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: (
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2007: (
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legacy html
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Up early, breakfast with Thiery from Airbus working on their
interesting avionics, as well as video for Linux. Off to
First Baptist's early
service; small congregation, but a good sermon. Back to the hotel,
phoned home.
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Profiled my new sandisk 8GB USB key, it can do the same
25Mb/sec that the built-in EEPC SSD does - good to have that baseline.
Off to the airport with Alasdair - good to get some vicarious
sight-seeing in.
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What with the general disapprobation from kernel people
about OO.o's pagein binary (that maps and touches each page
linearly), I did a little testing of launching OO.o from flash;
interestingly, even with a free-seek medium, pagein gives a win:
| type | readings | average |
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| with pagein | 4.160, 4.081, 3.987, 4.023 | 4.06 |
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| without pagein | 4.311, 4.759, 4.379, 4.571 | 4.51 |
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So 10% slower without pagein ie. just relying on the
posix_fadvise for shared libraries - even on cheap seeking SSD,
and even though the pagein -should- load more data than we
actually use; sad.
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Interested by the push-back to Greg's talk. While it was
perhaps a tad sharp, and could have been more broadly generalised;
his numbers reflect my day-to-day experience of the developer
community. Perhaps the most encouraging thing is that a lack of
up-stream contribution to the shared code-base is now (rightly) seen
as a negative thing, and I'm pleased by Mark's recent commitments
to resource Canonical's up-stream contribution. It's also interesting
how quickly the 'objective' conspiriacy theorists start slinging
allegations - personally my bias is clear: if someone doesn't want to
use my beloved SUSE for whatever reason, I heartily recommend Fedora
to them - if only because of the huge number of developers I respect
& call friends that are paid by RedHat, working together with us
on projects I care about. In time, I looking forward to being able to
recommend Ubuntu for the same reasons, at least to that tiny minority
that dislike green colour schemes.
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Met interesting girl (Marketa) on the plane from Vancouver
(to Prague) from her cruise ship: the Star Princess, an economist
and hair dresser / beauty therapist. Managed to avoid any beauty
therapy.
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Thinking of desktop cold-start times, it's interesting to
think how little data we extract from 3Mb of scattered hash files
in
/usr/share/locale-bundle/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/* an
lsof on those shows an interesting picture. Strangely, when I log
in. I only see less than a handful of translated strings on my
desktop - surely we an do better here. Perhaps some LD_PRELOAD'ed
gettext pre-cache might save some seeks.
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)
