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:
2008: (
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
),
2007: (
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
),
2006,
2005,
2004,
2003,
2002,
2001,
2000,
1999,
legacy html
- Cycled H. to school; poked at mail - delved into
autobuild. Fixed a couple of rather critical yast2 bugs, Rodrigo kindly
volunteered to add them to autobuild.
- Looked at reports of poor performance on OO.o startup;
finally found an area where strace makes a noticeable difference to
performance:
javaldx. The purpose of javaldx is to
(cunningly) grope your system - to look for performance-enhancing
java goodness: here are some stats:
| syscalls | 182000 |
|---|
| of which lstat64's | 161000 |
|---|
| normal (warm) start | 0.74 secs |
|---|
| under strace | 11.7 secs |
|---|
| strace log size | 17Mb |
|---|
Of course, we like to re-stat the same place a good few
times, presumably we don't trust the kernel that much: 51k stats of
/usr, 14k of /usr/lib, 13k of
/home etc. sigh. Perhaps the frenzy is just revenge for
not having any java on the live-CD system.
- Chased my nautilus (non) re-thumbnailing issue a little.
Wrote an ical scrubbing script, and sent calendar data off to
Federico; more bug pokeage.
- Booted opensolaris in KVM (eventually) - though it was
clearly not a happy operating-system with only 512Mb of virtual RAM;
despite having ~the whole live-CD in Linux' page-cache. Tried to get
to the root account: no
sudo; su - prompts
for a non-obvious password; interestingly vs. openSUSE's 11.0' LiveCD
there is no OpenOffice included; odd. Interesting to poke at baobab
to see the size breakdown of the live-cd - odd to have 130Mb of
fonts included, and nothing much to use them; Solaris suffers from
the gconf.xml.defaults malaise too - of ramming tons of translations
into a single file: when will the world stop doing this: 50Mb of
irrelevance ?
- Deciced to race the install in with an identical VM
with openSUSE (1 CPU each) - apparently both do an image copy.
Started openSUSE at 67% of opensolaris, got bored enough that when
I came back at 84% of opensolaris, OS11.0 install was long
finished, re-booted & did the post-install setup; overall
OpenSUSE at least 3x faster to install, prolly more. Unfortunately,
having not created a user account, and given a blank root password - I
can't log in; hey ho. Persuaded to file my opensolaris bugs - at
least they run a recent version of
bugzilla there, in contrast to OO.o.
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)
