconclusive.
- Breakfast, hacked a little, read stories to N. until she went
to bed, hacked a little, Julian arrived - talked, read code, Lunch. More
code reading bits, misc. hackerage & playing with git.
- Surely 'git commit' is the battle-cry of all long-term
girlfriends ? Lydia, Tony & Janice around in the evening, bed late.
- Up at 6, some hacking - cleaned up some corner cases,
display improving. Hacked away - implementing button clicks to zoom, it's
pretty amazing to do:
button.Clicked += delegate { Scale( 1.0, 1.0/VM_ZOOM_MULTIPLIER); };
and get what you would expect, 'Scale' being an instance method of the
object.
- Up early, set too - upgraded git to a version with git-rm
(useful). Poke at iogrind-gui, refactored lots of cruft. Hacked away
happily most of the morning.
- Played with kids in the afternoon, took H. for a swimming
lesson (with N. to sit on the knee), back; M. almost recovered
seemingly. Some hackerage in the evening, synched via git with
Federico and cross-merged some set of indent changes, it worked
well: neat.
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)
