Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit my employer
Novell which is an amazing company, and also
Dell who in days of yore provided me with a
free laptop for Gnome development / conferences.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Older items:
2008: (
J
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2007: (
J
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2006,
2005,
2004,
2003,
2002,
2001,
2000,
1999,
legacy html
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Still no baby, J. getting concerned: perhaps a good sign. Call from
Robert, call from at-build wrt. a building quote (not to be confused with
ooo-build). Started playing with banshee & filing bugs.
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Reflected on the parable
of the wise & foolish builders in light of Lake Delton.
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Federico pointed out that my cross-thread GObject construction
race
is actually a live bug, and I'm being a dofus since the apparent
fix was
included & in-effective; re-filed
& started to chase.
- TimJ nailed it from my repeatable test, and pointed out an
interesting paper
The Problem with Threads:
I conjecture that most multi-threaded general-purpose
applications are, in fact, so full of concurrency bugs that as multi-core
architectures become commonplace, these bugs will begin to show up as
system failures. This scenario is bleak for computer vendors: their next
generation of machines will become widely known as the ones on which
many programs crash.
The solution is of course obvious: to give staggering amounts of highly
parallel beefy hardware to an infinite number of free-software hackers.
Failing that, CPU vendors could do a lot worse than invest a fortune in
Julian's helgrind
thread checker.
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Lunch. Worked on some somewhat less interesting analysis task.
Read the recent Ray Ozzie (transcript - sorry .doc: "really understanding the importance of
interoperability") take on Open Source - that it is "potentially much
more disruptive than Google". I couldn't agree more, particularly vs. an
over-emphasis on open-standards (that allow proprietary software to interoperate)
at the expense of open-source innovation. I take issue with this
chasing the tail-lights meme I hear in several places: it's total
rubbish, at least when applied to open-source. Yes we can, and yes we
should do it: would the GNU project exist if someone hadn't been willing
to chase some (very distant) tail-lights in persuit of freedom ? pre-emptive
capitulation is just really silly.
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Dinner, worked late - call with JP, poked at beagle's I/O usage a bit.
Tried to build a new set of dri pieces for the latest radeonhd: stymied.
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)
