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:
2009: (
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2008: (
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2007: (
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2006,
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2002,
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1999,
legacy html
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Up, J. still in a bad way, call from Sanmarie - tap broken
and leaking; took H. to school - set off to fix tap - realised MOT
is today - set off for Cambridge.
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Sat in the car show-room, experiencing '3' 3G mobile internet,
distinctly sub-optimal in terms of bandwidth it seems. Chewed through
older mail at some length.
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Back, lunch, successful emergency plumber impersonation - back
to work.
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Amused by Florian's post
on API design - very true; the real problem I see with using UNO
interfaces (for which read COM), is that migrating existing code to them
incrementally is abominably hard and inefficient, and never gets finished.
Put simply - it is easy to design the perfect API, what is more difficult is
to re-work the old code into the shape of that API. If you choose as a
pre-requisite an (essentially) viral technology like UNO that makes
incrementalism impossible: your entire API surface has to be UNO or not
at all (modulo evil 'tunnel'ing) - then you instantly turn the problem
into a "all or nothing" disaster area - whereby you have to re-write
"everything" all at once, and inevitably you do that either very badly
( and given the way UNO exposes concurrency issues on every single
call, this is almost inevitable ), or you take a very long time to
do it. By far a better way, is to design the new interfaces you want
(I assume there will be more than one interface), pick them off one by
one, and re-factor the code incrementally to them - testing for regressions
constantly. As/when that is done (if you can be bothered), providing a way
to add UNO-isation is then easy (modulo the legion concurrency hazards
you don't need to care about if you don't use it).
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)
