Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
|
|
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
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
),
2007: (
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
),
2006,
2005,
2004,
2003,
2002,
2001,
2000,
1999,
legacy html
-
Tried to catch up on urgent mail very quickly, without much
joy. Off to Bressingham Steam Museum, for a fine day out with the
children: Tesco vouchers took the entry cost to under 2 UKP, and
somehow - after chatting to a passing local journalist pleasantly,
we ended up with a free season ticket; neat.
-
Took lots of hot & exhausted children home with some
considerable extra griminess from clambering on big engines (etc.)
riding on the merry-go-round, tired too. Poked mail again, worked
away at it until too late, sigh.
-
Phoned furniture village to call out their insect inspector.
Dealt with shady 'Frank Smart' who apparently has taken a load of my
personal data in an un-authorised fashion from our letting agency.
Filled forms, sorted building papers, much admin - while baby sitting.
-
Called Nildram to try to have them explain where many of my
packets are going - apparently they like to disappear on-route, in
an intermittent fashion. Very clueful L2 guy, but no obvious solution.
-
Into Town to negotiate with, and help out our existing letting
agent: nice chap. Back, Victoria, Mike & Rebeccah over for tea -
lovely to see them, had a great evening.
-
Set off for home after lunch, got back, tried to plan the rest
of the week off, dealt with post and accumulated answer-phone messages.
-
Discovered some fairly amazing exit holes, complete with swarf
in our new Furniture Village (where quality is always guaranteed)
leather sofa. Somewhat disturbing that the neat circular exit holes are
5-6mm, which is somewhat large by wood-boreing standards I think. Yet
more amazingly, the neatly drilled hole extends through the plastic
webbing covering the timber. Quality surely entails using treated wood,
right ?
-
Up at 6:15am, tried to keep M. quiet and sleep in her bed,
despite demands of 'arms', 'cuddle', 'drinks' etc. Watched children's
DVDs from newspapers for a while. Woke J. for breakfast.
-
Out to Sizewell beach with Anne, much fun had by all, digging a
trench in the sand, and building a castle under the breaking waves. Swam
with the children - an experience marred only by a large number of white
jellyfish many (apparently) dead. Appreciated the view of the nuclear power
station
~3% of the UK's power (according to the Economist). Particularly interesting
too the small amount of string that takes all that power to the consumer.
-
Back for lunch, to wash sand off the kit; and out to the Aldeburgh
park for swinging action: H. learned to swing without holding on: good fun.
Back for baby bathing, dinner and bed.
-
Up early again with M. off to Aldeburgh CofE where we were
married; rather a good sermon: he explained the passage clearly &
took it seriously.
-
Sue & Clive left before lunch. Out to the swimming pool
with three, leaving E. in the afternoon: pretty taxing keeping three
small people afloat and alive, even without E. - good fun though.
-
Much of the morning spent with children, or preparing food
and furniture for the big combined birthday party. The stream of
relations arrived - lovely food & wine, almost too hot weather.
A great celebration of ageing Griffins.
-
Up early, slept in M's bed trying to keep her quiet until a
human hour; breakfast. Off to the Aldeburgh sea-front boating lake with
(birthday-boy) Bruce's new radio-controlled boat. Played with that -
though clearly it is either too fast, or the pool is too small.
-
Wandered the beach, back to B&A's; paddling pool out, and
reading of the paper; lunch. Sue, Clive & Adam arrived in the
afternoon and helped prep for tomorrow's party. Fish & chip supper,
and bed early.
-
Semi-lie-in, the children's light failed to come on early, and
new things in their bedroom distracted them until 7:30 or so. Breakfast,
idly packed swathes of the house into the car. Set off for Aldeburgh.
-
Smooth journey, despite jam-packed roof-box, and car full of
fun-sized people & their accoutrements. Arrived, light lunch outside:
very hot indeed, played with scooters, radio-controlled spider, and other
misc. delights of the Griffin residence; read the paper.
-
Lazed in bed, playing with daughters etc. for a long time -
the start of two weeks of paternity leave; nice. J. took everyone on a
picnic while I finished up some queued work, before we quit tomorrow for
Aldeburgh.
-
Gotcha'd by perl's broken syscopy documentation, as apparently reported in
2002
bother. Interested in el-reg's reporting
of Verison's LiMo choice:
We chose LiMo because it's a collaborative effort. It's not just
one company runs the place. We like that. We like a collegial and
collaborative effort, where there is no barrier to entry on the
part of developers and, at the end of the day, there is no one
entity that can say 'OK, here's how we were playing now. The rules
are changed.'
LiMo will be our preferred OS because of this openness.
Whether sincere or not, I couldn't agree more. Give me a genuine,
open, plural community any day over a single vendor dominated one.
-
Finally created the first draft of a paper on culture I've been
meaning to get to for a while. Knocked off to play with returning kids,
have dinner, bathe them & put to bed.
-
Hunting around for keys to car roof-box, eventually located
them; fitted box, un-packed all manner of wonderful things from Julia's
friend - moving away, with lots to give away.
-
H's birthday, some presents in bed, breakfast - packed
everyone off for the last day of term. Mail, poked at more
splitting action, finally made make_installer.pl obey me.
-
Out to Newmarket Open Door to see about keeping
their network going during building work - pleasingly the SLED10
system there seems to have been running beautifully as a router
and workstation for 'yoof' for the last ~20 months, without any
problems; nice.
-
OO.o team meeting, out to Pizza Express for a birthday
dinner with all & sundry; back - presents, bed-time; back
to prod the building pieces.
-
J's birthday - up early, fed babes, poked mail. Amused to see
Red Bean's take on virtual software.
More split bits, misc. research. Read the nice LXF review of OpenSUSE
11.0, good stuff.
-
Conf-call with Mike, Mark & Rob wrt. a11y - sounds like
they're doing some great work there. Oddly un-productive ODF/Wiki IRC
meeting.
-
NCC, Tony speaking, met Mike a Sandwich Forensic Scientist,
had him over for dinner. Played in the garden on & off - cycling
practice. Bathed everyone, bedtime stories all together. Bed peacefully
modulo the loss of M. precious 'Duch' (cloth) - and inadequate
replacements thereof.
-
Up early, frenzied party preparation, out to the market with
Colin. More cleaning, and preparing, made boat-cakes; girls got into
pretty dresses.
-
Deluge of little girls arrived - lots of fun games: musical
dots, pass the parcel, jumping around with cups of water, a post-box
race thing. Fine party food, etc. Lots of tired & happy girls to
put to bed.
-
Off to get the car serviced; admired the Prius - albeit
with it's tiny battery, adjacent to a large amount of
effectively wasted boot space: odd. I'd love a plugin Prius,
with a real battery; and 6 seats - waiting is the only option.
-
Plugged away at scp2 translation, remembered to write up the
split-build stuff for Ingo. Finally escaped for lunch, Bruce &
Anne visiting, quick lunch; banged out an LXF column on GUADEC, call
with Catherine. Annoyed by an Evo/GWise bug - chased that down to
a missing mutex.
-
Fixed annoying warning in orbit2. Banged away at make_installer
to rip it's guts about: frankly scp2 seems so unpleasant and unnecessary
for Linux systems, it seems of dubious usefulness. Discovered to my joy
the hard-coded magic of 'gid_File_Lib_Vcl' - which has to be there as
a magic template, and the tens of lines of cut-and-paste that proove
that it really has to be there in several places; bother.
-
Barbara & Colin arrived for the weekend. Dinner with them,
up lateish preparing H's cake and catching up.
-
Realised that I'd changed my splitting strategy since building
the URE, tons of .rdb location issues: patched them all. Couple of
conf-calls, wrote up some minutes.
-
Discovered I get two weeks of paternity leave, but have to take
them adjacently, and soon. Submitted layout paper for OOoCon, this year
just before the deadline as opposed to just after. Back to packaging.
-
Mail pokeage, admin do-age, fix misc patches, idle splitting,
more GUADEC follow-up mail. Lunch, meetings all afternoon: JP's staff,
OPS meeting, DE meeting.
-
Out in the evening to work-around oddness with Chris' disk;
pleased to see XGL working on his ancient built-in Intel chip-set,
neat. Out for a drink later.
-
Amy took H. to school, prodded mail - well pleased that firefox 3 managed
to save & restore (over a hardware lock-up) not only the pages I was viewing,
but the small essay I had typed into a text field; nice.
-
Poked at an at-spi problem for Mark & Mike, all the same problems
come back every now and then to bite us: thank God some of us have made all the
right mistakes before.
-
Helped N. with her cycling on the road before lunch: improving - 5 paces
without falling off; lunch. Team meeting, more splittage.
-
Up early; Amy took H. to school - walked with her to the
post-box. Back, dug at the mail. Read up on Caolan's recommendation of strict
aliasing - interesting stuff.
-
Poked at DNS lookups, apparently Nildram can't answer them quickly;
even back-to-back; annoying. More mail, prodded package splitting in the
background, fixed my breakage for Rene. Nildram finally fixed the issue
somehow.
-
Found the business cards of the interesting chap I got chatting to
on the flight in, from Zero
Waste a company apparently converting tyres to oil.
-
Woke M,, lunch, set off to collect H. waylaid by J. returning from
the hospital, E. discharged, great. Back to work. Finished expense filing,
more split build tending.
-
Let J. have a lie-in; dressed everyone up & headed off to church.
John & Alba's marriage being blessed - lovely service, great to see them
looking so happy: did creche. Service sadly cut short by having to take E. to
Bury for the penultimate set of antibiotics.
-
Home for lunch, tried to get cleaned up a bit. Played with the babes
in the road on bicycles & scooters - N. improving nicely & very
stoical when bashed variously. Bed early.
-
Up early, quick breakfast, checked mail; set off for the airport
- amazing to see the queueing ships, presumably waiting to go through
the strait. Arrived at the airport, no passport, grief. Applied prayer,
& hunting - phoned Hubert who located it at the front-desk (apparently
this is a feature-not-bug). JP very kindly rescued me by taxi & I
made it to the plane, thank God.
-
Thinking over GUADEC, having talked at length to Tim, I'm just
slightly convinced that ABI breakage is worthwhile in the short term;
and having given lots of grief about it, that it will be measured &
manageable for existing software to move without huge disruption; and
that the gain is real.
-
Uneventful flight home, wonderful to hug little people left
& right, and relieve the parents of their labour of love. Lots
of fun, though far harder work than conferencing.
-
Up too early, off to Jonny's Evolution / MAPI talk, where we
announced the evolution re-licensing, and dropping of the copyright
assignment: read Srini's mail
here (appallingly wrapped due to mailer/connectivity issues at GUADEC).
This is great news in general, and good wrt. getting the Evolution / MAPI
connector shipped.
-
Lunch with JRB, chat with Jon about gdm, and Richard about
PackageKit. Long and interesting talk with Mark, rather re-assured
that his passion for bzr is for the love of it, not self-interest; must
take a look at it. Caught up somewhat with Matthew & Rob, on to
Federio's keynote & then out for dinner with Miguel, Owen, Gabriel
etc. at a fantastic restaurant. Back early with JP, via the blue mosque.
-
Sad to see that Joe
Barr passed on.
-
Off to the conference with JP & Aaron, skipped breakfast somehow;
call with the lovely wife: E. improving markedly, thank God. Great Telepathy
talk from Rob, and interesting talk from Michael on Moonlight: I didn't realise
how de-coupled from Mono 1.0 is.
-
Lunch with Federico & a GSOC guy working on memory fragmentation
detection with valgrind: interesting. Chatted to Tim at some length after
lunch, met Ryan Lortie for the 1st time: most interesting. Call to the
long-suffering parents at home, apparently coping.
-
Owen's talk - interesting, and another, great talk with Ryan.
Wandered the outside & off to the ship-board collabora party: excellent
beer and copious food, cake cutting for Gnome's 10'th birthday from both of
it's founders: good times. Boats have a certain partying auora, since the
first GUADEC. Back late with JP, talk, mail, bed.
-
Breakfast with JP & HPJ, off to the conference. Luis' opening
keynote, long & interesting talk with Dirk, interview with Andreas,
waylaid by long talk with Mark Shuttleworth.
-
Lunch with JP, caught up with Federico's sexy UI ideas; chatted
with the Evo. team, Owen, JRB. Afternoon, chatted to Tim at great &
interesting length; Dinner with Mikael & Richard too.
-
Back, for a musical bonanza on the roof; and lots of interesting
people: Karl, Leonart, Philipp, Don, Vincent, and many others. Back to the
hotel - spent much of the night checking mail, downloading things &
talking to JP.
-
Cheryl took H. to school, great. Poked mail quickly, captured
bug list from the old laptop install; fell over an interesting b-a-s
staleness issue,
despite the nice fix from Ray
to slave it to the session dbus lifecycle. Apparently the session dbus
refuses to behave itself properly and quit on Zap nicely, so the great
concept fails in practice. Isolated the (proable) root cause of b-a-s
not quitting cleanly itself.
-
Pleased to read Brian Proffitt's
Sun
should loosen up article:
The company must learn to let go a little bit and let the open
source ecology proceed naturally. In the short term, Sun might lose a
little bit of advantage in the market, but long term, it is has a
better shot at success.
Start with OO.o: give us real, meritocratic governance and real (instead
of sham) compromise on code ownership (as we have outlined & requested)
- instead of trying mightily to avoid both issues while feigning 'Open'ness.
-
J. arrived home in distress from the Doctor's. E. has a
temperature, bubbling at the mouth rather & she's heading off
to Bury Hospital; called the parents. Put N. to bed, and committed
b-a-s fix.
-
Pleased to see docs
on how to track down wireless / NetworkManager issues; it often seems
pinning blame on the kernel vs. hal vs. NM comprehensively is too hard.
-
Got the Peetle up, lunch, tried to work while lego towers were
built by the remaning girls. Mum & Dad arrived, got a bit of work
done. Dinner, packed things for J.
-
Dad drove me to Bury St. Edmonds hospital, found J. and E. in
a state of some exhaustion & drip-fed-antibiotic goodness, poor
dears. Talked with J. bid 'bye. Drove home, dug at mail, pinged misc.
pending business.
-
Dealt with the kids while J. slept, NCC - Janice spoke well.
Heavy showers (as forcast) rained off a joint rounders match. Home,
lunch. Installed SL11.0 on the hold-out laptop downstairs with some
dodgy pre-beta of SLED10 still on it - nice: 3D effects work
beautifully.
-
Breakthrough in toilet training for Myriam - apparently the
comprehension of the (now) impossibly attractive prospect of the phased
incentives: sweets, 'barbie pull-ups', playing with dad, 'big-girl'
knickers & finally a new car-seat pushed the balance. Also, fairly
sure the individually wrapped & choose-able chocolates, and the
sudden interest from big-sisters in 'helping' helped mightily.
-
Up early, J.'s mastitis rumbling on (poor dear); she slept while
I waited for the builder. Builder never turned up, phoned him, still
never arrived. Bother.
-
Lunch, off to the Newmarket Carnival - mercifully rain-free.
Wandered the show, paying through the nose for fairground rides for
innumerable little people. All Saints got to the final of the tug-of-war.
Had a beer with Chris & admired his steam roller, still going strong.
-
Poked mail, call with Vincent, into ESC meeting. Interested by
the do we need
users discussion in KDE-land. Personally, (for a broad definition
of developer), I couldn't agree more: just taste the OO.o community -
where non-developers are 'empowered' more than developers - for a while
to experience how bad it can get. Of course, this is unrelated wrt. the
target of the software you develop - that clearly has to be users.
-
Continued source-split work vs. m21 - better, I don't have to
do the patch forward porting in the same pass. ESC meeting finished
early. More mail chewage.
-
Poked mail, realised today is an all-day OpenOffice ESC conf-call;
fun (or not). Call with Florian at lunch, lunch. More ESC conf-calling,
interview. Late for Kelli's staff, desktop meeting.
-
Pleased to see militant leftists frustrated at the happy ending of
the personal tragedy [ no doubt justified as: for the greater good of
making property history ] of Ingrid B. Also amusing to see
another leftist darling: Chavez, caught supporting armed aggression in a
neighbouring country (while pumping up the gini co-efficient at home), all
in a good cause no doubt.
-
Dinner, chatted with Sue in the garden - most pleasant.
-
Prodded mail, back to the split package building interest: lots
of very slow & intricate work; pulled some patches up to m22. Call
with Janneke, lunch. Packed beb303-m2 for Rene.
-
Conf-call with the desktop crew.
-
Poked mail, read reports, annotated them; agenda poking.
Tweaked source packing script. Call with Naji, OO.o team meeting,
corporate call.
-
Fascinated to watch a small bug crawling between the
backlight and the LCD - gives a great insight into the internal
geometry of the panel: like xroach, but far slower &
un-kill-able (without a permanant splat).
-
Long and interesting team meeting. Put babes to bed, out
for a run with Suzannah; dinner, bed.
-
Cycled H. to school, brief mail pokeage, more paper work reading.
Dug at packaging, in parallel with misc bits, chat with Simon, Lunch.
-
Call with JP, poked Kohei. The newest go-oo
version with all manner of nice features
beyond what is in Sun's OO.o got released, lots of bug fixes and improvements there.
-
Hyper-lengthy phone-call in the afternoon / evening, slogged away at
packaging pieces in between. Pleasant dinner with Suzannah - great to have her
here to help, baby-wise.
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)
