Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Played with babes for much of the day, while J, went shopping. Out to Charlotte North's birthday party in the afternoon with N. at the Funky Fun House - tried to arrange thoughts on paper, with little success.
Back for dinner, poked at the wycliffe web-site, then 'stewardship' - totally dumbfounded by the staggeringly unusable if not downright horribly inadequate donation process: if God loves a cheerful giver - the frustration here is presumably a feature to whittle out any good cheer. Every year, I hope the situation has improved, and every year I see it has not.

2008-12-19: Friday.

Prodded mail, talked VPN bits with Bin Li. Knocked up a document, chat with Alex. Wondered why OO.o 3.0 takes 5 seconds to save a document of a trivial size, created a far larger document instead - that also takes 5 seconds to save - amazing indeed - profiling required.
Quick dinner, calls with Jeff; then Carlos.

2008-12-18: Thursday.

Got Cedric to the airport bus on time (Luton is clearly somewhere you don't want to go to from here). Prodded mail. Call with Eyal. Lunch.
Upgraded my 64bit machine to OS11.1 - looking nice, helped weed out a broken mirror issue with Peter, poked at a column for LXF on flash disks, quick sync. with Kendy.
Of course OpenSUSE 11.1 was just released, the Live CD is a great way to play, with only a small download. Of course the new zypper makes adding your favorite missing piece slick & easy too.
Kelli's staff meeting, call with Alex, sync. with Nat; J. helped improve my prose, bed.

2008-12-17: Wednesday.

Up early, dealt with M. again - baby sat while J. got H. and N. to school. Back for more fun with Cedric; out to N's pre-school play - very sweet.
Back, more discussion with Cedric, misc. phone calls. Fish & Chips for dinner & sat uplate by the fire chewing over misc. Linux tools for debugging OO.o.

2008-12-16: Tuesday.

Training with Cedric - spent a while on corparate bits; some overviews, dived deep into the writer code on a long & amusing call with Florian.
Convinced I've hit on the future of programming: what we need is a graphical programming language, and what better to implement it in than OpenOffice.org draw using the flow shapes - we can save as ODF, use some XSLT to generate JavaScript: today's performant langauge of the future that can run anywhere on the server, or the client, in the meta-virtualised thin-cloud ! A great advantage of this might be that no programming skill is required anymore to write an office suite: just drag and drop. Complicated threading problems can be collapsed by the GUI, the critical specification can be included as a multi-page adendum to each flow chart element, and consider the sheer productivity wins from the new language ... First of course, we have to re-write OO.o using it's own graphical language, errr... or something. Long rest in a darkened room to overcome buzz-induced madness.
Misc. calls with Peter, Kendy et. al. Slept the sleep of the dead, modulo gratuitous awakening to deal with N., and stripping the bed & washing a sick M.

2008-12-15: Monday.

Prodded mail, talked layout with Janneke, and indexing APIs with Philip. Lunch, BU call, call with Miguel, then JP. Off to Hannah's school play - lots of small people dressed up sweetly, back. Cedric arrived for some training action - somewhat crazy activity-wise home-life intruded on things, back to work.

2008-12-14: Sunday.

Up, off to NCC, did creche. Back for lunch, met an American service-man chap: Ryan on the way, had him in for a drink.
Cleaned the house at some length, got the fire going; Tim & Julie came over for tea - really lovely to see them, talked much of the afternoon. Dinner, bathed the babes - M. (still suffering from a crack-down on her bad behaviour), is a great neologist "un-lid it!" being the latest demand, in conjuction with closed bottles.
Dinner; dropped the computer table off at Charl & SanMarie's for safe keeping. Home, bed.

2008-12-13: Saturday.

Up earlyish, breakfast - got everyone crammed into the car, complete with various presents - and set off for P. Risborough for the annual Steam-train / Father Christmas experience. Amused that Mary commuted for the first few years of her career to London on a steam train.
Arrived, had lunch with Sue, Clive & Adam, mulled wine, etc. and off to the train. Good to see Steph & Jonny, Sam & Charlie again - albeit briefly. Enjoyed the train.
Back for cake & drinks, and drove home agian in the mist and rain - a thoroughly lovely (albeit wet) day.

2008-12-12: Friday.

Got a set of nice mails about Devel::NYTProf for perl profiling; apparently that would be the way to go if the problems were not so (relatively) trivial to find - thanks lazyweb.
Read bugs, followed mail, still pretty groggy; updated to the latest factory packages. Chat with Vincent. Lunch. Poked make_installer.pl again - saved another 2 seconds by the somewhat counter-intuitive trick of turning a 60k entry array into a single string, and then running 20 (pre-compiled) regexps on it - instead of doing ~1 per entry, and occasionally all 20. 2secs to 0.2secs is quite a win - I wonder why it was so bad before; I had carefully compiled with qr// the regexps. Anyhow nice to achieve at least some hack no matter how small.
Call with Kelli, then sync with Guy. Clarity. Dinner. Mary Rogers came over to sort some fund-raising out with J. back to work for a bit.

2008-12-11: Thursday.

Up in the night, thumping cold, can't sleep. Increasingly disillusioned with perl's SmallProf - methinks it lies unhelpfully. Switched to -d:DProf instead which looks saner. Found and fixed some really dumb algorithm taking 10 seconds, ~25% faster, good - it's still amazing to me how slow perl regexps (even pre-compiled) can be.
Mail; knocked off for breakfast, took H. to school, parents arrived - feeling pretty dead, talked to them for a while, nice to see them. More mail, lunch. Got a build of the latest ooo-build going nicely, committed misc. fixes.

2008-12-10: Wednesday.

Up early, prodded mail. Appreciated the 20 great quotes from RMS. More mail.
Ricardo suggested his approach to yast2 / ycp debugging: ln -sf /dev/stdout ~/.y2log - nice, leaving stderr for in-line custom fprintfs. Lunch.
OO.o team meeting, good to catch up with the lads. Tried yet again to get my pristine up-stream build to actually compile, sad really. Poked at the profile of make_installer. 1.8 million iterations of copy_collector taking 20 seconds; 1.2 million get_string_of_modulegids_for_itemgid taking ~perhaps 30+ seconds - fun.
Quick call with Kohei, Denzil. Read more perl - some just amazing code in there.

2008-12-09: Tuesday.

Poked at profiling perl applications to work out why make_installer.pl is so fearfully slow - why should it be ? More calls; pleased by the Q4 CTO employee meeting - seemingly we're all more engaged than ever; a bonus. Call with Scott.

2008-12-08: Monday.

Up early; poked mail, updated bugs, re-tested; slogged away at organising things, lunch; call with JP. EMEA earnings call, more conf callage.
Had Jon over for dinner, great to catch up with him - lots of interesting stories.

2008-12-07: Sunday.

Off to NCC, for Thomas' dedication - fine meal for the whole church afterwards; good to see so many great people. Home, dug out keys & showed Charl & SanMarie around our house.
Back; amused to notice that the result of not filing my copy on time for Linux Format is being featured as the telesales, susbcription photo. Played with the babes, piano practice with H. bathed everyone, cleaned up the house a bit, bed early.

2008-12-06: Saturday.

Up lateish, porridge; baby-sat while J. headed into town to plunder Woolworths and stock up on fruit & veg. Re-affixed external vents - drilling cheap wet brick is most curious.
Lunch, out to Lilly's party in the afternoon - bouncy castle, party food. Back, the babes watched Ratatoille; bed early.

2008-12-05: Friday.

Prodded mail gingerly, poked at yast2-gtk issue; burned by ycp again: what other language hides important syntax / parsing error messages away in an obscure log, and only when you have Y2DEBUG defined will divulge basic ycp parsing errors ? That yast2 works so nicely despite that, is clearly some sort of miracle.
A slew of company meetings today, post the earnings announcement. Lunch with Effie & Carol - looking after the babes while J. does a Pregnancy Crisis class for excluded children.

2008-12-04: Thursday.

Run out of mice to trap, or I've selectively killed all the chocolate lovers (hopefully the females); replaced Myriam-mangled vent outside. Poked at mail, filed more kernel bud scheduling while atomic syslog fun - I should run netconsole with verbose logging all the time perhaps.
Tried to unwind some ximian mail forwarding problem spamming my colleague with a deluge of ML traffic. Prodded a yast2 / slab crasher. Pleased that sudo zypper si OpenOffice_org-calc at least fetches the source now.
Lunch; SanMarie dropped in for it - back to work, call with Patrick. Discovered my flash disk boot partition type changed to vfat from ext2 - magic, can boot again; horay. Another dose of corporate conference callage.
Phoned up Robert & Thomas to try to divine what they want for Christmas, chatted to Thomas at some length - interesting.

2008-12-03: Wednesday.

Interested to read some anecdotal piece on managing programmers; perhaps a surprise only to anyone that has never been one: increasing the process barrier wherever possible has serious costs, not least in quality & motivation of staff. Having said that, a lack of concern for fixing serious bugs causes other problems.
Mail thrash, chat with Guy. Lunch, more mail. Tried to reproduce the (prolly thermal) CPU hang I was suffering. A rash of calls, DE meeting, chat with Jeremy.
Dinner, Alpha introduction here with Andy & Simon - it seems we're running an Alpha course at our home Wednesdays at ~7:30pm with meal, for the next few weeks; all interested in attending most welcome; mail me. [ NB. being close to Newmarket, UK helps substantially, linked web-site is shockingly poor; bug filed ].

2008-12-02: Tuesday.

Up early, J. reports hearing the trap go while feeding the baby, and some considerable thrashing: bother - seem to have one asphyxiated mouse, which had managed to eat the chocolate from the other trap first, clearly a jumpy creature.
To work, poked mail, sync with JP, poked at layout again, prodded yast2. J. returned home upset after a bump; lunch, spent some time on a paper. Meeting wrt. training.
Tried to install Fedora 10, booted the live-CD: pretty graphics, having said that Anaconda actually made me finally love YaST (with gtk+ front-end of course); wow. Filed ticket for the install failure; almost certainly user-error again bother. Dinner, J. off to meeting with Mel, back to work - chat with Greg.

2008-12-01: Monday.

Mail prodding, call with Florian, then Kurt & co. Prodded a yast2 bug to keep my hand in; more mail, OO.o bits, lunch. Filed misc. un-filed bug back-log. Poked at ipsec tools a little, call with Janneke.
Pleased to see Ricardo found & fixed a lurking, un-noticed GtkTreeView RTL bug, that has been there for years un-addressed. Nailed another y2 bug to cut the backlog.
Managed to find a recent nemesis, who silently disables my firefox cookie and password preferences behind my back: gnome-web-photo is the culprit: as (in this case) randomly called by evolution to thumbnail an HTML attachment on a specific groupwise meeting request; thankfully managed to track it to the source instead of filing deranged "Groupwise kills firefox settings" type bug.
Knocked off to discover some mouse-gnawed toy downstairs under the piano: set traps baited with chocolate, dinner, call from Louise, bed.