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:
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2007: (
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2006,
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1999,
legacy html
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Lie in, J. tweaked her back - earlyish lunch; out in the
freezing cold to Lackford lakes - abandoned walk in forest due to
perishing weather; played in the playground instead. Back, watched
Sleeping Beauty, bed early.
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More mail action, closed some bugs I can no longer reproduce.
Prodded gnome-settings-daemon at some length. One-on-one with Kelli,
more patch massage, hurt by some gnome-desktop ABI breakage. Profiled
gconfd with valgrind, 1.4 billion pseudo-cycles on login - hmm; Clarity.
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Out for a run in the evening, good to get moving again.
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Up early, a good night of it - M. kept quiet somehow. To
work, tried to reproduce misc. already fixed bugs, finding interesting
new bugs on the way, filed them.
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Dug at helpex - seems to hurt my system, perhaps creating ~1000
files from the help content, per language, and then much later zipping
them is the issue. I wonder if that could be optimised.
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J. took Myriam to the doctor's with a hurty arm, turned out to
be out of joint, re-placed in casualty - happier girl; phew. Lunch.
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Special debug port turned up by FedEx, plugged it in and dug
around on the net for information on using it, got minicom working,
reproduced the hang, but failed to get sysrq to work. Poked GregKH -
helpful man, turns out I'm missing some key part of the kernel.
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Call with hpj & co; Kelli's staff. More mail chew.
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Poked mail, chat with Milan. Dug at Coolo's preload bits.
Lunch. Call with compiz guys, call with Tambet, space. Chat with
Serdar.
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Alpha in the evening with Andy & Simon over for dinner.
Sorted washing mound between several little girls: I need a fool-proof
heuristic for determining which garment belongs to which, that stays
up-to-date with changing size and passing on of clothes. Surely there
is a market for some amazing robotic tagging device that ...
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Poked mail; pleased to see the screencast by
Sam Spilsbury of NOMAD, explaining some of the new Compiz goodness from
David. Of course, getting the fusion-like native-windows in video form
too would be nice, and the work is still stabilizing.
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Worked on text, early lunch, call with Fridrich & Chayim,
poked at Wine, prodded an odd ORBit2 issue. Checked with Guy, and
sent off my LXF column. Core team call. Ordered a USB debug devicelet
to poke at my interesting lockup. Filed / committed OO.o a11y fix.
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To work; prodded mail. Sorry to see Pete & Aaron let go
from IBM. Poked at sreadahead / preload.
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Poked at a patch for OO.o a11y, in the brave new world of
XSettings, instead of GTK_MODULES environment variables. Sent it
off to Brad to play with.
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Misc. calls in the afternoon. Dug at an interesting suspend /
resume issue around nfs (seemingly). Dinner, sync. with Patrick.
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Up early, J. had a lie-in, she looks so lovely asleep (as
awake of course). Packed everyone up, and off to NCC, Thea spoke
well; good to see Sam, Tyler & Michael.
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Back for lunch with Nicholas, Jon and SanMarie. Slugged by
the fire for a while talking, occasional guitar abuse etc. Put the
babes to bed. Lots of others around for A Knight's Tale in
the evening. Talked late with DT & Zoe, bed.
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Lie in, played with babes, and tidied up. Bruce & Anne
arrived, then Suzannah, Clive & Mark - had a fine family lunch.
Talked, read storied, etc. by the fire for much of the afternoon.
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Mary Poppins in the afternoon, lots of sorting out of
papers, and attempts to clear some of the archived junk from
the attic. Burned a great weight of obsolete bank statements,
mortgage recepits etc. cheaper than shredding, but somehow more
furtive. Got stuck into some P.G.Woodhouse; bed early.
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Up, poked mail; did some package downloading goodness,
read some analyst reports. It is amusing to see that people who
don't want to do something don't say they simply won't - but that
it will happen a year out; then next year, when you ask them again,
it is still a year out.
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Noticed Jono's Art
of Community book he is writing, no doubt it'll be a good read when
it's done. Worked on LXF column. Lunch.
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Call with Olaf & hpj. Interested to read about the self
service checkout view of open-source development; Jeff explains the
painfully obvious, rather lucidly.
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Call with Guy, prodded at misc. packages. Clarity.
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Chat with Fridrich, tested Helmut's iwl3945 kill-switch fix, works
nicely. Reviewed misc. libIDL patches with Kjartan. Prodded at, and filed
bugs. Upgraded to the latest SLED11 RC, considered LXF blog.
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Lunch, poked at a compiz hang; isolated the problem, interesting.
Dug at a nasty pulseaudio / skype interaction inconclusively. Kelli's
staff, DE meeting. Tried to get elluminate to work, unsuccessfully.
Chat with Brady.
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Up early, feeling pretty dead still; poked mail, filed
bugs, call with Kendy. Lunch. Interesting call wrt. compiz in the
afternoon. Alpha with Andy & Simon in the evening.
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Packed babes off to school with J., poked mail. Read some X server
code, trying to chase my hyper-slow memory copying / composite issue: three
seconds to copy a full-screen pixmap seems sub-optimal; go fbCopyArea!.
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Gave up and dug at some a11y lifecycle discussion instead for fun.
Booked FOSDEM train tickets. Lunch with Charl & SanMarie.
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Dinner, piano practice with H. call with Jono.
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Up early, J. lie in. Dealt with dressing, feeding babes - got
everyone into some sort of order. Up-ended, and dunged out the washing
machine - washable wipes like to migrate down into the sump, with plenty
of grey crud to match.
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Off to NCC, leaving Father to test the machine. Janice spoke
well, back for lunch. Slugged by a movie in the afternoon, bathed the
babes; evening with M. & D. night punctuated by E.'s complaints.
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Lie-in; sleeping downstairs with E. in the room, not so good.
Set too clearing and cleaning the house, Anne arrived, and smaller people
set out to buy a birthday present for N. in the toy-shop (another dress).
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H. who can now read well, purchased a fairy in a bar of water-soluable
fluff with her own pocket money, "watch it come to life in the water..."
- some considerable disappointment on the production of a dead (plastic) fairy.
Hadn't considered that eventuality.
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Auntie Louise came too; fine lunch, sat by the fire talking &
reading to small people, up late talking to the parents.
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Lie in, on a real bed, wow. Train home, prodded mail, calls
with Guy, hpj, JP, hacked slides. The washing machine packed up,
started over filling and making a juddering noise (prolly a jammed
filter). Pleased to see Kate Williams if only in passing.
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Mum & Dad arrived, and we set out to NCC's 25th
anniversary barn-dance - danced until rather late, good fun, good
of Claire to baby-sit.
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Meetings with Guy, Aaron, David & Vincent. Out for
drinks in the evening.
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To work, quick mail thrash, extracted Zoltan's sexy patch from Mono
head - which kills a polling mode, should save power. Helped Bert remove
his now broken motion sensor from his shed.
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Poked quickly at the effect gettext has on boot / login performance,
lots of reading tiny bits of data from scattered files there - a small cache
might help, wrote it up for hpj. Filed Evo / GWise nasty. Call with Patrick.
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Set off to London by train to meet Guy, Aaron, David & Vincent
- a mini-conf in the making. Train, call with JP.
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To work, weekend E-mail, administration, Clarity, sync with Rene.
Pleased to see my cousin Andy Whitcroft now with a Canonical E-mail
address, still working on the kernel - nice. Lunch.
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Worked digesting a paper for Kelli. Dug at an evil performance
problem afflicting compiz on my radeonhd machine - filed bug, why should
it take 25 seconds to switch into a composited mode, all of it shuffling
pixels in the X server ? . Poked at OO.o transitions a little again,
call with JP.
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Up early, lunch preparation, off to NCC, ran the creche
with Ruth, back for a fine beef stew with Dave. Chatted, and
slugged much of the afternoon, watched Sleeping beauty.
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Out to the NCC AGM, back late - with DT, Zoe & John
for an ad-hoc evening session, until late.
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Up early, N.'s party day - dispatched into town in the freezing
cold & snow to buy up party food. Back, applied house cleaning,
washing up, more cleaning, making of egg sandwiches, the usual stuff.
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Cascade of small people arrived to be fed & entertained -
leaped about, eat far too much silly stuff. Eventually got the babes,
and 'sleep'-over-ers (Emily & Naomi) to bed, with stories read to
them, and so on. Exhausting.
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Up early, after nightmares of French mice caught in traps. Checked
the mouse traps - some of them are defective, and should be clearly more
labelled "mouse feeding device", on the other hand, I got another one.
I suppose it's an economic way of acclimatising the children to death,
without having to own pets, or something.
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Read to the children while J. dropped H. at school (freezing out),
to the mail: responded to bugs, tried to encourage new OO.o developers.
Lunch.
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Chased & filed pulseaudio bug, afflicting my skype experience,
pondered boot performance. Filled in my first ESTA for the US - seems like
an accessible web-page albeit basic, and appears designed solely to duplicate
the paper form; I wonder if it helps speed up passport control.
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Poked at my radeon vblanking problem - whereby we block for ~2+
seconds on each
glXSwapBuffers in drmWaitVBlank's
ioctl (which tends to reduce the frame rate). And to think I thought it was
using software rendering ... it seems a custom ~/.drirc brings
Impress transitions back to normal, good.
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Call with Olaf, Hans-Peter & JP, another with David,
meeting with Kelli, more E-mailage.
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Up early for a conf-call with China, fun. Prodded beagled a
little, more mail. Customer direct call from Kelvin, re-directed
through the UK sales organisation, fun. Wrote minutes.
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Lunch, Lydia over - admired her latest pottery creations.
Back, Kelli's staff, quick calls with Stefan & Jeff. Bathed
the babes, practiced the Piano with H. (improving nicely), and
put them all to bed. Back to chat with Guy later in the evening.
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It seems that a chunk of some people's problem with beagle
may well be it indexing source directories in ~ - just reading all
those deep hierarchies to grok source files that no-one in the
right mind would want in beagle anyway is likely to blow your
dentry and inode caches and may everything else appear 'slow'.
Hopefully just adding a way of detecting a source directory:
RCS files + Makefile ? and pruning them in their entirety
would work nicely. Of course personally I have no problems, I
hack in /opt (no idea why, it's prolly not LSB compliant).
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Up early, more mail mountain scaling, bug fiddling. Poked at my
gdm strace - to try to dig out some DNS timeout there. Pushed new
yast2-gtk to the repositories.
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Poked at the strace some more, why is it statting vga_drv
17 times on startup (and ~all other drivers), with 11 duplicates
of hyperpen_drv and all other input drivers: most odd. Tried to get
happy with osc some more with Adrien's patient help.
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Filed evo hang with traces, booked flights and hotel for
SCALE - should
be fun.
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Up early, more mail fiddling. Call with Noel, long sync with
Guy, core team meeting, more mail.
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Wandered across the mail mountain, it seems slashdot generated a
flood of mail for me while I was away - most curious. Filed misc. queued
up bugs, poked at Evolution summary migration on x86_64 - discovered an
old and nasty 64bit portability issue wrt. moving summaries between
machines.
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Lunch, more mail pokeage, bugs, clarity, more wading backwards
through E-mail. Sync. with JP, chat with Kelli. Pizza dinner, put babes
to bed, back to work.
-
Off to NCC in the morning, Tony spoke on notices, back for lunch.
Put up some coat hooks at child height to try to overcome the avalanche of
small coats in the hall. At least it separates the the coats from the tens
of other redundant bits of clothing discarded (presumably) on the grounds of
incorrect color scheme there.
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Watched the end of The Jungle Book in the evening with the kids,
bathed and put them to bed. Listened to a Gordon sermon.
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Up late, tidied up variously, Louise came over for lunch.
Slugging all afternoon, and tax filing in the evening while
J & Louise went out.
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Up earlyish, out to Homebase with M. trotting along too.
Bought a large sheet of MDF, some brackets and coat hooks: as
always payed far too much for it.
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Home, spent some time whittling a shelf down to the
correct geometry - sadly the wall is (somehow) not at right
angles with the unit next to it - requiring some extreme
routing action. Managed to avoid electrocuting myself, more
by providence than judgement while peppering the wall with
holes. Moved a load of art pieces off the table & side -
by rights things should look tidier now, but mostly don't.
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Watched a little of 'My Fair Lady' in the evening with
the babes.
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Up earlyish, eggs for breakfast - from the neighbour whose hens
were going astray. Out to the race-course for some cycling practice with
the babes - H. has it cracked but for a man-week of practice. N. needs
more work. Phoned Nildram to try to get DSL authentication back - hmm.
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)
