Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

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: 2009: ( J F ), 2008: ( J F M A M J J A S O N D ), 2007: ( J F M A M J J A S O N D ), 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, legacy html

2009-11-19: Thursday.

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

2009-11-18: Wednesday.

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

2009-11-17: Tuesday.

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

2009-11-16: Monday.

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

2009-11-15: Sunday.

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

2009-11-14: Saturday.

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

2009-11-13: Friday.

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

2009-11-12: Thursday.

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

2009-11-11: Wednesday.

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

2009-11-10: Tuesday.

Up, prodded mail, off to visit Collabora, and Cambridge with Srini, wandered the town variously; lunch with Rob & co. interesting, as always.
Showed Srini - Kings College, Trinity, and the Round Church - while on a conference call; and back home by bus to get back to work. Prodded kiwi issue of interest, and more mail.
A little house tidying, to make room for a bed for Robert, who arrived in the evening, had dinner with him & toured the works - up late catching up.

2009-11-09: Monday.

Mail chew, attempted to get on top of things. Pete the tiler and a bricky arrived early, and continued building the side-way up vertically.
Analyst call in the evening; and out with Srini to see the sights of Newmarket high-street, and a drink.

2009-11-08: Sunday.

Up early - good to play with all the family again. Got H's bed put up, on top of Pete's nice, newly fitted, carpet. Off to NCC, DT speaking, met some fun new people .
Back for lunch, met Bert's daughter Helen on the way. Off to the station to pick up Srini, home, collected bed from Solomon & Peace for Srini & put it up in the semi-carpeted attic.
Bert & Helen around for a cup of tea, fine; lots of catching up with Srini.

2009-11-07: Saturday.

Up rather early to catch the train; checked Noel, and woke Thorsten - got the train with Kohei too. Dropped bags at Kohei's somewhat extraordinary hotel - got some cash back from Thorsten.
Set off by tube with Cedric & Rene to the Colluseum, got ripped off with an amazingly brief tour, but at least got in quickly: some staggering engineering, most impressive.
Wandered, looking for food; eventually ended up with Kohei back at the central station, for a pleasant lunch. Collected baggage, coach to the airport, flight home.
Family all away, so spent time admiring the progress in building, tidying, washing up & so on. Helped get exhausted children into bed, and lovely to see the wonderful wife again.

2009-11-06: Friday.

Up early, out to the go-oo GSOC panel session - extremely encouraged to see all the great work that was done, and see our students have a chance to pitch their work. For those of a Feminist bent, that are as amused as I am with these numbers - we had six students, three male, three female. Three ladies successfully completed the project, and one male - somewhat staggering. I wonder if the aggregated success metrics by gender across all GOSC projects are published.
On to Oliver's talk, somehow waylaid by Stefan and sadly missed Noel's - somehow I find tech talks really encouraging: summarising all the hard fought features of the last year.
Out for lunch with GSOC students, though couldn't find Donna (sadly) - that managed to run over Fridrich's talk, interrupted by a PM conf-call, etc.
Pleasant tour of the town in the gathering dusk, good conversation, lots of very beautiful things everywhere; down some tunnels. Off to a restaurant for dinner, got to know Maya a little. Sorrowful farewells, and back to bed.

2009-11-05: Thursday.

Up late, flitted from talk to talk, sat in the ODF track for a while admiring their tenacity.
Attempted to locate the rest of the ESC, for lunch - ended up only finding an elite core.
Fine Daisy / accessibility presentation, and Kendy's great OOXML talk. Wandered off for the native-lang team meal, caught up with Martin H, Rob Weir, and on to a very late night bar at which Doko, Martin & Oliver generously tried to pickle my liver.

2009-11-04: Wednesday.

Up lateish, cable-car to the plateau - and managed to check-in to the conference, met up with Kendy, caught up with Doko, Rene, Dieter, and many others.

2009-11-03: Tuesday.

Team breakfast / meeting, and out together for Lunch. Off into town with Fridrich, then an ESC meeting, and out for a quick drink / discussion.
Back to the Doma hall to locate the rest of the team, and some pizza. On to the impressive council (?) meeting place; spent much of the evening talking; and out in the evening to a pleasant wine-bar; got to know Tora a bit, and some of the other great Japanese guys.
Taxi back to wake up Fridrich, and get on-line. Spent the next hour on the phone with Jared; sleep late.

2009-11-02: Monday.

Off to the ODF plug-fest; interesting day - lots of interesting people working on this and that; met Doug and Andrew in person for the first time. Fine lunch.
Out to a bar in the driving rain, caught up with lots of interesting people, discussed ODF variously, on to a restaurant for a great meal - joined later by an increasing number of Novell and other OO.o hackers, great.
Wandered back to the hotel, down a rather slippery hill in the dark - stocked up at the shop next to the station, then invaded Fridrich's room & stayed up until rather late.

2009-11-01: Sunday.

Sadly left the family - it's too tragic really; M.'s inimitable "I want come with you, stay at home !" rendeth the heart strings, despite it's abiguous solution.
Coach to Stanstead, Ryan-Air - the neon-yellow airline to somewhere that is not Rome: nice; read The Economist - caught up with the blog backlog. Tried to navigate the kernel's ATA power management code.
Enjoyed a great sermon on Church Fathers - D: Dante, from Daniel Harrel - fasincating - must read the Divine Comedy.
Boggled at the latest copyright-assignment idiocy (which it seems is sadly becoming fashionable again) - this time from Canonical: want to alienate and shrink your developer community - while persuing an elusive and unrealistic goal ? - try adding copyright assignment. Jonathan makes some excellent general points in his LWN article:
Agreements like Sun's ... are common when dealing with corporate-owned projects; they clearly prioritize control and the ability to take things proprietary over the creation of an independent development community. ... When developers contribute code to a project, they tend to get intangible rewards in return. So asking them to hand over ownership of the code as well might seem to be pushing things a little too far .... allowing a competitor to take code proprietary may well be beyond those limits .... Companies which demand such rights may find that their community projects are not as successful as they would like.
What is particularly strange is that many seem to demand copyright assignment, with the most tenuous of rationals, and for code they have no realistic chance of re-licensing for money anyway. Asking for assignment to an independant foundation is a tall enough, order, nevermind a for-profit company. Presumably a better solution is to pick a license that fits your preferred business model, and compete with other entrants by being better.
Landed; rather grotty, but cheap bus - with high volume Italian football commentary to Rome - waited for Thorsten while trying to unwind the Italian train system. It would be great if the ticket machines (like some German ones I've enjoyed) would print you timetables (or even just show the connection details).
Waited for Thorsten, then the ante-penultimate train to Orte, then a taxi to avoid an indefinite wait in the freezing cold. Out for a late dinner with Thorsten & Fridrich.

2009-10-31: Saturday.

Another mini lie in, wow. Breakfast, and set out to Homebase with M. to stock up on paint. Bought the cheapest planeing machine - UKP 20 to wreck.
Managed to get E. to sleep, and the others to play quietly so I could paint the large bedroom, while J. got the bathroom into good shape.
Off to an 'Alleluja Party'
Managed to move the bunk beds into the touch-dry room, and got babes into bed. Got trick-or-treated by some (very sweet) little daughters of some friends - dressed up hideously, hmm. Considered the concept of 'Treat or Treating' as an antidote next year - giving each house a little gift or something.

Tea; Worked away at travel checkin / booking for tomorrow, re-assembled netbook, packed variously.

2009-10-30: Friday.

Lie-in, J. off to see Claire & co. in Coventry - leaving me to paint.

Played with the netbook instead for a bit - disassembled, and admired the relative scarcity of chips inside, dis-connected various potential power thirsty pieces, and booted and tweaked it with an open case - nothing that obvious showed up.

Made tea for, and conferred with the builders, before slogging away up-stairs painting doors, walls, skirting etc. in the attic, bathroom, and large children's bedroom.

To think - that the youth of today pay money to buy solvent to sniff - when they could be earning money as painters and getting nearly same experience.

J. returned tired, happy and full of news. More work in the evening - painting ceilings, caulking, etc.

2009-10-29: Thursday.

Cooked breakfast, and off to Sizewell Beach. Tried to build castles of sand amid the rolling breakers with mixed success and much amusement. Mini-milks from the erstwile Sizewell Tea now tragically renamed to something far more boring.

Admired bronze monument to the (only) 8 survivors of 32 young men escaping from (Holland?) to fight the Nazis in Kayacks, of which some far smaller number (3?) survived the war - wow; quite a distance to canoe.

Back for lunch, and set off home. Managed to get some painting of skirting boards done variously in the attic - a fine shade of green.

Expanded my netbook testing rig to include a spare light-switch to make it safe overnight, and my ammeter instead.

2009-10-28: Wednesday.

Up early, admired Bruce's collection of (unfortunately) too-low current ammeters; and set off to the beach. Did some boating at the pond, and wandered across to climb and slide on the shell.

Back for lunch; spent the afternoon trying to persuade a Panasonic DVR with HDD & DVD to play ball - an experience reminscent of getting oowriter to do bulleting / indenting in a vaguely sane fashion - ie. totally unusable for mere mortals. Depressing.

Played with the babes, and out to get Fish & Chips for dinner. Bathed and put them to bed, ate with Bruce & Anne, caught up with my blog.

2009-10-27: Tuesday.

Off to St. Anne's Wells Garden - in the morning, lots of sliding, climbing and swinging. Mother met old student of hers - with children in tow, which was fun.

Back for a fine lunch, packed and set off to Bruce & Anne's - got to Aldeburgh after an unusualy clean motorway experience - only congested at Dartford.

Played with the babes, admired Bruce's recent knee replacement and relative mobility. Bed early, tired.

2009-10-26: Monday.

Up in the morning, tested the netbook with the multimeter - got some interesting measurements. Off to the swimming pool with Grandma & babies - lots of time encouraging smallish people in their swimming.

Back to the work - iterated several potential fixes with varying success current-wise; good stuff. Tried to get some reasonable numbers to the team. Great to see the (dalston)gnome-power-manager re-write (why !?) writing a debugging message to ~/.xsession-errors, dirtying the inode and burning power when the battery status changes; hmm.

Watched Emma in the evening with the parents - lovely.

2009-10-25: Sunday.

Off to St Lukes in the morning, J. spent her time in the creche, and I with the babes - but good to see Sammy & Kate, Ali etc. Father spent the morning cooking lunch and perfecting the laptop battery connector.

Out to the Park in the afternoon, much runnung, jumping, balancing, swinging and so on. Wandered home in the end. Up late talking to the parents and watching a movie.

2009-10-24: Saturday.

Awoke early, boggled at the massive eco-house under construction behind them. Apparently adding fifteen 2x1 metre solar panels on your roof and a load of insulation is license for an unfeasibly large and unattractive building.

Off to the Booth museum while M. was asleep, to admire the avian casualties of the 19th Century - of course it's pleasing to see five Golden Eagles stuffed and in a case, but you can't help wondering if the would have been prettier in their unleaded state.

Home, lunch - off to Maplins with Father - picked up a load of tiny spade clips, and returned home to try to construct a compatible laptop battery connector - to allow a true on-battery power consumption measurement. Spent hours with father drilling holes in mahogony, spreading, thickening, soldering, and arulditing a new male connector for the netbook, while the babes watched a DVD; fun - left the epoxy setting on the Aga.

2009-10-23: Friday.

Plumbers, and Project Managers, and diggers, and carpenters conspiring to improve everything left & right. Briefed them all carefully for the impending week of holiday.

Prodded again at the dlopened module that was crashing on dlclose, fixed that by using an OO.o idle handler (one-shot timeout), but then on re-load we re-register the GType and bad things happen. Read the GTypePlugin code, oh dear. Why can't we simply have a single, simple flag that says "free this type when it is no longer referenced" - surely that would be infinitely easier. Decided to lookup and clobber an existing class of the same name's vtable manually if it is pre-registered, and to do my own class_init and instance_init - apparently that is by far the simplest approach. Of course, in C++ there are (I assume) far worse problems (around vague linkage) with unloading modules.

Fixed up the OO.o quickstarter issue, and created a CWS for it. Pleased to see the evils of dual licensing getting yet more exposure - speaking of Drizzle the author says:

Our reward has been that in our single year of operation we have achieved a larger base of contributions then MySQL achieved in its decade long existence. Community contribution at the expense of proprietary extensions is a small price compare if you consider the value that surrounds us by releasing that opportunity. ... The conflict inherent in trying to reserve rights, and take the rights from others, leads to conflict.

I couldn't agree more; and I too find RMS' support for the concept of proprietary licensing, as necessary for developing a piece of Software somewhat amazing; some kind of highly selective purism. Surely a better remedy than divestment would be the LGPLv2+.

Caught the builders at lunch filling in the trench with foundation, despite it being 10cm in the wrong direction along it's length - bum. Managed to rescue the excess concrete for a base for a children's play-house at the end of the garden.

Tried to work out what I did this year, to fill out my objectives in the web tool - I could swear I did this last year, but couldn't find that. Onto the next fun bit of admin - expense filing.

Eat dinner during an unexpected call - ultra-cheap Iceland sausage caserole & mash, (delicious), lighting packing of the car, and J. drove us to Brighton to M&D's.

2009-10-22: Thursday.

Builders with diggers arrived, and proceeded to dig left and right; good stuff. Prodded OO.o bits - team & PM meetings, one-to-one with Jared. Plugged at clutter (back in) time-line issue in the evening - David R. it seems has the real fix.

2009-10-21: Wednesday.

Up; builders started knocking through a nearby wall. Luckily off to Cambridge today - got the train. Interested to read Glyn Moody's thoughts on the so-called open source business model - excerpting viciously:

... owning the copyright ... introduces an asymmetry into the collaborative development process ... breaks the underlying contract of mutual benefit with companies and people that contribute code. And without the reciprocity, I think the urge to contribute is bound to diminish, because there is likely to be an underlying feeling that external contributors are being unfairly exploited

A very healthy dose of common-sense that applies well to OO.o.

Met up with Saad and Wei-Ming at the computer-lab, got OO.o building for them, lunch with Ross too. Back in the evening.

2009-10-20: Tuesday.

Up early, played with an OO.o build, chased VPN problems. Pete over for lunch - examined carpets at length with him, before choosing a couple.

Staff meeting with JP - read some health & safety at work blurb. Chat with Jeff.

Got suckered into a painting groove - painted skirting boards everywhere - while catching up with Sam Fisher on the phone - interesting.

2009-10-19: Monday.

Up early, off to have the teeth examined - it seems they need work doing to them. I wonder if there are any good, peer-reviewed papers on dental work-loads, and recession. It would be fascinating to see if the total number of suggested remedial actions increases in a downturn.

Prodded at mail, moblin bits, booked OOoCon travel, fought my VPN - suddenly flaking, perhaps from a surfeit of over-enthusiastic, but bogus DNS records.

How can one plasterer be twice as productive as another ? amazing - three walls and a square of ceiling in a day. The Union will be sending hit squads soon no doubt; got nearly everything done (but not dusted) up-stairs. Spent the evening with Bert, going over the plans again, and caulking holes.

Dish washer signalling it's displeasure with some interesting, un-documented blink code - don't you just love manuals with the "Try turning it off, then on again" mantra in place of any technical substance.

2009-10-18: Sunday.

Off to NCC in the morning, Helen spoke. Had Mila back for lunch, really good to see her again. Babes watched Madeline while J. painted the bathroom.

Spent the evening sketching a new airing cupboard, and planeing down old scrap wood, to make it look new and suitably attractive for the purpose.

2009-10-17: Saturday.

J. disappeared early to the conference, leaving me with four small girls to entertain - put up a shelf & mirror in the bathroom. Got E. into bed and asleep.

Early lunch, and set too at the dish washer. It'd be really good if there was a way to tip it over, to fiddle with, that didn't involve mopping water up for ages. Unfortunately the infernal machine has decided it is far easier to only clean, already clean things - with some sort of anaemic rotor non-rotation; most annoying.

Distracted by taking the babes into Cambridge to play in Cherry Hinton park, then picked up J. at Downing. On to collect some fish & chips for dinner, put babes to bed.

Bit the bullet, and dismantled the D/W pump - it seems my previous fix, almost exactly two years ago has only held off failure by a little - worse, I used a ferrous screw - so it rusted. Replaced the packer with a larger bit of brass screw, and added a washer to help seal it again. Re-assembled everything. Unfortunately we now seem to have an interesting wear problem - with the new washer audibly eating into the nylon pump housing - bother. With uncertain long term prospects, at least one set of crockery was cleaned reasonably - there is a limit to how much partially dissolved washing powder I can cope with in my tea.

2009-10-16: Friday.

Up early, chewed through our bug list, closing incidentally fixed / duplicate bugs - encouraging.

J. disappeared in the evening off to the C3 women's conference in Cambridge - hacked away late at nothing substantial.

Put up some new plasterboard in the root, Erected new insulated plaster-board to cover the porch roof - which clown decided it was a great move to have an externally open porch with only a bit of plasterboard and some floor-boards separating the house from the elements ? Had to glue the stuff to the existing ceiling, due to a lack of suitable joists to screw to.

2009-10-15: Thursday.

Up lateishm, groggy, and with builders setting to re-constructing the walls they moved yesterday. Plumber also arrived to plumb in the bathroom, and managed to split the hot water isolator so it leaked, and then (by some contorted genius) replace it.

Plugged away testing Thomas' suggested fix - nice, mine forgot the difference between killing an effect that wasn't started properly, and completing it (doh). Got a nice fix in. Worked with the up-all-night-Aaron, doing stirling work on Banshee's media panel (screenshots no doubt, to follow).

Robin - a nice chap from Ohloh responded, and kicked off a re-count of Qt; hopefully giving a sensible number for that.

Chat with JP; OpenOffice team meeting(s) variously. Dug briefly at an interesting store / rdb issue with Rene and Thorsten. Prodded at some stats.

Dinner / birthday party tonight which should be fun - new bath being used for the first time ever too. Claire & Simon, Laura & Creighton came over, stayed up late talking with them, good fun.

2009-10-14: Wednesday.

Pleased to find a new bug in libbonoboui, with a nice patch from Jeff Cai, fun - will that be the last bug-fix there ? What with Matthew's great work getting rid of it from Evolution - I'll be free. Filed for some FTO, prodded Clarity.

Wrote overdue LXF column; Moblin team meeting; noticed Aaron Siego had written a nice update on KDE numbers (and yes, I highly prefer a plain-text, simple-to-host, no-hosted-database-anywhere style to my blogging software, E-mail works well enough for comments though). That coupled with the "you are a trolling idiot" style, encouraing mail I got from KDE enthusiasts persuades me that someone (with time to update Ohloh) could profitably spend it updating both GNOME (to remove a few obsolete packages), and KDE (to include all of the packages that form part of it). Still - as a general rule, broadcasting: "I am an amazing 0.7936254" - without any referant for comparison, is not that helpful. Having said that - it is indeed interesting that (apparently) gtk+ is around 560k LOC and that Qt is (apparently) 16 m LOC - perhaps the included WebKit bulks it up - but it does seem amazing that Ohloh chalks up Qt as ~30x larger LOC-wise. It's also strange since, my checkout of the same git repo, and a find -name '*.[ch]*' | xargs grep ';' | wc -l - (crude, but easy) - seems to yield only 1.3m ';'s for Qt - which seems more sane, with WebKit being 470k ';'s. I must be a very easily confused hype-merchant to get such widely different numbers; I can believe OO.o is around 8 million lines, and Linux also around 8, but is it really credible to suggest that Qt is larger than the sum of these ? I suspect not - you would have to wonder what each line did. Assuming I'm right, I wonder what confused Ohloh - which I've previously tended to believe.

Plugged away at mutter for a while, seems we leaked an animation in some corner case - chased it with Thomas' help. Up very late digging into mutter effects code.

2009-10-13: Tuesday.

Up early, to work prodding tedious tasks; chat with Thomas Schmidt about FATE. JP's staff, one-on one, call with Shaan.

Builders finished re-hanging every door around the stair-well with three substantial fire-proof hinges - sadly splitting and mis-aligning some in the process.

Moved babes bunk beds out of their room (scheduled for demolition) into a new room (cue intense excitement) during a quick break before call with Frank & Jared. Dinner, then call with Frank & co.

2009-10-12: Monday.

Hacked happily at Cubano all morning. Synched with Aaron.

Interested to read Cornelius' blog on the value of KDE. Of course, its possible to do the arithmetic yourself, but if ohloh can do the work for you - all to the better. Interesting Ohloh has a higher LOC count for KDE, and a lower cost than Cornelius. Of course, the real question is not 'is KDE valuable' - of course it is; but how does it compare, Ohloh brings more balance perhaps:

Project Oh' LOC/m Oh' Cost / $m

GNOME 15.7 270

KDE 5.5 91

Linux 2.6 7.9 136

OpenOffice 8.5 143

Of course, Ohloh is perhaps not up-to-date, revision control systems move around, exact line number metrics vary, which module is part of what project is probably contentious, and apparently costing models vary wildly, and per language type. And.Of.Course.CPlusPlus.Developers() << Make.The.Point() << That.So. Much->Can.Be.Done.In->One.Line.In.CPlusPlus(); whereas c_developers (tend_to_point_out(), that(), the(), same_is_true_of_C()), but_lifecycle_is_harder()); or something.

Used some spare insulated plasterboard to plug some gaps in insulation, and put up some hard-board to try to make the loft crawl-space cleaner - lots of dust and moss around there.

2009-10-11: Sunday.

Lie-in, off to NCC, did creche; back home for lunch with Erin & John - good to get to know them a little better.

Knocked up a new floor-board in H's bedroom, it seems, finally to be finished - and got her moved in, to much excitement.

Managed to get the annoyingly under-engineered new light fitting installed in the 2nd floor stair-well, it seems not to fit any form of energy-saving bulb (sadly).

2009-10-10: Saturday.

Much sibling excitement and climbing of H's new bed; rotated it to better fit the room, and discovered that (inevitably) it needs more disassembling and re-making in aonther form.

Spent much of the day caulking cracks, and painting over them - surprisingly satisfying seeing a crack disappear and a new clean, filled surface arrive.

Out in the afternoon to a lamp shop - admired various twisted creations before a buying frenzy. On to Lackford Lakes playground, meeting Russel & Sue there. Much digging of sand, swinging, climbing, sliding etc.

Tweaked H's bed to fit new geometry; sleep.

2009-10-09: Friday.

Up later, tired, not feeling at all well. Slugged in bed until the builders arrived to bang on the door, and around the place. Groggily pressed keys on the keyboard for a while.

Chased down a nice g_idle handler returning TRUE in error bug in gnome-packagekit causing some interesting notification flash-bang.

No sign of the plumber come to fix the shower, so cut the pipes, and installed an isolator just for the shower; PTFE tape and compression joints on painted pipe-work - now more screwdriver-free forms of ablution are possible. Put up H's new bed in the evening, after J's painting frenzy.

2009-10-08: Thursday.

Up early, feeling more or less unwell - a day of conference calls with some hacking in the background at this & that.

More plumbing today - great, finally a radiator in the loft (my office) to warm the cockles of the (extremely sedentry and furred up) heart. Nice.

Having showered the babes, discovered the shower would no longer turn off; drat. Dis-assembled it, apparently the spring loaded solenoid valve is clogged with crud internally: huge great chunk of corroded copper & scale in the (partially broken) copper mesh filter to stop that sort of thing getting in. Re-assembled - sadly it is necessary to disable the toilet and sink in order to turn it off. Down to one functioning toilet up-stairs, one sink in the kitchen, and no shower: bad. Contemplated ordering the spare part myself post-haste - still, nothing so fun as turning an isolator with a screwdriver each time you want to wash.

2009-10-07: Wednesday.

Poked at bugs; cupsd not starting - added the nice Intel xinetd support patch; closed a number of simple issues.

Intense painting action in the evening - managed to seal the bathroom ceiling, while getting covered in watered down paint.

2009-10-06: Tuesday.

To work; mail chewing, bug poking, meetings, and so on. Normally I don't like corporate adverts, but this one actually makes a reasonable point about the inadequacies of alt-tab in an amusing way.

Quested for missing council paper-work for tens of minutes before finally discovering it crushed under the table - the joys of children, paid bills. Filled in J's tax return with her - another experience of pure bliss.

More work, while J. painted the ceiling up-stairs: nice.

2009-10-05: Monday.

To work, carpenters arrived somewhat under the weather; and fitted skirting boards around the place variously - as they do.

Prodded mail & news. Somewhat terrified to find another blast. It makes one introspect - do I use the word 'sexy' when I speak publicly ? As a matter of fact, I almost certainly do, as part of an effusive flood of positive adjectives; but never talking about women - mostly about widget rendering, toolkit layout, beautiful icons - that sort of thing; is that a fundamentally wrong word to use to describe something aesthetically pleasing ? Being offensively crude in one's description of a lady seems hard to forgive, but is expressing a mild opinion in the hearing of another that a friend is attractive really that wrong ? Should we all become completely asexual creatures in some way ? at least, I hope I'm still allowed to find my wife fantastically attractive. Consulted her briefly - her sage advice was "she seems to be a bit over the top doesn't she", but of course J. speaks from a position of strength five girls to one hairy hacker in my household. The cowed male bristling at the keyboard (or something).

A chunk of meetings, and more banshee prodding until late. Helped J. with her tax late.

2009-10-04: Sunday.

Up, off to NCC - Tony speaking from lots of small pieces of scripture read by the congregation. Home for lunch, with John Madden. Had a fine time talking and painting Hannah & Naomi's rooms with his kind assistance.

Martin, DT, Zoe & baby Patrick over to watch Prince Caspian in the evening: good fun. Much cuddling of baby P - very huggable indeed.

2009-10-03: Saturday.

Up early, off to Ridgeons to look ineffectually for things knotting treatment eg. really not a very baby-proof store. On to collect new flush for toilet - it has been leaking all night - presumably muck from soldering blocked the fragile whatnots inside.

Lunch; J. set off on a multi-hour quest for exactly the right tiles: plain gloss white with a simple black edging - incredibly these are rather hard to get hold of - most tiles these days being huge, rectangular and oddly textured.

Limbo'd under the toilet replacing the flush - seems to work, no obvious flooding / collapsed ceilings. Noticed the builders had insulated the back of some of the new walling in the loft - covered that with hard-board. Cut pipe work in the crawl-space, and extracted unused pipe & header tanks.

J. returned flushed with almost-victory and a boot full of tiles. Tea, put babes to bed; on with the painting, and poly-filling.

2009-10-02: Friday.

Played with pretty shutdown splash-screens, somewhat ineffectually - so much chvt / console fiddling fluff in the scripts - gdm itself seems to enjoy switching console when it gets a KILL; odd.

Wrote up a report on OO.o. Played with Cubano rendering the media panel in earnest.

2009-10-01: Thursday.

Read mail; it seems the lazy-web came up trumps in the form of Marius Gedminas's explanation for my conundrum with mov (%si), %ax affecting the inc %si; jnz test loop. It appears that if you try to read a word at 0xffff ie. across the segment boundary you get a SEGV, which often just spins - a satisfying answer at least. Seemingly Robert Forsyth also came up with the answer, nice.

Got the latest skype beta; apparently it uses pulseaudio properly - which is all good, sucking un-fixable proprietary software, but sadly necessary.

Lots of architraving got cut to size and fixed, and more doors arrived on their hinges. OO.o team meeting, and PM meeting.

Chatted to Thomas and Robert, both in Boston - Thomas suddenly ill poor soul; later it turned out in all the excitement some unidentified child had been filling my mobile 'hello-phone' with water; no torx screwdriver bit of the correct size to disassemble it either: drat.

2009-09-30: Wednesday.

Back to the fight; MBR tweak testing, Moblin team meeting, Legal training session.

Amused, and saddened to see Miguel slammed all over the place, yet again.

One of the things I like most about Miguel, is his courage in taking on the ill-informed, and his relative impermeability to crazies. Having been deeply involved with the OpenXML / ODF saga, I'm highly convinced that Miguel has a fairly correct perspective - de-coupled from the immediate noise, smoke and mirrors - and he has the benefit, as does Jody, of actually knowing something first-hand about the topic, having worked in the field for some years. He also defends a key principle: of fearlessly voicing his technical conviction amidst an argument demeaned by naked, pseudo-technical, second-hand politics and heat. I find it frankly laughable that the pundits pretend to know more about spreadsheets and their file formats than say Jody & Miguel. Seemingly they only know what they want to be the case.

I also tend to think that engaging with Microsoft and cautiously encouraging them to step closer to the light is better than sticking with the familiar, stark & lazy "goodies and baddies" games that children so enjoy. Of course, do so with caution, but to use an analogy - I suspect trying to cure a bully by endless beatings, regardless of what they do, is unlikely to be constructive.

I also loathe software patents, but that doesn't stop me filing for them - for defensive reasons, and it doesn't mean I go flaming eg. Fluendo for providing legally sound, patent licensed versions of (open source) codecs; indeed I'm glad to be able to simultaneously respect the law, while trying to change it, and listen to my music.

I tend to think that if you believe Sun's statistics on how much of 'their' code is in a GNU/Linux system (and yes, personally I still tend to call it GNU/Linux, for some strange reason), it could be called a Sun/GNU/Linux system - or perhaps a Sun/RedHat/IBM/Novell/Intel/non-GNU-volunteers/GNU/Linux system or whatever. That the "GNU/" initiative failed to inspire is hardly surprising. My joke at the time was that the FSF should change it's name to the GNU Slash Linux Foundation to reflect it's new core goal. It's not that, as a community, we didn't break our jaws trying to educate people on the Hackers vs. Crackers distinction - so as to have some idea that this was a loosing battle; it is a shame that wiser counsel on messaging did not prevail here.

Either way - it is difficult to think of people who by their productivity, example and sheer charisma have winsomely persuaded so many people to contribute so much to Free software; and have still stayed in touch with the keyboard, actively writing code. If Miguel is a traitor - I guess I aspire to being one too.

Made grub able to chainload an ext3 partition tagged as a recovery partition; why not ?

2009-09-29: Tuesday.

Up late; plasterer arrived to finish off, the plumber chappy came too - good. Eventually we got an electrician wiring up sockets endlessly, even better.

Worked away at backlog of administrative and uninteresting things. Off to the hospital with Miriam in the afternoon - to have her unusual mouth ulcers dealt with.

2009-09-28: Monday.

Carpenters and plasterer returned, the stairs got finished, the landing ceiling got plastered; and the external scaffolding was removed good - now we can actually open many of the windows: a pleasant un-caged feeling.

Sync with AJ on the build service.

Spent much of the day, and the evening working on grub, and after everything was working - switched to the 'master-boot-code' package on Torsten's advice; looking good.

Up in the night to tend the image build: re-started it.

2009-09-27: Sunday.

Up, off to NCC - ran creche; lots of fun-sized people around the place. Home for a quick lunch with DT & Zoe.

Played with the babes, while J. did some more painting in the afternoon - did lots more cycling practise in the road - Naomi finally starting herself and pedaling away crazily; H. confident even on up-hill starts. Elisabeth (~14 months) eager to sit on the tricycle and be pulled around. Managing and tracking four, transiently occluded babes concurrently is quite taxing. Saw Russel & Sophie from up the road.

Bed early; tired.

2009-09-26: Saturday.

Up earlyish, porridge for breakfast - J. set too with painting / sealing the rooms (with watered down emulsion), while I tried to hoover and clear the rooms in advance of her.

Tried to clean up and entertain children while J. worked. Lunch - set out to homebase to buy large quantities of paint; rollers and so on. Returned, managed to persuade babes not to cry constantly so we could both work for a while.

Gave up eventually and turned to fixing the dish-washer with the babes downstairs - it seems that a rubber gasket has given out - bought and fitted a new-one; glad it was not some more pernicious pump problem.

Spent much of the afternoon putting second coats on, J. out to Ruth's wedding party in the evening - up very late listening to Gordon sermons, from a laptop in a plastic bag, while painting the ceilings. Interested by Doesn't Religion Just Cause Hatred and Violence - addressing the interesting, albeit age-old debates between philiosophers and religious scholars. Seemingly the only new thing about today's crop of militant atheists is the tone and stridency; nothing new about Atheism itself. Sam Harris surprisingly writes - "If anyone has written a book more critical of religious faith than I have: I'm not aware of it", and you wonder - to be sure, he writes an effective tract in support of Atheism; but - what about Friedrich Nietzsche ? what about Sigmund Freud ? what about Feuerbach ? what about Carl Marx ? what about Jean-Paul Sartre ? and so on ? How can one not be aware that others have written powerful books opposed to theism ? The same blindness or deaf-ness, apparently is not limited to other atheists' work, but seemingly also to those who responded to the various arguments put forward. What is new is the stridency: that faith is so awful, wrong-headed, evil, so dangerous that it should not be any longer tolerated in any form. This is in itself an interesting nonsense; what you believe is clearly far more important than that you believe something. I'd recommend the brief taster / mp3 for those with a spare hour, though it addresses only the Christian perspective on the debate.

2009-09-25: Friday.

Hardware arrived by FedEx in the morning; worked away at it, new BIOS, and slogging away at grub's MBR code. All manner of excitement, forgetting that switching %ds has an unfortunate effect on trying to access those local string error messages. The joys of not having either printf, or a debugger - exciting stuff.

While trying to cram code into the 400 some bytes we have; stumbled upon this; why does (AT&T syntax): test: inc %si jnz test
complete - where: test: mov (%si), %ax inc %si jnz test
never complete - at least on my Atom & Core DUO - though KVM / QEMU seem to like it. Clearly my 16 bit, segmented understanding is obsolete.

Mary Rogers over for dinner, really lovely to spend the evening with her.

2009-09-24: Thursday.

Up early, chat with some Taiwanese friends; spent a while faffing around porting / building a nasty, 16bit disassembler before being shown: objdump -D -b binary -mi386 -Maddr16,data16 <file> neat; works well on your mbr: sudo dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1 of=/tmp/my-mbr

Spent much of the day unwinding 16bit, segmented assembler fun - a really good resource on the new write-your-own-MBR trend is here, I never realised the primary partiton table is crammed into the same sector too.

Back to sreadahead for some light relief; switched to polling every 1/2 a second using trace_poll, and added some termination when a magic filename is opened: far easier than getting a user process to signal it. Prodded mutter-moblin to open, close & unlink said magic file. Pushed to github.

Out for a date with my beautiful wife, for the first time in ages: nice.

2009-09-23: Wednesday.

To work - no builders in sight today; worked with Matt on grub briefly, misc. busy work; Moblin team call, chat with Ludwig, then Zach - learned lots of RESTful things.

Added Factory build target to our internal build service's mirror of Moblin:UI to try to accelerate the process of making it all work well vs. Factory.

2009-09-22: Tuesday.

It seems that Miriam has started writing a blog from Kabul - and very well written it is too. Looking forward to seeing the great work that Hagar does applied there.

Played with pybootchartgui some more; with the new high res bootchart collector, we start to see some fun problems: eg. when we do a double fork to spawn a process - we sometimes catch that process and assign eg. 'boot' a parent of the (very transient) parent - which appears to ruin the clean ordering.

The result of adding Arjan's nice kernel dmesg parsing scheme to bootchart, of course converted from perl to python, and albeit in a hacky way so far is:
Of course, it is less colourful, and less detailed than the scripts/bootchart.pl output - but hopefully will show up any particularly glaringly slow bits. Now to find out / and or render why there is such a long gap between the kernel appearing to finish, and init starting to spawn things.

Worked with Matt on grub pieces. Amused by Matt Assay's Linux is bloated comment; to me - the worst of the bloat would be around hack-ability. It is one (saneish) thing not to freeze your internal APIs forever - it is -very-much-something-else- to insist that all people trying to build, package and test the kernel need to join in with the 'measuring' contest of how quickly (or not) they can build the whole thing. If I need to only change ten lines of code, why do they force me to compile 10 million ? Sure - if I am already a kernel hacker, I can do that easily - if I am not, life is sufficiently hard to keep people away from simple hacks. I'd love to see a kernel that can be build straight through, and yet is routinely packaged and built as a dozen separate source (subsystem?) packages - of course whatever static library intermediates are lame, but - so is excessive build pain.

2009-09-21: Monday.

Caught up with mail, FATE, some admin, and waded through general tiredness - amazingly unproductively.

Interesting chat with Rob, and another with ScriptRipper; if I get enough cleaned up I can push some screenshots of the pybootchartgui hackery I've been working on.

2009-09-20: Sunday.

Enjoyed the lightning talks; though somewhat ad-hoc in places. Lunch, caught up with Sankar.

On to Gianugo Rabellino's keynote - initially very dismissive given the apparent Apache role in the Apache -> Collab.net -> OpenOffice.org -> compound community failure. Very impressed with Gianugo, and the Open Development model, I guess it's nice to find someone more articulate and credible - after all, I have (thus far) totally failed to fix OpenOffice's horrific community issues - from Apache saying the same things eg. on diversity. Shared some happy beers afterwards. It helps to see that perhaps the true locus of failure to build real community in Sun's open-source strategy is closer to home, and not just bad external advice.

Also, somewhat amazed by my first exposure to an E-cigarette, if you are going to try to poison yourself, this seems like a somewhat less effective, and yet more interesting way to do it.

Shared taxi's to the airport; flight home, Sandy visiting, bed late.

2009-09-19: Saturday.

Up early; lots of chats with various people during the day. Cheated by getting lots of personal demos / re-hashed talks from presenters in person, lots of interesting people around.

Second round of governance discussion was fairly positive; at least - inasmuch as we seemed to reach some consensus that having someone elected making decisions, sometimes, but only very rarely, and buffered by lots of other technical bodies, was ok, at least in concept; hmm.

More in depth catch up with people; great to have Guy here. Out to Ralf's house (cum Solar Power plant) in the evening with some of the lads to relax with some fine wine, beer and pizza; demo'd Moblin to the fun-sized members of the home.

Back, by now in some sort of dog-tired haze - stayed up chatting, and trying to avoid both the poisonous home-brew being passed around, and the mythical Camel Flu as recieved in verbatim copies from Miguel via Aaron. Stayed up even later catching up with Mike Fabian.

2009-09-18: Friday.

Up early, breakfast, more talk poking; arrived to setup for my talk, board session overrun yielded no time to fix the projector issues satisfyingly: most annoying - managed to use some old slideware too - bother; did some demos (slides). Stayed for Anas' interesting talk.

Lunch - chat with Ralf, got a fine demo of SUSE & Moblin running nicely on some unexpected Atom hardware. Managed to catch the end of the Governance discussion.

Out in the evening on the bus / tram to the office, for some bug squashing action. Got some great demos of the Zeitgeist work - looking pretty; and worked with FunkyPenguin on sorting out packaging SUSE/Moblin for Factory; poked with Aaron at the new Cubano plan.

Off to Will's recommended restaurant for a fine dinner & beer, back to the office via the castle - pretty at night; and eventually to the hotel & bed.

2009-09-17: Thursday.

Up bright & early, attempted to shower under the fitting, apparently designed to exclusively water the wall instead of me. Breakfast. Met lots of people.

Registered, keynote, milled around talking to people, un-conferencing, and so on. Out in the evening to a fine free beer party with the lads. Back rather late to work on the talk.

2009-09-16: Wednesday.

Up early, booked openSUSE conference travel, Alexia kindly booked me a hotel room for tonight, looking forward to it. Prodded icon theme changes while logging in as an issue; urgh - finished an interview, sent for review.

Plumber switched us over to the new combi-boiler; what fun - working, high pressure hot water - and he set the heating temperature to 70 degrees - presumably too hot to condense properly - doh; turned it down. Plastering, tile chipping, and bath movement going on at top speed.

Coach to Stanstead; met up with Roger & Andrew in the airport, great fools seldom think differently (or something). Good to share the journey with them. Arrived, saw Joe / Vuntz / Federico & met lots of others.

2009-09-15: Tuesday.

Up early; to work - played with xwininfo -tree -root a bit - interesting that OO.o creates so many apparently unused windows - consulted Philipp: it seems that many of them are all the un-popped-up pop-ups associated with visible combo-boxes; hmm.

Plumber arrived and started moving radiators, and/or installing some central heating: good stuff - an EcoVert condensing boiler, packed full of interesting failure modes no doubt.

2009-09-14: Monday.

Back into the mad school rush in the morning; got everyone dispatched, dressed, prayed, to work. Called an Australian sales colleague for an interesting de-brief.

Poked at a yast2 UI abstraction problem with bubli. Clarity, more bug massage; lunch. Wrote / sent LXF column.

Dug at bootchart, tried to pull up my pybootchartgui - developed a healthy loathing for the shocking evil that is setup.py, it appears to simply refuse to install software that works in a reliable way - at least for me. Interestingly the spec file, now I look doesn't use it - which seems sensible.

Caught up with David Mansergh in the evening, great to talk.

2009-09-13: Sunday.

Up late again, off to NCC - did the creche: survived alone vs. five somehow. Back home, fine lunch, put second coat of paint on. Helped dung out garden mess, slugged happily.

Movie in the evening - The Golden Compass - pleasant effects (though sadly the LCD projecter tends to blur all the fight scenes into a random mess, followed (hopefully) by an outcome), and some interesting ideas. Nothing noticably anti-Christian beyond the dystopic semi-clerical rule - perhaps that comes in a later movie.

2009-09-12: Saturday.

Up late, pottered around the house dunging out cruft from the attic, looked at re-siting the phone-line again without conclusion. Off to Homebase to buy paint, and cleats with babes, hoovered lots of annoying moss up, cleaned toilet.

J. couldn't find Miriam anywhere, and becoming increasingly frantic, considered the worst - apparently confirmed by an un-responsive pair of feet visible sticking out from under the bed. Discovered a sleeping M. partially hiding under the bed, apparently playing a solo game of hide & seek - phew.

Played tumbling games with everyone else in the garden while J. took N. to a party, then sorted the endless stream of washing; H's underwear-classifier algorithm is far faster and more accurate than mine - and only three sets so far; got the piles of clean washing under control.

Lay with J. on the scaffolding scraping & painting the underside of our weatherboarding in the setting sun - how romantic. Bed.

2009-09-11: Friday.

To work, burned image, tried to play with it.

Pleased to see the Taiwanese former president sentenced and jailed - it is good to see a country with strong enough democratic institutions that this can happen. Some random thoughts having stayed in both Taiwan and China. In my view, to be a truly civilised country, it is necessary not to have the population living in fear. It is particularly distressing when the population live in fear - not only of their own goverment abusing their human rights, co-ercing and intimidating them, but also then - being indoctrinated into some irrational fear of the alternative: a peaceful, bloodless transition to a more equitable form of governance. Taiwan presumably is so annoying, to China since it is (apparently) a successful, ethnically similar, free society born from a fairly peaceful transition from a dictatorship. Hopefully the lesson of incarcerated ex. heads of state cuts several ways.

Found a really amusing race condition in gdk's compositing, fun - it seems the case of racing g-s-d's GdkDisplay init against a starting window manager is an unusual one.

Caught up with Ricardo on IRC at last ! about to train him on obs usage, but it's down for scheduled maintenance. This provides a golden opportunity to hack on osc build --no-init so it doesn't touch the server: neat. If only it wasn't written in python (so you can test & add flow-control changes without massive indentation pain) and/or functions had fewer than a couple of hundred lines, without tens of local variables.

2009-09-10: Thursday.

Sync. with Aaron. Poked at spreadsheet functions to analyse my work; why is that grep -v on a CSV is so much easier than filtering data inside a spreadsheet.

Discovered the rat, having initially set off the trap while avoiding the crushing blow, fell for it a 2nd time (peanut butter too irresistable). 16 inches, and smeary brains.

Discovered XDG_MENU_PREFIX only applies to applications.menu - shame; it would have been nice to apply it to everything, and fall-back if not present; added a hack to yast2-control-center-gnome to add the prefix less elegantly.

Delved into mutter-moblin's media panel, while building a test image.

2009-09-09: Wednesday.

Spent much of the day on admin and calls - and still no end to the paperwork in sight: COBE training, stack of expenses to file etc. Poked at yast2 package lists for Moblin.

Out in the evening with H. to the Annual Art Competition, H. won a prize for a fine piece of writing (for a five year old) on My World - lovely to see it framed, and see the Mayoress.

2009-09-08: Tuesday.

Chat with Srini, poked at debugging interesting file-system bits under DOS with Joey - wow, am I thankful for a terminal that really works; the only good thing you can say for DOS is that it does boot instantly - BIOS uses get to do that I suppose.

Hacked away happily at banshee for a while; a11y conference call with Willie, Mark, Mike & co.

2009-09-07: Monday.

Up early; dug through the mail morass. Discovered our Moblin image using yast2-qt and stopped that. Plugged away at DOS build fun - finally got it working, apparently some LBA issue, and staleness in ext2 - code forgetting to bit-mask the length to a byte & so on. Back to more modern pursuits.

Amused by the standards dilbert. Unamused by seeing a rat peering in at us, apparently un-afraid from the garden: presumably this is the 'mouse' J. saw in the compost bin (but grown kitten sized). J. dispatched to buy a monster mouse trap.

Worked much of the evening at Cubano (or more clutter lifecycle problems) - while J. ran her pregnancy crisis centre.

2009-09-06: Sunday.

Off to NCC, skype-style recorded interview with Emily on mission in New Orleans, Tony preached. Good to see Solomon & Peace's baby - Daniel in person.

Home, continued frantic house clearing; Joy & Chris (Evans), Hannah, Elizabeth & Sophie arrived for lunch - really good to meet this part of J's family - lovely Christian couple, training at Oak Hill. They know Gervase too. Lots of fun, and playing of little girls in the garden.

Washed & got babes to bed; sleep.

2009-09-05: Saturday.

Up, to the market with Miriam and Hannah - detour via the toy-shop for H. to spend her hard-earned (by doing her Piano practise daily) £5 from the holiday. After some intense, and mature deliberation picked a painting-by-numbers thing - cue hours of potential fun.

Home, did some painting, early lunch. Set off to try to locate M.'s lost cup (tragically missing in action on the first day of it's life - having been fondly clutched while on a picnic earlier in the week). Considerable futile searching, and climbing of mounds of earth.

Off to pick apples at a friend's orchard; then on to Pete Down's 30th birthday party - much fun, fine barbeque, interesting people to talk to. Stayed up late with the babes, and on leaving discovered she had lost / left her sun-glasses; urgh.

2009-09-04: Friday.

Up early, to work - caught up with mail, and Joey, chat with Erwin. Today I discovered the ultimate explanation for why my dear wife is occasionally annoyed at my apparent lack of attention / ability to answer simple questions.

Finally unwound my bognor problem; banshee registers it's service before the bognor part is present and as such waiting for NameOwnerChanged is not going to work; added reload signal for good measure.

Got debugger running under DOS and started tackling the ancient ext2tools package - hmm, time to pull the code a decade forward in time.

Pleased to see Andrew's nice Goblin posts, packed with screenshot goodness: one and two.

2009-09-03: Thursday.

Chat with Fridrich & Joey; knocked up a test-case for my pet gtk+ bug. Lots of progress with insulation installation upstairs, and measuring for insulated plasterboard goodness too. Finally got a DOS version of ext2tools building nicely, in the build service; neat.

2009-09-02: Wednesday.

Up early, to work - poked at DOS cross-compilation, chased a horror PolicyKit-gnome issue to it's festering root. Builders finally got delivery of their plasterboard & insulation - internal walls started to move beyond the skeletal.

Novell / Moblin team meeting. Worked a little late. Off to Tesco to discover the pharmacy is shut, picked up some fluorescent bulbs on the way back - time to throw away some working obsolete incandescents.

Amazed / amused by TrollTech's attack on Pyqt - apparently it is fine to have an indefensibly non-scalable business-model, but only if you're TrollTech.

2009-09-01: Tuesday.

Back to work, dug through mail; call with JP. Worked with Feng on a PackageKit issue, and with Joey on loadlin (urk). In a crazy world, started working on ext3 reading from DOS - poked DJGPP (it's been a long time), and started importing DJ's cross-compiler packages into obs. Worked late until an analyst call.

2009-08-31: Monday.

Bank holiday, up late. Claire came to visit and inspect the works here, good to see her. Removed velux window (easier than expected) and sat on the ridge.

Removed last vestiges of TV arial fixings (die foul beast) from the chimney; and erected a pretty new weather vane (as designed by J.). Attempted to get the compass aligned correctly - putting it too near the iron vane gives a rather broken reading.

Lunch; slugged in the sun, played rough & tumble with babes in the garden. Roast dinner, Jules phoned to say he no longer needed the spiral stairs - urgh, dumped them in the skip. Bed late.

2009-08-30: Sunday.

Off to All Saints (NCC all off at Grapevine) - stayed in the creche much of the time.

Home, lunch, re-arranged timber in the front garden at some length; unscrewed the facing timber obscuring the chap's number that wanted our spiral stair - attempted un-successfully to replace the wonder self drilling / tapping screws going the steelwork; no joy even with brace & bit.

Chris & Cheryl over in the evening, stayed up late enjoying their company.

2009-08-29: Saturday.

Up early, fed and dealt with babes while J. went shopping, H. returned. Opened presents with Miriam - her 3rd birthday: much excitement.

Packed the car, too much stuff, not enough space, added roof-box: still pretty stacked. Picked up Grace Brighty and off to Thetford Forest. Managed to locate and get barbeque burning,

2009-08-28: Friday.

Poked at an obs issue with versioned links to non versioned links (should this be allowed ?). Worked on a report. More grub fun.

Read the XMultiServiceFactory implementation again in OO.o's stoc - if only we could completely remove the store/registry code.

H. disappeared to Charlotte's house in the evening for a sleep-over (the 'sleep' there is something of a misnomer).

2009-08-27: Thursday.

Played with boot performance some more, dug at openoffice localisations and packaging, worked away at grub with Timo on and off.

2009-08-26: Wednesday.

Played with boot performance, dived into the grub code - an interesting project indeed; good to be able to strip some of the mystique away from it.

Electrician arrived - pointed at lots of places for sockets, lights and the like; finally got the house sealed up, with a window in-place.

2009-08-25: Tuesday.

Frantic catching up with mail, admin, misc. boot charting. JP's staff meeting, some fun kernel code reading.

2009-08-24: Monday.

Up early, good to see wonderful Mum & Dad who had managed to keep the children entertained all weekend, and relieve them of duty. To work - chewed mail.

Amused to see that, according to Apple hype, they are about to release the world’s most advanced operating system, and the only system with built in Exchange support. Perhaps they should try SLED11 before so speaking; we've had built-in exchange support forages.

Call in the evening; chat with Jared. Worked late.

2009-08-23: Sunday.

Up for breakfast with Garret & Karren, Daniel, Alex and ladies arrived; curious but pleasant food, appetite suppressed by being boiled off in the heat.

Drove to Lucca, wandered the beautiful walled city (seemingly the walls are remarkably modern, and designed to fend off a cannon armed army, and hence somewhat distinctive & thick). Lunch, more happy drifting around the place.

On to Pisa, and around the cathedral, and up the tower - admired the huge volume of people standing on the grass carefully marked "please do not stand on the grass" - makes you wonder why they bother. Dismayed by the absence of any description of the engineering disaster and it's remedies, plenty about restoring it though.

Ryan Air, home really late; bed exhausted.

2009-08-22: Saturday.

Up slightly late; taxi to another fine villa (mercifully closer) overlooing the town for brunch. Caught up with innumerable fascinating people, and then set off for a tour of Florence.

Wandered the streets, admired the exterior of the cathedral, enjoyed ice-cream, soaked in the art and history; good fun. Ended up at the bridge - though forgot to bring a padlock.

Bid 'bye to all and sundry, an emotional time somehow - such a stack of joyful talent. Wandered the town with Alex & Julia a little, and went out for a lovely meal with just J. - the wife of my life; bed.

2009-08-21: Friday.

Up before the crack of dawn - Ryan Air from Stanstead to Pisa. Bus to collect our hire car - far more expensive than the flight. Set off to Florence.

Uneventful drive, except for some extraordinary navigation of masses of tiny one-way roads at the end; eventually found the hotel. Tried to check-in ineffectually, too early - off to wander the pretty town, via pizza for lunch.

Checked in, brief power-nap; dressed, off in a bus to Villa Artimino - met up with lots of friends old & current - good to see Nat's Dad again after something of a break.

Nat & Stephanie's exellent wedding, a somewhat unusual celebrant, but lovely dress, interesting guests, fantastic food & drink, much to enjoy and love - caught up with Louis at last - encouragingly it seems marrying is contagious.

Fireworks; failed, frenzied attempts to learn to dance in as fluid a fashion as the Lunardi with the lovely wife - back to the hotel, and to bed rather late.

2009-08-20: Thursday.

Up early, poked at Goblin kiwi image etc. dug at a groupwise bug, packaged OO.o foo; customer call, OO.o team meeting, dug at the OO.o desktop mis-detection bug.

Parents arrived, up late packing, slept on the floor with J.

2009-08-19: Wednesday.

Up later, no builders in evidence - hmm. Phoned Clint, they're on their way. To work - read some surreal E-mail. Poked at the behaviour of /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace_pipe - no use trying to tail it, catting it blocks at the end - but yields no new data; a strange interface indeed.

Amazed to see Federico's continued draining of the multiscreen swamp - I'm CC'd on the tracker bug with 120+ unique dependants, of which only ~15 remain open (for SLED11) - of course much of that has gone up-stream too; go Federico !

Made some arrangements for the inaugural openSUSE conference, the level of hospitality is good in Nurnberg.

Poked at OO.o, it's been too long since I ran a build; I love the --with-git configure option that makes download do some git clones instead of pulling source archives. Built an updated libs-gui, a quick patch to VCL for Moblin, and a quick re-build / test - the split build rocks.

DE meeting, dealt with babes while J. went out to counsel a lady. Managed to get everyone cleaned and into bed somehow; back to work.

2009-08-18: Tuesday.

Up; breakfast, packed everything, drove home, no builders in evidence; got down to the typing. Prodded FATEal OO.o features.

Tilers arrived to put some very black tiles on the end gable, most odd, I could swear we asked for matching redder ones. Got banshee synchronising it's play-queue nicely with mutter's media panel - and re-ordering / updating nicely: good.

Chat with Kohei wrt. a11y - what fun. Dinner. Back to sreadahead, added SSD detection, and tweaked the defaults appropriately to match - plugged away at various interesting boot time problems. Up late hacking with Aaron & co. - fun.

2009-08-17: Monday.

Up early - E. seems to enjoy waking ever earlier to lie in bed with us (a disaster area). Breakfast, to work. Plugged away at mail and bugs.

Identified and fixed the alsa init script problem giving us an always-muted pulseaudio - good. Misc. integration and fixing of uxlaunch.

Lunch, ferried small people, and a dressed up J. to the Carnival dressed as various animals. Back to work, had some fun with misc. banshee issues - emitted various bognor-regis friendly events.

2009-08-16: Sunday.

Up early, breakfast, off to Aldeburgh parish Church. Played with, fairly quiet, babes during the service - and back for a lunch outside in the sun.

Out into town for the rubber-band powered drinks-bottle egg-boat race. An unfortunate slip (loosing the egg container cover) caused a very premature exit. Only about 10% of boats actually made it the 3 metres across the pond - amazing.

Home, dinner for the babes, pushed E. around in a wheel barrow outside at speed, to calm her. Packed everyone to bed, and enjoyed a cocktail & fine dinner together.

2009-08-15: Saturday.

Up earlyish, cooked breakfast, to work while the babes went off to ride Donkeys (and so on) at the Aldeburgh Carnival (or somesuch).

Built, tested & merged various bits down to Moblin:Factory. Reviewed / merged patches, unwound silliness in our kernel / obs setup.

Lunch; out to the Carnival in the afternoon, the babes took part in the exciting lolly-pop hunt on the beach; then wandered the town - admired the whack-the-rat stall (which even extracted money from me) - and had a fun time.

Back, played with the kids, put them to bed.

2009-08-14: Friday.

To work, added various options to make uxlaunch a moblin-session replacement, instead of a gdm replacement - hopefully more useful.

Father arrived, off to Robert Jefford's funeral, my Mother's cousin with him. A 'Humanist' ceremony, words fail me to describe the despair, hopelessness, and fudgery - who should a Humanist be thankful, or grateful to, for Robert's (clearly) exceptional life ?

Back home, admired the now correctly aligned, and assembled new staircase. Back to work, plugged away at uxlaunch and mutter some more.

Drove to Bruce & Anne's in the evening; arrived in time for a fine dinner with Sue & Clive too. Bed.

2009-08-13: Thursday.

To work; prodded bug reports, processed mail. Updated to the latest packages, poked at the various problems.

Pleased to discover that building regs don't require the new stairs to be completely boxed in: nice, new stairs arrived in sections and started to get plugged together.

Bug review with JP, Aaron & co.

2009-08-12: Wednesday.

Up lateish, breakfast, builders arrived, tilers unable to work in the vigorous rain. Supposedly the stairs arrive today - lots of stud walling knocked out around the place; plumber arrived to move various pipes; water off, etc.

Fitted new continuous ink cartridge - the air bubbles in the pipe give a great feeling for just how much ink is wasted each time the head is cleaned - wow. Sadly the order is wrong CYMK instead of CMYK - which makes the colors strange (to say the least). Got sent a PDF on how to re-assemble / order the head - more inky fun in store.

Plugged away at mutter & mutter-moblin. Up-loaded my UKUUG moblin slides.

Lunch, it seems we are several walls short on the landing, and plus a huge hole in the ceiling - fun. Re-arranged the printer head and broke the clip in the process, some PVC tape, and it seems to work, nice.

Back to uxlaunch - deep joy. Got my first (pretend) cup of tea from E. (14 months) - refreshing.

2009-08-11: Tuesday.

Up early, prodded mail, back to the bugs. Itching to install my new self-re-filling printer ink system. Solomon phoned - Peace had a (massive) baby Boy - Daniel; exciting times.

Roofers fitted velux window, and I stripped some copper wire to add to the ridge (with luck it will kill the rampant moss before it gets started).

Poked at uxlaunch - my PAM is chattier than your PAM ! ergo, nothing works; fixed it. Amused to read Ross' write-up of Democracy Theatre at Facebook - sounds only too familiar, sadly.

Worked late, plugging away at mutter-moblin & async reported XSetInputFocus errors.

2009-08-10: Monday.

Churned through the E-mail; carpenter, and roofers arrived, hopefully we'll get a replaced roof, and new velux fitted today. Upgraded the netbook to the latest, greatest, Moblin packages. Packaged my banshee work.

Poked bug list, booked flight for opensuse conference. Hacked away at banshee, packaged uxlaunch - and tried to make it launch a session, hmm. Played with, and packed the babes off to bed while J. did some counselling. Worked late.

2009-08-09: Sunday.

Up late; off to the conference - discussed many of the UK's open issues with an interesting & articulate openrightsgroup guy. Lunch.

Set off home on the train; finally arrived - picked up by the wifelet. Home, Chinese food for dinner; packed everyone to bed, admired the wife's new wedding outfit.

2009-08-08: Saturday.

Mini lie-in; packed, train to Birmingham for the conference. Intense bout of OO.o use hacking on slides; got Robster finally, and poked Josh to see what he wanted to say, to discover he wasn't coming - bother.

Arrived, Ross Anderson's security engineering talk - good stuff, clearly I should read his book; chatted to Craig Heath - to understand the Symbian Foundaton afterwards - interesting.

Gave my Moblin talk, after a ZFS talk - went well; slides to follow shortly. Hung around talking to David (a Maemo guy), and David (a fonts guy) - good fun. Off to the conference dinner later with Alasdair.

2009-08-07: Friday.

Prodded mail, and banshee. Looked at travel details for the UKUUG conference this weekend, leaving at 10am tomorrow should just about get me there in time - nice.

Bought a continuous ink system for my Epson printer to avoid continuously running out and spending a small fortune on tiny cartriges.

Played with banshee and d-bus some more.

2009-08-06: Thursday.

Up early, builders arrived before I got to work; much hammering, and drilling action left & right - a very hot day. Boggled at the mailing lists.

Poked at OO.o a little; knocked up an rpm patch to auto-split out dll.mdb files from mono into -debuginfo packages to save space.

Lydia and Angela around for dinner in the evening, great to see them and meet Angela for the first time - fun.

2009-08-05: Wednesday.

Builders arrived back - more work here and there, one managed to put his foot through into the kitchen. Living here increasingly resembles a camping experience - piles of stuff everywhere, and hardly able to move.

Ordered J's birthday present; tried (unsuccessfully) to find a Haynes manual for my Toyota Verso, looked on-line and discovered I have to pay for (electronic) manuals - bother.

Poked at gupnp / gssdp packaging, caught up with Luc while waiting for the build service to complete, interesting. Submitted the various packages, and onto banshee. Call with Jared.

Admired the builders set of joists in the attic, hopefully a new floor will start appearing there shortly - spiral stair disassembled yesterday, and now access only by ladder.

Chat with John Hummerson; tired, and digestion slowly re-learning english food.

2009-08-04: Tuesday.

Flights all night / morning etc. slept well on the umpteen hour hop - perhaps avoiding jet-lag by sleeping closer to UK time in Taiwan will work well (at least now I'm back).

Poked at my netlink bootchart collector some more on the train, substantially reduced the data spew. Perhaps I should poll the low-grade system load & I/O data in /proc more slowly than the netlink data. Cleaned up the bootchart collector code.

Lots of exciting building work - somehow knocking down walls goes rather faster than building them - admired the sudden absence of walls in-doors. Went to see the girls at their accelerated swimming training - some good stuff there.

Back, worked through mail; JP's staff call. Lots of infernal banging and bashing up-stairs, is the sky falling ?

Interested by a Real men don't hit women facebook causelet to sign up for. What does it mean ? what is an un-real man ? why do men hit women ? can you even question this without being labeled a mysogenistic wife beater yourself ? Personally, I try not to hit anyone - but I recognise that if sufficiently trapped, provoked, abused, and perhaps inflamed by alchohol - I might well behave in a highly sub-optimal way. Luckily this hasn't happened to me, indeed did I mention my wife being the most wonderful, kind, patient woman ? - but who knows. At such a stage, I'm fairly confident I wouldn't discriminate sexually against an equivalent pair of beligerents, walloping both equally. Clearly this in no way condones vicious, unprovoked, casual abuse of anyone. I think, often, sadly, people mistake their privileged and comfortable situation, for some supposed personal virtue in a much worse situation.

Wonderful to be home with the darling wife - an intoxicating creature of thrilling presence and loveliness.

2009-08-03: Monday.

Alarm failed to wake me, urgh - packed everything in a hurry, skipped breakfast, and somehow made the partner training session. Spent the whole day trying to explain performance optimisation to a mixed audience, with a good few non-believers. Why do people always prefer to try to scrape the barrel of optimising malloc instead of working out why there are a million back to back calls of it in some dumb app ? I've seen enough discarded 3137alloc analogues in my time.

Back to the office, bid a fond farewell to the big friendly bunch of lads there, off to the airport, caught up with a bit of hacking at Starbucks (free wifi), onto the plane.

2009-08-02: Sunday.

Up earlyish, off to Taipei International Church, friendly atmosphere - met a nice American (Greg) and his charming Taiwanese wife - from the US not-embassy here. Good service, fine, balanced, challenging, helpful expository preaching - let down only sightly by an over-emphasis on greek word definitions; pleased, I heartily recommend it.

Set off by Taxi to Taipei 101, met up with Armani there - had a vertical elevator joy-ride, admired the panoramic view, a really clear day. Tried to discern movement in the large suspended ball stabiliser with no joy, wandered coral displays, then enjoyed ice-cream, and a brief crowding experience in some computer show.

Off by Metro - the plastic metro tokens, surprisingly conceal a wireless RFID thingit of insane coolness - to Danshui. Armani showed off the sleeping Buddah skyline - though his precise physionomy left something to be desired. Admired a temple of some sort, used (apparently) primarily for women to practise a divination of sorts. Drank the local iced tea.

Back to the Guanghua Market, it seems I missed most of the most interesting bits of it yesterday - under the ground, and in a new block. Found a T60 battery to replenish my increasingly poor capacity, and slow-to-charge model, neat. Taxi home.

More prep for training tomorrow, phoned the lovely wife, up excessively late trying to (and finally) installing debuginfo packages from kirk all over the place.

2009-08-01: Saturday.

Up disgracefully late, poked mail briefly while waiting for breakfast, got lost in Wikipedia - trying learn about Taiwan, learned a bit (it's an amazing place) - but drifted off and ended up learning about submarine implosions instead: sigh.

Out to the local tech market - hunted for cheap things, and hunted some more: hmm, presumably I'm looking in the wrong place. The only place selling T60p batteries I could find, was worse than the on-line store; I clearly need expert help - becoming practised in mental division by 54. Got a car DC to US / mains AC adaptor for applied in-car net-book usage at home. Managed to talk to the lovely wife, and some babies, finally. Returned recalling why I dislike shopping.

Wrote up my what is, and how to solve the infinite space problem in a11y rant for the umpteenth time; I really should just create a web-page for this issue; then again, if we can get the new D-BUS goodness actually -right- then there will be no need - unfortunately that requires a new Atk navigation interface so - who knows.

Prodded at banshee/cubano a bit, stubbed some of the bognor-regis interfaces, and played with mutter-media-panel, played music with cubano.

2009-07-31: Friday.

Struggled into the office before 10; read mail, prodded at the various intractable problems being faced by everyone. Talked with Jeffrey at length on his return. Out for lunch.

Long round of ad-hoc training presentations, ranging from IPC, through misc. infrastructure, software stacks, build tooling, etc. Intel meeting - always good to meet sharp, new people. More training, out for a western snack.

Back to the hotel, watched a rather fine movie about some unexpected parenting action; must dig out the title.

2009-07-30: Thursday.

Up early, off to a partner's office - great to meet another team of talented people, chewed over possible areas to collaborate in - lots of fun.

Out for lunch with Peggy, Armani, and Jeffrey. Back to the office, chewed mail quickly, met with Bruce from another partner - discussed X / DRI2 issues.

Slogged away at the hyper-odd hornsey issue - not showing images. Out for fine Korean barbeque dinner, and back for a walk-through call. Back to the hotel; OO.o team meeting - 22:30 is quite late to start a meeting. More Hornsey chasing, finally, it turned out to be an issue with 'unique' using the 'bacon' backend instead of the 'dbus' one - fun. Called J. bed.

2009-07-29: Wednesday.

Not overmuch overnight sleeping, up early, hacked a little; set off for the office. Met Matt, Joey, Gary, Jeffrey and more in person - really good to do that. Set out on a marathon training session: how to suck eggs - for grandmothers.

Out for lunch; ran through customer requests with Armani and Jeffrey - nearly falling asleep. Back with the team for collaborative bug chasing - prodded mail, chat with Kendy.

Out for dinner, and back late for Moblin team meeting, called darling wife, bed late.

2009-07-28: Tuesday.

Somewhen whilst asleep / travelling / running for the next terminal, and trying to re-assure the doctors that when I ticked 'cough' in the Swine flu symptoms list, this was a case of an overabundance of caution rather than any immenant peril of infection: got a free mask for my troubles.

Blown away by Tor's insanely cool start of porting the awesome Valgrind to Windows - what better way to teach the best Win32 developers about Free Software.

I lost most of a day, and arrived just in time for bed the next day, lovely hotel, with free Internet - nice.

2009-07-27: Monday.

To work, chewed through some of the E-mail backlog. Set off to Taiwan in the afternoon, trains to LHR, flight to Hong Kong.

2009-07-26: Sunday.

Up early, lie-in for J. Off to NCC - really good to see the family there again, wonderful to hear Pete & Shelly's news.

Back for lunch; tried to de-nail, and saw up lots of scrap timber, now scheduled for the fire this winter: heat your house by burning it down in bits.

Got babes to bed; Nick, Hannah & Joni over in the evening to admire the wood problem, and catch up over some port.

2009-07-25: Saturday.

Amazingly M. slept (in my room) like a dream, while the rest were nightmarish for J. Into York.

Played in the retail-outlet-park-and-ride playground - apparently the highlight of the day. Into York, wandered around admiring oldish bits of the town - the place where Constantine was pronounced Emperor eg.

Enjoyed the bus tour, lunch at Pizza Express, more open-top bus touring; M. fell asleep on the bus - lugged her back, played in the playground on return. Set off, drove & drove, and some more.

Eventually got home, packed babes to bed, and set off to admire the new roof structure - we now have two roofs, internal and external - interesting: be good to get back to just one sometime. House still secure though - good.

2009-07-24: Friday.

Up early, intense car packing, and house emptying - managed to get it all in eventually; and H. to overcome her distress at having some sand on her seat (still).

Set off to meet Jean & Peter - interesting couple from church who invited us over. Their house is at the end of a 1/4 mile+ drive (between fields). Admired their interesting family, got chatting with their Son, a trainee doctor, Ruth - the girlfriend interested in Eastern Europe and human rights law; and briefly Peter - designing wood chip boilers for people; a happy morning.

Drove, and drove some more - finally got to Brimham Rocks - just as the parents arrived too. Much nostalgic playing amid the wonderfully shaped rocks. Managed to get N. and H. to the top of one of the largest rock outcrops by means of brief chimneying, ledge traversal, scrambling, crawling through openings in the rock, and other fun - life is easier when you have a Dad to help you with the difficult bits it seems.

Eventually left, bid 'bye to the parents; and returned to the car - drove to the ultra-cheap rooms in the as-yet-not-built motel we had booked; thankfully it it been built by the time we arrived - neat. Very nice, pristine rooms; disgraceful Burger King dinner - exhausted children at the end of their tether. Got everyone to bed.

2009-07-23: Thursday.

Up late, lazy start to the day. Got to Bamburgh castle beach as the tide was out; endless fun all day making a monster, streamlined sand castle, jumping in and out of waves, chasing each other across the hot sand etc.

N. somewhat terrified by various dogs, but overcame her fears eventually. A wonderful location, modulo some missing toilets anywhere near the beach.

Lunch, waited for the tide to return, castle survived a pleasingly long time - until sucumbing to eventual innundation and oblivion. Interned girls in somewhat deep water by then though.

Returned for immediate bathing action of babes; followed by bangers & mash with the parents; put everyone to bed, and set about packing.

Watched the Beatrix Potter movie - very lovely, albeit sad; bed late.

2009-07-22: Wednesday.

H's birthday; lots of present opening at breakfast - out to clean out the local shop from ring doughnuts.

Off to Alwnick Castle - admired some coaches; then got N. and M. dressed up in some damsels outfits - lots of fun things to do for kids - avoided far-too-scary dragons quest.

Lunch near some climbable cannons - relics of the pre-rifling, pre-steel era, apparently good at making castles go obsolete though. Checked out a museum or two, M. it seems has a new aversion to pretend people - provoked I think by early exposure to a human statue street entertainer.

Baby-sat a sleeping E. while babes visited the house and counted owls; lightning visit - very taken by the library. Birthday cake in the evening for H.

Texting fun in the evening, chat with Florian, call with Jared. Watched the end of 'Meet the Parents' in the evening with J.

2009-07-21: Tuesday.

Up, frantic present wrapping, and card writing. J. arrived downstairs, her birthday - rather a poor showing present-wise (on my behalf). Packed lunch, and everyone into cars. Drove to Alnwick gardens.

Queued at length, and started to wander - played at collecting water in children's tractors; detoured via a rather excellent bamboo maze. Wandered the rose garden, on to douse the children in the water features. Enjoyed some of the excellent illustrations of various behaviours of water, soaked the babes in the hydrostatic fountain, then dried them.

Picnic lunch - in some slight rain. Lugged E. pram and provisions up the hill, admired the walled garden. Beat a hasty retreat to the extensive tree-house - with much fun trying to wobble the dual suspension bridges.

Tea & cake, drove home. Out in the evening with J. for a lovely meal across the road - we don't go out together enough - it's an outrage. Unanticipated but appreciated birthday cake for J. arrived - nice. Bed.

2009-07-20: Monday.

Up early, set off for The Holy Island of Lindesfarne in good time to get across the causeway that floods at high tide. Parked, admired the multitude of clear signs with pictures of sinking cars, and the tide tables at many prominent points.

Wandered the town, admired some new timber framed buildings built on piles (to avoid destroying the archaeology beneath by digging foundations), with some massive ply beams to hold them up. On to the post office, and church; into the ruins of the abbey.

Had fun admiring, and clambering over the architecture of the ruined monastry and playing with babes of all sizes - E. finally starting to stand alone for long periods apparently without much noticing she is doing it. Place scattered with interesting fiducials - presumably to calculate geometry / movement of the stones from photographs. Some incredible wind / weather erosion - some stones seem disproportionatly affected.

Breakfast lunch at the cafe; and back to the car to collect bits we had left. Marvelled at the Sea-King helicopter hovering over the causeway rescuing the latest hapless, clueless non-believer; hard to see, but apparently deposited in the car-park at some considerable expense - minus car (passed in a somewhat wet condition on the way back).

Payed a fortune for a somewhat under-matured maize-maze - which was nonetheless fun enough, while E. and M. slept in the car with the grandparents.

On to the museum; pleasant, clean display, friendly staff - and a total aspiritualised tragedy of a display. English Heritage - appear to rejoice in dates, geography, orthography, illumination - but totally at a loss to provide a view of the spiritual depth of the amazing men who followed their God to a land of pagans, and converted them en-masse - what did they believe ? what did the people believe beforhand ? what was their social impact ? why did they do it ? what was their theology ? no information. Saint Cuthbert would presumably vomit on the threshold to discover the display was more interested in the exact route & chronology of movements of his coffin - rather than the crucified carpenter, risen and victorious in whose name darkness and superstition were pushed back. Very occasional glimpses of their theology show through - that they deliberately walked through the area rather than riding, to be on the level of people; and that the regional King, having been converted gave his entire silver service to the poor - but far, far too little; depressing.

Out for a drink with J. in the evening, at the hotel across the road - discovered that our cottage is let to us by a chap with a fairground attraction. Sounds like an ideal synergy - in winter, when no-one wants to be there - a nice house to live in, and in summer being on the road anyway can earn from it.

2009-07-19: Sunday.

Off to Southview Evangelical Church, nearby over the border. Packed church, hardly room to stand up - chairs so close together. Escaped to the creche with various babes.

Met Robin afterwards, to discuss creative commons licensing of his various material. J. met Jean who kindly invited us to visit them.

2009-07-18: Saturday.

Awoken by sound as of a hammer-drill in the ear: ah, indeed this is home from home. Microbore plumbing combined with airlocks (?) or the wrong thermostatic valves yields an interesting acoustic experience.

Breakfast; raining conscientiously outside. Out into Coldstream, admired the beautiful bridge over the Tweed. Visited free museum about The Coldstream Guards, with some interesting, though under-explained exhibits. Some enterprising chap set up a Bible Factory here to reduce the price of the scriptures in people's hands, and break a royally granted monopoly - printing 170k in one year - though apparently shut after only 6 years. Played with the babes, some dressing up clothes there.

Back home for biscuits, and lunch - then out in the afternoon to Europe's oldest suspension bridge (of it's length, in continuous use, add equivocation to fit here). Interesting, though somewhat unsafe for children. More curiously a chunk of the road leading to it appears to have been washed into the river, and is thus impassable - making the bridge somewhat less than useful.

Visited a honey farm nearby, packed with character - cafe in a converted double decker bus, eclectic museum; and had a tour from the owner's son-in-law-to-be. Back for jacket potatoes, and sleep.

2009-07-17: Friday.

Up at 5am, packed everything - woke babes & stacked them into the car. Drove to Grantham, admired statue of Newton; breakfast with the babes. Drove on to Rippon; Fountains Abbey, met up with the parents there, raining fairly vigorously all the way - fearful driving.

Tea in the tea-shop; drove on to Cornhill nr. Coldstream. Lovely cottage, ideal for the family + grandparents; fine view, over the Tweed to Scotland. Tried to run off some of the children's energy in the garden, visited lovely local shop, across the road. Cooked, packed babes off to bed; bed early.

2009-07-16: Thursday.

Up early; carpenters arrived to bang about pleasantly up-stairs. Amused by Sam V's apparent inability to actually follow the simple instructions I posted to find, and read the Mono CP text - it seems if you really don't want to see something, being pointed directly at it is no obstacle.

Chased down my audio problem; /usr/share/YaST2/data/sndcards.ycp (obviously) - missing a Master volume setting.

Annoyed that I choose to go on holiday for a week just as things start to get even more interesting wrt. Oracle & Sun, apparently still on today.

Solomon arrived to collect keys for Falmouth St. Back to meetings. Dinner, put babes to bed, admired the building work - back to the admin. Optimistic wrt. the future of an Oracle owned Sun; go Oracle !

Packing, preparation, panicing - up early tomorrow.

2009-07-15: Wednesday.

Prodded mail. Builders arrived around midday to start putting joists into the attic. Played with pulseaudio - why is my audio muted on boot ? dug into it more and more - interesting, pulse believes alsa for it's very first set of defaults, and alsa is configured by udev, and (hopefully) system install. I need to debug system install instead.

Solomon over briefly, for lunch to sign contract. Discussion with builders to re-assure them that, in fact the metalwork & pad-stone should fit exactly where it's drawn.

Pulled children's cartoons from archive.org for babes to enjoy on the road trip to (near) Scotland tomorrow morning. Tried to build 'thoggen' and was stunned to see sourceforge demanding form filling with my life story before it would let me download the source archive - what gives ? - it turns out that the list of mirrors failed to load, and the form below was a Verisign advert - amazing. What sort of security concious person enters their personal details into an embedded advert ? and why hinder people from reading your white-papers (makes no sense at all to me).

2009-07-14: Tuesday.

Up early, poked at hornsey - no full-screen photos or videos - odd, updated bognor-regis - still no joy. Plodded away at various moblin bugs all day. Clint around in the evening to admire the problems of resting a big steel beam on a wooden lintel above a window.

Wrote up contract late, thanks to Charlie & J. for the initial typing.

2009-07-13: Monday.

Up early, parents popped past for breakfast, J. took H. to school in the car; admired the builders now correctly sized metalwork. Built and installed the latest image.

In one of those amazing moments of archaeology; I discovered some of the history of XEmacs: and I quote (and this is presumably a very historical 'Currently'):
Why are there two Emacsen?
Hysterical reasons. See the public flames if you must know. Currently the largest problems is that Sun owns the copyright for large part of the code. It is copyleft, but they refuse to sign over the changes to the FSF. Some people think it is good to have an Emacs variant where you can contribute code without signing any papers. Feel free to disagree.
And, of course personally I support at least joint assignment to the FSF (or other suitably structured, non-commercial, representative body). But I'm constantly being told by Sun engineers how no-one cares about copyright assignment, that it is never a barrier to entry, and that it is a total non-issue; what fun. It seems clear that some companies, sometimes, have real problems with it (and that was to a benign non-profit, not a commercial entity).

Since Sam Varghese, while happily calling Bruce Byfield 'clueless', seems unable himself to use a simple google search to find that MS, in addition to blogging, added the C# specs to their Community Promise page last week. A triumph worthy of Schestowitz, who with a simply mind-bending lack of irony or self-awareness has taken to griping that other people are using cheap shot(s), are unprofessional, and give only an illusion of balanced reporting.

2009-07-12: Sunday.

Slept fitfully on the plane; arrived rather too early at Gatwick, waited quite some time for the tube at Victoria, and at Embankment; finally home to the lovely wife & babes.

Slept some of the afternoon, slugged with babes otherwise - good stuff, bed early.

2009-07-11: Saturday.

Guy left in the night - shame; up earlyish, breakfast with Aaron and Federico - set to work on Moblin again. Filed five obs bugs in the first minutes, fun.

Fixed a few issues; given the sudden lack of fear of people writing code - I should point out that (having read quite a lot of really poor quality code) - we should be quite scared of at least some people writing code; though, amazingly things like garbage collection can help hide the incipient scariness of some; go mono.

Also got around to reading Lefty's concerns wrt. RMS. I rather disagree. Personally, I have few problems with people mocking Christianity particularly when we can be pretty silly and deserve it at times, (sometimes for being overly censorious). I also tend to think that offending me is the least of your problems The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (where fear overlaps with awe, or respect) - it's just silly to mess with the creator. Having heard Richards talk enough times to not want to bother again (it is extremely similar each time), last time I heard it, his balance didn't seem that unreasonable. I have one of those unfair suspicions that the deliberate inclusion of sexual language in his stock talk, is to make it easier to advance his declared hobby of 'affection' afterwards - which to my mind risks treating women as objects; personally I would strenuously recommend finding a life-long equal partner to delight in, grow with and so on (marriage rocks), and I have no idea why people sell themselves so short. As such, in my speaking career - I would occasionally show pictures of my wife (for OO.o Writer), and Damien's for Ekiga, and point out the obvious aphrodisiac quality of hacking on Gnome - hopefully without over-offending the polyamorous fringe. If RMS wants to stand up and broadcast some of his more silly views, that is fine by me - it is not as if people are unaware of his many foibles. Either way, I'm prepared to listen carefully to what he has to say, even where I completely disagree - because of his insight and passion in nucleating the Free software movement. And I strongly prefer to hear (and give) a talk which captures the essence and richness of the speaker as a person: warts, obscure political views, theological considerations and all. Who would want to attend a conference where software talks cannot be flavoured with a little personal detail ? As such, I really appreciated Aaron's non-technical lightning talks at GUADEC, and am sad I missed RMS' talk myself.

Stayed up for my late night flight.

2009-07-10: Friday.

Up earlyish, off to the beach with Guy, Alp & Andrea - lazy lunch, discussion of cunning new Gnome + 1 scheme. Much sympathy for an absent Aaron cycling up some huge hill elsewhere.

Took to the water, surfed the waves, lay on the sand all that relaxing stuff. Decided to attempt the trip back via the center of the island - somewhat mountainous there. Went through some spectacular scenery until our road ( after being suspiciously diverted directly into a restaurant car-pack ) turned into a rock track (which we had a good slide around on for a bit) and ran out. The local re-assured us that the last bit we needed was really just not there & we tried another route. Guy - it turns out was a driving ace in a previous existence - but this made the hair-pin bends, and precipitous drops none the more relaxing: fun stuff.

Back for dinner with a large set of fun Gnome guys; saw some SUSE KDE guys in passing. Got to know Lubos' charming sister a little, and tried to locate suitable chap to her liking. On to admire the drunken beach wanderers - and caught up with Philip & met Tina - which was fun, back to bed late.

2009-07-09: Thursday.

Off to the conference at midday, wandered around - caught up with Srini - good man, disposed of his Disney Truck. Aaron found his phone - horay. Gnome Foundation AGM was suitably fun and encouraging.

Taxi back, dinner with Stormey - which was fun, great. Discovered that most of her great work reports get hidden in the Foundation blog which is both interesting and, well - why, oh why is this not on planet.gnome ?

Back to the hotel and met David Faure - stayed up rather late catching up & talking cross desktop code sharing - what a man. Bastien arrived too to join the fun.

2009-07-08: Wednesday.

Woken by PR person reminding me of an interview in 40mins elsewhere - nice job ! lightning dressing, travelling, demo prep action. Interesting and thought provoking interview, lift with Ignacio to the conference.

Met up with Jesus - doing cool work with OO.o cross-compilation, it seems he's really close now, neat. Caught up with Guy; on to Nick's funky Moblin talk. Quick calls with Kendy & Florian.

Extremely pleased by the Microsoft CP action around Mono - personally I think they rock for doing that. Of course, some will immediately start examining the gift horse's dental state - while doing that, it is good to examine IBM's rather similar covenant (NB. cf. the footnotes at the bottom), and Sun covenant is (credit where due) the best practice here - though apparently only available for ODF. Of course - perhaps we should have an arms race in ever-better, clearer, more comprehensive patent covenants from big companies around standards. Should the OSI / SLFC have a stock, recommended text to use ? personally I think the MS one is briefer and more readable than IBM's, go Microsoft !

2009-07-07: Tuesday.

Up late; off to the auditorium with Lennart, and sculled around, out for lunch with some Eclipse-ish Red-Hatters, Alex and Andrew & co.

Back to the fray, managed to avoid ~all talks somehow, except Aaron's rather cool lightning talk, Moonlight substitution. Wandered the sea-front with Owen, Tim Janik, Federico & ended up back at the hotel, eventually. Out for dinner with the Intel guys, back for some collective software fun. Bed late.

2009-07-06: Monday.

Packed self up, checked beautiful wife is on survival trajectory. Set off by train, plane, etc. to GUADEC. Sat next to interesting mother - Jenny on the plane.

Arrived, caught up with the slate of great hackers wandering around; met up with the Sun guys, then Guy - out to the Gnome party - lots of old friends, and interesting things. Caught up with jrb, bed at 4am.

2009-07-05: Sunday.

Up early, picked up Kate & James, deluge of family arrived, set off to NCC. Dedication of E. - great service, (did creche), James spoke.

Back for lunch - fed the hordes; tours of the building work for random passers by; Bruce climed the two storey ladder outside somehow.

Dinner in the garden with David, and the parents; bid 'bye to them all.

2009-07-04: Saturday.

Up, off to the hospital with J. - new antibiotics. Back home. Mum & Dad arrived early afternoon - went to buy much of Waitrose for party tomorrow.

2009-07-03: Friday.

Up early, roofers arrived, as well as guys to create more pad-stones. Discovered the roofers planned to seal the roof with some incredibly cheap & inadequate membrane - requested and got something better.

Prodded mail, image builds, and boot-charts. Off to lunch with Naomi - her first (induction) day at school, good to see her world, tried to book app't with docter for J. with no success. Amused by the Suffolk accent seeping into H. - A noice toiger instead of a nice tiger.

Explained the structural engineer's metalwork drawings to the metalwork chappy and Clint, again. Glad I did two years of general engineering. Lord knows what I'll find when returning from GUADEC. Janine took M. off our hands for the day - lets hope no inadvertent vandalism happens to her.

2009-07-02: Thursday.

Up early, metalwork guys arrived - started taking the roof apart and installing huge chunks of steel; many of them in the right place even. They eventually stalled on one that protrudes substantially above the floor level - doh. Discovered M. standing by me cutting my trousers with scissors as I stood at the door - amazing.

Back to work, M. continued her run of fortune by spilling a pot of paint all over the carpet, bother. Mary Rogers turned up, like the heroine she is, with a meal for us all - nice.

Got my first high-res boot chart going nicely; now to work out how best to render I/O & swap latency.

2009-07-01: Wednesday.

Up early, Mum & Dad got the AA to fix their diesel heating thingit - on all the time, draining the battery at a rate of knots. Got some work underway. Richard arrived in the evening to do some more prep for the metalwork.

M & D left midday; continued mail & hacking on bootcharty things.

2009-06-30: Tuesday.

Mini lie-in, breakfast, Richard & Clint arrived - first sign of the builders for some weeks: they set to work hammer & tongs. Mother discovered a 'tic' on E. - guzzling away - prolly from Thetford Forest - urk; took her to the Doctor; H. to school / sports day. J. starting to recover slowly.

Poked mail. It seems we have an opensuse Moblin related mailing list setup now subscribe. Hacked away happily at a taskstat based bootchart collector in C - very happily, lots of high-res goodness we can show there, in contrast to the fearful /proc/*/stat bits.

2009-06-29: Monday.

Took babes to school, pre-school, J. to the doctor's; finally got to E-mail, and package pieces.

Hacked away at netlink / taskstat goodness for bootchart. Noticed that the hot weather, combined with the humidity of an adjacent 'me' is bubbling the the paint off my desk under my arms; hmm.

Parents arrived to nurse J. and look after babes - what a relief; inspected the various works with Father. Claire Reed very kindly made us a fine meal for the evening, what a dear.

2009-06-28: Sunday.

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

2009-06-27: Saturday.

It seems Dhananjay now has a blog. Up early, looked after babes while J. slept, idled around the house tending to sick wife.

Off to Thetford Forest for Benjy's party - a great time had by all, though feeling pretty exhausted & washed out myself. Drove everyone home. Alba kindly came to baby-sit; took J. to hospital - chest infection, anti-biotics and rest - poor girl.

2009-06-26: Friday.

Up, J. still in a bad way, call from Sanmarie - tap broken and leaking; took H. to school - set off to fix tap - realised MOT is today - set off for Cambridge.

Sat in the car show-room, experiencing '3' 3G mobile internet, distinctly sub-optimal in terms of bandwidth it seems. Chewed through older mail at some length.

Back, lunch, successful emergency plumber impersonation - back to work.

Amused by Florian's post on API design - very true; the real problem I see with using UNO interfaces (for which read COM), is that migrating existing code to them incrementally is abominably hard and inefficient, and never gets finished. Put simply - it is easy to design the perfect API, what is more difficult is to re-work the old code into the shape of that API. If you choose as a pre-requisite an (essentially) viral technology like UNO that makes incrementalism impossible: your entire API surface has to be UNO or not at all (modulo evil 'tunnel'ing) - then you instantly turn the problem into a "all or nothing" disaster area - whereby you have to re-write "everything" all at once, and inevitably you do that either very badly ( and given the way UNO exposes concurrency issues on every single call, this is almost inevitable ), or you take a very long time to do it. By far a better way, is to design the new interfaces you want (I assume there will be more than one interface), pick them off one by one, and re-factor the code incrementally to them - testing for regressions constantly. As/when that is done (if you can be bothered), providing a way to add UNO-isation is then easy (modulo the legion concurrency hazards you don't need to care about if you don't use it).

2009-06-25: Thursday.

Up early, fed the babes while J. slept, took H, to school. Did some Safety at Work survey thing. Call with JP. Finally got the image building, and installing as required based on 11.1 - whoop; nice.

Disappeared to nurse sick wife, and care for cascade of children, music lessons, school collection etc. Back to prod at image installation later. Pleased by Nat's recommendation of commandlinefu, interesting.

2009-06-24: Wednesday.

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

J. more ill in the evening, poor dear.

2009-06-23: Tuesday.

Up early; to work, installed a recent image; trotted off to Cambridge on the train - pottered about enjoying the sun. Caught up with the Collabora crowd. Pizza lunch, good to see Christian again.

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

2009-06-22: Monday.

Up early, to work; battling the build system, amazed by the under-thought Malthusian pessimism coupled with supposed eugenic solution. At least Malthus had the exuse of not having a large published literature on the subject to study first.

OPS call with Markus. Pizza with the family; read stories, put babes to bed & back to work.

2009-06-21: Sunday.

Up early, tidied & cleaned a little, off to NCC - some encouraging testimonies, Tony spoke. Caught up with various people, and off to Royston with Mike for a picnic.

Fine picnic in the open air, bouncy castles, lying in the sun, playing with babes etc.

2009-06-20: Saturday.

Mini lie-in, raining - so photocopied architect's drawings of our home (if only they were actually accurate) - played what turned out to be a highly popular map-reading game/race, involving finding coloured dots around the house.

Lunch; cycled out to the heath with N. H. on their bicycles - with an indominatable performance by M. on a tricycle. H. hugely improved her starting, breaking and speeding away; N. doing well, M. steering perfectly, encouraging.

Scaled the apex of the roof, and taped down / nailed the flapping weather-proofing material down, duct taped various pieces, sigh. Builders on holiday for another week.

2009-06-19: Friday.

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

Lunch. Fairly appalled by the various media outlet's editing, and excerpting of the Khameni speech, on every side - from AlJazera to Fisk, to various blogs; where is a complete, un-edited translation / transcript ? and why does that not come first, with analysis later ? much as I disagree with most of what Khameni stands for - it is precisely because I disagree with him so completely, that I would like to hear him out. Finally found something here.

Poked at nbtk, found my css speedup was causing much of the grief with new nbtk, disabled that and life is good. Nice. JP pointed me at kayak which seems like a rather usable travel site, in contrast to BCD's disaster. Booked GUADEC flights (6th-12th), hotel in Italy, and did admin variously: Clarity.

2009-06-18: Thursday.

Up early, half day today; my 2^5th birthday. Poked mail, caught up with happy hackers, kiwi fiddling with more success, image debugging.

Got some great presents, some fine sacred music on CD; and an interesting book Sustainable Energy without the hot air - an extremely fascinating, colorful and in (many) places droll text. Also available for free on-line as above. I believe David JC MacKay is the man behind Dasher - and as such something of a Gnome related genius; a must-read. I was particularly struck by the energy cost of a single return trip to LA, being in excess of a 1kW fire being on non-stop on all year. Though being only on chapter six myself, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Out to a violin lesson with Naomi; good to see her improving. Laura baby-sat, and out for a meal in the evening: lovely to get out, alone, with the lovely wife for once.

2009-06-17: Wednesday.

Up early, prodded mail; helped out Matt, Joey with packaging, discovered a chunk of the team were lurking on #opensuse-moblin on the internal IRC server instead of freenode - and confused as to why so few were there.

Prodded at bits for GUADEC; ineffectual kiwi fiddling, prodded at trying to reduce osc build times. The compliation of mutter-moblin (on a build server, from clean) takes:

stage duration (secs)

jail setup to end SuSEconfig 402

pkg unpack 1

configure 27

make 72

install 5

files / debuginfo 6

lint / checks 3

finishing / cleanup 18

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

Tony & John around in the evening to talk; interesting.

2009-06-16: Tuesday.

Up early, boggled at the Iranian news generally, prayed for them. To work somewhat late. Got stuck into unwinding some git2obs mis-feature causing me grief with package versions. Booked UKUUG conf. hotel while waiting for obs.

Finally filed all my expenses, before discovering (near mandatory) '-k' and '-p' options to osc build. Plugged away at build / packaging bits. Call with JP & team, then Paul.

Lydia over for dinner, great to hear the story of her trip to the US, and catch up - good stuff.

2009-06-15: Monday.

Up early, prodded mail, caught up with Taiwanese friends, tested package builds from the weekend, back to some writing slog. Solmon over for lunch, eat with him for a bit.

Steelwork chappy arrived mid-lunch, set off with him, to chisel through the plaster-board of the roof to reveal a slightly higher apex than expected - nice. Measured this and that. Back to almost finish lunch with Solomon, before being dragged away to a conf-call; then another, and another.

Great to see the leftist's darling Chavez congratulating Ahmadinejad on his victory; now there's a real democrat. More image building and polish.

2009-06-14: Sunday.

Up early. Elisabeth's first birthday, cooked her scrambled eggs while J. slept - thankfully no-one dead of food poisoning yet, cleaned & cleared up.

Out to NCC, Helen spoke pleasingly on the sword of the spirit, (which is the word of God). Back for chicken dinner - tried to persuade E. to unpack her presents (with little success). Older babes very taken with E's sand-pit, much more so than her.

Re-applied myself to the root, ultimately with victory - filled in the large-ish hole. E. worryingly learned to climb the stairs today - discovered 15+ stairs up, on the landing. Cue long training session on the under-developed art of going backwards!

Appalled by the plight of Iranian's, highlighted by Behdad. To recover, it was necessary to laugh at the loonies trying to write full-featured 'AJAX' applications for document editing, with all the font and layout power that gives you (or not) css is awesome - thanks Jeff.

2009-06-13: Saturday.

Mini lie-in, interrupted by the postman; urk. Cleaned the house while J. at the market. Into the garden to resume the attack on the infamous, poisonous root; we have a radical [sic.] problem in need of a solution. H. off to a party.

Persuaded by smaller people to take them to the playground to dig in the sand; much sun-block application later, set off. Met an interesting holiday booker there: Donna, sat in the sun watching small people have fun.

Back for lunch; more effort at the root, consulted the parents for input - acquired some spare, used bricks to support the jack, and had much more joy - the application of a 2 tonne weight can split a root quite effectively; nice.

Slugged for much of the afternoon, reading, played with the babes, got them bathed & to bed eventually.

2009-06-12: Friday.

Managed to get my inbox under a thousand mails; half of them unread - a minor victory; given the choice between hacking and reading mail, I strongly prefer the former - but indulgence brings a vast backlog of pain to recover from. Updated my previously bland abstract for the UKUUG Summer conference to be about Moblin instead, should be a fun time.

Prodded at Huawei modem issue with ModemManager with Tambet, who it seems has fixed it already; knocked a few things down. Pleased with the latest 'osc', osc build error reporting has got a lot friendlier it seems.

Started updating Moblin:UI to the latest git versions from Intel / up-stream; discovered .git/config with Pippin's help; why no git info or somesuch to cat that ? Slogged away at porting patches & cleaning up Moblin pieces, at great length.

2009-06-11: Thursday.

Up early, read the news; oh dear, oh dear, more ODF fluff. The comments being particularly saddening, the lack of sane structure, expertise, delegation and/or bandwidth in the ODF TC to actually consider and act (in a timely fashion) on all the proposals seems crazy to me. If we can't do this month's work in two months, what chance that the six month backlog will ever clear ? It's sad to see good proposals rotting, and that TC still holding back progress in interoperability. Oh what a tangled web, etc.

Poked at mail, priorities, task organistaion. Slogged away at documenting patches for L3 / maintenance at some considerable length. Out for some exercise in the evening - the clamour for this from the immediate family has grown to breaking point; today - cycling.

2009-06-10: Wednesday.

To work, Michael had kindly found and unwound my obs pain, built a fresh image. Somewhat amazed by nn; it seems the special meeting of Sun stockholders will be July 16th. Chat with Kohei.

Interesting Desktop preload team meeting; call with Jared. Break to see Suzannah & Adam, and play with the babes. Ham, Egg & Chips for dinner; Back to work after putting babes to bed. Workd late.

2009-06-09: Tuesday.

Poked at a silly GMarkup stack bloating issue of my own creation, fixed that trivially - encouragingly even if you inline a caller to 'alloca' (g_newa) the stack is adjusted correctly afterwards.

Prodded a pybootchartgui bug with Thomas, knocked up a patch. Finally dunged out all the internal build stuff, struggled with some obs issue, refusing to build the right source for some reason.

Charl & San Marie over for dinner, nice to see them, though sad they're leaving. Called Katie & Mike, friends from Church, whose amazing (somewhat graphic) story of delivery in a car, appears on-line.

2009-06-08: Monday.

Up early, poked at the OO.o performance issue on save I was seeing yesterday. Amazingly some great chunk of the time during save appears to be dedicated to rendering the scroll-bar, and doing some un-necessary Java-ness; most odd.

Tried to disable Java, just to see if that is related to the performance issue - there is still a check-box for that, thankfully - Tool->Options->Java->"[x] Use a Java runtime environment". Un-checked this, re-started OO.o, and I was amazed - simply typing in a blank writer document throws up a dialog:
Fine - so, I clicked 'Cancel' - surely typing 'foo' in a writer document doesn't per-se require Java [ in fact, it turns out that this is generated by the Java Grammer checker extension ]; then amazingly this shows the same dialog again, but with a slight tweak: the mouse pointer has been warped (which is unbelievably bad style anyway) to over the top of the 'Yes' button. So - if you try to continue clicking 'Cancel' or 'No', you appear to get rid of the cascade of evil - but in fact you just agreed to it. Of course - you only notice that because you then hit the world's least useful modal dialog:

Sadly, since the dialog is modal, and you get an endless stream of them, you can't in fact save your changes before force killing OO.o, and there is apparently no way out of the retry loop. I mean - I loathe Java less, now it's open source, but that is quite some evil. It's amazing we expose 'SetPointerPos' in VCL now, I don't recall that in the past, and it's hard to think of a sane use for it - it seems lots of dialogs are now warping the pointer to the default option [ urgh ], mailed the list; committed the patch to remove it to ooo-build; of course it subsequently turns out that I must have inadvertantly enabled the 'feature' somehow in the settings; hmm, apparently off by default (thanks pl) - a prime feature to remove.

Back to writing meeting minutes. Knocked up some annotated boot charts, and sent them to Joey. Filed some packaging issues around boost-devel (200+Mb) and samba-client - at 50Mb or so, they seem quite large, perhaps some static linking fun.

Dug at sysprof a bit; the GUI crashes for me, and apparently valgrind won't help me this time - most odd.

2009-06-07: Sunday.

Up early, off to Hertford to speak at Charlies' church; shared lunch afterwards, back to their place for a cup of tea; and drove home in the pouring rain.

Applied inaction & slugging, attempted to get to bed early, but was too amused by Labour getting beaten up on the radio election results, I didn't vote for UKIP, but they have some good points to make I think. Despite lots of the problems not being primarily Brown's fault - he could do a great favour to his party by being the scapegoat and taking them out into the desert with him to die (or so it seems to me).

2009-06-06: Saturday.

Mini lie-in; worked on sermon for tomorrow. Lunch. Out to Homebase - bought a circular saw: £19.99, amazing. Back - started dissecting all that potential fire-wood in the skip: normally one has to liberate timber from other people's skips - somehow less satisfying to do it from your own.

Discovered some pine tounge & groove planking in the bottom - amazing; no idea where it came from - repaired the children's swinging seat with it.

Attempted to jack the laburnam root out of the ground, with handy 2 tonne car-jack and suitably beefy new steel chain. The previous fairly reasonable nylon rope didn't survive this experience for that long. Some encouraging movement, but not enough travel on the jack more digging required.

Dinner together, popped babes to bed; more work on Sermon. Poked at mail and build service bits, I just discovered a use for non-versioned links - created some new IBS projects and started a new set of packages building to be ready for Monday - thanks to Ruediger for reading mail at the weekend.

2009-06-05: Friday.

Up early, poked at the poll results - sad to see the same old Prime Minister in office; a change is as good as a rest (so they say).

Prodded mail, Joey making some great progress on bootcharting some of our slower systems. Wrote LXF column on Moblin.

Amused by the talk (video) of re-writing OO.o based on JavaFX. Of course - there is much about the OO.o code-base that betrays it's palaeolithic origins as a demo application for a trendy new toolkit (now VCL) from 20+ years ago - many of which badly need to be undone with a clean re-design. Of course - opinions differ on how long it would take to re-write OO.o in C++ - ohloh suggests it is > 2000 man years. Lets briefly drink the cool-aid and believe that modern managed languages magically solve all complexity problems, are the silver bullet, give a 10x programmer productivity boost, and that we can throw out a chunk of the component, toolkit code. That leaves perhaps 200 man years of work. With Sun's OO.o team of under 50 programmers, assuming they abandon OO.o development completely, that is a four year endeavour; but if we look on the pessimistic side, it could be several decades. Who knows - it may even happen; Corel Office's total melt-down from porting to Java occured (after all) when CPUs were slower, RAM was more expensive, garbage collectors were worse, and Java was far less mature & well understood. At the end of the day though, where is the win for 200 man years ? a newer code-base, with newer, different bugs; a different set of performance problems; perhaps some better architectural under-pinnings; the deployment problem is moved from one of deploying and managing the right version of a fat-client OO.o to the right version of fat-client JavaFX (and version management, and certification of multiple applications, each against a thick-client stack in the same browser is very much an un-solved problem AFAICS). Of course any idea that this much Java is going to run on your phone, or that somehow (magically) the UI will 'just work' on small devices without substantial extra work is a pipe-dream. Personally - luddite that I am, I'd prefer to stick with re-factoring and optimising the code in C++, and adding incremental managed code (if any) for new UI features.

Poked at Intel 2D / cairo rendering performance again. Interestingly my cairo trace seems to run faster on the Intel / 2D netbook than my laptop; interesting, perhaps the problems lie elsewhere.

It is interesting to see Sun promoting the MySQL extensions for OO.o, it looks useful enough, but is interesting primarily for legal reasons; libmysql - last I looked, instead of being LGPLv2 (or v3) was GPLv2 (ie. incompatible with LGPLv3) with an EXCEPTIONS-CLIENT list - that (interestingly for 5.1) does not include the [L]GPLv3 - in it's FLOSS License List, although the web page does (and has a different text). This curious approach to licensing, combined with the obvious gotchas for ISVs (sic) was the sometime basis for MySQL's 'interesting' revenue model - for which they would arrive and demand retrospective compensation. The curious terms also (seem) to mean (to me, IANAL) that anyone unwittingly bundling the mysql connector with OO.o on a CD, will need to include complete source for OO.o; and can they compile ICU in ? ( at least one other license that's not listed there - or is ICU BSD ). Oh, and of course combining that extension with any other non-open-source extension seems unfortunate too. It is also curious that the component's page lists the license as LGPLv3 - does this herald a new dawn in client licensing sanity from MySQL ?

Looking deeper; downloading the Linux extension (essentially a .zip file) as you can do here (please do) contains a full copy of the LGPLv3, with this as the only license flagged, and inside the .oxt libmysql.so.16 - it would be great to get the source for that library under LGPLv3 too (or was that already announced elsewhere ?). Of course if this was a simple licensing blunder, would it be right to hold Sun to it ? odd - but potentially very positive if Sun is going the LGPLv3 route here.

2009-06-04: Thursday.

Up bright and earlyish; voted; off to London to visit Intel. Really pleased to see Eric & a chunk of the X team there, and catch up with them - even multiplying my understanding of GPUs drastically over a fish & chip lunch by the Tower of London.

Caught up with Rob, Nick, Matthew, Dirk, and many more lads there - compared tangled problems. Much fun. Back on the train; poked away at bootchart - suddenly realised that one thing about C# that annoys me is having to compile things - I love this #!/usr/bin/perl -w thing. Hacked up the world's lamest bash script to allow #!/usr/bin/mono-cs to be used with the ultra- fast Mono/C# compiler to make a gtk# 'Hello World' app easier to run. Surely, it already exists and I'm missing a trick here.

Poked mail, sent mail; home to beautiful wife.

2009-06-03: Wednesday.

Up early, to work, OO.o team meeting, call with Jared. Played with bootchart & kernel timer resolution in /proc/[pid]/stat which looks shockingly bad - no wonder we don't get great activity rendering in our bootcharts. Built new kernel to try to export something more interesting.

Baby-sat while J. visited the consulting dentist - it seems a while since the acute pain; thankfully she seems to have escaped unscathed this time : good. Dug at payroll tax issues; what fun. Call with Snorp around SLETC - interesting things live there.

2009-06-02: Tuesday.

Up early, pottered around cleaning the house up for J. Friendly call from the builders to remind us they exist - apparently they do still. Started on the tedious admin backlog - got the printer working, printed expenses sheets.

Distracted by an avalanche of interaction - three flavours of Rob, Thorsten, Fridrich, Charlie Bancroft wanting me to speak on Sunday; Poked around at mojito with Robster. Poked at gnome-menus with Robsta.

Lunch; more E-mail, call with Thorsten, then Florian. Chat with Paul, conference call, call with Srini. Poked at Empathy, which for some reason has write-only channels, for me, for now - odd.

2009-06-01: Monday.

Up early, interrupted before breakfast by JP needing a fix. Worked solidly much of the day debugging this and trying to fix that. It seems xset -dpms can in fact enable screen blanking, while without it xset dpms 0 0 0 actually works - interesting (or perhaps it was the xset s noblank that was my friend).

Chased a random mutter moblin crasher at inordinate length, turned out to be a juicy CORBA / gconf / e-d-s re-enterancy bug that had to be seen to be believed; a ~3 line fix that appeared totally unrelated.

On to an exciting mojito issue, spent hours reading the code, and trying to work out what is (not) going on with the network; found a juicy NM bug on the way with resolv.conf re-writing & on-line status stuff.

James grabbed me about an OO.o / screensaver interaction issue, seems we missed an --enable-dbus in our OO.o compile, most odd - it used to be there. Bed rather late.

2009-05-31: Sunday.

Up lateish, off to St Lukes - fun enough family service on Pentecost Sunday, some amazing burning paper trick to briefly create a tounge of flame over the head of a suitably hair-less volunteer. Good to catch up with lots of old friends.

Home, a fine beef roast cooked by Father; climbed trees in the garden for a while, admired the fine bath Father had managed to acquire, and the result of the neighbour's re-enamelling investment; slugged variously. Eventually packed everything up, bid 'bye to the parents; and set off home.

Fairly sub-optimal weekend driving experience, home, packed babes to bed, chopped down our poisonous laburnum and filled the bin, exhausted sleep.

2009-05-30: Saturday.

Up early, breakfast with the girls, worked the morning fixing images, tweaking & testing this & that for Computex. Fun to work with JP & Guy (and of course our Taiwanese team) in Taiwan, an exhausted but burningly productive Aaron working multiple timezones in a row, Srini in India, and having a truly constant development process.

Really cool to see our (not yet loved enough) Moblin UI channel turned into something cool looking, and get interest from Andrew in: Goblin it'll be great to get that all integrated nicely, after the Computex crunch.

Amused to read some Cubano / Banshee code, and see the conflation of probing for technologies, along with IInterface naming: the compelling ISupportClutter interface sounds useful.

Out to the national Lilac park in the afternoon - wandered trying to climb trees with H. encouraging M. to stagger ever onwards, fun in the sun. A tad more hacking, and dinner with Peggy when back.

Off westwards for a barn-dance with the wifelet and M&D - good fun, but exhausting - pwrt. the work waiting back at home.

Yet more packaging, race condition hunting, permissions & imaging problem hunting, device testing, yet more image building and so on. Found and fixed blocker telepathy / mission-control / empathy / anerley startup race.

2009-05-29: Friday.

Up early, to battle. Wrote my first kernel module to use the trace points (lame code). This finally showed me the mystery killer (SIGQUIT) of my X server, the Linux kernel - and where it came from: n_tty_receive_char.

More digging. Drove down south to my parents, plugged in and back to battle. Egbert swears that the correct tcsetattr or equiv is called by the X server, and so it seems. strace'd all children of 'rc' -ttt, narrowed the problem window down, chopped all the logs by time, and audited all the TCSETS ioctls, until I finally found: fresh from the blogd department - a set of 'stty' calls in the init scripts, that (amazingly) reset the isig flag on the current vt (which in our case is the X vt). For anyone ignorant of the vile mess of consequences that means (obviously) your X server gets a SIGQUIT when you press enter. Joyfully deleted stty calls all over.

Dunged out my disk to make space for more image building. Very happily deleted the 3+ ati binary proprietary driver installers I had lying around. Thank God they did the right thing, and the Ati support works well out of the box these days - the days of evil hacks to try to get both multi-head and 3D working in the days of SLED10, I never want to repeat.

Played with H. in the garden, who is starting to acquire a taste for climbing trees - which is exciting; if only her taste for clothes matched the task. Worked much of the evening.

2009-05-28: Thursday.

Up slightly later - babes didn't wake until 8am; to work. Certain amount of reverting of over-enthusiastic package upgrades in an attempt to isolate some functionality drop-offs.

Spent a looong time trying to work out who is killing my X server when I press enter. Team meeting. Dinner with Mary Rogers, lovely to see her again. Tried to make p $_siginfo work in gdb - which failed even for my banal test: botheration.

2009-05-27: Wednesday.

Up early, slogged away at X / KMS / framebuffer goodness for boot splash, with final victory over the gruesome detail.

Submitted a proposal for The OpenSUSE conference - should be fun. Dug at an odd mutter crasher.

2009-05-26: Tuesday.

Up early, half term avoids too much of an early morning rush. Builders arrived to start breaking up the existing loft room. Poked away at misc. admin.

Started valgrinding mutter-moblin - some fun things there; with the 'prctl' calls included, you can use 'top' and as/when the process name changes use callgrind-control to dump the output at the right moment (the valgrind slowdown being rather an advantage here). Knocked up a patch to speed up some of the mutter css styling stuff - seems to make a measurable difference, which is nice.

Poked at the X server - apparently the fbdev driver is not kind to modern Intel systems, as well as slowing down startup.

2009-05-25: Monday.

Lie in, out to crash course with the babes, swimming while I shopped for barbecue goodness. Back, barbecue with Charl & San Marie, Chris & Claire - and babies.

Whiled away the afternoon, call from JP & back to work in the evening - up late working on Moblin bits. Discovered my mission control wasn't starting - an un-noticed hack in moblin-session slipped past me.

2009-05-24: Sunday.

NCC in the morning, Claire spoke - some good insights. Back for lunch, played in the garden with babes, lots of slugging. Assembled play-house kindly passed on from the Geaches - lots of fun for small people. Elisabeth particularly keen on standing and looking out of the windows.

2009-05-23: Saturday.

Up late, cleaned up the loft, removed the stair rails, got the fitted shelving removed from the wall - loft even more unsafe than normal.

Out to a party with Mr Rainbow in the afternoon, detour via a taxi back to the house to locate the real venue. Rather good magic. Back, bed early.

2009-05-22: Friday.

Day off, lie in for J. took H. to school. Cycling training for M. and N. in the road, in the sun. Played with babes & relaxed.

2009-05-21: Thursday.

Up early, to the slew of mail and tasks left over from yesterday.

It seems there is was some confusion over generated over 'what is carrick' in our Moblin vs. that from moblin.org. That's an anachronism from a previous plan to build a common front-end to ConnMan (used by moblin.org) and NetworkManager used by SUSE. Anyhow - apologies for that; to avoid any potential confusion we'll rename 'carrick' to NetworkManager-netbook (ono) and import that into Gnome git.

NetworkManager-netbook (like carrick) follows the great UI design from Intel (and thus they look suspiciously similar, sharing widgets from the new 'mux' library too - though the NM version is less polished thus far). Screenshots:

This is some good work from the inimitable Tambet Ingo. One nice feature (apart from the drag and drop of connections to prioritise the fallbacks - sadly not working plugged into mutter), is that the list reflects the latest up-to-date state - which is not possible with nm-applet's GtkMenu. Of course the 3G network list is also rather useful.

Discovered where my simply appalling 'web' experience comes from. The magic window-left, window-right buttons carefully placed next to the arrow keys on my T60p (rather useful to use arrows when editing a wiki), trigger this sexy browser feature of going back / forward - which also, really helpfully looses the content I was editing: nice work browser guys. Dear lazyweb, how do I turn that off ?

Hacked away at boot-chart, trying to isolate some of the slowness I'm seeing in our boot process. Added some trivial but evil code to bootchart to allow a hacker to split their process into multiple sub-process-lets. Rob's idea from yesterday was to do this via changing the process' name - thus by adding:

prctl (PR_SET_NAME, "start-slow-thing", 0, 0, 0);
you can split out that piece into an (apparently) separate process in the boot-chart; like this: (for mutter)

which was previously one long process. patch on the Gnome performance list.

Dinner, played with kids. Back to work - prodded empathy, the people panel, and created a fun new mutter profiling boot-chart: hopefully somewhat useful.

2009-05-20: Wednesday.

Up lateish, poked some people on IM, set off for London. Got my 3G modem working with wvdial, need to hack at the NM support clearly.

Met up with Robster, and gave a short Linux Netbook talk hashed together on the train; followed by a nice Moblin demo from Rob. Back to the Intel office to chew over status & progress.

Train home, met Nick on the Cambridge platform - a pleasant surprise.

2009-05-19: Tuesday.

Slogged away at packaging. Spent much of the day working with the other Novell cool kids getting things into order.

Moblin Rocks

The official announcement of Moblin 2.0 happened - with all the code for the first time. I'm dead pleased, in particular because it sucks to fill a blog full of minutia about ones personal dental care - instead of tech content - becuase Moblin has been substantially secret until now.

So is that what you've been working on - I hear you ask ? well, sort of - only - most of the hard work was done by the great bunch at Intel, many from the OpenedHand, famous of yore, and fun to hang out with. Of course we've spent a lot of time putting some great pieces into the pie too - but my role (frustratingly) has mostly been around wringing ever more performance out of the OpenSUSE / SLE boot process - so we can deliver those sexy pixels faster to your popping eyes.

Some interesting bits

Having said all that, and there'll be a lot more to be blogged about over time - at Novell we've been working on some fun bits. Anjal of course, but also Aaron has been working away at 'cubano' - a new banshee front-end using clutter, and Tambet has been creating a simple, easy-to-use new UI for NetworkManager called carrick - along with some great 3G information parsing stuff. Hopefully these guys'll blog about this shortly too. Of course - a lot of the design and flair in the UIs has come from Intel's excellent UI team - thanks guys: and late at night sadly I can only remember Nick's name.

Why Moblin ?

Well - it's cool and sexy - if you don't believe me, watch the pretty Intel Video. Of course - it works wonderfully on all those sexy, slim netbooks out there with fairly low res screens, poor touch-pads and so on. I for one like the netbook form factor, and more so with Moblin on it.

Why not Moblin ?

Of course, for bigger desktop or laptop machines - with more power, more pixels, you might be able to host a more business'y desktop - with the complex UIs you expect there: your Evolution, Exchange meeting booking, and so on. ie. There is still a huge space in the market for GNOME, KDE etc. This new UI is clearly light, simple, consumer focused, and (increasingly) a pleasure to use. Conversely - if you don't have fairly good 3D support - the new UI is not for you: go buy a new Atom netbook instead.

OpenSUSE / Moblin

Of course, Moblin is many things - well worth checking out their pretty web-site, but the UI components (and they collectively need a good name - at least one better than say bognor-regis - thanks Iain for the reflected glory on that place: giving Bognor Regis a good name as it were) can sit on top of any distro - much like a 'normal' desktop eg. GNOME. As such - you can find them (and a mix of other bits) packaged for OpenSUSE 11.1 and Factory, as well as a warning - dangerous - immediate disk flashing bootable ISO in these places.

Wiki page: http://en.opensuse.org/Moblin

Build Service: Moblin:UI

ISO etc. Download: beware of the ISO it will wipe your disk without confirmation

The build service repo has the added excitement that it contains (thus far) a mix of packages that may speed up (or even completely break) your Gnome desktop as a side-effect.

Summary

Exciting, pretty, slick, sexy, new, fast-booting, interesting thing: play with it, and get involved.

Suddenly remembered I have to give a talk tomorrow in London at Cloud Expo Europe on netbooks, which I had forgotten. By some happy co-incidence I should be able to show the latest moblin I guess.

2009-05-18: Monday.

Up early; to work - couple of lads continuing to lay bricks up in the air. Most of the day spent on packaging tasks of a level of tedium only surpassed by the thrill of watching paint dry.

Mercifully assisted by sbrabec and vuntz in my efforts. Finally got what I wanted by 5am.

2009-05-17: Sunday.

Another mini-lie in, recovering the sleep debt slowly. Then J. slept, poor creature. Off to C3 in Cambridge for a Geach dedication service.

On to Isleham bowls club for a fine meal, and chance to catch up with the Geaches massed. Home eventually - babes watched a DVD - while I (somehow) unwound the wiring in the loft, and dis-connected and removed an external lamp - saving it from the deluge of mortar from on high.

2009-05-16: Saturday.

Mini lie-in; J. off with some friends of hers to the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge for a treat. Played with the babes, admired the brick-work at the top of the house with fun-sized people etc.

Back; out to quest for reclamation yard goodness - where can one find articles of a reasonable quality, not designed to fall apart immediately. Back, played with the babes - put them to bed early.

2009-05-15: Friday.

Set off for bed at 6:30ish, but interrupted by a fine flow of water through the roof - set about that with buckets. Breakfast with the babes, back to work for a bit. To sleep for a few hours.

Woke up, got an image building; chat to Tony who came over for lunch. Got Tambet & Srini's goodies into the next image; Call with Jeff & Greg, then with Guy, JP & the team; then chat with JP.

Quick chat with Janine, fine lasagne with Julia; helped get the babes to bed; quick kernel testage, to bed.

2009-05-14: Thursday.

Up early, poked mail, packaging, massaging spec files, and fiddling with performance at some length left and right, and centre. Watched brickies finish the wall to the height they could - more scaffolding arriving tomorrow.

Poked at hal; for some reason it is inordinately slow to start - fired up valgrind; missing ioctl - bother, got the latest valgrind; eventually unwound the --retain-privileges needed to be able to write the output. Compared fdi files vs. moblin:

OpenSUSE Moblin

.fdi 1.6Mb 388k

mmap cache 1.3Mb 235k

Interesting - 223k calls to handle_match, yet only 9k 'match' rules in the .fdi files. Of course, during boot this drags out to a much longer time doing this and that.

Fired up a profile of hal startup; 70% of the time taken in resolve_udi_prop_path, of that 13% in g_strsplit and g_strfreev and another 50% in strncpy - which it seems can't be easily in-lined due to the way it's done - how odd. Knocked up a trivial patch to ~tripple the speed. 1.8billion pseudo-ops down to 0.64bn. No doubt there is some obvious silly in my patch, but - looks good; Kay kindly helped out testing it.

Staying up late means the next day arrives without an interruption in the flow of work ...

2009-05-13: Wednesday.

Back to work, poked mail, started to get an F10 system setup, and try to unwind my (obs inspired) kernel-syms versioning grief. Spent ages trying to unwind endless grief around kernel package version mismatches to get sysprof to build; wow life can be made unnecessarily painful.

Admired the brickwork that had gone up during the day - nearly up to the point of requiring the next lift - amazing what four men can do in a day. They bricked the temporary roof felt into the wall to make a new gutter for the duration.

Admired the first heavy rain of recent times leaking through the left-over screw / nail holes in the waterproof roof felt - intended to be a drain.

2009-05-12: Tuesday.

Slogged away at packaging, tweaking, fast-boot bits etc. Carpenters arrived in the afternoon to cut through the roof joists, after a little persuasion not to do something dumb, they did the sensible thing.

Calls with JP, Paul & Mark, Jared. Alpha in the evening. Up in the night - dreaming of software and building work: a brain curdling mix.

2009-05-11: Monday.

Up early, side-tracked by builders arriving to knock off most of the roof tiles - interesting "You do have felting underneath ?" - "no" - "oh". Plugged away at packaging, beginning to loathe Bognor Regis.

Builders sliding tiles down the roof and stacking them makes rather a noise - but, appears less destructive to watch than it sounds. Examined the absence of weather protection at lunch - the Met Office predict a lack of rain until Wednesday.

Misc. image building & mail reading. More build, packaging and tweaking. Dinner with the babes, J. out to the pregnancy crisis centre AGM. Up late hacking.

2009-05-10: Sunday.

Lie in; off to NCC - did the creche. Had Katie, Mike, Sarah & Corrie back for lunch - good to get to know them. Much splashing about in the paddling pool, and misc. fun.

Fed, and got the babes to bed. Quantum of Solace in the evening - with San Marie & Charl, Gary & Mila, Mike & DT & Zoe - and their georgeous new baby. Film moved far too fast for me to follow, and is apparently missing substantial context. Appears to end in a rather haphazard place too; hey ho.

2009-05-09: Saturday.

Up early, off into town to buy fruit & veg. while J. slept. Back.

Set off on a special outing with just M. - her first. Much excitement from the train / bus combination to Cambridge, wandered the streets admiringly. Walked through Trinity, round the backs: with a remarkable degree of interest shown in the coaches parked there. To the Anchor for chips and lasagne by the Cam. Wandered back to the bus via the Fitzwilliam museum and through Downing. With the kitchen-gate out of action, it seems the poor engineers must have to walk far further than can be right to get to the department these days. Bus / Train back.

Hyper-ventilation attempting to blow up an enormous paddling pool in the garden - with the added bonus of a slow leak, to allow a repition of the joy each day. Filled with water, and sprinkled girls variously.

Wandered the scaffolding in uffish mood - will there be builders come Monday ?

2009-05-08: Friday.

Up lateish, set about fixing the broken build. Continued to fix trivial, and uninteresting build brokenness, tweak spec files & so on - sigh.

Lunch, call with JP, more packaging; Clarity.

2009-05-07: Thursday.

Up at 4:30am, mail, some hackery, image test. Breakfast, conf-call, with scaffolding delivery commencing during it. Wrote up minutes, etc. Lunch.

Scaffolding going up nicely - looks surprisingly neat and tidy at this stage - before the builders arrive on it. Nailed nasty kiwi / modutils interaction bug around modprobe -C /etc/modules.conf not working anymore.

Poked at sillies in udev network hotplug during boot. Amazingly my ethernet socket on one machine seems to be the exact width of a standard USB connector: leading to some rather odd "wow, where is that device I just plugged in" fun.

Out to see Dave in the evening.

2009-05-06: Wednesday.

More packaging, image build; OO.o team meeting, Desktop team meeting. Interrogated at end of business by M. "is that a baby c'uter?" ... "is that a talky thing there ? ... I like it!" ... "where's the dancing car ?" ... "where's the roller-coaster ?" etc.

More emptying of the filing cabinet, bed late. Up in the night.

2009-05-05: Tuesday.

Prodded mail, scanned bugs, chat with Matt, built images. Massaged task lists, built, burned & tested images. Amused to see Dan getting censored by Sun. A real shame, I was hoping OO.o / ODF would make the top #10 - I at least, have fond memories of working with Dan & co. Hopefully we'll get the goods in some memoir form at some stage anyway.

Massaged wiki, updated bug lists, etc. Dinner; tried to shrink the filing cabinet's contents - somewhat ineffectually.

2009-05-04: Monday.

Up early, cleaned up, and set off to Studlands for the church outreach - bouncy castle, free hot-dogs, cakes & coffee. Lots of fun, and intermittent rain. Saw Dave & his home.

Back home for some slugging; and cupboard clearing action; took M. and H. to her swimming lesson. Back; under eaves cupboard mostly cleared - good.

2009-05-03: Sunday.

Up later; off to NCC - Tony spoke, lots of new people around. Home for lunch. Dropped H. at a bowling party; back home. Disassembled bed and managed to man-handle it downstairs with Charl - lashed it to the car, and dropped it down to Falmouth St. with N.

Back to pick up H., N. managed to gate-crash the end of the party and get some nice food. Spent some time teaching small girls to unscrew screws in the attic - removed some rather heavy MDF sheeting protecting the stair. Played with the old attic trap-door a bit.

Chat with DT & Zoe in the evening, flushed with the arrival of their new son. Gordon Sermon on Jacob's Ladder, slept.

2009-05-02: Saturday.

Up early, played with babes a bit; set off with a picnic to hunt for bathroom-ware and tiles in Bury St. Edmonds. Variously appalled at the price of everything, £600 for a single piece of glass & fixings - amazing. Eventually decided a wet-room, with a curtain is the best solution.

On to a local park for a picnic; then wandered around, climbing on a wooden Panda, Dragon etc. Enjoyed the trees, grass, and M: "I want you look after me Daddy." etc.

2009-05-01: Friday.

Up, chewed mail, started to prune back the long backlog of interesting things to respond to. Poked at KMS - interesting, it seems that if the X server modprobes you failed already; eventually got some results.

Effie baby-sat, while I took J. to the dentist's for an examination - a floating wisdom tooth root causing extreme grief. Lunch.

Committed omitted GMarkup patch to glib. Tea with Janine and kids in the garden; chats with Greg, JP, JRB. Bathed and put babes to bed. Back to some hackery while J. went to Tesco; split up and simplified some bug documents to file.

Clarity timesheet filling - what fun; status mail action.

2009-04-30: Thursday.

Up early, poked at obs a bit with WuFung. Tried to organise thoughts, tasks & conclusions. Isolated and filed a silly crasher in nautilus-sendto's pidgin plugin.

Call with Egbert. Lunch with Bruce & Anne - good stuff. Call with Ian, chat with Pete, team meeting with JP. More osc hackery.

After poking around a little, discovered my gmarkup parsing speedup didn't actually get committed to glib2 - though seemingly a ChangeLog entry did [ amazing ], re-opened the bug.

Dinner in the evening with Andy & Simon; Alpha video, bed earlyish.

2009-04-29: Wednesday.

Up, quick breakfast, train to London; one set of meetings with a charming lady; lunch, another set of meetings with another set of great guys. Back in reasonable time - tried to catch up with E-mail on the train - wow, commuting to London sucks.

Back late, relaxed, drank wine with Kate & the Wifelet (still scarred from her tooth extraction).

2009-04-28: Tuesday.

Poked at osc build bits; chat with Fridrich wrt. odd T60p BIOS issues; it seems we all suffer them. Lunch.

Plugged away at various things, profiled my X server startup. Call with Guy, then Greg.

2009-04-27: Monday.

Up early, chat with Alex, poked Timo & Christian, phone demo with Jeff & Markus; fun new H/W arrived. Poked at installing stuff on it, prodded Kiwi gingerly; lunch.

More misc. image building, calls with JP, Mark, Paul & Jeremy. Sometimes I wonder if being US president comes with built-in Bush-isms Barack seems (50 seconds in) resolved to halt the rise of privacy in that region.

Un-anticipated prayer meeting; poor J. still scarred by the process of her first tooth extraction. Caught up with some hackery. Clarity.

2009-04-26: Sunday.

Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept, cleaned up the house. Set off for NCC, ran the creche while John spoke. Back for chicken lunch; David off - and back to NCC for a prayer tea - fun.

Move movement of things around the house, cramming stuff into nooks and crannies variously. Glued up a blanket box that appeared to be falling apart; moved some computers downstairs. Gordon sermon in the evening on Genesis.

2009-04-25: Saturday.

Up lateish, looked after everyone, and tidied the house while J. went clothes shopping at the race-course. J. arrived back minus car - the Peetle (M.) appears to love exiting the car via clambering into the front seats [ and switching all the battery draining features on ].

David arrived, and helped jump start the car; great. Back for lunch, then a lot of furniture movement with David' stirling help. Unscrewed some of the stairs, so we could get my desk downstairs - amazingly it went up there quite easily (from what I remember) - why does it not go down again ? re-assembled stuff downstairs.

Out for a spontaneous barbeque with Chris & Claire, which was fun - admired their chickens, new bench etc. Back, packed the babes to bed - up late enjoying David's company.

2009-04-24: Friday.

Up early, took H, to school; to work; poked at initrd again. Dug at OO.o images.zip performance and ordering to get some details for Tora to carry the torch there.

Call with Jeff, then James. More patching of interesting /lib/mkinitrd scriptlets.

Interested by John's call for a foundation for OO.o. Apart from the insinuation that criticising Sun's stewardship is a subtext for wanting to substitute an identically bad regimen with a different steward (which is not the case here, and would be truly dumb), it's encouraging.

For some reason people like to ask me what Oracle's acquisition of Sun means for OO.o - luckily I don't know, so I always have at least that to tell them. What I do know is that if Sun had acted, as advised, in a truly open fashion, and built a project that other companies, large and small could invest in and work with fairly: things would be better. In that (hypothetical) world, it would have produced more service revenue from the better product it fathered, but also would have made the project far more featureful and successful. As a side effect, that would have made individual developers with OO.o skills, and the project itself very much more secure against uncertainty at any single company. The key question for me is - will Oracle have the vision to create a real Free software community around OO.o, that can turn it into something as diverse, dependable and fun as it should be - there are a lot of highly clueful people there, so of course I'm optimistic, lets see what happens. As a great example of extreme clueful bravery, in the face of lots of fashion accessorising, I (personally) love Larry's views on the cloud - It has already achieved dominance in the industry ... complete gibberish ... there are still mainframes ....

2009-04-23: Thursday.

Up early, chat with Kendy, long sync with Guy. Plugged away at the mail backlog, and profiling startup - it seems our initrd does some incredibly slow things, wow - who would have thought you could boot a whole kernel in the time it waits for blogd to quit. Spent time tweaking it left & right.

Worked late, while J. went out to baby-sit. Chat with Rich, Alan and Greg.

2009-04-22: Wednesday.

Up very late. Call with Pete & Srini. Chat with Zonker & Patrick, chat with Miguel, caught up with E-mail, more crazy hacking on boot time - started a dung-out of our Xresources yielding some surreal internal flameage.

Today E. learned to say 'DaDaDaDadee' or something to that effect, and was instantly deluged with acclamation and hugs. Structural engineer also apologised and provided new drawings complete with a new Beam 8 as suggested. The roof will shortly be full of wire it seems.

2009-04-21: Tuesday.

Up early, poked at some boot time issue - fsck being run on every boot. Turns out if your kernel mounts root with different data ordering flags to that in your fstab; then when you unmount the partition you get: EXT3-fs: cannot change data mode on remount which seems to be code for - bad luck we didn't really unmount it; workaround add rootflags=data=writeback to the kernel command line.

Discovered we spend 3 extra seconds at boot, before hitting the initrd if we have a resume=/dev/sda1 type kernel command-line; magic - hopefully Greg can fix it. Worked insanely late.

2009-04-20: Monday.

Seven years of marriage today; good stuff - like a fine wine, it just gets better.

Google trends has some suitably useless graph on revision control: git vs. mercurial - of course, if people didn't call their new project by some clever household name eg. 'foot' - the "Free Object Oriented Toolkit" we might be able to better track trends - oh, and actually find what we're looking for. It's obvious that naming your next child 'gzdrqvg' will not only guarentee them the account name of their choice ~everywhere, but also make them instantly google-able.

Filed missing Clarity time-sheets, poked at udev packaging - with some crazy idea. Dug at aaa_base - why not. Chat / sync call with JP. Poked at OO.o icon themeing and performance, call with Peter.

Out in the evening for a very lovely anniversary dinner with the lovely wifelt in Ely; feeling rather under the weather, so drove. Detour on the way back. Parents left very late to get a clear run home.

2009-04-19: Sunday.

Off to NCC in the morning, back for lunch. Moved our log pile with Dad's help (and an army of small, trotting girls) from the side-way that is soon to be a lean-too (DV).

Took a break to examine the loft - strange, the wall the structural engineer is balancing 1/4 of the roof on doesn't appear to extend to the attic. Drilled a hole into it, appears to be made of cinder-block fluff - hmm. Looks like another wonderful opportunity for a large metalic beam.

Finally got the phones re-routed re-routed such that they are less likely to be 'Buildered' to death; good. Up late with the parents, had a fire to burn legacy receipts.

2009-04-18: Saturday.

Up early, cleaned house, helped set the table. Mum & Dad out all day; Sandy dropped in, then the Bancrofts, arrived: Tania, Charlie, and lots of more fun-sized people.

Large passover-style meal, slugging in the Sun, fine company, good food, lots of fun. Mum & Dad back later, slugged with them.

2009-04-17: Friday.

Naomi's first violin lesson with Anne; good stuff, learned the names of the strings fairly quickly with animal mnemonics.

Took up the landing carpet - apparently it is glued down with some re-usable tacky glue - which is great. Lifted the floor, discovered a nest of phone cable, much of it un-used, considered re-routing. Lunch.

Out to Bury St Edmonds, went to the music shop, poked around - looks great. Wandered through the Cathedral gardens. Back.

More telephonic endeavour, managed to get the floor down. Bert over for dinner, good to see him, up late.

2009-04-16: Thursday.

More clearing up, recovering from yesterday; threw out a load of ISA cards, ancient 486 motherboards, and my first 10Mbit Ethernet hub (a gift from Simon Tennant).

Tried to reduce the weight of my filing cabinet by throwing away tons of obsolete receipts and guarentees. Mum & Dad arrived in the evening, up late talking to them.

2009-04-15: Wednesday.

Up early, off to Wicksteed Park. Fantastic day out, lots of little people running from ride to ride, often the same one repeatedly. The roller-coaster a big hit with M. Hannah terrified, but fascinated by a giant swinging Pirate ship, N. and others enraptured by a car track. Lots of fun, back late, quick dinner, bed.

2009-04-14: Tuesday.

Up very late; slugged, more packing and moving of things, amazing how much time it takes to move fairly little stuff.

2009-04-13: Monday.

Lie in for J. knocked up new shelf for the kitchen, routing MDF produces some ugly swarf. R & I. up, had breakfast and left.

Did a bit of work, caught up with critical E-mail. Out for a swim with everyone - E. surprisingly happy in the pool, but rather easy to accidentally dunk at the 'normal' holding height. Fun stuff, back, tested new kernel, committed, worked late.

2009-04-12: Sunday.

Off to NCC, nice to see everyone again. Back for a quick chicken dinner. Off to Thetford Forest with the children and R&I. Suitable amounts of rushing around, climbing everything. Hot cross buns & tea; E.'s first chocolate - it is Easter after all - I suspect further confirming her suspicion that everyone else is eating something nicer than she is.

Up late by the fire, talking & enjoying Flanders & Swann.

2009-04-11: Saturday.

Up early, dealt with the babes while J. slept. Off to the market to buy fruit - got stuck into the Lyons, free Easter egg hunt with the kiddies.

Back; J. awoke, spent time cleaning the house, tidying bedrooms, making beds, getting things ready for Robert & Ilona. They arrived later, had our own easter-egg hunt in the garden. Stayed up talking to Robert & Ilona by the fire.

2009-04-10: Friday.

Bank Holiday; lie in - spent lots of time packing things away under the floor from the loft, moving various things out in preparation for impending building work.

2009-04-09: Thursday.

Chased down a twisty set of bugs causing icecream not to work properly inside the build service, or at least - when I'm using 'osc build' locally. Finally got my kernel builds to run in parallel, by not running the scheduler on the same machine as the main compile - good.

Mail, and DRI playing - interesting stuff poking at Mesa, some fun stuff to allow all manner of creative display corruption.

2009-04-08: Wednesday.

Up, wrote LXF column, poked Vuntz. Read mail, interested by the dconf thread, I look forward to seeing how that pans out. David Neary has an insightful write-up of the problems of 'joint' copyright assignment; companies don’t believe. They don’t have morals. - some of course try harder than others, but at root their morals are primarily aligned with their fiduciary duty to generate as much value as possible for their shareholders.

Dug out another trivial to fix performance silly caused in part by a bad impl. over-used by the UNO threading environment code. Call about a11y with Mike, Mark, Brady and Jared. Wrestled with the weird kernel build stuff - oh for fewer .spec file lines and more shared logic across distros.

Drove home, lifted babes into their beds; sweet little baby creatures; prodded snail mail, and the answer-phone. Bed.

2009-04-07: Tuesday.

Cooked breakfast, and to work ... found another OO.o silly taking, ~6% of import time, some heavy lifting manual RTTI check for a leaf type (SfxVoidItem) that could be a single comparison; and some multiple of 17 million calls to it, 1 line of diff.

Noticed that ooo-build has hit 1000 patches, and this blew the mind of apply.pl such that it wouldn't incrementally re-patch properly; tweaked that a little to suit. Poked at / filed a gdb failure with simple, non-threaded apps.

Most amused by Thorsten's spoof OO.o DSCM decision. I guess, it's a bit like the Irish referendum results on the Lisbon treaty: continue polling using the method de jour until your preferred outcome comes top; then stop.

Various meetings, call with Jared, got my kernel to compile finally.

2009-04-06: Monday.

Breakfast with the in-laws; poked mail, fixed up a kernel build in osc - it appears that using osc versioned links is the only sane thing to do (should it be the default ?) - osc link -r 1234 or add <link project="openSUSE.org:Kernel:Vanilla" package="kernel-source" rev="1234">

Quick call with Thorsten. Got my kernel to build; poked at HTML import some more, hacked in some more largeish wins; 24bn cycles down to 5bn including startup to load a smallish / cut-down test document, of course for larger docs - 14 seconds vs. 170secs is worth having.

Chat with JP, Jared. Poked at the latest obs builds; Clarity.

2009-04-05: Sunday.

Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept, packed to travel; off to NCC, and then Aldeburgh. Good to see Bruce & Anne. Read the paper, played with the babes, tried to encourage E. to crawl on the carpet ( softer for falling forward and banging your face on perhaps). Fine dinner, bed late.

2009-04-04: Saturday.

Lie in, breakfast; started emptying the loft of things, took futon and some obsolete testing machines down to SanMarie & Charl's. Big roast lunch.

Dug rotting apples out from under the floor, babes played crawling around under the floor and in the attic, moving boxes down the house with some success. Out for a cycling expedition in the afternoon to the race course. N. doing very well with her pedaling and steering now, real progress.

Got the babes fed, and put to bed; watched Gosford Park - rather a hair raising, and tragic film. Bed.

2009-04-03: Friday.

Up early, poked mail, dug at calc, made HTML import 60% faster or so unfortunately, that's still 55seconds for 64k cells. Lots of fairly un-amusing N^2 type feasts in there. With a small 10k cell test case, 250k linear searches through all cell contents - I guess doing the same search 25 times or so. 8bn cycles plus. Sped up the EditEngine for this corner case (with some trepidation).

Lunch; builders arrived: Clint and Richard to work out which bits to knock down first, somewhat inconclusive. Poked at mail, chewed tasks, looked at optimisation pieces. Quick call with Naresh.

2009-04-02: Thursday.

Off to the dentists with the wifelet and three babes; they're a lovely lot there. Back to the E-mail. Boggled at the calc HTML table import code, mind blowingly limited and slow, re-uses the EditEngine (at least some code re-use), but can't import more than 64k cells, and takes me 170secs to import that many; more thought & analysis required.

2009-04-01: Wednesday.

Poked at mail. Pleased to see Federico's ongoing nailing of exotic multi-head bugs in the internal tracker; 70+ down, 30 to go - that's a deep hole to fill in. Dug at Clarity, expense filing etc.

Really pleased to see, that for the first time ever we have the latest GNOME for both Factory and the latest openSUSE: 11.1 - so it's dead easy to upgrade and play: thanks to Vuntz, Luis Medinas and Magnus. Installation is rumoured to be rather easy:
zypper ar http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/STABLE:/2.26/openSUSE_11.1/ gnome226 zypper ar http://widehat.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME:/Backports:/2.26/openSUSE_11.1/ gnomeback zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/XOrg/openSUSE_11.1/ latestX zypper dup
This of course gives you the very latest X release too, as a side-effect - great to help out with improving things there too. Of course, you need to re-start X (or even re-boot to get the new dbus) and you're a happy Gnome 2.26 user.

Poked at C++ temporary lifetime semantics briefly. Switched to the sexy new ooo-build freedesktop.org git repository using Kendy's nice instructions. Added some strong deprecation warnings, with forward pointers to the old svn repo, configure now errors out there.

Committed a configmgr win - some 1+% of the startup time, spent doing heavy string sorting in a red black etree, where no strong order is required at all; 10 trivial lines of fix. Re-enabled, and updated the up-stream bug for a similar previous silly. Now - why is 3% of startup initialising language guessing fingerprints ?

Poked at go-oo DNS records, OO.o team meeting. Dug at lingucomponent and idle initialized the language guessing code saving 2.5% of the startup CPU pseudo-cycles, and a load of pointless I/O (and some memory no doubt) in a few lines.

2009-03-31: Tuesday.

Up early, off to a deserted office at 9am. Where is the jet-lag when you need it ? Dirk arrived to let me in - neat, then Mark. Prodded mail gingerly, connected some more dots; train back to Kings X, Cambridge, then Newmarket.

Played with babes, poked at mail - two hour DE meeting. Up late chatting with the wife, I've clearly missed her.

2009-03-30: Monday.

Up early, took H. to school, picked up Benjy, dropped N. at pre-school, took Benjy home in error, dropped him back at pre-school (sigh). Mail skim, packed for London, worked on the train.

Great to meet everyone in person; pleasant surprise to see Alan again; meetings, dinner with Dirk; out for drinks with Nick, Josh & Hilke. Slept in a convenient local hotel.

2009-03-29: Sunday.

J. unwell still, poor dear. Took bigger girls off to Church; ran creche, caught up with everyone. Back for lunch, dropped M. & N. at the Brighty's for Grace's party, and took H. and E. to Andy's baptism at Isleham - a happy time. Played at the Isleham playground with the babes.

Back to collect everyone else; got everyone home, made spag-bog for everyone eating; helped bathed babes, J. feeling somewhat better. Bed lateish.

2009-03-28: Saturday.

Nursed sick wife in the night; dealt with the babes for much of the day - kept inside by rain, hail etc. Watched bed-knobs and broom-sticks, displayed amazing cooking skills by buying fish & chips. Got everyone to bed, slept.

2009-03-27: Friday.

Up later; to the office, played with vmware a little; chewed long overdue mail pile. Amused that my ~trivial, but IMHO blocker OpenSolaris bug (number 64) is not only still not fixed, but still under discussion (progress after some break). It's enough to make you wonder whether simply re-using an existing Linux installer: yast2, anaconda, and a robust Linux package manager such as RPM, deb, wouldn't have been a quicker & better bet.

Go-oo was selected for Google Summer Of Code this year - all interested applicants who want to win eternal fame and glory, helping many millions of people have a sweeter, more pleasant life - head to here, and/or our ideas list - and get involved, or encourage your student friends to - it'll be fun.

Talked with Gerald at some length, then Holger, read through some bugs; got to know Werner Fink a little; called home, booked hotel for Monday. Off to the airport, still no Wurst anywhere to be found: what is happening to Germany ?. Plane home - prodded mail mostly. J. feeling unwell.

2009-03-26: Thursday.

A day of breakouts; final presentations, cake, etc. Out to dinner with the desktop lads for the last time; back to work - caught up with Clyde, Gerald & Holger. Stripped down and filed misc. OO.o bugs caught during the presentations.

2009-03-25: Wednesday.

Great pitch from Guy first thing; snatched lunch over a partner call with the other guys. Really compelling stuff from Holger; curious, brave but effective open session with Ralf.

Out for dinner with the assembled SUSE architects - cut short prematurely by an interesting call with Andy.

2009-03-24: Tuesday.

Up early; good presentation from Nat; all hands, cooked talk with Olaf instead of lunch, presented that together later - fun; good to see things take shape with more people involved.

All-hands call with Markus, launch of SLE11 - the world's best Enterprise Linux desktop (and server of course). Checked out Nat's latest toys, and caught up with him a little - exciting times. Down for a packed release party, and catching up with many people; old and new. Back to bed late.

2009-03-23: Monday.

Up early, breakfast with the desktop lads - really good to catch up again in person; off for desktop meeting with Ralf. Strategy briefings & meetings all day; Dinner with the desktop team and Guy; intense and friendly discussion with Alex about the merits of Chinese Communism, and bystander apathy: excellent guy. Bed lateish.

2009-03-22: Sunday.

Up early, dealt with the babes, kept them quiet, off to Tesco to buy chocolates on the advice of M. (Maltesers) and E. (milk tray - somehow a more discerning taste from the 8 month old): Mother's day. H. & N. made a fine card - back on an even keel.

J. awoke, carded and chocolated; stayed away from Church - more erratic sickness; listened to a sermon while the kids played lego. Lovely roast lunch.

Out to local gardens with monster slide & fun free playground. Much bouncing, swinging etc. Packed up, lashed ladders to the roof to take home, got everyone in the car, drove for home: traffic good. Stopped off at Stanstead, flight to Nurnberg, arrived late & tired, bed.

2009-03-21: Saturday.

A night of applied sickness, changed two children's sheets multiple times each; very annoyed with M. for not even trying to learn how to use a bowl. Exhausted.

Lie in, breakfast, lunch and out to the park in the car with the ill babes - who miraculously recovered and had a wonderful time in the playground; good.

Back, watched Cinderella; dinner, talked with the parents, bed early.

2009-03-20: Friday.

Worked for the morning, only mostly on E-mail, agonised over just the right words in the right order, etc.

Packed family, and kids in the car, and travel clothes for Nurnberg, set off bright & early for the 2hr drive to Brighton. 4:30 later arrived there - nice: moral - don't try to drive on the M25 during daylight hours.

Amusing incident - whereby while I went to fetch chips for the kids, and just as E. was 1/2 way being changed, M. was sick in the back of the car with just J. to deal with it. Cleaned up the mess. etc.

2009-03-19: Thursday.

Up early, chat to Thorsten, sync with Florian, poked at some paperwork; lunch at the laptop, travel projections. DE meeting, filed expenses.

Managed to persuade architect that in fact we do have a solid brick wall from ground floor to attic at the centre of the house - despite his drawings.

2009-03-18: Wednesday.

Up late; feeling shocking - avoided breakfast; poked mail. Worked on slideware, chewed Rennies in vain, to try and calm the stomach. Break to see family and not eat lunch.

Conference call, chat with Jeremy. Some toast for dinner; sat and read mail while J. filled out grant forms in the evening.

2009-03-17: Tuesday.

Up early, to work, call with Olaf, chat with Doko, just when I thought I might be becoming productive got embroiled in some inotify related evilness. As well as being a big beast, apparently configuring OO.o kills both firefox & evo. in some /tmp/ watching inotify cascade: spent some time looking at that why watch /tmp anyway ?

Lunch, call with Kendy, prodded at X server / DRI, kernel mode-setting and why it doesn't work for me; inconclusively. Core team meeting. Spent more time chasing down the inotify problem with Colin

Alpha in the evening. Back to work afterwards, stayed up rather late fixing bugs for Guy.

2009-03-16: Monday.

Up early, to work - eager to finish early tonight. Netgear router died overnight, decided to upgrade the firmware: that bricked it - nice. Rushed out to buy new router - ended up with a 'Buffalo' instead. The default admin account of 'root' looks good, seems to be a Linux box, but I'm missing the nice, friendly, yellow, GPL message that Netgear put in the box.

2009-03-15: Sunday.

Lie in, off to NCC, Tony speaking, good to catch up with all & sundry. Solomon & Peace around for lunch, sunned ourselves in the garden for the first time - perhaps Summer is a coming in ?

Played in the garden with the babes, N. cycling in the road hit a record 46.5 paces of free-wheeling action; nearly time to complicate matters with some pedals.

2009-03-14: Saturday.

Up early, out into town to do the shopping while J. slept. Detour via the Memorial Gardens to do some swinging. Back, made packed lunch. Set off for Thetford Forest.

Lots of climbing, clambering, learning to slide down poles, bumping of knees and so on. N. completely overcame her fear of climing the unfeasibly tall pyramid to slide down. Not overly sunny, but very fun.

Back, tired, packed everyone off to bed. Filled out grant application form, using Florian's new fields work - nice.

2009-03-13: Friday.

Took H. to school - red nose and dress-down day. Fixed the OO.o crash on start issue, filed up-stream etc. Did a little profiling, poked at pidgin - trying to reproduce a previous memory corruption issue, with no joy.

Poked at kernel compilation, chatted with a chap Daniel - also bitten by the sexy "dbus-send sometimes doesn't" feature, nice.

Discovered my crash on start (when not using the splash) is a consequence of a patch disabling the 'INTRO' style on the window which used to encourage the WM to nail the splash screen on top of all else and was shockingly un-usable; interesting.

2009-03-12: Thursday.

Up lateish, feeling under the weather - some sleep debt to pay off somewhere. Poked mail, talked Fridrich through gconf bits. Lydia and Sanmarie over for lunch.

Built the latest ooo-build. Desktop staff meeting. Booked flight to Nuremburg. Helped to isolate a pulseaudio bug in our packages. Early dinner, bathed babes, J. out baby sitting.

Dug at OO.o, linkoo not working for me, for some strange reason: component bootstrap horked again. Chat with Peter, finished up mail. Discovered that soffice.bin doesn't start unless you do ./soffice.bin -splash-pipe=0 - presumably the random argument sets up the Universal Content Broker (UCB) correctly, without it - bang.

2009-03-11: Wednesday.

Prodded mail, worked through the endless mound of interesting things to do that had accumulated while doing packaging, QA. Call with Florian & Andy & co.

2009-03-10: Tuesday.

Up lateish, to work; started to catch up on queued mail finally. Call with JP, Florian, team meeting, etc. Wrote LXF column.

2009-03-09: Monday.

Up early, to work - call from Thorsten, call with Kendy, chat with Adrian, intense image and package building action. Chatted with Matthew & his team.

Intense day of poking at Xorg, it's packaging, and the marvels that exist under the sun there - lots of build-service action; then some frantic bug fixing, worked very late.

2009-03-08: Sunday.

Up rather early, fed E. amused the others with children's DVD - breakfast; out to the local CofE - tried to avoid creating too much noise. Back for lunch.

More bicyling, N. free-wheeled 35 paces down-hill to great acclaim, packed everything up, attached bikes to car, set off in pouring rain, home safely.

Wow - Sanmarie had cleaned the ground-floor beautifully, everything tidy, clean and as neat as can be: a most pleasant surprise. Dinner, bathed and put babes to bed.

2009-03-07: Saturday.

Mini lie-in, full English cooked breakfast; off to Sizewell to admire the juxtaposition of the nuclear power station, and the new feed-in sub-station for the planned off-shore wind-farm.

Back, put E. to bed, more cycling practice with the babes; N. getting the idea of steering nicely now, but hindered by a typical glancing curb collision accident.

Lunch. Out to the front to sail boats on the boating lake, and admire the lifeboat etc. Back, more running around the garden hiding behind bushes & similar critical games.

Put babes to bed, watched grisly murder thing on the TV; bed.

2009-03-06: Friday.

Up in the night, poked IRC, back to bed. Mail chew, call with Tambet, call with Thorsten. Wasted hours, and hours, and hours again with trying to build working OEM rescue images. After one particularly unamusing last-throw episode of dd'ing over the disk I was using, needed a live-USB key - should be easy to generate surely ? Luckily I had the C ISO to hand.

Started reading the How to make a boot-able USB key FAQs FAQ 1 - mksusebootdisk failed - FAQ 2 - only 5 pages, and umpteen commands, onto HOWTO 1 - again, yielding a non-booting key. Amazing - how is it that we make it -so- difficult; judging by the plethora of documentation out there, this is far too difficult. Eventually in desparation looked for other distros with Live-CDs. For the benefit of viewers - I hereby reproduce the Moblin live-USB Key FAQ, in all it's complexity.

Download the live-CD image

Insert USB key - critical not to forget this step

cat /path/to/moblin.iso > /dev/sdb ; sync

Roll on the next OpenSUSE, which no doubt will have this feature too.

Off to Aldeburgh to see the in-laws after lunch; kept doing image builds in the background every few minutes - while catching up with Bruce & Anne, and training kidlets in bicycling - an ideal incline on the warren.

Set up Bruce's Windows Vista laptop in the evening, to do what he wants. Amazed the plague of crud-ware dialogs that hassle the living out of the average user. The dial-up people it seems won't die, and want their cascade of silliness, the Anti-virus vendor, and goodness knows whom else who paid to put their logo and annoyances in front of the unsuspecting punter. Turned everything off; used wireless connectivity instead, things worked better.

2009-03-05: Thursday.

Ignored mail, worked at image building oddness. Endless pain trying to get useful images to build, what a world of sickness and grief. Why be productive, when you can battle with ISO creation. Meetings.

2009-03-04: Wednesday.

Up disgracefully late, quick mail prod, more packaging debugging and fixing of things. Watched image creation - some real fun goes on there. Misc fixes to misc. packages.

2009-03-03: Tuesday.

Prodded mail, spent much of the morning in calls, and a frantic build-service / kiwi learning experience with Adrian's kind assistance, hpj, JP, Olaf, Tambet and various other heroic types.

Conference calls, update from Jeff, core team meeting. Worked until 4:30am on misc. packaging problems, learning the (sweet) build service, tweaking and fixing things.

2009-03-02: Monday.

Looked after the sick M. so it doesn't infect babes at school. Chugged through mail slowly. Pleased to see Matthias committed my gmarkup speedups; wrote up some more notes on low-hanging sillies for the Gnome performance list.

Slogged away at mail, and meetings much of the afternoon.

2009-03-01: Sunday.

Up early, took the older two off to NCC by myself, DT spoke well; loitered at the end catching up with people, gave Jon something of a ride back.

Lovely roast lunch, lay about feeling full & contented. Some degree of running around in the garden later, hot cross buns for tea, bed earlyish.

2009-02-28: Saturday.

Up lateish, played in the road with the children, keeping our distance from others: Scarlet-Fever-wise. H & N. slowly learning to ride their bikes. H. got started on the next size up, Naomi had some success learning to steer her pedal-less bike, interestingly learning more going up-hill and running to a stop, than going down hill.

Lunch, more playing outside, J. concurrently de-grassing the front-garden; why is it that grass grows wonderfully in the borders leaving the lawn the preserve of moss ? Watched Veggitales' Jonah in the afternoon, tea, bed.

2009-02-27: Friday.

Booked coach ticket to Romania; surprisingly civilised wrt. late booking & cancellations, the coach company - compared to eg. cheap flights it seems. Wrote some notes up on OO.o.

Call with Sean, back to sorting receipts into heaps. Lunch, filed expenses at some length, while listening to internal Q1 financials call.

Poked at doing a dbus-launch from the gnome session shell script to avoid linking gnome-session twice, and launching b-a-s early to stop it delaying the panel later. Poked at nautilus' plugin loading ways. More Clarity.

2009-02-26: Thursday.

Up early, to work, poked mail, call with Ralf, call with Olaf. Lunch. Fought the inbox, updated the gmarkup bug for Matthias. Filed clarity bits.

M. off to doctors and then hospital with J. to handle possible scarlet fever case; leaving me holding the fort; Desktop staff meeting. Cooked something lame for the remaining babes for dinner, fed and put them to bed.

Back to work; J. arrived back late. Poked at Impress OpenGL transition color scheme issue (related to cairo somehow), and poked an odd launcher issue. Extracted a groupwise XML trace for a bug, worked with JP on a security issue.

2009-02-25: Wednesday.

Up lateish, poked mail, some degree of catchup there. Read about bugs. Lunch; OO.o team meeting. Up-loaded my OO.o slides from Scale.

Call with Adrian, wrote up some notes, chat with Kohei. Plugged away at admin until late. Niculai around in the evening for dinner.

2009-02-24: Tuesday.

A night of flying, slept a little. Iris scan worked like a charm on my return, nice - no passport required. Plugged away, code reading on the train. Discovered gnome-session doing some chunk of startup linking twice - since it execvp's a dbus-launch of itself, surely better to dbus-launch gnome-session the existing parent script.

Returned to the bosom of the family etc. The peetle's ~20 month old, repeated telephonic: I want you back! ceases to give that wrenching effect.

2009-02-23: Monday.

Up early, call with Guy & co. breakfast, prodded at mail. Checked out, wrote some mail, poked at gconf some more - did some cleanups for Mathias and noticed another trivial win - interleaving ASCII detection into the escaping code for free - to avoid more utf-8 validation.

Off to see some hills, and a partially mangled 'HollyWoodLand' sign, and a hotel or two - interesting enough I suppose; failed to notice any particularly attractive women: particularly to match those in Newmarket. Quite pleased with the relatively tasteful abodes of the film class. Back to the airport.

2009-02-22: Sunday.

Up early, breakfast again; off to Joe's talk - nice slides, some good points. Poked at gconf some more, to try to build a separate simple list of what is touched at login time - which should be a tiny fraction of the data. Lots of interesting stuff in the trace, mailed some people to encourage them to pre-load directories where they are not.

Why do we (apparently) load all the thumbnailer keys on startup ? 484 round-trips for that at least: interesting. Some interesting un-necessary sets happening on login too.

Enjoyed the EyeOS talk, back to the booth, talked to people at considerable length on every topic, got a few people interested in the build service. Chatted to a chap with some beautiful python library for generating ODF, helped pack up the booth.

Out for dinner with Christian, Jeff, Nathanial & co. Daniel Philipps came for desert which was tasty, a most pleasant evening.

2009-02-21: Saturday.

Up early, breakfast with an interesting chap from the Navy. On to the booth, gave DVDs and magazines to all and sundry, demo'd distinctive openSUSE goodness.

Lunch with Stephen, back, tweaked slides. Gave my talk, despite being in the begginners track instead of the developers (somehow) - got something across. Talked to a number of people afterwards.

Back to the booth, plugged away, on for drinks afterwards. Dinner with Jono & some Canonical lads. Back, watched the weakest geek a bit - back to hack a bit instead. Poked at gconf some more - apparently we now spend ~15% of the time validating that text content is in fact empty - nice.

While, of course the g_ascii_isspace and g_utf8_next_char use these cunning arrays of flags, to speed them up, this makes any further optimisation hit the wall (from all_whitespace) so:
slow:
while (p != end) { if (!g_ascii_isspace (*p)) return FALSE; p = g_utf8_next_char (p); }
3x faster:
while (p != end) { if (G_UNLIKELY (*p != ' ' && *p != '\t' && *p != '\n' && *p != '\r')) return FALSE; p++; }
When parsing utf-8 text breaing on ASCII tokens, there is no need to care at all about the wunder-non-ascii multi-byte-sequences; so don't it really slows things down. Everyone trying to write utf-8 parsing code needs to type man utf-8 and read for a while before typing.

2009-02-20: Friday.

Up very early, tried to sleep, failed. Breakfast, started on the mail, spammed people with a write-up, started slide creation; deeply tempted by the prospect of removing some more fat from gconf. Read some analysts output.

Poked at libmapi exported symbols, wow; it badly needs a map file, or better - visibility work, and an agreed symbol prefix / namespace to boot GetTable or SetColumns is not going to fly in a big application without that.

Back to slides; unbelievably irritated by DreamHost, talked to a RackSpace sales chap in some interactive chat thing - that's a good, sticky sales method - particularly when coming from something far lamer.

Remarkably successful slide-ware creation, on and on like a machine; skipped lunch - the joys of a huge breakfast, and no exercise. Out for dinner with Stephan, Trevor & Will.

2009-02-19: Thursday.

Up rather early; bid 'bye to the lovely wife & babes. Set off on the train. Hacked GMarkup a tad, made it another chunk faster by avoiding a couple of allocations per element and attribute, now ~35% faster, and more to come.

Knocked up some in-place un-escaping logic, and callgrind reports an overall 45% win, good. Ran over the nice, simple regression test suite, looking good, somewhat reduced quality error reporting but - seems reasonable.

Watched misc. movies on the plane, the latest Cohen Brothers' Burn After Reading seems to me a somewhat scorching comment on the ethics of extreme positive thinking, interesting film.

Finally arrived, found the hotel, managed to persuade the network to like me, filed my gmarkup patch. Chat with Guy, Gary, JP. Bed early (for LA).

2009-02-18: Wednesday.

Prepping crazily for absence at SCALE from tomorrow; dug at mail. Chat with Srini & Tambet, call with Mark, wrote notes, filed misc. bugs.

Lunch, OO.o team meeting, call with misc. Novell guys; beta customer call. Packed in the evening, got the laptop setup, built the latest OO.o.

2009-02-17: Tuesday.

Up early, holiday today - a day off in half term; off into Cambridge with all the babes - via the Park & Ride - to enjoy a double-decker bus with the kids. On to the Zoology Museum, admired various skeletons, the kidlets got some sketching in.

On to a Restaurant near Magdalene for lunch, back to the Whipple Museum of the history of science later - much (free) fun had by all small girls. Misc. shopping - how I loathe buying printer ink at a vast price in a small package; home variously. Watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks with the little girls.

Managed to get second round of quotes for building work printed and sent out.

2009-02-16: Monday.

Up lateish, the School holidays, time off tomorrow. Poked at bugs, chased a beagled issue swallowing my disk, poked at KCachegrind output some more. Lots of mail chew.

More chasing of beagle file leakage into compressed mail attachments, clarity. Poked at cmake quickly. Discovered the Kumppa screensaver is a rival to the washing machine for baby entertainment, if only it made a <whirr-clunk> sort of noise too.

Bathed babes, put them to bed, pizza dinner - back to poking at the GMarkup performance problems: there are a load of places that do odd things like: if (*p == '\n') p = g_utf_next_char (p); that are just daft - one of the joys of utf-8 is that if you're looking for an ASCII '<' then there is no way some clown can hide that in a more complex multi-byte sequence; ergo we can parse the XML, and then validate it rather than pre-validating. Implemented that - throwing a ton of logic away, and saved 8%, good; now to reduce the heap thrash.

2009-02-15: Sunday.

Lie in, off to NCC, Tony spoke met a new couple from Nigeria Solomon & Peace - back for lunch; some form of slugging, out to Hannah & Nick's in the afternoon, had a lovely meal there too; wow. Back, babes to bed, relaxed.

2009-02-14: Saturday.

Up early, rapid Valentines day card creation from emergency spares laid down in a time of plenty. J. had a lie-in, fed and packed all babes into the pram, set off for the market. Flowers, heart-shaped cake purchasing action - along with tons of vegetables.

Back, lunch. Disassembled the R40 and replaced the old fan assembly with a new one - laptop now working, played with misc open-source games for a while. H. out to a party, played with the other girls, and Benjy for a bit - bed early.

2009-02-13: Friday.

Up early; disappointed to see the Government's inept handling of Wilders. Similarly amazed by the Muslim council's attitude; at least from what I've seen Fitna the movie is apparently an attack on the tiny minority of Muslims that apply a selective and barbaric hermeneutic to the Qu'ran and act on that: empirically such people exist, and use the texts he highlights. Given that context, surely a moderate Islamic response is to use the opportunity here, to not only condemn Geert Wilders (for his lack of balance), but to strenuously separate the peace-loving, vast-majority of Muslims from the pernicious and frankly cowardly minority - that apparently lauds the beheading of defenceless captives in cold blood (as an example). It is mildly distressing to see Geert being roundly condemned as a fascist, but an apparent silent condoning of the fanatical Ideologues, the likes of al-Zarqawi, to whom the term might more accurately apply. Demanding censorship of such a film, while simultaneously not robustly mirroring his message of condemnation of such views is really concerning. People will see it, and they desperately need to know know that the vast majority of Muslims do not share this interpretation, and are no risk to them; who will tell them ? Who will persuade all Muslims to avoid anti-semitism and intolerance if their spokesmen will not ?

Dug at mail. Tried to fix a yast2 bug, and had all manner of grief with both sudo and su - eventually realised it was down to stracing my whole session; good to fix that. Fixed a nasty entity handling issue in the yast2-gtk HTML -> XHTML conversion, HTML is truly nasty.

Spent some time analysing our packages, patch counts and so on, requested FTO for Tuesday, worked on documents, not code.

2009-02-12: Thursday.

Dug at mail, wrote some unit tests, poked at gconf some more. Discovered a chunk of time spend building 11k error messages during XML parsing, that we subsequently threw away: gettext, g_strdup_printf etc. committed the obvious patch. Filed the inherited attributes thing, seemingly most of the remaining win is to remove the un-necessary l10n strings in the main defaults/schemas file.

Staff meeting with Ralf, more mail thrash, poked at nautilus startup - wow, waiting for b-a-s to start is a pain. Dinner with pretty wifelet. Back to dig at b-a-s, grief the translation problem has exploded in the .server files: 96% of the CPU time is spent parsing XML; g_markup could clealy use a little optimisation love it seems: ~2Mb of .server file parsed in 240million pseudo-ops, 120 pseudo-ops per character parsed seems a little excessive.

2009-02-11: Wednesday.

Poked mail, lots of bug mail - wandered around reading and fixing misc. issues. Played with new laptop from the postman. Noticed a nomination for 'Geek of the Week'; what a horrible designation Geek is, nevermind the tie.

My thinkpad overheated & failed; backed up data, and tried again. Installed real software variously on the new machine. Poked at gconf some more.

2009-02-10: Tuesday.

Up too early, helped get the babes to school variously. Tried to catch up on sleep, no success - to work instead. Poked mail, rather a backlog from the weekend somehow.

Pleased to see Alex Larson's artifact free scrolling work in gtk+. Sorry to see Hub's news. Lunch.

More mail, filed queued bug reports from being away from the net. OPS all-hands call. Amused that the gconf regression test: 'test-persistence' takes ever so long to execute.

2009-02-09: Monday.

Up early, breakfast & off to the Eurostar. Poked at gconf performance some more. Several oddnesses. Firstly it seems that %gconf-tree.xml is 50% composed of the space character (pretty-printing, with 8 stop space indents). Knocked up a trivial patch to accelerate writing and save ~2Mb (of 5) here.

It seems that the split out localisation code doesn't apply to keys with no default - leaving the localisations inline, adding 25% (700K) to the size of the main tree we parse. Then of course we have lots of redundancy from duplicate mtime and schema nodes that could be cascaded into their parents, then there are un-necessary tags for eg. boolean default values, and empty descriptions. A quick breakdown might be:

Size/Kb Description

5221 size of my pre-existing %gconf-tree.xml

2717 literal white 'space'

729 l10n for items with no default key

332 mostly redundant mtime and schema attributes

1234 (magic) size after removing all of the above

Of course, there is still more fat that can be removed there, not least in the in-memory storage structures - and clearly in terms of reducing CPU-usage, removing redundant attributes and elements should be a priority.

Stopped off at the British Library briefly, lunch with Karen, happily passing through London. More gconf hacking on the train, saw the news in Cambridge - seemingly a large fire in Beijing fire, apparently rather nearby both RH & Novell's offices.

Knocked up a patch to inherit mtime from a parent node - to drastically reduce the number of attributes we need to parse; got to work on collapsing the schema attributes similarly.

2009-02-08: Sunday.

Up early; off to the Xorg room, got my key-signing goodness well underway. Enjoyed Matthew's talk, wandered the hall-ways some more, lunch with Keith & Eric A. Saw Eric B's nice 3D transitions on OS/X. Caught up with Zonker.

Back to the hotel with Doko, starting to understand the Brussels topology; out to the subtle death place to enjoy the acutely rude waiter and great company there. Bed late.

2009-02-07: Saturday.

Up earlyish, breakfast with some Gent-oos, off to the conference. Wandered the halls catching up with fascinating people eg. David Axmark, Keith P, Bdale G, Ted T, Danese C, Michael T, Simon P. Again - FOSDEM has an insane number of exactly the right sort of people around the place, interesting & fun.

Missed the talks I most wanted to attend due to rooms being entirely packed full of people - wow. Out for dinner in the evening with some Gnome & SIL guys.

On to the Gnome beer event, caught up with Thorsten, Matthew & Eric, back to bed.

2009-02-06: Friday.

Up early, packed, synched mail, swept drive, off to the station; to FOSDEM. Poked at odd fglrx issue on the train - somehow it turned up and broke my almost-perfect radeonhd experience, bother.

Chased an evolution off-line / attachments bug. Missed the Intel guys on the train, luckily hit the laptop-power carriage and, by some co-incidence, Andrew Haley, Alasdair Kergon, Matthew Garret, and co. Spent a pleasant time at the bar.

Off to the hotel, with Alasdair, out for dinner with Christian & the GStreamer crew; on to the Delerium thingit, great to see Simon again, catch up with the OO.o guys, meet up with all the right sort Free-Software hackers that lurk here, really good fun.

2009-02-05: Thursday.

Prodded mail, isolated a yast2 bug. Dug at OO.o OpenXML import issues. Looked at some boot-charts again, filed noddy gdm patch. Profiled main-menu, deferred 30% of the startup work, lunch. Calls in the afternoon.

2009-02-04: Wednesday.

Snow still lingering on the ground. Poked at boot time some more. OO.o team meeting, prodded USB debug device with a new kernel - after much fiddling with Greg, confirmed it seems like a new type, as-yet-not-supported-by-linux, wow.

Played with system-tap to get early_pci_allowed status out of the kernel, apparently mis-configured on my system and failing to compile (urgh), pinged Takashi. Eventually, after learning a lot about system-tap, from the very helpful hackers on IRC [ surely there must be a better way of debugging the kernel ], discovered pci_probe is (now) 8 - interesting at some level.

Alpha in the evening with Simon & Andy.

2009-02-03: Tuesday.

Work, lots of mail, lots of bootchart goodness. Amused by N. helping J. hang up all the wet nappies at great length, then when J. left, returning them to the washing-machine, causing some incredible double-take. Wrote up an interview. Chat with Peter, bug review.

2009-02-02: Monday.

Snow, lots of it - spent some time sweeping the drive to avoid difficulties later. Chewed mail, packed N. and M. off to hospital with J. No school for H. today.

Poked linker bits for Julian, quick call with Janneke, Compiz call.

2009-02-01: Sunday.

Off to NCC, did creche with Claire. Chris, Claire, Keziah & Jadon back for lunch. It started snowing, as Jadon played in the garden - settling too.

Snuggled by the fire, watched balmy DVD; did some research for a spoof theology of weather, "ban teaching isobars in school" etc. Psalm 147 - He spreads the snow like wool, and scatters the frost like ashes. - "ban the sinful divination on the weather channel!" [ or something ]. Lots of beautiful imagery in there for brutal twisting with an excessivly 'literal' (or de-contextualised) hermenutic; should be fun.

2009-01-31: Saturday.

Lie in, J. tweaked her back - earlyish lunch; out in the freezing cold to Lackford lakes - abandoned walk in forest due to perishing weather; played in the playground instead. Back, watched Sleeping Beauty, bed early.

2009-01-30: Friday.

More mail action, closed some bugs I can no longer reproduce. Prodded gnome-settings-daemon at some length. One-on-one with Kelli, more patch massage, hurt by some gnome-desktop ABI breakage. Profiled gconfd with valgrind, 1.4 billion pseudo-cycles on login - hmm; Clarity.

Out for a run in the evening, good to get moving again.

2009-01-29: Thursday.

Up early, a good night of it - M. kept quiet somehow. To work, tried to reproduce misc. already fixed bugs, finding interesting new bugs on the way, filed them.

Dug at helpex - seems to hurt my system, perhaps creating ~1000 files from the help content, per language, and then much later zipping them is the issue. I wonder if that could be optimised.

J. took Myriam to the doctor's with a hurty arm, turned out to be out of joint, re-placed in casualty - happier girl; phew. Lunch.

Special debug port turned up by FedEx, plugged it in and dug around on the net for information on using it, got minicom working, reproduced the hang, but failed to get sysrq to work. Poked GregKH - helpful man, turns out I'm missing some key part of the kernel.

Call with hpj & co; Kelli's staff. More mail chew.

2009-01-28: Wednesday.

Poked mail, chat with Milan. Dug at Coolo's preload bits. Lunch. Call with compiz guys, call with Tambet, space. Chat with Serdar.

Alpha in the evening with Andy & Simon over for dinner. Sorted washing mound between several little girls: I need a fool-proof heuristic for determining which garment belongs to which, that stays up-to-date with changing size and passing on of clothes. Surely there is a market for some amazing robotic tagging device that ...

2009-01-27: Tuesday.

Poked mail; pleased to see the screencast by Sam Spilsbury of NOMAD, explaining some of the new Compiz goodness from David. Of course, getting the fusion-like native-windows in video form too would be nice, and the work is still stabilizing.

Worked on text, early lunch, call with Fridrich & Chayim, poked at Wine, prodded an odd ORBit2 issue. Checked with Guy, and sent off my LXF column. Core team call. Ordered a USB debug devicelet to poke at my interesting lockup. Filed / committed OO.o a11y fix.

2009-01-26: Monday.

To work; prodded mail. Sorry to see Pete & Aaron let go from IBM. Poked at sreadahead / preload.

Poked at a patch for OO.o a11y, in the brave new world of XSettings, instead of GTK_MODULES environment variables. Sent it off to Brad to play with.

Misc. calls in the afternoon. Dug at an interesting suspend / resume issue around nfs (seemingly). Dinner, sync. with Patrick.

2009-01-25: Sunday.

Up early, J. had a lie-in, she looks so lovely asleep (as awake of course). Packed everyone up, and off to NCC, Thea spoke well; good to see Sam, Tyler & Michael.

Back for lunch with Nicholas, Jon and SanMarie. Slugged by the fire for a while talking, occasional guitar abuse etc. Put the babes to bed. Lots of others around for A Knight's Tale in the evening. Talked late with DT & Zoe, bed.

2009-01-24: Saturday.

Lie in, played with babes, and tidied up. Bruce & Anne arrived, then Suzannah, Clive & Mark - had a fine family lunch. Talked, read storied, etc. by the fire for much of the afternoon.

Mary Poppins in the afternoon, lots of sorting out of papers, and attempts to clear some of the archived junk from the attic. Burned a great weight of obsolete bank statements, mortgage recepits etc. cheaper than shredding, but somehow more furtive. Got stuck into some P.G.Woodhouse; bed early.

2009-01-23: Friday.

Up, poked mail; did some package downloading goodness, read some analyst reports. It is amusing to see that people who don't want to do something don't say they simply won't - but that it will happen a year out; then next year, when you ask them again, it is still a year out.

Noticed Jono's Art of Community book he is writing, no doubt it'll be a good read when it's done. Worked on LXF column. Lunch.

Call with Olaf & hpj. Interested to read about the self service checkout view of open-source development; Jeff explains the painfully obvious, rather lucidly.

Call with Guy, prodded at misc. packages. Clarity.

2009-01-22: Thursday.

Chat with Fridrich, tested Helmut's iwl3945 kill-switch fix, works nicely. Reviewed misc. libIDL patches with Kjartan. Prodded at, and filed bugs. Upgraded to the latest SLED11 RC, considered LXF blog.

Lunch, poked at a compiz hang; isolated the problem, interesting. Dug at a nasty pulseaudio / skype interaction inconclusively. Kelli's staff, DE meeting. Tried to get elluminate to work, unsuccessfully. Chat with Brady.

2009-01-21: Wednesday.

Up early, feeling pretty dead still; poked mail, filed bugs, call with Kendy. Lunch. Interesting call wrt. compiz in the afternoon. Alpha with Andy & Simon in the evening.

2009-01-19: Tuesday.

Packed babes off to school with J., poked mail. Read some X server code, trying to chase my hyper-slow memory copying / composite issue: three seconds to copy a full-screen pixmap seems sub-optimal; go fbCopyArea!.

Gave up and dug at some a11y lifecycle discussion instead for fun. Booked FOSDEM train tickets. Lunch with Charl & SanMarie.

Dinner, piano practice with H. call with Jono.

2009-01-19: Monday.

Back to the mail; bugs, clarity.

Decided to do some Web 2.0 research, apparently Facebook is just great - registered there to play. The add friend workflow is pretty poor: keyboard widget / focus traversal appears rather broken, I guess the popups are faked which explains the lack of wrap-around. A visible focus highlight is non-existent for many links / widgets and so on. Yet more irritating, is the captcha dialog which (apparently) has neither keyboard accelerators nor a default action for the entry box; urgh. Of course, right clicks everywhere bear a staggering and content-free resemblance to the browser's. Then of course there is the extraordinary profusion of unhelpful built-in browser / keyboard accelerators that make you go back / forward with no notice, and inevitably loose your data, urgh. "Yes Holmes, the 'application development platform of the future' includes this great 'throw away your data' feature, easily accessible from any number of keystrokes, placed carefully adjacent to the keys you like to press." Retreated quickly to a world of fat-client sanity.

Lunch, call from UK tax advisor, filed tax return, tried to pay large HMRC bill on-line, without obvious success, call with Carlos. Got stuck in an endless loop of recriminations with:
osc build Getting buildinfo from server wrong repo/arch?
tried various increasingly contorted combinations of repo/arch to no joy, still the same frustratingly unhelpful message - once again a wet-ware failure no doubt, filed bug.

Dug out some compiz startup performance numbers for David, put babes to bed while J. split to counsel a crisis, played with E. for some time to keep her calm until J. returned with food. Bed early.

2009-01-18: Sunday.

Up early, J. lie in. Dealt with dressing, feeding babes - got everyone into some sort of order. Up-ended, and dunged out the washing machine - washable wipes like to migrate down into the sump, with plenty of grey crud to match.

Off to NCC, leaving Father to test the machine. Janice spoke well, back for lunch. Slugged by a movie in the afternoon, bathed the babes; evening with M. & D. night punctuated by E.'s complaints.

2009-01-17: Saturday.

Lie-in; sleeping downstairs with E. in the room, not so good. Set too clearing and cleaning the house, Anne arrived, and smaller people set out to buy a birthday present for N. in the toy-shop (another dress).

H. who can now read well, purchased a fairy in a bar of water-soluable fluff with her own pocket money, "watch it come to life in the water..." - some considerable disappointment on the production of a dead (plastic) fairy. Hadn't considered that eventuality.

Auntie Louise came too; fine lunch, sat by the fire talking & reading to small people, up late talking to the parents.

2009-01-16: Friday.

Lie in, on a real bed, wow. Train home, prodded mail, calls with Guy, hpj, JP, hacked slides. The washing machine packed up, started over filling and making a juddering noise (prolly a jammed filter). Pleased to see Kate Williams if only in passing.

Mum & Dad arrived, and we set out to NCC's 25th anniversary barn-dance - danced until rather late, good fun, good of Claire to baby-sit.

2009-01-15: Thursday.

Up early, more meetings.

2009-01-14: Wednesday.

Meetings with Guy, Aaron, David & Vincent. Out for drinks in the evening.

2009-01-13: Tuesday.

To work, quick mail thrash, extracted Zoltan's sexy patch from Mono head - which kills a polling mode, should save power. Helped Bert remove his now broken motion sensor from his shed.

Poked quickly at the effect gettext has on boot / login performance, lots of reading tiny bits of data from scattered files there - a small cache might help, wrote it up for hpj. Filed Evo / GWise nasty. Call with Patrick.

Set off to London by train to meet Guy, Aaron, David & Vincent - a mini-conf in the making. Train, call with JP.

2009-01-12: Monday.

To work, weekend E-mail, administration, Clarity, sync with Rene. Pleased to see my cousin Andy Whitcroft now with a Canonical E-mail address, still working on the kernel - nice. Lunch.

Worked digesting a paper for Kelli. Dug at an evil performance problem afflicting compiz on my radeonhd machine - filed bug, why should it take 25 seconds to switch into a composited mode, all of it shuffling pixels in the X server ? . Poked at OO.o transitions a little again, call with JP.

2009-01-11: Sunday.

Up early, lunch preparation, off to NCC, ran the creche with Ruth, back for a fine beef stew with Dave. Chatted, and slugged much of the afternoon, watched Sleeping beauty.

Out to the NCC AGM, back late - with DT, Zoe & John for an ad-hoc evening session, until late.

2009-01-10: Saturday.

Up early, N.'s party day - dispatched into town in the freezing cold & snow to buy up party food. Back, applied house cleaning, washing up, more cleaning, making of egg sandwiches, the usual stuff.

Cascade of small people arrived to be fed & entertained - leaped about, eat far too much silly stuff. Eventually got the babes, and 'sleep'-over-ers (Emily & Naomi) to bed, with stories read to them, and so on. Exhausting.

2009-01-09: Friday.

Up early, after nightmares of French mice caught in traps. Checked the mouse traps - some of them are defective, and should be clearly more labelled "mouse feeding device", on the other hand, I got another one. I suppose it's an economic way of acclimatising the children to death, without having to own pets, or something.

Read to the children while J. dropped H. at school (freezing out), to the mail: responded to bugs, tried to encourage new OO.o developers. Lunch.

Chased & filed pulseaudio bug, afflicting my skype experience, pondered boot performance. Filled in my first ESTA for the US - seems like an accessible web-page albeit basic, and appears designed solely to duplicate the paper form; I wonder if it helps speed up passport control.

Poked at my radeon vblanking problem - whereby we block for ~2+ seconds on each glXSwapBuffers in drmWaitVBlank's ioctl (which tends to reduce the frame rate). And to think I thought it was using software rendering ... it seems a custom ~/.drirc brings Impress transitions back to normal, good.

Call with Olaf, Hans-Peter & JP, another with David, meeting with Kelli, more E-mailage.

2009-01-08: Thursday.

Up early for a conf-call with China, fun. Prodded beagled a little, more mail. Customer direct call from Kelvin, re-directed through the UK sales organisation, fun. Wrote minutes.

Lunch, Lydia over - admired her latest pottery creations. Back, Kelli's staff, quick calls with Stefan & Jeff. Bathed the babes, practiced the Piano with H. (improving nicely), and put them all to bed. Back to chat with Guy later in the evening.

It seems that a chunk of some people's problem with beagle may well be it indexing source directories in ~ - just reading all those deep hierarchies to grok source files that no-one in the right mind would want in beagle anyway is likely to blow your dentry and inode caches and may everything else appear 'slow'. Hopefully just adding a way of detecting a source directory: RCS files + Makefile ? and pruning them in their entirety would work nicely. Of course personally I have no problems, I hack in /opt (no idea why, it's prolly not LSB compliant).

2009-01-07: Wednesday.

Up early, more mail mountain scaling, bug fiddling. Poked at my gdm strace - to try to dig out some DNS timeout there. Pushed new yast2-gtk to the repositories.

Poked at the strace some more, why is it statting vga_drv 17 times on startup (and ~all other drivers), with 11 duplicates of hyperpen_drv and all other input drivers: most odd. Tried to get happy with osc some more with Adrien's patient help.

Filed evo hang with traces, booked flights and hotel for SCALE - should be fun.

2009-01-06: Tuesday.

Up early, more mail fiddling. Call with Noel, long sync with Guy, core team meeting, more mail.

2009-01-05: Monday.

Wandered across the mail mountain, it seems slashdot generated a flood of mail for me while I was away - most curious. Filed misc. queued up bugs, poked at Evolution summary migration on x86_64 - discovered an old and nasty 64bit portability issue wrt. moving summaries between machines.

Lunch, more mail pokeage, bugs, clarity, more wading backwards through E-mail. Sync. with JP, chat with Kelli. Pizza dinner, put babes to bed, back to work.

2009-01-04: Sunday.

Off to NCC in the morning, Tony spoke on notices, back for lunch. Put up some coat hooks at child height to try to overcome the avalanche of small coats in the hall. At least it separates the the coats from the tens of other redundant bits of clothing discarded (presumably) on the grounds of incorrect color scheme there.

Watched the end of The Jungle Book in the evening with the kids, bathed and put them to bed. Listened to a Gordon sermon.

2009-01-03: Saturday.

Up late, tidied up variously, Louise came over for lunch. Slugging all afternoon, and tax filing in the evening while J & Louise went out.

2009-01-02: Friday.

Up earlyish, out to Homebase with M. trotting along too. Bought a large sheet of MDF, some brackets and coat hooks: as always payed far too much for it.

Home, spent some time whittling a shelf down to the correct geometry - sadly the wall is (somehow) not at right angles with the unit next to it - requiring some extreme routing action. Managed to avoid electrocuting myself, more by providence than judgement while peppering the wall with holes. Moved a load of art pieces off the table & side - by rights things should look tidier now, but mostly don't.

Watched a little of 'My Fair Lady' in the evening with the babes.

2009-01-01: Thursday.

Up earlyish, eggs for breakfast - from the neighbour whose hens were going astray. Out to the race-course for some cycling practice with the babes - H. has it cracked but for a man-week of practice. N. needs more work. Phoned Nildram to try to get DSL authentication back - hmm.

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)

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

Size/Kb	Description
5221	size of my pre-existing %gconf-tree.xml
2717	literal white 'space'
729	l10n for items with no default key
332	mostly redundant mtime and schema attributes
1234	(magic) size after removing all of the above