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.

2008-07-04: Friday.

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

2008-07-03: Thursday.

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

2008-07-02: Wednesday.

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

2008-07-01: Tuesday.

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

2008-06-30: Monday.

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

2008-06-29: Sunday.

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

2008-06-28: Saturday.

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

2008-06-27: Friday.

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

2008-06-26: Thursday.

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

2008-06-25: Wednesday.

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

2008-06-24: Tuesday.

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

2008-06-23: Monday.

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

2008-06-22: Sunday.

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

2008-06-21: Saturday.

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

2008-06-20: Friday.

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

2008-06-19: Thursday.

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