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: (
J
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2006,
2005,
2004,
2003,
2002,
2001,
2000,
1999,
legacy html
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Off to the market, shopping; home - back to bed. Up, lunch,
out with N. & M. to the playground while H. went to Keziah's
party. More cycling practice in the afternoon, some useful slugging.
-
Cooked breakfast; more practice with H. - now getting remarkably
good at balancing - counting her progress in paces of un-interrupted
bicycle free-wheeling.
-
Packed, and drove home; more practice in the street - discovered
the brake chaffing the (somewhat bent) front wheel, and fixing this
doubled H.'s best-distance to 70+ paces: nice.
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DVD for the children, combined with efforts to write a covering
letter describing the building work we want done; failed. J. out
baby-sitting, and got back to it - alternating with E-mail and so on.
-
Breakfast; off into Aldeburgh to wander through the town.
Traditional admiration of the RNLI life boat. Back - spent a fun
time helping H. learn to steer a bike & balance herself - with
a suitably de-pedalled children's bike from the local tip: 3 for
a pound. Great time.
-
Lunch, more balance training (in the rain) after lunch;
poked mail.
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Poked mail quickly, some debugging fun with Rodrigo. Curious about the
AMD 780 radeonhd work; I updated my git repo and was unfeasibly pleased to
see the 3D / DRI work by Matthias Hopf starting to appear there.
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Found
gbookmarkfile doing a thousand or so time() syscalls for no reason
while digging through strace code. Poked at gvim - which appears to provoke
compiz into doing it's window-selection effect: XWarpPointer is even more
harmful than I thought, as you see in this gvim
KWin 3.1 workaround.
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Lunch, some more work; dropped Rodrigo at the train station. Poked
at pulseaudio a little. Filed and isolated a silly in the PolicyKit adjust
date dialog; filed GL transition crasher, tried to create a simple test-case
to make gdb misbehave even with debuginfo symbols.
-
Set off for Aldeburgh with the family for a break; got the children
into bed; fine dinner.
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Up early, breakfast - disappeared up-stairs with Rodrigo for
some mail processing. Poked at super-irritating pulseaudio glitch-fest
on my oldest, slowest machine - stracing the daemon we see that it's
waking up 5x per second (or so) and some rather unfortunately long
poll response times: eg.
1211970599.543457 poll({snip fd details}], 14, 186) = 1
1211970599.543928 gettimeofday({1211970599, 544334}, NULL) = 0
ie. we ask to sleep for 186us, and we get control back to call
gettimeofday 471us later. Of course, quite why we are waking up -so-
frequently, and reading ~20 bytes of samples, and going back to sleep
for such a short time is unclear to me; 260 poll / recvmsg's per
second - just to play a mp3; odd. Could it be that
this is the solution ? Unfortunately esd works (apparently)
perfectly on the same machine at a much more sedate 14 2k reads
per second instead.
-
Hit upon a nice e-d-s crasher. Wrestled with memos, and got
some sent in the end, and the web tool setup for vacation Thur/Fri.
Lunch. Call with Jeff, interview.
-
Hacked with Rodrigo on misc. bugs. Out for Dinner with
Rodrigo & his sister Eva's family - pleasant; bed late.
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National holiday. Lie in, took N. out for a treat with her
Father: went to Ely, wandered around the Cathedral, had 'chips' for
lunch at a local pub. Back to a playground in the grounds, and thence
home.
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N. sickening on return home - perhaps too much wandering in
the rain. Set too getting the new phone extension wired up, the
conduit fitted, network connection point wired etc. A fair degree of
success.
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Dinner, bed early; up to fetch Rodrigo from Stanstead rather
late, returned home; bed again.
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Mini lie-in for J. extreme potatoe & carrot peeling action. Off
to NCC - DT speaking for the first time: caught some good stuff from the
creche.
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Home for lunch with Elisabeth, Josh sadly flying, fine chicken
crock pot; talked and played with the children for some time; watched
Madeline.
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Dinner, Martin, DT & Zoe around to watch I am Legend in
the evening: a surprisingly good film. Bed late.
-
Up lateish; into town with N. to do the shopping variously.
Lunch; out to Mepal Outdoor Centre - for assorted play-ground, climbing
fun. Lots of child near-submergal experiences in the 1 metre deep
ball-pool: quite fun.
-
SUSE rock-star Michael Matz made my whole month with his
three line gdb patch to make debugging un-instrumented x86
binaries work again; nice.
-
Gave up on hoping that Gnome would serve my blog sanely -
apparently asking for it is a denial of service attack. Duplicated
it at
http://www.go-oo.org/~michael/blog/index.atom.
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To further confirm Michael Matz is my hero - I did a comparison of
OO.o debugging. OO.o is interesting because the debuginfo package
you need is 275Mb small - but of course, you actually need rather
more than that: the glib debuginfo package and various other
pieces. Here is the trace before the patch:
(gdb) bt
#0 0xffffe430 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1 0xb6eb21d7 in *__GI___poll (fds=0x8641990, nfds=6, timeout=599) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/poll.c:87
#2 0xb554f6f2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#3 0x08641990 in ?? ()
#4 0x00000006 in ?? ()
#5 0x00000257 in ?? ()
#6 0x08641990 in ?? ()
#7 0x00000006 in ?? ()
#8 0x00000000 in ?? ()
And afterwards:
(gdb) bt
#0 0xffffe430 in __kernel_vsyscall ()
#1 0xb6eb21d7 in *__GI___poll (fds=0x8641990, nfds=6, timeout=599) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/poll.c:87
#2 0xb554f6f2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#3 0xb554f9d8 in g_main_context_iteration () from /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
#4 0xb5b3d68d in ?? () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvclplug_gtk680li.so
#5 0xb54f4751 in X11SalInstance::Yield () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvclplug_gen680li.so
#6 0xb7e06cf1 in Application::Yield () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
#7 0xb7e06d3f in Application::Execute () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
#8 0x08071c53 in desktop::Desktop::Main ()
#9 0xb7e0a27e in ?? () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
#10 0xb7e0a41a in SVMain () from /usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/libvcl680li.so
#11 0x08066c60 in main ()
Save your download bandwidth quota (and the planet too) by grabbing a
new gdb for your OpenSUSE 11.0 from here.
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Discovered & filed a juicy gcc -Os crasher. Lunch - Tina and
children visiting, good to meet her. Back to work, mail to chew.
Finally got around to writing up some of my thoughts on how to make
the OO.o Community Council more relevant, representative and frankly
interesting to people, that Louis asked for;
posted for discussion, though missing the drawings.
Call with Kelli.
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Poked at mail, waded through bugzilla entries - filing bugs certainly
creates lots of work. Apparently USB died on my machine, the hardware
flaked which is interesting & unusual. Made some floppy disks to
flash the BIOS just in case that helps - brought back some heady
memories of using Linux for the first time. I should really build
a VM with the DOS games we wrote back in the day in assembler.
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The Microsoft announcement that they will natively
support ODF is at some level encouraging. And better - MS will
join the ODF TC and contribute: which could be really interesting
(be careful what you wish for). Of course this may end up being
really good for ODF: it all depends if the blatant psuedo-technical
competitive marketing continues in the (already dysfunctional) TC context.
We'll at least see if all those who kept chanting:
"MS should build the extensions they need for interop on top of
ODF"
were actually sincere, or whether they now switch to an equally shrill albeit
contradictory:
"They are evily embracing and extending our standard"
Given the feature sub-set problem in ODF, can you have the embrace
without the extend ? Of course, it is possible that MS (unlike Novell) have
no real interest in improving the serious inadequacies around interop. in ODF,
in which case their customers will just get upset:
"why does my document look different when I save as ODF, and re-load it in Word"
or even
"Why, when I select ODF mode, do so many features disappear in the UI"
Can you imagine the synthetic outrage that either of these will generate ?
Then again, perhaps they will want to improve interop. in the standard,
at which point we will inevitably quickly hit the:
"This can't go into the standard because there is no
implementation in OO.o [or perhaps the more sophisticated 'multiple
implementations']"
type argument, or will that be waived - in which case we will hit the:
"OO.o can't load & render it's native file format"
chestnut - which of course has always been true of KOffice's ODF use
and which we keep hearing re-iterated in various forms about Office 12 and
OpenXML.
Anyway - at the end of whatever "pick your own fight" session we're in for,
when all the dazed, confused and exhausted pundits grind to a halt there are
perhaps two lessons that will become obvious here:
- Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to decieve
- Open Standards are good but Free software is far better.
-
Woke Florian up, while he was on vacation: drat, should have known he
would travel to some exotic spot. FreeDos fails to boot on the hardware
on which I need to flash the BIOS. Whence, a working DOS boot CD ?
finally found a dusty floppy that worked, flashed the BIOS & USB
returns: amazing.
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Lunch, back - a deadlock in b-a-s: drat; debugged it; it turned out
to be an horribly evil nasty - when do you avoid emitting 'broken'
callbacks in the mainloop when a connection dies.
-
Various conf-calls in the evening - found an extraordinary busy-loop
in gnome-keyring-daemon, apparently burning up ten+ seconds during
login: not ideal.
-
Started trying to debug the non-booting / kernel panic of my AMD64
machine: most odd - played with install and remove of packages:
still some odd things going on there. Tried to track down an
intermittent firefox crash in valgrind: with no joy. Filed a broken
USB issue (hmm) - tried the latest kotd: still no USB, not good.
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Lunch, Lydia around. Poked #sysadmins about my strange blog woes,
good to see Jeff again. Interesting that
www.gnome.org
answers replies to queries rather differently depending on where
they come from (apparently) - some people just get ECONNRESET almost
immediately (perhaps a firewall issue). Of course, wget works from
everywhere - here is the query it does:
GET /~michael/blog/index.atom HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Wget/1.11.1
Accept: */*
Host: www.gnome.org
Connection: Keep-Alive
vs. the query the uber-powerful (etc.) feedparser code does
(apparently due to some fun charset love:
GET /~michael/blog/index.atom HTTP/1.0
Host: www.gnome.org
A-im: feed
Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept: application/atom+xml,application/rdf+xml,application/rss+xml,application/x-netcdf,application/xml;q=0.9,text/xml;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1
User-agent: Planet go-oo +http://planet.go-oo.org/ Planet/2.0 +http://www.planetplanet.org UniversalFeedParser/4.1 +http://feedparser.org/
Presumably the latter looks like a DDOS attack, but only from some
IPs (perhaps go-oo.org has a dodgy 2nd hand Russian-Mafia-style
IP address).
-
Pondered LXF column. Kendy produced a lovely patch
to reduce the N^2 statting stupidity in OO.o trying to find java
at OO.o startup I was
moaning about - should more than halve OO.o startup time in
a virtualised world.
-
Out into Cambridge by bus to meet Christian & Rob at the Cambridge Camra beer festival. Unexpectedly met
an old acquaintance Christian Ashby outside, also Simon Kelso, then tons
of people inside: Steve Macintyre, Andrew Haley, Matthew Garret, Ben, and
lots of fun people from Amino and
SolarFlare; with more
random acquaintances: Keith Cooper & Alan. Apparently Cambridge has a
higher density of cool kids than most places it seems.
-
Poked mail variously. Installed SUSE Linux 10.0 in a
virtual machine, to play with it's gdb a bit; poked Clarity
for last week.
-
Migrated my blog to
PyBlosxom and all entries back to 1999 - helped by the
obscenely simple format. Hacked the python a little to reduce
bloatage & synched. Hopefully that decisively fixes the
permalinkage problem.
-
Got a better trace from gdb in 10.0 and updated bug. Lunch.
Called to school to pick up H. - no water at the school, somehow
managed to get involved with trouble-shooting the cause of the
problem, examining the (empty) tanks on the roof, and so on;
interesting albeit inconclusive.
-
OO.o team meeting. Spent a while chasing some nasty problem with
gstreamer targetting esd (when no esd is available) inside Pidgin.
Found & nailed it.
- Cycled H. to school. Poked at OS11.0 bugs. Downloaded
the latest Lenovo bootable-CD BIOS update for my T60p - sadly it didn't
seem to like the idea of multiple browser windows - and managed to popup
download bits elsewhere. Merged nice yast-gtk patch from Sanford Amstrong
to make the package manager more intuitive.
- Lunch, call with JP, chased extraordinary xkb/libxklavier
keyboard problems at length, and still fruitlessly; drat. Back-ported
ORBit2 fix.
- Dealt with babes while J. slept; packed the car, set off to
Princes Risborogh for Adam Mark Hawkins (my 1st nephew)'s Christening.
Lots of family & friends, great to see them all - happened in the
tiny church across the lane; next to JK's mansion: good service even for
the paedobaptistically unconvinced.
- Back for a lovely garden party - fine food, good company -
caught up with all and sundry; lovely sunny day - played in the river -
acclimatised N. to dogs (reduced the shrieking problem a little). Played
badmington, talked about engineering design of
JCBs etc. a fine time.
- Attempted lie-in; more wallowing under the floor getting the
phone cable routed correctly. Amazingly - the cable that was jammed under
the floor last week came free immediately this week: creep (or something).
Managed to get it routed to almost where it needs to be; ~just too short
for a beautiful job sadly.
- J. made fine chocolate cakes with H. & N. (complete with
rather sweet chef's hat for N.). Out to Bury St. Edmonds for a swimming
bonanza: complete with slide & Pirate ship. M. finally found her
confidence in the water - and turned into an un-stoppable repeat slider.
Great fun.
- Back, jacker pots, bed.
- Couldn't sleep, up rather early, poked mail - bits of hacking.
- Amused by the
metasploit motivational posters. Quick chat with the evo guys, read
some code. More bug mail thrash. Pleased to measure oowriter launching in
~500ms (according to the RTL_LOGFILE timing debug in the main binary), at
least wall-clock time of oowriter is around ~1 second for me in factory.
- Prodded my gdb bug again; why should prologue analysis be
necessary to walk the %ebp chain ? valgrind manages to do a great job
here in the same test case.
- Knocked off early. J. out to Laura's party - back to work
for a bit. Dug at a really strange xkb / libxklavier bug: most amazing,
still no progress on it.
- H. sick in the morning, J. to doctors; poked mail - pleased to
see Ricardo's nice yast2-gtk fixes landing. Finally realised that the
Debian / Ubuntu security hole affects us too - we work with Debian-ites and
allow people with their keys to connectt to our systems. That makes it less
funny - also (I guess encouragingly) GNOME SVN is unavailable while the
situation is unwound: it'd have been nice to find some easy-to-use "strong
key checker" to quickly run over lots of public keys to disable broken ones.
- Finally annoyed enough to create a cut-down test case for the
gdb back-tracing inadequacies experienced over the last months - wrt. it
giving up prematurely in various ways - filed it.
- More code reading; finished J's tax return with her, worked late.
Spent a while poking at PyBlosxom - looks pleasant, and I should be able to
migrate the last ~decade of blog entries into it (I hope); we can't have Dave
complaining my musings are hard to link to.
- Turned to valgrinding for my strange X kb problem; poked the
X server, found a few trivial things. Lost a chunk of time when
xorg-x11-driver-input.spec deleted all of
/usr/src/packages/BUILD
and then unpacked SOURCES/*.tar.bz2 poked Stefan & Petr.
- Off into Cambridge to visit consultant; traffic amazingly bad.
- Bathed babes, wife sniffed out a problem with N. cell group
in the evening.
- J's hips playing up - the effort of lugging around a baby
for too long; dropped H. at school for her. Prodded mail. Dug around
at yast2-gtk yet more, fixed a number of strange sizing issues.
- Lunch; OO.o team meeting, call with JP. Poked at OpenSolaris
again: this time a race to boot; both virtualised in KVM, on the same
hardware, running similar desktop software: Gnome. OpenSUSE 11.0
boots to a fully logged in desktop on 1 CPU in 56 secs while in
parallel OpenSolaris takes 89 seconds to get only to gdm. Allowing
for an extra 12sec cold login experience on opensolaris, it's around
half the speed of linux. Clearly this is not yet optimised for
desktop-size-memory, single-CPU machines: but no surprises there.
- Cycled H. to school; poked at mail - delved into
autobuild. Fixed a couple of rather critical yast2 bugs, Rodrigo kindly
volunteered to add them to autobuild.
- Looked at reports of poor performance on OO.o startup;
finally found an area where strace makes a noticeable difference to
performance:
javaldx. The purpose of javaldx is to
(cunningly) grope your system - to look for performance-enhancing
java goodness: here are some stats:
| syscalls | 182000 |
|---|
| of which lstat64's | 161000 |
|---|
| normal (warm) start | 0.74 secs |
|---|
| under strace | 11.7 secs |
|---|
| strace log size | 17Mb |
|---|
Of course, we like to re-stat the same place a good few
times, presumably we don't trust the kernel that much: 51k stats of
/usr, 14k of /usr/lib, 13k of
/home etc. sigh. Perhaps the frenzy is just revenge for
not having any java on the live-CD system.
- Chased my nautilus (non) re-thumbnailing issue a little.
Wrote an ical scrubbing script, and sent calendar data off to
Federico; more bug pokeage.
- Booted opensolaris in KVM (eventually) - though it was
clearly not a happy operating-system with only 512Mb of virtual RAM;
despite having ~the whole live-CD in Linux' page-cache. Tried to get
to the root account: no
sudo; su - prompts
for a non-obvious password; interestingly vs. openSUSE's 11.0' LiveCD
there is no OpenOffice included; odd. Interesting to poke at baobab
to see the size breakdown of the live-cd - odd to have 130Mb of
fonts included, and nothing much to use them; Solaris suffers from
the gconf.xml.defaults malaise too - of ramming tons of translations
into a single file: when will the world stop doing this: 50Mb of
irrelevance ?
- Deciced to race the install in with an identical VM
with openSUSE (1 CPU each) - apparently both do an image copy.
Started openSUSE at 67% of opensolaris, got bored enough that when
I came back at 84% of opensolaris, OS11.0 install was long
finished, re-booted & did the post-install setup; overall
OpenSUSE at least 3x faster to install, prolly more. Unfortunately,
having not created a user account, and given a blank root password - I
can't log in; hey ho. Persuaded to file my opensolaris bugs - at
least they run a recent version of
bugzilla there, in contrast to OO.o.
- Up lateish, off to NCC Tony spoke, continuing the
Romans series. Back, lunch, babes to sleep. Off to Pete &
Shelley's in the afternoon to train their new puppy in the ways
of children, and visit the menagerie of farmyard animals at
their home; much fun - except for N. whose irrational terror
of animals continues. Gordon sermon in the evening on the
covenant in
Genesis 15.
- Up early, off to the market; J. out to pregnancy crisis
centre. Spent much of the morning & until late in the evening
fitting conduit, and trying to get networking cable routed via an
impossibly twisty route from under the downstairs floor to the loft.
Eventually achieved it - helped by the old decaying rubber power
cables left under the floor providing a way to thread new cables
round rather easily.
- Up, prepped babes for (pre-)school; recovered my x86_64
RAID setup; good; poked at and filed Noel's gcc buglet with test case.
Managed (by swapping disks variously) to get 11.0 Beta2 installed on the
system whose only chance of boot media is a floppy disk: looking good
there too.
- Lunch, Bruce & Anne around - lovely to see them, back
from Paris. Nailed three nasty yast2-gtk bugs. Poked at Chentil's nice
catch for an allocation bug in g_base64_decode, fixes my evolution /
groupwise bug.
- Awoke in the morning, to discover a crushed mouse in the
"better mousetrap", the part-time vegan (have to one-up Miguel) in
me not inconsiderably upset by this; binned it.
- To work, phone call with Noel - who has isolated a most interesting
64bit compiler bug afflicting the OO.o test-tool: nice. Dug at mail.
Filed bugs, played with Soeren's display properties capplet, and was
unfeasibly pleased to see it working so nicely.
- Amused by
Philip's extraordinary analysis of BS 1363
as Wikipedia says This plug is often described as the safest in the world.
What is meant by this concern for static electricity is quite
unclear to me; by design (as is common), the earth pin is connected
before the live & neutral pins are so the device casing is earthed: ie.
it should not be possible to have a device (even with a live -> earth
fault) whose casing is live & un-earthed. Consequently - you can touch
the earth pin as much as you like (or drop tin foil on it or whatever) and
if you get a static shock - this is because you have a nylon carpet you
were just shuffling about on: you would get the same effect from the
tap, a lamp-post, or well anything good earth.
- Call with Florian, lunch with Lydia. Booted the Gnome Live-CD
on x86_64 - looks beautiful, configured my awkward monitor correctly too:
nice. Did the install with yast-ncurses to avoid the now fixed yast2-gtk
live installer bug.
- Chased nasty nautilus bug a bit; played with the babes;
conference call with Greg & crew on the OSRB - interesting. Installed
all the good stuff onto the x86_64 live CD install system: the joy of
zypper etc.
- Cycled H. to school. Sucked into bug mail somehow, ended up
debugging evolution, ended up improving some debugging code in ORBit2,
and chasing the problem a little further at least. Nice to see Ray fixing
bonobo-activation lifecycle issues.
- Lunch, knocked up a quick pattern lint tool for coolo to help
avoid future factory breakage with broken patterns. Phoned letting agent to
why 2007 was missing a month - Lizzy to investigate.
- Enlightening call about artwork with Jakub and Garret, fixed
nasty yast2 gtk bug killing popups from the second stage of the installer.
- Cell group in the evening; back late. Lay in bed, admiring the
wife, the ceiling, trying to sleep & that sort of thing Is that
scratching noise you !? - discovered a mouse under the chaise-longue:
cue sudden wifely exit & a most interesting bonding exercise: man with
mouse - involving the ineffective persuit around the room of a tiny, fast (and
remarkably sweet) little creature by a large, slow & clumsy me. Piled
furniture on the bed to get a better view: confounded by it hiding under
the edge of the carpet. Eventually lost it under the door into the rest of
the house. Set traps, back to bed. It's comforting that it really preferred
to scurry across the floor - perhaps the stereotypical women have the right
idea standing on chairs to avoid them.
- Up early, poked mail, chat with JP. Reflected on my love for
nice
lab manuals to write notes in during the day: I think the answer is
laptop computers., most amusing.
- Tried to re-build
lzma-alpha-devel and
deltarpm on my old server system to make an applydeltaiso
that can operate on the new openSUSE ISOs: failed, bother. Time to upgrade
that system to an upgradeable system.
- Installed OS11.0 Beta2 on more hardware, filed more bugs - but
looking rather good. Lunch. Spent a good while chasing a most irritating
keyboard / keymap issue. Then another set of curious nasties around a
strange gdm / gconf interaction, and more bugs - new betas are exciting.
- H. discovered a Bratz bag in a pile of second-hand
(mostly) good-things we were passing on; bother - she appears insanely
pleased with this grey bag with the apparently ugly & unpleasant girls
tacked onto it.
- May Bank Holiday (or Labour day) - thank God for organized
labour, and that it doesn't strike on labour day (or something). Lie in.
Hugh, Emma & Duncan from across the road around to play in the
garden.
- Lunch, out to Reach Fair (now in it's 800th+ year) in the
afternoon - fun rides, ice creams, etc. met up with Chris & Cheryl
selling chocolates. Tea with Nick & Hannah (and Charlie & Tania),
and myriad children. M. (under 2) did a stirling job of climbing the rope
ladder into the tree-house: apparently insufficient fear.
- Back, did J.'s tax return in the evening.
- To NCC, Thea speaking on the assurance of salvation. Back
for lunch; applied slugging for much of the afternoon - in the sun in
the garden. Got the paddling pool out and inflated it (via. some
parental hyper-ventilation).
- Finished The Midnight Folk good fun. Considered the
evils of re-building half of the house down while living in the other
half - pwrt. it's effect on network connectivity: searched the house for
suitable places for new conduit to re-route phone & network: [ you
can never have enough handy conduits ]. J. found a great location after
a number of less fortunate suggestions.
- Up early, to the market - bought lots of good things; back.
Babes to bed - set too filling up our inspection hole & tamping the
earth down with a handy 4x2.
- Discovered some handy mortar there to throw on top. Lunch.
Contemplated means of making handy blocks of tarmac more viscous: is J's
best baking tray in the oven right ? would a naked flame be a good idea
(for this block of ~crude oil & stones) ? no conclusion.
- Set too plumbing in the new water-butt: which has a cunning
filling / overflowing mechanism requiring only one pipe: managed eventually
to cut it into the adjacent down-pipe. Bed early.
- Phoned Nildram to enquire how my line upgrade was going;
apparently the wrong number & postcode conspired to produce the
wrong results; interesting. Poked at mail & web bits.
- Call with Florian, Lunch. Call with JP, chat with Jon.
Fun call with Kelli, it's been too long, call with Jacob.
- Bummed around much of the day writing text, dropped another
three meetings, nice - played around with Xen a bit: seems like a great
way to wedge your whole machine: but I can do that more simply with
cat /dev/random > /proc/kmem. If only KVM worked on my hardware. Then
again could we not with a hack to 'as' insert hooks for all the trap-able
instructions as we compile the kernel - and get a fully para-virtualised
KVM ? (ignorance is bliss).
- Various meetings, call with Hub, Guy, Kelli, missed Ralf etc.
Parents arrived for a while in the evening
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)
