Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Off to NCC, Emily & Keith's last day - somewhat tearful; Tony gave a summary of Grapevine, back for quick lunch. Much more house prepping, cleaning, barbeque lighting, wafting. A sudden rush of very small children for Myriam's second birthday party.
• Very pleasant, leisurly afternoon, apparently two-year olds have more fun playing amongst themselves than in barely-understood party games. Caught up with the neighbours happily. Mike popped around in the evening to help with the leftovers.

• Off to the market - bought up excessive amounts of good things to barbeque tomorrow. Back for lunch, cleaned the house, concreted the inspection hole some more - played with a blowlamp and some spare tarmac - apparently, you can indeed make it more malleable with a flame, and it resists burning nicely.
• Amused to recieve duplicate payment reminders from Rentokil to Furniture Village, still at my house: apparently they have serious back-office issues. Lots of tidying of the house, washing of clothes & dishes, cleaning. Sandy around in the evening, long time no see.

• Miriam's birthday today - much excitement, dolls house from Grandfather unveiled, and packed with suitable dollies from us. Dug at mail, interesting.
• Gave up trying to unwind my dbus threaded oddness, and just created a connection per thread. Lunch, the rest of the family out with Nicki. Poked mango, FATE bits.
• Poked at more mail, split build bits with Calc, Chinese travel, dunged out the disk to install 11.1 Alpha2.
• Listened to the audio walk through of an accessible install of OpenSUSE. Wow, that is a great recording, gives me a palpable feeling of the sensation - not being able to see his screen. It sounds like he is using Ricardo's yast2-gtk installer, with Orca, and well - the flow should be vastly easier in 11.1 - with Mike Gorse' yast2/root a11y; even so lots of obvious improvements leap from the speaker.

• Up early, poked mail & Srini, tweaked code. Caught up with Julian's valgrind hackery. Did some more analysis of the configmgr deadlock - a simple lock ordering problem, with the magic of apartments and configmgr2 trying to be a separate thread-safe piece.
• Wrote up some notes for Frank. Dug at FATEal issues, long planning call in the afternoon, chat with JP.

• To work, chewed away at script to analyse evolution code ownership, generated list of yet more hundreds of clean files to update.
• Poked at a configmgr deadlock - apparently there is a nasty issue with the idle writer thread that does a service activation, while holding the config lock, while the service activation can do config lookups (holding it's own lock). Urgh.
• Quick lunch with Lydia, good to see her. Back to a surprisingly interesting all afternoon security meeting. Up late digging into some dbus oddness.

• To work - hack week, but lots of mail. Phoned BCD - glad they booked my flights, albeit without confirming to me. Phoned Rentokil's Tracy to re-explain that Furniture Village are still, not co-located with my home; gave their real address.
• Quick chat with Srini, more mail, told Clarity what I've been up to. Call with Janneke about layout. Encouraging to see all the great work happening while I'm away: must go away more often. Committed Mike's ORBit2 root/a11y tweak.
• Off to collect some spare laminate flooring from Julie, lunch, sync call with JP. Poked at OO.o local linking speedup, which seems to have bit-rotted a little.
• There are times when you need a strong stomach to read some C++, a classic example today; the somewhat pathetic non-existence of constructor chaining (cf. C# eg.): INI_LIST type macros; this simple 60+ line macro saves you typing all those huge constructor function calls (most of them to a constructor, with at least one fn. call in the arguments) multiple times: that means you can easily create a leviathan .text section, without even trying hard.

• Up early, re-admired laptop, ordered replacement power jack from the US, $33 vs. £100 to fix it professionally. Bank holiday today - missing a day of hack-week, bother.
• Out to Ely, to wander the cathedral, played with the frizbee, swings, slides, clambering etc. Back, a little more castle work; lunch. David left for home, missing the Veggi-Tales DVD & pop-corn, really good to see him.

• Off to Rock in the morning, J. dealt with the babes, solid sermon. Back for lunch at our place, with James, Kate & Peter. Fed them up. Played with the babes a little, examined the problems of in-castle shelf and sofa construction.
• Laura & Creighton arrived with broken Acer laptop. Diverted to this task, then out to Hope Baptist in Teversham to hear James speak in the evening - stayed for some after-service snacks, a fine community going there, interesting people.
• Back for dinner & more laptop disassembly - having removed almost every screw - and levered lots of plastic bits (many of which surprisingly failed to noticably break) located, and de-soldered the evily under-engineered power-jack. Never seen something so important, so obviously flimsy - the tragedy of the thing is that a beautiful and hyper-complex working laptop, should be laid low by a tiny piece of broken wire doing the simplest of tasks.

• Off to the market to stock up on good things, good to be home. David arrived at lunch time, great to see him. H. desparately eager to be building the castle afterwards. Instead headed to the gallops on bicycles to remove the rush from the children.
• Back home; expert flag-pole & flag creation & errection from David and Julia. Talked until late.

• Up earlyish, off to buy a 'big girl' car seat with the Peetle (Myriam), for a solidly successful potty-training experience all week, she seems very pleased with it.
• Packed everything rather slowly, and got the car stuffed full, roof box & all. Bid 'bye to the parents & brother & Ilona. Set off for a speedy & uneventful trip home.

• Lie in, slugged in the morning; out to Worthing to another park / playground in the afternoon, train ride around the park, lots of paddling and splashing around. Back, watched Herriot in the evening.

• J. lie in, played with babes. Rained much of the day - played Lego in the morning with them: made castles, tried to identify female lego 'men'. Lunch.
• Out to the lagoons on the front in the afternoon in the rain, played in the playground. Back, to watch the end of The Sound of Music.

• Lie in, then out to the Booth Museum of stuffed animals (mostly birds) or Victorian Taxidemi (depending on how you look at it). Good fun, some interesting pieces.
• Home to join in with Father's exciting drain-rodding experience, what fun - mercifully finished this before meeting Robert's charming new girlfriend Ilona. Lunch.
• Out swimming with the babies, Rob & Ilona - lots of fun, splashing, swimmin etc. Back to watch The Enormous Crocodile and other Rohld Dahl bits, and the beginning of The Sound of Music.
• Put the children to bed, played guitar with Dad's accordian practice (no better time to start to learn an instrument than your seventies) which went well. Dinner, talked late.

• Up early, J's lie in. Played with the babies, trained Dad on the uber-slow, but functional laptop. Off to St. Annes Wells garden in the afternoon - lots of slides & swings to play on. Slugged, watched the olympics a little. Robert feeling unwell sadly.
• Watched some of Dawkins on the TV, interesting - must get around to reading his latest book, if I can get it second hand somewhere. Sadly, he reminds me of myself age 16 - irritated by being made to study the arts, and wanting to focus solely on maths & science. Luckily later in life I discovered that, in fact, science has answers only for part of our experience, and that studying romance, history, art, theology is highly valuable. Amused by some of the hubris and misrepresentation applied to Rowan Williams - and the apparent lack of grasp of the history of thought on these topics for the last millenia: eg. the action of chance in producing us - who has not heard the stories of the meeting of people's parents as if at random, and been glad that < insert improbable event > occured, lest we not exist at all ? My personal favorite experience of seeing emminent scientists (eg. the UK's Chief Scientist) tying themselves in conceptual knots, and failing to understand was at a small lecture on a basic topic from the head of the History & Philosophy of Science faculty at Cambridge, an undergraduate course highly recommended before over-prognostication in public on these matters. As a banal analogy Ali G's demand to a vegetarian Eat this chicken, or I kill this other chicken ! condenses a fine moral dilema worthy of detailed consideration into a forum where an answer simply cannot be provided or even explored.

• Lie-in, and off to St. Lukes. Dealt with three in the creche, interesting talk to an ex. professor of parasitology afterwards, caught up with old friends.
• Returned to Father's birthday party - seventy-two sounds old, but he's active and in good spirits. Wandered across the parks to the new Hove Park playground, refurbished and in great condition. Thomas left in the evening - sad to see him go.

• Up early, frantic packing for a week and house cleaning; set off, late for Auntie Louise & Uncle Anthony's 50th wedding anniversary celebration: some serious goodness there. Lots of great food, a fine party.
• Out to a small local fair with Stephanie, Adrian, Adam & co. went on a tiny dragon roller-coaster with the babes. Back, set off to my parents for a week off; arrived happily. Thomas & Robert also there, good to see them.

• Phil the friendly beetle-killer arrived from Rentokil, with a water based spray, and a van full of interesting goodies; helped get him ensconced under the floor.
• Tried to make systemtap do my bidding. Found out more about kernels, the split between -obj and source, symlinks in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build, and so on. Finally found the bug is fixed in HEAD systemtap anyway, filed a SUSE issue, sent off a trivial patch. Sadly when it runs, it does something -so- strange to my system that it terrifies me; will come back later.
• Poked at mail. Discovered that the versionrc type files installed all over the place in OO.o are all generated from scp, which is fun; though the syntax for creating a simple flat text file with some substitutions is quite amazing - ~8 lines per line of output, with a magic 'Order' identifier and so on, turns a 30 line file into 255 hard-to-read lines.
• Finally got the split build actually working (for some value of work - no python or java components registered). The rest is just re-factoring & polish. Started a from-scratch re-build of it all again. Found another parallel build issue - I guess the nice thing about that is that OO.o's magic perl build scripts can do quite a good job of finding parallelism.
• Frank encouraged me to test systemtap under kvm, great plan got that going, upgraded the kernel etc. Quick call with Jared. System-tap working perfectly with a matching kernel & debuginfo package - clearly we need the NT_GNU_BUILD_ID feature turned on somewhere.

• Burned images for Mary Rogers with brasero, filed misc. bugs against it around the place. Poked mail, played with builder to create a bootable USB key image, filed bugs. Cyberorg used kiwi to do a rather better job.
• Knocked up an LXF column. Visit from Michael - the building regs inspector, he inspected things thoroughly. Phoned Rentokil to point out that builling Furniture Village at my address is unlikely to work that well.
• Tested Cyberorg's lovely Icecream iso - some OpenSUSE JEOS-like goodness - insert, boot, compile and watch your builds fly.
• While discussing with Mark Wielaard SUSE's lack of kernel debuginfo packages for updated kernels (bug) he pointed me at system tap example scripts - tried to play with the candy.

• Up early, mail; nursed overnight build breakage of my own creation. Quick visit to the Doctor, knocked something up about icecream.
• Lunch, Team meeting - some good talks & great work going on.
• Dinner with Mary Rogers, somewhat surprised to see the US moving troops into the war-zone in Georgia - even if for humanitarian purposes; still surprised to see the media talking about "Russian Citizens" in South Ossetia - the recipients of a recent passport hand-out precisely for this propaganda purpose apparently.
• Discovered Cyberorg just created an OpenSUSE/LTSP/Icecream setup to make it easy to re-use all those wasted Windows machines nearby for building things; nice indeed.

Something for nothing ?

First, if you don't happen to have spare computers lying around that you are not using and feeling pretty guilty about, this is prolly not the right oil for your snake. Also, please note the OpenSUSE is not that relevant: something similar should work nicely on Fedora too.

Caveats

Icecream is a sharp tool, it lets other people build software on your machine, needs you turn off your firewall, and it requires a working LAN. The wiki page is your friend. [update]: Martin Vidner points out that if you don't like to disable your firewall, it's easy to use some built-in rules; as root:
echo 'FW_CONFIGURATIONS_EXT += "iceccd icecream-scheduler"' >> /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2
/sbin/SuSEfirewall2 start

Invest one minute to make your builds fly

sudo zypper in -y icecream icecream-monitor # install the package < 5 secs
sudo /sbin/chkconfig --level 345 icecream on # enable icecream startup on boot

Next - decide if this is going to be the scheduler machine ? if so:
sudo sed -i 's/ICECREAM_RUN_SCHEDULER="no"/ICECREAM_RUN_SCHEDULER="yes"/' /etc/sysconfig/icecream

Then - start the daemon everywhere:
sudo /etc/init.d/icecream start # start the daemon ...

Finally - fix your path:
export PATH="/opt/icecream/bin:$PATH";
make -j8 # and run a parallel make

Non-griping

But I use different distros & versions on each machine - icecream pushes enough of your compiler and toolchain across to the remote host that this shouldn't be a problem.

But I like to turn the scheduler off / unplug my laptop - fine, icecream will handle your use-case perfectly: don't fret.

My mega-server is a 64bit machine, but my laptop is 32bit - fine, icecream will handle your use-case perfectly by default. It can even do cross compiling with more tweaking.

How do I know it's working - for those burned by the psychosomatic Gentoo experience, running 'icemon' can help overcome your fears (albeit at the cost of too much of your CPU):

(Thanks to Jonny Lamb / Collabora, or see an animated version).

But I run SLED ... - package here.

Credits

Clearly, the usual heros - Stephan Kulow, Michael Matz, Dirk Mueller wrote the software, Kendy said enough nice things about it & Will Stephenson, with Collabora actually showed me it working to great effect. Thanks guys, you made my builds fly. In my next blog post, perhaps I'll explain how by buying Mavis Bacon's typing tutor, you can double your programming productivity by simply increasing your typing speed; or something.

• Dug at mail, booked flights, more mail, chat with Srini, more inbox action - sigh. Kocked up a new python script to work out who has contributed to OO.o recently rather more accurately than last time. Created a perl script (which I still preferred to python for some reason, perhaps force of habit) to parse svn annotate output in various trivial ways.
• Finally got the ooo-build source split work underway again just as they day ends - Chris came over for a chat, good to see him again.

• Up early, checked mail - lots of interesting stuff, it's good to be back (at least for a week). Churned through FATE mail, booked travel variously.
• Lunch, tended the split build, more misc. tweaks. Massaged Mike's ORBit2 patch a little and committed it. Fixed up a ton of ant files to have more pleasant paths.
• Dinner, J. cut my hair; knocked up a quick prototype list to seed a membership process for OO.o, to try to get really representative council elections going.

• Off to NCC earlier than normal for breakfast before the service, good fun really. Met Charl and Sanmarie from South Africa, and had them over for lunch, and biking to the race-course. Really great to meet them.

• Cleaned out & thoroughly hoovered the afflicted room, discovered 3 other beetles - apparently the local spiders had wrapped them up, though whether they died after laying their eggs, no idea.
• Out to Molly's party with three babelets - 'Mr Marvel' was doing some entertainment for the children: simple magic, Punch & Judy, that sort of thing. Fine lunch, and a mini-disco-thinglet, mercifully very innocuous afterwards - lots of little girls jumping up and down.
• Back for lunch, the same chaps arrived to remove the sofa as had delivered it: wrapped it in plastic (much good may that do them), and hoiked it out.
• Off to James & Kate's 5th wedding anniversary party: great fun, lots of interesting people; good to see Rob & Sarah there - with Philip; you always meet interesting people at J&K's somehow. Back, bed exhausted.

• Phoned Furniture Village's Wayne who promised people to at least remove the beetle-eaten sofa, and provide a replacement; good. Cleaned up Bert's hedge cuttings - a rainy day. Spent a lot of time doing some months of filing, and starting on tax returns.

• Up early, mailed photographs of beetle to Rentokil, and off to the smashing Dinosaur Adventure Park near Norwich, good stuff. Lovely weather, despite the Met Office's dire predictions & weather map.
• Interested by Bob Sutor's comments that the Linux desktop needs better designers. No doubt he's right and luckily it's easy for IBM to fix that: bring some to the party (though clearly hackers are needed to implement their output & win people over to it). Having said that, is Notes or even Workplace nearer the summit of usability perfection, or even efficiency in the use of resources ?

• Prodded mail properly for the first time: wow, there is a lot of it. Played with Empathy some more, looks good, writing down the minor irritations for future reference / fixing. Call with Florian.
• Caught up with a certain amount of admin / bug filing. Call from Murfitts / builders wrt. a deadline for their quote: end of the month. Played with Conduit a little on the local network. Lunch with Laura.
• OO.o team meeting, call with JP, call with Grant, more talk with JP. After much digging into rpm things, I discovered that the mystic spec file goodness: make %{?jobs:-j%jobs} is best handled with some rpmbuild --eval '%define jobs 8' -ba foo.spec than otherwise, sadly much googling, manual and code reading didn't make this at all obvious.
• When is Open Source not that open source ? - when it is inorganic of course; J. reading a book Swindled currently on fake food (it's not as good as expected, perhaps like the food). Should we have an open-source FDA, that can name & shame harmful additives ?
• Dunged out the laptop disk, somehow filled 250Gb rather too quickly, kicked off some new m28 split builds.
• Poked at the sofa again: just playing with finding the depth of the various holes with some wire - when (much to my amazement) I hooked a hugeish beetle out of one of the holes; somewhat surprising to say the least. Stuck it on one of the Rentokill beetle sticking pads, though clearly these are designed for lesser beasts - it could move slowly around / off it. Managed to clap it inside a jam-jar, and kill it with some handy permethrin woodworm killer. Examining it it seems to be a False Powder Post beetle identical to the picture here: , Wikipedia is surprisingly unhelpful about Bostrichidae sadly.

• Up in the night with an upset M. encouraging reports of increased potty training success yesterday. Breakfast with Will, got down to work. Pleased to review a nice patch from Mike Gorse making the fast Unix Domain Socket path in ORBit2 work for the root user, making yast2 accessible as root, and (incidentally) speeding up startup of ~all Gnome apps just a little.
• Lots of interesting tweaks from Will, got Icecream setup locally to accelerate builds. Spent some time reading KDE code, debugging bits, Kopete, QObject, MOC output, KConfigXT etc. interesting stuff.
• Rentokill chaps arrived: Eddie Milton and Andy, admired the holes, helped chop open some of the plastic fabric covering, admired the rather shocking piece of timber, no obvious conclusions but that things came out, not in. Dropped Will off at the station. Dinner, babes to bed etc.

• Up, poked mail, synched with Will caught train with him to Cambridge, prodded mail; introduced to the joys of icecream. Rob arrived, lots of Telepathyesque discussion. Out for lunch with the Collabora team. Back, more talking, out to the Eagle in the evening for a pub dinner, back to Newmarket.

• J. lie in, out to the market with M. Applied slugging, and attempted potty training, with mixed success. Watched Mole DVDs in the afternoon.

• E. back to shorter sleeping cycles. Off to the market in the morning, forbidden from buying flowers for the lovely wifelet [ the infamous credit crunch you see ]. Back, for lunch. Various fruitless attempts at potty-training M. - she can do it easily, she just doesn't want to.
• Out in the afternoon to Lackford Lakes in the pouring rain; thankfully perfectly timed, such that the rain stopped as we got out, and we had the place to ourselves.

• E. slept for 8 hours in the night, wow - exciting stuff. Off to NCC to fix their networking, ripped up floors, pulled through old wiring variously. Interrupted by Andy from Furniture Village - who clownishly tried to suggest that perhaps the beetles came from the outside [ clearly laying their eggs on plastic, and then the larvae eating a 5mm hole in the plastic, then the wood: seems likely ]. Sent him off with suitable photos.
• Back to NOD, got the wiring done, and spent a while training a chap in the making of ethernet cables: somehow I (foolishly) assumed that every young adult can read the names of colors - got there in the end. Called back to talk to Rentokil's "Eddie", tried to setup an appointment for him to see it too: should charge an entrance fee apparently.