Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Bank holiday, up late. Claire came to visit and inspect the works here, good to see her. Removed velux window (easier than expected) and sat on the ridge.
Removed last vestiges of TV arial fixings (die foul beast) from the chimney; and erected a pretty new weather vane (as designed by J.). Attempted to get the compass aligned correctly - putting it too near the iron vane gives a rather broken reading.
Lunch; slugged in the sun, played rough & tumble with babes in the garden. Roast dinner, Jules phoned to say he no longer needed the spiral stairs - urgh, dumped them in the skip. Bed late.

2009-08-30: Sunday.

Off to All Saints (NCC all off at Grapevine) - stayed in the creche much of the time.
Home, lunch, re-arranged timber in the front garden at some length; unscrewed the facing timber obscuring the chap's number that wanted our spiral stair - attempted un-successfully to replace the wonder self drilling / tapping screws going the steelwork; no joy even with brace & bit.
Chris & Cheryl over in the evening, stayed up late enjoying their company.

2009-08-29: Saturday.

Up early, fed and dealt with babes while J. went shopping, H. returned. Opened presents with Miriam - her 3rd birthday: much excitement.
Packed the car, too much stuff, not enough space, added roof-box: still pretty stacked. Picked up Grace Brighty and off to Thetford Forest. Managed to locate and get barbeque burning,

2009-08-28: Friday.

Poked at an obs issue with versioned links to non versioned links (should this be allowed ?). Worked on a report. More grub fun.
Read the XMultiServiceFactory implementation again in OO.o's stoc - if only we could completely remove the store/registry code.
H. disappeared to Charlotte's house in the evening for a sleep-over (the 'sleep' there is something of a misnomer).

2009-08-27: Thursday.

Played with boot performance some more, dug at openoffice localisations and packaging, worked away at grub with Timo on and off.

2009-08-26: Wednesday.

Played with boot performance, dived into the grub code - an interesting project indeed; good to be able to strip some of the mystique away from it.
Electrician arrived - pointed at lots of places for sockets, lights and the like; finally got the house sealed up, with a window in-place.

2009-08-25: Tuesday.

Frantic catching up with mail, admin, misc. boot charting. JP's staff meeting, some fun kernel code reading.

2009-08-24: Monday.

Up early, good to see wonderful Mum & Dad who had managed to keep the children entertained all weekend, and relieve them of duty. To work - chewed mail.
Amused to see that, according to Apple hype, they are about to release the world’s most advanced operating system, and the only system with built in Exchange support. Perhaps they should try SLED11 before so speaking; we've had built-in exchange support forages.
Call in the evening; chat with Jared. Worked late.

2009-08-23: Sunday.

Up for breakfast with Garret & Karren, Daniel, Alex and ladies arrived; curious but pleasant food, appetite suppressed by being boiled off in the heat.
Drove to Lucca, wandered the beautiful walled city (seemingly the walls are remarkably modern, and designed to fend off a cannon armed army, and hence somewhat distinctive & thick). Lunch, more happy drifting around the place.
On to Pisa, and around the cathedral, and up the tower - admired the huge volume of people standing on the grass carefully marked "please do not stand on the grass" - makes you wonder why they bother. Dismayed by the absence of any description of the engineering disaster and it's remedies, plenty about restoring it though.
Ryan Air, home really late; bed exhausted.

2009-08-22: Saturday.

Up slightly late; taxi to another fine villa (mercifully closer) overlooing the town for brunch. Caught up with innumerable fascinating people, and then set off for a tour of Florence.
Wandered the streets, admired the exterior of the cathedral, enjoyed ice-cream, soaked in the art and history; good fun. Ended up at the bridge - though forgot to bring a padlock.
Bid 'bye to all and sundry, an emotional time somehow - such a stack of joyful talent. Wandered the town with Alex & Julia a little, and went out for a lovely meal with just J. - the wife of my life; bed.

2009-08-21: Friday.

Up before the crack of dawn - Ryan Air from Stanstead to Pisa. Bus to collect our hire car - far more expensive than the flight. Set off to Florence.
Uneventful drive, except for some extraordinary navigation of masses of tiny one-way roads at the end; eventually found the hotel. Tried to check-in ineffectually, too early - off to wander the pretty town, via pizza for lunch.
Checked in, brief power-nap; dressed, off in a bus to Villa Artimino - met up with lots of friends old & current - good to see Nat's Dad again after something of a break.
Nat & Stephanie's exellent wedding, a somewhat unusual celebrant, but lovely dress, interesting guests, fantastic food & drink, much to enjoy and love - caught up with Louis at last - encouragingly it seems marrying is contagious.
Fireworks; failed, frenzied attempts to learn to dance in as fluid a fashion as the Lunardi with the lovely wife - back to the hotel, and to bed rather late.

2009-08-20: Thursday.

Up early, poked at Goblin kiwi image etc. dug at a groupwise bug, packaged OO.o foo; customer call, OO.o team meeting, dug at the OO.o desktop mis-detection bug.
Parents arrived, up late packing, slept on the floor with J.

2009-08-19: Wednesday.

Up later, no builders in evidence - hmm. Phoned Clint, they're on their way. To work - read some surreal E-mail. Poked at the behaviour of /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace_pipe - no use trying to tail it, catting it blocks at the end - but yields no new data; a strange interface indeed.
Amazed to see Federico's continued draining of the multiscreen swamp - I'm CC'd on the tracker bug with 120+ unique dependants, of which only ~15 remain open (for SLED11) - of course much of that has gone up-stream too; go Federico !
Made some arrangements for the inaugural openSUSE conference, the level of hospitality is good in Nurnberg.
Poked at OO.o, it's been too long since I ran a build; I love the --with-git configure option that makes download do some git clones instead of pulling source archives. Built an updated libs-gui, a quick patch to VCL for Moblin, and a quick re-build / test - the split build rocks.
DE meeting, dealt with babes while J. went out to counsel a lady. Managed to get everyone cleaned and into bed somehow; back to work.

2009-08-18: Tuesday.

Up; breakfast, packed everything, drove home, no builders in evidence; got down to the typing. Prodded FATEal OO.o features.
Tilers arrived to put some very black tiles on the end gable, most odd, I could swear we asked for matching redder ones. Got banshee synchronising it's play-queue nicely with mutter's media panel - and re-ordering / updating nicely: good.
Chat with Kohei wrt. a11y - what fun. Dinner. Back to sreadahead, added SSD detection, and tweaked the defaults appropriately to match - plugged away at various interesting boot time problems. Up late hacking with Aaron & co. - fun.

2009-08-17: Monday.

Up early - E. seems to enjoy waking ever earlier to lie in bed with us (a disaster area). Breakfast, to work. Plugged away at mail and bugs.
Identified and fixed the alsa init script problem giving us an always-muted pulseaudio - good. Misc. integration and fixing of uxlaunch.
Lunch, ferried small people, and a dressed up J. to the Carnival dressed as various animals. Back to work, had some fun with misc. banshee issues - emitted various bognor-regis friendly events.

2009-08-16: Sunday.

Up early, breakfast, off to Aldeburgh parish Church. Played with, fairly quiet, babes during the service - and back for a lunch outside in the sun.
Out into town for the rubber-band powered drinks-bottle egg-boat race. An unfortunate slip (loosing the egg container cover) caused a very premature exit. Only about 10% of boats actually made it the 3 metres across the pond - amazing.
Home, dinner for the babes, pushed E. around in a wheel barrow outside at speed, to calm her. Packed everyone to bed, and enjoyed a cocktail & fine dinner together.

2009-08-15: Saturday.

Up earlyish, cooked breakfast, to work while the babes went off to ride Donkeys (and so on) at the Aldeburgh Carnival (or somesuch).
Built, tested & merged various bits down to Moblin:Factory. Reviewed / merged patches, unwound silliness in our kernel / obs setup.
Lunch; out to the Carnival in the afternoon, the babes took part in the exciting lolly-pop hunt on the beach; then wandered the town - admired the whack-the-rat stall (which even extracted money from me) - and had a fun time.
Back, played with the kids, put them to bed.

2009-08-14: Friday.

To work, added various options to make uxlaunch a moblin-session replacement, instead of a gdm replacement - hopefully more useful.
Father arrived, off to Robert Jefford's funeral, my Mother's cousin with him. A 'Humanist' ceremony, words fail me to describe the despair, hopelessness, and fudgery - who should a Humanist be thankful, or grateful to, for Robert's (clearly) exceptional life ?
Back home, admired the now correctly aligned, and assembled new staircase. Back to work, plugged away at uxlaunch and mutter some more.
Drove to Bruce & Anne's in the evening; arrived in time for a fine dinner with Sue & Clive too. Bed.

2009-08-13: Thursday.

To work; prodded bug reports, processed mail. Updated to the latest packages, poked at the various problems.
Pleased to discover that building regs don't require the new stairs to be completely boxed in: nice, new stairs arrived in sections and started to get plugged together.
Bug review with JP, Aaron & co.

2009-08-12: Wednesday.

Up lateish, breakfast, builders arrived, tilers unable to work in the vigorous rain. Supposedly the stairs arrive today - lots of stud walling knocked out around the place; plumber arrived to move various pipes; water off, etc.
Fitted new continuous ink cartridge - the air bubbles in the pipe give a great feeling for just how much ink is wasted each time the head is cleaned - wow. Sadly the order is wrong CYMK instead of CMYK - which makes the colors strange (to say the least). Got sent a PDF on how to re-assemble / order the head - more inky fun in store.
Plugged away at mutter & mutter-moblin. Up-loaded my UKUUG moblin slides.
Lunch, it seems we are several walls short on the landing, and plus a huge hole in the ceiling - fun. Re-arranged the printer head and broke the clip in the process, some PVC tape, and it seems to work, nice.
Back to uxlaunch - deep joy. Got my first (pretend) cup of tea from E. (14 months) - refreshing.

2009-08-11: Tuesday.

Up early, prodded mail, back to the bugs. Itching to install my new self-re-filling printer ink system. Solomon phoned - Peace had a (massive) baby Boy - Daniel; exciting times.
Roofers fitted velux window, and I stripped some copper wire to add to the ridge (with luck it will kill the rampant moss before it gets started).
Poked at uxlaunch - my PAM is chattier than your PAM ! ergo, nothing works; fixed it. Amused to read Ross' write-up of Democracy Theatre at Facebook - sounds only too familiar, sadly.
Worked late, plugging away at mutter-moblin & async reported XSetInputFocus errors.

2009-08-10: Monday.

Churned through the E-mail; carpenter, and roofers arrived, hopefully we'll get a replaced roof, and new velux fitted today. Upgraded the netbook to the latest, greatest, Moblin packages. Packaged my banshee work.
Poked bug list, booked flight for opensuse conference. Hacked away at banshee, packaged uxlaunch - and tried to make it launch a session, hmm. Played with, and packed the babes off to bed while J. did some counselling. Worked late.

2009-08-09: Sunday.

Up late; off to the conference - discussed many of the UK's open issues with an interesting & articulate openrightsgroup guy. Lunch.
Set off home on the train; finally arrived - picked up by the wifelet. Home, Chinese food for dinner; packed everyone to bed, admired the wife's new wedding outfit.

2009-08-08: Saturday.

Mini lie-in; packed, train to Birmingham for the conference. Intense bout of OO.o use hacking on slides; got Robster finally, and poked Josh to see what he wanted to say, to discover he wasn't coming - bother.
Arrived, Ross Anderson's security engineering talk - good stuff, clearly I should read his book; chatted to Craig Heath - to understand the Symbian Foundaton afterwards - interesting.
Gave my Moblin talk, after a ZFS talk - went well; slides to follow shortly. Hung around talking to David (a Maemo guy), and David (a fonts guy) - good fun. Off to the conference dinner later with Alasdair.

2009-08-07: Friday.

Prodded mail, and banshee. Looked at travel details for the UKUUG conference this weekend, leaving at 10am tomorrow should just about get me there in time - nice.
Bought a continuous ink system for my Epson printer to avoid continuously running out and spending a small fortune on tiny cartriges.
Played with banshee and d-bus some more.

2009-08-06: Thursday.

Up early, builders arrived before I got to work; much hammering, and drilling action left & right - a very hot day. Boggled at the mailing lists.
Poked at OO.o a little; knocked up an rpm patch to auto-split out dll.mdb files from mono into -debuginfo packages to save space.
Lydia and Angela around for dinner in the evening, great to see them and meet Angela for the first time - fun.

2009-08-05: Wednesday.

Builders arrived back - more work here and there, one managed to put his foot through into the kitchen. Living here increasingly resembles a camping experience - piles of stuff everywhere, and hardly able to move.
Ordered J's birthday present; tried (unsuccessfully) to find a Haynes manual for my Toyota Verso, looked on-line and discovered I have to pay for (electronic) manuals - bother.
Poked at gupnp / gssdp packaging, caught up with Luc while waiting for the build service to complete, interesting. Submitted the various packages, and onto banshee. Call with Jared.
Admired the builders set of joists in the attic, hopefully a new floor will start appearing there shortly - spiral stair disassembled yesterday, and now access only by ladder.
Chat with John Hummerson; tired, and digestion slowly re-learning english food.

2009-08-04: Tuesday.

Flights all night / morning etc. slept well on the umpteen hour hop - perhaps avoiding jet-lag by sleeping closer to UK time in Taiwan will work well (at least now I'm back).
Poked at my netlink bootchart collector some more on the train, substantially reduced the data spew. Perhaps I should poll the low-grade system load & I/O data in /proc more slowly than the netlink data. Cleaned up the bootchart collector code.
Lots of exciting building work - somehow knocking down walls goes rather faster than building them - admired the sudden absence of walls in-doors. Went to see the girls at their accelerated swimming training - some good stuff there.
Back, worked through mail; JP's staff call. Lots of infernal banging and bashing up-stairs, is the sky falling ?
Interested by a Real men don't hit women facebook causelet to sign up for. What does it mean ? what is an un-real man ? why do men hit women ? can you even question this without being labeled a mysogenistic wife beater yourself ? Personally, I try not to hit anyone - but I recognise that if sufficiently trapped, provoked, abused, and perhaps inflamed by alchohol - I might well behave in a highly sub-optimal way. Luckily this hasn't happened to me, indeed did I mention my wife being the most wonderful, kind, patient woman ? - but who knows. At such a stage, I'm fairly confident I wouldn't discriminate sexually against an equivalent pair of beligerents, walloping both equally. Clearly this in no way condones vicious, unprovoked, casual abuse of anyone. I think, often, sadly, people mistake their privileged and comfortable situation, for some supposed personal virtue in a much worse situation.
Wonderful to be home with the darling wife - an intoxicating creature of thrilling presence and loveliness.

2009-08-03: Monday.

Alarm failed to wake me, urgh - packed everything in a hurry, skipped breakfast, and somehow made the partner training session. Spent the whole day trying to explain performance optimisation to a mixed audience, with a good few non-believers. Why do people always prefer to try to scrape the barrel of optimising malloc instead of working out why there are a million back to back calls of it in some dumb app ? I've seen enough discarded 3137alloc analogues in my time.
Back to the office, bid a fond farewell to the big friendly bunch of lads there, off to the airport, caught up with a bit of hacking at Starbucks (free wifi), onto the plane.

2009-08-02: Sunday.

Up earlyish, off to Taipei International Church, friendly atmosphere - met a nice American (Greg) and his charming Taiwanese wife - from the US not-embassy here. Good service, fine, balanced, challenging, helpful expository preaching - let down only sightly by an over-emphasis on greek word definitions; pleased, I heartily recommend it.
Set off by Taxi to Taipei 101, met up with Armani there - had a vertical elevator joy-ride, admired the panoramic view, a really clear day. Tried to discern movement in the large suspended ball stabiliser with no joy, wandered coral displays, then enjoyed ice-cream, and a brief crowding experience in some computer show.
Off by Metro - the plastic metro tokens, surprisingly conceal a wireless RFID thingit of insane coolness - to Danshui. Armani showed off the sleeping Buddah skyline - though his precise physionomy left something to be desired. Admired a temple of some sort, used (apparently) primarily for women to practise a divination of sorts. Drank the local iced tea.
Back to the Guanghua Market, it seems I missed most of the most interesting bits of it yesterday - under the ground, and in a new block. Found a T60 battery to replenish my increasingly poor capacity, and slow-to-charge model, neat. Taxi home.
More prep for training tomorrow, phoned the lovely wife, up excessively late trying to (and finally) installing debuginfo packages from kirk all over the place.

2009-08-01: Saturday.

Up disgracefully late, poked mail briefly while waiting for breakfast, got lost in Wikipedia - trying learn about Taiwan, learned a bit (it's an amazing place) - but drifted off and ended up learning about submarine implosions instead: sigh.
Out to the local tech market - hunted for cheap things, and hunted some more: hmm, presumably I'm looking in the wrong place. The only place selling T60p batteries I could find, was worse than the on-line store; I clearly need expert help - becoming practised in mental division by 54. Got a car DC to US / mains AC adaptor for applied in-car net-book usage at home. Managed to talk to the lovely wife, and some babies, finally. Returned recalling why I dislike shopping.
Wrote up my what is, and how to solve the infinite space problem in a11y rant for the umpteenth time; I really should just create a web-page for this issue; then again, if we can get the new D-BUS goodness actually -right- then there will be no need - unfortunately that requires a new Atk navigation interface so - who knows.
Prodded at banshee/cubano a bit, stubbed some of the bognor-regis interfaces, and played with mutter-media-panel, played music with cubano.