Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Spare part arrived for Laura's laptop, spent a while soldering it on remembered to use flux properly this once; looks excellent, and actually robust. Re-assembled everything, gaining only one screw. Quite a nice enclosure really.
• To work, poked at an ORBit2 pre-processing bug with Kjartan, and some split build buits with calc. Filed emacs bug - loading ORBit2 idl generated headers seems to cause slowness and grief.

• Off to NCC, Emily & Keith's last day - somewhat tearful; Tony gave a summary of Grapevine, back for quick lunch. Much more house prepping, cleaning, barbeque lighting, wafting. A sudden rush of very small children for Myriam's second birthday party.
• Very pleasant, leisurly afternoon, apparently two-year olds have more fun playing amongst themselves than in barely-understood party games. Caught up with the neighbours happily. Mike popped around in the evening to help with the leftovers.

• Off to the market - bought up excessive amounts of good things to barbeque tomorrow. Back for lunch, cleaned the house, concreted the inspection hole some more - played with a blowlamp and some spare tarmac - apparently, you can indeed make it more malleable with a flame, and it resists burning nicely.
• Amused to recieve duplicate payment reminders from Rentokil to Furniture Village, still at my house: apparently they have serious back-office issues. Lots of tidying of the house, washing of clothes & dishes, cleaning. Sandy around in the evening, long time no see.

• Miriam's birthday today - much excitement, dolls house from Grandfather unveiled, and packed with suitable dollies from us. Dug at mail, interesting.
• Gave up trying to unwind my dbus threaded oddness, and just created a connection per thread. Lunch, the rest of the family out with Nicki. Poked mango, FATE bits.
• Poked at more mail, split build bits with Calc, Chinese travel, dunged out the disk to install 11.1 Alpha2.
• Listened to the audio walk through of an accessible install of OpenSUSE. Wow, that is a great recording, gives me a palpable feeling of the sensation - not being able to see his screen. It sounds like he is using Ricardo's yast2-gtk installer, with Orca, and well - the flow should be vastly easier in 11.1 - with Mike Gorse' yast2/root a11y; even so lots of obvious improvements leap from the speaker.

• Up early, poked mail & Srini, tweaked code. Caught up with Julian's valgrind hackery. Did some more analysis of the configmgr deadlock - a simple lock ordering problem, with the magic of apartments and configmgr2 trying to be a separate thread-safe piece.
• Wrote up some notes for Frank. Dug at FATEal issues, long planning call in the afternoon, chat with JP.

• To work, chewed away at script to analyse evolution code ownership, generated list of yet more hundreds of clean files to update.
• Poked at a configmgr deadlock - apparently there is a nasty issue with the idle writer thread that does a service activation, while holding the config lock, while the service activation can do config lookups (holding it's own lock). Urgh.
• Quick lunch with Lydia, good to see her. Back to a surprisingly interesting all afternoon security meeting. Up late digging into some dbus oddness.

• To work - hack week, but lots of mail. Phoned BCD - glad they booked my flights, albeit without confirming to me. Phoned Rentokil's Tracy to re-explain that Furniture Village are still, not co-located with my home; gave their real address.
• Quick chat with Srini, more mail, told Clarity what I've been up to. Call with Janneke about layout. Encouraging to see all the great work happening while I'm away: must go away more often. Committed Mike's ORBit2 root/a11y tweak.
• Off to collect some spare laminate flooring from Julie, lunch, sync call with JP. Poked at OO.o local linking speedup, which seems to have bit-rotted a little.
• There are times when you need a strong stomach to read some C++, a classic example today; the somewhat pathetic non-existence of constructor chaining (cf. C# eg.): INI_LIST type macros; this simple 60+ line macro saves you typing all those huge constructor function calls (most of them to a constructor, with at least one fn. call in the arguments) multiple times: that means you can easily create a leviathan .text section, without even trying hard.

• Up early, re-admired laptop, ordered replacement power jack from the US, $33 vs. £100 to fix it professionally. Bank holiday today - missing a day of hack-week, bother.
• Out to Ely, to wander the cathedral, played with the frizbee, swings, slides, clambering etc. Back, a little more castle work; lunch. David left for home, missing the Veggi-Tales DVD & pop-corn, really good to see him.

• Off to Rock in the morning, J. dealt with the babes, solid sermon. Back for lunch at our place, with James, Kate & Peter. Fed them up. Played with the babes a little, examined the problems of in-castle shelf and sofa construction.
• Laura & Creighton arrived with broken Acer laptop. Diverted to this task, then out to Hope Baptist in Teversham to hear James speak in the evening - stayed for some after-service snacks, a fine community going there, interesting people.
• Back for dinner & more laptop disassembly - having removed almost every screw - and levered lots of plastic bits (many of which surprisingly failed to noticably break) located, and de-soldered the evily under-engineered power-jack. Never seen something so important, so obviously flimsy - the tragedy of the thing is that a beautiful and hyper-complex working laptop, should be laid low by a tiny piece of broken wire doing the simplest of tasks.

• Off to the market to stock up on good things, good to be home. David arrived at lunch time, great to see him. H. desparately eager to be building the castle afterwards. Instead headed to the gallops on bicycles to remove the rush from the children.
• Back home; expert flag-pole & flag creation & errection from David and Julia. Talked until late.

• Up earlyish, off to buy a 'big girl' car seat with the Peetle (Myriam), for a solidly successful potty-training experience all week, she seems very pleased with it.
• Packed everything rather slowly, and got the car stuffed full, roof box & all. Bid 'bye to the parents & brother & Ilona. Set off for a speedy & uneventful trip home.

• Lie in, slugged in the morning; out to Worthing to another park / playground in the afternoon, train ride around the park, lots of paddling and splashing around. Back, watched Herriot in the evening.

• J. lie in, played with babes. Rained much of the day - played Lego in the morning with them: made castles, tried to identify female lego 'men'. Lunch.
• Out to the lagoons on the front in the afternoon in the rain, played in the playground. Back, to watch the end of The Sound of Music.

• Lie in, then out to the Booth Museum of stuffed animals (mostly birds) or Victorian Taxidemi (depending on how you look at it). Good fun, some interesting pieces.
• Home to join in with Father's exciting drain-rodding experience, what fun - mercifully finished this before meeting Robert's charming new girlfriend Ilona. Lunch.
• Out swimming with the babies, Rob & Ilona - lots of fun, splashing, swimmin etc. Back to watch The Enormous Crocodile and other Rohld Dahl bits, and the beginning of The Sound of Music.
• Put the children to bed, played guitar with Dad's accordian practice (no better time to start to learn an instrument than your seventies) which went well. Dinner, talked late.

• Up early, J's lie in. Played with the babies, trained Dad on the uber-slow, but functional laptop. Off to St. Annes Wells garden in the afternoon - lots of slides & swings to play on. Slugged, watched the olympics a little. Robert feeling unwell sadly.
• Watched some of Dawkins on the TV, interesting - must get around to reading his latest book, if I can get it second hand somewhere. Sadly, he reminds me of myself age 16 - irritated by being made to study the arts, and wanting to focus solely on maths & science. Luckily later in life I discovered that, in fact, science has answers only for part of our experience, and that studying romance, history, art, theology is highly valuable. Amused by some of the hubris and misrepresentation applied to Rowan Williams - and the apparent lack of grasp of the history of thought on these topics for the last millenia: eg. the action of chance in producing us - who has not heard the stories of the meeting of people's parents as if at random, and been glad that < insert improbable event > occured, lest we not exist at all ? My personal favorite experience of seeing emminent scientists (eg. the UK's Chief Scientist) tying themselves in conceptual knots, and failing to understand was at a small lecture on a basic topic from the head of the History & Philosophy of Science faculty at Cambridge, an undergraduate course highly recommended before over-prognostication in public on these matters. As a banal analogy Ali G's demand to a vegetarian Eat this chicken, or I kill this other chicken ! condenses a fine moral dilema worthy of detailed consideration into a forum where an answer simply cannot be provided or even explored.

• Lie-in, and off to St. Lukes. Dealt with three in the creche, interesting talk to an ex. professor of parasitology afterwards, caught up with old friends.
• Returned to Father's birthday party - seventy-two sounds old, but he's active and in good spirits. Wandered across the parks to the new Hove Park playground, refurbished and in great condition. Thomas left in the evening - sad to see him go.

• Up early, frantic packing for a week and house cleaning; set off, late for Auntie Louise & Uncle Anthony's 50th wedding anniversary celebration: some serious goodness there. Lots of great food, a fine party.
• Out to a small local fair with Stephanie, Adrian, Adam & co. went on a tiny dragon roller-coaster with the babes. Back, set off to my parents for a week off; arrived happily. Thomas & Robert also there, good to see them.

• Phil the friendly beetle-killer arrived from Rentokil, with a water based spray, and a van full of interesting goodies; helped get him ensconced under the floor.
• Tried to make systemtap do my bidding. Found out more about kernels, the split between -obj and source, symlinks in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build, and so on. Finally found the bug is fixed in HEAD systemtap anyway, filed a SUSE issue, sent off a trivial patch. Sadly when it runs, it does something -so- strange to my system that it terrifies me; will come back later.
• Poked at mail. Discovered that the versionrc type files installed all over the place in OO.o are all generated from scp, which is fun; though the syntax for creating a simple flat text file with some substitutions is quite amazing - ~8 lines per line of output, with a magic 'Order' identifier and so on, turns a 30 line file into 255 hard-to-read lines.
• Finally got the split build actually working (for some value of work - no python or java components registered). The rest is just re-factoring & polish. Started a from-scratch re-build of it all again. Found another parallel build issue - I guess the nice thing about that is that OO.o's magic perl build scripts can do quite a good job of finding parallelism.
• Frank encouraged me to test systemtap under kvm, great plan got that going, upgraded the kernel etc. Quick call with Jared. System-tap working perfectly with a matching kernel & debuginfo package - clearly we need the NT_GNU_BUILD_ID feature turned on somewhere.

• Burned images for Mary Rogers with brasero, filed misc. bugs against it around the place. Poked mail, played with builder to create a bootable USB key image, filed bugs. Cyberorg used kiwi to do a rather better job.
• Knocked up an LXF column. Visit from Michael - the building regs inspector, he inspected things thoroughly. Phoned Rentokil to point out that builling Furniture Village at my address is unlikely to work that well.
• Tested Cyberorg's lovely Icecream iso - some OpenSUSE JEOS-like goodness - insert, boot, compile and watch your builds fly.
• While discussing with Mark Wielaard SUSE's lack of kernel debuginfo packages for updated kernels (bug) he pointed me at system tap example scripts - tried to play with the candy.

• Up early, mail; nursed overnight build breakage of my own creation. Quick visit to the Doctor, knocked something up about icecream.
• Lunch, Team meeting - some good talks & great work going on.
• Dinner with Mary Rogers, somewhat surprised to see the US moving troops into the war-zone in Georgia - even if for humanitarian purposes; still surprised to see the media talking about "Russian Citizens" in South Ossetia - the recipients of a recent passport hand-out precisely for this propaganda purpose apparently.
• Discovered Cyberorg just created an OpenSUSE/LTSP/Icecream setup to make it easy to re-use all those wasted Windows machines nearby for building things; nice indeed.

Something for nothing ?

First, if you don't happen to have spare computers lying around that you are not using and feeling pretty guilty about, this is prolly not the right oil for your snake. Also, please note the OpenSUSE is not that relevant: something similar should work nicely on Fedora too.

Caveats

Icecream is a sharp tool, it lets other people build software on your machine, needs you turn off your firewall, and it requires a working LAN. The wiki page is your friend. [update]: Martin Vidner points out that if you don't like to disable your firewall, it's easy to use some built-in rules; as root:
echo 'FW_CONFIGURATIONS_EXT += "iceccd icecream-scheduler"' >> /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2
/sbin/SuSEfirewall2 start

Invest one minute to make your builds fly

sudo zypper in -y icecream icecream-monitor # install the package < 5 secs
sudo /sbin/chkconfig --level 345 icecream on # enable icecream startup on boot

Next - decide if this is going to be the scheduler machine ? if so:
sudo sed -i 's/ICECREAM_RUN_SCHEDULER="no"/ICECREAM_RUN_SCHEDULER="yes"/' /etc/sysconfig/icecream

Then - start the daemon everywhere:
sudo /etc/init.d/icecream start # start the daemon ...

Finally - fix your path:
export PATH="/opt/icecream/bin:$PATH";
make -j8 # and run a parallel make

Non-griping

But I use different distros & versions on each machine - icecream pushes enough of your compiler and toolchain across to the remote host that this shouldn't be a problem.

But I like to turn the scheduler off / unplug my laptop - fine, icecream will handle your use-case perfectly: don't fret.

My mega-server is a 64bit machine, but my laptop is 32bit - fine, icecream will handle your use-case perfectly by default. It can even do cross compiling with more tweaking.

How do I know it's working - for those burned by the psychosomatic Gentoo experience, running 'icemon' can help overcome your fears (albeit at the cost of too much of your CPU):

(Thanks to Jonny Lamb / Collabora, or see an animated version).

But I run SLED ... - package here.

Credits

Clearly, the usual heros - Stephan Kulow, Michael Matz, Dirk Mueller wrote the software, Kendy said enough nice things about it & Will Stephenson, with Collabora actually showed me it working to great effect. Thanks guys, you made my builds fly. In my next blog post, perhaps I'll explain how by buying Mavis Bacon's typing tutor, you can double your programming productivity by simply increasing your typing speed; or something.

• Dug at mail, booked flights, more mail, chat with Srini, more inbox action - sigh. Kocked up a new python script to work out who has contributed to OO.o recently rather more accurately than last time. Created a perl script (which I still preferred to python for some reason, perhaps force of habit) to parse svn annotate output in various trivial ways.
• Finally got the ooo-build source split work underway again just as they day ends - Chris came over for a chat, good to see him again.

• Up early, checked mail - lots of interesting stuff, it's good to be back (at least for a week). Churned through FATE mail, booked travel variously.
• Lunch, tended the split build, more misc. tweaks. Massaged Mike's ORBit2 patch a little and committed it. Fixed up a ton of ant files to have more pleasant paths.
• Dinner, J. cut my hair; knocked up a quick prototype list to seed a membership process for OO.o, to try to get really representative council elections going.

• Off to NCC earlier than normal for breakfast before the service, good fun really. Met Charl and Sanmarie from South Africa, and had them over for lunch, and biking to the race-course. Really great to meet them.

• Cleaned out & thoroughly hoovered the afflicted room, discovered 3 other beetles - apparently the local spiders had wrapped them up, though whether they died after laying their eggs, no idea.
• Out to Molly's party with three babelets - 'Mr Marvel' was doing some entertainment for the children: simple magic, Punch & Judy, that sort of thing. Fine lunch, and a mini-disco-thinglet, mercifully very innocuous afterwards - lots of little girls jumping up and down.
• Back for lunch, the same chaps arrived to remove the sofa as had delivered it: wrapped it in plastic (much good may that do them), and hoiked it out.
• Off to James & Kate's 5th wedding anniversary party: great fun, lots of interesting people; good to see Rob & Sarah there - with Philip; you always meet interesting people at J&K's somehow. Back, bed exhausted.

• Phoned Furniture Village's Wayne who promised people to at least remove the beetle-eaten sofa, and provide a replacement; good. Cleaned up Bert's hedge cuttings - a rainy day. Spent a lot of time doing some months of filing, and starting on tax returns.

• Up early, mailed photographs of beetle to Rentokil, and off to the smashing Dinosaur Adventure Park near Norwich, good stuff. Lovely weather, despite the Met Office's dire predictions & weather map.
• Interested by Bob Sutor's comments that the Linux desktop needs better designers. No doubt he's right and luckily it's easy for IBM to fix that: bring some to the party (though clearly hackers are needed to implement their output & win people over to it). Having said that, is Notes or even Workplace nearer the summit of usability perfection, or even efficiency in the use of resources ?

• Prodded mail properly for the first time: wow, there is a lot of it. Played with Empathy some more, looks good, writing down the minor irritations for future reference / fixing. Call with Florian.
• Caught up with a certain amount of admin / bug filing. Call from Murfitts / builders wrt. a deadline for their quote: end of the month. Played with Conduit a little on the local network. Lunch with Laura.
• OO.o team meeting, call with JP, call with Grant, more talk with JP. After much digging into rpm things, I discovered that the mystic spec file goodness: make %{?jobs:-j%jobs} is best handled with some rpmbuild --eval '%define jobs 8' -ba foo.spec than otherwise, sadly much googling, manual and code reading didn't make this at all obvious.
• When is Open Source not that open source ? - when it is inorganic of course; J. reading a book Swindled currently on fake food (it's not as good as expected, perhaps like the food). Should we have an open-source FDA, that can name & shame harmful additives ?
• Dunged out the laptop disk, somehow filled 250Gb rather too quickly, kicked off some new m28 split builds.
• Poked at the sofa again: just playing with finding the depth of the various holes with some wire - when (much to my amazement) I hooked a hugeish beetle out of one of the holes; somewhat surprising to say the least. Stuck it on one of the Rentokill beetle sticking pads, though clearly these are designed for lesser beasts - it could move slowly around / off it. Managed to clap it inside a jam-jar, and kill it with some handy permethrin woodworm killer. Examining it it seems to be a False Powder Post beetle identical to the picture here: , Wikipedia is surprisingly unhelpful about Bostrichidae sadly.

• Up in the night with an upset M. encouraging reports of increased potty training success yesterday. Breakfast with Will, got down to work. Pleased to review a nice patch from Mike Gorse making the fast Unix Domain Socket path in ORBit2 work for the root user, making yast2 accessible as root, and (incidentally) speeding up startup of ~all Gnome apps just a little.
• Lots of interesting tweaks from Will, got Icecream setup locally to accelerate builds. Spent some time reading KDE code, debugging bits, Kopete, QObject, MOC output, KConfigXT etc. interesting stuff.
• Rentokill chaps arrived: Eddie Milton and Andy, admired the holes, helped chop open some of the plastic fabric covering, admired the rather shocking piece of timber, no obvious conclusions but that things came out, not in. Dropped Will off at the station. Dinner, babes to bed etc.

• Up, poked mail, synched with Will caught train with him to Cambridge, prodded mail; introduced to the joys of icecream. Rob arrived, lots of Telepathyesque discussion. Out for lunch with the Collabora team. Back, more talking, out to the Eagle in the evening for a pub dinner, back to Newmarket.

• J. lie in, out to the market with M. Applied slugging, and attempted potty training, with mixed success. Watched Mole DVDs in the afternoon.

• E. back to shorter sleeping cycles. Off to the market in the morning, forbidden from buying flowers for the lovely wifelet [ the infamous credit crunch you see ]. Back, for lunch. Various fruitless attempts at potty-training M. - she can do it easily, she just doesn't want to.
• Out in the afternoon to Lackford Lakes in the pouring rain; thankfully perfectly timed, such that the rain stopped as we got out, and we had the place to ourselves.

• E. slept for 8 hours in the night, wow - exciting stuff. Off to NCC to fix their networking, ripped up floors, pulled through old wiring variously. Interrupted by Andy from Furniture Village - who clownishly tried to suggest that perhaps the beetles came from the outside [ clearly laying their eggs on plastic, and then the larvae eating a 5mm hole in the plastic, then the wood: seems likely ]. Sent him off with suitable photos.
• Back to NOD, got the wiring done, and spent a while training a chap in the making of ethernet cables: somehow I (foolishly) assumed that every young adult can read the names of colors - got there in the end. Called back to talk to Rentokil's "Eddie", tried to setup an appointment for him to see it too: should charge an entrance fee apparently.

• Tried to catch up on urgent mail very quickly, without much joy. Off to Bressingham Steam Museum, for a fine day out with the children: Tesco vouchers took the entry cost to under 2 UKP, and somehow - after chatting to a passing local journalist pleasantly, we ended up with a free season ticket; neat.
• Took lots of hot & exhausted children home with some considerable extra griminess from clambering on big engines (etc.) riding on the merry-go-round, tired too. Poked mail again, worked away at it until too late, sigh.

• Phoned furniture village to call out their insect inspector. Dealt with shady 'Frank Smart' who apparently has taken a load of my personal data in an un-authorised fashion from our letting agency. Filled forms, sorted building papers, much admin - while baby sitting.
• Called Nildram to try to have them explain where many of my packets are going - apparently they like to disappear on-route, in an intermittent fashion. Very clueful L2 guy, but no obvious solution.
• Into Town to negotiate with, and help out our existing letting agent: nice chap. Back, Victoria, Mike & Rebeccah over for tea - lovely to see them, had a great evening.

• Set off for home after lunch, got back, tried to plan the rest of the week off, dealt with post and accumulated answer-phone messages.
• Discovered some fairly amazing exit holes, complete with swarf in our new Furniture Village (where quality is always guaranteed) leather sofa. Somewhat disturbing that the neat circular exit holes are 5-6mm, which is somewhat large by wood-boreing standards I think. Yet more amazingly, the neatly drilled hole extends through the plastic webbing covering the timber. Quality surely entails using treated wood, right ?

• Up at 6:15am, tried to keep M. quiet and sleep in her bed, despite demands of 'arms', 'cuddle', 'drinks' etc. Watched children's DVDs from newspapers for a while. Woke J. for breakfast.
• Out to Sizewell beach with Anne, much fun had by all, digging a trench in the sand, and building a castle under the breaking waves. Swam with the children - an experience marred only by a large number of white jellyfish many (apparently) dead. Appreciated the view of the nuclear power station ~3% of the UK's power (according to the Economist). Particularly interesting too the small amount of string that takes all that power to the consumer.
• Back for lunch, to wash sand off the kit; and out to the Aldeburgh park for swinging action: H. learned to swing without holding on: good fun. Back for baby bathing, dinner and bed.

• Up early again with M. off to Aldeburgh CofE where we were married; rather a good sermon: he explained the passage clearly & took it seriously.
• Sue & Clive left before lunch. Out to the swimming pool with three, leaving E. in the afternoon: pretty taxing keeping three small people afloat and alive, even without E. - good fun though.

• Much of the morning spent with children, or preparing food and furniture for the big combined birthday party. The stream of relations arrived - lovely food & wine, almost too hot weather. A great celebration of ageing Griffins.

• Up early, slept in M's bed trying to keep her quiet until a human hour; breakfast. Off to the Aldeburgh sea-front boating lake with (birthday-boy) Bruce's new radio-controlled boat. Played with that - though clearly it is either too fast, or the pool is too small.
• Wandered the beach, back to B&A's; paddling pool out, and reading of the paper; lunch. Sue, Clive & Adam arrived in the afternoon and helped prep for tomorrow's party. Fish & chip supper, and bed early.

• Semi-lie-in, the children's light failed to come on early, and new things in their bedroom distracted them until 7:30 or so. Breakfast, idly packed swathes of the house into the car. Set off for Aldeburgh.
• Smooth journey, despite jam-packed roof-box, and car full of fun-sized people & their accoutrements. Arrived, light lunch outside: very hot indeed, played with scooters, radio-controlled spider, and other misc. delights of the Griffin residence; read the paper.

• Lazed in bed, playing with daughters etc. for a long time - the start of two weeks of paternity leave; nice. J. took everyone on a picnic while I finished up some queued work, before we quit tomorrow for Aldeburgh.
• Gotcha'd by perl's broken syscopy documentation, as apparently reported in 2002 bother. Interested in el-reg's reporting of Verison's LiMo choice:

  We chose LiMo because it's a collaborative effort. It's not just one company runs the place. We like that. We like a collegial and collaborative effort, where there is no barrier to entry on the part of developers and, at the end of the day, there is no one entity that can say 'OK, here's how we were playing now. The rules are changed.' LiMo will be our preferred OS because of this openness.

  Whether sincere or not, I couldn't agree more. Give me a genuine, open, plural community any day over a single vendor dominated one.
• Finally created the first draft of a paper on culture I've been meaning to get to for a while. Knocked off to play with returning kids, have dinner, bathe them & put to bed.
• Hunting around for keys to car roof-box, eventually located them; fitted box, un-packed all manner of wonderful things from Julia's friend - moving away, with lots to give away.

• H's birthday, some presents in bed, breakfast - packed everyone off for the last day of term. Mail, poked at more splitting action, finally made make_installer.pl obey me.
• Out to Newmarket Open Door to see about keeping their network going during building work - pleasingly the SLED10 system there seems to have been running beautifully as a router and workstation for 'yoof' for the last ~20 months, without any problems; nice.
• OO.o team meeting, out to Pizza Express for a birthday dinner with all & sundry; back - presents, bed-time; back to prod the building pieces.

• J's birthday - up early, fed babes, poked mail. Amused to see Red Bean's take on virtual software. More split bits, misc. research. Read the nice LXF review of OpenSUSE 11.0, good stuff.
• Conf-call with Mike, Mark & Rob wrt. a11y - sounds like they're doing some great work there. Oddly un-productive ODF/Wiki IRC meeting.

• NCC, Tony speaking, met Mike a Sandwich Forensic Scientist, had him over for dinner. Played in the garden on & off - cycling practice. Bathed everyone, bedtime stories all together. Bed peacefully modulo the loss of M. precious 'Duch' (cloth) - and inadequate replacements thereof.

• Up early, frenzied party preparation, out to the market with Colin. More cleaning, and preparing, made boat-cakes; girls got into pretty dresses.
• Deluge of little girls arrived - lots of fun games: musical dots, pass the parcel, jumping around with cups of water, a post-box race thing. Fine party food, etc. Lots of tired & happy girls to put to bed.

• Off to get the car serviced; admired the Prius - albeit with it's tiny battery, adjacent to a large amount of effectively wasted boot space: odd. I'd love a plugin Prius, with a real battery; and 6 seats - waiting is the only option.
• Plugged away at scp2 translation, remembered to write up the split-build stuff for Ingo. Finally escaped for lunch, Bruce & Anne visiting, quick lunch; banged out an LXF column on GUADEC, call with Catherine. Annoyed by an Evo/GWise bug - chased that down to a missing mutex.
• Fixed annoying warning in orbit2. Banged away at make_installer to rip it's guts about: frankly scp2 seems so unpleasant and unnecessary for Linux systems, it seems of dubious usefulness. Discovered to my joy the hard-coded magic of 'gid_File_Lib_Vcl' - which has to be there as a magic template, and the tens of lines of cut-and-paste that proove that it really has to be there in several places; bother.
• Barbara & Colin arrived for the weekend. Dinner with them, up lateish preparing H's cake and catching up.

• Realised that I'd changed my splitting strategy since building the URE, tons of .rdb location issues: patched them all. Couple of conf-calls, wrote up some minutes.
• Discovered I get two weeks of paternity leave, but have to take them adjacently, and soon. Submitted layout paper for OOoCon, this year just before the deadline as opposed to just after. Back to packaging.

• Mail pokeage, admin do-age, fix misc patches, idle splitting, more GUADEC follow-up mail. Lunch, meetings all afternoon: JP's staff, OPS meeting, DE meeting.
• Out in the evening to work-around oddness with Chris' disk; pleased to see XGL working on his ancient built-in Intel chip-set, neat. Out for a drink later.

• Amy took H. to school, prodded mail - well pleased that firefox 3 managed to save & restore (over a hardware lock-up) not only the pages I was viewing, but the small essay I had typed into a text field; nice.
• Poked at an at-spi problem for Mark & Mike, all the same problems come back every now and then to bite us: thank God some of us have made all the right mistakes before.
• Helped N. with her cycling on the road before lunch: improving - 5 paces without falling off; lunch. Team meeting, more splittage.

• Up early; Amy took H. to school - walked with her to the post-box. Back, dug at the mail. Read up on Caolan's recommendation of strict aliasing - interesting stuff.
• Poked at DNS lookups, apparently Nildram can't answer them quickly; even back-to-back; annoying. More mail, prodded package splitting in the background, fixed my breakage for Rene. Nildram finally fixed the issue somehow.
• Found the business cards of the interesting chap I got chatting to on the flight in, from Zero Waste a company apparently converting tyres to oil.
• Woke M,, lunch, set off to collect H. waylaid by J. returning from the hospital, E. discharged, great. Back to work. Finished expense filing, more split build tending.

• Let J. have a lie-in; dressed everyone up & headed off to church. John & Alba's marriage being blessed - lovely service, great to see them looking so happy: did creche. Service sadly cut short by having to take E. to Bury for the penultimate set of antibiotics.
• Home for lunch, tried to get cleaned up a bit. Played with the babes in the road on bicycles & scooters - N. improving nicely & very stoical when bashed variously. Bed early.

• Up early, quick breakfast, checked mail; set off for the airport - amazing to see the queueing ships, presumably waiting to go through the strait. Arrived at the airport, no passport, grief. Applied prayer, & hunting - phoned Hubert who located it at the front-desk (apparently this is a feature-not-bug). JP very kindly rescued me by taxi & I made it to the plane, thank God.
• Thinking over GUADEC, having talked at length to Tim, I'm just slightly convinced that ABI breakage is worthwhile in the short term; and having given lots of grief about it, that it will be measured & manageable for existing software to move without huge disruption; and that the gain is real.
• Uneventful flight home, wonderful to hug little people left & right, and relieve the parents of their labour of love. Lots of fun, though far harder work than conferencing.

• Up too early, off to Jonny's Evolution / MAPI talk, where we announced the evolution re-licensing, and dropping of the copyright assignment: read Srini's mail here (appallingly wrapped due to mailer/connectivity issues at GUADEC). This is great news in general, and good wrt. getting the Evolution / MAPI connector shipped.
• Lunch with JRB, chat with Jon about gdm, and Richard about PackageKit. Long and interesting talk with Mark, rather re-assured that his passion for bzr is for the love of it, not self-interest; must take a look at it. Caught up somewhat with Matthew & Rob, on to Federio's keynote & then out for dinner with Miguel, Owen, Gabriel etc. at a fantastic restaurant. Back early with JP, via the blue mosque.
• Sad to see that Joe Barr passed on.

• Off to the conference with JP & Aaron, skipped breakfast somehow; call with the lovely wife: E. improving markedly, thank God. Great Telepathy talk from Rob, and interesting talk from Michael on Moonlight: I didn't realise how de-coupled from Mono 1.0 is.
• Lunch with Federico & a GSOC guy working on memory fragmentation detection with valgrind: interesting. Chatted to Tim at some length after lunch, met Ryan Lortie for the 1st time: most interesting. Call to the long-suffering parents at home, apparently coping.
• Owen's talk - interesting, and another, great talk with Ryan. Wandered the outside & off to the ship-board collabora party: excellent beer and copious food, cake cutting for Gnome's 10'th birthday from both of it's founders: good times. Boats have a certain partying auora, since the first GUADEC. Back late with JP, talk, mail, bed.

• Breakfast with JP & HPJ, off to the conference. Luis' opening keynote, long & interesting talk with Dirk, interview with Andreas, waylaid by long talk with Mark Shuttleworth.
• Lunch with JP, caught up with Federico's sexy UI ideas; chatted with the Evo. team, Owen, JRB. Afternoon, chatted to Tim at great & interesting length; Dinner with Mikael & Richard too.
• Back, for a musical bonanza on the roof; and lots of interesting people: Karl, Leonart, Philipp, Don, Vincent, and many others. Back to the hotel - spent much of the night checking mail, downloading things & talking to JP.

• Up several times in the night with various childly complaints, and again early: M & D kindly took them to school & went to the market, poked mail. Dug at a main-menu performance issue - could well be the thumbnail leakage problem:

  $ ls -lR ~/.thumbnails | wc -l
  12798

  hmm. Apparently we shove all those into a hash_table in the slab too gnome-thumbnail.c (read_md5_dir)
• Dug at logistics for flight to Turkey today. Synched with parents, train, plane - poked at mail and pending tasks: ship-wrecked by an unbelievable concurrency issue in gtype.c (again, again).
• Got to the hotel, out for a quick dinner with Aaron, Gabriel & Rufus; on for drinks & laughs with Miguel the leftist: an his interesting new visions. On for more drinks with Alp, Andrea, Rob & co. bed too late.

• Cheryl took H. to school, great. Poked mail quickly, captured bug list from the old laptop install; fell over an interesting b-a-s staleness issue, despite the nice fix from Ray to slave it to the session dbus lifecycle. Apparently the session dbus refuses to behave itself properly and quit on Zap nicely, so the great concept fails in practice. Isolated the (proable) root cause of b-a-s not quitting cleanly itself.
• Pleased to read Brian Proffitt's Sun should loosen up article:

  The company must learn to let go a little bit and let the open source ecology proceed naturally. In the short term, Sun might lose a little bit of advantage in the market, but long term, it is has a better shot at success.

  Start with OO.o: give us real, meritocratic governance and real (instead of sham) compromise on code ownership (as we have outlined & requested) - instead of trying mightily to avoid both issues while feigning 'Open'ness.
• J. arrived home in distress from the Doctor's. E. has a temperature, bubbling at the mouth rather & she's heading off to Bury Hospital; called the parents. Put N. to bed, and committed b-a-s fix.
• Pleased to see docs on how to track down wireless / NetworkManager issues; it often seems pinning blame on the kernel vs. hal vs. NM comprehensively is too hard.
• Got the Peetle up, lunch, tried to work while lego towers were built by the remaning girls. Mum & Dad arrived, got a bit of work done. Dinner, packed things for J.
• Dad drove me to Bury St. Edmonds hospital, found J. and E. in a state of some exhaustion & drip-fed-antibiotic goodness, poor dears. Talked with J. bid 'bye. Drove home, dug at mail, pinged misc. pending business.

• Dealt with the kids while J. slept, NCC - Janice spoke well. Heavy showers (as forcast) rained off a joint rounders match. Home, lunch. Installed SL11.0 on the hold-out laptop downstairs with some dodgy pre-beta of SLED10 still on it - nice: 3D effects work beautifully.
• Breakthrough in toilet training for Myriam - apparently the comprehension of the (now) impossibly attractive prospect of the phased incentives: sweets, 'barbie pull-ups', playing with dad, 'big-girl' knickers & finally a new car-seat pushed the balance. Also, fairly sure the individually wrapped & choose-able chocolates, and the sudden interest from big-sisters in 'helping' helped mightily.

• Up early, J.'s mastitis rumbling on (poor dear); she slept while I waited for the builder. Builder never turned up, phoned him, still never arrived. Bother.
• Lunch, off to the Newmarket Carnival - mercifully rain-free. Wandered the show, paying through the nose for fairground rides for innumerable little people. All Saints got to the final of the tug-of-war. Had a beer with Chris & admired his steam roller, still going strong.

• Poked mail, call with Vincent, into ESC meeting. Interested by the do we need users discussion in KDE-land. Personally, (for a broad definition of developer), I couldn't agree more: just taste the OO.o community - where non-developers are 'empowered' more than developers - for a while to experience how bad it can get. Of course, this is unrelated wrt. the target of the software you develop - that clearly has to be users.
• Continued source-split work vs. m21 - better, I don't have to do the patch forward porting in the same pass. ESC meeting finished early. More mail chewage.

• Poked mail, realised today is an all-day OpenOffice ESC conf-call; fun (or not). Call with Florian at lunch, lunch. More ESC conf-calling, interview. Late for Kelli's staff, desktop meeting.
• Pleased to see militant leftists frustrated at the happy ending of the personal tragedy [ no doubt justified as: for the greater good of making property history ] of Ingrid B. Also amusing to see another leftist darling: Chavez, caught supporting armed aggression in a neighbouring country (while pumping up the gini co-efficient at home), all in a good cause no doubt.
• Dinner, chatted with Sue in the garden - most pleasant.

• Prodded mail, back to the split package building interest: lots of very slow & intricate work; pulled some patches up to m22. Call with Janneke, lunch. Packed beb303-m2 for Rene.
• Conf-call with the desktop crew.

• Poked mail, read reports, annotated them; agenda poking. Tweaked source packing script. Call with Naji, OO.o team meeting, corporate call.
• Fascinated to watch a small bug crawling between the backlight and the LCD - gives a great insight into the internal geometry of the panel: like xroach, but far slower & un-kill-able (without a permanant splat).
• Long and interesting team meeting. Put babes to bed, out for a run with Suzannah; dinner, bed.

• Cycled H. to school, brief mail pokeage, more paper work reading. Dug at packaging, in parallel with misc bits, chat with Simon, Lunch.
• Call with JP, poked Kohei. The newest go-oo version with all manner of nice features beyond what is in Sun's OO.o got released, lots of bug fixes and improvements there.
• Hyper-lengthy phone-call in the afternoon / evening, slogged away at packaging pieces in between. Pleasant dinner with Suzannah - great to have her here to help, baby-wise.

• Off to NCC, Helen spoke. Lunch, George's party in the afternoon - much fun with a strange parent vs. children game with footballs & a parachute. Bed early, exhausted as normal.

• Up at 6:30, out for a run - try to get the back into shape. Breakfast with the girls, off into town to the market. Back, out to Cheeky Monkeys in the afternoon for Benjy's party - much fun; playing in ball pools etc. Back late, children dunked & put to bed, sleep.

• The parents went home after helping us so much all this week. Poked mail, pleased to have some really great documents from the KDE team to read.
• Attempted to run a .Net application on windows: eventually found the ".Net framework 2.0 configuration" tool (festering away in some obscure and un-findable place). Amusingly the tool itself (presumably written in .Net) apparently had insufficient trustworthiness to operate on it's own settings for an individual assembly: turned all .Net security off instead, cunning.
• Lunch - Auntie Louise around; good to see her. Back, re-massaged tar balls - dug at .spec files endlessly, interview.

• Glad that you can't fool everyone all of the time: Sun's still screwing up. Nowhere is that more evident than in OpenOffice.org: strangled on the alter of Sun's proprietary advantage. When will we have a project that is run for the benefit of the project itself ? by people who care about the long term viability & world-dominating prospects of the code ?
• Poked mail, features & bugs. Still blundered on removing inlines, and got UML to compile and even run eventually: really sweet for using a debugger to understand code flow; still can't find my hard-copy of RML's magnum opus though.
• Spent a while digging at OO.o build infrastructure, and source packaging, tried chopping up the source another way. Amused during the work to appreciate an outbreak of humour from the Strba, apparently the unpack script nowadays has: echo "Unpacking OO.o build tree - [ go and have some $DRINK ] ..." with a fully configurable:

  AC_ARG_WITH(drink,
  [
    --with-drink            The parameter is a favourite drink that unpack should advice you to take.
  		      
  			  Example: --with-drink=coffee],
  ,)

  - the joys of community; tweaked the spelling: 'advise' - thank goodness the default is still tea (for the UK), and not Coca-Cola. Chat with Rene.

• Committed my sabayon login speedup / fix, Federico liked it at some stage I recall. More work / Fate bits. Architects call - rambled extensively, prodded Julian. Added a patch to check for ant-apache-regex in OO.o's configure.
• Firefox 3.0 seems to do a simply terrible job of scaling images, for no reason I can work out. Then again, I'd love to have a 'default zoom' that can be set instead of the (different) default font size bits: who cares about font sizes in points - I just want everything bigger.
• Read a nice write-up from Lubos; dunged out my disk. Rene kindly cleaned up my ant patch. F. Alexander pointed out that I can solve my firefox zoom broken-ness by installing a plugin (on every computer I use) - No Squint - which is just what I want. As with all plugins though - the very concept of shipping squint-full software, that can be fixed after the fact with an optional download is somewhat mind-blowing.
• Continuing to have an evil time compiling a UML kernel; apparently the SUSE gcc doesn't like the latest git kernel much, which is sad: even ooo-build builds with that.

• More mail backlog catchup; poked at SDL qemu irritation whereby emulation stops making progress when you switch to another virtual workspace. it seems a failing X11_GrabInput is causing the problem: why spend all your life grabbing an unwilling X server ?
• Irritated enough by the less-than-helpful "Create Document" nautilus functionality; dug at nautilus trying to teach it to follow the KDE document template work. Built the latest ooo-build HEAD.
• Lunch, interrupted by call with Andy, team meeting, call with Guy. Back to templates hackerage. Tried to make user-mode-linux compile - more difficult than anticipated: when you avoid the interesting crasher / gcc optimiser bug, you hit other nasties.
• Worked late, finished and posted the nautilus template patch - it's nice to get to some hacking again after a long break from it.

• Started on the mail - it's great to see the back-log of OO.o team mail: doing some great work. Re-tested my last Xen bug having installed more RAM - still failing, hmm.
• Beautiful boxed set of OpenSUSE 11.0 arrived - installed that, and burned some DVDs for friends. Filed some more bugs, updated others, got on top of the Clarity backlog.

• NCC - Tony preaching, did creche - showed off E. to all and sundry. Emily & Keith also brought their new baby Grace for the first time: a joyful time.
• Home, lunch - to bed for a few hours myself. Mum & Dad arrived to help out next week, great to see them. Amused by the choral arrangement of spiderpig, and the apparent Dutch appreciation of PhatFish.

• Avoided walking into town in the rain with the children - J. finally getting nearly enough sleep: great. Chris came over, good to see him - had some peace while the children all watched a DVD & retired into the child-free front-room.

• Laura ('LawLaw') came over to see the baby and to let Benjy / Grace play with our little ones. Took M. to clinic - still complaining of her arm; nurse diagnoses nothing really wrong, excellent.

• Took H. and N. to school & pre-school: managed to forget ~everything: book-bag, water, hat; bother. M. managed to throw a tantrum while walking home from school when it turned out her father was not going to carry her - and in doing so, twisted her wrist painfully: lots of tearful grief from that. Tania brought us a fine dinner.

• Dropped H. at school; and off to Cheeky Monkeys a children's play place with H/M/E - to celebrate my birthday: much diving into ball pools, sliding on slides & so on. Met an interesting friend of Kate & James' there - Trish / Jo - the latter on leave from working with tearfund in Sudan. Claire kindly brought us an immense and tasty dinner.

• Up early, Elizabeth (the 4th) encouragingly learning to sleep for longer at night - after some paternal viciousness injected into the process of keeping her waiting for 3 hours during the day. Rachel cooked us a fine meal in the evening.

• Mum & Dad took H. to school, up lateish, cleaned house, washed up, nappies on, put babes to bed: no idea how J. does all this when I'm at work normally. M&D left for home; brief blogging action.
• Out to collect H. with N. Estimator around to examine the building task, a professional free-lance estimator apparently, though less thorough than the chap who would do the work himself interestingly.
• Dinner, bed as early as possible.

• Up late, Mum took the children to All Saints, T. looked after the baby, and R. played rough & tumble with H. while J. slept. M & D cooked a lovely roast lunch while I tidied up, and disposed of remains of yesterday.
• J. E. and M. up after lunch, Sue, Clive & Adam arrived, brothers left, took bigger babes to a party with Mum - some sleep, hectic schedule. Up to collect kiddies.
• Cheryl & Emily arrived with a fine cake, J. to bed, more slugging and eventually tried to sleep. E. up almost the entire night, interspersed with N. crying for a drink and M. wanting kisses; sigh. Exhausting.

• Poor wife labouring on & on, Laura arrived to help with the children, Ann & Nina arrived to help with the baby. Lots of stirling work from J. Cheryl & Laura took the children away; yet more final stage pushing - for an hour or more.
• Eventually decided hospital would be better; ambulance at speed to Bury St Edmonds, plenty of contractions in the ambulance: and a ton of electronic paperwork: filling out various details. J. gave birth shortly after arriving to a beautiful baby girl: Elizabeth Julia Hope Meeks; 8lb4oz.
• Spent a long while waiting before the baby was old enough to get it's FooBaa score - midwife eventually arrived to do that. Passed the time by reading the frankly hideous woman's magazines in the hospital: simply unbelievable - a cross between voyeurism and soft porn apparently.
• Father came to pick us up, Mum & Dad having arrived and collected the children. Home, just as Thomas arrived; Robert came later, and Bruce & Anne - all to see E.
• Spent the afternoon playing in the sun with the babes, talking to the family, J. slept - exhausted. Stayed up rather late to avoid waking J. brothers both practicing their dancing & showing pictures of the latest & greatest ladies.

• Up rather early, filed a Xen bug before breakfast, poked mail. Breakfast, back to the mail. For fans of the asymtotic approach to perfection the Happiness Nowhere spoof Mac ad is lecker.
• Some poking at FATE, merged nice patch from Mike Gorse to fix dbind array usage. Picked up Naomi from pre-school while J. slept. Lunch.
• Booked GUADEC travel. Miguel has a really nice write-up of the new Monodevelop / OpenOffice.org integration templates complete with pretty screenshots.
• Played with qemu - some beautiful stuff; finally discovered ctrl-alt-1 and the fun that lurks there. Wife reports more persistent contractions - life apparently about to get noiser.
• Stayed up, watched Parenthood with the wife as she laboured, got a few hours sleep - contractions not well established or regular.

• Decadence, sweet decadence! Some interesting discussion on planet gnome on the subject. As a hacker who manages to age without apparently getting wiser - I have to say, I am highly suspicious of change for it's own sake.
  • This is particularly true when you take into account the typical hacker tendency to start things that never get finished. Those who would deny this tendency, should introspect: how many TeX-like bug-free & finished programs have they created; vs. how many mouldering half-finished proof-of-concepts ?. When I cast around for the programmers I respect most perhaps they have some of these defining characteristics:
    • Hackers that produced libraries or applications that have stood the test of time: became the canonical solutions in a given area, were cleanly designed & maintainable - and as such began to be taken for granted & disappear from view. ie. I love people that finish things.
    • Alternatively I see giants who took broken unfinished things, and heaved them upwards into a more usable, polished & consistent state - eg. getting nautilus from where Eazel left it to today's version.
    • Those who lead others by example: sheer hard work, determination and working to include, build and keep a developer community; oh and who compromise to ally with, and include other people. For example if your Foo project seeks to revolutionise the desktop - best to join up with Baa project and Baz project with similar goals, before trying to persuade everyone to work with you.
    It turns out having 'vision' is easy enough, you don't need any special (or even programming) skills. What is not easy is having an achievable vision, articulating it clearly, building consensus and delivering on it.
  • Then of course, there is a wonderful (albit brief) paper by Jamie Zawinski on the revolutionary CADT development model. I'm personally not so convinced that version 0.8 is always followed (on re-write) by 0.8, often AFAICS it's 0.7 or 0.5. Having said that getting to 0.9 is perhaps possible, if the re-write is done by people wiser after suffering all the original mistakes. Sadly though re-writes are done by 'fresh blood'. Perhaps the reduction in CADT in GNOME is due (as people have pointed out) to an increasing proportion of the middle-aged: with pictures of babies replacing bungee-jumpers on the planet.
  • Pyro / web-desktop type ideas as a way forward: I used to (somewhat) sneer at people who describe themselves thus: "I program HTML". Then I tried to make a web-site look as I wanted it to (ie. not grotesquely ugly), wow - perhaps they were onto something. Some think there is a pile of broken mess in our desktop, but at least you know where you are with a GtkHBox.
  • Then of course - there is the thesis itself: of decadence. If people want pervasive & noticeable change you can instantly see - it means several things: potentially huge code changes, new metaphores and lots of experimentation. Doing that will inevitably screw up lots of the new things: or worse, they will be an excellent idea (eg. spatial nautilus) that the users will revolt against. Of course, that is no reason not to try, but the bigger the project, the harder it becomes, and the more necessary it is to have a clear and substantial benefit articulated.
  • Personally, I think the thesis of slow decay is unconvincing: I look at the wider Linux desktop of which GNOME is a key part, and see us actually getting to a place where it works well enough that the positive feedback that entails gets us yet more users, developers and improvements. Simply because the UI involved in say draining the package management swamp is small - doesn't mean the effort fixing the mess is (or would be any easier in a new paradigm). Similarly, when it comes to resourcing decisions eg. I applaud Soeren, Federico & the X guys for working on the inglorious draining of the swamp of multi-monitor hot-plug from hardware to end-user. They could of course have been doing something else: perhaps adding 3D gizmos that only render properly on ultra-new hardware - would that be time better spent ? Personally I'm excited about new things like PackageKit, PulseAudio, working multi-display hot-plug, (finally) pervasive free-software X drivers, the latest compiz effects, and so on.
  • I guess, ultimately we should aim at making our libraries and infrastructure as (apparently) boring as the kernel: which people take for granted, is just there, and expands incrementally. That might leave us to move up-stack and make our applications integrate beautifully with all our new technologies; dunging out the old libraries & APIs to make further change possible, and adding user functionality people want to use: but then, I'm always on the look out for more ooo-build hackers I guess.
• Got on with reading mail & working instead of pontificating. Spent a while trying to debug an odd problem with a child of X locking up at 100% in Pclose, looked like some horrific kernel issue; dug at the results of echo t > /proc/sysrq-trigger a little but got no-where in the end. Well pleased with X / drm / radeonhd stability - in comparison with the proprietary drivers, I spent an hour SIGKILL'ing X, switching consoles, modprobe -r'ing, starting and killing compiz and so on, and the machine is still alive.
• Bit of OO.o code review on the side; poked at xen & xenner some more.

• Still, still no baby, Ann came for a mid-wifely visit, no particular conclusions yet. More prodding at beagle related I/O metric generation. Interleaved that with some more attempts to get DRI working, after poking in the debugger at some length to work out why R500 support requires a newer drm. - I actually read the drm readme, and discovered make install needs running in linux-core as well as the top-level (obviously).
• DRI success on my RV530 (M56GL) - but only as far as 'glxgears', compiz seems to wedge the X server, and gdb crashed on attach; bother. Finally got to E-mail, also started logging my desktop I/O usage to see how it looks during the day & do some number crunching on that. Popped into the KDE team meeting.
• Pleased with the chart anti-aliasing caused by Radek's nice EMF+ rendering patches; disk stats over a ~three minute period of normal desktop use:
  
  The question is - when should beagle start and stop indexing the latest file data ? I'm sure some algorithmic genius, such as Morten knows the answer; and/or if you play my disk activity backwards as audio: does it contains some hidden message: answers on the back of a post-card.

• Still no baby, J. getting concerned: perhaps a good sign. Call from Robert, call from at-build wrt. a building quote (not to be confused with ooo-build). Started playing with banshee & filing bugs.
• Reflected on the parable of the wise & foolish builders in light of Lake Delton.
• Federico pointed out that my cross-thread GObject construction race is actually a live bug, and I'm being a dofus since the apparent fix was included & in-effective; re-filed & started to chase.
• TimJ nailed it from my repeatable test, and pointed out an interesting paper The Problem with Threads:

  I conjecture that most multi-threaded general-purpose applications are, in fact, so full of concurrency bugs that as multi-core architectures become commonplace, these bugs will begin to show up as system failures. This scenario is bleak for computer vendors: their next generation of machines will become widely known as the ones on which many programs crash.

  The solution is of course obvious: to give staggering amounts of highly parallel beefy hardware to an infinite number of free-software hackers. Failing that, CPU vendors could do a lot worse than invest a fortune in Julian's helgrind thread checker.
• Lunch. Worked on some somewhat less interesting analysis task. Read the recent Ray Ozzie (transcript - sorry .doc: "really understanding the importance of interoperability") take on Open Source - that it is "potentially much more disruptive than Google". I couldn't agree more, particularly vs. an over-emphasis on open-standards (that allow proprietary software to interoperate) at the expense of open-source innovation. I take issue with this chasing the tail-lights meme I hear in several places: it's total rubbish, at least when applied to open-source. Yes we can, and yes we should do it: would the GNU project exist if someone hadn't been willing to chase some (very distant) tail-lights in persuit of freedom ? pre-emptive capitulation is just really silly.
• Dinner, worked late - call with JP, poked at beagle's I/O usage a bit. Tried to build a new set of dri pieces for the latest radeonhd: stymied.

• Cycled H. to school - lovely day, getting slightly fitter against the odds. Still no baby - Anne (the midwife) around to inquire as to where it has got to - inconclusive.
• Poked mail. Thrilled to find that between me seeing the critical yast2-gtk installer bug on Friday, and Monday morning - Ricardo fixed it and Coolo packaged it: nice. Also, Ricardo implemented a beautiful map based timezone selector widget to match Qt, though it'll miss 11.0.
• Set too trying to reproduce and file a number of bugs. Caught nautilus synchronously statting bookmarks on every new window - which is really bad with stale NFS mounts.
• Lunch; managed to reproduce an evil GTheme warning bug I've been trying to catch for some weeks now - only to discover it was a race in GObject class initialization that Tim just fixed, hey ho: down to zero inexplicable-and-scary bugs to track. Discovered that the latest banshee is available as 'banshee-1' instead of 'banshee' in OpenSUSE: nice.
• Amused by the latest NetworkManager feature interacting with my eponymous wireless network:
  which am I ? sadly no tooltip to clarify the decision matrix.
• Pizza for dinner, played with the children in the garden, bed; back to work for a bit.

• Lie in, off to an outreach thing ont the council estate near the churc: bouncy castle, free hot-dogs, cakes & drinks - Pete doing a storming job in some goal-shooting game; fun in the sun.
• Home, babes to bed - played "hang-man" in the garden with Hannah, seemingly 3 letter words are hard to beat, or just obscure ones: "coccyx" a personal favorite. Woked the babes up - very unhappy & sleepy.
• Interesting chat with Heather about prayer for Israel: which of course, has to be a good thing in itself. It's always interesting to me - the several steps in the chain from a solid faith in Christ, to eschatological views I can understand but don't share, to the leap that we should (somehow) be actively involved in ensuring prophecy is fulfilled (God is surely strong enough to accomplish this himself), and yet further to almost unqualified support for evil done to fulfill some people's idea of what God said will happen. For me, it is sad to see those who should yearn to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God end up twisted in knots by speculative theology, and apparently going in a different direction.
• Play, tea, bath, bed. Fine Gordon sermon He Built an Altar on Genesis 12. Some fascinating insights.
  • The altar as an analog of Kuduru stones - marking out land as belonging to various people - erected by kings almost like a title deed. Indeed, 'altars' being created not always to sacrifice on but apparently for a similar purpose.
  • The radical difference in the Israelite altar vs. pagan ones: worshiping the God 'who is', built very simply with un-dressed stones: with the maker's marks un-blemished by man's. cf. the law of the altar: Ex 20 either just earth for sacrifices, or un-dressed stones.
  • God's ultimate ownership of everything, as soverign - whether palestine, England, or our lives: Abraham's confession of himself as God's own: calling on the name of the Lord.

• Off to the market with the babes in the rain; back - bought new pair of Opterons - that will hopefully work in my motherboard, and have a power save mode (as well as being faster); hopefully will save the world, and some fan noise.
• Finally got downstairs connected to up-stairs via ethernet. Lunch - pork spare ribs: unexpectedly good. More teaching of small children to balance on bicycles, scooters etc. in the light drizzle.
• Watched Howel's Moving Castle again with the babes in the afternoon; hopefully they understood just a bit more. Tea, lightning shower for children, put them to bed; poked mail briefly.

• Up early, tried to file Xen bugs, but got side-tracked by a cracking memory leak in nautilus: apparently piling up (26Mb) of duplicate status bar messages on the (invisible) desktop window status-bar; in parallel with finally being able to repeat the "package updating the theme / icon cache crashes firefox" (seemingly a GtkPlug issue), hopefully all the detours result in a far better OpenSUSE 11.0.
• Filed many virt-manager bugs; that beastie needs some usability love. Long lunch break to make up for last night - picked up H. from school, chatted with Janine & watched her boys play. Call with Patrick. Discovered the ftw glibc call - I wonder how efficient it's I/O is.

• Poked mail, quick call with Alex, dug at the kernel some more. Call with Jo, filed some more bugs. Sadly yesterday's Xen install failed to boot, tried again and finally had some joy with OS11.0 RC1 on some more hardware: perhaps my Core/Duo is the problem. More installing & bug filing joy.
• Lunch. Back - to discover amazing mails being filtered out of my inbox; set too debugging filters with a helpful tip from Andre. Hideous - discovered Evo had been putting all mail with RE in the subject in some stupid place. Discovered a load of mail I apparently lost: bother: it seems "Filter on Subject" with a certain [subject] RE: foo - can give a seriously unhelpful filter. Started re-reading mail from 27th Feb.
• Kelli's staff. Poked NCC to buy some more RAM for an elderly, but still much loved AMD64 Opteron machine (circa 2004). Worked rather late, encouraging call with Calvin.

• Poked at bugs, good to see Federico's fixes for my two file-selector issues. Got a lot of nice structural drawings in the post from Charles Tallack - soon there will be steelwork everywhere it seems: amazing what can be done with a few 10cm steel joists.
• Tried to find a working E-mail address for someone and failed: the second instance in two days - blog entries everywhere, photos, etc. but no (functioning) address: how irritating - I imagine an increasingly common problem - you can find people's detailed accounts of dental flossing, but not how to mail them.
• Lunch with Lydia. Buried under FATE mail from Guy. Annoyingly it seems emacs wedges pretty hard when a11y is turned on under GNOME - why ? last I looked stack-traces from emacs were not friendly. Managed to get further with virt-manager/xen than ever before - looking nice; read some of xenner.
• Found & chased a nasty crasher in OO.o's png loader - why do we have custom PNG loading code in OO.o instead of using libpng ? perhaps quicker than the Sun/legal paperwork to get libpng included, but certainly buggier ?
• Cell group in the evening, only Simon & Lydia, good fun though.

• Up; poked at mail etc. Extremely pleased to see Nat's pet project (SUSE Studio) get announced publicly for the first time at LinuxTag. There is some minimal screencast (NB. it takes some time to load in the popup). As you expect from the Friedman Franchise, it's extremely cool: if you build virtual appliances, you'll be wanting to sign up to have a play. Conversely if you just havn't got into this whole virtualisation thing, now is a good time to start - made easy for you by:
  
  
• Chat with Alex - who has an exciting plan around KVM & Xenner. Filed my clock time set fix; dug at strange firefox / theme change crasher issue. Found, analysed & filed a nasty file-selector crasher for Federico; Lunch. Dunged out some longer term bugs, core team meeting.
• Poked at a11y for tools running as root; apparently there is no good way to do this securely. Probably the best approach is for the root runnign tool to detect the user account for which it is running, and create it's sockets in /tmp/orbit-$USER for them - with relevant permissions. Currently connecting to the registryd works fine, but getting ORCA to connect back doesn't.
• Watched Howl's Moving Castle again, some great artwork - admiring the castle (built by a daemon) - it's tempting to make comparisons with various pieces of software. There are some suspiciously over-engineered guns poking out everywhere, as everywhere in the fine parody of an over-militarised society.

• Baby due today - lets see if it arrives. Poked mail, filed bugs, started RC1 installation. Unfeasibly pleased to discover the compiz wall plugin: to feed my need for fast, multiple desktops: pretty. Worked on slide-ware and older mail.
• Lunch; call with Nirav, poked idly at various bugs. Dinner with the babelets, bath & put them to bed. Back for conf-call.

• Up lateish, off to church: John spoke well on Romans; Jim Gilbert showed a rather neat albeit short short of SM Lockridge's Thats My King, good stuff.
• Back, watched a fun Japanese cartoon / film with the kids from DT & Zoe. Diary sync, prepped more quote requests for local builders. Hannah's birthday party invites created, long call with the parents, then Robert.

• Off to the market, shopping; home - back to bed. Up, lunch, out with N. & M. to the playground while H. went to Keziah's party. More cycling practice in the afternoon, some useful slugging.

• Cooked breakfast; more practice with H. - now getting remarkably good at balancing - counting her progress in paces of un-interrupted bicycle free-wheeling.
• Packed, and drove home; more practice in the street - discovered the brake chaffing the (somewhat bent) front wheel, and fixing this doubled H.'s best-distance to 70+ paces: nice.
• DVD for the children, combined with efforts to write a covering letter describing the building work we want done; failed. J. out baby-sitting, and got back to it - alternating with E-mail and so on.

• Breakfast; off into Aldeburgh to wander through the town. Traditional admiration of the RNLI life boat. Back - spent a fun time helping H. learn to steer a bike & balance herself - with a suitably de-pedalled children's bike from the local tip: 3 for a pound. Great time.
• Lunch, more balance training (in the rain) after lunch; poked mail.

• Poked mail quickly, some debugging fun with Rodrigo. Curious about the AMD 780 radeonhd work; I updated my git repo and was unfeasibly pleased to see the 3D / DRI work by Matthias Hopf starting to appear there.
• Found gbookmarkfile doing a thousand or so time() syscalls for no reason while digging through strace code. Poked at gvim - which appears to provoke compiz into doing it's window-selection effect: XWarpPointer is even more harmful than I thought, as you see in this gvim KWin 3.1 workaround.
• Lunch, some more work; dropped Rodrigo at the train station. Poked at pulseaudio a little. Filed and isolated a silly in the PolicyKit adjust date dialog; filed GL transition crasher, tried to create a simple test-case to make gdb misbehave even with debuginfo symbols.
• Set off for Aldeburgh with the family for a break; got the children into bed; fine dinner.

• Up early, breakfast - disappeared up-stairs with Rodrigo for some mail processing. Poked at super-irritating pulseaudio glitch-fest on my oldest, slowest machine - stracing the daemon we see that it's waking up 5x per second (or so) and some rather unfortunately long poll response times: eg.

  1211970599.543457 poll({snip fd details}], 14, 186) = 1
  1211970599.543928 gettimeofday({1211970599, 544334}, NULL) = 0

  ie. we ask to sleep for 186us, and we get control back to call gettimeofday 471us later. Of course, quite why we are waking up -so- frequently, and reading ~20 bytes of samples, and going back to sleep for such a short time is unclear to me; 260 poll / recvmsg's per second - just to play a mp3; odd. Could it be that this is the solution ? Unfortunately esd works (apparently) perfectly on the same machine at a much more sedate 14 2k reads per second instead.
• Hit upon a nice e-d-s crasher. Wrestled with memos, and got some sent in the end, and the web tool setup for vacation Thur/Fri. Lunch. Call with Jeff, interview.
• Hacked with Rodrigo on misc. bugs. Out for Dinner with Rodrigo & his sister Eva's family - pleasant; bed late.

• National holiday. Lie in, took N. out for a treat with her Father: went to Ely, wandered around the Cathedral, had 'chips' for lunch at a local pub. Back to a playground in the grounds, and thence home.
• N. sickening on return home - perhaps too much wandering in the rain. Set too getting the new phone extension wired up, the conduit fitted, network connection point wired etc. A fair degree of success.
• Dinner, bed early; up to fetch Rodrigo from Stanstead rather late, returned home; bed again.

• Mini lie-in for J. extreme potatoe & carrot peeling action. Off to NCC - DT speaking for the first time: caught some good stuff from the creche.
• Home for lunch with Elisabeth, Josh sadly flying, fine chicken crock pot; talked and played with the children for some time; watched Madeline.
• Dinner, Martin, DT & Zoe around to watch I am Legend in the evening: a surprisingly good film. Bed late.

• Up lateish; into town with N. to do the shopping variously. Lunch; out to Mepal Outdoor Centre - for assorted play-ground, climbing fun. Lots of child near-submergal experiences in the 1 metre deep ball-pool: quite fun.

• SUSE rock-star Michael Matz made my whole month with his three line gdb patch to make debugging un-instrumented x86 binaries work again; nice.
• Gave up on hoping that Gnome would serve my blog sanely - apparently asking for it is a denial of service attack. Duplicated it at http://www.go-oo.org/~michael/blog/index.atom.
• To further confirm Michael Matz is my hero - I did a comparison of OO.o debugging. OO.o is interesting because the debuginfo package you need is 275Mb small - but of course, you actually need rather more than that: the glib debuginfo package and various other pieces. Here is the trace before the patch:

  (gdb) bt
  #0  0xffffe430 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
  #1  0xb6eb21d7 in *__GI___poll (fds=0x8641990, nfds=6, timeout=599) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/poll.c:87
  #2  0xb554f6f2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
  #3  0x08641990 in ?? ()
  #4  0x00000006 in ?? ()
  #5  0x00000257 in ?? ()
  #6  0x08641990 in ?? ()
  #7  0x00000006 in ?? ()
  #8  0x00000000 in ?? ()

  And afterwards:

  (gdb) bt
  #0  0xffffe430 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
  #1  0xb6eb21d7 in *__GI___poll (fds=0x8641990, nfds=6, timeout=599) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/poll.c:87
  #2  0xb554f6f2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
  #3  0xb554f9d8 in g_main_context_iteration () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
  #4  0xb5b3d68d in ?? () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvclplug_gtk680li.so
  #5  0xb54f4751 in X11SalInstance::Yield () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvclplug_gen680li.so
  #6  0xb7e06cf1 in Application::Yield () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
  #7  0xb7e06d3f in Application::Execute () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
  #8  0x08071c53 in desktop::Desktop::Main ()
  #9  0xb7e0a27e in ?? () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
  #10 0xb7e0a41a in SVMain () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
  #11 0x08066c60 in main ()

  Save your download bandwidth quota (and the planet too) by grabbing a new gdb for your OpenSUSE 11.0 from here.
• Discovered & filed a juicy gcc -Os crasher. Lunch - Tina and children visiting, good to meet her. Back to work, mail to chew. Finally got around to writing up some of my thoughts on how to make the OO.o Community Council more relevant, representative and frankly interesting to people, that Louis asked for; posted for discussion, though missing the drawings. Call with Kelli.

• Poked at mail, waded through bugzilla entries - filing bugs certainly creates lots of work. Apparently USB died on my machine, the hardware flaked which is interesting & unusual. Made some floppy disks to flash the BIOS just in case that helps - brought back some heady memories of using Linux for the first time. I should really build a VM with the DOS games we wrote back in the day in assembler.
• The Microsoft announcement that they will natively support ODF is at some level encouraging. And better - MS will join the ODF TC and contribute: which could be really interesting (be careful what you wish for). Of course this may end up being really good for ODF: it all depends if the blatant psuedo-technical competitive marketing continues in the (already dysfunctional) TC context. We'll at least see if all those who kept chanting:

  "MS should build the extensions they need for interop on top of ODF"

  were actually sincere, or whether they now switch to an equally shrill albeit contradictory:

  "They are evily embracing and extending our standard"

  Given the feature sub-set problem in ODF, can you have the embrace without the extend ? Of course, it is possible that MS (unlike Novell) have no real interest in improving the serious inadequacies around interop. in ODF, in which case their customers will just get upset:

  "why does my document look different when I save as ODF, and re-load it in Word"
  or even
  "Why, when I select ODF mode, do so many features disappear in the UI"

  Can you imagine the synthetic outrage that either of these will generate ? Then again, perhaps they will want to improve interop. in the standard, at which point we will inevitably quickly hit the:

  "This can't go into the standard because there is no implementation in OO.o [or perhaps the more sophisticated 'multiple implementations']"

  type argument, or will that be waived - in which case we will hit the:

  "OO.o can't load & render it's native file format"

  chestnut - which of course has always been true of KOffice's ODF use and which we keep hearing re-iterated in various forms about Office 12 and OpenXML. Anyway - at the end of whatever "pick your own fight" session we're in for, when all the dazed, confused and exhausted pundits grind to a halt there are perhaps two lessons that will become obvious here:
  • Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to decieve
  • Open Standards are good but Free software is far better.
• Woke Florian up, while he was on vacation: drat, should have known he would travel to some exotic spot. FreeDos fails to boot on the hardware on which I need to flash the BIOS. Whence, a working DOS boot CD ? finally found a dusty floppy that worked, flashed the BIOS & USB returns: amazing.
• Lunch, back - a deadlock in b-a-s: drat; debugged it; it turned out to be an horribly evil nasty - when do you avoid emitting 'broken' callbacks in the mainloop when a connection dies.
• Various conf-calls in the evening - found an extraordinary busy-loop in gnome-keyring-daemon, apparently burning up ten+ seconds during login: not ideal.

• Started trying to debug the non-booting / kernel panic of my AMD64 machine: most odd - played with install and remove of packages: still some odd things going on there. Tried to track down an intermittent firefox crash in valgrind: with no joy. Filed a broken USB issue (hmm) - tried the latest kotd: still no USB, not good.
• Lunch, Lydia around. Poked #sysadmins about my strange blog woes, good to see Jeff again. Interesting that www.gnome.org answers replies to queries rather differently depending on where they come from (apparently) - some people just get ECONNRESET almost immediately (perhaps a firewall issue). Of course, wget works from everywhere - here is the query it does:

  GET /~michael/blog/index.atom HTTP/1.0
  User-Agent: Wget/1.11.1
  Accept: */*
  Host: www.gnome.org
  Connection: Keep-Alive
  

  vs. the query the uber-powerful (etc.) feedparser code does (apparently due to some fun charset love:

  GET /~michael/blog/index.atom HTTP/1.0
  Host: www.gnome.org
  A-im: feed
  Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
  Accept: application/atom+xml,application/rdf+xml,application/rss+xml,application/x-netcdf,application/xml;q=0.9,text/xml;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1
  User-agent: Planet go-oo +http://planet.go-oo.org/ Planet/2.0 +http://www.planetplanet.org UniversalFeedParser/4.1 +http://feedparser.org/
  

  Presumably the latter looks like a DDOS attack, but only from some IPs (perhaps go-oo.org has a dodgy 2nd hand Russian-Mafia-style IP address).
• Pondered LXF column. Kendy produced a lovely patch to reduce the N^2 statting stupidity in OO.o trying to find java at OO.o startup I was moaning about - should more than halve OO.o startup time in a virtualised world.
• Out into Cambridge by bus to meet Christian & Rob at the Cambridge Camra beer festival. Unexpectedly met an old acquaintance Christian Ashby outside, also Simon Kelso, then tons of people inside: Steve Macintyre, Andrew Haley, Matthew Garret, Ben, and lots of fun people from Amino and SolarFlare; with more random acquaintances: Keith Cooper & Alan. Apparently Cambridge has a higher density of cool kids than most places it seems.

• Poked mail variously. Installed SUSE Linux 10.0 in a virtual machine, to play with it's gdb a bit; poked Clarity for last week.
• Migrated my blog to PyBlosxom and all entries back to 1999 - helped by the obscenely simple format. Hacked the python a little to reduce bloatage & synched. Hopefully that decisively fixes the permalinkage problem.
• Got a better trace from gdb in 10.0 and updated bug. Lunch. Called to school to pick up H. - no water at the school, somehow managed to get involved with trouble-shooting the cause of the problem, examining the (empty) tanks on the roof, and so on; interesting albeit inconclusive.
• OO.o team meeting. Spent a while chasing some nasty problem with gstreamer targetting esd (when no esd is available) inside Pidgin. Found & nailed it.

• Cycled H. to school. Poked at OS11.0 bugs. Downloaded the latest Lenovo bootable-CD BIOS update for my T60p - sadly it didn't seem to like the idea of multiple browser windows - and managed to popup download bits elsewhere. Merged nice yast-gtk patch from Sanford Amstrong to make the package manager more intuitive.
• Lunch, call with JP, chased extraordinary xkb/libxklavier keyboard problems at length, and still fruitlessly; drat. Back-ported ORBit2 fix.

• Dealt with babes while J. slept; packed the car, set off to Princes Risborogh for Adam Mark Hawkins (my 1st nephew)'s Christening. Lots of family & friends, great to see them all - happened in the tiny church across the lane; next to JK's mansion: good service even for the paedobaptistically unconvinced.
• Back for a lovely garden party - fine food, good company - caught up with all and sundry; lovely sunny day - played in the river - acclimatised N. to dogs (reduced the shrieking problem a little). Played badmington, talked about engineering design of JCBs etc. a fine time.

• Attempted lie-in; more wallowing under the floor getting the phone cable routed correctly. Amazingly - the cable that was jammed under the floor last week came free immediately this week: creep (or something). Managed to get it routed to almost where it needs to be; ~just too short for a beautiful job sadly.
• J. made fine chocolate cakes with H. & N. (complete with rather sweet chef's hat for N.). Out to Bury St. Edmonds for a swimming bonanza: complete with slide & Pirate ship. M. finally found her confidence in the water - and turned into an un-stoppable repeat slider. Great fun.
• Back, jacker pots, bed.

• Couldn't sleep, up rather early, poked mail - bits of hacking.
• Amused by the metasploit motivational posters. Quick chat with the evo guys, read some code. More bug mail thrash. Pleased to measure oowriter launching in ~500ms (according to the RTL_LOGFILE timing debug in the main binary), at least wall-clock time of oowriter is around ~1 second for me in factory.
• Prodded my gdb bug again; why should prologue analysis be necessary to walk the %ebp chain ? valgrind manages to do a great job here in the same test case.
• Knocked off early. J. out to Laura's party - back to work for a bit. Dug at a really strange xkb / libxklavier bug: most amazing, still no progress on it.

• H. sick in the morning, J. to doctors; poked mail - pleased to see Ricardo's nice yast2-gtk fixes landing. Finally realised that the Debian / Ubuntu security hole affects us too - we work with Debian-ites and allow people with their keys to connectt to our systems. That makes it less funny - also (I guess encouragingly) GNOME SVN is unavailable while the situation is unwound: it'd have been nice to find some easy-to-use "strong key checker" to quickly run over lots of public keys to disable broken ones.
• Finally annoyed enough to create a cut-down test case for the gdb back-tracing inadequacies experienced over the last months - wrt. it giving up prematurely in various ways - filed it.
• More code reading; finished J's tax return with her, worked late. Spent a while poking at PyBlosxom - looks pleasant, and I should be able to migrate the last ~decade of blog entries into it (I hope); we can't have Dave complaining my musings are hard to link to.

• Turned to valgrinding for my strange X kb problem; poked the X server, found a few trivial things. Lost a chunk of time when xorg-x11-driver-input.spec deleted all of /usr/src/packages/BUILD and then unpacked SOURCES/*.tar.bz2 poked Stefan & Petr.
• Off into Cambridge to visit consultant; traffic amazingly bad.
• Bathed babes, wife sniffed out a problem with N. cell group in the evening.

• J's hips playing up - the effort of lugging around a baby for too long; dropped H. at school for her. Prodded mail. Dug around at yast2-gtk yet more, fixed a number of strange sizing issues.
• Lunch; OO.o team meeting, call with JP. Poked at OpenSolaris again: this time a race to boot; both virtualised in KVM, on the same hardware, running similar desktop software: Gnome. OpenSUSE 11.0 boots to a fully logged in desktop on 1 CPU in 56 secs while in parallel OpenSolaris takes 89 seconds to get only to gdm. Allowing for an extra 12sec cold login experience on opensolaris, it's around half the speed of linux. Clearly this is not yet optimised for desktop-size-memory, single-CPU machines: but no surprises there.

• Cycled H. to school; poked at mail - delved into autobuild. Fixed a couple of rather critical yast2 bugs, Rodrigo kindly volunteered to add them to autobuild.
• Looked at reports of poor performance on OO.o startup; finally found an area where strace makes a noticeable difference to performance: javaldx. The purpose of javaldx is to (cunningly) grope your system - to look for performance-enhancing java goodness: here are some stats:

  syscalls	182000
  of which lstat64's	161000
  normal (warm) start	0.74 secs
  under strace	11.7 secs
  strace log size	17Mb

  Of course, we like to re-stat the same place a good few times, presumably we don't trust the kernel that much: 51k stats of /usr, 14k of /usr/lib, 13k of /home etc. sigh. Perhaps the frenzy is just revenge for not having any java on the live-CD system.
• Chased my nautilus (non) re-thumbnailing issue a little. Wrote an ical scrubbing script, and sent calendar data off to Federico; more bug pokeage.
• Booted opensolaris in KVM (eventually) - though it was clearly not a happy operating-system with only 512Mb of virtual RAM; despite having ~the whole live-CD in Linux' page-cache. Tried to get to the root account: no sudo; su - prompts for a non-obvious password; interestingly vs. openSUSE's 11.0' LiveCD there is no OpenOffice included; odd. Interesting to poke at baobab to see the size breakdown of the live-cd - odd to have 130Mb of fonts included, and nothing much to use them; Solaris suffers from the gconf.xml.defaults malaise too - of ramming tons of translations into a single file: when will the world stop doing this: 50Mb of irrelevance ?
• Deciced to race the install in with an identical VM with openSUSE (1 CPU each) - apparently both do an image copy. Started openSUSE at 67% of opensolaris, got bored enough that when I came back at 84% of opensolaris, OS11.0 install was long finished, re-booted & did the post-install setup; overall OpenSUSE at least 3x faster to install, prolly more. Unfortunately, having not created a user account, and given a blank root password - I can't log in; hey ho. Persuaded to file my opensolaris bugs - at least they run a recent version of bugzilla there, in contrast to OO.o.

• Up lateish, off to NCC Tony spoke, continuing the Romans series. Back, lunch, babes to sleep. Off to Pete & Shelley's in the afternoon to train their new puppy in the ways of children, and visit the menagerie of farmyard animals at their home; much fun - except for N. whose irrational terror of animals continues. Gordon sermon in the evening on the covenant in Genesis 15.

• Up early, off to the market; J. out to pregnancy crisis centre. Spent much of the morning & until late in the evening fitting conduit, and trying to get networking cable routed via an impossibly twisty route from under the downstairs floor to the loft. Eventually achieved it - helped by the old decaying rubber power cables left under the floor providing a way to thread new cables round rather easily.

• Up, prepped babes for (pre-)school; recovered my x86_64 RAID setup; good; poked at and filed Noel's gcc buglet with test case. Managed (by swapping disks variously) to get 11.0 Beta2 installed on the system whose only chance of boot media is a floppy disk: looking good there too.
• Lunch, Bruce & Anne around - lovely to see them, back from Paris. Nailed three nasty yast2-gtk bugs. Poked at Chentil's nice catch for an allocation bug in g_base64_decode, fixes my evolution / groupwise bug.

• Awoke in the morning, to discover a crushed mouse in the "better mousetrap", the part-time vegan (have to one-up Miguel) in me not inconsiderably upset by this; binned it.
• To work, phone call with Noel - who has isolated a most interesting 64bit compiler bug afflicting the OO.o test-tool: nice. Dug at mail. Filed bugs, played with Soeren's display properties capplet, and was unfeasibly pleased to see it working so nicely.
• Amused by Philip's extraordinary analysis of BS 1363 as Wikipedia says This plug is often described as the safest in the world. What is meant by this concern for static electricity is quite unclear to me; by design (as is common), the earth pin is connected before the live & neutral pins are so the device casing is earthed: ie. it should not be possible to have a device (even with a live -> earth fault) whose casing is live & un-earthed. Consequently - you can touch the earth pin as much as you like (or drop tin