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:
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legacy html
- Up early, to work; poked at an ORBit2 bug (really the clock applet
setting a NULL string on a gconf key). Of course, gconf has several pre-conditions
to check for & fail in this case, but (sadly) whatever distribution thought
it would be a great ideal to speed up their build with --enable-debug=no (instead
of the more sensible minimal). This turns on G_DISABLE_CHECKS so:
#define g_return_if_fail(expr) G_STMT_START{ (void)0; }G_STMT_END
Unfortunately, that means that people's stack traces are pretty meaningless.
Strange too, I thought Sun proved (in the past) that the best option here was:
#define g_return_if_fail(expr) G_STMT_START{ if (G_UNLIKELY (!(expr))) return; }G_STMT_END
which retained the condition, without the large warning function call / string.
- Poked at mail. Apparently other people also suffer from the dbus API
usability problems, and there is some fragmentation here: Hoger Macht has the
wonderfully named
liblazy to solve the problem; then there is Rob's dbus-glib (which also helps
for the most simple cases, while apparently leaving the harder cases with a
mess of GValues). Fragmentation breeds fragmentation, but perhaps by writing
yet-another binding, of exceeding sweetness, the situation can be improved ?
- Chewed mail, tweaked bugs.
- Up lateish, to work; call with Srini. Up-loaded slides from my
recent
lightning talk on iogrind. Poked at fsview of my ~/.evolution - which is
apparently spread nicely over the entire disk.
- Pulled the latest evolution snapshot from
srinidhi's build-service repo; looks nice, filed bugs. Updated to
factory & filed more bugs.
- Yet more mail work, and back to deskice work, made it distcheck.
Dinner, J. out to study with Mary, back to the hacking.
- Dug at dbus - wow, what a nightmare of hand-written marshalling -
bit tounge, clenched fists and typed big, bulky, slow code to de-marshal a
simple array of structures. Hopefully someone, somewhere wrote a better
binding for C; poked Rob Taylor.
- Cycled H. to school; considered project names - really imperative
to choose an initial vowel so as complexity bundling happens, you are included:
consider the problems of replacing Apache with Zeus in the LAMP stack eg. Then
again SQL seemed to manage somehow. Wrote notes. Battled the dreamhost control
center.
- Mail action; call with Jeff, team meeting, call with Calvin.
Finally got to some hacking - sadly the most productive part of the day is
always just before I knock off (why?).
- Cell group, meeting until late with Brady, Kelli, Jared & JP.
- To work again; read Behdad's
nice preload paper that I'd somehow missed before. Poked Chris wrt. btrfs
directory layout.
- Wrote LXF column; pleased to see Linus giving sensibly qualified
support to Microsoft's recent direction (great, but can go further). Of course,
if Miguel were to say the same things obviously, he would get flamed.
- Interested to see my friend
Christian's interesting confidence & comment on the 10
Commandments (
Exodus 20) (which incidentally I applaud, discussion of such things
is good, albeit time consuming):
- Uraeus: Yet I remember when we where thought the ten
commandments in school I started wondering about how if those where
the direct words of God
Fair enough, and a good question to ask:
the passage says And God spoke all these words:
but can we know that ? and (separately) how can we know anything ?
epistemology
is an
interesting field of course.
Uraeus (emphasis mine): they by their wording seemed to clearly
indicate that women where the property of men since it said you should
not covet your neighbors wife, and putting women on the same level as
oxes and donkeys in that regard.
That would be a substantial accusation of course: this Woman & Man
both
made in the image of God, should one be the property of the other ?
lets read the text:
"You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not
covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or
donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
There are several simple points to make here:
- In contemporary English, it sounds revolting -
the 'house' comes first after all. Well, translation
is not trivial - and worse tends to be hampered by human
conservatism, cf. people preferring unclear & out of date
translations (or those that are similar to them). As I understand
it, the Hebrew word translated House matches this English word
well, but not in all it's senses: the sense of "only bricks
and mortar" is not suitable; in the sense of "household", "his life"
and "everything he owns" it does match: ie. this is an
all-encompasing heading, followed by elaboration.
- Clearly, contrast and enumeration serve to augment the all-encompasing
nature of the command. After the initial "don't want what others have got"
(colloquilized). The verb is then repeated, and we get down to
details, with a spectrum of things you might want to covet: from the
closest to his heart (the wife), to the donkey,
or anything [else].
- The insinuation (cf. Bishop Spong) that this is in some sense a
list of inferior chattels, is not present, but on the other hand, there is clear mutual-possesion
in marriage and simply because she is "my wife", does not mean I am
not "her husband".
- Androcentric language is clearly used in scripture, and the
law is casuistic: the coveting of husbands is clearly not acceptable
either, or of Kangaroos (or whatever). At a minimum, for economy of
language generic terms for humankind (such as 'man') are regularly
used; and context is important.
- There is nothing like this command in other ANE law codes:
prosecution would be somewhat hard; it's a pure moral command
from the God that knows our hearts & minds.
- Far from being sexist, or anachronistic, the 10 commandments
were, (and still are) extremely radical. "You shall not murder"
for other ANE
laws (arguably not informed by the national experience
of slavery in Egypt) - the penalty for killing very much depended on
whom you killed: aristocrats, citizens, slaves, women
(vs. men), the unborn etc. each a different value & hence penalty.
None of that context & baggage dilutes God's radical view of
human worth here (as one example).
In conclusion, there is no clear sexist bias here, and (frankly)
while I hold a rather egalitarian view of women (vs. complementarian incidentally)
there are better passages to develop that sort of argument from.
Uraeus: ... was edited as they didn't include the implicit
endorsement of human slavery that I find the the English version.
Well, of course this is nonsense - and particularly ironic given the
pedigree of
many of those who fought for the abolition of slavery: their faith was what
propelled them. Even more ironically, the 10 commandments - particularly the eighth
commandment was a key text in that struggle: indeed, the only
application of the
death penalty for theft is that of stealing persons
NB. the translation 'kidnap' is of the same verb here 'to steal'. ie. taking
free people, and enslaving them, though of course, there is
a lot more to
be said on the topic.
Personally, I'm a fan of William Cowper's poem from the time of
abolition, still useful today for those of a racist bent; that "Every
reader of Scripture should know":
That souls have no discriminating hue,
Alike important in their Maker's view;
That none are free from blemish since the fall,
And love divine has paid one price for all.
Anyhow, as Christian apparently experienced in childhood, often
children are offered inadaquate and unsatisfying (or even no) explanations,
which is really a great shame; Worship God with your whole ... mind.
Having said that, it's easy to ask more questions in a minute than can ever
be answered in a lifetime, if ever, however interesting they are.
- Lunch. Mail, bug massage. Chat with Radek. Objective and
Competancy(?) Management tool bits - built OO.o in the background:
which will complete first ?
- Finally some hacking, deskice, OO.o unit-test bits, etc.
- Up early, interesting breakfast with Joe; lots of
opportunities there, clearly. Meetings with JP's team much of the
day, great to see OpenSUSE's Gnome being cleaned up.
- Code reading on the train. Finally back home to my darling
wife & children, lovely to be back with them.
- Up earlyish, breakfast & taxi to the conference -
caught the end of the KDE talk; then JP's well attended Gnome talk;
Then Eike's calc formula internals talk; the calc team now have some
nice details
in the wiki which is great.
- Chat with Simon Phipps on the way back to the OpenSUSE
booth. Lunch with Mark Wielaard.
- Breakfast, back to work on talks. Taxi to the conference,
manic OpenSUSE DVD distribution at the booth, fun. Caught up with lots
of people, met up with Thorsten, Lunch, caught up with Rob. Did
lightning talk on iogrind; wandered off to help out some PostgreSQL
guys examine their file-system layout & tweak their performance
with it.
- Caught up with Eike, Stephan, and Louis: the Sun/OO.o
contingent. Sculled around, out to eat with the lads & on to
the Gnome party - up rather late.
- Up early, prodded mail, and started to get the laptop
setup for FOSDEM. Got DRI working, external monitors cloning, files
backed up, a11y updated, etc. I hadn't noticed Calvin's interesting
blog on the topic; no idea
why; perhaps reading more RSS daily would help An RSS feed a day keeps
the ignorance away
- Picked Naomi up from pre-schoo, lunch with her & the
wifelet, who took me to Cambridge; train - thankfully the Eurostar is
only ~60mins from Cambridge now. Cut down iogrind slides for a lightning
talk tomorrow at FOSDEM, started on an a11y slide-deck. Met a Chris Nice
in passing on his way to Brussels too.
- More slide-ware hackery, intense draw usage, filed some bugs
by E-mail. More unit-test .rdb file work - to avoid problems with
parallelism, install one .rdb file per module, and merge at unit test
time.
- Arrived, met up with the Novell desktop lads, and out for
dinner; good fun & on to the beer meeting - met up with Wim, Alp,
Rob & co. Back with JP, Fridrich, poked mail.
- Up extraordinarily early, Thorsten & boys kindly gave
a lift to the bus station, bus, plane, train. Hacked unit testage some
more, further investigation of vtreloc details - an impressively
quadratic tail-off in the number of unique named relocations (bindings)
in various different libraries. Found some interesting oddities in
configmgr symbol exposure.
- Bruce picked me up, home, slept. Up, dealt with the children
while J. took H. swimming, tried to attend a staff meeting in parallel
with little success, bother.
- Heated up dinner, fed babes, bathed, read stories to etc.
babes, put them to bed. Back to mail, bugzilla etc. Looks like a
fascinating new
development from Microsoft, and a coup for the lads in the
Interop. group there. Of course, there seems to be a few 'Z's missing
from RAND, but I look forward to seeing more detail.
- And the plaudits keep coming:
Roy Fielding resigns from OpenSolaris - as someone who really enjoyed
working with Sun for a long time, and is mostly saddened by the huge
opportunity they are peeing away here, this is a shame, again a medly of
excerpting (emphasis mine):
Sun didn't just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris;
they made promises about it being an open development project.
That's the only way they could get someone like me to provide
free labor for their benefit. Given Sun's recent track record
on breaking promises, another one doesn't surprise me at all. ...
Sun gave up its right to make arbitrary decisions regarding the
phrase "OpenSolaris" as part of its public agreement with the
community in the form of the Charter. ...
Sun agreed that "OpenSolaris" would be governed by the community
and yet has refused, in every step along the way, to cede any real
control over the software produced or the way it is produced, ...
Rather than be honest about it and restructure the community
to correspond to this MySolaris style of over-the-wall
development, Sun prefers to lie to the external community
members while ignoring their input. Yes, Sun has the legal
right to make that decision, just as it has a legal right to
dissolve the charter and start over with a new governance
model. The choices being made are NOT the problem. The problem
is the way that the choices are being made WHILE, at the same
time, portraying the project in public as a community-driven
effort. ...
Sun should move on, dissolve the charter that it currently ignores,
and adopt the governing style of MySQL.
- Of course - the MySQL comparison (and it's famous 'model')
is completely irrelevant to OpenSolaris, as can be understood by a
trivial inspection of who pays their revenue, but perhaps more of that
tomorrow: briefly, the MySQL model kills external community contribution,
but can bring in cash (if it works, and therein lies the hitch).
- After a frustrating time re-working the calc unit testing,
re-started iterating from the working configmgr case. Unwound a nasty
with the solver's Setup.xcu having non-conforming ${PRODUCTVERSION} values
instead of (schema conforming) values like 2.4. A custom Setup.xcu in the
(transient, per-test) user install would be better perhaps.
- Lunch with Thorsten, interesting discussion. Call with Jan wrt.
layout. More unit test hacking, managed to get enough of the infrastructure
bootstrapped & working to run a first simple calc unit test - adding
two ones via a spreadsheet, in the build tree.
- Continued hacking away at prettifying the infrastructure;
dumped the code, and the tiny skeleton generation pieces into comphelper,
with some fixes to regcomp, all that's required is some intense
Win32 / OSX fixing love. Set off a from-clean build.
- Bite to eat, filed a bug or two. Out for dinner at a fine, old
german restaurant in the evening, good fun, bed rather late.
- Up early; missed the train due to an omitted phone; slightly
late - hacked on bootstrapping calc from a unit-test on the train. Great
presentation from Gregor on the build-bots, updated the ESC
dashboard.
- Lunch, more discussion of what needs fixing, and some added
impetus with deadlines. Back on the train which sadly broke before it got
there. Lift with Thorsten back to Buxtehude, then a space for "real work"(TM).
Amused by Federico's
baby pictures. I guess the most exciting development from the ESC
meeting was Heiner's commitment to move OO.o fast to svn, and within a
year to a DSCM - git / mercurial / bzr (to be decided later).
- Lots of mail. Curious to read champion Ben Rockwood's
Sun Confirms Inflexability & Community Disregard post; I don't know
Ben, or the facts of the matter, and apparently he's not a hacker, and
clearly I care not at all for what 'OpenSolaris' stands for; but caveat's
aside, some of his blog reads to the OO.o experience:
Sun is making decisions "for" the community with no regard
to the membership or Governing Board ... Sun is holding all the keys
and while I trust 99% of the Sun employees involved in the community,
the fact remains that it would seem that none of them had a hand in
this decision ... OpenSolaris as it was conceived by the community is
a sham. ... we have open source but we don't have open development. Sun
has done an admirable job with releasing code, but Sun's track history
in the arena of open development efforts with the free software
community has been abysmal ... the MySQL model, which I refer to as
"glass house development", that is, you can look in at whats going on
but you're not part of the action.
- Back to unit test hackerage; got Thorsten setup with MSDN,
ordered pizza.
- Up early, breakfast with the family good to inflict my poor
German on the children; chewed over the various corporatey type things
with Thorsten.
- Train to Hammerbrook, hacked a little bit on unit testing / uno
infrastructure setup. ESC meeting all day with the lads.
Out in the evening; good to catch up with everyone, and get to know Heiner
a little better. Back on the train late with Thorsten.
- Up lateish, off to NCC - a family service, Helen speaking.
Back for a quick lunch, and off to the airport; visiting Thorsten &
Hamburg. Read the Economist for a while, before sucummbing to poking
my local icecore server.
- Thorsten picked me up from the central station, admired his
fine, extremely tidy home; dinner, chewed things over, bed late.
- Up early, off to the market with the babes, a buying frenzy.
Home, packed babes off with Mum to Olivier's birthday party. Back, M.
to bed, house cleaning, slept myself.
- Slugged mightily in the afternoon, packed, bed early: still
enjoying Understanding Dispensationalism: what could 'literal'
mean - the irony of the acute imprecision around a common word is
extraordinary; forgot to pack it.
- Up early, dug at mail, pointed a new guy at the VBA work.
Brainshare travel booking, at some length, ordered business cards, lots
of tedious stuff.
- Spent a long time chasing strange deskice / dbus-sharp
oddness, caught up with Alp, knocked off a patch. Amazed that d-bus
appears to have no sane way of marshalling exceptions, though pleased
that there is expansion space for this. Reliable determination of exactly
what kind of unusual error occured has to be a useful feature.
- Children taking turns to wake their parents in the night.
Drove everyone home, tiredly. Poked mail, setup some svn accounts.
Fixed my deskice race-condition & committed various cleanups, good.
- Lunch. Chat with Kendy, back to ice-iness, call with Kelli,
call with Fridrich, then Thorsten, then conf-call, and still the strange
behaviour is unaccounted for. Dinner.
- Wrote briefing document, fiddled with hotel booking, bed
late.
- Up early, mail prodding & sending. Interested to
see OpenSUSE being used for
Video storage by the BBC, linked from the OpenSUSE Weekly News.
- Poked at baobab with Sankar, hopefully iogrind can help
accelerate it; then back to deskice. Lunch, interview with Todd. More
deskice polish.
- Out for dinner in the evening to the Parrot & Punch-Bowel
with the wifelet, lovely meal and ad-hoc folk music from next-door, fine.
- M. upset in the night; tired. Poked mail, boggled.
Hacked away at deskice, great to see Srag helping out there. Added
credentials storage to deskice, saves a lot of typing too. Further
cleaned up un-readable monodevelop generated autotools output.
- Apparently BT removed the block on irc.gimp.org: nice
people. Call with VJ after dinner.
- Hack week this week: nice, this is the week where we do
all those crazy, critical, but (somehow) never resourced fun hacks.
Where the team takes time off from it's load of paperwork, iTeam
formation, meeting attendance, conference-calling, union activities,
specification writing (and all such other things that make life worth
living), and focus on the tiresomely fun process of innovation. Lets
see what happens. Chewed mail.
- Mathias Muller-Prove's blog on User Experience related
topics can be read here for
those interested. Kicked off the latest OO.o build.
- Prodded metacity on the new
radeonhd driver - the 2D composited desktop appears to fly, yet
supposedly, there is no 2D acceleration; I wonder how it can be so much
worse with fbdev.
- Finished interview for opensuse. Lunch. Chat with Brady,
phoned BT to complain that port 6667 is being blocked for irc.gimp.org
but not irc.freenode.net. A fairly amazing experience with the
(off-shored) call-center: Ulrichi, apparently completely ignorant of
the basics of the internet, TCP/IP, what a 'port' number is, and so on.
Luckily her supervisor's advice was to talk to PC World - some great
insight there. After waiting for an interminable period, listening to
(not bad) music, they cut me off: go BT ! tried E-mail instead.
- Patched deskice's autotools a little.
- Up early, packed car, off to NCC, spoke. On to Bruce
& Anne's afterwards - a beautiful day. Slugged at their house
for the afternoon, attempted to either use, or teach use of the
pogo stick (with little success). Bed, slept badly.
- Lie in, breakfast, made a picnic lunch & set
off for Thetford Forest - wandered, climbed on various large
wooden toys, enjoyed the spring sunshine etc. A lovely time
had by all.
- Back, worked on sermon for tomorrow, using
John Jefferson Davis's analogy (from his book
The Frontiers of Science and Faith) between the
peculiar consequences of quantum mechanics, and the doctrines of
pre-destination and the omniscience of God. Should buy that book.
- Cycled H. to school, checked mail, thread calming
and approaching communication: nice. Poked at building yast2
on Alpha2 - somewhat easier with the dependencies, hit by
cryptic cmake errors, hey ho.
- Lunch, filed Alpha2 bugs, managed to get a local
webdav server setup (eventually), lots of stale docs on-line
sadly, the mod_dav
faq did it in the end.
- Call with Kurt & Naji, call with Janina, dug
into the X server for Stefan, found my bug. Dunged out the
laptop with baobab (pretty circular space charts). Poked at
Boyd & Brady's project, looking fun.
- Up late, poked mail. OpenSUSE Gnome meeting - well
attended encouragingly. Poked at the new Conferencing product,
and the lwp code some more.
- Got an Alpha2 install running to poke at yast2, call
with Calvin, Rob, filed installation crasher.
- The children took turns to wake us in the night - hmm.
Up early, cycled H. to school, poked mail - what fun, sent Jon some
hints on swampy bits in the toolkit/vcl interaction. Read Kohei's nice
ScCompiler patch - finally, perhaps we can get the English to like
entering formulae into calc =SUM(1,2,3) (without hurting our
continental friends of course).
- Never realised that
Stephen Fry grasped technology issues as well as begin rather a
fine comedian.
- Thought I'd publish a (cryptic) internal presentation on
vtable relocations
I must say, the new chart color scheme is better - with a bit of
gradient and some prettier borders the result would it'd look incredible.
I'm looking forward to Armin's drawing-layer re-work landing.
- Reported / updated various bugs, extraordinary OOo dev mail
thread, chased an X server issue. Poked at a strange DT_NEEDED issue
with calendar-lookup-applet: most odd.
- Pleased to see IBM's Lotus Workplace code finally starting
to land in OO.o CVS, particularly the long-awaited Lotus Word-Pro
filter (at least for 1.1.x) - interesting to read the code having spent
too long trying, unsucessfully to unwind the binary file format - cool!
- Up very late waiting for a meeting with Kelli &
transcribing a sermon for Sunday; no meeting, bed 12pm.
- Up, slightly better, talked to Duncan, poked at the
yast2-web-wt prototype, interesting. Dug at mail. Installed 11.0
Alpha1 to poke at yast2-gtk a little, Coolo has kindly been doing
a great job of keeping it building.
- Pleased that Joe Brockmeier's joining Novell got announced,
we have a cool / new OpenSUSE community manager, neat. Team meeting.
- H. to school, prodded the web. Burned old cruft to DVDs to
clean up storage. Quick call with Jan wrt. translation. Read through the
mass of bugzilla mail from the cleanup.
- Booked travel for FOSDEM
possibly the best conference of the year, should be fun. Checked out a
finance presentation. Caught the end of the ESC meeting, worked on a
presentation for tomorrow. Felt grim all day. Chat with David in the
evening - a skiing survivor.
- Off to NCC, Emily speaking (back from mission in New York),
did creche, bounced babies etc. Back for lunch, snoozed on the sofa
while H. played Childsplay's packman game.
- Hannah, Nick & Joni popped in for tea, had a lovely time
with them. Bed early, J. caught up with Louise on the phone.
- Up early, took babes to the market, feeling pretty rotten.
Out in the afternoon to Clair - with play-ground, ruined castle,
abandoned railway station, and ducks: a fine time had by most.
- Back, babes to bed, watched The Departed a twisty,
violent film, lots of suspense though.
- Took H. to school, poked mail, quick call with Jarek K,
prodded Win32's named pipe APIs, interesting, read the d-bus socket
code, hmm. Dug through bug mail.
- There are times in life (like just before you install
a load of unstable packages) that I really wish linux had file-system
snapshots, Go Oracle,
the on-line conversion from ext3 -> btrfs sounds insanely neat.
- Call with Thorsten & JP, Architect popped around in the
middle. Created OpenID account thingit. Poked Nat's project. Played with
Brady's new server, and read Java code.
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)
