Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
|
|
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: (
J
F
),
2008: (
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
),
2007: (
J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
),
2006,
2005,
2004,
2003,
2002,
2001,
2000,
1999,
legacy html
-
Up early, off to a deserted office at 9am. Where is the
jet-lag when you need it ? Dirk arrived to let me in - neat, then
Mark. Prodded mail gingerly, connected some more dots; train back
to Kings X, Cambridge, then Newmarket.
-
Played with babes, poked at mail - two hour DE meeting.
Up late chatting with the wife, I've clearly missed her.
-
Up early, took H. to school, picked up Benjy, dropped N. at
pre-school, took Benjy home in error, dropped him back at pre-school
(sigh). Mail skim, packed for London, worked on the train.
-
Great to meet everyone in person; pleasant surprise to see Alan
again; meetings, dinner with Dirk; out for drinks with Nick, Josh &
Hilke. Slept in a convenient local hotel.
-
J. unwell still, poor dear. Took bigger girls off to Church;
ran creche, caught up with everyone. Back for lunch, dropped M. &
N. at the Brighty's for Grace's party, and took H. and E. to Andy's
baptism at Isleham - a happy time. Played at the Isleham playground
with the babes.
-
Back to collect everyone else; got everyone home, made spag-bog
for everyone eating; helped bathed babes, J. feeling somewhat better.
Bed lateish.
-
Nursed sick wife in the night; dealt with the babes for
much of the day - kept inside by rain, hail etc. Watched bed-knobs
and broom-sticks, displayed amazing cooking skills by buying
fish & chips. Got everyone to bed, slept.
-
Up later; to the office, played with vmware a little; chewed
long overdue mail pile. Amused that my ~trivial, but IMHO blocker
OpenSolaris bug
(number 64) is not only still not fixed, but still under discussion
(progress after some break). It's enough to make you wonder whether
simply re-using an existing Linux installer: yast2, anaconda, and a
robust Linux package manager such as RPM, deb, wouldn't have been a
quicker & better bet.
-
Go-oo was selected for
Google Summer Of Code this year - all interested applicants who want
to win eternal fame and glory, helping many millions of people have
a sweeter, more pleasant life - head to here,
and/or our ideas
list - and get involved, or encourage your student friends to - it'll
be fun.
-
Talked with Gerald at some length, then Holger, read through
some bugs; got to know Werner Fink a little; called home, booked
hotel for Monday. Off to the airport, still no Wurst anywhere to be
found: what is happening to Germany ?. Plane home - prodded mail
mostly. J. feeling unwell.
-
A day of breakouts; final presentations, cake, etc. Out to
dinner with the desktop lads for the last time; back to work -
caught up with Clyde, Gerald & Holger. Stripped down and filed
misc. OO.o bugs caught during the presentations.
-
Great pitch from Guy first thing; snatched lunch over a
partner call with the other guys. Really compelling stuff
from Holger; curious, brave but effective open session with Ralf.
-
Out for dinner with the assembled SUSE architects - cut
short prematurely by an interesting call with Andy.
-
Up early; good presentation from Nat; all hands, cooked talk
with Olaf instead of lunch, presented that together later - fun; good
to see things take shape with more people involved.
-
All-hands call with Markus, launch of SLE11 - the world's best
Enterprise Linux desktop (and server of course). Checked out Nat's
latest toys, and caught up with him a little - exciting times. Down for
a packed release party, and catching up with many people; old and new.
Back to bed late.
-
Up early, breakfast with the desktop lads - really good to
catch up again in person; off for desktop meeting with Ralf.
Strategy briefings & meetings all day; Dinner with the desktop
team and Guy; intense and friendly discussion with Alex about the
merits of Chinese Communism, and bystander apathy: excellent guy.
Bed lateish.
-
Up early, dealt with the babes, kept them quiet, off to Tesco
to buy chocolates on the advice of M. (Maltesers) and E. (milk tray -
somehow a more discerning taste from the 8 month old): Mother's day.
H. & N. made a fine card - back on an even keel.
-
J. awoke, carded and chocolated; stayed away from Church -
more erratic sickness; listened to a sermon while the kids played
lego. Lovely roast lunch.
-
Out to local gardens with monster slide & fun free playground.
Much bouncing, swinging etc. Packed up, lashed ladders to the roof to
take home, got everyone in the car, drove for home: traffic good.
Stopped off at Stanstead, flight to Nurnberg, arrived late & tired,
bed.
-
A night of applied sickness, changed two children's sheets
multiple times each; very annoyed with M. for not even trying to
learn how to use a bowl. Exhausted.
-
Lie in, breakfast, lunch and out to the park in the car
with the ill babes - who miraculously recovered and had a wonderful
time in the playground; good.
-
Back, watched Cinderella; dinner, talked with the parents,
bed early.
-
Worked for the morning, only mostly on E-mail, agonised
over just the right words in the right order, etc.
-
Packed family, and kids in the car, and travel clothes
for Nurnberg, set off bright & early for the 2hr drive to
Brighton. 4:30 later arrived there - nice: moral - don't try to
drive on the M25 during daylight hours.
-
Amusing incident - whereby while I went to fetch chips
for the kids, and just as E. was 1/2 way being changed, M. was
sick in the back of the car with just J. to deal with it. Cleaned
up the mess. etc.
-
Up early, chat to Thorsten, sync with Florian, poked at some
paperwork; lunch at the laptop, travel projections. DE meeting, filed
expenses.
-
Managed to persuade architect that in fact we do have a solid
brick wall from ground floor to attic at the centre of the house -
despite his drawings.
-
Up late; feeling shocking - avoided breakfast; poked mail.
Worked on slideware, chewed Rennies in vain, to try and calm the
stomach. Break to see family and not eat lunch.
-
Conference call, chat with Jeremy. Some toast for dinner;
sat and read mail while J. filled out grant forms in the evening.
-
Up early, to work, call with Olaf, chat with Doko, just
when I thought I might be becoming productive got embroiled in
some inotify related evilness. As well as being a big beast,
apparently configuring OO.o kills both firefox & evo. in some
/tmp/ watching inotify cascade: spent some time looking at that
why watch /tmp anyway ?
-
Lunch, call with Kendy, prodded at X server / DRI, kernel
mode-setting and why it doesn't work for me; inconclusively. Core
team meeting. Spent more time chasing down the inotify problem
with Colin
-
Alpha in the evening. Back to work afterwards, stayed up
rather late fixing bugs for Guy.
-
Up early, to work - eager to finish early tonight. Netgear
router died overnight, decided to upgrade the firmware: that bricked
it - nice. Rushed out to buy new router - ended up with a 'Buffalo'
instead. The default admin account of 'root' looks good, seems to be
a Linux box, but I'm missing the nice, friendly, yellow, GPL message
that Netgear put in the box.
-
Lie in, off to NCC, Tony speaking, good to catch up with
all & sundry. Solomon & Peace around for lunch, sunned
ourselves in the garden for the first time - perhaps Summer is a
coming in ?
-
Played in the garden with the babes, N. cycling in the
road hit a record 46.5 paces of free-wheeling action; nearly time
to complicate matters with some pedals.
-
Up early, out into town to do the shopping while J. slept.
Detour via the Memorial Gardens to do some swinging. Back, made
packed lunch. Set off for Thetford Forest.
-
Lots of climbing, clambering, learning to slide down poles,
bumping of knees and so on. N. completely overcame her fear of climing
the unfeasibly tall pyramid to slide down. Not overly sunny, but very
fun.
-
Back, tired, packed everyone off to bed. Filled out grant
application form, using Florian's new fields work - nice.
-
Took H. to school - red nose and dress-down day. Fixed the
OO.o crash on start issue, filed up-stream etc. Did a little profiling,
poked at pidgin - trying to reproduce a previous memory corruption
issue, with no joy.
-
Poked at kernel compilation, chatted with a chap Daniel - also
bitten by the sexy "dbus-send sometimes doesn't" feature,
nice.
-
Discovered my crash on start (when not using the splash) is a
consequence of a patch disabling the 'INTRO' style on the window which
used to encourage the WM to nail the splash screen on top of all else
and was shockingly un-usable; interesting.
-
Up lateish, feeling under the weather - some sleep debt to pay
off somewhere. Poked mail, talked Fridrich through gconf bits. Lydia
and Sanmarie over for lunch.
-
Built the latest ooo-build. Desktop staff meeting. Booked flight
to Nuremburg. Helped to isolate a pulseaudio bug in our packages. Early
dinner, bathed babes, J. out baby sitting.
-
Dug at OO.o, linkoo not working for me, for some strange reason:
component bootstrap horked again. Chat with Peter, finished up mail.
Discovered that soffice.bin doesn't start unless you do
./soffice.bin -splash-pipe=0 - presumably the random argument
sets up the Universal Content Broker (UCB) correctly, without it - bang.
-
Prodded mail, worked through the endless mound of interesting
things to do that had accumulated while doing packaging, QA. Call
with Florian & Andy & co.
-
Up lateish, to work; started to catch up on queued mail finally.
Call with JP, Florian, team meeting, etc. Wrote LXF column.
-
Up early, to work - call from Thorsten, call with Kendy, chat
with Adrian, intense image and package building action. Chatted with
Matthew & his team.
-
Intense day of poking at Xorg, it's packaging, and the marvels
that exist under the sun there - lots of build-service action; then
some frantic bug fixing, worked very late.
-
Up rather early, fed E. amused the others with children's
DVD - breakfast; out to the local CofE - tried to avoid creating
too much noise. Back for lunch.
-
More bicyling, N. free-wheeled 35 paces down-hill to great
acclaim, packed everything up, attached bikes to car, set off in
pouring rain, home safely.
-
Wow - Sanmarie had cleaned the ground-floor beautifully,
everything tidy, clean and as neat as can be: a most pleasant
surprise. Dinner, bathed and put babes to bed.
-
Mini lie-in, full English cooked breakfast; off to Sizewell to
admire the juxtaposition of the nuclear power station, and the new
feed-in
sub-station for the planned off-shore wind-farm.
-
Back, put E. to bed, more cycling practice with the babes;
N. getting the idea of steering nicely now, but hindered by a typical
glancing curb collision accident.
-
Lunch. Out to the front to sail boats on the boating lake,
and admire the lifeboat etc. Back, more running around the garden
hiding behind bushes & similar critical games.
-
Put babes to bed, watched grisly murder thing
on the TV; bed.
-
Up in the night, poked IRC, back to bed. Mail chew,
call with Tambet, call with Thorsten. Wasted hours, and hours,
and hours again with trying to build working OEM rescue images.
After one particularly unamusing last-throw episode of dd'ing
over the disk I was using, needed a live-USB key - should be
easy to generate surely ? Luckily I had the C ISO to hand.
-
Started reading the How to make a boot-able USB key
FAQs FAQ 1 -
mksusebootdisk failed - FAQ 2 - only
5 pages, and umpteen commands, onto HOWTO
1 - again, yielding a non-booting key. Amazing - how is it that
we make it -so- difficult; judging by the plethora of documentation out
there, this is far too difficult. Eventually in desparation looked for
other distros with Live-CDs. For the benefit of viewers - I hereby
reproduce the Moblin live-USB Key FAQ, in all it's complexity.
- Download the live-CD image
- Insert USB key - critical not to forget this step
cat /path/to/moblin.iso > /dev/sdb ; sync
Roll on the next OpenSUSE, which no doubt will
have this feature too.
-
Off to Aldeburgh to see the in-laws after lunch; kept
doing image builds in the background every few minutes - while
catching up with Bruce & Anne, and training kidlets in
bicycling - an ideal incline on the warren.
-
Set up Bruce's Windows Vista laptop in the evening, to do
what he wants. Amazed the plague of crud-ware dialogs that hassle
the living out of the average user. The dial-up people it seems
won't die, and want their cascade of silliness, the Anti-virus
vendor, and goodness knows whom else who paid to put their logo
and annoyances in front of the unsuspecting punter. Turned
everything off; used wireless connectivity instead, things worked
better.
-
Ignored mail, worked at image building oddness. Endless
pain trying to get useful images to build, what a world of
sickness and grief. Why be productive, when you can battle with
ISO creation. Meetings.
-
Up disgracefully late, quick mail prod, more packaging
debugging and fixing of things. Watched image creation - some
real fun goes on there. Misc fixes to misc. packages.
-
Prodded mail, spent much of the morning in calls, and
a frantic build-service / kiwi learning experience with Adrian's
kind assistance, hpj, JP, Olaf, Tambet and various other heroic
types.
-
Conference calls, update from Jeff, core team meeting.
Worked until 4:30am on misc. packaging problems, learning the
(sweet) build service, tweaking and fixing things.
-
Looked after the sick M. so it doesn't infect babes at school.
Chugged through mail slowly. Pleased to see Matthias committed my
gmarkup speedups; wrote up some more notes
on low-hanging sillies for the Gnome performance list.
-
Slogged away at mail, and meetings much of the afternoon.
-
Up early, took the older two off to NCC by myself, DT spoke
well; loitered at the end catching up with people, gave Jon something
of a ride back.
-
Lovely roast lunch, lay about feeling full & contented.
Some degree of running around in the garden later, hot cross buns for
tea, bed earlyish.
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)
