Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, interested to see go-oo getting hammered in a performance comparison. A really interesting site Andrew has put together, and embarassing to look so bad. A large part of the problem is with comparing go-oo's 'Universal' build, (built with an ancient tool-chain so it actually runs on ~all Linux's) with Fedora's nice, natively compiled version (using native system libraries); though of course not wanting to switch O/S to test something is understandable - clearly go-oo runs rather faster on OpenSUSE. Having said all that, for me - the most depressing thing is to (re?)-discover Andrew's site, and see that despite the huge amount of work Novell / I have put into trying to make OO.o faster, much of which is now up-stream, we are losing the fight: Is OpenOffice getting faster "In conclusion, OpenOffice.org is generally getting slower with each release." - thanks for keeping us honest Andrew.
Poked Fridrich wrt. binutils versions, prodded yast2 settings. Lunch, prodded architect some more, verified my stacked chart bug is fixed in OO.o 3.0.
Hour long trip to see the doctor for the snip (or, as it turned out the cauterise) - so far, not much more painful than substantial dental work. In consequence missed most of the core-team meeting.

2008-09-29: Monday.

Up early, mail pokeage, wrote some perl scripts to analyse git logs. More mail, wrote a screed, call with Sean Atkinson, nice to hear from him.
Sat in on the end of Hannah's first piano lesson, out for a run afterwards.

2008-09-28: Sunday.

Lie in for J. got the kids marshaled, tried to keep E. quiet. Off to NCC, Helen speaking. Had Leyla & Nathan back for lunch, good to meet them.
Out to Cheeky Monkeys for George's party with the girls: lots of leaping, jumping, tumbling, ball-pool action etc. Managed to avoid getting sucked in for the most part.

2008-09-27: Saturday.

Lie in; read the economist while J. shopped. Bruce & Anne arrived for lunch, good to see them. Clive helped cook a great meal. Played with the children for much of the afternoon, and tidied up. Bed early.

2008-09-26: Friday.

Mail, call with Hallski, more mail, wrote up notes from yesterday. Lunch, caught up with Morten, call with Alex, took a look at novell-ipsec, hmm.
Call with Stephan & Gary, then with Guy, then with Kelli - more talking than programming is bad.
Sue & Clive arrived, got too with frantic child cleaning, putting to bed etc. Laura baby-sat, while we went out with Sue & Clive to Cherly's chocolate meal: which was rather excellent. Caught up with Rachel, fine wine, fine food & cholocate in every course. Bed late.

2008-09-25: Thursday.

Up in the night, prodded mail. Off to the dentist, and back for an interview. Struggling with linux kernel gitdm output, since 2.6.15 we have 96k changes, somewhat more than the 64k rows we have, interesting having cropped from 2.6.24 to today, the DataPilot seems to require more memory than quite reasonable to crunch it: ~2Gb mapped or so before an allocation failed.
Lunch during conf-call, call with hpj & networky people. Series of back-to-back calls all afternoon & early evening, desktop staff, DE meeting etc. bed early.

2008-09-24: Wednesday.

Up with the babes; H. still unhappy about going to school for some reason. Got everyone dressed up & packed into the car, only to discover that M. (the Peatle) had turned the light on and drained the battery. J. cycled in instead, while I put it on charge, and taped up the switch in the roof to avoid repeat use. Surely there should be some software fix there (since it's apparently centrally controlled).
Swallowed & re-gurgitated mail. Architect called, apparently my stair would fit. Back to stats generation. Out in the evening to an Alpha dinner at NCC, good stuff.

2008-09-23: Tuesday.

Feeling deadly jet-lagged. To work anyway, H. complaining about having to go to school: apparently football is the cause (very understandable). Backed up the laptop. Tried to install the latest evo. snapshot - apparently killed by gratuitous .so bumping on libedataserver: wow.
Did the Employee Engagement survey; more mail chew, Clarity, call with JP, Lunch, phoned Morris Armitage to chase missing rent, and Graham to chase missing drawings.
More mail thrash. Booked flights to OOoCon / Beijing, dug at VISA pieces. Core team call, quick chat with Brian/Tim. Worked on some statistics.

2008-09-22: Monday.

Slept through the morning, trains home; lovely to see the wonderful wife & kidlets again. Read stories in a loop, before being read to by H. and doing some subtractions with her. Fine meal in the evening, bed very early.

2008-09-21: Sunday.

Up early, breakfast with Thiery from Airbus working on their interesting avionics, as well as video for Linux. Off to First Baptist's early service; small congregation, but a good sermon. Back to the hotel, phoned home.
Profiled my new sandisk 8GB USB key, it can do the same 25Mb/sec that the built-in EEPC SSD does - good to have that baseline. Off to the airport with Alasdair - good to get some vicarious sight-seeing in.
What with the general disapprobation from kernel people about OO.o's pagein binary (that maps and touches each page linearly), I did a little testing of launching OO.o from flash; interestingly, even with a free-seek medium, pagein gives a win:

type readings average

with pagein 4.160, 4.081, 3.987, 4.023 4.06

without pagein 4.311, 4.759, 4.379, 4.571 4.51

So 10% slower without pagein ie. just relying on the posix_fadvise for shared libraries - even on cheap seeking SSD, and even though the pagein -should- load more data than we actually use; sad.
Interested by the push-back to Greg's talk. While it was perhaps a tad sharp, and could have been more broadly generalised; his numbers reflect my day-to-day experience of the developer community. Perhaps the most encouraging thing is that a lack of up-stream contribution to the shared code-base is now (rightly) seen as a negative thing, and I'm pleased by Mark's recent commitments to resource Canonical's up-stream contribution. It's also interesting how quickly the 'objective' conspiriacy theorists start slinging allegations - personally my bias is clear: if someone doesn't want to use my beloved SUSE for whatever reason, I heartily recommend Fedora to them - if only because of the huge number of developers I respect & call friends that are paid by RedHat, working together with us on projects I care about. In time, I looking forward to being able to recommend Ubuntu for the same reasons, at least to that tiny minority that dislike green colour schemes.
Met interesting girl (Marketa) on the plane from Vancouver (to Prague) from her cruise ship: the Star Princess, an economist and hair dresser / beauty therapist. Managed to avoid any beauty therapy.
Thinking of desktop cold-start times, it's interesting to think how little data we extract from 3Mb of scattered hash files in /usr/share/locale-bundle/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/* an lsof on those shows an interesting picture. Strangely, when I log in. I only see less than a handful of translated strings on my desktop - surely we an do better here. Perhaps some LD_PRELOAD'ed gettext pre-cache might save some seeks.

type	readings	average
with pagein	4.160, 4.081, 3.987, 4.023	4.06
without pagein	4.311, 4.759, 4.379, 4.571	4.51

2008-09-20: Saturday.

Up disgracefully late, after watching Bridget Jones II, and (of course in the US) about half of another movie on another channel interleaved in the advert breaks - roll on cheap VOD in every room.
Off to the Leibowitz's in an incompetant Taxi driver's car, had lunch with Rebecca, Max & Dhananjay, admired their home. Back to Dhanajay's to meet his family & learn more of Intel micro-architecture, kindly dropped back at the hotel.
Finally caught up with some of the pending tasks, dug at binutils to find a good place for some fallocate system calls. Out for a great dinner with Bastien, back & talked to Alasdair until late.

2008-09-19: Friday.

Breakfast with Jan Kara prodding the kernel in various places. Off to the dbus / plumbing talk. Finished the kernel round-up, chat with Keith, off for a fine lunch with Bastien, Jon, Colin and Dan.
Back to pick up Dave, Simon, Wim and on for some applied all-afternoon drinking and food. Taxi back, bed.

2008-09-18: Thursday.

Breakfast at the conference; Jonathon's keynote was interesting. On to Dirk's 5 second startup talk, switched to Chris's btrfs talk. Caught up with Simon and the latest telepathy bits.
Lunch, and talked with an X guy at length about graphics memory management issues. Great to catch up with Dan Williams, amusingly we diagnosed my laptop's screwed up NetworkManager resume behavior as yet another dbus-send doesn't instance - as reported in March, now affecting /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/10NetworkManager. NB. people using dbus-send must add --print-reply if they want to reliably send a message.
Chat with Jim Gettys, and Kay Sievers, system-tap talk, and off to NetApp sponsored cocktail party. Caught up with Dirk & Alasdair, realised I was missing the speakers dinner & split to there. Good to catch up with Jon, David & Leonard.

2008-09-17: Wednesday.

Up earlyish, poked at iogrind; off to the conference with some RedHat networking guys. Met up with a ton of interesting people, got the laptop to project (somehow), synched with Matt Wilcox and Margaret. Greg's keynote - fairly amusing.
I/O talk - incredibly well attended; showed people iogrind, and promoted my crazy ideas - at least, in passing. Jan Kara did a great spiel on recursive mtime, hopefully a useful concrete win to come out of it.
Out for lunch with Ted, back to the tracing miniconf; and on to Linus' detailed git tutorial: discovered git grep. Out to a nice Intel sponsored dinner in the evening - Intel knows how to throw a good party.

2008-09-16: Tuesday.

Up too early, breakfast, packed, bid 'bye to the children. Taxi to the station, wrote minutes on the train. More admin on the train etc. Back on-line on the heathrow express.
Pleased to discover the pretty right-click 'Power History' graphing in gnome-power-manager. Fascinated to find the lady next to me is a Neuroscientist with all manner of interesting insights into the brain. Also dead pleased with AirCanada's in-seat power, wow, a God-send.
Hacked on re-factoring iogrind; I wonder if VOD in-flight entertainment systems in part pay for themselves with reduced toilet capacity requirements - by substantially staggering demand.

2008-09-15: Monday.

Up early, poked at mail, call with Florian, interview with Richard. Posted scanned drawings to the architect - hopefully he can sort something out.
Installed the latest evolution daily snapshot for 11.0, which Chen has made available I'm still convinced daily builds are the best solution wrt. filing good bug reports. Backed up laptop, incl. mail, Clarity.
Accessibility call with Marco, Mike & co. New couple: Peter & Greta came over for dinner, up late.

2008-09-14: Sunday.

Lie in, off to NCC, out for lunch with Jon & Alba & Mike, admired J&A's wedding photos. Back, slugging, up late finishing stair-well drawings: how to support the floor over the stair well ?

2008-09-13: Saturday.

Up with the babes, off to the market while J. slept. Spent some time reading the 2000 Building Regulations in regard to stair design; brushed up my technical drawing recollections & managed to fit a turning stair into the available space to the loft (on paper).
Watched Pygmalyon on DVD with the children. Zoe, Dt, Simon & Mike over to watch Ratatouille in the evening: rather pleased - in contrast to Nemo's tedium, this held real plot interest.

2008-09-12: Friday.

CJ Murfits builders came over to quote on the task. Tired - up late last night trying to fit another set of stairs into the house (we need more stairs).
Lots of eAdmin, started digging at Empathy. Quick chat with Ganesh, dug at empathy at some length - some good things in there. Call with Pilsbury, then Jared.

2008-09-11: Thursday.

Up early, back a bit better after reading that bed-rest is not helpful, and gentle exercise is better. Cycled H. to school to further cement the theory, seems fine.
Shoveled mail; pleased the swarf from Kjartan cleaning up bugzilla and polishing the code (as normal): a consistent Gnome hero over the last decade. Read a passing paper.
Peter from Rentokil appeared again, with his hair-raising tales of various forms of creature; treated the lounge again.
Hacked frantically on LXF column once again on the deadline, inspiration or condensed perspiration ? chat with Ross, Kelli's staff, one to one with her. More perl hackery.

2008-09-10: Wednesday.

Couldn't sleep, poked mail, up-loaded iogrind to gitorious. Read some kernel bits. Breakfast.
Fixed up some iogrind pieces, looked at showing blkparse output on the fsview - to blend some real-life data with the fiction that iogrind's simulator produces.
OO.o team meeting, some great VBA updates from Noel, look out for him at OOoCon. Then gtk+ 3.0 call with ISVs. Call with Patrick, cell group cancelled.

2008-09-09: Tuesday.

Up to help get kids ready for school; tried to work, back to bed-ridden state, paracetamol and sleep. More joy after lunch, so much to do. Poked mail, caught up with people, booked Portland hotel, chatted with Eric. Staff sync with Roger, call with Kelli.

2008-09-08: Monday.

Woke in the UK; train home, twisted my back horribly (no doubt the flight), and can barely stand up, or lie down; bother. Slept much of the morning. Tried to help J. much of the afternoon.

2008-09-07: Sunday.

Up late; Finagle a circular-sawed Bagle, then Park Street at 11am; soaked up the sun on Boston common, which apparently also doubles up as a home for the bewildered. Out for lunch with Guy to Gaslight - very nice. Wandered the streets of the neighbourhood for a while, and experienced Guys' fantastic roof deck.

2008-09-06: Saturday.

Up early, tad of evolution cleanup; lunch with Miguel at Charlies; back to his home to meet Maria & Mother in law; Duncan showed up, then Guy. Out shopping for oysters with Guy, who dropped me back; bed.

2008-09-05: Friday.

Final meeting action; dissolved. Caught up with Brady, Miguel, Aaron. Out for dinner with Miguel, Nirav, Aaron & Alex and his interesting quantum computing friends.

2008-09-04: Thursday.

More meeting action; out for dinner with Kelli & co. at Legals, stayed up late with JP, Alex and Nirav.

2008-09-03: Wednesday.

Up jet-laggedly early, poked mail, breakfast with the guys; off to the office for early meetings with Guy. Laptop-free meetings all day. Out to CBC in the evening with Brad Taylor, Aaron & some of the lads.

2008-09-02: Tuesday.

Up early, packed more. Drove to Ely with the wifelet, once again falling ill as I leave - poor creature. Train to Cambridge, and onwards to Kings X. Finally got around to looking into the firefox / flash plugin crasher that plagues my youtube usage in 11.0. Turns out to be hard to debug when off-line, tried to make a smaller test-case without much luck.
Flight arrived eventually, taxi to the office, booked a room, out for dinner with Kelli's team, Nat & Miguel - good stuff, bed early, tired.

2008-09-01: Monday.

Spare part arrived for Laura's laptop, spent a while soldering it on remembered to use flux properly this once; looks excellent, and actually robust. Re-assembled everything, gaining only one screw. Quite a nice enclosure really.
To work, poked at an ORBit2 pre-processing bug with Kjartan, and some split build buits with calc. Filed emacs bug - loading ORBit2 idl generated headers seems to cause slowness and grief. Clarity.
Building estimator arrived, showed him around variously. Installed 11.1 Alpha 2 - interesting, filed strange passwd bug. Tried to update my KDE4 build environment, while having the icecream cluster to hand. Spent some time doing a write-up while it built.
Packed for flight tomorrow, a week of meetings in Boston.