Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
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legacy html
- Up; J' hacking away across the table - ok only at
Word - but looking most lovely. Installed the ORBit2 / linc
changes, Nautilus worked first time - good, will commit.
- Started to chew mail. Committed my fixes. Committed
Earle's eog porting work. Found Anders' reference bug in
libbonoboui, sadly fixing it will throw up hundreds of double
destroy type bugs in Nautilus, hey ho.
- Wrote some fairly nasty linc regression tests -
poked into all the pokeable places, good to have some nice
tests running in there. Found an evil bug with the buffer
flushing logic, fixed it.
- Struggled with the nasty 'Nautilus locks on 2nd
execution' problem; horribly evil.
- Set off for the Mansergh's house ( my Best Man )
for a New Year's eve bash; car dead - phoned the RAC - an
hour wait, finaly got the car started - but with no obvious
fix - stayed at home; very disappointed to miss the Mansergh's
fine spread & company (esp. J' who had got all dressed up).
- Heaped coal on the fire, celebrated a year of
knowing each other, and didn't stay up for Midnight.
- Up lateish, off to J's church - everyone very
pleased to see her back - lots of ring examination etc. Saw
Ryan - the USAF WISO back from service in a confidential
location - interesting to talk world politics. A fair enough
service / family sermon.
- Back for lunch; played guitar while J' unpacked,
snoozed for an hour or so.
- A quick dinner, and then off to Eden Baptist for
a rather uninspiring service, but you can't win 'em all.
- Back, bed early - tired; lovely to get into the
warmth of Bed - out of the cool night air.
- It seems everyone is pretty happy with the ORBit2 /
linc changes, so I'll shove them in Monday after a bus load of
testing.
- Today is the day that the sets of parents / families
get to meet each other; prayed hard, breakfast.
- Commenced cooking - or at least J' did, I played with
the fire - Mr G' is bringing some coal, washed up.
- Bruce & Anne Griffin arrived and we set about getting
the dinner going, umpteen baked potatoes in the oven. Auntie
Louise and Uncle Antony arrived, then Cousin Tim and Julie his
wife, my parents still absent. Finally they arrived.
- Immediately nothing happened - except the coat hooks
fell off the wall under the weight; no fights, no clawings, no
lost eyes, all teeth stayed in sockets - hmm; perhaps they don't
know these are the in-laws-to-be. Introduced them all.
- Proceeded to have a very serene and pleasant
afternoon, set of introductions, huge meal - fine champagne,
etc. great. Eventualy they all left, claiming they were very
happy with the other lot etc. Phew - an answer to prayer.
- Miguel reports that the C# compiler compiles itself
and produces an MSIL executable with only ~20 errors, wow - it
looks like it is almost self bootstrapping: the point where we
can move it to a fully free system; wonderful.
- Phoned David to re-arrange the New Year's Eve
beano, subtracting the walk to the Seven Sisters. Sat on the
sofa next to my love & chewed mail, synced with the parents.
- Up early; got steaming into the linc non-blocking
work, got it mostly done. Very impressed with Evolution's mail
push / pull, and the sexy rendering of my spam. Fixed some
ultra tedious ORBit2 IDL compiler sign warnings - nice.
- Got on with the linc stuff, knocked up an ORBit2
regression test - started looking into some curious slowness
in ORBit2's copy code with some performance regression tests
in ORBit2.
- Slept most of the afternoon, just dead beat.
Hacked some more on linc stuff - sent off patches, and change
requests to the release team etc.
- Off shopping for tommorow to Tesco - lots of food,
but no coal; tried to find coal but there was none in
Newmarket, loads of cars around due to a set of accidents on
the A14 (?).
- Went for a run - so cold, you can really feel
your lungs, felt totaly dead afterwards - but then warmed up
and felt great.
- Up early; to work, sucked mail into Evolution.
A new release of the Gtk+ set out - with many, many fixes -
great.
- Pinned up the latest amusement form Kellogs,
on the side of their giant cornflakes packets; there is a
mouse ringed by a mouse cord; with the legend:
Crashed ? - Fancy a Snack ? Readh for the Kelloggs
with a subscript The Kellogg's Garantee: Kellogg's is
committed to providing quality products, and we welcome your
comments and enquiries - presumably some marketing Guru
needs Microsoft Airbag 2000.
- Got on with the linc work, committed an atk
patch I'd forgotten. Mother sheared me - removing the worst
excesses of a hair explosion, Robert too - Anne Marie
arrived which was nice. 'bert is somewhat brutal to her
which is a shame; he must be nice sometimes though.
- Went to Lord of the Rings - rather good,
somewhat excellent special effects, and overall impressed.
Under-amused with the inital elven king of Rivendale who
fluffed his part.
- Pulled the XFree86 source to give it a bit of a
read, now I'm not scared of a tad of kernel exploration -
it's time to get into X - and to see if what Owen says about
gdk pixbuf rendering is in fact as fast as claimed.
- Hacked in the car on the way home (to Newmarket),
got a fair bit done. Bed - clapped out again.
- Up extremely late; went for a run around the
recreation ground. Lunch - mostly the same as yesterday.
- Very tired - snoozed in the afternoon. Watched
"The lost world" in the afternoon ( the 2nd part on TV ),
then tea [ with cream meringues - wonderful ], then played
'pit' and 'the baa moo cluck game' etc. to much amusement.
- Bed in a dead sort of state.
- Christmas day - up early, discovered Mr
Griffin basting the turkey with butter; lovely. J' couldn't
believe I was up before her; but then arrived dressed most
fabulously - Clive arrived with a tie - and the same shirt
as Mr G' - odd.
- A lovely christmas breakfast, then lots of talk
and carols, then lunch & presents.
- Set off for my house at 5.30pm or so. Got there
rather late, tea with Barbara & Colin, John & Joan, & family.
Tea, more presents, bed - clapped out.
- Up early; a nice cooked breakfast and off into
a local town to do grocery shopping, then into Aldeburgh -
found some more presents for various people. Saw the church
we're to be married in, inside the town - with a hotel
opposite; ideal. Saw the nearby nuclear powerstation in the
distance - lovely.
- Back home, and off for a run - ran across the
warren, not altogether freezing cold which was nice. Back,
showered.
- Sat around talking, reading, drinking tea &
cuddling - wow. Wrapped presents for various people, mostly
J', managed to turn J's potatoe peeler and fish slice into
a cruciform package with some lashing, newspaper etc.
- Clive & Sue arrived in the evening + 2 dogs.
Had Champagne [ testing some for the wedding ], and sat
around chatting until midnight mass time.
- Set off for the church - very full, ~ 300
people there - rather a good turn out. Service rather
pleasant - several carols. Back to bed, talked to Clive for
a while - who refused to be led on Sue.
- Up late, not woken by J', rushed breakfast, and
off to church slightly late. A light Christmasy sermon, got
back. Wrapped presents. The parents arrived home and had
dinner ( same food as last night ).
- Set off for Aldeburgh, read the economist in
snippets to Julia in the car - a long journey. Arrived there
after dark, in the snow. Had afternoon tea, talked.
- Dinner - and talked weddings a bit; looked at the
Griffin's wedding photos - discovered Mr Griffin looked like
Tony Blaire when he was young. Mrs Griffin things J' should
marry an octogenarian millionaire first. Bed lateish.
- Up early; went Christmas shopping with J - a great
stimulus to my feeble shopping ability - got presents for all
the non-difficult people, still stuck on some.
- Back home - Thomas' 18th birthday - nice dinner &
presents - his new digital camera wouldn't play ball with
gphoto-0.4.3, checked out gphoto-2.0 - which plays well with
the camera but this doesn't include any GUI to browse the
images - which sucks rather - merely a command line interface.
Someone needs to write some eog support for gphoto2
- Chewed mail; wrote a status report. Looked to see
whether ADSL is available in Newmarket - yes, but not near J's
house. J' went to see Louise, I chewed mail for a bit.
- Thomas' birthday dinner - lots of friends of the
family came around, more present unwrapping - he got broadly
the same presents I did at 18; we pitched the tent in the hall
though since it's freezing outside. Sit down dinner, some
games, bed.
- Up early, said goodbye to Julia. Tried to install
Ximian Gnome on top of the clean Red Hat 7.2, acute dependency
problems - instead I had to install
Red Carpet directly, and then install packages individualy -
luckily they were all cached localy, lots of grief.
- Grandma's nursing home rang, she passed away in the
night, family sad, mother more so.
- Poked at libbonoboui while evolution downloaded so I
can read my mail. Tried playing 'Tux Racer' which in contrast to
the playable game on Thomas' machine [ Voodoo whatnot ] crawls so
badly it takes a while to even quit. Committed my minor Nautilus
traffic reduction patch, and a libbonoboui speedup.
- Chewed mail, and bug reports. Re-built the system
from the ground up. Managed to forget and miss the release team
meeting over tea.
- Fixed up some more bits, added an API for Bill's
Bonobo accessibility support, went to pick up Julia from the
station, finished up and knocked off for Christmas.
- Up early, sent J' off; got to the E-mail - setup more
and more evolution filters; started some more actual usage; moving
mail seems somewhat un-ergonomic, perhaps that's just me not
adjusting to the VFolder metaphore.
- An interesting set of mails with Federico / Ettore on
the general slowness of how we render pixbufs in the UI handler, and
how this code is essentialy just a cut & paste of the Gnome 2.0 code.
- Chewed lots of mail; committed the first lot of linc
changes; very pleased to see Miguel
interviewed on MSDN, judging from his
status report Mono is coming along in great leaps and bounds.
- Seth tells me that Lord of the Rings is really good,
although somewhat graphical in places - the family birthday outing
to the Cinema will not have to be postponed then.
- John sent the CD's immediately, they arrived this morning,
wow - pretty amazing service, given the Christmas post etc. Committed
the first round of libbonoboui speedups, the really big win with the
GdkPixbuf cache not in yet.
- J' arrived home very cold and late having missed her
train, poor creature - picked her up at the station. Dinner, bed.
- Up very early, sent J' off to the City, hacked linc -
added it's own GSource for more efficiency, and as a precursor to
the new buffering API. ADSL connection totaly dead, evil software
issue; started pulling some Mandrake 8.1 ISOs onto a windows system,
the evils. Clearly one would prefer to use Red Hat 7.2, but one hasn't
recieved the boxed set yet, and one hears rumours of improved PPPoE
support in Mandrake; hmm.
- Read mail on the windows laptop; botheration; 4 hours
left to pull the first 2 install CD's. Discovered that John Winters'
LinuxEmporium takes card
orders - horay, ordered some cheap CDs at midday. Consumed time by
backing up all my mail to CD and switching to evolution fully.
- Installed Mandrake 8.1 over the top of Redhat 7.1 - with
some considerable trepidation. Mercifuly it was successful, since I
only considered the data on the server in mid install. A fairly
pleasant but somewhat flickery and slow install process [ an unknown
PCI video card ] - but it knew about the Speedtouch modem and set it
up such that it only needed an hour of Thomas to get it working -
great to see the Brother in action, and nice that they put effort
into supporting a very common UK setup.
- Sent the nautilus patch off to Darin; grabbed mail with
evolution - very impressed with the overall beauty of the experience.
- Up earlyish; breakfast, made eel cache gconf keys, cleaned
up and sent off the bonobo-activation patch to Maciej. Chewed lots of
mail, fixed an ORBit2 pre-condition. Wrote my status report.
- Tried to find a birthday present for Thomas; with some
success. Sent patches off to Darin. More struggling with the lack
of .la files - not a good idea by Havoc/Jacob to get rid of them IMHO.
- Mailed Damien confirming for FOSDEM we'll have a Gnome hackers
session there - all Gnome hackers are welcome, and there is no charge
for this conference - No Charge, this has to be one of the best
places to hear some excellent technical talks and meet other hackers,
and it would be great to have a substantial Gnome presence. One might
sign up here.
- Hacked in the car back to Brighton, spent the whole time
responding to Darin's comments; not such good time usage.
- Got home, dinner & chatted with the brothers, Auntie
sent the tax bill - better than my pessimistic predictions; good, I
can afford it. The ADSL connection at home is far, far more flakey
I wonder why. Sung to J' as she lay in bed [ what a hardened skull
she must have ].
- Up earlyish, phone still not connected but plenty to
get on with in the meantime. Wondered why - with my bonobo
optimization Nautilus was not that much faster. Discovered that per
URL change it was sending the history list: N items (name, location,
and stringified pixmap) to every NautilusView and hoping oneway would
not block. Re-architected it with the Control's ambient properties -
'title' / 'history' / 'selection' and and an event source so people
can explicitely listen instead of always being told.
- Plugged a bonobo-activation query cache into nautilus, so
we don't spend out life doing the same lookups. Looked at the 'access'
straces in nautilus, found a hotspot and noticed I called the same
(slow) method twice in quick succession - doh.
- After caching Nautilus' oaf queries most successfully, I
noticed that really the cache needs to be in bonobo-activation, since
gnome-vfs likes to repeat the same query multiple times itself, doh.
- Phone connected at 7.00am tommorow, bother - no mail today.
Got the bonobo-activation patch into shape, tested the cache limiting,
all fine. Knocked off at 6.00pm.
- Just missed the crack of dawn, up at 5.20am - off to
London Kings X - BR got me there only 15 minutes late, met a
frozen creature on the platform. Wonderful to see her. Coffee &
Bagel with cream cheese.
- Fast train to Cambridge + mega tons of luggage, taxi
to Newmarket, and her parents were there. A very warm greeting
from Bruce & Anne, they have re-fitted Julia's kitchen themselves
and it looks amazingly well, beautiful even. Tea & Engagement
presents - J' got a little gold wol broach, and I got a genuine
hand made Griffin gentlemens watch in brass with a pretty enamel
on the back; lovely.
- Dinner & they left. Sat around in the front room by
the fire and read some of "Life at the Extreme" while J' processed
her junk mail mountain. Suddenly realised we needed to go to Church,
headed off for 'Eden' (Baptist church in Cambridge).
- Slightly late, a childrens sermon [ J' was very tired ]
about the Magi - and the meaning of wisdom, an extremely good and
interactive sermon for Children. Had an amusingly contemporary dance
to 'Fat boy Slim's carol of the wise men:
We've come a long long way together,
through the hard times and the good,
I've got to clebrate you baby,
I've got to praise you like I should,
I've got to praise you ...
Storming. Met James Williams afterwards, had to leave to
put the tired girl to bed, but great to catch up with him.
- Back home, bread & bed.
- Up late; Saturday. Today we get innundated with
brothers. Thomas arrived home before lunch. Interesting pumpkin
soup.
- Polished my bonobo patch,
made it work as before with Nautilus - still lots faster,
committed. Moved onto porting it to Gnome 2.0; went for a far
more invasive but efficient approach discarding the GdkPixbuf
cache and marking each xml attr dirty as neccessary. Gnome 2.0:
not only smaller, but faster too.
- Robert arrived home late, now bristling with computers,
updated the hub to Robert's 10/100 switch. Located an atk chaining
bug.
- Plugged onwards with the merge to libbonoboui, hmm.
Bed, seeing J' at the crack of dawn tommorow.
- Up at 8.30, chewed mail, very positive about
Gnome 2.0. Poked at some libbonoboui issues. Committed
Sam Couter's first ORBit2 cleanup patch; good to have him
on the team. Talked to Mark about the panel - seems to be
coming along rather nicely.
- Started binary chopping leaks out of the UI
code. Discovered GConf leaks nastily, improved built in
ref tracking inside libbonobo. Fixed a rat's nest of
sillies in various places. Mark committed his unhandled
mouse click forwarding code - nice.
- Pulled
GStreamer-0.3.0, and some of the
prereq packages; particularly Hermes-1.3.3, SDL-1.2.3,
mpeg2dec-0.2.0, mad, mad-libs, remember to install the -devel
packages too. Failed to build it - it wants libxml1; can't
ship that with Gnome 2.0; pulled the CVS sources to have a
hack. Grabbed
automake-1.5 apparently neccessary - has some whacked out
perl dependencies; build it from source instead.
- Configured at great length, whilst chopping more
ref bugs out of libbonoboui. Finally got a gstreamer build, fixing
several interesting issues along the way. Sent off a patch to
Wim Taymans for merging action. Got pointed at a load of mug
shots of the hackers.
- Nana is in a bad way - sores all over her and
getting worse, Doctor rang to say she needs to be in hospital
in the next 24 hours.
- Ported the media player to Gnome 2.0, still having
serious issues with the debugger and the module registry; hmm.
Managed to get several of these solved, pushed a code cleanup
through part of the 'elements'. Wrote to J'.
- Up at 5.30am - going the wrong way, hmm.
Got a nice
link from my love - still no work on the honeymoon,
bother - must consult some travel agent.
- Tried to encourage people not to merge the
entire Gnome development list set into a single list, grief -
sure it'd reduce cross posts, but re-posts - well through the
roof.
- Caught up with Nat on IRC, did some work with him,
looked at the way linc blocks - particularly stupidly it turns
out.
- J' rang up from her bed, lovely to hear her voice.
Tried to explain why you should not inherit interfaces unless you
know what you are doing to all and sundry, with little success.
- Re-enabled the Nautilus list view - I forgot it was
disabled waiting for me to port EelList. Got on with libbonoboui
fixage, tried to release libbonoboui-1.108.0 since James just
released libglade - horay. Fixed GConf API usage problem in
gnome-vfs.
- Got to a the lifecycle issues in libbonoboui, after
a lot of fuzzy thinking finally got some clarity. Cleaned away
some really brainless bits (of my own creation) from the
UIEngine/UIContainer combo and made it pretty. Nautilus now
closes windows beautifuly. Committed the Nautilus bits,
committed the libbonoboui bits, onto testing gnome-core.
- Jody started porting gnumeric to Gnome 2.0 - which
looks like it'll result in some hard core platform butt-kicking
fairly shortly; great news. Committed an eel fix for the list
view - now get (crushed) icons but no text. Did some more
research work for Nat.
- Committed some more nautilus bits, cereal, bed
at 12.00pm - got up to write to J' - doh. Realised I'd
forgotten to go to Cell group; bother.
- Up early, 6.00am; chewed mail, fixed up gail's
pkgconfig file, added check to at-spi. Great - it seems that
Sam Couter and Ryan are going to work on folding ORBit C++
back into ORBit2 - which is great news.
- Wow - Mark Mulcahy posted his gnome-speech thing
and sent me a tar.gz, nice stuff indeed - a Bonobo server
that deals with speech output; needs to hit CVS soon.
- Maciej doesn't like the addition of C++ bindings
to the ORB - despite them being purely code additons,
involving precicely 0 existing code to change; hmm. Did some
work merging the code into a branch.
- Spent some time removing bonobo calls from the
cspi implementation, and shoving them into a sub-library;
hmm. Finished & fired a patch off. More misc. at-spi fixage.
- Did a linc-0.1.11, ORBit2-2.3.100 and
libbonobo-1.108.0 releases, whilst doing some more at-spi
re-organization.
- Wrote to J', bed.
- Up late 9.30am - overshot; doh. Chewed lots of
mail. Committed my gail / atk fixes.
- Phone call from Eddie Bleasdale - lots of
interesting happenings. Wrote a status report. More mail
chewage.
- It seems people are having issues with the not
fully non-blocking nature of oneway method calls; sigh, at
least Havoc is. Got on with fixing up gal from Chris Phelps'
patch - did a load of XAtom -> GdkAtom porting.
- Onto looking at ORBitCpp with a
view to merging it back into ORBit2.
- Tried to get some idea of what gail / gtkhtml2
would be doing in the core dependency wise. Back to at-spi,
add some macros, and use them everywhere to ensure that we
don't return duff data on exceptions, remove the int return
value on ref/unref. Committed another big patch. Pointed
Havoc at where to hack in linc-connection to make
non-blocking-ness more convincing.
- Continued working over the API - ensuring that
exceptions resulted in sensible return values, massive
tedious API auditing and fixage.
- Wrote to J' - bed, 10.00pm.
- Up at 7.00am, getting back to some sort of
normal schedule I hope.
- Off to Church - very cold and crisp the air
outside. The story of Zacheus - so I had to pretend to be
a burly person that couldn't be peered over at the front,
and the vicar climed a ladder and swung from the rafters.
Preached from his Apple laptop again, content very good.
The way the story of
Zacchaeus sums up the
preceeding several parables is most interesting.
- The parable of the Pharisee and the
Tax collector in the temple - and the
Tax collector coming away justified before
God.
- Little Children coming to Jesus - and
the short Tax collector's undignified tree
climbing.
- The rich young ruler - very outwardly good
but loving his money; vs. the wealthy tax
collector who gave 1/2 of his ill gotten gains
away on conversion.
- And finaly a blind begger given his sight
Jesus said to him, "Receive your sight;
your faith has healed you."
- And finaly Zacheus, the hardened, calloused
chief Tax Collector, a sinful collaborator
with the Romans, a man whom to touch would bring
defilement; Jesus said to him, "Today salvation
has come to this house, because this man, too,
is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to
seek and to save what was lost." Indeed, this
man is a friend of sinners and thus me.
- Back home - phone a somewhat startled Julia - had
a lovely talk. A lovely Sunday dinner and read some interesting
things on-line. Particularly extracts from the definition of
Jihad from TP Hughes' "Dictionary of Islam".
- Off to Church to do the 'Sound Desk' for the
practice, and service. Dog tired, forgot to turn various
knobs at the right time, particularly forgetting to record
the sermon; sigh.
- Back home, tea - Mum & Dad watching "Sense and
Sensibility" on video.
- Up at 4.30am, started poking at at-spi again,
more cleaning around the shop, implemented a sol'n for the
exit / mainloop / quit abstraction. Found a memory leak in
glibc's elf code with memprof - nice, sent a bug report and
patchlet off to bug-glibc. Pruned some leaks in atk.
- Beggining to feel rather ill, argh. Found and
fixed a nasty link bug making gconfd-2 chew 100% CPU; hmm.
Copied the bonobo docs into libbonobo, and fixed / upated
them.
- Breakfast, and checked out Scroll Keeper
since Nautilus was spawning a 50 or so shell processes all
zombifying and moaning about it's absence; hmm. Pulled
docbook-dtd412-xml-1.0-8.noarch.rpm.
- Hmm, the tree view refuses to activate too -
in the course of fixing added _much_ prettier exception
reporting to bonobo-moniker-oaf, so we can catch errors
trivialy now. Made the tree view activate nicely,
discovered eel-ctree needed porting.
- Ulrich points out my glibc patch is totaly
bogus, hey ho - try again with the latest source. Nearly
went mad with boredom, doing the EelCList port from Gtk+ 1.2
to 2.0; not at all obvious how to procceed. Discovered the
heinous mess that CList and it's derivatives has spawned.
EelCList -> EelCTree -> EelList -> EelListColumnTitles etc.
Finaly got some icons and text showing up in the sidebar and
gave up, committed and back to glibc.
- Wow - I'm so blessed with a fast connection,
fun things to do and learn and time at the weekend to do it;
amazing.
- Bill approved this morning's at-spi patch;
committed, made up a mail explaining the performance impact
of (a ? TRUE : FALSE) at execution time, quite apart from
the stylistic monstering - fired it off to Padraig.
- Interested by Martin LK's famous washington
speech, while we often hear:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and
live out the true meaning of it's creed - we hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal
we tend to hear less of:
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted,
every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places
will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made
straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all
flesh shall see it together.
- Tea, and bed.
- Up before 3.00am, hmm - looks like the 'ole body
clock is a tad confused - but can still count 8 hours. Chewed
mail. Started re-building my system in a bottom up fashion.
- Jacob's doing really great work with libglade-convert
so we can map all our old GUI code to Gnome 2.0 - the action
happening
here. Also porting glade1 to Gnome 2.0 on the glade-gnome2-branch.
- Rodrigo also steaming away at my TODO - which is
great, it's most encouraging to have such help. Chewed mail,
while the re-build churned ... re-set my system time; sigh,
how can it always be so wrong ? - prolly copying etc around to
have different configurations I expect.
- Everything still building, and the laptop not doing
so for responsiveness with 3 parallel builds going on - not much
swapping happening though so ... reviewed Mark Sobell's chapter.
- To at-spi eventualy, sent a patch to Padraig, the
signal lookup business is just broken wrt. signal registration
only happens on class init => we should init the class.
- Downloaded festival
so I can spend forever getting the computer to talk to me -
nobody loves me; sob. [ NB. 'sigh' has apparently been banned,
so sobs will have to suffice instead ].
- More at-spi bug fixage, robustification and
testing, buckets of fatal bugs nailed. Managed to get festival
working, and the magnifier - rather impressive overall I think.
- Grant Richards came round for lunch which was nice,
then Simon phoned - Mr Tennant's cancer is much worse and
unresponsive to treatment - he's on the way out, very sad.
Simon seems to be doing well though, which is great.
- Back to at-spi; merged to HEAD and committed -
great, found a nice bug in HEAD with the regression tests,
fixed that, and we're pretty golden.
- Dinner, mailed J' saw Jacob's screenshot of Daemon's
glade porting
progress; nice. Bed early; 8.30pm.
- Slept a little.
- Fled the dawn around the globe. Watched 'Atlantis'
which was fairly appalling. Very little character development,
in fact that characters were about as 2D as the animation was
badly done; sigh.
- Cleaned masses of cut and paste crud out of
at-spi/libspi, just a staggering mess of 5 line cut and paste
with different buggy variants; sigh. It would have been so
easy to write right in the first instance. Shoved the SpiBase
class in at the bottom to manage the AtkObject ( which we proxy )'s
lifecycle cleanly.
- Finaly back in England - with the luggage, bus &
train home, read lots of King. Father collected me from the
station, great to be home. Transpires they thought I was
returning yesterday and were terrified, which is sad.
- Tackled the most pressing issues in the snail
mail mountain, onto IRC. Red Hat, very kindly Fedex'd me
Red Hat 7.1 - [ I'm a big fan of Red Hat because of their
continuing kind patronage of me in this way ], awaiting RH
7.2 with baited breath, and wishing I hadn't switched to XFS -
I think I was tempted by offers of gdm3 being finished, but
I forget.
- Had forgotten how great it was to be able to
worship God privately in song with acompanying appallingly
bad guitar playing - remembered.
- Slightly woozy and getting a cold; hmm, missing
J' too. Checked with Mark, added regression test & fixed ORBit2
hashing bug, faster too. Wow - a whole ADSL connection to
myself again - sadly it dies reguarly.
- Some great work in the mailbox from Peter Laszlo,
and Mark at Sun fixing Union marshalling in the ORB.
- Realized I had another great opportunity to test
the time-admin tool now I have moved timezones again, and
HPJ's fix for the same.
- Had a long and very productive and encouraging
phone call with Bill, excellent. A fair bit of work mapped
out which is good, and lots of sense talked.
- It seems the parents have killed the fatted
lentil for me - rejoicing at my home coming; lovely to eat
with them again;
- Bed early at 7.00pm.
- Up early, lugged the luggage (sic) to the station,
train, then to CAF - for power & connectivity. Chewed mail -
horay it looks like Federico is fixing up Sawfish - great work.
- Committed the ORBit2 regression tests that don't
help find Laca's problem; sigh. Sent another patchlet off to
Bill, killed a stale lock in at-spi. Fixed another FreeBSD build
'brokenness' in linc - that makes it look like the include order
is important for that system; sigh.
- Looked over Cristiano's gnome-terminal work; merging
his tabbed terminal with Gnome 2.0's terminal. Also Havoc has
come trampling along; privately and without discussion starting
a re-write of the terminal - discarding the Bonobo UI Handler,
and treading on Cristiano's feet substantialy - then being
reluctant to co-operate / work with Cristiano. Sigh - I forget
quite what the RFP process was supposed to achieve, but it's
as loathesome now as ever I suspect.
- A tad of red-carpeting; time to get Evolution 1.0.
Replied to Bill with another patch addressing some issues, and
fixing others. Caught what looks like a particularly evil ORB
issue in the debugger.
- The Taxi arrived, very sad to leave Julia, but
mostly we were both too busy immediately beforehand to feel
it, at full effect at parting. Read more of Martin Luther King's
autobiography in the Taxi - heart elsewhere, good stuff though,
historicaly and spiritualy interesting, a great ... servant
in the cause of Christ and Freedom.
- Hacked up another regression test to find a bug in
ORBit2 that again - didn't seem to be there; back to at-spi.
Made the tests properly automated. Lots, and lots more at-spi
work - getting better, tests throwing up a lot of stuff.
- Watched part of 'Rat Race' on the plane, loads
more issue fixage in at-spi, now the registry daemon doesn't
allow itself to start multiple redundant copies, and copes
rudimentarily with apps quitting abnormaly.
- Stopped at Bangkok, got off for an hour - most of
that consumed queueing to get back on again - hmm. Slept, the
wings on the seat being most helpful.
- Discovered a rather nasty flaw in ORBit2's object
hashing methedology; potentialy a nice speedup in there.
- Slept a little.
- Up early, off to work with J' they have power and
internet at CAF; great.
- More applied at-spi fixage; turned on reference
tracking and started tackling the swathe of reference issues,
some by binary chop, others by code reading. Made it so the
registry didn't have to be killed each time you ran the test
app, etc. etc.
- Very pleased to see that Jason Hildebrand has hacked up
gnome-vim
a VIM bonobo component - so die hard VIM users can use evolution
with ease and joy - very cool, and a nice demo of bonobo's
capabilities.
- Updated at-spi with Bill's changes - he also did the
large sed of 'boolean->SPIBoolean' that I suggested but named
slightly differently; sigh.
- Found the stupid bug stopping the Nautilus buttons
re-rendering, a chaining error in expose_event. Noticed that
some very daft bonobo_activation queries were causing lots of
data to fly around on new windows etc.
- Got mail from a chap using ORBit under VxWorks on
an embedded PowerPC realtime system - wow :-) a most interesting
usage.
- It seems we released Evolution 1.0 today which is
great - after a huge development effort, with so many people,
the worlds best collaberation whatnot is released. Also,
announced the Exchange server plugin. Amazing that when you give
people the fruit of a vast investment totaly free, they still look
the gift horse in the mouth - and object to us charging corporations
( who have already bought Exchange ) - for their foolishness.
Wow, if they want to use standard and open protocols then
they can have a fully free system; if not - they get to pay us
for the pleasure.
- Got about 10 'broken pipe' errors on committing to
at-spi, looks like the longer the commit message the higher the
likelihood of error; hmm.
- Sent a large at-spi patch off to Bill and committed to
the 'fixups2' branch, with a plea not to try and merge again. Got
onto looking into some intriguing ORBit2 string marshaling issue on
Solaris, added a regression test for something that might be the
problem - to no avail.
- Met J' at the station, and back home - still no power;
another romantic candlelit dinner - with warm wine and yoghurts;
hmm. Bed early - again, packed all my stuff into various suitcases,
and a fair bit of J's stuff too.
- Up early - get to the hacking, 3152 mails in the inbox,
none of them pullable from Maildir ... found maildir2mbox and managed
with some help to start extracting my mail in a sensible way - 11Mb
of accumulated reading matter; sigh - no useful work today then.
- Started re-building the system bottom up, discovered we
still havn't released a libgnomeprint[ui] set for the platform beta;
sigh. Wrote a status report - not enough this last week.
- Slogged at E-mail, some amusing flamewars arrived and
passed, closed some bugs, more slogging. Updated my mail filters;
Did a libgnomeprint[ui]-1.107.0 release set.
- Finally got to re-building Nautilus - almost at the
top of the stack it seems; horay.
- Wow - a massive storm overhead, never heard lightning
and thunder so close; an almost searing crackling sound - plenty of
power surges; got off line - thank God for laptops. Then the rain
... lots of it ... and hail, more lightning, lost power after a
while. Looking out of the window into the courtyard - the rain
looked like the wind was blowing downwards, the palm trees bent
right over. Battened down the hatches variously, sat in the
sudden darkness, the rain falling out of the sky in great sheets,
hopefully melting the growling clouds away.
- Carried on doing things to at-spi. Suddenly the storm
receeds, leaving no power and the girl from above's towel on a bit
of tree outside my window. Beautiful blue sky and sunshine within
a few minutes. More hacking, then a tentative inspection as to
quite why the power is down. It seems some clown's roofing skills
are not quite up to getting the tin roof to stay on the building.
long strips of twisted galvanized roofing blown right across the
road, and severed the power lines.
- Struggled with extreme CORBA badness, something very,
very odd going on in at-spi. If only I could get on-line, but no
sadly the modem needs external power.
- J' arrived home late - train badness, and forgotten
keys + video doorbell not working - oh for a piece of string and
a bell.
- Went for a run - lots of broken glass on the roads,
some cars wiped out, one roof in strips draped over a huge broken
tree. Felt re-invogorated, started cooking in the half light, and
then showered in the dark, a nice candle-lit dinner, bed early.
- Up earlyish; off to Church at Thornleigh, a great
sermon from a member of the church.
- Back for lunch - nachos, siesta.
- Off to 'carols in the park' in the evening; Picked
up by Todd & Catherine as we were canoedling under a jackerander
tree walking from the station.
- A rather interesting carol session. It started with
a brass band of primary school children which was excellent
considering, and lots of fun people. Weather hot, but we had a
little shower. Talked to Matt back from camp - no-one went to
hospital this year, vs. 10 last year [ a rather over-engineered
plastic water slide with jump & lake ]. The State Emergency Service
(SES) - a bit like the UK's Territorial Army - but more useful [
they fix power lines, tree falls - huge hailstone damage etc. ]
was out in force, and the fire brigade on the scene.
- As it got darker, everyone lit candles stuck in the
sawn off tops of plastic bottles. There were a few speeches by
various political figures - which were horrendously out of
touch, staggeringly so. And a short talk by Pastor Neil - who'se
boots & lumberjack shirt, "check it out" message and humour
demonstrated quite aptly who was in touch with the moment.
- Sung several carols - a steak sandwich, and off home.
Somehow the heat militates against In the bleak midwinter
and other classic carols, but overall very encouraging.
- Toast, bed.
- Up early, credit card expires today, the new one
in England; hmm. Went to Kelly Tarlton's underwater world -
which had a particularly amazing arctic section. Penguins
a plenty with newly hatched babies being fed, and a glass
sided tank to watch them swim.
- Lots of amaing facts about the antarctic, and
Scott & Shackleton's voyages, the incredible cold - down
to -70 degrees Celcius, and the background behind their
treck to the pole. In stark contrast to the Norwegian
expedition, when they found the frozen bodies of Scott and
his team their sledge was still laden with many pounds of
fossil specimins and scientific finds.
- In an effort to save the team from starvation,
Oates walked out of the tent to his death with the noble words
I am just going outside, and I may be some time .... In
the words of Scott It was the act of a brave man, an English
gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit
and assuredly, the end is not far
- On March 21st 1912, in a blizzard, tied down
only 11 miles from their next supply depot Scott wrote his last
journal entries; Surely misfortune could not have exceeded
this last blow. I do not regret this journey which has shown
that Englishmen can endure hardships .... and meet with death
with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. Had we lived,
I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance,
and courage of my companions that would have stirred the heart
of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies
must tell the tale...
- Also - the amazing story of how Shackleton
managed to save his men when his ship was crushed and
destroyed by ice. Well worth the read. Also an under water
aquarium made of perspex with large amounts of fish -
impressive.
- Back into town by bus, a beer - asked if we
were on honeymoon by the waitress - lunch, back to
the hotel, and then off to the airport. Upon checking in
and after a lovely stay in NZ - the experience was soured
by the spectacularly short sighted, small minded,
inefficient, offensive and generaly inexplicable need to
pay an extra charge of $22 to board the aircraft. Rather
than charging the airline for the pleasure of using the
port and hence putting it on the ticket - they insist on
charging the individual unexpectedly. Wonderful ! instead
of a tiny adjustment in the fee the airline pays anyway -
we get to go through a siginificant amount of hassle.
Clearly a punative reciprocal 22UKP tax for Auckland bound
flighers at the UK end is neccessary to encourage clear
thinking. Doh.
- A pleasant flight in a 747, got to hacking
at-spi - (again). Got really into it - sigh, grief ! what
utter evilness lurks within; you start looking at one
problem only to find a mess of leaks you can see reading
the code - great swathes of cut and pasting of complex
( buggy ) code etc. etc. Massive cleaning all flight.
- Got back home, unpacked, bite to eat & bed.
- Up early. Hacked at-spi, fixed up several issues
with the mainloop handling; started writing some automated
regression tests, added user_data pointers to all callbacks.
After much fixing found bonobo-activation starting 2 instances
of itself - argh!
- Found the stupid bonobo-activation race; really
very dumb, no obvious fix - but evil hacks around. Sigh.
- Managed to get on line, discovered I had enough
votes to be on the board; but sadly 4 Ximian people were
more popular than me :-) still, at least we have a better and
more rounded representation on the board - although one could
argue that 4 out of 11 doesn't quite represent Ximian's
contribution. So I don't have to try hard to be shockingly
polite to people, which is probably a good thing.
- So - someone amazingly clever 31337 genius copied
someone else's 'leet vulnerability and hacked Ximian's mail
server - resulting in a switch elsewhere and the infliction of
maildir => no E-mail.
- It turns out to be substantialy difficult to hack
around the evil bonobo-activation problems; mailed Maciej again,
needs a substantial internal re-write.
- Did a libbonobo-1.107.0 release for Sander.
- Wow - finaly found things in my mail; it seems Bill
committed my work in progress - fixing it up - duplicating
the work I've done, and creating innumerable conflicts and
issues wasting a large chunk of my time - and screwing the
credit / blame information - wow I'm annoyed.
- Spent an hour or so merging the mess together,
and a mystery bug arrived - horay ! sent it off to Bill
and co. again.
- Back to the hotel, and J's calming influence,
off to a cafe for dinner, back to bed.
- Up early, breakfast & off to the Waitomo caves,
notable particularly for their glow worms. Paid through the
nose; a short wait and down into the bowels of the earth. The
glow worms were quite amazing, a greeny blue light and all
the constelations like the stars above as we were pulled
through the caves in a light boat.
- Then off to a natural arch nearby, wandered around
some pretty scenery and through a little tunnel, over a
suspension bridge, lovely - very quiet too.
- Set off for Auckland, I drove most of the way, J'
topping and tailing. Found our ultra cheap hotel (CAF paying)
and moved in.
- Wandered round the town, had a Guinness in a
new Irish pub, carefuly designed to look like a converted
church inside ( although clearly built recently of breeze
blocks outside ). Wandered through the parks.
- Dinner at a nearby place, back home, bed.
- The alarm failed to wake us again - this time set
correctly, but the time had an AM/PM mess up; luckily J' woke
up at the right time (again).
- A nice cooked breakfast, left them for various sight
in the local area. Headed to the Hukka falls first; lake Taupo
is really high above sea level, and so they control the flow
from it, holding the water at night and using it when power is
needed in several hydro plants. When we saw it the river was
roaring through a channel 15m wide and 10m deep (~2-3m deep
water perhaps), and going over the falls which were awesome.
The water goes a very bright blue/cyan colour, with beautiful
bubbles and makes quite a noise. The flow rate varies from 30
to 250 m^3 / second going over the falls which change height
from ~5-7.5m or so depending on flow. An impressive display of
the power of water.
- Went into the 'Volcano Centre' very worthwhile,
a couple of interesting films. The recent eruptions of Mt
Ruaopehu only (only) spewed out 0.2 km^3 of rock in it's
recent 1995 eruption whereas what is now lake Taupo in it's
mega blast chucked 150km^3 of debris into the air ... seen
as far afield as China and India (apparently). It's last major
eruption was relatively recent geologicaly ~400AD.
- Interestingly the biggest bangers are not the ones
that have time to form a cone shaped steryotypical volcanoe,
but rather ones in which there is a huge eruption of underground
pressurised rock, and then a collapse to form a caldera where the rock
subsides and often a lake forms; explaining Taupo's lack of
huge conical things.
- Then on to the 'Craters of the Moon' - an area where
steam bursts from the ground. Apparently this is a somewhat new
phonomenon caused by recent engineering; dams, drainage or the
thermal power station or somesuch. Either way, notable because
apart from the steam, large chunks of the ground occasionaly are
blown into the air leaving huge (15x15x10m) craters and mud
everywhere. Better than that, unwary visitors can sink into the
soft (>100degree C) soil, burning themselves badly - if they
stray from the path. Also, instead of 'last eruption 5 years
ago' or '400AD' it was 5th Feb 2001 - great fun.
- Onto another place, saw more of the same really,
but paid $15 for the pleasure. Then stopped at some boiling
mud pools at the side of the road; great fun.
- We (J') then drove a substantial distance across
the country west to Waitomo where there are some fine caves;
stayed in a hotel past it's best. One has to be slightly
concerned when each room comes with a can of 'Raid' bug
killer spray - but no hair drier. Good restaurant though.
- Back to bed, didn't even try to set the alarm.
- Up early, the alarm failed to go off but J's body
clock rescued us. Breakfast & J' to her meeting, I went off to
hack. Bill still vacillating, committed my code to the 'fixups'
branch in at-spi.
- Got a Taxi to Budget and rented a nippy little car.
Set off up north towards Taupo. The NZ scenery is extraordinary,
so mountainous, but extremely green and often cultivated.
- Stopped at some one horse town on the way to get
lunch, and spotted the first of the volcanoes around the bluff
of a hill, snow capped and extraordinarily beautiful.
- We drove around the west side of the huge range of
mountains. One looking extremely conical with a clearly visible
crater at the top, the other apparently an older cone, with it's
top substantialy missing.
- Got to Taupo and somewhat dismayed at the prospect of
staying in a motel, decided to head outside to a B&B at Kinloch
which was 15 mins drive north. Impressive roads, easy to drive
at 100kmph, with no problems at the corners and no one on them
seemingly.
- Found a nice B&B with an old London copper: Paul
and his Kiwi wife Elisabeth, great German Shephard fans, who made
us a nice cup of tea. Went to look at the lake, extremely
clear water, and lots of strange rock on the beach. Very crumbly
and floated on the water, most pretty.
- Dinner in the town, and back to bed early.
- Up somewhat late; alarm failed to go off. J' nearly late
for her meeting - somehow time doesn't work in this place. Luckily the
meeting just across the road. The room also has a high speed internet
connection. Great - better than in Sydney.
- Chewed mail. Horray there is a frozen Gtk+ release -
great news indeed for a monday morning; lets get a library beta
out fast. Worked on persuading 'raven' to move his app to libbonobo.
- Discovered a slight issue in the at-spi work, and a load
more brokenness - no user_data's on any of the callbacks; sigh. Lots
more fixage before commit.
- Did a linc-1.0.10 release; a number of fixes, released
ORBit2-2.3.98 and realized I'd missed the TypeCode expansion fix, and
released ORBit2-2.3.99 to match. Started re-building gnome from the
bottom upwards.
- The laptop is starting to hang for brief periods;
rather worrying - perhaps kernel VM issues - or dodgy hardware,
nothing in the syslog, just a 5 second freeze and then back to normal
every now and then. Listened to Rachmaninov, Symphony no. 2. Did
a libbonobo-1.107.0 release; very few changes.
- Back to at-spi fixing, emit a signal when we get an event
so we get a powerful callback mechanism we can sub-class.
- Spent an age hacking on at-spi, fixing brokenness piled
on brokenness, and not being able to commit in case it caused a
'regression' whereas it seems to me the thing has no right to work
anyway - when you can see bugs just reading the code. Sent another
patch off to Bill; 106K now.
- Up late, Church in the morning - a presbyterian church;
some Youth With A Mission (YWAM)'ers from a mercy ship that sails
around the phillipines doing cateract surgery and other critical
surgery and support of poor communities. An interesting, but
un-anchored sermon on social justice; the Prime minister of NZ used to
be an active elder of this Church (apparently).
- Wandered into town, eventualy found the cable car that
took us up the side of a hill next to the town. Enjoyed the view and
an ice cream at the top; then walked down through the lush botanical
gardens. After a break for food, appreciated the extensive rose garden,
and snoozed in the sun amid the rose beds; got slightly sun-burned
despite precautions.
- J' particularly liked the old English pink climber:
'Albertine', the purple, non-climbing 'Ripples', the old English
climber, Santa Catolina and the non climbing Valentine Heart rose.
The boy was required to make wooden signs for the various flower
beds in the garden.
- Back to the hotel; a fine Indian dinner, and back for bed.
- Up at 6.30am, as reccommended, phoned the Lync
ferry; not open until 7.00. Set the alarm for 7, moved the
wakeup call. Woke at 8.00 - missed the ferry - as if by
magic, neither worked. So we don't get to see the south
Island - hey ho.
- Back to sleep; up late, off to a lovely cafe for
a large breakfast. Wandered through town - discovered a set of
rather wonderful double classical CD's for $10 each ~ 2.80 UKP,
bought a shed load of rather excellent music; very pleased.
- On to Te Papa a national museum of considerable
interest - the Maori 'Kiwis' live in Iwis ( or something ).
There was considerable amnesia and confusion on the subject of
the extermination (and consumption) of the Maoriri by the
Maori probably a pre-requisite of keeping the moral high
ground. Overall very interesting though; some pleasant
carvings, a meeting house one had to remove ones shoes to
go into. Lots of green stone carvings looking rather like
the 'forest spirits' in Princes Monawhatnot, ( but green ).
Idols in the west tend to be cars, houses etc., rather
than pretty carvings; but it's good to see some immutable
human traits in action.
- Apparently the scary face on the front of the
'war canoe' was to warn people that they came in peace and
not to fight [the raiding party] - somewhat incredible
revisionism one might speculate.
- Out to a rather nice place for dinner; 30 UKP
for two, 3 courses + wine + port. The local nobs were
somewhat puterbed by J's baggy grey jumper much to my
irritation.
- Back, bed.
- Up early, off to CAF with J', the first step
to New Zealand - on holiday for a week (well only 3 days
but disruption of connectivity for a week).
- Sucked mail, and got down to fixing up cspi
for public install / include - got sidetracked by vast
tracts of wooly cruft. Just staggering, mind numbing, head
shaking cruft - doesn't bear thinking about.
- Pulled Owen's egtk.el
lisp for emacs for auto-nicely indenting function
prototypes.
- CAF AU offered me a short job designing
their CRM database under Access - doh, more clue than the
current designer - but don't want to get involved. Wrote
my status report. Sent in my foundation vote - sadly you
can't vote for everyone.
- Major, major cspi re-writing action, killed
a shed load of cut and paste coding; re-structured - and
cleaned up the object referencing. Lots of fixes.
- Tried to nail the Nautilus activation problem
that seems to still persist despite multiple fixes for it.
Off to the plane.
- A fairly protracted Quantus flight to
Wellington, watched some movie about a ring, and tried
to explain, with examples and pictures how computers
remember things to Julia with some success.
- Taxi to the Ibis hotel - 2 hours ahead; very
late, found some food at a Star Mart, slept.
- Up early; get back in sync. Pulled mail.
Attacked the intriguing issues Louise Miller had found
in linc / ORBit2 - discovered our regression tests were
only using UDS and not the wealth of fun that can be had
with other protocols.
- Found a whole load of festering stuff in linc
and ORBit2 that needed fixing; fixed most of it - it seems
the hang as seen sometimes in Nautilus is now repeatable
with both ends of the regression test just hanging there;
excellent !
- Started adding some hard core debugging code
to linc, after much glib instrumentation and pain
discovered the really rather trival bug in linc.
Untangled the clash between Owen's nautilus fixage
and my rather stunted version of the same.
Did a little nautilus warning fixage to salve my concience.
- Started looking at the atk / gail patch; sigh.
Went off to Hornsby shopping center's Starbucks to meet
Jeff Waugh; sat reading The Autobiography of Martin Luther
King, Jr (Clayborne Carson) - excellent stuff. Jeff didn't
show.
- Back home, a tad of hacking, J' arrived home,
very pleased to see her; off for a run. Reconciled the gail /
atk+ changes while J' showered.
- Did some at-spi work while J' looked at tea,
the trials of being in a conflicting timezone to Bill who
wants to approve everything. Fired off a cspi rationalize
patch for comment, committed atk, gail bits.
- Bed, tired.
- Up late; lost 1.2Mb of mail due entirely to
stupidity ( I use scp to pull my mail in a block ).
I hope there was nothing too interesting in there; not a
good start to the day.
- Started a const review of atk+ and gail,
got embroiled in fixing several things, and making it
almost warning free. Sent off the patches to the
accessibility list; and returned to at-spi. Talked to
Owen for some time about various things, good to catch
up.
- Started tiresomely re-building the whole
system from the ground up - again, again. Committed the
bonobo object instantition speedup. Continued building,
gnome-core builds nicely now; lots of good work going in
there it seems from Mark and Glynn. Made nautilus build
for the gtk+ changes.
- It transpires that I lost my gnome foundation
ballot in the mail I dropped; sigh. Fixed more at-spi
breakage ( this time of my own creation ) and sent another
patch and more questions off to Bill; blocked there. Back
to other things.
- Still raining and winding well. Late lunch,
hacked Nautilus a little - the tests building, fixed up
some destroy -> dispose / finalize bits. Fired off a
patch and committed. Stopped libgnome churning out scads
and scads of timing information on startup - all of it
missed the real latency; pango init - which is done on
demand anyway.
- Fixed the nasty in the ORB whereby only the
first ref was being registered in the objref table,
causing much unneccessary out of proc CORBA traffic,
committed a fix and re-write / re-org - dynany fix and
it seems the new allocators stuff worked wonderfully
first time on Solaris; and without any of the ugly
black magic bit-masking of pointers etc.
- Bill mailed, committed the at-spi stuff.
Got a series of confused mails about the atk / gail
code. Fixed a nasty issue in CORBA_Object_is_equivalent
added a slew of regression tests, committed.
- Bed, must phone J' though.
- Up early, J' set off into the blue to BHP on
the west coast; sad. Dirk-Jan published his
bonobo wizard article - well worth a read.
- A good 'ole Australian family row going on
upstairs and across; somewhat distressing - an enraged
couple shouting at each other. Sent my at-spi patch to
Bill H, with a drasticaly ameliorated commentary.
- Owen finally replied to my mail - right,
well after one could possible get changes into gtk+,
rejecting the suggestion that we might want some decent
built in automated leak checking; sad. Still, there is
hope for gtk+ 2.2, and until then, everyone's apps'll
leak insidiously.
- Did some more genericization of the ORBit
GIOP code - nice code savings are possible, but it'll
need some savaging really.
- Onto at-spi, some nice code cleans; header
fixage, comment correction, added a library header.
Committed a set of cleans; Owen fixed my GtkPlug bug -
horay. Off to CAF to take J's laptop, which turns out
to be neccessary :-) raining pretty proficiently.
- Hacked at-spi on the train, regaled at
some volume by some proto-socialite of limited
intelligence and vocabulary discussing her recent
party with some mates.
- Realised that I suddenly liked Australia,
had become aclimatized, the rain helped. Got to CAF,
committed the bits from the train. Out for lunch with
Julia.
- Got back; checkout out OpenOffice - detected
acute brokenness in the checkout instructions; mailed
Sander, more wide scale brokenness in at-spi, lots of
fixing. Started building OpenOffice in the idle cycles.
Upgraded glibc via red-carpet, a risky strategy miles
from the nearest RH install set.
- OO build stuffed by a lack of Java -
amazingly the Sun download page refuses to let you
accept their stupid (non [L]GPL) license, which
sucks totaly. Why can Open Office not build certain
bits optionaly. Mailed my last at-spi patch ( before
blocking ) and some questions to Bill.
- Sat around and re-wrote the ORBit2
memory allocation code, to optimize more for size
and speed. Poked substantialy further into the code,
lots of room for improvement. Dog tired, bed.
- Up early, J' off to work; pushed a glib patch
into bugzilla, started re-building everything ground up
fashion.
- Fixed the canvas for the new glib marshaler
regieme, found Owen on IRC & committed the gmodule leak
fix. It looks like the Gtk+ guys are finaly getting
towards a hard freeze; great ! Peter Williams seems to
be fixing up stuff in Gnome 2.0 which is great.
- It seems Evolution 1.0 has been branched
in CVS, and rumour has it that the mono compiler is
running under Linux - which is excellent news, when it
bootstraps I'll be happy. Posted a couple of trivial
API addition requests to gnome-2-0-list.
- Read through Dirk-Jan's latest bonobo expose,
good stuff indeed. Discovered why we wern't re-using
connections properly - passing the wrong arg. to the
cache method; easy fix.
- Discovered (and pruned) some totaly bogus
syscalls and allocation lurking inside linc; yet more
speed. Enabled the connection cache - everything
lovely. Sent another plea off to Maciej to privatise
a load of exposed bits in linc.
- Fixed up the canvas again to build with
the, almost, but not quite frozen Gtk+ - a spasm of
changes before the end ... fixed up libbonoboui to
build; pre-emptively. Lots and lots of ugly rain.
- Did the linc API changes and committed,
assumed implicit activation in libbonobo to
accelerate object instantiation.
- Looked at at-spi again; some work - before
I was filled with frustration and loathing; gack. You
just can't believe it really. Nearly sent a patch off
to Bill.
- J' arrived home, bacon & egg butties - and
off to Thornleigh Baptist church ( in the rain ).
- Did marriage prep. with Pastor Neil and
his wife (counsellor etc.) Jenny - she was far more
provocative in her discussion, but most insightful
too.
- Talked a lot about, all manner of touchy
feely issues - makes one feel greasy inside; net
prognosis - very good in most areas. Only 2 areas
flagged as 'growth areas'; very positive overall.
- Back, bed - no big arguments, no
husband-to-be bashing - very tame. No shipwrecks
and nobody drownded, 'fact nothing to laff at t'all
(Stanley Holloway).
- Up early, off to Church at Thornleigh.
- Back for a rather good chicken special by
J' had a hack at an audio-visual slide show thing I'm
cooking up. Realised that whoever was responsible for
OpenOffice's slide show code needed to put some
microseconds on the slide times ( and drop the double
digit hours field (?) ), time to cvs update OpenOffice
and have a little hack I think.
- Tried to go to Church in Gordon, the trains
were down - tried to go to a Church nearby, but power
lines were down in the way. Pulled another great Park
Street sermon. Acts 4:8-22, "Isn't One Religion As Good
As Another?". Extremely encouraging.
- The trinity revealing and exemplifying God's
his pre-eminant characteristic of love; God is love.
God indwells us as his supreme expresion of love for us.
By contrast Islam is opposite, not a relationship with God,
but submission to a transcendant soverign God.
- The Koran at no point, anywhere commands love;
it doesn't tell you to love your wife as Christ loved the
church, or to love even your enemies. But the Old Testament
scripture as Jesus summarises it is To love God with your
whole heart and mind and strength, and to love
your neighbour as yourself.
- You can find lofty ethics, and inspiring
thoughts in many other religions, much that is good. But
in no other religion is there salvation. You can find how
to achieve Nirvanah - extinction of the self, keep the
pillars of faith, follow the immutable law of retributive
justice of Karma, but still have no assurance of salvation.
- In every other religion it is the great thinker
that has come to help man reach up to God but in Christianity
it is God who has reached down into the cess-pool of the human
condition; the word made flesh and living among us - living a
perfect life and giving it up for us, paying with his perfect
death on the cross the ultimate penalty for our sin.
- Salvation is found in no one else, for
there is no other name under heaven by which men can
be saved.
- Up at 4.00am, had a length release team
conference call - 1 hour 15 mins; of which Bill Haneman
talked for 45 mins about accessibility. Managed to
agree some important bits at the end, and get some clue
about where we're going; hopefully.
- Back to bed; slept - woke at midday, ravenous.
- Off to the Westfield shopping center; had a
pleasant 'Norm' burger (large), and proceeded to meander
around the vast edifice. Purchased some shoes, a shirt,
underwear (shocking), and food.
- Home, watched "The sound of music" on the
box, rather a wonderful movie. Jacket potatoes, bed.
- Up early, chewed mail. NotZed sending
amusing mails again, responded in kind - Ettore
still panicking. Fixed up a minor bonobo bug, fixed
NotZed's ancient g_free not xmlFree bug - and did
a new release bonobo-1.0.17.
- Tried to persuade the release team that
there is no point in freezing things built on top of
an unfrozen glib / gtk+, and that libbonobo was
frozen, and that we should do a new release.
- Alex reminded me of the obvious soln' to
finding the nautilus issues - an strace and an ORBit2
trace at the same time (perhaps), strace -p is ones
friend apparently.
- Found a very daft bug in g_io_channel_unix,
committed a fix. Tried to get Owen to agree to a hard
API freeze soon - but it all hinges on Tim and him not
having a cold; sigh.
- Hammered away at the nautilus component
issues, trying to get a file manager window visible
instead of a grey rectangle.
- Struggled with Nautilus - just acute and
amazing evilness; started rendering on gdkwindow,
walking window hierarchies etc. etc.
- Wow - eventualy found the mess - Hallelja !
(praise God) inside bonobo. The ORB's idea of what is
in-proc disagrees profoundly with X's idea - and thus
my GtkSocket workaround doesn't always work ... urgh -
that simple. Made a
screenshot to prove it can be done. Cleaned and
committed the bonobo side of this. Then the misc.
Nautilus fixes.
- J' arrived home - went for a run;
showered, tried on my nice new cotton pyjamas she had
bought me - dinner ( bangers and mash ), business call
for J' - hacked linc / ORBit2 idly, looking at
connection sharing.
- Bed.
- Up early; dog tired, didn't sleep well,
sucked mail. Lots of tedious mail chewage. Added
extern "C" to the libole2 headers so I wouldn't get
more dumb mails from C++ developers with link
problems.
- Got the class boilerplate macros setup
more to my liking. Did a bonobo-1.0.16 release with
Federico's BadMatch fix, and the re-enterancy fix.
- Bill replied; sigh. Fixed up some
sillyness with the setFrame / getWindowId thing so
we actualy pair the control and it's frame at a
sane time; makes Nautilus happy again. Stubbed
the new popup API as per gcl spec.
- Finally by much devious trickery, managed to
get the broken Nautilus-2.0 scrolled window to render some
icons on the desktop; excellent, looks good. Sadly, a total
hack. Built some libbonoboui tests to try and find the
root problem.
- Responded to allegations of "Bonobo UI
keeps breaking" ( interestingly about bonobo-1.0 ),
it seems Dan Winship has discovered that our 'sigsegv'
handler that does odd things in threaded contexts is
likely to have been giving broken stack traces which
is interesting.
- Tried to calm Maciej down on the freeze.
It seems the board have over-reacted, and demanding a
harder freeze for things higher up the tree than those
lower is madness. Copied over the bonobo docs to
libbonobo and libbonoboui John Fleck wants to get to
work.
- Started re-building glib / gtk+ from the
bottom upwards; slowly ... committed various ORBit2
updates I noticed kicking around. Fixed up libgnome
so it builds with the latest set of accelerator API
breakage.
- Up early, sucked mail ... fixed a daft
bonobo bug I introduced yesterday. Replied to Mark -
together it seems we have a decent design for popups.
Wow - Tim Janik really sees the benefit of memory
debugging, he kicks ass; if only we could show Owen.
- Committed the first of the at-spi sedding:
installing the headers in a sensible place. Made up
some seds to convert libspi to the Spi, spi_
namespace, commited - then realized I'd sedded the
IDL generated code which was why it worked; refined the
process & re-committed.
- Started working on at-spi warning reduction,
smitted by angst about the coding style - mailed Bill at
some length. Submitted my Gtk+ issues to bugzilla, it
seems they get forgotten otherwise.
- Off shopping, had a Norm burger and waded
back laden down with masses of food.
- Had a look at an evil evolution bug in
ximian bugzilla (14734), very, very strange. John Fleck
setup linc API documentation builds which is nice; we
need to get them building again for libbonobo[ui].
Replied to Bradford re: bonobo-config-archiver wierdness.
- Cleaned up and expanded the linc
documentation from 25% to 75%, still it has almost no
real methods so ...
- Back to wondering why Nautilus just doesn't
work on a dirty run ... instead hacked away lots of cruft
assuming a BonoboObject is a GtkObject, fixed up dispose /
finalize stuff.
- J' home, went for a run; Jacket potatoes & bed.
- Up early, off to CAF AU with J', sucked mail
at speeed ... got some Red Carpet action in. Wrote a
status report. Helped some guy trying to build bonobo
under Cygwin - which sounds interesting.
- Tim Janik replied to the glib ref counting
stuff fairly favorably, wow - progress; re-explained
what I envisaged more in his terms - encouraging.
- Finaly got down to bonobo bug fixing - got
Duncan's BadMatch, and Darin's UI component re-enterancy,
started installing OpenOffice. Installed the latest
evolution from RC - refuses to start up, the evil
bonobo-conf problem; an oaf-slay, killev and savaging
gconf personaly solved the problem it seems.
- Worked on fixing up linc-connection to make
the handling of EAGAIN slightly logical, at least so it
didn't trash the stack and create evil deadlocking
recursion situations. Fixed minor issue in nautilus.
Chased some (bogus) EBADF appearances. Killed a nasty
bug causing segvs' invoking methods on deactivated
but referenced CORBA objects.
- Got on with lifecycle issues, time to make
the things re-parent properly. Discovered that oneway
methods invoked on de-activated object keys can return
unexpected NON_EXISTANT system exceptions; hmm.
- Pruned warning churn from Nautilus, found
some amazing things, eg. the throbber does a gnome-vfs
mime lookup, which does a massive oaf query which must
take ages - and all just to render a throbber; hmm.
- Discovered linc wasn't setting O_NONBLOCK
on the server side connection fd, on accept, doh.
The blocking issue is back with a vengance it seems,
argh. Struggled with the dratted thing all afternoon -
absolutely no joy; not a clue. Committed some more bits
to nautilus.
- Up at 4.00am, the miracles of release meeting
calls. Discussed several things, and got some stuff done
and decided - good. Pain in neck worse - sigh. More sleep.
- Up later; breakfast & off to Thrifty car rental.
Set off for the Hunter valley.
- A chunk of driving - we went via a scenic
detour, but the main road had a certain rugged beauty (to an
Engineer) - a huge amount of the road had been carved through
the solid rock to an amazing depth. The road being ~3 lanes
each way, had a ~ 2 meter wide rock wall of varying height -
3m up to 6-8m in the middle to separate the traffic that had
simply not been removed. Amazingly where a road would branch
off - they would quite happily do this in the middle of an
extremely deep cutting ~ 20m or so, leaving a vast triangular
island of rock in the middle of the road - often with trees
growing on top. In some places the bridges across the road
- intead of having a central resevation pillar - simply
rested on the unremoved rock in the middle.
More than that - it was clear that some of the strata in
the rock were particularly weak - perhaps sand or shingle,
and these strata were noticable since they had been concreted
over to ensure the (extremely steep ~ 75degrees) sides didn't
subside - similarly great inch wide score marks down the rock
seemed to indicate some giant clawing machine used to slice
through - fun.
- We took a detour to Cessnock, via. a large dam
which was rather interesting, it had a capacity of 30% of
Sydney harbour, with the capability to expand that to 100%
in future - which says a lot about the Australian approach
to infastructure provision. Looking out over it we saw a
huge ~ 5ft long lizard - initialy, seeing only the tail
whipping up the tree I thought it was a snake - but, then
it stopped and stood still. Beautiful yellow stripes, a
forked tounge and an inquisitive look.
- On to an amateur observatory further along the
road - determined that it was a somewhat small place, and
midday not a good time for star-gazing and moved on. The
chap had an interesting statistic about the ratio of
beaurocrats to general populous; must find out what it is
in the UK.
- By now pretty hungry, studied the Hunter valley
guide to restaurants - unimpressed by most of them although
Mc Donalds was billed as FIXME - headed for 'Amandas on
the edge' at the end of an unmetled road. Sat and eat in
almost total peace ( most people were out voting for John
Howard it seems ), with bubbling water nearby, looking
out over a vineyard. Had an extremely sumptious 3 course
meal - fantastic creme broule, some of their own wine,
complimentary (sweet & fruity) port - 35 UKP for both of
us, wow.
- Headed on to another place at the end of the
track, tasted some wine, wandered around their pretty show
garden, and to a larger place to try and get some port.
Got a nice tawny, but couldn't find the sweet fruity thing,
hey ho.
- Back... via. lake Maquarie ( everything is
called Mcquarie in Australia, banks, lakes, bridges, hotels,
hospitals, animals, children, fish, rocks, - etc. ).
- Got home, eat, bed.
- Up early, sucked mail, an eclectic mix. Pleaded
with the Gtk+ guys for a glib/pango/gtk_debug_shutdown
method so we can track resource allocation more elegantly
there as well. Gergo sent in a nice patch to fix
bonobo-storage-memory; horay. Mark sent in some fixes, and
some more documentation - what it is to have a person who
as he learns writes it up so others can follow more easily.
- Re-built nautilus looking for another bug
reported by Darin - it's the fire fighting season it seems.
Ordered a book for Mother, the joys of internet shopping.
- Pleaded with Owen on IRC for the _debug_shutdown
approach to Gtk+. Lunch time before I finished fooling around
with non-hacking; got dressed etc.
- Struggled with control lifecycle thing, GtkPlug
does some odd things to GtkSocket; hmm. Fixed some paranoia
in the ORB, spent some considerable time unwinding, and
re-winding the mess in giop-recv-buffer. Fixed several
possible bugs whilst re-factoring, now it's prettier.
- Sent a patch to Mark, and continued re-factoring,
killed the two interlocking state machines - have 1 instead,
turned the 3 case statements into 1, and shortened the code
paths. Sent another patch to Mark and committed; grief - I
wonder if I've nailed Darin's bug by accident yet.
- Another 4-5 instances of Bradford's config
archiver problem - crash on login in bugzilla - assigned to
me in error; sigh. Sent Ravi my LWE slides for his talk in
India shortly.
- Committed some libbonobo[ui] fixups, can't
replicate Darin's problem, so ... looks good. Sent another
mail off on the subject of verifiably clean shutdowns to
gtk-devel, sigh.
- J' arrived home; a bite to eat - and then off
to Church for Marriage preparation - somewhat apprehensive.
Rather encouraging, possibly we're not going to be clawing
each other lots. It seems we can communicate rather well;
which is nice. Amusingly we seem to also have similar
ideas about the strengths of our relationship, and what
we like in each other. Much of interest.
- Back home - ran for and caught the train,
heckled by some drug addict, home & bed - pain in neck
worse.
- Up early, pulled mail. Interesting lockup in
ORBit2 it seems, started writing a regression test to try and
re-produce it. Did some spelling fixes in the UI IDL for
Darin.
- Chased Darin's 'deadlock' bug where we get two
processes just waiting for each other to reply, seemingly
having lost the other's input. Fixed a scad of quite
worryingly trivial bugs in linc-connection; not the cause
though, committed.
- Managed to contact Anders and get a
libgnomeui-1.106.0 out; badgered the release team to stage /
release / announce etc.
- After a couple of hours of instrumenting my
linc / glib to the very hilt I found that we wern't recursing
over the GSource, because the GSource didn't have the
can_recurse flag set. Sigh; what a waste. Fixed, committed
and off for lunch.
- Updated ORBit2's purify cleanliness, wipe all
objects having released them, shaved a stack frame in
several places, cleaned coding style. Did a linc-0.1.7
release. Back to libbonoboui lifecycle, discovered some
particularly silly sillies.
- More poking in at-spi, mailed Bill some more -
looks like it needs some cleaning before libbonoboui will
depend on it. Cristiano working on gnome-terminal found a
nice Gtk+ bug, and sent a patch - great. Copied the
Gtk+ packages across from ftp.gtk.org, so we can release a
full set. Worked on the ORBit2 FAQ a bit more.
- J' arrived home - went for a run, Natchos,
timeline, bed.
- Up early, mail checkage; a slew of bogus
candidacy announcements and some interesting ones; posted
mine to add to the mix.
- Updated eel and nautilus, lots of fixes,
re-built. Sent a plea to the Gtk+ team for debug shutdown
routines to help squash leaks easily. Federico committed his
keystroke forwarding fixes ( the design of which is neccessarily
utterly horrible ); did a new bonobo-1.0.15 release.
- Committed my at-spi code, Bill gave me carte
blanche to code clean too, great. Isolated the glibc regex
bug with electric fence; another masterpiece of convolution:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <regex.h>
int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
regex_t regex;
regcomp (®ex, "AUTHORS", REG_EXTENDED | REG_NOSUB);
return 0;
}
link vs. efence and ... bang.
I have glibc-2.2.2-10 (RH 7.1), it seems the bug
is fixed by glibc-2.2.4-19 (RH 7.2).
- Found a load of rather unbelievable bugs in GtkPlug,
only for the in-proc case. Rather strange, with the fixes I get
the forward and back buttons in the Nautilus toolbar at least.
- J' arrived home, toast & off to Bible study group
at Todd's house - Peter & Karen took us there with their
georgeous baby belted securely in his baby seat. A long, but
interesting study, and nibbles afterwards. Home late, bed.
- Up early, chewed mail - interesting things
happening in the world. Explained the UI handler to Mark,
hopefully we'll see some funkyness in the Foo bar shortly.
Committed Arjan Molenaar's canvas patch.
- Onto working out why test-ui segvs, turned on
glib memory debugging, enabled glib object tracking in linc
and libbonobo. Mercifuly we seem to be pretty golden; no
obvious leaks.
- It seems Darin is well into porting Nautilus
to Gnome 2.0 - which is wonderful. Checked it out to see
how I can help. Fixed up a few issues, sent a patch off to
Darin. An encouraging ORBit2 fix from Johan Dahlin (zilch)
that seems to suggest he's poking at the new typelib stuff,
great.
- Realized the Nautilus problems come down to
the zoomable interface not being ported properly. Read
through the code - urgh, a horrible mess. Committed a
fixed up zoomable, ( with some BonoboWidget fixage ) and
onto the frame. Committed my Nautilus patch.
- Fixed up the frame, fixed up Nautilus. Looking
better, but for the huge GtkObject -> GObject transition
work that is probably needed inside Nautilus on all the
CORBA related objects. Back to libbonoboui, fixed up some
more bits, and played with Nautilus some more.
- After a while got a window, and a sidebar to
come up - some evil problem with bonobo-activation /
ORBit2 though - time for the trace debugging. Moaned about
regex brokenness in gnome-vfs, again again. Committed a
fix to eel, and sent a Nautilus patch to Darin with another
few sillies. I can now get to the help menu and it seems
to hit a stable state after a while.
- J' arrived home, stopped. Sat around drawing
time-lines of our lives and talking things over -
interesting.
- Up early, started pulling mail and re-building
gnome-vfs, and gnome-libs, and tweaking libbonoboui before
release. Installed gnome-mime data first. Pain in the neck
from sleeping on a camping mat on the hard floor, if only
the bleach ( to kill the mildew ) & water would dry out
from my foam matress.
- Read the bonobo-config-archiver, and
identified the segv on starting Gnome problem, mailed
Bradford. Released libbonoboui-1.106.0. Fixed up libgnomeui
to work with it - we need another version, sigh, released
libgnomeprintui-1.106.0. Wrote a status report.
- Added reference debugging to bonobo-activation
for Maciej, fixed several leaks in the async activation code.
Found and fixed a realy stupid silly in my new accelerated
string marshaling code, only doing the fast case when it
when it was not possible.
- Had a look at libgda for Rodrigo, having trouble
with CORBA_anys. Grief, depressed by the quality of
bonobo-storage-memory, needs a re-write and it's never been
used; sigh. Discovered the annoying first time bonobo-activation
leak in starting the server; nice. Released
bonobo-config-0.106.0.
- Gergo made my day by taking on the fixing up of
bonobo-memory-storage; horay. Fixed up gnome-core for
the released libbonoboui. I see Mark is doing fine work in
the panel; hopefully cleaning acres of cruft out. Committed
the main leak fix to bonobo-activation, the debug stuff is
pending pondering.
- J' arrived home, went for a nice run, lazed
around, read some more of the Hat book and slept.
- Up early, off to Church. Had lunch with Graham
and Heather Chatfield, Graham a most interesting chap - a
lecturer in Ecclesiastical ( and particularly reformation )
history at the local Baptist college. Barbeque, climed their
tree in the garden - fun.
- Back home, slept. Eat, Sermon from Park Street in the
evening via. the miracles of mp3 - Thornleigh are doing the
same sermon morning and night - hmm.
- Bed.
- Up at 6.00am, forgot to actualy arm the alarm
clock for 4.00am having set it, sigh, back to sleep.
- Got up, breakfast, and off with J' to Darling
Harbour to the Maritime museum. Went on the 360ft retired
Navel boat they have there - a crew of ~300 = 1 ft each.
Still, a huge vessel. Then onto the submarine moored beside -
which only slept 70. Interestingly most of the exterior
shaping was fiberglass to make the exterior pipes
hydro-dynamic.
- Off to dinner at a rather fine 'Italian'
restaurant nearby. Then back to see a map exhibit, gold
digging - the population of Australia multiplied by a
factor of 3 over 10 years of gold rush; apparently. A
rather fine suspended Wessex Helicoptor and things.
- Back home. Did a release of libgnomeprint.
- Lay in until 8.00am; wow. Got up, sucked mail
over breakfast, started re-building the system with the
freshly released linc/libIDL/ORBit2.
- Discovered that having a broken system time
screwed Peter who is trying to build packages of bonobo /
ORBit etc. Talked to Owen on IRC - committed my GtkSocket
double unrealize fix, re-styled the Control IDL.
- Started re-building a ton of stuff to get XST
to build, libcapplet, gnome-control-center,
ximian-setup-tools. Telsa convinced me to prune my log,
as I was getting at Owen (unrepentant) for having a 750Kb
ChangeLog ( 230Kb gzipped; -z3 ?) and committing too quickly
for me to get in over the modem.
- Spent a while debugging the XST time-tool, since
it seems to work wonderfuly, but only on the 2nd set of the
same data.
- Sat here listening to the (what can only be described
as) Heroic! drivers skidding round the corners here. It appears
that in Australia you spend about 4 years learning to drive, and
yet - it appears to have no positive effect on the general
standard of driving whatsoever - at least around here. The road is
black with tyre rubber at virtualy every corner.
- touched all my source and started re-building /
installing everything; grief - the pain. Perhaps it's easier to
sleep for a day. Updated the dependency diagram of modules for
the Gnome 2.0 platform - a lot of modules it seems.
- Fixed up the libgnomeprint and libgnome builds.
Finished re-working the control bits; I see controls local
and remote - but it leaks them like crazy - hey ho.
- Spent a huge time re-building evolution due to the
incredible proliferation of duplicate libraries for libtool to
grok, and the strange operation of libtool. Added a hack to
ltmain.sh eventualy, then gave up - timestamp problems with
ORBit/bonobo-conf thinking it is tommorow, sigh.
- Discovered I needed to add an API to the (API
frozen) ORBit2 ... sigh. Added that & regression test, forward
ported last night's ORBit1 test, accelerated TypeCode
demarshaling, and memory de-allocation as a nice feature.
Released ORBit2-2.3.97.
- Found I liked hacking the ORB, accelerated all
the string marshaling, ignored the more important control
issues for a bit.
- Bed.
- Up early, said goodbye to J' off via Brisbane
for meetings with BHP for 3 days. Sucked mail. Learned
from the gnome summaries that IBM just published my last
bonobo
article.
- Spent a while looking at evolution / bonobo-conf
stable bugs ... sigh. Evolution is looking wonderful though,
with almost 0 blocker bugs left.
- Talked to Mjs on IRC and finaly got agreement on
bonobo-activation shutdown. Managed to commit the patch in
the end; sigh. Went shopping, had lunch.
- Mark added guards around a load of ORBit2
headers, so that we have a far smaller API to support -
which is most excellent. Added some helper functions to
expose things I need & some regression tests for them. Made
bonobo_object_ref / unref more pleasant to use.
- Used new ORBit2 bits in libbonoboui, re-wrote the
control lifecycle design to account for the very different
in-proc case. Audited libbonobo for redundant virtualization
(with the new BonoboObject) found and killed some cruft.
Accelerated the magic casting macros in libbonobo - ready to
roll now for Gnome 2.0 I hope.
- Back to the control lifecycle. Jacob pushed his
information about the new Gnome 2.0 library platform
snapshots. Loads more control-frame cleaning. Found and
analysed a rather odd Gtk+ bug concealed in the trace amidst
scads of GSignal marshaling nonsense. Sent a report to Owen.
- Realised that I was supposed to be being picked
up at the station shortly for house group by Peter - just as
I was in the middle of a stressful bug hunt for Ettore; argh,
argh; sigh. Managed to rapidly extract his phone number from
a friend and cancel - drat.
- Finaly managed to repeat, and identify the
heinous TypeCode reference counting ugliness in ORBit
stable, it's like wading through treacle in there.
Considered a fix. Produced a regression test first - very
repeatable.
- Fixed ORBit-0.5.12, fixed the side effects in
bonobo-1.0.14, and added regression tests to bonobo-conf-0.14,
it also fixed some obscure side issue happily.
- Talked to Mark - it seems the ORBit2 release is
steaming ahead, allowing the platform beta to get going.
- Bed exhausted, the (huge) cockroach I saw earlier
has ( it seems ) so far eluded my attempts to throw 'Bride to
be' magazine at it (NB. not my magazine).
- Up early, chewed mail. A very amusing mail from
Radek, pointing out how to do
evil things to Windows XP. I'm amazed that no-one is
shipping binaries.
- Polished exception flagging in ORBit2 on ORB
objects, wrote the release notes for the next version.
Checked out Iain's port of gnome-media to Gnome 2.0 ( on
HEAD ).
- Fixed up yet more obscure, broken g_signal
mess in libbonobo, sigh. Now we can emit the system
exception signal again - and it's regression tested.
- Starting to get bored of having so much
un-committed work on my machine; will commit after lunch,
it's better all round already in so many ways. Argh,
had to commit libbonoboui 3 times, due to broken pipe
errors in cvs.
- Made the default factory auto-exit
correctly, doh. Chopped another ref count error out of
the moniker GClosure marshaling code.
- Tried to contribute meaningfully to the
complete lack of sense being displayed prominently on the
foundation list. Carried on fixing libbonoboui. Started
writing some hefty regression tests, hard to automate.
- J' arrived home, dinner, more reading of 'The
Man who mistook his Wife for a Hat' - somewhat fascinating,
although the author does love to obfuscate it seems. Bed.
- Up early, sucked mail very slowly. Tried to
re-build glib/pango/atk/gtk+ going well, until a screwup in
gtkiconfactory - reverted to the release version & it
was fine. Wrote a status report for last week.
- A whole forest of bug reports in the mail, sigh
looked through them all. Darin seemed reasonably happy with
my proposed control lifecycle re-write, which is nice. But
didn't understand my decisions behind BonoboObject it seems.
- Onto the Control re-write in earnest, made it
more Java friendly, followed the IDL naming convention
properly, lots of oneway efficiency wins. Code looking
smaller and nicer.
- Beavered away removing inefficient signal
handlers and using cleaner virtual methods instead all
over the shop. Fixed a poa bug in the ORB. Darin had more
helpful input on the issues, great. Maciej still failing
to grasp the need for a shutdown fn in bonobo-activation;
sigh.
- J' arrived home, tried to concentrate on the
various styles of invitation she is pondering - instead of
her herself that is. Went for a run.
- Up early, off to Church; an interesting lay
preacher. Suggested that some of the Genaeologies in
Genesis 10-11 might be for literary effect - to highlight
God's silence for many generations between Noah & Abraham.
- Prayed for Andrew - leaving soon to command
the Australian naval contribution to the task force in
the Gulf. It's good to know that some men in power know
that they will have to give an ultimate account of their
actions.
- Home for dinner, slept most of the afternoon.
- Church in the evening - lead by the young
people; rather good. Got a date for counselling with
Pastor Neil ( finaly ), and a lift home from Emma. Bed,
knackered.
- Up early, off to the 'Thrifty' car rental
place, and then headed off to 'Palm Beach' - supposedly
where 'Home and Away' - a TV comedy fantasy - is filmed.
- Swam in the sea - a little cold, few people
around, too early in the morning ( got there before the
Germans ), wandered down the beach, tried to find a non-
Nestle ice cream without success, and drove into 'Avalon'.
Passed all the surfers in a traffic jam getting to the
beach - bought some sandwiches.
- Off into Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park,
lovely countryside and water. Drove to West Head - just
beautiful. Looked out over Broken Bay, Pittwater and the
Pacific generaly, beautiful water, sailing boats almost
capsizing as they hit the headwind and their spinachers
collapsed, etc.
- To the resolute picnic place, ( complete
with free gas-powered, automated, municipal
barbequeues - amazing ), and did a walk to see some
Aboriginal hand paintings (very faint) and sandstone
outlines - well endowed. Apparently there are Lyrebirds
(?) there that imitate noises such as other bird calls,
and even chainsaw sounds.
- On to Cottage Point, past Akuna Bay where
they had a dry dock for keeping boats over the winter,
where they were stacking the huge numbers of motor
boats 3 high. A very fine ice cream desert and Tea at
the Cottage Point restaurant, looking over the
various Islets - lovely.
- Back home, did a release of bonobo 1.0.13
that depends on oaf, _and_ actualy builds with the
recent header movement everywhere. Tried to be
constructive on the g_atexit disagreement on gcl,
and get bonobo-activation to free it's resources right.
- Dinner & bed.
- Up early, chewing mail. Tried to commit
Arjan's canvas layout patch - doesn't seem to fix the
problem sadly, banged my head against it for a while.
It seems the canvas needs re-writing to not inherit
from GtkLayout.
- Hacked away at finding various resource
reference leaks inside the ORB ... finaly chased them
all down ( it seems ); great. We now have somewhat
strong resource tracking debugging, excellent. Sent
a huge patch to Mark.
- Went shopping. Nailed the final few obvious
ORBit2 ref counting bugs, moved higher up the stack.
Moved some of the shutdown stuff into bonobo-activation
and sent a patch to Maciej, freed the base services
inside bonobo-activation, and sent another patch; hmm.
- Auspex pointed me to the
HDF format as
a possible compound document storage thing, no time to
look - this area is very non-productive it seems to me,
and ripe for standardization.
- Back to libbonoboui and control wierdness,
drasticaly rationalized the evil control frame / socket
mutual referencing issues. Building up a beefy patch.
- J' arrived back, time for Tea.
- Went out to a rather superior restaurant
that we often run by nearby. First rate food, fine wine,
excellent company - 30UKP total, extremely cheap.
- Back home, bed.
- Up early, chewed mail. Some chap reported a
silly build bug in bonobo 1.0.11 just after I released
1.0.12 with the same problem; sigh. Now if only we had an
oaf release to depend upon - 2 months since the last
release, and umpteen serious bugs fixed.
- Excellent! Owen agreed to doing a new Gtk+
release, so we can build our platform beta almost on
time. And Owen has a fix for my Gdk resource tracking
bug too - wow, Christmas has come early. Jacob checked in
his libglade work, so now I can build bug-buddy-2.0.
- Discovered a load more mail flooding in when
I'd just pulled it - hmm, very strange indeed.
- Added a FIXME back into libbonobo, sigh.
Committed the shlib factory fixes to libbonobo. Rationalized
the slew of g_atexit functions in bonobo to ensure they all
run in the right order, and that we can cleanup explicitely.
- Wrote a FAQ
for ORBit2 and posted it to the list. Namespaced the type
library install properly as well.
- Finally managed to pull my mail. More ORB
fixing - versioned the typelib install path, fixed up
various things, read some more of at-spi, mailed Bill.
- Fixed up the libbonoboui glade support - curious,
still good to have libglade really at the core of it all,
especially since it's so small nowadays. Fixed up several
recently introduced libglade bugs, fixed the canvas
libglade API usage. Finally bug buddy works in all it's glory.
- Added menus-have-icons to libgnome's desktop
settings schema so we get to see the icons. Phoned 'Pastor
Neil' - he can't meet us this weekend, so we can go off
elsewhere; excellent.
- Fixed a host of interesting reference counting
problems in the tests inside libbonobo, abandon trying to
unload shlib components - not very feasible, nor gives a
large win.
- Binary chopped out a POA reference leak inside
bonobo-activation; good. Added protection in linc so you
can only turn threading on before you start creating locks,
updated the FAQ. Got on the trail of some evil POA refernce
leaks inside the ORB, very strange.
- J' arrived home, looking quite georgeous. Tea,
and off for a run. Copped out half way round, feeling totaly
feeble, Jacket potatoes & bed.
- Up early, sucked mail; read this on
malloc behavior. Intrigued by the Lookaside possibility for
very small chunks of memory; hmm.
- Very pleased with the low number (4) of Gtk+ 2.0
API release critical bugs. Looks like we might be able to
push a platform beta out shortly.
- Committed a patch from Matthew for gb. It seems
to be pretty dead these days - everyone hacking on Mono
instead; still at least Mono has a chance at completeness.
- Added Copyright / Authors headers to all of
linc which was missing them. Wrote up a summary of the
libbonoboui Control / ControlFrame interactions, posted it
in a half cocked form to gcl to elicit some flames.
- Checked out bug-buddy to see the fruit of
Jacob's labour. Did a new release of bonobo: 1.0.12, started
using my OzEMail account because the competiton seem to have
serious problems configuring their routers.
- Up early, phoned by Mr Griffin, it seems the date
for the wedding is the 20th April; excellent, with a reception
in Laceton Abbey.
- The fruit's of Nat's labour discovering what the
"man on the street" thinks of evolution can be seen here.
- Looked back at bugzilla, and discovered that a
load of the bugs assigned to me had been closed by Trow, wow,
nice. Did a search for remaining bugs assigned to me, oh -
several. Fixed a bonobo-conf bug set. Did a bonobo-conf-0.13
release, did an ORBit-0.5.11 and a bonobo-1.0.11 release,
minor buglet fixes for Evolution.
- Back to libbonoboui bugs and issues, good,
sorted out the gnome-preferences issue; hmm. Tried to build
beast to trace Tim J's canvas bug reports. Added a
linc_set_threaded method, so it is possible to turn off
threading across the ORB, even when gnome-vfs has enabled
threads.
- Jody reported a leak in bonobo-xobject; grief,
how daft, found and fixed it. Poked inside the canvas again,
grief it's evil in there.
- Started cleaning the linc / ORBit server
connection code in preparation for the big control lifecycle
fixage spree; hmm.
- J' arrived home late, went to meet her at the
station; went for a run, bacon & brie bagels & bed.
- Up early, breakfast while sucking mail.
- Nice work from Cristiano De Michele, who it seems
has got steaming into the Gnome 2.0 work, having built the
whole thing from scratch and is fixing away / merging up his
fun new terminal improvements.
- It seems Jacob is steaming away at Gnome 2.0, fixing
up libglade and porting the most vital app Bug
Buddy.
- Nat's been around town gauging the user's response
to Evolution 1.0, extremely amusing. Wrote up my status report.
- Set to building gal, gtkhtml, evolution to tackle
my quota of bugs. Re-built gnome-core, it looks like Mark and
Glynn Foster are doing excellent work for Sun on the panel.
- Fixed up libglade radio button conversion. Had a
look at some particularly nasty Plug / Socket keyboard issues
just totaly wierd - passed 6150 on to Federico with some more
of an explanation of what is going on.
- Passed another on to Federico, sigh, to do with
key event propagation - the code looks fine to me, but hey.
- Off into town to change my flight home, hacked
tests for the async control stuff; you can create your
control, get a widget - and it's all resolved asynchronously,
and idly for you: neat. Discovered a nice deadlock in the ORB
and yet further cleaned the butt ugly IO flow control in
there, it's now almost beautiful.
- Back home, committed both sets of fixes, still no
word from Owen. Found and fixed a minor ORBit stable bug.
- Up early, off to Church. Back home, off for
another run - felt totaly dead, the midday sun is hot indeed.
The Pastor got our marriage preparation computer survey back
and said there should be lots to talk about in it - ominous.
- The parents phoned, just as we were off to Church.
Ran for the train. Phoned Father back later, lovely to catch
up with everything happening in the rainy land.
- Bed & stuff.
- Up extremely late. Went to Circular Quay for
dinner with Daph and Michelle - two of J's friends. It was
Acapella day or somesuch. Some rather moving Christian music
sung by non-christians, but hey. Need to find some quality
close harmony stuff on CD.
- On to Darling Harbour to look at the naval museum,
complete with floating submarine to wander around. Too late to
get in. Wandered off to the cinema instead - all the films
looked dire, back home.
- Bagels, wedding list composition, bed.
- Up early, off to CAF. Pulled up red-carpet and
sorted out the increasingly stale software on my system.
Grief RC is sweetness, pretty, pretty and flawless ( apart
from some terminal debug churn, but let's blame that on
gtkhtml ).
- Tried to get the Java / Bonobo / Accessibility
stuff moving for Bill, then back to libglade for some
GtkImageMenuItem furkling. Fixed up stock GtkButtons, mapped
GnomeDialogs to GtkDialogs. etc. Coffee with J'.
- Fixed up mnemonic widgets, so accelerators work
nicely, added BonoboWindow support. Good enough for most
things now, time to get to libbonoboui for some polish.
- Started sorting out the mess in bonoboui-hello,
more comments, rename and make it conform to all the best
practice we can find. Jody released gnumeric 0.72 with this
shot
either JPEG artifacts are getting worse, or we support
gradient graph backdrops.
- Fired some queries from the hip at gtk-devel,
got on with libbonoboui cleaning. Struggled away with some
gtkplug bug, causing daftness finalizing the GdkWindow
resources, seen it before in Gnome 1.4, the old fix doesn't
work though, sigh. Sent a lengthy analysis off to gtk-devel.
- 50 FIXMEs in libbonoboui, sigh. Spent an age
fixing one, but advanced on the evil Control / ControlFrame
lifecycle mess promisingly. Nailed another daft one, time to
go.
- Home, went for a run, made some Nacho type things,
eat, studied, bed.
- Up early; off to CAF for B/W hugging.
- Did some more research, chewed mail, committed
the GtkEntry 'text' patch. Discovered the heinous async
monikers bug was in the async moniker code - hey ho, lots
of potential buglets fixed elsewhere.
- More libbonobo polishing, killed all the
remaining FIXME's and left 3 TODOs - a happy day, onto
libbonoboui.
- Made ORBit2's object type_id a GQuark to save
both time and memory - nice ( just in passing ).
- Untangled an unholy mess of obscure error
conditions each with slightly different code paths in
ORBit2 / linc's IO interaction.
- Back onto the libglade issues, finaly got
the OptionMenu sorted out and committed that. It seems
Jacob has done a storming job of getting Gnome 2.0
packaged and that daily snapshots will be coming as soon,
as we can push the work back into CVS.
- Sorted out GtkScrolledWindow's and their
policies. Enticed home by J.
- Went for a run, phoned by J's Mum & Dad, cooked
Natchos & eat. Dog tired, snoozed until midnight; phoned 2
sets of Vicars. The incumbuent chap wants to do the wedding
service itself, but is happy to allow someone else to do the
address - extremely irritating chap. Who wants to be married
by some unknown, possibly extremely dodgy person.
- Bed proper.
- Up early; breakfast, and to work. Chewed
mail, closed some bugs. Committed the gnome-vfs fixes,
no input on the activation ones; sigh. Read the Primarion presentation
on optical busses, interesting.
- Ross Golder seems to be putting nice work
into ORBit2, fixing various annoying bugs - and advancing
threateningly at the threading issues with the bug squasher.
- Added microsecond time stamping to the ORBit2
method traceing code, so simple, yet so powerful. Discovered
evidence to suggest slowness Jacob thought was bonobo was in
fact pango's fault; sigh.
- Off to the shops to get yet more keys cut, now we
can get into the mailbox again ! wow, letters arrived from
Home, horay. Saved them up for J.
- The people above seem to insist on screaming
gratuitously, if they didn't keep laughing it would be fine
one could simply call the police instead of fretting that
they're being murdered or worse slowly.
- Got on debugging the async monikers and catching
various other problems around the place.
- Spent hours banging my head on the ORB to get it
to do in-proc Async stuff properly. Committed the
bonobo-activation work, and finally the ORBit2 changes, it's
good to have Mark to send them to to look over.
- J' arrived home, we read the nice letter from
Mother. Then off to house group. Got back, phoned up the
Vicar, got Davina instead - she was very positive. Bed.
- Up early, got the E-mail shovel out.
- Finaly got E-mail from Peter our Vicar at
home - horay! apparently this Friday Ximian turns 2
years old, wow. Committed the ORBit2 async bits,
and the libbonobo async moniker bits, and the not
working libbonoboui tests; hmm, not so good.
Committed the libgnomeui bits.
- Fixed up gnome-terminal removing lots of
my devel cruft, and committing something slightly sane
so that Cristiano can hack on it.
- Went shopping, found an amazing key cutting
shop that had an automatic computer controlled grinder
for copying keys.
- Back to the mail mountain, lots of ORBit
interest - good. Wierd problems with async monikers -
trashed all libraries and re-built from the ground up.
- Wrote a status report so Miguel thinks I'm
doing something. Reduced the number of FIXME's in
libbonobo to 8, mostly fatuous ones - a set of
misc cleans.
- Fixed a nasty bug in my gnome-vfs monikers.
Located my earlier nasty async problem inside
bonobo-activation; hmm - no-one tested the async code,
added a regression test. Slogged away discovering yet
more brokenness and finaly the activation tests pass.
- J' home, tried to phone the Vicar.
Discovered my friend Tim Spanner is working for the
church for a year - horay, and said he would play for
the wedding, no Vicar though.
- Out for dinner at a 'modern Australian'
restaurant, ended up eating a huge chunk of beef, with
almost 0 carbohydrate; sigh, what a waste, tasted good
though.
- Back to bed.
- Up early, bid Gerd farewell, sad to leave
really, it's been good here.
- Tried to get on line, with no success,
decided to write some async moniker regression tests
before setting off.
- Set off for the city. Lunch at the RACV
club with John who drove us to the airport, still
feeling gummy.
- Got home, got on-line; long talk to Nat,
lots of poking around, didn't commit anything yet.
- Bed late.
- Got up, off to church: the 'Christian
Worship Sanctuary' a Pentacostol Assemblies of God,
an interesting and contemporary musical style, if not
a little repetitive. Somewhat concerned about the
church's use of 'prosperity' even with qualifications I
think the term is misleading; if we are believers only
for this world - then we are more to be pitied than any
man. Some interesting points in the sermon though; lots
of talk about money though, sigh.
- Off to the Museum for lunch with James -
Gerd's friend from the church; eat first at a passing
Turkish restaurant.
- A pleasant museum, lots of interesting
things there, then went to the IMAX cinema for a 3D
movie 'CyberWorld'. Rather good, sponsored by Intel -
full of wry comment on the totaly shoddyness of
software.
- Wandered back to the station, and off
home. Watched 'Enemy of the State' and eat Indian
takeaways; never heard of such strong garlic bread.
- Bed.
- Slept quite lightly; up early, got steaming
into some hacking in bed, while every one else slept.
- Implemented another async regression test;
I wonder if it's worth implementing IDL compiler support
for the async invocations; should be easy anyway.
- Re-implemented the libbonobo async monikers
code; nice.
- Got up eventualy, (8.50am) went to forage for
fodder near South Yarra station, absolutely famished and
dog tired by walking; hmm.
- Back, toast for breakfast, feeling better,
off for a walk to the botanical gardens, we wandered
round looking at the various pleasing flaura, me
lethargicaly dragging my feet. Tea at the cafe by the
lake.
- Walked on into the City via the war memorial.
Got a ferry from South Bank to Williamstown where we eat
a most pleasant Italian meal ( still almost no appetite )
then a quest for emergency J' chocolate supplies.
- Finally back on the ferry, learned a huge
amount about large boats from Gerd's maritime experiences.
- Back home, met Emma. Out to an Irish pub,
on to the DVD rental place ( quite a hike ), after a
protracted discussion got 'Patriot Games'. Got a takeaway
on the way home from the local kebab joint. Setup all the
magic contraptions to play it, and enjoyed the thing. Bed
late.
- Woke early, read the paper, feeling better;
got up, had a shower - worse again - how tedious. Breakfast
even worse a fruit juice breakfast.
- Off to the cafe - sucked mail.
- Reviewed Mark Sobell's practical guide to RH
Linux, which (tragical for him) has a Gnome section using
Gnome 1.2 instead of 1.4 - sigh. Strangely it's put up
against quite a recent KDE version; hmm.
- Committed a libgnomeui patch, sent the next off.
Had a nice lunch with J', feeling slightly more human.
- Alex posted a nice picture of the Gnome 2.0
panel a brutal port so far, but quite fun.
- Got steaming into the ORBit2 async stuff -
looking pretty nice so far; good, fixed a nasty ORB bug.
- Off to see Molly and Tristan, Julia's friends.
- Located the flat by guessing the correct floor,
and the correct door to knock on. Met them both, Molly just
had a baby. Worrying to talk to Tristan, he said that for 3
hours before her epidural he'd never heard anyone in such
pain before - horrifying, mercifuly Molly doesn't remember
it at all; that bit sounds worse for the husband, although
perhaps not at the time. Anyway - they had a boy.
- Looked at Tristan's show-reel of some of the
TV adverts he has been making; the Yoplait (yoghurt)
adverts, in French; a Honda advert and some pointing
thing. Very amusing really. He's also responsible for the
"They'd only just met but tomatoe couldn't help itself"
bill board ads with a biscuit and a vegetable in bed.
- Had tea and English cakes, procured at vast
expense.
- Off to Gerd's in a Taxi. Met my cousin Gerd for
the first time; nice guy, running Gnome on his Red Hat box
too.
- Out to TFI Friday for an Australian style meal,
rather good. Then back home and had tea and talked to Gerd
for a long time about his career so far. He was a naval
engineer on board ship for a while. Amazing to think that
in a 230m oil tanker you can look from the bridge and see
the boat bend as it hits a wave, and see the flexure of the
boat ripple down to you.
- Apparently the bass straight ( between Tazmania
and Australia ) is a horribly rough and treacherous sea.
Gerd being thrown out of his bunk the first time there.
Interesting that sailors - though they have a hard life,
get 6 months holiday per year. Also interesting, that oil
tankers often have no fixed destination - "Head off towards
Singapore, but don't go too fast", and get re-routed
depending on all manner of factors.
- Also, the spectre of competing against Panamanian
registered rust bucket ships, with a load of poor 3rd world
hired hands, just waiting to sink, with lifeboats rusted to
their davits; somewhat scary.
- Bed rather late; Gerd slept in a sleeping bag
on the floor - very good of him.
- Woke up feeling dead ill, slept until midday,
dragged myself out of bed eventualy with the aid of
paracetamol.
- Chewed mail, interesting IRC chat with Nat, fooled
around with things. Committed my Gtk+ changes.
- J' arrived - diagnosed me as very ill - what a
caring creature; most lovely. Sent packing to bed, fed and
watered. Slept.
- Up early, breakfast with J', off to the Mall for
internet access - shop not open yet; thank God for laptops.
- Interesting link on biological weapons from
theregister; somewhat raving, but hey - an alternative non
doomsday viewpoint.
- Burned a load of time porting Daemon's
GtkFontSelectionDialog from Gtk+ 1.2 to Gnome 2.0 renaming to
GnomeFontSelector - so we can still select X fonts nicely.
- Got on with ORBit2's asyncronous method
invocation interface; rather fun - makes any CORBA method
capable of async operation, with a bit of jiggering, ( even
local ones, although I don't know if we will create a local
socket if we're in-proc; hmm ). Replaces bonobo-async,
hopefully very sweetly.
- Added some basic 'no return value' regression
tests; hmm, committed.
- Off to Melisa and Simon's for dinner with Duncan,
Jenny, Simon and John & his wife Christina. Somewhat interesting
vegitarian sushi - and other things. Some engaging conversation.
- Back to the hotel, feeling ill.
- Up early, working breakfast with J, SB & Duncan,
rather good though.
- Located a superb internet cafe round the corner,
they gave me a 50% discount at 20AUD/day for a nice ADSL
connection - and a place to sit; wow. And clueful people too.
- Committed the libglade notebook work done James'
way, works rather nicely - started building up regression
tests and onto the flags brokenness.
- Interesting talk with Rusty on IRC about the
substance of reality. Lots of little libglade buglets
hammered. Onto adding missing Gtk+ properties.
- Re-built most of the system to get the latest
Gtk+ to work properly. Sent my libgnomeui patch off to
Anders, committed libglade stuff, and sent the first gtk+
patch off.
- Back to the cafe; committed stuff - back to
the hotel, hacked until late.
- J' arrived back, out for a large dinner at
another nice but somewhat cheaper Italian place. Bed, early.
- Up early, saw J off to work, James not commented
on my libglade python stuff; sigh. Chewed mail misc.
- Suckered by the TV a bit - it remains to be seen
how accurate the military hardware is these days. Didn't
realise the US hit a Mosque in error last time - I can see
how the image of a charred Qu'ran is horribly offensive to
Muslims.
- On with libglade-convert hackage, talked to
James H on the phone. Committed some of my changes, worked
on the improved way to handle GtkNotebooks.
- Dinner, set off for the airport; hacked on the
train.
- Arrived, met John and went to collect Jenny, and
Sir Brian Jenkins, off to the Hotel.
- Met in the Lobby, interesting talk with Sir Brian
over a large G&T about the Euro (he's agnostic, but has a
personal dislike), ethical investment, what Barclays is up
to, etc. Explained the ethics of free software to the chap,
and then the Ximian business case; and learned about the
importance of software to Barclays / Woolwich.
- Discovered that SB. was Lord Mayor of London
during my time at Christ's Hospital - I thought I recognised
his face. So I would have got my 'shilling' (20p) from his
private purse from his hand. Interestingly he was mayor when
the IRA's Baltic Exchange attack happened, very interesting
to listen to. Apparently Barclays doesn't mention 'charitable'
giving as such in it's report, but as it talks about it's
contributions ( which are substantial ) starting with th 1Bn
tax bill it pays. Also, didn't realise that the UK was the
world's 4th largest economy after the US, Japan and Germany.
- Off to an Italian restaurant, had some very
thick, red, transylvanian wine - drink it before it
congeals. Some excellent food, and a glimpse into a rather
different world. Despite the waiter being asked for a new
bottle every 10 minutes, luckily we survived without quite
that many.
- Back to the hotel, bed, clapped out.
- Slept well, woke to freezing cold. Lots of wind.
- A relatively pleasant breakfast, with real bacon
not the twirly, cremated, nightmares of American pedigree.
- Wandered down the Fubar steps past the Katoomba
falls ( a pretty waterfall sheeting over the cliffs ). Very
wonderful to see the light and shade playing in the valley,
and also looking up from the shade to see the raindrops
being blown off the waterfall, and drifting in the sun
light above like a swarm of myriad fireflies.
- Lots of steps, got almost to the bottom, saw
the coal mine entrance they have there. Grief, they complain
about the 'dangerous' life of the miners, even when they
have a thick flat seam with perfect drainage etc. etc. they
should try their contemporaries jobs mining coal in England
miles out under the sea. Wandered along a little, very
pleasant views, countryside & company.
- Took the scenic railway up the mountain, a
52degree incline - quite steep. Amusingly the train had
a mesh roof that was angled from one side of the car to
the other - because of the shape of the hole in the crack
that it rocketed up.
- Had a beer in a revolving cafe at the top. Julia
noticed a large roller coaster ride there, that looks
horrendously dangerous. Sadly it's not in operation for
reasons unknown. Walked back into town.
- Lunch at a nice cafe, and then caught the train
back to Strathfield in the snow or at least hail; hmm.
- Back home, quick turn-round, back out to church.
- Back to bed.
- Up early; set off for the Blue Mountains. Got
the 'fast' train instead of the slow one. Fast train delayed
by giant digging machine straddling the track ( for
apparently no good reason ). Sat on the train for ages while
the workmen just stood around Stop standing around! people
will think we're workmen
- Eventualy got a Taxi & the train to Katoomba.
- Wandered to the B&B place, via. a rather fine
cafe and art studio - wonderful scones with cream and tea.
A nice guest house called Hermon, dumped our baggage, and set
out for a little walk.
- Honeymoon lookout, saw the huge cliffs - almost
sheer sandstone, very high and beautiful tree lined valleys
below, awesome really. Wandered along the edge peering
over and out at various viewpoints, very lovely.
- Walked out onto the three sisters - three
rocky outcrops at the end of a spit like thing, went down
the nearest one a little way to a bench. A wonderful
climing face - some people going up on the opposite face.
- Back home, read some Jared - coming to the
end of it, and then off to 'Lindsays' - The Art of Food,
a very nice restaurant with quiet, live, Elton-John-esque
music, and very pleasant food.
- Back to bed.
- Chewed mail, it seems Jacob is burning away in
the snapshot stakes, excellent.
- Back to reconciling gal diffs, sigh; still,
could be worse. Committed the first sed job, updated my
version - hacked out scads of conflicts.
- The Mono project seems to be coming along really
nicely, the MSIL emitter is coming along well I understand,
operator overloading getting sorted, class handling falling
into line, all bringing the possibility of bootstrapping on
a free system much closer.
- Committed the gal stuff to tag 'gal-2'.
- J' phoned up to say Duncan had changed his mind
wrt. dinner tonight, so I loose the girl until very late.
- Started struggling with python, trying to learn
the language, persuade emacs to indent it sensibly, and fix
the libglade2 translator. Made glade2 build again.
- Spoke to Colin McCormack on the phone about
Gnomes, Basics, and Monos - and about his gigabyte scale
object database thing, on sourceforge somewhere.
- Managed to get the libglade-convert script a
lot more up to scratch in several areas, the gnome-terminal
dialog now has an almost sensible GtkNotebook. It's lovely
to hack on libglade though - very sweet stuff.
- Knocked off for some theology and food ! wrote
up Gorden's sermon on War; a lengthy read or
listen but I found it very rewarding.
- We agnoize as to what an appropriate response to
this is. The President calls for a 'war' against Terror.
- We must surely pray for our those in uniform
that God might protect them, strengthen and encourage them
and allow them to do what is right. And also to protect them
from adding to the wrong by taking yet more innocent life.
- The scriptures enjoin us to pray for peace, and
so we do. But what does the scripture have to say about this
war or indeed any war. What does the Bible say ?
- So, everything hinges on the Old Testament,
and the exegetes attitude towards it, there being two
seemingly equal and opposite errors into which excellent,
wonderful Christians have been apt to fall.
- The old testament is virtualy 100% applicable,
the 'everything carries over' position.
Which further splits into two schools:
- Palestine is the holy land and
- America is the holy land - or whatever
nation you call home.
- Or, the old testament is virtualy entirely
inapplicable to modern warfare.
- Firstly, the school of thought that some small
chunk of land in the middle East is uniquely 'holy' ground,
and thus the ownership of it is non negotiable, The West Bank
can never be on the negotiating table. This was the pre-supposition
that inspired the crusades 11th->13th Centuries, which eventualy
cost ~5 million lives. It began with the offence taken when the
Turks took over the holy land.
- Exodus 32 was invoked to justify the cleansing of
the land, even with the sword. Moses called to his contemporaries
when they were wallowing in idolatory and said "Who's on the Lord's
side" and the Levites repented, and in the first 'ordination' of
what became the priesthood ran among the people and cut down all
the unrepentant Israelites. Serious about keeping defilement from
the presence of God.
- The transferal of the Old Testament precedent willy
nilly to the modern day started with the supposition that the 'holy
land' was still over there, the holy city still Jerusalem.
In Judges 5:23 the people are condemned for not fighting
to cleanse the holy land - it's not optional for the people of God.
- The problem of course is that that bit of territory
in the middle east stopped being the holy land even in the old
testament. What makes the land Holy is the presence of the holy
God, and the visible manifestation of the holy spirit.
- Sinai was originaly mount Zion, but God's spirit went
ahead of the people into Jerusalem.
- In Ezekiel 10:18 the prophet sees the spirit of God
departing from the city and the temple, leaving it defenceless.
When the holy spirit leaves, it's no longer the holy land, because
he is the one that makes it holy. God promises to be with his
people where they are instead.
- Jeremiah counsels the Israelites to surrender since
God's spirit had left, and they would die by their own sword.
- So the question is now what is the holy land?
has the kingdom been forfeited ? is there now another Jerusalem
to look for ?
- Even in our own day although no one is calling for a crusade
there are some who have made the same mistake, imagining that
some land in the middle east is uniquely holy land, some city
that has a right, a title for Israel, for the people of God, that is
non negotiable, land that would include parts of the west bank,
that must never be put on the negotiating table, because God says
it's holy land.
- The new testament tells us that there is a holy land,
a mount Zion, a city of God - but it isn't there!
- In Hebrews 12:18-25 we read
But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly
Jerusalem, the city of the living God. if you're a
Christian the city of God where he lives with his people
in his midsts is where we are. ... You have come to
God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of rightious men
made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant
- But you say; I want a Zion that can be touched, not
this spiritual nonsense; Great ! there is a Zion to fight
for, a holy city; the new Jerusalem - problem is, it's
coming out of heaven Then I saw a new heaven and a new
earth ... I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God Rev 21:1-2. You're welcome
to go to battle for that. No defiling presence will be
allowed in that city; we'll be thoroughly sanctified then.
- Well the other mistake, is not to equate it with
something in the middle east, but say no - it's America.
- Ever since John Winthrop in 1629 pronounced that the
Mass Bay Colony was "the city opon a hill" this has been
entrenched in the thinking of many, especialy the Mass
Puritans, equating America's body politic with the Israel
of old.
- Because of that some odd things happened.
- Indeed, there are many promises that God makes to
Israel that it would be just wonderful to have today.
- God promises his protection over Israel, unless
the people sin. Leading to the misguided assumption
that somehow he has 'removed his protection' now for
whatever reason.
- Exodus 34 promises that whenever God's people would
go to worship all the soldiers could leave their
fortifications because on those days God would protect
the borders without them.
- Here in Massachusets, were convinced of this view
would leave their guns at home when they went to Church.
Unfortunately the Indians hadn't read those passages,
and they didn't seem to hesitate to attack on the
sabbath.
- One of the earliest laws was enacted so that you
had to bring your musket to church so that at least even
if you had faith enough to believe God would protect you
the state would overrule that, and your submission to the
state would mean we wouldn't all get wiped out.
- Other similar uses of the sword. A law in 1675
dealing with people leaving church in the middle of the
service. It was the law, you had to go to church -
the sermons were 2-3 hours, as you went out of the door
it became just unbearable. So the good commonwealth
passed an order to lock the doors, and post marshals
at them, guarding them so you couldn't leave.
- All of this happens when you have the crazy notion
that our nation is Israel. We have to give greater
account of the difference between the old and new testaments.
- Israel was a Theocracy - America is not.
- Jesus said - My kingdom is not of this world, if
it were my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by
the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place
John 18:36. In just saying this, Jesus prohibits us from
resorting to the power of the sword to impose biblical
precepts on one another, that would have been appropriate
in the old testament Israel but are certainly not appropriate
now.
- The opposite view of course is the one to which many
christians are attracted. Nothing, or virtualy nothing carries over.
- After all didn't Jesus say to Peter "Put your sword back
in it's place ... for all who draw the sword will die by the sword"
Matthew 26:52.
- It's assumed that nothing carries over, Jesus in his
sermon on the mount says I tell you, love your enemies, do
good to those that hate you, bless those that curse you, pray for
those that mis-treat you ... If someone strikes you on the right
cheek, turn to him the other also Matthew 5. and so on.
- This seems to tell against an overly facile assumption
that everything carries over from the Old Testament, it seems we're
being called to a sort of personal pacifism.
- Tolstoy argued from this that we should get rid of our
judges, magistrates - unless they just forgive, and likewise there
must be no armies. An attractive view, but is that the point ?
- We have to avoid excessive literalism here as in many
other texts. This verse is in the context of passages of if your
right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.
- We want to know what does he mean ? In the context most
commentators have argued that he is condemning not self defence but
a spirit of revenge.
- Indeed in John 18:22-23 Jesus is struck on the cheek by
his captor, and does say here you missed the other one !
but ... why did you strike me did he ask us to do something
he didn't ?
- Also, it is not asking us to turn our neighbours
other cheek, not legislating bystander apathy - if you see your
neighbour about to be raped raped; you don't yell to them "turn the
other cheek" you intervene because you are to love your neighbour
as yourself, and you love a God that loves Justice, and if he does
that ought to be exhibited in our passion to see that right be done.
- So how are we to enterpret the scriptures on this.
- Ultimately both camps are wrong, and both are right.
What has confused the issue is the failure to notice what is so
unique about the old testament law on war, and particularly a vital
distinction that many readers miss.
- There are two kinds of wars;
- Holy wars - wars of Infinite Justice and
- Wars of defence - just Just wars.
- Every war fought by Israel in the OT. was a holy war,
what does that mean ? It does not mean it was for religious
reasons ? it doesn't mean that wonderful 'belivers' were getting
all worked up about something and said "lets go kill 'em".
- A holy war is when God is fighting. As our
text (Deuteronomy 20) verse 4 he is the one who goes with
you to fight for you against your enemies. It's his war,
it is where he goes, because he is behind it and personaly
present in it.
- It was the norm in the OT to make it clear to
everyone that a holy war was being waged because you fight
with inferior weapons and reduced man power.
- You want a situation where it's David vs. Goliath,
(1 Samuel 17) so it's clear that you come against me with
sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name
of the LORD Almighty...
- Israel was prohibited alliances, they didn't want
England or anyone else joined with them, because they wanted it
clear that the LORD can save whether by many or by few.
- When Gideon was called to holy war with initialy
32,000 men against 135,000 enemies, God said you have
too many men for me to deliver Midian into their hands
Judges 7, there's only a 4:1 disadvantage - we've got to get
it up to 35:1 so it's clear it was God's victory.
- In Deuteronomy 20 we hear the whittling down,
after being reminded that the LORD was going to fight, the
officers, the generals the macho men vs. 5 say to the army:
- Anyone who got engaged but not married let him go home
- Anyone who has built a house and not enjoyed it
should go home
- Anyone who has planted a vineyard and not enjoyed
it's fruit ( 5 years from plant -> enjoy ) should go
- you can almost hear "Anyone who'se favoirite TV
program is on tonight" ... We don't need you - go home !
we don't need anyone but God.
- And particularly anyone afraid, should not fight
because faith and fear are antithetical.
That is what a holy war looks like.
- No-one in their right mind ( you might think ) would try to
apply this to today.
- As you might know the Childrens Crusade tried in in 1212 AD,
all little children, girls and boys age 12 thereabouts. Felt God's
call to wipe out the Infidels on the holy sites in the middle east.
- They marched defenseless, with no weapons, they came down to
southern France and stopped at the shore and expected God to open
the waters - but he didn't. Instead Kidnappers were present by the
dozens who took them by the thousands and sold them into slavery
in Egypt.
- See, we're not fighting a holy war; that would have worked fine
back in the days of David an Goliath. It's garenteed to fail in our
time, other than when we're talking about spiritual warfare, then
the weakest of us is a mighty man or woman of God.
- In the handout we have the sermon Gordon didn't preach, in
which he sets out the distinction between the unique wars that Israel
fought (of infinite justice) and other wars.
- The Canannites had been sinning for 400 years and the land was
ready to vomit out it's inhabitants. He didn't flood them but appointed
his people as judges, and though they held no animosity for these
people they were to eliminate them, to wipe them out. No terms of
peace, any more than a judge offers a murder terms of peace.
- It was Israel's job to see to God's justice. It wasn't their
idea. How is this any better than a bunch of fringe crazies in some
movement of Islam believing that God is happy with them terrorizing
the rest of the world and taking innocent life.
- To make a parallel this is what it's like; you don't have Moses
and Joshua having a little prayer meeting and God speaking to them
in their hearts; and us having to believe that God said it.
- Instead what you have to have is Allah or God appearing in a
pillar of fire, that causes water to divide, that destroys all of
it's enemies and utters in all of our hearing his commands and
authorises this battle of conquest and dispossesion. Not subjective,
objective.
- Secondly, you've got to have the pillar of fire be so objective
that he feeds you while you're making your way to the battle front,
water out of a rock etc. and just to make clear - well if we apply
it to the modern situation: if the terrorists had not hijacked
planes, but instead had had a prayer meeting at the base of the
towers, and a prayer walk around the towers once a day for 6 days
and on the 7th day 7 times, and then - to our horror - we saw on
live TV the towers collapse without any use of explosive, then,
then we better get very serious with God. Then we better repent and
listen to the message.
- That's what happened at Jerico - to make it clear it wasn't
someone's figament of their imagination. That's what wars of
judgement were like, and incidentaly no innocent people were
killed, no collateral damage. All repentant people saved.
Otherwise the fire falls only on the guilty, that's God's
judgment, that's what wars of 'infinite justice' look like.
- The other kinds of wars are wars of defence, and wars of
defence are Just wars if the provocation is just, no. 1, namely
self defence period.
- No wars of agression were allowed. Verse 1, when you see
horses and chariots - the offensive weapons of the ancient world,
when you see them you're being attacked. Then you are authorised
to carry out just war, a war of self defence.
- The prosecution had to be just, only target combatants
and their willing acomplices: when you go to attack a city offer
terms of peace.
- Finally, the objective of Just war in the bible, is not
justice, it's peace.
- The wars of conquest had justice as their objective, and God
is the only one that is able to judge between the nations and
authorise such a war - and he isn't doing that now, and he
hasn't done that since the conquest of cannaan.
- Any other war is a Just war, if it is anything the Bible would
approve at all, and if it is a just war, the objective is just the
cessation of hostilities.
- You don't say "you destroyed one of our cities, we'll have
one of yours", you don't say "you took 6500 lives of ours, we'll
take 6500 of yours to make it even". Human beings are not capable
of exacting justice, and certainly not on their own behalf. When
you are a victim, you cannot be the judge.
- But we have a God who has the requisite authority and ability
to judge, and he will judge between the nations and command peace, even
to the ends of the earth.
- So what are we do to ? well, it's no comfort to anyone who doesn't
believe in God's justice, but if you do - you're great comfort is that God
will secure justice in the last day. Nothing has been missed.
- Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but be careful to do what
is right. In so far as it lies within you, live at peace with everyone,
do not take revenge my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, "for
it is mine to avenge, I will repay" [says the Lord] (Romans 12).
- God's wrath can be counted on. What is our job ? it is to pray
for Kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and
quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.(1 Timothy 2)
- Pray for the city into which we've been sent in exile
(Jeremiah 29) for the peace and prosperity of that city.
- We pray for peace, but you say "What good is this !?" -
"These terrorists are religious fanatics who will stop at nothing, they
hate us !, they think they're doing God a favour when they wipe us out,
whom they call Infidels!". Don't you know the story of the apostle Paul ?
- Paul started as a religious fanatic, who hated Christians, he
thought he was doing God a favour every time he wiped another one off the
face of the earth. God turned the enemy of the faith into it's most self
sacrificing friend. Even though I was once a blasphemer and persecutor and
a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief.
The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly. Here is a trustworthy
saying that deserves full acceptance, Christ Jesus came into the world to
save sinners - of whom I am the worst; but for that very reason I was shown
mercy, so that in me - the worst of sinners - Christ Jesus might display
his unlimited patience, as an example for all those who would believe on
him and receive eternal life
- You think God can actualy change a personality that radicaly ?
from someone given to violence - a religious fanatic, and turn him into
an apostle of love. Jesus did it, and so we pray with confidence to the
one who places a table before us in the presence of our enemies, and we
commit ourselves to lives of those who overcome evil with Good.
- Martin Luther King said "If we give into hate we'll be no
better than our enemies"
- Abraham Lincoln said "The best way to destroy your enemy is
to make him your friend".
- The LORD God says Do not be overcome by evil, but
overcome evil with good.
- Up very late, but feeling less ill. Chewed mail.
Linas Vepstas has been doing some nice bonobo reading and
playing; his split out hello world demo is
here.
- Updated zvt, atk, libglade, gnome-core and had
a poke around - work needed on libglade it seems.
- Wow, it seems the gnumeric team are steaming
ahead great guns; the gnumeric/guppi combo now doing simple
graph rendering, with excel import, due for release shortly,
very exciting, also evolution 'Send file' support - this
seems to be creeping all over the shop; which is nice.
- Discovered ftp.planetmirror.com works well
in .au. still only getting 300 bytes/sec, hmm. modems.
- Off to CAF, a team meeting dinner - wow it's
well worth having another half on 'a team' :-) pulled
the python stuff in a few seconds.
- Got a nice spam in the mail, they'd even put
the effort in to insert my name at the top; nearly gave
them all my bank details - and then re-considered :-)
- Talked to clahey; can start merging parts
of my stuff into stable gal. Built guppi3 / gnumeric,
prepared to be blown away. Clahey was very reasonable
about large, but ultra boring code changes to gal to
make gtk+ 2.0 porting a far smaller diff.
- Wow - very impressed with Jody & Trow's
work on gnumeric / guppi. Loaded an excel spreadsheet
I got a long time ago and charting worked beautifuly
out of the box,
very, very pleasing; the first really useful example
of bonobo in the compound document arena. Very pleased,
lots of great Goldberg & gnumeric hackers work, also
in some ways a vindication of a huge amount of
hidden infastructure.
- Team dinner with the CAF Australia team,
and directors. Managed to get an invite to the board
meeting dinner tommorow night - led by Alan Cox (no
relation apparently) - in Sydney Yacht club. Had a
very convivial meal.
- Back home, J' to bed.
- Tried to reason civily with Andrew Orlowski
at theregister, which at least generated a response.
Poked around at other E-mail, bed.
- Slept fitfully, feeling aweful. Up, chewed mail,
interesting stuff on the gcc list; seemingly an Ada compiler
has arrived, and Red Hat's pre-compiled header work is being
merged to a branch. Jacob seems to be getting on well with
setting up the Gnome 2.0 snapshot build stuff.
- Uploaded ORBit-0.5.10 with the interoperability
and HP's header movement patches.
- To work on gal, went shopping for basics,
ordered a present for Robert's B/Day ( a month ago sadly ).
Finally chewed through the ~100 destroy methods in gal.
- Made a screenshot to prove that I've been doing
something at least;
shot doesn't show the spewing debug on the console but ...
- J' arrived back. Pasta, read, bed.
- Up early with a very cloudy head and sore throat.
- Chewed mail & bugs. Started chasing ORBit 1 / 2
interoperability for Havoc. Found one evil bug, someone
decided to change the ORBIT_SPECIFIC IOP profile format; doh.
Finaly got both versions talking happily to the the gconfd-1
daemon.
- Of course, the old won't talk to the new happily,
sigh, looks like a garbled GIOP header version.
- Went into CAF ( dinner with the nobs tonight ),
and committed the ORBit2 stuff, partialy implemented server
side method tracing, need to make it more conditionalized
though I think. Worked the ORBit-stable debugging into a
conditional state, and ensured no regressions & committed.
- Dinner with Julia's work colleagues, back home
feeling bad, bed.
- Up early - today is Labour day ( apparently -
I thought it was the Anzak version but Tim Riley helped me
out ) which means I should be on holiday.
- It looks like 'gtt' and 'mrproject' are starting
to co-operate and look at working together - great.
- Chewed mail, updated ammonite, tried to re-build
nautilus again. Committed some gconf warning fixes. Updated
xst, the mailing list looks exciting.
- Off to 'Positive Outcomes' for lunch with Jules'
friends Anthony and Louiese. Experienced an Aussie barbeque -
rather nice.
- Back home, red, eat, bed, feeling ill.
- Up early, off to Church. Back home, had Natchos
for dinner - yum, slept.
- Off to Church early for marriage preparation. A
relatively interesting computerized test, eg.
"If our relationship is in difficulty having a child may
help solve our problems": 1-5 Strongly Disagree,
Disagree, Undecided, Agree, Strongly Agree. [ naturaly it's
rather a crack-pot question ]. Some rather amusing questions,
some rather searching ones too. Look forward to the 'results'.
- Evening service
- Back home, run, eat, bed.
- Up at 4.45am - heard the very crack of dawn.
It seems in Australia they have manic bird song at strange
times - apparently they are on heat or something.
- Off to the airport to pick up Julia's division's
director - Jenny, just in from England. Took her to her hotel
and then wandered off through 'Hyde Park' - a relatively good
imitation of the original in taste terms.
- Wandered up through the parks, to the harbour, and
then to the bottom of Sydney bridge - famous for its big-ness.
Sadly we needed to be on the roadway a hundred feet above to
get into the museum we discovered. Trecked back through 'The
Rocks' via. a very fine sandwich shop ( for breakfast ), and
walked round to the real shebang.
- Lots of amazing facts, statistics and images of
the bridge being built - a double cantilevered structure whilst
being built - and upon joining both sides an arch. An amazing
feat of engineering really.
- Back through town via. many bookshops. Tried to buy
a book on massage without it being riddled with 'Shatisu',
'Reflexology' and other trendy 'new age' nonsense. Eventualy
located one - horay.
- Then to the AMP tower, rocketed up it in a nice
elevator and had an 'eat as much as you can' dinner which was
very nice. The seating area revolved at about ~ 1cm / sec
relative velocity ( at external diameter ) leaving the central
serving area and extremity windows static. Slow enough that
your seat was mostly where you left it in relation to the bar
when you got back.
- On the way down discovered that the shell
of the structure was mutliply perforated, and that if you looked
down the lift shaft, you could see a very long way verticaly
down - fun; the girl was scared, and needed hugging - mental
note - must go up more tall buildings.
- Wandered round some girl clothing shops looking
for a particular dress; still trying to calm my nervousness
at being seen in lingerie stores. Not convinced that decent
men get dragged in that sort of place;
- One gets assaulted by the sheer volume of
different types colours, and styles of the things - the
amazing extent of human vanity. Tried to work out whether it
was women's vanity ( all his Y's are plain white ), or
whether's it's man's folly reflected in women trying to
attract them with pretty colours. Came to a compromise 50-50
stupidy allocation.
- Train back home, dog tired. Snoozed all afternoon,
on examination my foam mattress has contracted a chronic case
of mildew from lying on the floor, sigh, and I thought the bad
smell was me.
- Watched an interesting documentary about the
evolution of feet etc. slightly marred by somewhat polemical
atheism - and not letting the creationists answer their
accusers, and having no evolutionist christians to provide
a balanced view of the faith they were so happy to pan.
- Dinner, bed - a long and fun day.
- Up early, off to Julia's work - a fast
connection at last. Some charities scrounge off businesses,
but this one man business scrounged B/W from a charity, hmm.
- Committed libgnomeprint fixes, chewed mail.
- Havoc doing some nice work across gnome 2.0
now, patches to libbonobo etc. great ! Fixed up the
gtkhtml2 build for the new glib, patch to Andersca. Lots
of fun mail.
- Bandwidth - so Red Carpet time !, pulled down
the Codeweavers Wine stuff - fun new channels in RC - good
stuff. Luckily snarfed SO a while back inside Ximian.
- Lauris was
interviewed on linux.com today.
- It seems that Philippe Fremy of KDE KParts
fame is reading through bonobo and asking lots of sensible
questions - which is nice.
- Frb having some evil problems with 'tuning'
on UltraSparc; and printing guint64's in generated code in
ORBit-stable ( well libIDL's IDL_LL really ). That sucks.
- Realised my recent slug talk hadn't uploaded
at all well, so sorted that mess out.
- Re-build Nautilus from source for the first
time in forever and a day, to try and address Darin's bug.
- Found Gorden's notes on warfare
here, very condensed, also the church's page on the
issues.
- Back to gconf - questing for interoperability
between gnome 1.4 and gnome 2.0 a worthy goal indeed. It
seems gconf doesn't work for me at all with the new code,
so it's hard to test interoperability :-) Back to gal and
sanity, sorted out a load of GDK types and their marshalers.
- Helped Julia put together her information packs
for some charity seminars next week.
- Off to Sydney Concert hall ( next to the Opera
house, and in the same style ), picked up our
tickets for the concert. Back to a strange Oyster restaurant
for dinner. Fine wine, a sad New York steak - avoid that
cut; and a nice blackforest cheesecake.
- Nearly late for the concert; J' looking
georgeous in her pink dress thing; lovely music: Dvorak's
Carnival Overture, Op 92. Then Samuel Barber's violin
concerto, with Cho-Liang Lin on violin. Interesting how
the emotion in music transcends cultural and even tonal
barriers, very good. Then a break - managed to mistake
the Opera house for the concert hall returning from the
loo - sigh. Then Brahms symphony no. 2 in D Major, Op 73.,
less inspirational but well executed.
- Back home, to bed late - very tired indeed.
Interestingly the function of the street lighting in
Hornsby seems primarily designed to strip you of your
night vision, whilst simultaneously leaving the majority
of the road in darkness. Scary for lone girls.
- Up early; more libxml fannying around - pinned
the bug down still further with a slightly simpler test,
tried to placate Ettore who doesn't like his strings hex
encoded in the serialised xml.
- Iain pointed me at
this Park Street sermon (Gordon) on war in scripture
the need for defence but not retaliation etc. the Christian
meaning and understanding of a 'Holy War' etc. Extremely
solid and moving as normal; both pacifists and Zionists
get gently rebuked.
- Continued trying to debug the multiple oafd
problem - oafd consumes ~ 1Mb resident memory and takes
a second or so to startup - so stopping 5 starting will
hopefully give a nice win.
- Found and fixed the bug; read a bit more of
the kernel - the nicest way to find why errors happen,
sigh the code looks nice in there. Sadly the only way to
determine if that fixes the bug is pragmaticaly.
- Posted release notes.
- Built bonobo-1.0.9 and released that, without
Ettore's pending fixes, hopefully the moniker escaping bug
will help someone and the fixes will arrive soon.
- J' home, went for a run, had a lovey dinner,
listened to Gordon together, bed early.
- Up early, b'fast, got to work, mail trickled
feebly down the wire. We finally got a new release of
glib/gtk+/pango/atk etc. Horay ! wow, the alpha is looking
a lot nicer now.
- Discovered someone had made a royal mess of
trying to release packages on master.gnome.org, gack, spent
a while unwinding it manualy and doing it right, despite
ssh over a modem whilst updating evolution having a horrendous
latency, line dropping that sort of thing; fun fun.
- Pushed the recently released gtk+ package set to
ftp.gnome.org's pre-gnome2 so people can get everything in
a single blast. An inconsistant set there ATM though.
- Lots of interest in having bonobo-conf bugs
fixed, sigh - something fishy happening in activation somewhere
it seems.
- Lots of badgering from Nat / Miguel about evolution
bugs, particularly 4911
an evil critter with stack corruption, nonsensicalness etc.
moved a lot of them on to other people, but this one bites.
- Finally got Evolution built, grief it took ages,
someone has been writing lots of code. Tried to provoke 4911
so I could catch it, corrupted the config database, activated
multiple oafds, etc. etc. all to no avail. Found a nasty race
condition in oafd I thought had been fixed.
- Found a nasty bug in bonobo-activation looking for
the same race condition in G2.0, sigh, at least repeating it is
easy. Mjs was pleased - good; trying to get G2.0 alpha 1 out
ASAP.
- Went food shopping. The local (huge) Mall has
opened, looked for book shops; only 1 'ABC' and it sells videos
and CDs as well. Clearly acute intellectual injelititus is well
under way - still a WH Smiths is mooted to open soon to fill the
vacuum.
- Wrote the release notes for libbonobo*, libgnomeprint*,
released libbonobo2-1.103.0, libbonoboui2-1.103.0,
libgnomeprint-1.105.0 and libgnomeprintui-1.105.0 while Julia kindly
fed me toasted crumpets & marmite.
- Off to bible study group, interesting study - and
discovered the leader was into fluid mechanics in a past life
which was most interesting; he had some good ways of thinking about
viscous flow.
- Forgot Grandma's 91st birthday - apparently it was
today, oh dear.
- Back, bed.
- Up early, breakfast with J', chewed mail. Lots
of interesting work around, lots of good mail.
- Suprise suprise, libxml doesn't preserve utf-8
even if you have a doc node, and you set the encoding to utf-8.
Spent a very long time carefuly constructing a regression test,
debugging the problem to an extent, testing gconf, writing a
lengthy report; sigh, and I reported it last year.
- Still, with bonobo-config stalled, waiting on DV
I get a chance to do fun Gnome 2.0 hacking; re-build the
system. The pushing inside Ximian for the Gnome 2.0 team to
build nightly snapshots seems to be bearing fruit.
- Started reading about process management in the
Linux kernel, I was sent to review. Most interesting - sadly
I'm no expert on this so reviewing it is not feasible; in fact
the text is very interesting.
- Got gal back into action - fixed a load of silly
issues - now e-table works as well as e-tree but the shortcut
bar is being silly. Stuck on the (incredible) GtkObject double
destroy feature, stopped it happening in my Gtk+ for now.
- Blimey - it knows how to rain here - none of this
fooling around with raindrops - great bucketloads; glad we're
on the 2nd floor.
- Went to the library to photocopy some extraordinary
pictures of Father as a young man, met J. home, and then out
for a run in a lull in the downpour.
- Very tired, dinner, bed.
- Up early; breakfast - to work !
- Made libbonobo not only compile, but execute, wow.
If only people wouldn't commit unapproved patches, and if only
I had time to read patches more carefuly; hey ho.
- Chewed mail, updated MrProject - having fixed my
account passwd, secure forced password expiry; not seen that
much since university. Nice looking, the Evolution stuff plugs
into it nicely; the new views are very plush, looking much
sweeter.
- Uploaded the slug talk here
and as a tar.bz2 here (4Mb).
- Reviewed the last IBM developerworks article,
some minor corrections - but looks good & more useful than
I remember.
- Worked on getting the next bonobo release
together; now blocking on Ettore. Small gnome-vfs moniker
fix, made some more regression tests run automaticaly in
libbonobo; nice.
- Did a little bug maintenance, lots of bogus
evolution bugs filed against bonobo; sigh.
- Hacked up bonobo-conf to do utf-8 validation,
and have a spurious global doc node on every node with the
magic string 'UTF-8' in it's encoding, so that each property
set we can do a strcmp on it ...
- Off to Circular Quay (NB. pronounced 'key', NB. Nota Bene,
NB. A useful note [ a long aside for American readers ] ). Met Julia
just out from her Charity seminar. Went to a nice Italian type
restaurant. Had a Kangaroo salad, first you feed them, then you
eat 'em - rather good in fact; a lamb/beef hybrid.
- Notably one had to walk through an art gallery to
the salle de bains, which had another curious suspended urinal
strange. On the way back Julia said 'Ximian - the monkey
business' rather a good marketing line for when we're scraping
the barrel.
- Home on t'rain, very tired; mailed St Lukes to try
and beg or borrow a Vicar for a wedding. Bed.
- Up early, off to Church at Thornleigh.
- Dinner with Julia's temporary boss: Duncan,
and Helena his wife. Rather pleasant.
- Back home - flaked; kipped for a while.
- Church in the evening, back home, J' and I
made Nachos - wow, I feel my Nacho addiction returning
but more strongly.
- Hacked a bit at bonobo-conf, read & Bed.
- Up at 3.00am for a release team meeting
conference call - argh. Somewhat tedious; little discussed
that couldn't be done over E-mail, but at great expense
and at 3.00am, sigh.
- Back to bed; up at midday, shopping.
- Off to Manly beach - arrived at 5.00pm,
paddled but with the sun setting, swimming not good.
Water seemed very warm in comparison with the North Sea,
but Australians think it's cold apparently.
- Guiness in a pub - sketching lists of people to
invite to our wedding - somehow it seems there are always more
friends than spaces.
- On to a niceish restaurant, back home, bed.
- Up early, 14Mb of mail, bzip2'd it for good
measure, and sucked. Need to write a talk today for this
evening and get some demos rustled up.
- Good to be back at work. Started reading mail
and re-building my system from the bottom up, again again.
- Lots of mail, mostly very positive.
- Started writing the
SLUG talk, what fun - tried to generate some new copy.
- Nailed a nasty to detect bonobo escaping code
bug, that only MALLOC_CHECK_=2 would see.
- Finished the talk over several hours; will
upload it tommorow. Off to J's, collected her - looking
georgeous in her pink skirt etc., and then on to SLUG.
- Managed to locate the building, hung around
near a group of likely looking hacker types. Met Jeff
Waugh - nice guy. Having never been to a LUG before,
somewhat perplexed by the question and answer session;
interesting in parts though.
- Got some teeth into the talk; having J' to grin
at when one is idling was nice - and to pick up ones annoying
mannerisms, some good questions.
- Off to a rather fine Chinese place afterwards,
had dinner with Jeff, Ken, [Nasdaq?], Gus, Jeff W, Andrew & ~
Mary & my lass; very pleasant. Passed up on the karaoke
opportunity - apparently "I sing" so this was odd :-) They
even paid for our meal - wow.
- Back home at great length on the train; bed.
- Up late, went to see several beautiful beaches
on the south arm, and strolled on them variously.
- Lunch with Mark and Dianne & the family.
- To the airport, and left Auntie and Uncle -
sadly.
- A smooth flight home - in a brand new jet;
Quantus must be peeved - the price of 2nd hand aircraft
must be at an all-time low in the wake of Anset.
- Home, went for a run, pizza and bed.
- To a salmon and trout farm. Amazingly the trout
and salmon had been brought as eggs in a ship from England.
The first 3 tries failed, with ice melting over the equator
etc. The 4th try put the eggs in a wooden box with ice,
layers of moss and some charcoal, and made it intact. Thus
the first(?) trout/salmon of the southern hemisphere arrived
in 1864(?) and the trout thrived, whereas the salmon were
more difficult to introduce.
- Had a little dinner at the salmon falm - didn't
eat any fish.
- On to the National Park - saw some lovely old
gum trees, some of them extremely tall, and a waterfall or
two. An amazingly different and much colder climate under
the trees - with ancient ferns and spray from the water
fall; lovely.
- Cup of tea, and back home. Took Auntie & Uncle
out for a nice dinner - hit a place of intermediate quality
food - and somewhat strange demeanour - but local. They had
slot machines, and a direct computer link to the casino for
some instant gambling game; shocking.
- Back home; meandered through more photos - saw
some totaly shocking pictures of Father minus beard, plus
hair - and very young; couldn't really believe it was him.
Somewhat frightened by seeing that all the people I consider
old and past it, were once young and attractive. Being on
the brink of being old and past it is scary.
- BS & Bed.
- Off to Richmond, saw the oldest bridge in
Australia circa 1834 or somesuch - it's all so shockingly
recent really. A couple of nice churches etc. Auntie bought
us a letter tray for an engagement present which was nice.
It is made out of Huon pine - a wood which apparantly tastes
so bad to all things that chew that it is practicaly
impervious to rotting type things. Now if only we could
geneticaly engineer fast growth into the thing as well ...
we could soon take all the carbon out of the atmosphere and
precipitate another ice age - GreenPeace would be thrilled.
- Had lunch at the Richmond bakery - very good
food indeed.
- Back home, and took the dog 'bonnie' and Leslie's
dog 'fletcher' to a nice beach for a long wander. They smelt
really badly of 'wet dog', rather peturbing.
- Then Antie & Uncle went off for advanced
Square Dancing, and a nice barbeque - we went for a run along
the beach in the setting sun, with the misty mountains and the
sea - very fine.
- Back, lit the fire, showered & stuff, read Jared,
relaxed. Bed.
- Up later. Went into Hobart, and looked around the
Museum. Finaly saw a nice model of the sunken ship under the
Hobart bridge ( it rammed it some 25 years ago and broke a
great section off which collapsed on it and sank it ). A very
odd bridge construction - with lots of spindly concrete legs
all meeting at a concrete plinth, and then a somewhat less
messy arrangement above the water - where people can see;
strange. Lots of other interesting Aboriginal and misc.
displays. Confirmation of Jared's "Humans killed the
megafauna" thesis, but perhaps partialy by fire rather than
direct hunting.
- Lunch at the cafe / coffee house, and back into
Auntie's little red bus, and on to the botanical gardens. A
very pleasant meander around the gardens, talked to Rolf -
who has a most amusingly droll sense of humor. eg. apparently
they have whole armies of 'banana benders' in Queensland.
- Back home, read about the development of writing,
inventions, idea-diffusion etc. much of interest. Dinner, and
then sat around in the lounge, played guitar vaguely, and
stayed up very late talking to Auntie about family history and
intrigue. BS & Bed.
- Up early again, off to a Baptist church nearby,
with Rolf. They meet in an old bowling alley. Sermon relatively
interesting; Christians are called to be ready to die for their
faith - but the God we believe in is a God of justice, mercy
and peace.
- Off to Square Dancing at a tiny club miles away
from anywhere, Antie & Uncle danced very nicely - and we
watched for a while. Then, for a wander through the village
which looked pretty ropey to us, much like a 'western' town,
nice view of the sea though.
- Back home, Rolf showed us his barn, and the place
where he goes when he's hiding from Sylvia - complete with
easy chair and crosswords - amid the piles of logs.
- Managed to find a book on 'Marriage
Etiquette' - Sylvia works in the Red Cross 2nd hand book
store, and gets lots of bargins. If we honeymoon in Sunny
East Acton we could save a fortune ! nice light dinner.
- Sat around in the lounge with the log fire
burning, and played guitars and sang various things, a
lovely evening. R&S sang several songs in German, including
one rather risque piece, R also played the 'folk zither'
rather well, a somewhat interesting instrument.
- Bed & stuff.
- Up early, struck out for "Port Arthur", a penal
colony type place whereall the wicked British people were
sentanced to 7 years a throw for (seemingly) the most minor
offences. Met Mark and Diane & Natasha, good to see Mark
again after ~ a decade.
- Still, they did a good job and really made something
out of it; although some of their efforts - reclaiming a huge
area of land by filling for a cricket pitch seemed fairly banal.
They cleared land, and it seems reformed many thousands of
criminals, teaching them trades etc. etc. in what seems like
quite an enlightened prison, especialy for the time.
- It was said that during their long voyage to England
many of them learned to read and write - such that those that
signed on with an 'X' at one end, came out much improved at the
other - simply from the sheer boredom of a year at sea I
suspect.
- Went out into the harbour on a little boat, and
appreciated a wonderful rainbow, avoided the Isle of the dead.
- Wandered around, and visted the 'most haunted house
in Tazmania' - which seemed totaly devoid of ghosts, had an openish
mind until I saw the 'terrifying' collection of ghost photos,
most of which could be summarized - "I just took the picture and
never realised ( until I had it developed ) what a funny effect
grease on the lense could have!", or the corrolory - something
terrible happened in the developing process, still I could make
good on it by positing an 'obvious' apparition.
- Back by van - Antie driving, stopped at the Tazman
Archway and Devils Kitchen on the way back - very spectacular.
Then at the 'blow-hole' also much fun, and somewhat inspiring.
- Then to dinner at Esthers' a
charming old lady who had come to stay with us last year as a
relation of hers had just been dug up in the battlefields of
France and was being re-interred with full military honours.
- Afterwards Esther told us that a honeymoon couple
had got sucked into the blow hole and horribly drownded, hmm.
A lovely evening overall though.
- Back home, post-card writing and bed.
- Up early, had breakfast - cereal and nice fruit bread,
with Auntie & Uncle.
- Off to Mt. Wellington, drove up it - pretty much
cheating, but an excellent view in every direction eastwards
from the top. Patches of snow, and extremely cold [ hang on to
the car door - or it gets blown off; or likewise, it'll blow
the milk right out of your tea :-]. Could see all of Hobart,
and the pretty, frilly coastline, and mountains in the clouds
in the distance. Very beautiful.
- Back to a food court in Hobart for dinner; Mexican
food - in Australia, pleasant.
- Out again to Bonarong zoo - didn't quite know
what to expect. Got greeted by a kangaroo leaping towards the
latest visitor with good things to eat. With a mouth somewhat
like a sheep - and prepared to eat out of your hand. Most
endearing, some with 'Roo's sitting in Kanga's pouch. Saw and
stroked a wombat, koala bear, lots of kangaroos. Lots of other
interesting creatures, possums, enchiladas, an emu and various
other birds, Tazmanian 'devil's etc. etc. much fun.
- Back home; fed the chickens with the spare feed
the kangaroos didn't get, watched the news and eat in front of
the TV - highly decadent. Bed & stuff.
- Up early, packed franticaly, off to CAF Australia
so J' can get some work in before we leave. Pinched her internet
connection - wow, the speed of DSL after a modem; nice.
- Congratulations flooding in it seems - very lovely
to have so many well wishers. Not so many well wishers on the
mailing lists; sigh. The -Werror faction, another unwinnable
battle to make Gnome easier to build.
- Continued struggling with the horrors of
bonobo-conf and lots of xml fragments, all of which somehow need
doc nodes - but not to really be part of a common document; sigh.
- Off to the airport, flew to Hobart.
- Met Sylvia and Rolf on arrival - great to see them,
picked up the luggage and headed in Auntie's vanlet thing to
their home. Beautiful scenery, a lovely house; sat in the
kitchen and lit a fire in the hearth and had a nice cup of tea.
- Got to know Rolf better which was nice, and then
Dianne ( Cousin Mark's g/f ) & Natasha her daughter arrived,
and then Leslie and Leon arrived - lovely older
people. Had a most amusing and pleasant evening, admired the
house, Rolf's painting, fine wine, pumpkin soup, salad, meat,
and potatoes.
- Bed earlyish - very tired.
- Up at 1.00am for a 'release meeting' - phoned into
the AT&T hub - access denied; spoke to the operator meeting not
for two hours; sleep. Up at 3.00am, no-one in the meeting,
snooze no one there at 3.15am, sigh. IRC meeting instead it
seems.
- Horrified to see the attacks on the USA,
How
suprised can we be ? what is new ? Why do they
do it ? or is
this "the truth" ? Does Bin Laden have anything to do with
it. Clearly an atmosphere of calmness, restraint, justice and
a careful assessment of the situation is neccessary - will the US
be able to deliver on this ?
- Back to sleep, slept fitfully.
- Up late, mail, back to gal; getting some wierd issues
that look like gal bugs; cvs updated to suffer the conflict pain,
mercifully not that bad.
- Off to Bible Study group, for a social this time;
prayed for American families & others.
- Back - more gal building fun.
- On holiday for a week starting tommorow afternoon ...
- Up early, sucked mail. A chap called Francisco
wanted an archive (5Mb)
of the lwe tutorial slides.
- Mark worked out why ORBit2 is so dog slow on
Solaris - it's not using UDS - so everything is going via
local TCP sockets; doh - now for some better Linux / Solaris
speed trials.
- Lots of encouraging mail chewage, foolishly
wandered into IRC. Got round to mailing family and friends to
tell them I got engaged - read it here first !
- Lots and lots more gal work, bits of patches
to other things to make it work etc. The shortcut bar seems
to work nicely now; e-table dies horribly. Argh, the whole
g_type_param_ vs. g_type_ mess is just so evil to look at.
- Talked to James and committed my libglade bits.
- Gregday pointed out this cute ipaQ
screenshot of his; nice.
- Got gal to mostly build, shot at runtime by
the new enum setup - hmm, have to declare a load of new
enum types; doh. Got bored and decided to s/ENUM/INT/ to
play instead. Got to further runtime error nastiness.
- Bed lateish.
- Up early, registered with OzEmail, they were happy to
take my credit card details, but wouldn't accept my PPP account's
existance though, so back to a friend's account elsewhere; sigh.
- Sucked E-mail. Fixed a linc bug, worked on Martin's
NO_IMPLEMENT poa bug. Idly moved gal nearer Gnome 2.0. Got nailed
by another annoying ORB bug, sigh, found that - bad alignments,
nailed the other bug - and back to gal.
- Fixed up libgnomeprint[ui], and back to gal.
- Ported all of the gal 'widgets' directory to Gnome
2.0, trashed the 'unicode' part - all in glib already.
- J' back, bummed around, cooked a nice dinner, read
together & bed.
- Up early, off to die Kirche; lovely to hear a jarring
Australian accent used for something lovely - "God loves ye'r
mate"; always nice to experience the freshness of a different
culture worshiping their maker.
- Sermon on
1 Kings 19 about Elija's stress management problems - interesting,
Pastor just back from the USA though - perhaps still recovering a
little from the therapy culture.
- Several good jokes; "I try to
take one day at a time, but recently several attacked me at once"
and also ( more for the faithfull ) - "Don't let worry and stress
kill you - let the church help" :-)
- Some good points - find God in the still small voice of
calm; "Be still and know that I am God"
(Psalm 46:10). Criticism of the modern lifestyle.
- An anecdote about an architect who at the end of his life
said that an incident with his uncle when he was young had been very
formative - They were walking across a field in the snow, and when they
looked back his Uncle said "look and learn - you see my footprints
forging ahead straight to the goal at the other side of the field,
and then yours meandering wastefully all over the place". He said
that he realised then that he wasn't going to miss out on all the best
things in life like his Uncle had, but would go slowly and see them
all.
- Back to the flat, potatoes in oven, off for a run.
- Nice dinner, read some "Guns Germs and Steel",
interesting stuff.
- Back to church in the evening, a great sermon on
indecision and guidance. You can often only know for certain
in retrospect having acted in faith
Exodus 3:12 Moses asks for a sign that he should lead
Israel out of Egypt and God says "... this shall be the sign
for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought forth the
people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain".
- "Life must be lived forward but can only be understood
backwards": Soren Kirkegaard.
- Spoke to the Pastor about marriage
preparation - apparently there is a computerized questionaire
thing called 'Prepare'.
- Back, dinner, bed.
- Up late, breakfast & off to 'Manley' in a sea cat
ferry thing. Walked up to the North point ( curiously at the
south of the spur ).
- Decided that however pretty the place is, there will
always be a nicer place you'll find round the corner - so decided
the particular quiet viewpoint with cliffs, sea, and sun would do
nicely.
- One knee - blathered incoherently; but she said "yes,
of course" :-) managed to extract the ring from it's various
packagings and put it on her pretty hand - so, wow. Rather
awestruck at my boldness.
- Now I'm a Financie - or something :-) hopefully that
means I'm rich - which is certainly true now.
- The girl cried which was quite disconcerting, she
claimed happiness, but I suspect terror.
- Walked back to the ferry in the sunset, getting
altogether more happy with the prospect and less nervous, dinner
at a nice cafe / restaurant place.
- Back home to tell the parents.
- My Mum - to Julia "arn't you being a little rash ?" :-)
- J's Dad - "as I told him, you'll have to do what she says".
- J's Mum - "yes he is being a bit rash"
- Sue - somewhat muted.
- J's Granny - "I'm not much to look at", "I'll tell you a
secret - neither am I".
- Tea, BS & bed.
- Up early, saw Jules off to work. Got to the
hacking action ... but first, sent a status report in to make
people think I did something last week, and then an invoice
to get paid for it. Lots of bug report reading, and misc.
tedious admin things.
- Mark is doing some really georgous work inside
the ORB - looking extremely nice, shrinking memory usage,
and accelerating the thing too.
- The first in a series of three IBM developerworks
articles
on bonobo was pushed recently it seems.
- It turns out Alex has already re-written the gtype
code to use far less locking using a similar strategy, which
is good, saves me having to finish it.
- Started reading non-inbox stuff, and re-building my
system from the ground upwards.
- Made libgnomeprintui build again, people seem to love
putting the headers in broken places. Of course the mantra is likely
to be "do it the gtk way", but then gtk/gtk.h is only 9 chars, not
libgnomecavas/libgnomecanvas.h at 29.
- Met J at her office, and saw some of the things she's
been working on which was nice.
- Went out to downtown Sydney, saw the 'Opera House' which
turns out to be actualy 3 buildings, each modeled after a slug /
caterpiller, and significantly smaller than you might imagine - but
still somewhat beautiful; picked up a programme. Gunniess on the
waterfront, and a lovely dinner near the rocks.
- Back home, BS & bed.
- Up early, off to return the (unmarked)
'Win' Modem I purchased yesterday a 'Dynalink' miracle
of technology. Bought a standard modem instead, insisted
on getting an AOL subsription pack - a local ISP is no
use to me, and hey - AOL are a big company, they must be
good.
- Resigned to installing it on a Windows computer
to suck the settings for PPP etc. out; spent ages installing
the thing - only to discover that (now I can search on-line)
that the service is utterly useless to Linux users. Frustrated
almost beyond words; tried to control myself whilst immediately
canceling my account - still, they got $24-95 out of me.
Dumbfounding - I should have gone with a cheap local ISP
instead.
- Finaly managed to get PPP working via someone else'
thing. Magicaly Red Hat turn off chat PPP debugging by default
which sucks rocks. Furthermore, Australians seem to insist on
using 'Username:' intead of '[Ll]ogin:' which sucks even more
badly.
- Started pulling 16Mb of mail over the modem ...
hmm, committed libbonobo bits, started pushing some mail.
- Chewed mail - suprisingly little of interest so far,
amazing; you stop writing to people ... and they just stop
writing to you.
- J' arrived home, went for a nice run together
while dinner cooked itself in t'oven. Bible study, Bed.
- Watched 'Dr Dolittle 2' and various other
movies of dubious merit, but passing entertainment
value. Flight only 13 1/2 hours not 18 - excellent,
must have mis-calculated from East coast time somehow.
- Hacked bonobo-config around to cut and
paste the troublesome Any <-> XML code out of bonobo
( messed up by the UINode transition ), and moved it
into bonobo-config-utils.c so we can pass a doc node
around on the stack constantly - so we can set an
encoding - so that it will be UTF-8 clean; horay !
- Got peeved with bonobo-config as well,
hmm - not good. Somewhat highly excited about seeing
J' again after so long.
- Finaly arrived - managed to go through the
'Goods to declare' section without being charged duty -
horay.
- Loitered outside by the Exchange desk or
'Foreign Money' counter as the terminaly ethnocentric
Americans would say.
- The lovely lady arrived shortly afterwards
from an unexpected direction - wonderful to hold her in
my arms again after so long; wow. I'd forgotten so many
wonderful things about her - it's quite silly really.
- Bus, then train, then taxi home & a nice cup
o' tea. Admired the nice flat, unpacked, need to buy a
modem. Got back to bonobo-config, eating 'top deck' [
another excellent non-Nestle chocolate from Cadburies ],
and drinking tea.
- Off to her house group, had a great time,
lift back to bed.
- This day lost in action; crossing the intl.
date line - hey ho, perhaps I'll get it back going the
other way sometime. Swallowed several Aspirin to fend
off the DVTs.
- Up early, an American breakfast, packed, and
off to the Caltrain. Fixed some encoding issues in the new
UI xml code ...
- Struggled around SFO trying to find an open
internet cafe with a working connection; apparently today
is a national holiday. Finaly found a "DSL internet cafe"
only to find it had a horrendous, evil custom interface,
and wouldn't co-operate whatsoever with DHCP / trying to
see what was behind the thing. Got bored, and went to the
Airport.
- Having had several first hand experiences with
'American' I decided to get on standby for a much, much
earlier flight. Got to LA with 5 hours before the next
flight. LA looks typicaly uninteresting, and smoggy.
- Sat about mangling GType beyond recognisation.
Problem is - since a GType is an guint32 we have to do
loads of tedious locking before operating on the type -
locking ~= 40% of the profile.
- Easy to solve - make GType a gpointer, then
we can propagate the invariants we are passed; such as
an Object isn't freed while it's passed to you [ and hence
it's type data isn't ], and we can just walk the tree with
impunity totaly without locking most times. So far it's
looking almost binary compat for 32bit machines.
- Hmm - more breakage, bits flying everywhere -
lots of tedious typing, and then - screwed by the 'hyper'
efficiency with G_SIGNAL_TYPE_STATIC_SCOPE. Got tired of
it all and played gnibbles instead - only a few more hours
before the flight now.
- Slept on the flight for 6 hours or so; excellent.
- Sunday. Up early, phoned Martin - he was in !
excellent, talked through various issues; everything looking
positive - great.
- Dressed, breakfast. Off to 'Calvery Church' as
discovered on yesterdays detour - an excellent church it
seems, but a teaching free service due to a mission roundup
bonanza type thing; people back from building orphanages in
Romania, on Aids rides to Alaska, childrens work in Lithuania
that sort of thing.
- Back to the hotel - managed to mis-calculate the
timezone in Australia and wake Julia's kind hosts in the
middle of the night - aweful; doh.
- Did washing, some sunbathing - got burned and
things - hmm - if only the red bits turned into tanned
looking bits then perhaps I'd look less like some super
pale creature crawling out from under a rock.
- Phoned the Julia creature - at the correct time
this time - although somewhat late, since she had to rush to
get a tram; she's still alive and kicking, which is nice.
- Went for a run, saw a peacock strolling in the road
on the way ... watched some appalling (and some good) American
TV, pizza & bed. Next time I sleep in a bed, it'll be in
Australia - horay.
- note - sunburn doesn't aid sleeping at all;
tried to lie in the position I was bathing in. In future,
try to get sunburned in a comfortable sleeping position.
- Arrived SFO & got a taxi share, shuttle thing to
the Las Gatos Lodge - 2.00am = 5pm Deutschland time, tried to
phone Martin - no-one around. No net connection ... hmm.
- Slept until 1.00pm got up, walked into Los Gatos,
found a nice shop wherein to buy a present for Simon & Maggie,
and managed to get one; it transpired to be difficult to wrap
however which took some time. Got my hair cut; lost a lot of
it, hmm - not convinced with the result.
- Walked back to the hotel - walked rather too far
down some track by the roadside; there was a nice river in a
little cutting, but some clown had concreted over both sides
of it - amazing. Realised I had left my alarm clock in the
card shop - sigh, J' gave me that.
- Got back, met Matthew & Larissa (for the first time),
changed, waited 25 minutes for a taxi, finaly got a taxi just
as the wedding was supposed to start. The guy couldn't find
the place, in then end I had to map read - and he wanted a
tip ... very late.
- Luckily it hadn't started, 'snuck' in the back,
introduced to the small differences of American weddings;
bridesmaids first one by one, then Maggie looking demure.
A lovely service overall.
- Drinks in the garden, met Robin from Eazel,
and his lady: Taska, also Jason - who has a new shaved look,
and Zach Brown of Kernel
Traffic fame.
- Dinner; sat next to Mrs Tennant, who was most
encouraging, and told me how good God was to them both,
and how he is with them through Mr Tennant's struggle
with cancer.
- Discussed things with Matthew variously to
several people's amusement; talked with Zach about Origami
and C++. Talked to the minister who frightened me about
marriage, and Mr & Mrs T, who encouraged me - sigh, the
trials of life.
- Wedding lovely overall, Bride looked lovely,
Simon - a happy man, family seem reasonable - nice house
too, food good. Met Anne at the end - Simon has pretty
in-laws now it seems.
- Lift home, and sleep exhausted.
- Slept a little on the plane; which was delayed.
- Chicago - missed the connection by 1 minute;
knocking half a day off the Red Hat trip; not good.
- Had breakfast with Larry and sat around.
- Chewed mail, fixed up an embarassing bug in the
libbonobo sample code, did some other misc. reading.
- Arrived at Red Hat - managed to get onto the
earlier flight on standby, excellent - no one around; off
to lunch you'd imagine; Elliot Lee was there and got me
setup which was nice though.
- The lads arrived back eventualy, Jonathan, Owen
and Alex - and Mike Johnson. Talked to Mike about his work -
interesting stuff; then into a meeting with J, O & A,
eventualy Havoc and Dave Mason turned up. One long, long
but positive meeting.
- Chinese food afterwards at some nice place,
and off to the airport early - thankfully got there and
got switched to an earlier flight via Dallas - since
mine was connection-breakingly delayed. First class on
the way back; excellent.
- Up early, off to the conference - sat around
talking to people, and giving them frisbees.
- Off to a meeting slightly out of town in a limo,
rather a depressing corporate 'cube' culture - but sharp
guys & gal.
- Back to the hotel - foolishly went out to lunch
with Nat & Miguel - ended up booking a flight to Red Hat
for a day leaving that evening, 11.00pm.
- Got to the airport and met Larry Troan, which
was most interesting - nice chap. Slept a little on the
plane.
- Up early, and mailed J' at length before getting
to the gnome 2 E-mail, escalating flame-war, gack - at least
it's not me in the middle, just yet.
- Off to the show floor - spent all day struggling
for the will to live "This is Red-Carpet, the premier
software management tool ...", "have you seen Evolution ?
the powerful personal information management
application ..." still, some interesting bits. Got to know
the guy cutting the turkey at the carvery better which was
nice.
- I met Simon and Jonathan - which was nice,
although having to deal with interested people doesn't help
the smooth flow of conversation.
- Finaly it finished - managed to get a group of
people to get to some place and eat together. Bill came
with us, and Maciej and Eskil and people. Had a nice Mexican
meal thing at a reasonably non-tacky food court.
- Longish talk with Bill about the at-spi code,
how we can make accessibility work across the plug/socket
boundary etc. very productive.
- Back to the hotel to hack, process mail, read
Mono, ORP etc. and sleep.
- Read libffi - interesting indeed, could use it
nicely in ORBit2 and efficiently too if we just re-organised
the TypeCode structures a little. Read a comparison of virtual
machines, and a paper on Finite-State Code Generation.
- Up, off to the conference, wrote to J. I'm
'idle' supposedly - so I get time off to see the show;
great.
- Went and helped field questions and sell
T-shirts and things at the foundation booth; good fun.
- Did a load of sitting around and demoing
of Ximian Gnome, answered hundreds of questions - got
very tedious towards the end.
- Out for a Ximian party - fairly
entertaining, off to an arcade afterwards.
- Back to the hotel to deal with the E-mail
mountain, and the developing Gnome 2.0 mess; grief.
- Up extremely extraordinarily early, mailed J
and stuff.
- Hacked on my tutorial, shower, breakfast.
Got a safe deposit box, to deposit my safes in - rather
frightening regulations on the thing though.
- Lots of very tedious talk on gnome 2 list
about extending the libgnome freeze deadlines, and screwing
about with lots of the work that has gone in to carefuly
prune crud APIs out and put them in a compat library.
Grief ! sit back and watch your work unravel.
- Had a look at fixing some gnome 2.0 canvas issues
for my demo.
- Managed to photocopy my talk, made 30 copies,
expecting 25 people - 10 extras turned up, and amazingly
managed to keep most of them there for 3 hours. Pleased
with the talk as a whole. Slides are here, a
link to Hillaire's python tutorial. Also the
lisp to make C-x 4-h do gtk-doc style comment headers. You need
to put
(load "~/gnome-doc.el")
in your ~/.emacs file and
re-start.
- Overall went well.
- Back to the booth, met the guys - absorbed a pep talk.
- Met Bill Haneman, and tried to get bonobo-activation
to build on Solaris - no joy; scuppered in several directions,
mostly in system headers, -Werror should be a per user CFLAGS
option, as all right thinking people know.
- Spent a long time there, the accessibility stuff is
looking sweet though overall. Deserted by Ximian, lost my laptop,
off for dinner with Bill, bed early exhausted.
- Up at 6.00, Taxi to airport, plane to Denver, on
to San Francisco - lots of flying. Talked to a very interesting
Geo Physicist next to me, Dener -> SF, learned a lot about all
manner of interesting things.
- Got to the Marriot - the room smell really bad; gack,
perhaps it's a smokers room by mistake. Really good internet
connection, mail from J - I forgot to send yesterdays mail to her
- in the dog house, gack. Wrote to J.
- Started to try to have a day of rest in earnest.
- Bed early.
- Up early, couldn't phone J' from the barracks -
error 21G: great. Phoned the operator, put me through to the
non-existant international operator; 411 told me they don't
get up until 8.00am; Wonderful ! how amazingly co-ordinated;
annoyed.
- To work; phoned J, lovely chat. Foolishly
checked mail - rather upset Sander.
- Finished the tutorial - wrote a perl script to
render the slides to postscript using gnome-print; discovered
the ~5Mb limit on printed job size - rendered all the images
down: loads of fuzz - yuck.
- Started printing out random but possibly
interesting things to include. Finally finished, and it's all
printed - phew.
- Sucked the latest CVS everything and quit the
Boston office...
- Home, ate, to the mall, home, washing, running -
a very long run, home, packing bed.
- Up early, to work ! wrote to J. got on with trying
to release a new ORBit2. Spent ages fixing multiple build
brokennesses introduced with the new IDL compiler dependency
generation code, and some ancient cruft too. Hard when make
bails out without any error message, in a different
directory to the brokenness.
- Finaly, finaly released a new ORBit2.
- Yesterday we hired Ravi Pratap - excellent :-)
- Re-booted my machine to check things will survive
that - hitting the road soon.
- Hacked tutorial all day - looks like I'll have to
come in tommorow as well for half the day; sigh. Bed lateish.
- Work at 9.30am, proceessed mail, wrote to the Girl.
Sorted out the POA policy lifecycle issues - slaved to the orb ref for
PIDL interface instances with Mark, good to fix.
- Got to my Tutorial ... it looks like Jacob is coming to
hack on Gnome 2.0 - which is excellent news.
- Freed up loads of space on my disk to put exciting new
things into - dropped "Windows 2000 Advanced Server" in favour of
another xfs partition.
- Got an overview and some thoughts together for the
tutorial, grief - so much left to do ... horrifying, I always do
this and think I should have started earlier.
- Wrote the release notes for tommorow's linc and ORBit2
releases - good we have been doing something useful.
- Up early, to work - no mail from J; perhaps she's
been mauled by wild kangaroos !? phoned her to check - in
defiance of probability, she's just fine; excellent.
- Back to the final corners on the UI node re-write,
nailed the status regression - looking good. Committed to a
branch 'ui-shrink', sent patch to the list, encouraged Jacob
to use the code.
- Discovered that bonobo-conf is doing utterly nasty
things with xmlNodes and casting them to BonoboUINodes and
things, making the changes far, far more invasive; yuck.
- Fixed up bonobo-conf and commited to the
'ui-shrink' branch, hmm, ugly. For evolution, hand waving
finger in the air, not like for like comparisons seem to
suggest we save ~ 600Kb. 20% of the shell's memory
consumption.
- Argh - working on Gnome 1.4 is so frustrating,
like wading through treacle - Gnome 2.0 is so much nicer.
- Did a new libgnomeprint release for Lauris,
discovered it was still broken after making the package; sigh.
- Went for a nice walk down by the river side,
a most pleasant and beautiful evening.
- Back into action, forward ported the UI work
and Alex' cache to libbonoboui, committed to the hilt -
Gnome 2.0 is great. Posted my next self-help to gnome-devel,
problem is I havn't writen no. 6 for the local mob yet:
slipping behind, another 13 hour day, and still no 3 hour
Tutorial. Bed.
- Up extremely early, off to work. Wrote up the
notes for Gordon's sermon.
- Had a long and constructive talk with Nat, great.
- Hammered on with UI shrinkage - looking very good,
hit a very strange problem, tried to use -lefence - hit an
even stranger problem in glibc's _IO_vfscanf, inside a macro
that gdb couldn't help me with that calls a macro that doesn't
appear to be defined anywhere: __libc_cleanup_end, will
mysteries never cease ? gack.
- Lauris found the libgnomeprint bug and is sorting
it out: excellent. Backport the UI speedups to bonobo 1.0 so we
can debug the thing - looking nice, very nice in fact, 100Kb
saved for the somewhat simple test-ui test program. Lots more
for Nautilus / Evolution one hopes - faster too. Still some
minor issues to clean though.
- Alex committed his UI xml caching thing which
makes Nautilus new window creation 15% faster - also good.
- Played with libgnomeprint with no success.
- Back home.
- Slept badly, up early, off to work.
- Miguel arrived - caught up with what he's up to,
and tried to remember what I've been doing recently.
- Fixed some daft interactions between bonobo and
libxml in both branches, contemplated re-writing our node
structure.
- Got a lovely card from my Girl ! a pretty
colour, and many sweet words.
- Uploaded bonobo-1.0.8, and wrote up the release
notes, fixed up libbonoboui, Dirk is nailing the eternal evil
SIG_PIPE issue in linc, onto reducing the memory consumption
of bonobo-ui-node.
- Dragged off to a party at Ben & Amy's, got sad,
went home early.
- Up early, off to the 9.00am service, Gorden -
very good: The Lion of the tribe of Judah from
Genesis 49
- In the passage, 'I' is sometimes God, and
sometimes Jacob - it being obvious from the context
Gather around so I can tell you what will happen to
you in days to come. (vs. 1)
- The passage is Jacob's will, and spiritual
inerhitance.
- Ruben the first born is first; starts
pleasantly, but he is disinherited for sleeping with his step-mother.
He was not caught in the act - forfeiting his life, but lost his
spiritual inheritance.
- So why mention it all ? well, in modern terms apparently
if you want to disinherit someone, they must be mentioned in the
will - otherwise it can be contested.
- Simeon and Levi the next 2 sons, also
disqualified. This was all detailed in
Genesis 34 where, having defiled Diana Shechem did the right
thing by her - and went to great lengths to marry her, and Simeon and Levi
decieved, and slaughtered them all.
- Although there is no mention of God's displeasure with S&L
recorded in scripture at that point - often things are so bad as to
not need a divine moral footnote 'that was bad'. Here, sometime later
on Jacob's deathbed we get the verdict:
Cursed be their anger, so fierce, and their fury, so cruel!
I will scatter them in Jacob and disperse them in Israel.
Genesis 49:7
ie. the sin is hated, not the sinners; but they are punished.
- And Simeon had no separate inheritance in the promised land,
and the Levites had no inheritance either.
- So how can God's punishment on these brothers decendants be irrevocable ?
- God is the soverign judge who rules.
- But ... God can turn a curse into a blessing,
- Of all the tribes Levi repented
at Mount Sinai with the golden calf incident. And God who is unchanging
didn't reverse his punishment - but instead He was their
inheritance and the Levites became the holy priesthood.
- So truly
God works to turn all things for the good of those who believe.
- Judah - the 4th Son ( his name derived from 'Praise' ) gets the
blessing from Jacob.
- He will be like a Lion - the king of the beasts.
- The sceptre will not depart from Judah until
he comes to whom it belongs and indeed all the kings
from David onwards were from the line of Judah - until
the King of Kings came.
- Tethering a donkey to a vine ( which is a valuable
thing and takes several years to grow and breaks easily )
is a picture of superabundant prosperity.
- So why Judah ?
- Ruben committed sexual Sin,
- Simeon & Levi killed their near brother in law,
- But, Judah also a sinner.
- Suggests selling his brother Joseph to Egypt
Gen 37
- Marries a cananite woman,
Gen 38
- Sleeps with what he thinks is a prostitute
Gen 38
but is actualy his daughter in law Tamar.
- So what is the difference ? why him ?
- By no means a sinless life
- But a tender concience and repentence
- Of Tamar - a women who deserved death he
says
She is more righteous than I
- By the time Joseph sees Judah again in Egypt he offers
himself as a substitutionary prisoner in place of his
brother Benjamin, for his Father's sake.
- Again with David - Judah's offspring, a man after God's own heart,
- He admits
that he was wrong - as he is deflected from killing Naban
- After taking Bathsheba and confronted by Nathan the prophet he
says
I have sinned against the LORD.
- So God doesn't look for the perfect life, the spotless hero, but instead humility,
repentance and faith.
- It is this same tenderness of concience that lets Paul
say:
Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full
acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save
sinners -- of whom I am the worst.
- Larry Ewing arrived - great to catch up with him.
- Dinner with Chris at 'DunWells' steak-house (
strangely they didn't serve steak on Sundays ).
- Off to church in the evening with Iain.
- Honeydew dohnuts and bed very early.
- Up early - wrote to J at some length. Fire alarm,
abandoned ship briefly.
- Got on with linc, then fixed all of ORBit2'
locking code. The new locks - as in gdk, are a single
branch if threading is not initialized; which should
accelerate things nicely. Fixed up libbonobo's type library
building to handle the bonobo-activation changes.
- Did some research on the internet into a few
issues pertaining to a hypothetical marriage - then wished
I hadn't, sigh - sounds more aweful than it was.
- Got on with the 3 hour tutorial planning that
I'd been avoiding like the plague - fleshed out the overview,
copied the ancient version I had lying around, and set to
work. Gave up pretty quickly, hmm, must go to bed.
- Lots of Nautilus profiling and fixing action
going on at Red Hat, looking very nice indeed in fact.
- Home & bed early.
- Up late - 8.15am, to work - wrote to J. Time to
pull the last 3 days E-mail.
- It seems Ravi has been doing some storming work
on GB - control arrays working nicely now, it looks as if our
GUI designer written in VB is a lot closer to being executable
now - which is great news.
- Chewed mail for an unfeasibly long time. Addressed
Jeroen's event-source re-enterancy issue - at least, one
possible cause thereof. Noticed Mark renamed himself 'vulture'
on IRC - strange chap.
- Posted my proto-glib patch off to owen / gtk-devel.
- Cleaned cruft off my disk - a scary time.
- Ximian free fodder & demonstration - at least
something works nowadays.
- Supposedly GNOME is 4 years old today ! excellent.
- Fixed yesterday's broken C code fragment - thanks
to Anthony Jacobs.
- Released a libgnomeprint version for Lauris, and
then a libgnomeprintui - platform coming together nicely -
now we loose Lauris back to cool Gnome 1.4 print type
features.
- Watched 'Mall Rats' - fairly amusing. Committed
Hallski's libbonobo work, set to re-writing the linc threading
code to be sane and portable - discovered we only use the lock
in 1 place - after spending ages setting it up and fooling
around - and the codepath there is broken; sigh.
- Dragged away to Dave Camp's flirtation with death
by alcohol poisoning - or 21st birthday pub crawl depending on
how you look at it really.
Tragicaly it seems that becoming paralyiticaly drunk, and
being horribly ill is something to be boasted about.
- Bed early.
- Up at 9.00am - late. Onto Bill's bug, nailed
Martin's linc bug correctly this time, linc seems to be
somewhat extremely untested.
- Spent _ages_ tracking down a poll stupidity
in glib / linc / ORBit / glibc, eventualy hit the kernel
where the bug was ! sod. Strangely this bug has been there
since 2.4.2 all the way to 2.4.8, and only just fixed
(apparently) by David Miller in 2.4.9pre4, drat.
- Here's how to see if you have a broken kernel:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <sys/poll.h>
#include <sys/errno.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#define PAGE_SIZE 4096
#define MAX (PAGE_SIZE / sizeof (void *))
int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
struct pollfd fds[MAX];
int i, fd;
fd = open ("/dev/null", 0);
for (i = 0; i < MAX; i++) {
fds[i].fd = fd;
fds[i].events = 1;
fds[i].revents = 0;
}
if (poll (fds, MAX, 0) < 0 && errno == EINVAL)
printf ("Buggy kernel\n");
else
printf ("Clean kernel\n");
close (fd);
return 0;
}
- Went shopping, fixed some path issues I had
left around in bonobo-activation. Tried to make my peace
with DV - I hope we understand each other better now.
- Hacked away at glib trying to reduce the
poll structure length to workaround the kernel.
- Eventualy fixed glib, only to find that there
is linc brokenness at the bottom as well - and to top it
all if that is re-designed I'd have never seen the poll
problem anyway. Sigh. A half hour re-work of the linc
API, and some ORBit2 stuff - and bingo.
- Bed - quit while you're ahead.
- Up early, put washing on, went for a run,
washing -> drier, shower, breakfast, quiet time, fold
washing: done - wow. Only 1/2 a day wasted.
- Off to work, met Ian Peters, long chat, got
on the wrong train, didn't notice for a while; doh.
Wrote to Dad - his birthday.
- Got into looking at Bill's at-spi / glib
issue; hmm.
- Company boat trip beano, fairly interesting.
- Bed.
- Up early, mail chew, committed gconf patch.
- Martin released a new set of libgnome,
libgnomeui and left me to release libgnome1-compat, and
it's looking most encouraging. We only have to squash
all the bugs now :-)
- Alan Cox turned up and had done a most
excellent performance
analysis of Nautilus. Interestingly mostly in that
it exonerates bonobo ( so far ). Hopefully we'll get some
nice optimizations out of that work.
- Sat around distchecking libgnome1-compat,
a couple of nice issues to nail, uploaded it, committed,
tagged.
- Posted the next self help article to
gnome-devel-list, commenced writing number 5 for preliminary
internal company release.
- Implemented an IOR moniker to take advantage of
the new http:// IOR code in ORBit2 - excellent stuff, a
totaly trivial - but extremely powerful nice thing.
- Alan has really shaken up the bee hive, spent
a while trying to optimize a truly inefficient part of the
UI xml translation code; hard to say if it worked, but we'll
see tommorow.
- Bed late.
- Up early, off to work, wrote to J. Martin's
doing storming work, and all of Gnome 2.0 is coming along
nicely it seems.
- Committed some cruft removal for gconfd, now
to get to the bottom of the slowness. Fixed the linc issue
that Martin found ( or a possible cause ), added execVerb &
uiEvent methods on the UIContainer - so we can add macro
support really easily.
- GClosureized libgnomeprint, killed some evil,
worrying brokenness, and fired a patch off to Lauris.
- Went shopping. Spent ages trying to persuade
libIDL to let me do type lookups across the tree; totaly
useless, horribly unfriendly, undocumented API, no joy.
- Didn't get anyway, committed libgnomeprint fixes
at least - Lauris awoke.
- Up super early, off to the office - phoned the
girl, ( Nat very generously allowed me to use the company
phone line ), had a lovely conversation.
- Off to church in the morning, Kris Perkins speaking
on
Ephesians 5:1-21, essentialy the sermon summed up in the first
verse: "Be Imitators of God", disagreed with some of what he said.
But we are to imitate the faith of our elders too
Heb 13:7. Ultimately we need to know who we are in Christ before we
can live as children of light. He'd rather replace WWJD bracelets with
WHJMYTB: Who has Jesus made you to be bracelets. Hmm.
- Back to write to Julia, spent some happy hours. Eat
bagles with Ettore with Nutella and Cream cheese - talked.
- Off to church in the evening, Dr Gorden Hugenberger.
Amazingly, I picked up the 2nd part of his sermon series on Healing,
the first of which I heard last time. Extremely good. 3 Pages of notes.
- He started by telling of how as a young minister
he never knew anyone close to him be sick, his whole
family was healthy and he never considered death. Then
he got some horrendous heart autoimmune
response. Having counseled the dying before he never
realised the peace of God until looking up he saw the
blood drain out of the Doctor's faces - as they saw
his condition. And he knew - not that he would be healed
but to be absent from the body is to be with Christ.
- The whole church was praying for Gordon - and he
came through - God can heal, even hearts. By what
mechanism is immaterial. But, then his wife's good
friend the secretary died a horrible death of cancer,
and she was not healed - despite the same treatment;
why ?
- What is Satan's view of illness ? after Job' has
lost all his material wealth, and still
praises God The devil says "But stretch out your
hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will
surely curse you to your face."
(Job 2). Indeed so strong is Job that he says:
Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him
(Job 13:15)
- Can it be that illness and the brink of death
brings to you, and those around you an acute awareness
of the value of life ? that when you can see that
things are not worth dying for, then living for them
seems foolish too.
- Conclusions from last time
- God can, and does heal
- It is utterly foolish not to ask him to heal
- But, every healing is ultimately just a reprieve
Lazarus lived to die again.
- The ultimate, perfect, healing is in death:
Heaven.
- There are degrees of 'miraculousness'
- Miracles wax and wane in frequency
accompanying God's redemptive plan. So God
warns his people that when the come into the
promised land they will no longer have bread
falling from heaven, and must beware of
thinking that they are feeding themselves by
the sweat of their hands - beause God is still
feeding them.
(Deuteronomy 8)
- The Doctrine of Concurrence: there are
multiple explanations of causation, and many
are true in parallel. Whilst if something has
a material cause - you planted the seed and
watered it - ultimately the planting and
watering was fully caused by God. And yet, God
also can work without obvious means.
- ie. simply because when your pneumonia
went away you could measure more white blood
cells fighting it - by no means indicates that
God did not cause it.
- Do not disparage Doctors, to claim that this shows
a lack of faith is to radicaly misunderstand how God
often chooses to work, and construct instead a
misguided ascriptural presumption on God's grace.
Many churches can get this wrong.
- Admittedly in a parable Jesus says On
hearing this, Jesus said to them, "It is not
the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick...."
(Mark 2:17). Jesus didn't have a problem
with healing people, so should it be
re-phrased no-one needs a doctor now ? -
no.
- The
Good Samaritan held up as an example for
us all used bandages, oil, wine to disinfect
and took the wounded man for a convalesence
and cared for him.
- Timothy was told by Paul ( again with 2
ressurections to his name ) to Stop
drinking only water, and use a little wine
because of your stomach and your frequent
illnesses.
(1 Timothy 5:23).
- So what do we see today - yes God heals people,
but why is it that in some 'healings' so often we hear
of a leg seemingly lengthen in an apparently already
healthy person - but the people in most need are not
healed ? Why do we see trivial healings when the
amputee is not even prayed for ?
- The NT miracles were not like this: this man was a
paralytic for 40 years - and even the
critics did not think of denying his healing for
he was walking, and jumping, and praising God
(Acts 3:8).
- Why are there not more miracles ?
- They cluster around turning points in
redemption history.
- They point to a deeper and lasting healing
that God is working with his people.
- Jesus heals "all", and the quality is amazing:
Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes
of a man born blind.
(John 9:32). Not the prophets before or since - Nobody.
A man born blind is an amazing metaphor for my life.
- During the Acts of the apostles there were 2
ressurections in 30 years [Dorcas,Euctus], and plenty
of Christians died - life insurers shouldn't offer
lower premiums for Christians; it's not statisticaly
significant.
- God's special favorites have not been especialy healthy
- Elija's successor Elisha - with twice
the spirit of God - notice Elija didn't
even die - he was taken into heaven. Elija fed
1 hungry man, Elisha 100, etc. How did Elisha
die ? he suffered an illness and died from it
(2 Kings 13:14)
- Again, Paul - not wanting for gifts of
healing - his friend Epaphroditus: Indeed
he was ill, and almost died.
(Phillipians 2:27)
- And Paul himself - As you know, it was
because of an illness that I first preached
the gospel to you
(Galatians 4:13)
- Is it not that God can adjust the test to our
strength or our strength to the test ? Is it not that
instead of longer legs we need to say with the
sufferer of acute calamity in
(Habakkuk 3) The LORD God is my strength, and
he will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will
make me to walk upon mine high places.
- Do we not need to acknowledge and remember that
"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is
made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all
the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's
power may rest on me...
(2 Corinthians 12:9).
- Gordon remembered visiting lady in the church
dying in her home, and she would say "I know what
you're thinking Gordon, you're just jealous that I'm
going to see Jesus first" - and the constant stream of
people into that living room to see the comfort of God
in action.
- David C.K. Watson a very prominant preacher on the
power of prayer in England - ( apparently associated
with John Wimber of the Vineyard movement ( who prayed
for him ) ) in his book Fear no Evil: One man deals
with terminal illness he writes (along the lines
of) "some are whispering that God hasn't done
anything for me ... but God has been far from
inactive. From 1 until 3 in the morning he came and
spoke to me, and told me that nothing was important in
comparison with my personal relationship with him
... and that this was a mockery if I didn't love my
brothers from the heart" and he finishes "Not
my will, but yours". (
(Luke 22:42).
A very solid sermon - much to think about.
- Nosh with Iain and back to the barracks on the train.
- Watched "Dr StrangeLove - or 'how I stopped worrying
and learned to love the bomb'" - extremely amusing. I didn't
realise Stanely Kubric was capable of producing movies without
excessive violence / sex - how ignorant am I.
- Up early, to work - wrote to J at length.
Discovered that my flight to SFO arrived at the airport
halfway through my talk - hmm, doh.
- Got on with poking around at some Gnome 2 stuff.
- Read Mark's CORBA_Object cleanups wrt. the mess
with Object Keys - looks nice to me, what an evil mess of
mis-optimzed stuff there is in there, even still.
- Talked to Chris about shmem. To list shared memory
segments use ipcs and to remove leaked ones: ipcrm.
- Helped track down and nail an evil and brainless
soup bug - horay :-)
- Note; lsof -p >pid< shows the files opened
by a certain pid, and fuser >file< shows the processes
using a certain file.
- Martin managed to get an initial port of the panel
up and running ... great. After some considerable debugging
it seems that gconfd-2 is the cause of a vast degree of
initialization slowness in Gnome 2.0. Still, at least that
means it's probably easy to accelerate.
- Bed early.
- Up at 7.00am, off to work, there by 8.00am,
discovered that J' shouldn't be in bed quite yet - so can
phone her; wow, the miracles of early rising. Had a lovely
talk to the dream lady: great.
- Onto the mail pile ... interesting stuff, it looks
like Darin is getting steaming into the dirty work of the
Control / ControlFrame issues: great.
- Trying to fixup some of the evil problems with
activation still seeming to lurk in ORBit2/bonobo-activation.
Fixed up bonobo-activation-slay. Wrote a long letter to J'
made bonobo-config deal with prepending '/'s nicely so
properties can be addressed more sensibly.
- Back into the fray. Mailed Havoc about an
interesting gconf issue. Fixed an evil bug ( actualy in linc,
not re-creating /tmp/orbit-$USER at all ) and got back to the
real issue.
- Seemingly the issue is so evil, that I'll just
have to spend more time perfecting my ORBit2 strace -
excellent, an extremely, extremely helpful debugging tool.
Mostly finished the trace stuff, committed. Back to the real
problem.
- Read over the omg proposal for changes to the
CORBA C binding - seems resonable, nothing we don't do already
it seemed; threw a few spanners in the works of my own.
- Wrote up my status report, so many little things.
- Off to 'Fire and Ice' with some of the evolution
hackers - actualy rather good; must go again, but this time
feeling more hungry.
- Up at 8.00am light and 'trash cart', off to work.
Started chewing mail - 2 from my girl; great.
- Mark in Sun is attacking ORBit2 with purify and
quantify and it's looking good.
- Discovered that Tim Ney was here ! wow - we donate
him an office at Ximian to support his work - cool.
- Hacked away at misc. things, lots of minutia.
Phoned up Martin - and we worked out what needed doing to
libgnomeui; some work - but sounds feasible.
- Continued hacking on ORBit2's CORBA strace type
thing - seems to be working pretty sweetly.
- Went to the Longhorn steak house downstairs - had
the blue cheese steak - somehow not as good as I had remembered.
- Very tired, bed early - 9.30pm.
- Up at 7.15am, going the wrong way - still, slept
slightly better - noise still bad, but at least no hammering from
above as in the past. Chewed mail, a lovely mail from my love,
great.
- Martin doing excellent work fixing evil libbonobo
property bag bugs, and improving scripting bindings. Must checkout
his guile-gobject code and learn guile.
- Bumbled away at E-mail, and sorted an ORBit2 issue.
Setup a talk at the Sydney LUG
for the 21st September. Fixed up some creeping ORBit2 brokenness,
seems to be coming together nicely though.
- Committed typelib dump, the start of a helper method
to list system type libraries. Made the libbonobo typelib install
the activation type info.
- Re-built my Gnome 2.0 system from the bottom up, some
clown added a Gtk+ method that gtkhtml2 needs. Ported Miguel's
bonobo echo sample and moved it to libbonobo.
- Seth made me happy by switching the gnome-vfs metadata
API to use a property bag - horay, really very good news; we're
beggining to get API cleanliness and consistancy. Martin hacking
away at porting the panel, and finding bugs all over the shop
with various things; great work.
- Off to 'Drinking Culture' with the lads - didn't drink
much, talked a lot - interesting things. Back to the barracks with
Rodrigo - 11.30 bed.
- Up at 7.30am, not a good sleep strategy. Off to work,
beat most people in.
- Started committing stuff I did on the plane, pushed mail.
- Wrote to J at length, partook of the marvels of 'fresh
city's chicken ceaser wrap & the Ximian coffee machine.
- Mark been doing nice work, Cody doing some cleans, good
good. Spammed Martin with my thoughts on libgnomeui. Talked to Jacob
about FileSel.
- Posted my transient stuff to Ettore / the evolution list,
now to try and merge it into libbonoboui. Finaly nailed the nasty
build bug. Did an ORBit-2.3.93 release with some of the leak fixes
and Mark's new object adaptor work.
- Discovered one of our distro hackers emerging from the
toilet with laptop in hand - now that is dedication; productivity
around the clock regardless of location.
- Miguel persuaded me to air my 'Self Help' programming
tips weekly thing to a wider audience; posted the first article,
await the flames with bated breath.
- Tried to solve the acute 'laptop time' problems on
my machine. Now 'date' thinks it's the right time, but the foobar
think's it's 5 hours ahead - hmm. Discovered you need to change
the timezone manualy in evolution - did so. Pointed out the (now)
acute performance problems in the calendar rendering to Daemon,
they have to get fixed now.
- Re-released ORBit2; sigh, can't spell equivalent,
added some regression tests to make sure it won't happen again.
Released a fixedup libbonobo2.
- Off to Central for an Indian meal with Anna, Ettore,
and a crowd. Felt knackered. Bed 11.00pm.
- Up early, shower, breakfast, started to pack for Boston
sidetracked by the E-mail mountain. It's raining very hard - but
that's global warming; sorry climate change for you - we get
unpredictable weather, just like we've always had; what a change. Not
looking forwards to walking to the station. Strangely the wind seems
extremely uniform - either that or gravity has moved to ~15 degrees
from the normal I wonder if the drops inertia and it's long fall have
an significant smoothing effect on its direction.
- Did a new bonobo-config release with Martin's fixes, did
a libgnomecanvas2 release, now all of libbonoboui's dependencies
should be satisfied. Still no real mail from J.
- Finaly got a nice, and most amusing mail from J, replied
at length; it's so much easier talking somehow. Finished packing, and
Alex kindly gave me a lift to the station.
- Hacked a little on the train - the plane was delayed
doh. Hacked up a solution for Evolution's transient problems;
excellent, works really nicely - almost quite simple.
- Implemented CORBA_TypeCode_equivalent, very simple.
- Talked to an interesting Indian girl on the plane,
a nutritionist working for the USAID, doing surveys on nutrition
in Syria, fascinating stuff. Learned more, a new perspective on
the varied politics of the middle East, and also nutrition in the
fertile crescent, agro economics, the amazing possibilities of
generitcaly engineering crops to produce a full complement of the
vital amino acids we need etc. Much food for thought.
- Looked over the libgnomeui API, saw some of Shrek
without any sound - rather impressed by the fabric modeling,
rather realistic dress the heroine wears, and the wedding dress
veil etc.
- Knocked up another self-help hacking guide for the
Ximian folks. Read over the libglade HEAD test code. Had a bit
of fun hacking up the strace type thing for ORBit2 - looking good
so far, very good in fact.
- Finaly arrived - mailed J; bagels & cream cheese !
wow. Managed not to locate the drinking session & the bulk of the
drunken Ximian mob, good thing - forgotten about the Aspirin by now.
I'm fairly convinced though that the majority of DVT is contracted
whilst waiting at the baggage carosell.
- Met Ettore and the other lads eventualy, met Chris
Toshok for the first time - seems a nice guy. Back to the
barracks in Cheridy's car, driven by Alex. Bed at 1.30am,
extraordinarily hot - hmm.
- Up latish, dropped Tax stuff at Nana's - sitting
up and drinking her food it seems.
- Off to Church - great service by the YWAM team on
Mark 8: What good is it for a man to gain the whole world,
yet forfeit his soul?. Very challenging, extremely challenged by
not loving God with much of my heart.
It's all too easy to profess the love of God, without it being
truly internalized - prayed for that.
- Back home, had a phone call from my lovely girl,
tried to comfort her as much as possible, nearly 1/2 way there
chronologicaly now.
- Wrote to J at length too.
- Light Tea, and off to the evening service rehearsal.
- Evening service was very good - on 'Inner Healing',
really not as whacky as it sounds. Essentialy trying to clean out
the accumulated detritius of past sins, fondled hatreds etc. Had
an alliterative summary: Revelation, Release, Repent, Resist,
Renounce, Renewal. Didn't have enough time to really get to grips
with actualy doing it though - the tragedy of the music group.
- Back home - Thomas watching the 6th sense, fluey
sort of feeling - perhaps I'm a chimney. Bed.
- Up early, no particularly interesting mail. Finished
the remains of the day, extremely moving, subtle and skillfully
woven. A shame to finish. In a manner common to myself, the
feelings of the man are only visible through other people, and
even then almost opaque to him.
- Still no interesting mail. Started processing the
recepits and stuff from the last year, simply sort loads of tiny
pieces of paper into date order - remembering to decode date
based on American vs. sensible date ordering.
- Mail from J' horay, and before I'd even read it a
lovely phone call from the creature - a bumper day. Spent ages
and ages writing to Julia, then phoned Sami & Kate to finaly
congratulate them on baby Ruth - havn't seen them at all.
- Spent ages managing my Evolution addressbook, now
why can't I have a list view grouped by categories ? prolly lost
the button or something.
- Finaly got my Tax sorted, bundled up and a shocking
ballpark figure that I owe the governmnent worked out - hmm.
- Watched "the best of Banzai" on TV - very far out
comedy. Chewed work mail finally, discovered Martin had released
libgnome2 - horay, happy happy happy. Wrote the libbonobo
and libbonoboui release notes and mailed them off. Bed.
- Up early, released a tentative API frozen libart_lgpl
package for Gnome 2.0. No mail really. Split the log.
- Collected my nicely extra-soled shoes, went to see Nana.
- Contemplated releasing libgnomecanvas, sigh - where has
Martin got to ? subscribed to the glade-devel list to find out what
if anything is going on in there.
- Backed up all the parents documents off the server onto
my laptop.
- Wrote a status report for this week.
- Up 10.30am, off to collect a package we hadn't been
awake to receive at 8.40am, sigh.
- No mail to chew to talk about - it seems the time I
slept is dead time. A lovely long phone call to Julia. Discovered
the lack of mail was due to a broken mailserver.
- Got very, frustrated with the general apathy of
people not freezing / releasing on time. Finaly mail seems to have
got back on-line. Started making sure gnome-vfs distchecks to speed
those guys up.
- Started wading into gnome-vfs, and discovered it now
depends on Gtk+ - WHAT! discovered the metadata API - humerously
mooted to replace bonobo-config is awful, bad, dire, grotesque.
Made up a nice large patch to fix several things.
- Finaly caught yakk replicating my changes to gnome-vfs
( broken mail server ), and caught seth, and hurried them into
doing an API release of gnome-vfs.
- Released bonobo-config-0.1.1, uploaded it, uploaded
Seth's gnome-vfs release, did a new libbonobo2 build fix release
and uploaded that.
- It became tommorow a while ago. Phone Antie Sylvia
in Tazmania - who was very positive about J' and I staying;
which is excellent.
- Got libbonobo to build with bonobo-activation.
- Dinner at 5.15am, still no sign of Robert.
- Interrupted sleep - Robert rang to say he stayed at
the Youth Hostel, and they'd be back in the evening.
- Up at 1.00pm, breakfast. Wrote to J, chewed mail -
nothing happened in the last few hours. Got on with porting gconf
to bonobo-activation.
- Went to get shoes re-soled, small shops shut early
on Wednesday, doh. Saw Grandma instead, Uncle Chris was there -
talked about Australia, both going - read the Bible to Grandma
and prayed for her.
- Back to the action. Managed to raise Havoc - horay.
- Committed gconf stuff, then libbonobo, libgnome,
libbonoboui, bonobo-config, libgnomeui; holding out for a gnome-vfs
maintainer so the platform will be still buildable at least.
Finaly got through to yakk, gnome-vfs fixed.
- Did a gnome-common release, Maciej turned up and got
on the case of a bonobo-activation release; excellent. Fixed up
the Bonobo_GenericFactory API nicely. Uploaded a bonobo-activation
and then a libbonobo2-1.100.0, that's a sucking package name if
ever I saw one [ Martin's fault :-].
- Watched "Big trouble in Little China" - an appalling
film if ever I saw one. Bed, 2.00am. Feeling slightly ill.
- At some stage today arrived without me noticing,
how rude. Renamed bonobo's ActivationContext to make room for
oaf. Started pruning explicit liboaf.h includes from misc. user
code around the place.
- Suddenly realized the freeze really was supposed to
be tommorow. Bed at 2.00am.
- Up at midday, let battle re-commence. Chewed mail.
- Robert's girlfriend arrived, and they went off to
Alfriston for a walk, gave him the south downs way book, but he
left it behind. Said they'd be back for dinner.
- Set to work on bonobo-activation, after a night of
renaming mahem - getting the autoconf back into some sort of
shape.
- Went for a run around both parks - nice and long,
extremely warm and sunny.
- Still hacking away at bonobo-activate, time pouring
into the project ... grief, so many symbols renamed. Sent a huge
patch off to Maciej, nearly building.
- Off for dinner with Ben.
- Robert still not back when I got home.
- Finished porting the bonobo print client side into
libgnomeprint, now to re-write the horribly ugly server side bit.
Did some silly work removing redundant oaf_init's from around the
place - using the single one in libbonoboui from bonobo-config,
- Checked with Sainsburys, Robert not working there
tonight - worrying. Finished the libgnomeprint bonobo print stuff
and committed - a much cleaner API. Finaly got bonobo-activation
to run a query for me, a few silly bugs - nailed easily.
- Up early, plenty of time for panicing today -
the Gnome 2.0 library freeze day. Started chewing mail.
Dreamed about the freeze last night , and having an argument
with Owen about versioning structures for some reasons, and
some whacked out stuff.
- Horay - Gergo has been doing some really
excellent work with GClosures in the Bonobo API while I was
asleep - wow. And Martin has taken on the ORBit2 scripting
support very nicely.
- Maciej came up with a very sensible proposal for
moving towards a more sensible Oaf / Bonobo relationship in
Gnome 2.0 - it's good to work together more constructively.
- More API review work from Jamil Geor - excellent.
- Breakfast - in a hurry.
- The fix for gmodule's libtool lib loading went
in finaly - excellent, can get back to finishing ORBit2's
type loading and registration. Vitualized some of the canvas
methods we need virtual for libbonoboui - couldn't remember
quite which ones Mike wanted - so reserved some vtable space
instead.
- Added a broken connection signal to
linc-connection, built Gail.
- My lovely girl phoned my up from a Melbourne
hotel, talked for a while, beautiful.
- Merged up the first part of the Gergo's GClosure
work - adapting it to be more backwards compatible - tested
and committed. Onto fixing the Listener interface - which I
had forgotten about in a fit of foolishness. Then back to
more GClosure work of my own, nice reports from Zilch on
precicely which ones need work.
- Chris phoned up, at Nana's - wanted someone to
go down and play some music to her, since she's unresponsive,
argh - so busy.
- GClosurized bonobo-ui-component, took too long,
fixed a juicy bug in bonobo_closure_invoke. Martin got his
idl-compiler fixes all in place. Nailed bonobo-moniker-simple.
Started debugging another moniker issue - oaf being unhelpful
with exceptions again; posted a patch.
- Reviewed Mark's poa virtualization code, looks like a nice
cleanup, although I'm not sure quite how useful writing ones own
object adaptors might be. Dietmar's moniker re-write went in -
we're looking almost peachy.
- Linc distcheck'd just fine, ORBit2 distcheck'd more
painful - need to install tex for some stupid reason. Committed
my oaf patch, and now the re-organisation starts. Maciej and I
created the new master.gnome.org gnome2/ ftp directory, uploaded
linc.
- Got on with ORBit2's type registry - got a skeleton
implementation together - plenty of room for performance
improvement - which is good. Wrote to Julia.
- Talked to Elliot Re: release notes for ORBit2.
- Sunday; famed for its restful qualities.
- Church in the morning, the visiting YWAM team ( post work in
Argentina ) led the service. Nice sketch, some interesting
things - fairly insubstantial though. Got prayed for afterwards.
- Went to a Barbeque with the YWAM'ers and our
young people's cell groups. Talked to a Russion Neuclear
Physics professor about 'non time deterministic'
processes and how he is trying to study them. Unfortunately
he had rather broken English, and I couldn't quite grasp
the topic.
- Went home - discovered 3 mails from J' - horay,
she managed to get on line somehow at the weekend. Replied
to her at some length. Robert seems depressed.
- Back to Church for the evening service,
excellent worship - quite good teaching by YWAM'mer. Back
home - even more J mail churn.
- Bed.
- Up early, no interesting E-mail. Phone call
from Guy - Kate gave birth to a baby girl at 5.47pm
yesterday: Ruth >something< Lindsay, wow - quite
a trick.
- Ulrich Drepper fixed my glibc bug - excellent;
told me off for using the glibc internal __asprintf in my
problem demonstration - sigh, doh.
- Phoned Anty Sylvia in Australia - but she
was not in, doh. Re-posted on the gmodule name mangling
bug, posted a patch to solve the problem this time.
- After hacking up the Any within struct
regression tests - it seems ORBit2 doesn't suffer from the
ORBit-stable bug, phew.
- Gergo doing some great work on cleaning up the
libbonobo - the Factory infastructure is now much, much more
beautiful; great.
- By fooling with dev-fs, finally managed to get
my cdrom to work - time for some U2 I think. Kept ringing
Australia - no answer.
- Spent a while fixing all the libbonobo API
consistancy bugs that Jamil has found, lovely to have
someone pouring over the API - good work.
- Spent a while reading "Structures or why things
don't fall down" (JE.Gordon) ISBN-0-14-013628-2, possibly
one of the best, most accessible books on engineering I have
ever read. Of interest to any intellectual, covers an eclectic
mix of materials, structures, topics from dress making to the
American railroad trestles, ships breaking apart at sea, birds
pulling worms out of the ground etc.
- Wrote to J at some length, not that she can read
it - on business in Melborne Monday early. The days seem to
fly by like crawling toads till we meet. J' was asked out by
some random bloke at a party last night - said no obviously,
but the incubus of potential loss hangs over me.
- Back to hacking on libbonobo - a GClosure code
read for the API, in favour of all the language bindings.
- Solved a problem for Seth with a control. On
Seth's instructions moved the libgnome monikers into
gnome-vfs.
- Very constructive exchange with Maciej over quite
what to do with oaf for Gnome 2.0, it seems we got a long way.
- Got to the bottom of Gergo's moniker problems -
a bug in his code, not mine; excellent.
- Bed at midnight - very tired, finished "The
Bang Bang club" though - not a massively good book IMHO.
- Up early, 2 mails from J queued - 1 normal, 1
a lovely poem, what a nice way to start the day.
- Started processing other mail, remembered
Owen's kind response to the modality problems in Evolution.
Specced up what we needed to do in Evolution to get modality
right and fired it off.
- Ploughed through at-spi re-hashing the IDL, and
the mass of include guards and stuff in it. Committed some
fixes.
- Seth decided to make gnome-vfs depend on
libbonobo, which is great. Finaly at last we're starting to
build a fully componentized desktop from the foundations up.
- Now the Gnome 2.0 deadline is only 2-3 working days
away - processed my TODO, ruthlessly extracted all the API bugs,
estimated times for them all and prioritized.
- Committed some ORBit2 work, chased Gergo's bug
with resolving monikers. Fixed brokenness in libbonobo, and
in libgnomeui.
- It's very, very hot. Re-built lots of Gnome 2.0
while I was on the phone. My friend Kate is going into labour
apparently, hmm.
- Made oaf report a sensible, translated exception
for the error case I found, test exception, fix the underlying
error in libgnome, now I get to the real problem - at last.
- Wrote to J', 350 lines - must be going out of my
tiny mind a fruitcake for a Girl.
- Committed a fix for bonobo-object destruction,
and help chaining to "destroy" in impls.
- Up early, slept not particularly well, very
worried about kicking sean in the head, or indeed the
effects of my feet getting anywhere near him.
- Want to get home, to see if there is any
interesting E-mail from J - very soppy.
- Hacked on ORBit2 type stuff on the train.
- Back home - lovely mail from J, back into the
thick of the mailing frenzy - chewing like mad.
- Checked out Bill's at-spi code.
- Found a heinous glibc bug ... gack, luckily
had the source to hand - churned through it from gmodule
down: _IO_vasprintf etc. etc. :-) electric fence is a
marvel. Simon Tennant rung up, and we talked over his
impending marriage - lovely.
- Finaly isolated the glibc bug:
#include >stdio.h<
extern int __asprintf (char **string_ptr,
const char *format, ...);
int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
const char *a = "/opt/gnome/lib/orbit/Everything_module.so";
const char *b = "cannot open shared object file";
const char *c = "No such file or directory";
char *result;
free (malloc (8));
__asprintf (&result, "Hello %s", "World");
fprintf (stderr, "%s\n", result);
__asprintf (&result, "%s: %s: %s", a, b, c);
fprintf (stderr, "%s\n", result);
return 0;
}
gcc -lefence -g foo.c ; ./a.out
- Segv with glibc-2.2.3-7 (Debian), glibc-2.2.2-10 (RH7.1)
but fine with glibc-2.1.3-15 (Rh 6.2) - that's progress for you.
- Struggled for ages with libtool - eventualy
discovered a stray '-static' directive poisoning my shlib
code. Wrote to J. Mailed my libtool frustration off to
gtk-devel, to get some traction.
- Watched a terrible film called "Atomic Train" -
the only redeeming feature - amid the smothering, humid
cheesiness of it all - was that the Atomic bomb actualy blows
up and wipes out a load of people.
- Bed.
- Up early, wrote to Julia, caught the train.
- Hacked in the station, and on the train.
- Off to Marble Arch - visited the US embasy,
got to queue with a most interesting bloke outside - who
had Englishm Russian and Sudanese passports + a diplomatic
UN passport - quite a feat, but he still had to queue
outside for a Visa.
- Lunch - a hot dog in Hyde park, in the sun -
very pleasant, onto Cambridge.
- More hacking on the train.
- Went shopping - very, very tight deadlines -
can jump much higher now.
- Dinner with Sean & Abbie, Iain and Lucy at
the Golshan curry house, great fun. Sean is fighting it
out with SIP vs. H323 at AT&T's research lab in Cambridge
of OmniORB fame.
- Bed on the Fouton at Sean's.
- At some stage the night turned into the
next day. It seems the ORBit2 memory leaks are back with
a big vengance, doh - someone's lost a ref.
- Bed at 3.00am.
- Slept, fitfully - woke early, and every hour
thereafter to check mail. Finally got what I was looking
for, tried to phone for a while - eventualy got through.
Talked to the girl for an hour, got thing straightened
out a lot. Midday.
- Phone call from Mark & Bill, another bad
ORBit2 bug causing them grief. Tried to hunt it down,
understand the giop code fully and fix it correctly.
- Went to see Grandma, buy some stamps. Sat
in St Anne's well's garden in the sun. Prayed about
life in the abstract - and for clarity.
- Got back & processed the IBM developerworks
articles and turned them round in only a couple of
hours - excellent. Back to ORBit2.
- Rung Sean and Abbie ... it seems fine to
stay with them tommorow night - great, read the H1B
Visa bumph, hmm. I get to go to London tommorow it
seems. Wrote some snail mail - how pleasingly
unusual - pretty much forgotton how to write.
- Tracked down a very silly ORB random key
generation bug. Wrote a rather foolish mail to Julia.
- The server's HDD seems to have died in a
strange way - almost as if it's not powering up properly.
Switched round the power connectors inside ... hope it
will stay working - or my internet connection goes with it.
- Grabbed autoconf-2.52, let the borkage begin!
- Mike Kestner committed his nice compound doc
cleanup - and interface savaging exercise. We are now nice
and clean, at last - after all this time.
- Bed around 6.00am, up again at 2.00pm.
- Nice mail from Julia, she pointed out that I
should link to the Church website, whilst
the Vicar was [ this week ] preaching from his IMac (
probably due to a lack of time / need to print the
sermon ), sadly it's not on-line.
- Jody's IRC nick changed to jody_dad today,
"Ryan Solomon Goldberg" 3.25 Kg 53cm - excellent news.
- Added a --version switch to orbit-idl so we
can actualy detect what serial revision the thing is
compiling at. Continued forward porting, and re-hashing
Alex's UI speedups from recent bonobos.
- Went for a run to the post office - it had
just shut when I arrived, I should run faster clearly -
exhausted.
- Lots of nice work & fixes from Martin gone
into libbonoboui, robustness and completness work.
- Discovered my flight to Australia was going
to cost twice what I thought it would; sigh.
- Eat up the Lamb Caserole that had been
languishing in the fridge for 4 days [ after
microwaving ] - probably be the death of us.
- Told my Brother off for building too much
of his life around computers & computer games - shortly
afterwards had a long time of being shown painful things
about my badly laid life foundations by God.
Pride comes before a fall. Feeling rather miserable
about life, spent a long time with God.
- Back to the fray, finished porting the
faster UI attr set / get stuff.
- Christian assures me that the GStreamer RPMS are
working nicely now - and that one should be able to build
just fine now.
- Fixed a stupid set of exception problems in
ORBit2 - double free & a more cunning one, we now marshal
unknown exceptions quite safely. Realised we could really
use a 'shallow copy' method in the ORB.
- Read more of the "Bang-Bang Club", lying in bed
watching my E-mail flow for anything from J. Back to work,
feverishly hacking at orbit-small's type library loading
code, we need an internal, separate type registry as well
it seems ... or to fabricate full class information.
- Up very late - missed Church in the morning
for no good reason but tiredness, hmm.
- Washed up, played the guitar, messed around.
Finished the ESEF's fascinating book "The Global Warming
Debate" - ISBN 0952773406. Papers by all manner of people,
including Sir Fred Hoyle ( with a theory of ice age
creation ). Essentialy it seems there is a total lack of
rigour and public debate in matters pertaining
to ( what has now been ameliorated to ) "Climate Change".
It seems to me now that even if Bush is killing Kyoto
for the wrong reasons, it's the right thing to do - there
is no impending climate catastrophy. [ this is not to deny
there are other real environmental problems of course ].
- Off to Church for a music group practice, few
in number, but we played well.
- Sermon on
Isaiah 10 - judgement being linked to blessing. The
awesome sovreignty of God, the evils of attributing
success to personal strength / wisdom: 12-14 and not to
God. The fullfillment of the prophecy against Assyria's
soldiers in
II Kings 19 - the danger of heaping up insults
against God, and the importance of trusting him against
seemingly a invincible force.
- Back home, alone, Robert shelf stacking at
Sainsburies.
- Started to read 'The Bang Bang' club,
couldn't sleep - decided to hack instead.
- Up late; midday, breakfast, washed up. A tad
of mail grokking - suddenly realised it was Julia's
birthday and that I had nearly missed my scheduled phoning
slot - gasp. The horrors of the thought of explaining how
I had forgotten being very apparent I hastily fetched the
'oneTel' box and dialed feverishly. Mercifully I was not
too late (DG), lovely to catch up with the creature, and
to wish her a happy birthday.
- Considered going for a run. Read Ravi's nice
GB patch - overall extremely helpful. Built the new
gnome-control-center & bonobo-conf.
- Wrote a new 'self help' E-mail for the Ximian
crew - basic programming tips, from a basic programmer.
- Got out of my pyjamas at 5.00pm and went for
a run - got rather over heated rather rapidly, so stopped
after 1 lap - bad news, very unfit.
- Sami called up & I went over there with Derrin
for Chinese food, and then onto Jurassic Park III. The film
was totaly uninteresting, but the engineering was rather
fun. Still rather insulted that on a project of that scale
and import it is assumed the engineers will get it wrong.
Electric fences nothing, I'd have great double ferroconcrete
barriers with multi-stranded individualy tensioned and cross
re-inforced steel wires - not to mention the inter-fence
distance being mined with great big explosive bolt firing
booby traps, etc. sigh, how we are maligned as a
profession.
- Back to bed - fairly early.
- Up very early, had to drive the parents to
school so they could go to Wales in a minibus with some
girls & my younger brother.
- No mail from J'. Strange solaris ORBit2
problems reported by Mark, time to get on the case. By
the time I had returned, I had a mail from J' - excellent.
- Hacked away at Mark's problem, IRC debugging
session, argument with Bill H about UTF-8 coding in CORBA
strings and what the spec said. Mercifuly saved by the
recent specs that do sensible things with encodings.
Suddenly had a phone call from my georgous girl -
lovely to be able to try and comfort such an exquisite
creature so far from home - upsetting though.
- Re-wrote a chunk of the giop code, a load
more fuzzy logic with 'register' scattered across it.
Implemented the CHAR_SETS tag to please Bill - so now
all ORBit2 strings are utf-8, and utf-16 for wstrings.
- Tried to remember what I did this week, I
certainly did nothing but fight fire that came from Sun
today, an untouched TODO.
- Wrote to my Girl at some length, what a
pleasure.
- Got a lift to a Music group barbeque / party
at Richard James' house with Tim & Charlie Spanner & a
couple of others. Lovely barbeque.
- Spoke at length to (Sir) Peter Woodhead, who
was a Chief of Staff in the Falklands war ( became a Christian
just beforehand ), and commander of 8 battleships in the
British intervention in the Iran / Iraq war. He managed to
survive [ by means he doesn't know - but wouldn't be suprised
if it was God ] rear rotor failure in a small helicoptor at
1000 feet above the sea ( flying back from saying 'bye to the
local Sheik ). 2 non Christian pilots praying, and Peter in the
back as it plummetted - hit the sea not verticaly - whence it
would have sunk without trace, not horizontaly - meaning instant
death, but at a pleasant angle - crumpling to absorb the shock.
All suffered serious spinal injuries, and were unconcious. On
regaining conciousness the pilots managed to get out the front
[ large windows, crash resistant seats ], Peter's escape hatch
had crumpled on impact and was unusable. Helicoptor filling
with water and sinking fast - Peter ran out of air, lungs filled
with water. He escaped ( some say ~90 ft down ) he doesn't
remember how. 3 months of intensive care later, and 2 inches
shorter he lived to tell the tale. He preaches occasionaly,
can often be seen cleaning the church and sits on the PCC.
- Back to bed.
- Up late, instant E-mail check, mail from J'
excellent. Calculated her phone number by various means, and
phoned her - 10am => 7pm. Half an hour's chat - priceless.
- Read a fascinating article in the IEE journal
about a new type of high pressure, internal combustion gas
turbine invented in Britain by a chap called Roland Heap
Numatics seemingly
setup to sell it - strangely nothing there currently.
A fascinating, extremely clued up design - no obvious flaws
[ as with Wankel's seals ], can be augmented with steam up
to very high saturations - in the auxiliary expansion /
exhaust chambers. Very efficient, horribly simple - should
be a winner.
- To work, chewing Mail. It looks like Sebastian
will come and help on ORBit2 as well - hopefully importing
the ORBit-mt thread safety and helping nail our threading
issues before they happen: excellent news.
- Phone call with Mark McLoughlin, seemingly
enjoying his time at Sun, made some excellent points about
the stupidity of what I had asked him to do - very kindly.
Re-thought the approach.
- Very long phone interview with Jan Chong.
- Fixed another nasty poa problem, a BonoboUINode
issue and found a pango problem [ amazing what happens when
you use electric fence ], more libbonoboui thinkos, mostly
from porting. Finaly test-ui runs to the end without
crashing, time to re-hash and forward port Alex's UI speedups.
- Up late. My Girl has E-mailed me and is
alive - horay.
- Wrote some more Gtk+ test code, discovered that
gthread cunningly doesn't warn you if you do multiple calls to
g_mutex_unlock (mutext); - rather unimpressive, and this seems
to be somewhat of a way of life inside Gtk+.
- After finaly getting to grips with the threading
issues in Gtk+ / glib, I got to trying to solve them using
duplicate contexts / main-loops. Code written, only works if
we don't register a watch with the Gtk+ mainloop as well as
the linc one; sigh.
- Off to the pub for dinner with Cell group.
- Finaly caught and fixed the problem - in ORBit2
of course, and commited a new linc / ORBit2 combo to stop the
deadlock in Gtk+ [ and the re-enterancy issues ].
- Committed my oaf debug fixes so it looks nice
again. Removed the bonobo_directory cruft in favour of oaf,
and committed the bonobo_selector fixes neccessary for that.
Hacked more crud out of libbonoboui, reducing line count and
complexity - excellent.
- Consulted my friend David Riddoch of OmniORB fame
on how best to do locking, and the manifest evils of the Gtk+
system.
- Stayed up somewhat late. Still havn't got to my
Tax stuff yet, argh. Stayed up even later - still no mail
from J' - the trials of being silly hours different from
Australia.
- Up early, off to see the Justice of the Peace (JP)
that lives across the road - to get her to sign my passport
photos certifying that it is in fact a true likeness of me etc.
what fun.
- Processed some mail, caught the train in the rain.
Hacked away at ORBit2, realized that it was all nicely
virtualized anyway - without me having to worry about it all -
or is it ?
- Fixed a scad of widget re-rendering problems in
libbonoboui - some clown was calling gtk_widget_draw in an
expose method: hmm. Discovered a whole load of new work to do
in libbonoboui - if only it worked well enough to be able to
test new code / forward ported stuff.
- Got home, committed a load of small but nice bits.
- Dinner. After much painful oafd debugging - having
trapped it into being good, discovered the ORB bug causing the
activation context problems. ORBit_object_get_connection being
(confusingly) a macro, and non_existant returning TRUE for local
objects that hadn't been remoted yet - the price of optmization.
- Reported a nasty deadlock in Gtk+/glib causing
serious grief for anyone doing GUI gubbins inside a GUI
event callback - the joys of thread safety.
- Bed somewhat late, I wonder where J' has got to.
- Up late, 3Mb of mail over a weekend over a modem.
Lots of Mono mail.
- Checked out libgnomeprint, the new non-GUI split
part of the Gnome 2.0 printing infastructure. Chewed lots of
mail, caught up with a some nice things. Onto ORBit2 again
I think. Owen did a nice writeup of the ORBit2 reference
counting & finalization issues, very helpful - set too hacking
it up.
- Sorted out Julia's laptop - discovered a loose screw
inside it ( it fell out ), worrying. Also, we have half an
ethernet card - strange. Also, it seems that there is a filled
PCMCIA card behind a blanking plate, ( complete with hidden eject
button ) and a dubious PCB with wires connected to the card
disappearing off into the innards. Doesn't fill me with confidance
in Compaq.
- Helped J pack, send off her unused food to Rachel
next door. Then off to the Airport, got a lift from Sue, lugged
the ladies Lugg-age - very weighty.
- Got to the airport in good time, despite the first
train we got on being rendered irreperable [ weird ], and the
tube being super slow.
- Said goodbye to my love, she cried - got rather
too close myself for comfort. Prayed for each other, parted.
- Tube back into town to get train from Victoria.
- Hacked on libbonobo, resolved the CORBA vs. GObject
finalization issues as Owen suggested. Got home,
- Up early, J mowed the lawn to prepare for
parents arrival, showered, small breakfast.
- Church - video on "Ministry in the Workplace"
same guy as "Thank God It's Monday" and the guy that started
the "Adopt a Phonebox" campaign to rid our boxes of pimp's
call cards.
- Lots of farewells to Julia and then back home
to meet her parents and her sister (Sue) & boyfriend (Clive),
and out for dinner.
- Off to the XYZ for a very pleasant dinner, and
then the parents went shopping [ J' and I abstained (
Sunday ) ]. Managed to get Mr Griffin on his own and ask his
permission to ask his daughter to marry me [ of course, only
on the understanding that God thinks it's ok ]. Positive
response - excellent.
- Back home, and off for a walk on the heath -
where they race the horses - to take Clive's dogs for a
run.
- Back for tea, a garden examination, and then
present unwrapping - J's parents: masters of economy. They
use wall-paper to wrap presents, at 1UKP / roll, far cheaper
than 'wrapping' paper [ and thicker too ], good tip for the
future. Also it was Sue's birthday soon, so she opened her
presents early [ displaying a certain lack of the proper
decorum, but understandable since all the family were
there ].
- Julia got a bottle of "Superior Bath Foam" -
essentialy a balsamic vinegar bottle re-filled by mother
with Tesco's bath oil of some sort - to much merriment.
Lots of other nice presents though.
- Read "Guns, Germs & Steel" to Julia as she
packed all her stuff, amazing the spread of the food
production package East - West in Eurasia, and the almost
total lack of food technology spread in Africa and America
( North - South ) in prehistoric times. Apparently "America
the Beautiful" is almost entirely wrong, in Eurasia the corn
spreads thousands of miles under wide skies from East to West
- whereas no indigenous American corn species managed to get
from East to West America [ or sim. ].
- A spot of dinner: scrambled egg with cream instead
of milk, yum; eatups time. The Girl went to bed, the Boy
tampered with her luggage at some length.
- Up late, went to buy a laptop backpack for J's
new machine - to save on shoulder strain - and a wallet for
the marriage certificate.
- Back home, fooled around, nearly late for the
wedding. J' had to read the reading. J' looked georgeous in
her nice new pink dress, but unfortunately managed to rip
the shoulder strap as she got into the car. Bit ruffled, but
she read her piece very well. Dianne had made her own wedding
dress [ a fabric technologist ], and those of her bridesmaids.
- Onto the reception, talked to 'Richard' Stephen's
boss, interesting chap, much light and insubstantial
conversation. Fine food, pleasant wine, beautiful girl.
Disco at the end - but not too gash. Displayed my lack of
dancing ability only fleetingly for a slow dance - slightly
to my disappointment.
- Taxi home - J's pretty shoes sadly rather foot
mangling [ Chinese eat your heart out ]. Got home, had a nice
cup of tea, bed.
- Up quite late. Chewed mail, lots of nice work
going on - Martin fixing up the Bonobo UI code nicely, while
I'm still trying to get the demo to run properly for me.
- Mark McLoughlin starts work for Sun on Monday,
sent a cheeky request to various people at Sun that he might
be allowed to continue his work on ORBit2.
- Fixed yet another nasty ORBit2 assumption that
align == size: often true, but for doubles: very broken [
except perhaps on an Alpha ]. We now have all 12 regression
tests passing fully - great.
- Built all of Gnome 2.0 from the ground up again,
with the latest Gtk+ / ORBit2 etc. Fixed ORBit2
CORBA_Object_is_a stuff and add a regression test. Fixed a
daftness in bonobo-config. Now to work out why 'socket' is
returning an fd of '0', worrying.
- Updated depends.dia to try and reflect the
innumerable small modules & their dependencies in Gnome 2.0.
- Julia arrived back home from work - with a nice
Compaq laptop for her time in Australia. Set off out to a
rehearsal for Dianne & Steve's wedding tommorow. Julia travels
every day on the train for an hour with Dianne & they lift
share. Steve is an electro/mechanical engineer putting
solenoids into automotive applications.
- Back home, and off to the pub for a good-bye
party - J' flies to Australia on Monday. Met lots of nice
people and talked to Rachel & Andy from next door a lot.
- Up early, off to get a new passport today.
Mail chewage and some hacking before breakfast.
- Finaly managed to get ORBit2 to work nicely
after expunging ORBit-martin-forked' ORBit2-util.so that
was being cunningly linked into several things and
screwing stuff up badly. Probably ORBit2 install should
assasinate this library.
- Phone call from Julia - ill in bed apparently,
poor dear. Set off for the passport office, after a short
wait got an appointment - very clean and civilised the
process. Sadly they refused to acknowledge that I looked
like I used to, and demanded that the photos be counter
-signed [ sigh ]. No passport available.
- Train to Cambridge. Hacked away at ORBit2 /
libbonobo / libbonoboui tests.
- J' picked me up, unwell. Read Jared to J' as
she lay in bed. Committed my various bits.
- Up late. Mail parsing, back to code cleaning
and cruft removal - switching fully to ORBit2, need to
re-write bonobo-async.
- Mark caught the poa / servant destruction
issue in the boundary between ORBit2 and libbonobo -
interesting, but difficult.
- David explained my misunderstanding of C++,
which comes down to the fact that you can't cast across
an inheritance hierarchy - only up and down, ie. with:
A : C, D, E
B : D, E, F
Where C D E F are independany base classes.
You can't have:
foo (D in_arg)
{
E tmp = in_arg;
}
Since you can't cast across the tree.
Apparently:
The proper design for the case above would to have
G: D, E
and
A: C, G
B: G, F
with a dummy level in between. It's at times like
this that I'm convinced that aggregation is conceptualy far
simpler.
- Pondered the licensing issues (with no
conclusion) of run-time linking propriatory MS code via
libwine into a GPLd' application.
- Merged up Tim Mooney's alpha-dec-osf5.1 bonobo
compile fixes, nice.
- Got annoyed with the server's broken USB
speedtouch driver / PPPoATM / Alcatel propriatotry binary
code - and tried to build a new driver / kernel. Totaly
failed, what a total mess.
- Spent a while working out the best way to weed
out the forest of deadlocks in ORBit's recursive allocation
code. Fixed it all.
- Off to Cell group at Mark & Ruth's house,
rather good. Back, bed.
- Up at 10.00, J' left already at 6.30am. Chewed
mail, looked at what remains to be done around the place.
- Hacked away at the moniker / storage module /
plugin type mess - kill everything in favour of monikers -
much nicer. Sent Michelle my complicated LWE travel needs -
sigh, they're really not simple.
- Upgraded (red-carpet: what a joy) to the latest
nautilus - Alex's work seems to have given some nice speedups
on new window creation. Played mp3s through Nautilus - goes
against the grain to use a GUI. Finished porting / fixing
the vfs moniker, and the file moniker inside libgnome.
- Got bored by all this cleaning. Switched all
of Gnome 2.0 to require ORBit2 [ and linc ].
- Had a look at glade2 to see how it is coming
along, and what we can do to make things nice for Gnome 2.0
wrt. bonobo.
- J' arrived home, had a cup of tea and went out
to 'Sole Meo' - a nice restaurant between Hove and Brighton.
Animated discussion about the evils of corporations [ or
otherwise ]. Back late, bed.
- Up early, moved bed from my brothers room to my
room as Julia vacated my bed for work.
- Slept until 10.00, realized I had missed my
appointment at the passport office at that time - argh.
- Started chewing mail. Very frustrating time
explaining to people with too much time to write mail [ but
no willingness to educate themselfs by reading code ] how to
proceed on various fronts.
- Overall looking good, reccommended switch to
ORBit2 now. Discovered the reason red-carpet was refusing
to suggest any updates was that my transparent HTTP cache
had cunningly cached the XML packages description for ever,
blanked the cache - 84 Mb to pull.
- Read mail, the CORBA spec trying to work out
what type_id was in fact good for. Thought up a contorted
C++ MI example - without virtual functions and asked David
Faure for elucidation.
- Did some CVS surgery to move the monikers and
storage modules that need gnome-vfs up the dependency heap
into libgnome [ with the tests ].
- Installed
gnomemeeting, but insufficiently cunning peripherals to
make it work nicely I think, and a lack of time to work out
how it works. Looks nice though.
- Mono was
announced today, got a nice plug in
TheRegister which is always pleasing.
- Commented on Mike Kestners' nice analysis of the
compound document situation inside Bonobo - great work.
- J' arrived home from work - looking georgeous as
normal.
- Dinner, talk, bed.
- Helping setup Newmarket Community Church in the
morning, nice to see all J's friends there, sermon poor and
rambling, praise good (& God).
- Back home for lunch, packed up the house -
examined the garden & drove to Hove. Read Jared in the car,
extremely interesting. Apparently we havn't domesticated any
new grass crops in the last thousands of years, and of the
vast number of wild species we use only ~12 for 80% of our
food crops by tonnage. Lots of arguments as to why these should
have been developed / domesticated in the fertile crescent.
- Got to my church, great sermon by Peter on
Isaiah 8. A child called 'Sudden Disaster'. The evils of not
trusting in God, but making spurious political alliances, 'God
With Us' (Imanu-ell) not such a fluffy lovely thing, God's role
as judge, holiness and abhorrence of sin - as well as his love.
The huge cost of sin.
- Saw Ben after the service - really good to catch
up with him.
- Back home, unloaded stuff - went to bed.
- Up really late, breakfast with (the lovely) J.
finished her introduction to Asterix - 'The secret weapon' :-)
- Processed some mail, Mark is producing most
excellent ORBit2 work, very encouraging. Nice size reductions,
lots of good work going in - very optimistic about it now.
- Grabbed Martin's guile-gobject work to look at the
CORBA binding, hopefully we can test the ORBit2 work in here.
- Hacked around cleaning things up inside libbonoboui,
the test almost works - all but for a deadlock inside ORBit2 -
the trials of locking :-) luckily a trivial one.
- J's friend Cat arrived, lunch, went for a walk. Then
Claire and Anne arrived - sat around, had tea, talked etc. Got back
to work [ pretending not to be antisocial ]. Fixed the ORBit2
deadlocks. Got to some nice utf-8 coding issues in bonoboui,
excellent.
- Went to the pub for some food / drink - not serving
food, doh. By the time we came out - pouring with rain, got
very wet indeed.
- Gave J' some of her presents, bed.
- Removed some of the humor from my UKUUG talk,
along with some of the more casual / transient slides and
bundled them up for Alasdair.
- Chewed mail. Today I can talk without croaking,
the appetite is begginning to re-surface.
- Caught train to N'mkt, hacked on libbonobo,
managed to get to Kings X 2 hours early, [ note to self,
4.00pm != 14:00, don't lookup times late at night ].
- Sorted some of the bonobo-win deprecated API
nightmare legacy from bonobo 1.0, much cleaner, smaller and
sweeter: nice.
- Got to J's earlyish, very tired. Slept.
- Killed updatedb again, I hate loosing my disk to
some indexing program of truly marginal usefulness - which
sees fit to run itself even when disconnected and trash the
battery. Savaged it's crontab entry.
- Still ill, very frustrating. Natwest sent me a
new switch card with an impossibly broken signature area on
the back.
- Did a bonobo-1.0.7 release with Andersca's fix
for the nasty set/get prop bug that seems to be rearing
its ugly head into my bugzilla.
- Ill, bed. Met the German's in the evening - nice
people, then wrapped presents for J'. Mail processing, IRC,
Lemsip & sleep.
- Ill & extremely tired. Removed gnome-fileconvert
from libgnome, committed gconf cleans. Made libgnomecanvas
build with new pango.
- Caught a coach to Cambridge, & train into Kings X,
hacked on the train to distract myself from the heat and
illness.
- Grotty cold, up late. Tried to pull my mail, cvs
update everything, read theregister etc. - remembered how slow
modems are.
- No wonder my mail took so long to download, Dietmar
had sent me a bonobo-conf release to upload to ftp.gnome.org,
sigh. Must get Dietmar an ftp account.
- Got a belt & braces fix for linc - we were have a big
hit repeatedly generating the same names for files - very silly.
Fixed the collision case, and then made collisions horribly
unlikely.
- Committed my ORBit2 fixes, looking very nice now.
- Built a new gnome 2.0 system, looking good. Feeling
horribly ill, slept fitfully all afternoon.
- Up midday, feeling groggy. Got on-line. 3.7Mb of mail,
the joys. Pushed my mail via. Pine - going to get killed, must
switch to Evolution when things calm down, or work out a super
good excuse.
- Wrote an analysis of the linc UDS problem for
Elliot / the ORBit-list - found it - whoppee, and I try to know
nothing of sockets and binding, listening, accepting, bah humbug.
- Went to Cambridge with Julia, wandered around - did
a tad of ring shopping, feeling dead and ill. Went to the
hospital for J's apointment, sat around writing mail.
- Got back. A tad of mail syncing, bed.
- Breakfast with Andrea Archangeli, I managed to
miss all of his talks tragicaly - got a brief refresher
course - nice guy.
- Off to the Station earlier than anticipated.
- Monstor British Rail journey 11:29 -> 6.00
Manchester -> Cambridge.
- J' cooked a lovely dinner of 'Toad in the Hole'
which sounds lot worse than it tastes.
- Bed, getting some rather swolen gland on the LHS
of the neck - wierd - I'd feel better if I hadn't met a girl
on the train who got a cyst there and needed a vast scar to
remove the thing.
- Up early. Breakfast with David Faure, discussed my
thesis that XML sucks [ or at least it's not a the panacea that
it's mooted as by many ].
- Off to the conference hall - Steven lent me his TTF
fonts - cool, Christian helped get them working.
- Desparate hacking on my talk as yet still in outline
form. Quick lunch break, continued hacking, finished 10 minutes
beforehand.
- Went Ok, waved my snapped off car radio ariel at the
screen. Overran by ~10 minutes, too much material. Christian's
talk went well - very positive responses. Very much mobbed by
the mob, for Monkeys, T-Shirts, stickers, pens & all things
good and Gnomeish.
- Dog tired. Wandered around, coffee, ate at the
doorstop sandwitch shop. Relaxed a little, long and tedious
stuff - considered fleeing to Cambridge. Caught only the end
of Stephen's "Zero Copy, Hidden Dragon" talk - sad.
- Sat and got bored by people talking at extraordinaty
length about demographics, and plans for future conferences.
Managed to discover the issue with Unix sockets though ! :-)
Did manage to see Al & James'
Worldforge which looked very pretty.
- Off to the student bar ... drink but no food.
After wandering with Al & James through central Manchester for
a while we managed to discover a Chippie which was great.
- Back for some more refreshment & chat, then bed
early.
- Up at 6.00am, breakfast, finished packing - Father
took me to the station. Train to Manchester - a staggering 130UKP
return trip.
- Fixed a couple of ORBit2 sillies, and then spent hours
banging my head against linc brokenness - trying to chase why the
Unix domain socket failed to bind with 'Address already in use'
if run without a sleep in the init, sigh.
- Extensively re-wrote chunks of Bill's 'spi' thing,
and commented on it at length; if only ORBit2 worked I could try
and fix his issues. Dog tired.
- Decided to start writing my talk instead.
- Arrived. Managed not to find the hotel despite it
being right in front of me, eventualy noticed it after touring
the locale.
- Met all manner of interesting people / old friends -
Dick Porter, David Faure [ of KDE fame ], Dave, Al Riddock,
Steve GFS, Ole GPhoto, etc. Scoffed biscuits to fob off hunger
pangs.
- Dick's Palm pilot crashed ( reset ) whilst
changing the screen brightness - wicked.
- Several interesting talks, met Luke Leighton - and
his g/f Heather, seems a nice girl, had tea together and discussed
DCE, CORBA, SMB, Advagato etc. nice chap.
- Back to see a reconstruction of the 'Manchester Baby' -
the first stored program computer, very fun.
- Had an extremely long discussion with David Faure about
the overhead of C++, particularly in combination with MI & RTTI, had
a long disassembly session.
- Off to the Chinese restaurant, whilst learning the
marvels of KWord. Sat with Al Riddoch, and had an enlivening
conversation with Andrew [ to my left ] and Al, about many matters
to do with faith, conduct, politics, hacking etc. and much wine.
Andrew it transpires is a X'stian.
- Back to my room - helped Christian polish his RAD
Python / GNOME talk for tommorow - looks good. Fooled around with
mine [ suddenly realized I didn't have MagicPoint installed, or the
MS fonts, or the TTF server - argh... ].
- Sleep.
- A lovely copy of
Component Based Software Engineering, nice to see ones name
in print - and lots of other chapters to read, learn and inwardly
digest, now to try and encourage 6bn people to buy it.
- Tried to build
GStreamer, no joy downloading the somewhat huge auxiliary
packages - doh.
- Committed bonobo-config and libgnome changes.
- Onwards with libgnomeui, seemingly this is not building
with the latest Gtk+, chunks of API been renamed / removed - great,
helper apps renamed too.
- Found a nasty bug in the canvas / gnome-print, assuming
realloc didn't move memory, hit a pango issue instead.
- Owen pointed me at the best pangoft2 setup docs
in gtk+/docs/README.linux-fb, managed to get a semi-working (
not complaining ) pangoft2 setup on a stock RH 7.1 system with:
/opt/ngnome2/etc/pango/pangorca
[PangoFT2]
FontPath = /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1:/usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript
AliasFile = /opt/ngnome2/etc/pango/pango/pangoft2.aliases
and /opt/ngnome2/etc/pango/pangoft2.aliases
sans normal normal normal normal "urw gothic l"
serif normal normal normal normal "urw palladio l"
monospace normal normal normal normal "nimbus mono l"
- Phone call with Bill ( working on Atk+ with Sun ), having
issues with getting ORBit to play ball with him.
- Read the
Desktop entries spec, a strange place to store mime information if ever I saw one.
- Mail processing, did a bonobo release with the various
improvements of the last aeon. Listened to 'True' Euphoria - quite
interesting really.
- Did a gb release ... lots of nice work going on there
from Ravi, Frank and others.
- Caught myself folding my pyjamas - what a worrying
influence this young lady is having on me.
- Went shopping for J' shaped presents with some
success - spent a small fortune on new leather soled, stitched
shoes - if the soles on these don't stay on, I don't know what
will. Rubbed the soles with wet and dry paper to improve their
mew. [ 2 cats on a roof, which one falls off first ? - the one
with the smaller mew ].
- Re-built all of gnome2 after the glib header move,
hmm - cunning. Got ripped by the parents for not telling them I
was eating out.
- Off to cell group, very interesting. Met a guy called
'Tim' from Pembroke, a Doctor - lived with Rob Waller, a christian
I knew from Downing whilst being medical. Told me that a "your
relationship with God is what it's all about, a wife is just
someone you walk with for a time" - very apt. I keep forgetting
that.
- Discovered that if I get up super on Friday I can
delay setting off for Manchester until another day. Managed
to get the new Red Hat print-tool to setup my printer at last.
- Mostly ported libbonobo to ORBit2, only the legacy
config compat code left, discovered I needed to port bonobo-config
first ... did that, fairly easy mercifuly.
- BT Openworld net connection died ... Bed.
- Up midday. Did some CVS surgery for Mike who has done a
lovely clean on the bonobo embeddable interfaces.
- Chewed mail. Mark got his CVS account and committed a
load of lovely code to ORBit2 - great.
- Tested and uploaded Dietmar's nice new bonobo-conf 0.5
release, very impressive evolution-calendar-config demo - nice work.
- Struggled with ORBit2, fixed a daft bug with wierd
symptoms where the CORBA requests were not being de-queued after
use, and getting id conflicts - and then being re-processed. Fixed
a daft inheritance method ordering issue. Back to getting libbonobo
to work with ORBit2 and ORBit-martin-forked in tandem.
- Played with gtkhtml2, very nice it seems - although I
know nothing of the intricacies of html/xml/dom/css/tla/etc., it
seemed fast and functional.
- Got libbonobo to build with both ORBit2 and
ORBit-martin-forked using --enable-orbit2.
- Talked to Cactus about his cut&paste persist ideas,
Alex sent a nice patch to accelerate Nautilus' use of bonobo [
and Evolution as well ].
- Robert & Thomas bought me 'True Euphoria' some sort
of club style music for my birthday to simplify my musical
tastes :-). Ripped it to mp3 since my CD player doesn't want
to work with SGI's xfs + devfs + RH 7.1 combo; hmm.
- Up early, mail processing.
- Caught train back to Hove, merged up a Mark ORBit2
POA fix patch - must nag Martin about a CVS account for him.
- Merged up Martin's ORBit2 fixes.
- Oaf it seems does work quite nicely, but for some
reason the new oaf won't talk to the old oaf ... hmm. Did some
more compat tests ... no compat problem.
- Forced running the new oaf, works fine when done
manualy. Wierd, added an entry barrier caught it in the debugger,
stepped through - works fine. Remove debug code - broken. Insert
a 1 second sleep into oaf - works fine - horrors.
- Discovered oaf works with ~1/2 sec usleep, but not
less - started moving the delay around to try and chop the
error - gack.
- Put:
ORBIIOPIPv4=1
in my ~/.orbitrc file, so that I could at least
make IP connections to myself, since Unix domain sockets didn't
want to play ball - suddenly everything worked beautifuly.
- Started porting libbonobo to ORBit2 in a dual build
mode so we could go back at anytime to ORBit-martin-forked.
- Fun hacking, limited by typematic rate again instead
of brain overload; excellent.
- Sunday - up extremely late. Off to Church in the
park - a fun day for all the kids and fairly low on adult
content really.
- Lunch in the park - ate strawberries out of jam
jars - with cream from a use peanut butter jar etc. very
lovely.
- Back home - slept for a good chunk of the
afternoon. Idled around, went for a run, nice tea, bed.
- Up early, J up earlier than scheduled too. Checked
E-mail.
- Off to see J's sister Sue for lunch, met up with
her, then off to eat at her boyfriend (Clive)'s house. Admired
his lovely cottage that he has re-built, and his extensive and
organised garden. Clive owns a cardboard tube manufacturing
business.
- On to see J's friend Cat, who lives in a converted
stable - an amazing house with a 2 level effect throughout - a
balcony overlooking the lounge eg.
- Went with Cat to feed the foal 'Chip' some disgusting
looking mixture of stuff.
- Onto a nice restaurant with Sue, Clive & Cat, nice
meal - parted in the car-park.
- Home - dead tired.
- Couldn't sleep, up at ~4.30am to hack. Made tea for J'
at 6.30am - she's off to London for a day work - and I get to keep
The Economist to read - wow.
- Eazel's profiler is nice, caught a serious inefficiency
in Bonobo UI code's handling of stock pixmaps, essentialy converting
each stock icon -> GdkPixbuf: nastily wasteful.
- Hacked at 'prof' a while, added a dump stats to stderr
feature, and some command line options for short lived programs.
- Nailed one bottleneck in the UI code, ~ 40% faster for
my test case - is it good enough ? sent patch to Alex.
- Looked at ORBit2 again, encouraging mail from Mike who
is sorting out the compound document mess in Bonobo 2.0 - excellent.
- Slept all afternoon - very tired. J' woke me up on
returning from work.
- Out in the evening with Ryan ( a US weapons operator,
co-pilot type person ), and 2 friends of Myriam's from Holland.
- Back, sat around with candles, J' very georgeous.
- Slept like a log.
- Up early, Miguel very supportive and kind, problems
seemingly being resolved. Apparently the Hub conspiriacy goes to
the very top
of US government :-)
- Martin back, looking at ORBit2 - great.
- Train to Newmarket, chewed more mail, Mike K. fixing
libbonoboui, better and better. Played with MrProject to distract
myself, the underlying structure seems to be improving nicely.
- Wrote a long mail explaining myself on the train.
- Got a nice analysis of Nautilus performance from Alex,
rather interesting. Started to tackle bonobo to find a way to
replicate and accelerate.
- Out to Julia's cell group - prayer walking round
Newmarket - a den of gambling and other misc. vices. Onto the
pub.
- Bed.
- Up earlyish. Decided to take a day off ORBit2 work and
make gnome-libs 2 work more elegantly.
- Trashed my Gnome 2.0 install, and started from scratch
again. Spent ages locating pkgconfig's new resting place which is
here.
- Nice mail from Christian, who is it seems doing very
well for himself.
- Got Gnome 2.0 up and running again by following Ravi's
instructions
here, they work nicely.
- Very distressing mail via Miguel; considered tendering
my resignation from Ximian, and Gnome. Mostly extreme sadness at
my own foolishness I think. If only I got my self worth not from
a job well done but God, then I might be less of a fool.
- Off for a social with cell group, lots of
encouragement, 3 halves of marriages there to re-assure me that
I'm not going totaly loopy.
- Back, read mail, some kind words from Alan, bed.
- Up at midday, set to work on making it possible to move
in my bedroom - discovered credit card bills to pay, stacks of as yet
not-processed boring things, doh. Found my map booklet of Dublin -
just too late to be useful.
- Finally binned my paper diary, Evolution calendar is
doing all the hard work these days.
- Started to merge ORBit2 'orbit-small' branch into the
ORBit2 mainline ...
- Sent my slightly more considered reply to Havoc's "Fuck
you Michael" E-mail, tried to point out the irony of the ( non-existant )
Hub. Sigh, what it is to be awfully insecure. Mailed J'.
- Got on with some useful work at last.
- Depressing mail from Owen, and DV, doh.
- Dinner, got on with ORBit2.
- Encouraging phone call from Elliot, really good to talk
to him, calmed me down a lot, focused back on making ORBit2 kick some
serious butt.
- Went for a run before bed, but got distracted by Anthony
Trollope on a video, sigh.
- Woken by squeak of my bedroom door - J' sleeping in my
bed [ nice and hard ], me sleeping in my Brothers room. Got up.
- Breakfast, a nice sunny day - then set off for "Devil's
Dyke", where we went for a little walk towards Truly Hill, very lovely,
a clear day - could see for miles. Lots of hang-gliding, and paragliding
going on - a rather packed sky.
- Back to the pub at the top for a light lunch, and studied
Wayne Grudem's excellent "Systematic Theology" for a little, the
distinction between 'common' and 'saving' grace, very interesting.
- Back home, and had a snooze with J - so tired, lovely to
sleep with her in my arms.
- Parents arrived home - checked my mail, hmm. Depressing
really.
- Lovely birthday dinner cooked by Mum, Dad & J'.
- A whole smorgasboard of nice presents from Julia, quite
unexpected really. A lovely backpack for my laptop - to stop me getting
severe back strain - really hard to find for my model. A nice book, and
underwear to replace those with obvious ( and embarrasing ) holes :-)
- Sadly said g'bye to J' - we've been together for ages now
it seems hard to be apart again.
- To work on the mail mountain - flamage everywhere. We the
senseless, led by the clueless are doing the useless to obstruct the
sensible. Argh, politics and interfering non-contributors.
- Sadly, the nice, humble, active hacker, who has been
working on Gnome 2.0 for the longest got sick of it and walked away.
Simply because he is too nice to fight the morons, gargh.
- Mark McLoughlin started sending me nice patches for
ORBit2 - wow, what a hero, this is cool.
- Chewed some conference and other more long term stuff.
- Looked at the ongoing gb work - nice.
- Wracked brains for nicer things for J's B/Day, soon.
- Stayed up rather late. Sleep.
- Woken too early, breakfast - praise, discussion, prayer,
communion together.
- Discovered the house came with 2 air rifles, one .22 with
telescopic sight - off for a tad of shooting pratice with the lads.
- Lots of volleyball, house cleaning - then home.
- Church in the evening, extremely good sermon on Ezekiel
and God's feelings about society.
- Stayed up extremely late with J' talking about various
interesting things, and praying for my rather jaundiced view of
myself and others.
- Bed late.
- Saturday, up extremely early. Off with J. to HandCross to the
Vicar's modest wedding present [ a house and estate :-], for a
weekend on 'living in the spirit'.
- Two people from a church on a run down council estate
in Eastbourne came - apparently the ambulance often doesn't go in
there if you ring for it - Jo and Suzy - golden oldies.
- Series of talks, dinner, more talking. Went for a walk
around the estate for a bit. Very pleasant.
- Stayed up very late in the evening, praying for each
other - rather an emotional time for many. Got to know each other
a lot better.
- Bed knackered.
- Up early, built the new linc, started again at ORBit2,
pwrt. getting oaf to work, sigh.
- Dinner with J's parents in Bury St. Edmonds at a Cafe
Rouge - nice food.
- Back to hack.
- Car journey back home.
- Lots of mail flamage - Bonobo-config vs. GConf, the
Good vs. the Ugly. Yet more laughable conspiriacy theories, sigh.
Tried to bring some understanding about - probably ineffectualy.
- They are cranking up the FUD that Gnome 2.0 is not
going to be ready in time.
- Bed, extremely late.
- Up late, finished 2nd part, and finished the 3rd part.
- Time to face the E-mail mountain - 17Mb, argh.
- Chewed half way through, seems to be working well so far.
- Good response to the 'self help' programming tips. Churned
out the 2nd version, must remember to accrete some more for next week.
- Lots of nice work going into gb from Ravi ( finished
school ), Frank and Matthew Mei - great guns, too much to review
carefuly.
- Up late, decided to not start on the mail pile today,
but write up the 3 articles for IBM developerworks on bonobo that
I've been meaning to get to for so long .... 1500 words for the
first article, and just copying the material to massage into the
buffer makes it 1600 words - hmm, savage cutting required.
- J doing lovely sewing of a present for her sister
next to me - how sweet.
- Finished the first draught of the first part of the
Bonobo series.
- Went for a nice run with J, got back, shower.
- Started to work, Mormons arrived - spoke to them for
a rather long time, learned a number of interesting things. Shared
2 Cor 4:2 with them, asked them where the coins were [ they outlive
every civilization in great droves: still digging up Roman coins
just like Jesus held in his hand and said 'render unto Ceaser what
is Ceasers', but strangely ... not a single coin as mentioned by
Joseph Smith ]. Prayed with them, and got on with some work.
- Almost finished the first draught of the second part
of the Bonobo articles.
- Up lateish, packed, off into town. Walked for
miles and miles, managed to find suitable presents for all
the neccessary people at length. Ate at 'Eddie Rockets', too
much food - very American.
- Bus back, wrote note to Lisa, and left for
airport extremely early. Trapped in traffic for an hour - a
horror story of Meeks clutch control. Only stalled a couple
of times ( at crucial moments naturaly ).
- Got to the airport, crossed the foot and mouth
mats - amazingly good the Irish reaction to F&M, everywhere
we visited, car-parks in towns, some shops - all had
disinfectant mats for everyone. Consistantly everywhere,
paths were blocked off, and everyone was talking it extremely
seriously. An amazing contrast to England where there were
seemingly no real precautions even at the hight of the
outbreak. Perhaps due to the area being more rural, perhaps
1/3 of the economy being agriculture instead of 1/20th in
the UK.
- Flew back to Stanstead, Ryan Air - on time and
cheap: lovely. Located the car in the long term car-park -
amazing.
- Tescos & home, quick dinner and exhausted sleep.
- Up early, lovely full Irish breakfast, and off
south to Ennis, stopped at Quin abbey, shut due to foot and
mouth, on to Conemairaknegog [or sim.] a musem of houses, and
various ancient Irish things - including the St Brendan - a
leather boat they sailed the atlantic in - very impressive.
Tea and scone.
- Off to Limereck - the guide book said it was a
dump, crossed the river ( luckily without getting 'the
consumption' ) and looked for thank-you presents with no
success. Lunch.
- Long drive to Lisa's. Talked a lot about J's past
life and boyfriends, in her pre-christian era. Got very
sad and jealous, my student life was extraordinarily dull
in comparison, but perhaps more productive. Also read Diamond.
- Managed to find Lisa's house got an Indian
takeaway. Stayed up and prayed and talked for ages, so that
I could get sorted out.
- Bed.
- Woke very early, bad news. J' had slept even
worse - poor dear. Took one look at the free breakfast and
de-camped to a decent hotel.
- Found the tourist office and tried to locate a
decent church - "I'm sorry we only really have 'catholic'
churches here" - upon further inspection of the paper in
front of here - a whole host of churches were discovered.
- Went to a pentecostal church in a hotel - on
the basis that they would have been singing for hours
before the sermon - so we might catch the teaching.
- Interesting accent of preacher seemed to be due
to his parents being Dutch, speaking Irish Engish [ ie. 'th'
= 't', cramped vowels etc. ] and having been in Brazil as
a missionary's child. Rather difficult to understand the
message - nice people though. "I know I have a bad voice,
but even a sewing machine is a Singer" - joke.
- On to Kinvara to escape Galway and it's
hostels. J' rather distressed by fatigue and life. Found
a lovely B&B for us, single room - 2 beds [ of course ].
- Went for a 3 mile walk around the small castle
and through the back of the village. Guinness and chips
for dinner with my lovely girl.
- Enjoyed the comforts of the B&B, bed early.
Lay in bed grinning at J on the other side of the room,
and talked for hours - quite nullifying the efficacy of
going to bed early. Really lovely to talk so long, and
learn so much about my girl. Sleep.
- Up early, coffee at a bookshop. Drove through
Connemara national park. Stopped at Killmore Abbey / castle,
wandered round - saw their minature replica of liverpool
cathedral - weird.
- Lunch at Clifden in a homely cafe.
- Back on the road to Galway - decided on 3 hostels
that sounded like good places to stay. Parked by the docks.
- Discovered all 3 hostels were full. Managed to
find a place instead at somewhere described as 'clean but
cramped'.
- Off to pizza and then "Bridget Jones' Diary" at
the cinema - very amusing. Drove all the way round town to
find that the overnight car park was right behind the
cinema - doh.
- To the hostel - tried to study in a smokey room
with motor racing on TV.
- Bed - for want of a better name - mattres had
a very apperent 'digging spring feature', bed creaked like
the crack of doom, slept. Awoken by arrival at 3.00am [ and
I thought a late curfew was a good thing ] of scads of
children - Saturday night. Talking on mobile phone, sending
messages, making scads of noise - excellent. Told them off,
with remarkable success.
- Slept ok - great. Up early, shopped for
sandwiches, got some coffee and drove off to Achill Island.
- Drove to the far south west point, and climbed
a small hill to a deserted hut at the top [ loads of deserted
property in Ireland ]. Looked out over the atlantic, amazing
scenery, view & company. Amazing gradation of blues in the bay
behind us as the gently sloping sand gave way to the deep. In
front of us the steep cliffs and the deep ocean. Contemplated
swimming to the US.
- The gaggle (coachload) of screaming tourists
arrived - we left post haste. Descended via another route and
sat for a while by a small river in a hollow enjoying the
wild flowers, peace and surroundings.
- Walked on beach - very sandy, limpets to move
slightly, mussles on the rocks etc. etc.
- Off to the honey pot cafe, had a picnic and then
a coffee. Then to the 'Deserted Village' the relic of a sadly
failed attempt to convert Achill Island by some protestant
missionary hundreds of years ago - lots of remains.
- Sat around in the car and started to read
Jarred Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" - that Miguel lent
me. A set of fascinating insights into the inequalities in
the modern world ( East vs. Wbest, Mauri vs. Moriori,
Western settlers vs. Native [Americans, Australians etc.] )
in an extremely successful attempt to crush the 'obvious'
explanation that in some way the Westener is some way
superior to the conquered. Very, very interesting.
- Very amused by the name 'Overkill' given to the
rapid extintion by humans of 'incurably tame' species - who
had never evolved a fear of humans, such as in the American
and Austrailian continents, resulting in the death of all the
'megafauna' - robbing people there of domesticatable power
source / manure / dependable food / bone.
- Back into Westport - had a pint in a hotel with
an interesting ancient map, read more book. Tried to eat at
the 'lemon peel', but got diverted elsewhere. Had a lovely
meal instead elsewhere, more guinness, study and bed.
- More people in the room banging about - 1
ancient couple sleeping next to each other in a tiny bed,
very sweet.
- Slept badly, up earlyish, and off to Westport.
drove 1/2 & 1/2 with J - except she is a considerably
slicker driver. Had a picnic lunch 1/2 way in the garden
of a very beautiful, English looking, stately home near
Stokestown.
- Arrived at Westport, and booked into the Hostel,
only 9 IrP / night. 13 IrP ~= 10 UkPs. Then went for a walk
around a pretty headland on the coast - amazing sky,
mountains, sea, sun and cloud, beautiful girl, idylic -
mental note: God is too good to me.
- Had dinner at a small pub near the hostel,
back - some bloke had put his stuff on J's bed - hmm. Got
some new (bunk) beds. Studied the bible together and bed.
Other people arrived and banged about only slightly.
- Slept badly, rather like a sea monster: only
partialy submerged. Up late.
- Bus into town, eat at "nude" a highly trendy
place supposedly owned by Bonno [ or something ], cheap
and extremely electric green.
- Off to Trinity - went round the book of Kell's
exhibition, amazed again how lovely the trinity library is,
and how tasteful the exhibition was. The exhibition again
on the beggining of printing - strongly protestant - but
this may be due to 'us' wanting to give the word of God to
as many people as possible in a form they could read. Also,
had a nice printed [ for bulk ? :-] papel indulgence on
display.
- Had a pint at Gotham's [ raining rather a lot ],
got the bus back, had dinner, talked for ages - then bed.
- Up at the very crack of dawn, J brought me tea
in bed - lovely girl.
- Mad rush to airport, nearly missed the plane.
- The hire car was considerably more expensive than
the flight: amusing, told the man confidantly that I didn't
need the collision damage wavier insurance for 5 IrP/day since
I wasn't going to crash.
- Nearly crashed in middle of the town - unprepared
for the generaly appaling standard of Irish driving - either that
or wasn't awake. Got to Lisa's (J's friend).
- Walked into town and lay on a blanket in the park in
the sun and eat O'Brians' sandwitches - lovely. Back to L's cooked
her dinner, chatted for a while [ a nice girl ] and bed.
- On holiday - horay.
- Chewed mail, a somewhat massive backlog. Julia's
parents arrived. More mail chewage.
- J's Dad painted the front door and installed a
safe in the wall, while I tried to catch up.
- Fixed Owen's re-enterancy bug inside the event
source, and some other acute brokenness in the removal
mechanism.
- Wrote a super long mail to Martin about selection
stuff, it seems to be all falling into place quite nicely now
which is encouraging.
- Worked late processing various bits.
- Out for a nice Indian meal with J, bed.
- Up early, off to J's church - an extremely
wooly service. Myriam was teaching on the Holy Spirit - a
controversial subject. Learned some things, under-convinced
on others.
- Back for lunch - very nice. Dozed in the garden
in the sun in the afternoon.
- Off to StAG for the 5.00 service. Mark Ashton
(again) on the Exodus. Rather an amusing passage, the
Israelites' army marched boldly off until they caught a
glimpse of the super hard Egyptian army in the distance at
which point they came out with the priceless "were there not
enough graves in Egypt that you lead us out ?" to Moses. NB.
the Israelite slaves had been the labour behind the legendary
Egyptians love of lavish tombs. Lots of other rather good
points.
- Got back, and went for a run with Julia, talked
lots and didn't die - despite the somewhat marathonesque
distance. Realized that although both Mormons and Muslims
think their scriptures are copies of those written in heaven
on gold plates, that God giving the law at Sinai was
instructive. Whilst the disobediant Israelites were busy
making their golden idols - God wrote the ten commandments
on the rock.
- Tea, read the bible & bed.
- Up late, to S&A's for breakfast, then to AT&T
research labs to park, then punting.
- Punted down the backs, past the various colleges,
sunny and overcast in worrying succession. Had an ice cream at
Jesus green.
- Back for a pint at the anchor, then onto 'all bar
one' for ham egg and chips. Onto AT&T to see Sean's funky VoIP
telephone, and it's various cool applications. Lots of funky
VNC usage - used the Compaq iPAQ as a mobile telephone - with
a wavelan card [ although you had to hold it upside down
to talk ] - very cool.
- Dropped S&A back at their home, and off to CICCU
bible reading. Mark Ashton preaching on 2 Timothy, lots of
interesting points, few of which I was expecting.
- Back home, tea and bed.
- Up very early ~ 7.00am, breakfast and Richard took
me to the station on the way to work.
- Bought a 'Linux Format' - interesting, mostly
accurate - some amusing typos, eg. consistantly calling CORBA
COBRA in an article on Soap [ appeases the spell checker no
doubt ].
- Hacked away at ORBit specific profiles and unix
domain sockets. Discovered more horrendous brokenness in linc,
argh - it's just a total mess.
- Got to Julia's, more investigation.
- Julia arrived home, looking georgeous as usual.
- Headed off for Cambridge and eventualy managed to
find Sean and Abbie's - the directions involved a white stone -
there being rather a number of prominant white stones cunningly
placed as red herrings.
- Found them in the end, by the power of mobile
telephony. Got changed, and chatted, met Sean's sister Sarah.
- Formal hall at Downing, very pleasant - lots of old
friends turned up which was quite lovely, off to the Bar
afterwards for table football and misc. interesting discussion.
- Back to Sean & Abbie's and then to their old home for
bed, talked to J for a while & slept.
- Up late, bit of hacking, lots of packing.
- Train to Sutton, reviewed bits of bonobo-config code
for inclusion into bonobo, a number of suggestions, queued a load
of mail.
- Got picked up by Richard Buckel at the station, he was
upset since he just crashed one of his cars into another of his
cars. Off to his house, met Narissa and Derby.
- Sat around and talked, eat a nice dinner and talked
until extremely late.
- Awoken early for no good reason by a younger brother /
Mother combo - hmm.
- Got on with hacking ORBit2, trying to work out why it
is behaving strangely with the orbit-specific profiles.
- Added a regression test for '#pragma inhibit'.
- Very impressed - on the GB list some guy posted a
fragment of a virus he had received and wanted to know how to run
it:
The code I want to execute is the following :
Execute UnCode("... a lot of chars ...")
Function UnCode(sCoded)
For I=1 To Len(sCoded)
CurChar= Mid(sCoded, I, 1)
If Asc(CurChar) = 15 Then
strChr= Chr(10)
Else
strChr = chr(asc(CurChar)-5)
End if
UnCode = UnCode & strChr
Next
End Function
Fine I thought, a harmless mail indeed - however it must
be a fairly common virus signature since, and I was impressed to
get this from one machine:
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 00:42:15 +0100
From: EXIM Mail System
To: gb-admin@helixcode.com
Subject: Virus / harmful content found in EMail
Your EMail with subject '[GB]executing simple script', sent to the recipient(s)
someone@eim.surrey.ac.uk
contains a virus or other harmful content.
The message has NOT been delivered to the recipients.
Please contact the postmaster (mailto:postmaster@eim.surrey.ac.uk) for further information.
--
Message generated by exiscan 1.00
Looks like a useful piece of software, even if it's somewhat
paranoid.
- Postal ballot applications closed at the town
hall - argh, un-believable, extremely irritating.
- Went to Cell group at Mark and Ruth's, lovely dinner,
fascinating set of insights into the female psyche from the men
present, a most encouraging time.
- Back home, setup squid, bed.
- Up extremely late, re-set the alarm 3 times. More mail
chewage at length, interesting times.
- Back to dynany in ORBit2, ported it, then ported the
regression test suite. Nicely in ORBit2 we comply far more fully to
the DynamicAny spec.
- Getting some ugly memory corruption from somewhere
provoked by test-dynany which is fairly evil.
- Tried to encourage a few people to work on Gnome 2.0,
it looks like Rusty will be working on sorting the canvas out -
horay.
- Tried to encourage some of the people working on
satelite ORBit projects to give me input on my ORBit2 work.
- Found memory corruption and fixed - all dynany tests
pass, fixed the bug in stable too.
- Monday, up late - went for a run round the two parks with Julia, felt
not altogether dead afterwords - a good sign.
- Discovered J's car tire had gone flat, and having removed it that
it was severely worn in 1 place [ cut wire sticking out ] seemingly having
almost blown out, and was badly worn around the inner rim - worrying. Replaced
it.
- Organised visiting Richard, various train times et-al.
- Tea, and J' left for home.
- Hard-core mail chewage, caught up with the clipboard, ref
counting vs. leases and various other errudite discussions I had been
ignoring whilst on ORBit2.
- Sunday - church in the morning.
- Back for Sunday dinner, washed up, sat around for a while.
- Off to practice for church in the evening, J went to see her
Aunt & Grandmother who live nearby.
- Back for tea, organised and booked our holiday for the week
after next.
- Bed late.
- Up late, lunch. Thomas arrived home from school.
Off to see Grandma, and then onto shopping. Power cut in the Co-Op made
all the cash tills reboot, running OS2 warp on 486/DX 33's with 32Mb of
RAM seemingly. Bought J' some nice pink shoes to go with an outfit of
hers.
- Back home for tea, and then for a walk around the park, and
off to a nasty mock georgian pub for some hopeless pool playing.
Saturday, walked around the park, shopping.
- Back home, watched the end of trigger happy TV and then
'Waterworld' which was feeble in its execution, 2 dimensional in its
characterization, and unconvincing in the development of many of it's
themes. Someone took themselfs too seriously.
- Up at 7.00 or so, hacked for a while on ORBit2.
- Off for a run, lunch, more hacking.
- Tried to reason with various people on misc. design
issues.
- Richard Buckell - an old friend from school phoned
me: wow.
- More work. Julia arrived in the evening.
- Stayed up not extremely late, talking and fooling about.
- Up early at 6.00am, getting re-synched hopefully,
still feeling somewhat dead.
- Chewed mail, wondered why the bonobo docs seem to
have such appalling coverage at the new status page.
Started looking into it - mostly gtkdoc brokenness to my mind, and
a load of macros.
- Documented a load of bonobo macros.
- Continued with ORBit2.
- Eddie Bleasdale rang up - he's been successful in
wringing money out of the UK Government to investigate 'Open Source'
[doh] PKI infastructure, which is great.
- Finaly sorted out the linc / ORBit2 mess, got Elliot's
approval and committed it, got to work benchmarking. It seems that
I'm ~5% slower than the large stubs / skels and 50% of the size.
Sadly I think this is because of some heavy duty inefficiencies that
have yet to be ironed out in ORBit2. Still, it's as yet unoptimized.
- Continued hammering bugs out of the typecode code.
- Bed.
- Up at 5.00am - the dreaded itch. Started "The Global
Warming Debate" by the ESEF, the first writer an economist was
very interesting - it can be summed up by the following:
- We don't know that the world is definately
warming, given recent satellite data.
- If the world is warming, we don't know what
is causing this change - man or nature
- We don't know whether a warmer world is good
or bad.
- Breackfast, and mail chewage, tried to contribute
meaningfully to Gergo's thoughts on cut, paste & monikers -
interesting stuff.
- Slept most of the rest of the morning and afternoon.
- Out to the park for lunch, and playing some strange
ball game with the 20s-30s from Church, great fun - then played
in the children's playground briefly, before de-camping to the pub.
- Back to bed.
- At some stage it changed day unexpectedly while I
was hacking, continued the fight.
- Arrived at LHR, tube to Holbern, dragged my luggage
to J's. Met her and had some more breakfast, off to the Australian
Embassy - sat around together for a while catching up a little, as
she waited for her butchers ticket to come up.
- Off home, great to see Father, and later Mother.
Feeling totaly dead beat.
- Bed at 7pm.
- Discovered I'd left tons of debug on inside libole2,
groan - another release with #define DEBUG 0 instead of 2.
- Meeting with Miguel before I left, stocked up on
marketing type stuff - lots of monkeys, forgot to leave the
cave keys for Joe, and had to bribe the night watchmen with
monkeys to look after it quickly. Printed scads of documentation
out on the high speed printer, managed to get no paper cuts.
- Said goodbye to everyone I could find, off to the
airport.
- Really missed suspend to disk - stupid bios doesn't
believe the partition type, it wants magic inside the partition.
- Worked away at ORBit2 - it seems there are some nasty
linc issues hiding the leaks, reverted most of my linc work and
started again.
- I finaly realized that local server objects shouldn't
have a connection pointer on them, only remote client objects
should. Struggled on all night and morning with the mess between
linc and ORBit2 - lots of thoughts about things, but nothing
working.
- Up early, off to Church, there was a children's
singing and acting something or other. They got a standing
ovation [ whilst the ( actualy extremley good ) Bach Offertory
didn't - doh. Studied
Daniel 6. I'd never noticed that if he had just not prayed
for 30 days, he could have got away with it. I also didn't know
that
prayer towards Jerusalem was not just random wierdness and
superstition but obediance.
- Bagel for lunch, back to the office. Sat around and
talked to Daemon and Chris, more lunch at the Steak House.
- Big argument with Miguel over the war on drugs, felt
rotten, late for the evening service.
- Excellent sermon on Miracles by Gordon. Lots of points.
- Miracles are miraculous, "Expect a Miracle" is
an oxymoron, they don't happen often by definition.
- Text
Acts 3 - the healing of the cripple from Birth who hadn't walked for
40 years
- Notable, is that the miracle is undeniable,
it is not something you have to 'percieve' by faith, or to claim
or whatever - the only suprising question is "How did you do it ?"
another person saved by
faith
- Indeed, this was a obvious quality job, complete
recovery, not just walking but
jumping and praising God.
- It appears there are seasons of Miracles in
scripture, they come in droves, and then nothing. Miracles, or
"signs and wonders" as they are commonly called, usualy acompany
God's redemptive work in history. Eg.
Moses and the deliverance from Egypt. But then Gideon is wondering
where all the signs and
wonders are ? and he God delivers Israel through him. Again,
Daniel after being rescued from the Lion's den,
prayed for his people's redemption, and was instantly answered.
- Some confuse themselfs with
Mark 11:24, into thinking that some kind of self delusion is
neccessary to be healed. And indeed the text is problematic, however -
if viewed from the angle of non measurables such as God's forgiveness
(cf. verse.
25 ) it makes total sense to believe you have received it and move on.
- Of course, the pinacle of redemptive history
being Christ, and the smorgasboard of miracles that were performed both
in
Quantity and
Quality.
- The Saducees are like today's rationalists, they
accepted a Hellenized faith, they thought Miracles had happened in the
past, but didn't happen today - and they didn't belive in the
resurrection or personal supernatural beings Jesus
told them, they were in error because they knew neither the Scriptures
nor the power of God.
- It sounds another oxymoron, but scripture suggests
a distinction between ordinary and
extra-ordinary miracles. Indeed, these extraordinary miracles
were proof of
apostleship - exceptional, since there were plenty of miracles in the
Corinthian church. Again, in the early church Tertulian says they had
plenty of miracles: healings, exorcisms, prophecy - but no ressurections
since the apostles.
- But some misunderstand the
John 14:12 text to mean that we should all be performing miracles,
and we should - but what is the miracle ? is it 'Greater' than Jesus' ?
if so - we should be providing wine for umpteen weddings ? we should be
feeding the 3rd world miraculously ? but not even the apostles did
greater miracles - true, Paul resurrected a guy - but he was only dead
a minute - not
4 days - and with a bad smell. So perhaps the real miracles in
spiritual terms are those Jesus talks about in
Mark 2, the gospel of forgiveness and new life.
- God can do anything, and choses to do in his own
time - as the end of time draws near we should expect heavy duty,
exceptional miracles. But we should not be confusing reports of the
miracles of today, with those of scripture which when they came were
unarguably awesome and un-deniable.
- Finaly, our approach should be that of
Daniel 3:16-18
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to the king, "O
Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this
matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve
is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O
king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we
will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set
up."
- Back to the office, apologised to Miguel, and bed.
- Looking forward to returning to the green and
pleasant land. Up early.
- To the office, Martin's been doing great work
on gnome 2.0, fixing bonobo issues etc. Got to work doing
a libole2 release for Jody. Discovered that the large file
writing is a fairly incurable bug of Tenix' - hmm. Released
without a fix - depressing.
- Went to try out the gymn - rowed for a handful
of minutes - saw 2 others rowing - an incompetant man, and
a competant woman. Some cycling, another few minutes at the
maximum setting of the machine - it still relies on you
pedaling far, far too fast. Felt clapped out, off for a shower,
felt dizzy - nearly sick - hmm, probably overdid it.
- Back to the office to recover.
- Some more ORBit2 re-factoring loving action, a
little more polish. Still leaking great hunks of memory, but
the profiler refuses to tell where they are going.
- Alex' birthday, back to the cave to have a
meeting with Miguel - he went to sleep instead, watched
"The Spanish Prisoner" - rather good.
- Bed.
- Up early, watched the latest friends - Monica &
Chandler got married - very scary.
- Hacked away at ORBit2 - got a leak free server, and
a handful of ORB leaks in the client.
- Jacob's getting a wierdness in ORBit on HP-UX,
mallocating - 800Mb succeeds instantly and only fails on the
2nd pass, ( a 1Gb machine ).
- Off to Music Espresso - a strange music shop hidden
in what looks like a building out of a gangster movie, bought some
music for Federico.
- Back, made the client leak free & tried to profile
ORBit2 using the eazel-tools profiler, just getting a lot of
locking overhead on the profile, hmm.
- Off to the cave to play Diplomacy with Ronnie, Taylor,
Travis, Nat, Chris and Dave. As France I formed an alliance with
England (Travis) and Nat (Germany) and beat up Italy (Ronnie) and
Russia (Taylor) and came to a stalemate against Dave (Austria) and
so had a 6 way draw. An interesting game.
- Bed.
- Struggled onwards with ORBit2 - it started leaking half
of the memory it allocated, now down to only 5% - what an improvement.
- Fought with libtool-1.4, stupid, stupid thing.
- Havoc helped me get libtool sorted - seemingly you need
to not upgrade to the rawhide autoconf, stay at 2.13-10, and it's far,
less tolerant of acconfig wierdness, meaning that any aclocal macro
conflicts screw you totaly.
- More ORBit2 hacking, wrote to J at length, bed.
- Up at 1.00pm, at least an hour before Miguel - NB. always
get up before the boss.
- Went for a run - felt virtuous, watched Tivo for a while,
realized I should work.
- Hacked ORBit2, wow ... going well.
- Got ORBit2 branch orbit-small to pass all the regression
tests [ except 2 that are just evil ref counting bugs inside the ORB
proper ], wrote the CORBA_Context regression tests, and made that work
- Halleluja. Considered writing my strace - like argument dumping
function for CORBA - thought I'd like to make oaf work instead,
fiddled inside oaf.
- Dinner with Miguel, interesting & exciting times.
Understood a whole lot more about garbage collection - great. Boehm's
conservative collector is for slow, wimps :-)
- Committed a load of ORBit2 stuff burning a hole in my HDD.
- Built the latest CVS wine.
- Fiddled with W2K a bit, installed a load of stuff, played
with wine some more, grabbed vmware.
- Bed.
- Up late, to the office - continued restoring the system,
got to a point where I could hack ORBit2 and stopped.
- Hacked ORBit2 for a while - got the local case to work,
nice, now to get the local case to work going through my arg mangling
scheme ...
- Off to the Fitness Club ( in the same building ) to try
and buy some headphones - apparently you get them free on joining.
Joined so I could use the ergos. Got no headphones - hmm.
- Back for more hacking - tried to dig out W2K Advanced
Server from MSDN.
- Spent absolutely forever installing W2K - appalling driver
support - had to download pretty much everything from dell.com - ahh,
it looks great though in 640x480 - with no networking, etc. etc.
- Re-configured Linux - grief it boots quicker - it even logs
in quicker - with Nautilus, and I know what it's thinking - which is
re-assuring.
- Quiet time, bed.
- Up early to write to J.
- Played with bonobo-draw, caught a nasty re-enterancy problem
in the canvas - yuck. Released bonobo-1.0.4.
- Started cleaning the laptop up to cut down space wastage
started with 14,100Mb used, now at 7,100Mb - just deleted every other
bit. Starting to wipe the machine, for a fresh RH 7.1 + XG 1.4 install.
- Wow - installed XFS from the RPMS - trivial - a toddler could
do it perfectly - contrasted with the evils of building patched kernels
with ReiserFS - amazingly easy.
- Installed Prion on top of RH 7.1 - very nice, great to see
a fully working system for once in ages - pretty slick.
- Stayed up late playing.
- Up early, off to Church.
- Gordon talking about election, Jacob & Esau and their
reconciliation - American mothers day - lots about Mothers.
Got to
Genesis 33:1-11. Interesting the similarities between the deceptions that
Jacob used, and those that happened to him - reaping what he sowed.
- After church ate in the park - was rather disgusted by the
Second Amendment Sisters -
'Armed Informed Mothers Rally' - a special Mothers day meeting. I read
their literature through carefuly. Amusingly reading the paper on how
stringent Massachusets gun ( and offensive 'mace' / 'pepper spray' ) laws
were, there was a 'Now do you feel safer ?' semi-rehtorical at the end -
and in fact I did. It's great to know that not just any whacko can buy
an assault weapon, or even mace spray.
- Went and talked to a 'Pink Pistols' guy - funny name, practiced
being civil and listening to someone I profoundly disagree with. Ultimately
I think the argument has to be that I think I personaly ( and the people
around me ) are less safe if I have a fire-arm, [ nevermind them
all carrying concealed weapons ], than if only the criminals have guns.
And since I have no paranoiac conspiriacy theories about the state trying
to enslave me, and am confidant in the Police' ability to protect me,
have a reasonable grasp of the probability of my own demise per unit
time, and am not afraid to die - I neither want nor need a gun.
- Talked to the policeman standing nearby, he has guns as
a private citizen, sigh. Seemingly there is no understanding that the
widespread availability and manufacture of legal firearms, might lead
to an increased availaility of criminaly held firearms. Also, the
assumption that it is quite good and proper to kill someone in your
home whom you don't know is quite horrifying.
- Some provocative images though
1
2
NB. You're clearly not a good mother unless you keep a snub nose revolver
under the pillow.
- Looked through Simon's photos and discovered some horror
pics of
Imaginator I look rather younger.
- Decided to run-in my new running shorts - simply go
slow for the first 1000 miles. Got further than before without dying.
- Sat around discussing how to break the Realtor inefficiencies
in Boston - realized eventualy that while we had lots of good ideas, none
of us could get too excited about running the business.
- Cleaned the Cave - what a mess, incredible. Hands went extremely
wrinkly with the soap - thought I was going to loose them for a bit.
- Lovely Mexican meal with lots of courses with names I
couldn't remember - cooked by Miguel and his friend Daniel. Excellent food,
good company.
- Watched the latest Friends - then 'Heavy Metal' - an extraordinary
film / cartoon which I didn't really understand.
- Bed - realized I hadn't written to J. must get central heating
in the dog house.
- Up very late, Saturday.
- Off to the Mall to buy some replacement running shorts -
hmm. Finagled a bagel on the way - impossible to eat without getting
plastered in cream cheese.
- Got back to the office - had an huge argument with Miguel
[ and everyone ] about Cannabis.
It seems several issues are being confused, but mostly the reaction is
against the unrealistic, and unethical manipulation of the penal and
legal systems in America by politicians.
- Bought some tickets for 'The Usual Suspects' tonight.
- Asked Miguel's permission and tried to phone Julia -
after a protracted period of frustration ascertained that 011 is the
right invocation - not there, or asleep at 10.00pm, hey ho.
- ORBit2 hacking, trying to write a CORBA_Context
regression test.
- I discovered that Douglas Adams died
yesterday - a great loss to the English speaking public.
- Tried bonobo-draw with Mike Kestner's bonobo canvas
fixes - nice work indeed, few minor issuelets, but looking good.
- Continued work on sorting the remaining indirection
and allocation issues in ORBit2. Made a nice spreadsheet of the
indirection things. Fixed a fatal bug in the Excel export.
- Wow ... got an E-mail telling me to phone Simon,
which I duly did. It seems he is engaged to be married to
Maggie
which is rather shocking, amazing and very pleasing. Great to catch
up with him, and hear how it's all going. Interestingly his new
father in law is Mark Tolliver.
- Rushed off to see 'The Usual Suspects' at the Fenway
Cinema [ in the same building as the office ]. 15 minutes late,
and it still hadn't started due to some tedious talk bit to start
with.
- Back to bed - very late.
- Up not very late at all, strangely woke up a few seconds
before the alarm went off - remembered this happening before
frequently. Does that mean that I wake a lot in the night and look at
the clock and go to sleep again without remembering ? perhaps I should
try with the clock facing away.
- Off to work - had printed another copy of the infamous
Table 1-2, the famished document swallower must have passed during
the night.
- Only in America do they have power assisted staplers -
especialy when it's drasticaly worse than a standard stapler, since
- It swallows batteries.
- It obscures the location that will be stapled,
garenteeing an incorect positioning.
- You can fit your finger in the thing.
- It costs far more.
Stapled it together.
- Free Pizza dinner - what fun.
- Bad news - J. goes to Australia for 6 months in July,
sigh - our life.
- It looks like Yoann Vandoorselaere from MandrakeSoft
did some great detailed analysis on Nautilus performance issues, and identified
a nice bottleneck with a somewhat trivial fix - load the directory
asynchronously where it wasn't doing so.
- Tried to extricate myself from a sticky fix in my
E-mail chess game with James - e4 e5, f4 exf4, d4 Qh4+, g3 fxg3,
Bg2 gxh2, Kd2 hxg1=Q, Qxg1 ... if only I'd know that I should have
done Kf2 instead of d4 - apparently common knowledge.
- Idly implemented corba context's [ with a CORBA context
you can associate a sequence of strings with any method - hmm ].
- Back to the cave for Friends the Simpsons and bed.
- Up late, very lazy - bad, didn't mail J' in time, argh.
- Made bonobo honour the "have_icons_in_menus" setting, that
I never knew existed.
- Realised ORBit2 is totaly broken, the fast local case
just doesn't work eg. sigh. more work.
- Managed to fix several of the issues, stubs / skels /
common compile in a warning free fashion - nice. Got the idl compiler
producing nice skels, very nice in fact eg.
void
_ORBIT_skel_small_test_AnyServer_opAnyLong(POA_test_AnyServer *
_ORBIT_servant,
gpointer _ORBIT_retval,
gpointer * _ORBIT_args,
CORBA_Environment * ev,
CORBA_any *
(*_impl_opAnyLong)
(PortableServer_Servant _servant,
const CORBA_any * inArg,
CORBA_any * inoutArg,
CORBA_any ** outArg,
CORBA_Environment * ev))
{
*(CORBA_any * *)_ORBIT_retval =
_impl_opAnyLong(_ORBIT_servant, (const CORBA_any *) _ORBIT_args[0],
*(CORBA_any * *)_ORBIT_args[1],
(CORBA_any **) _ORBIT_args[2], ev);
}
- Halved the stripped size of the skels - only half.
- Got the support marshaler hacked into the poa, realized
I wasn't supporting CORBA_Contexts - hmm. ignored for now.
- Started to impl. the shrunk de-marshaler, had a funky
idea for a recursive fn. to alloca space for some of the args. in a
readable & efficient way. Got super simple cases working.
- Rested on laurels instead of discovering the next evil
problem - Quit while you're ahead!
- Back home - watched Tivo with Taylor and his friend David.
Taylor had not drunk enough to make his reactions slow enough such
that the Tivo went back to the right spot. I think Tivo should use
cuts to sync it's rewind - easy to detect. Stayed up very late
watching nonsense.
- Up in the morning, jus. Processed mail, split my activity
log - just for Telsa.
- Ettore started assigning me bugs from the evolution heap,
so sat around fixing minor issues in bonobo.
- Today was a sad day for us and Rachel, talked to Nat about
it and got slightly happier.
- Drew pictures on the white board, the ORBit2 thing is
looking interesting - had several ideas.
- Tim Ney arrived - really good to talk to him for a while,
an interesting chap - producer of a movie to be, FSF hero etc.
- Off to Drinking Culture, at John Harvards - with the guys,
Tim turned up again later for a beer too - great.
- Home with Taylor and Abi via Algiers - a place I suddenly
discovered that Nat [ with impeccable taste ] had taken me to when I
first went to Boston [ where I first met Taylor ]. Squashed into the
car with Jacob & Nat.
- Nat was in the mood of shouting psychometric yes/no
questions out of the car window at bystanders eg. "I wish I could be
as happy as others seem to be." or "I am almost never bothered by
pains over my heart or in my chest." reading the questions through is
truly terrifying - the amount of information discernable from the
answers is staggering.
- Got back to discover someone in Nat's parking space,
phoned up to get them towed. Back to the cave for carrots and some
soap about the White House - excellent.
- Bed.
- Up relatively early, depressed by ORBit2 issue.
Decided to hack on
MrProject instead.
- Grokked for the MS project file formats, found
this
hacked merrily away all day at an 'mpx' importer [ an obscure, deprecated by MS,
project file format ]. Got it sort of
working
but needs a lot more loving.
- Off for dinner at UNO's Pizzeria, greasy American food -
and too much of it.
- Back for some more hacking action, got basic resource
importing working
nicely.
- Wrote to J & went to bed.
- Up late, discussed with the cleaning lady as to
where my running shorts might possibly have vanished to, didn't
mention everything was also pink [ too much for her perhaps ].
A tad more ORBit2 hacking.
- Did an analysis on the first pass at my
ORBit2 stub shrinkage improvements to try and persuade Elliot to
commit it.
- Elliot not playing ball - lunch with Miguel.
- Got to work on the drastic skel shrinkage, hit a rather
tedious problem, and decided to call it a day: 'its a day'.
- Bed.
- Church in the morning on
Genesis 25.
- Found the home page of Dr John Emsley
author of "The Consumer's Good Chemical Guide" a book that profoundly
changed my views on the 'green' movement of today, truth and science
reporting in the media - tried to buy some copies.
- Off to Church in the evenin with Chris and Iain.
- Back to watch 'a fish called wanda' - rather amusing,
particularly killing the old lady, and running down the CIA guy.
- Bed.
- Up late - midday. T't office.
- Chewed mail, hacked on ORBit2, fully ported
the orbit-stable small stub engine to HEAD. Just need to
actualy output small stubs now.
- Back to the cave - watched 'Gallipoli' - very
depressing. More hacking.
- Off for Pizza with Miguel - ORBit2 --small is
passes more of the regression tests than ORBit2 plain :-)
and I suspect the buggy [ still not converted to shrunkenness ]
skels / core of brokenness ( personaly ). Halleluja.
- Watched Platoon at midnight - rather better on
the big screen than the cut version on the BBC recently.
- Back to bed.
- Up really early.
- Hacked on ORBit2 all day, ported the stable
regression tests to it, talked to Elliot for a while about a
mystery idl-compiler bug before adding a sed script to the
Makefile to work round it - not my fault.
- At Elliot's insistance put the small stub / skel
code into the main IDL compiler - yuck, mixing sweetness and
ugliness to make more ugliness.
- Went for Mexican with Jacob: an interesting fellow.
- Shrunk _alloc, _allocbuf and temporarily _freekids
successfully.
- Used Nautilus from CVS HEAD - wow ! much faster
than I remember - still slow to startup, but great. Probably
purely psychosomatic, I imagine it's always that fast, but
normaly my brain is more alert. The help browser looks
prettier than I remember, they even have a www.theregister.co.uk
newsfeed for the LHS bar - wow I'm sold.
- Sat around hacking on ORBit2 until 12.30pm or so
with Iain playing ogg things from his new panel applet.
- Back to the appartment, met Miguel - tired from
travelling & Alex. Bed.
- Up early, processed mail. Spent half an hour
processing Dietmar's nice property bag / config datbase work.
- Updated my Gnome 1.4 system, re-built everything
important.
- Looked at ORBit2.
- Used gnome-chess to check how to castle queen side,
( yes I'm dumb ), spent a while fixing applied nastiness of
various sorts and robustifying it - looking much better than
last time though. Rumour has it jpr will release soon.
- Watched some Japanese cartoon about iron and trees,
( Princess Mononoke ) animist animators I suspect.
- Bed early.
- Up midday. Attempted to go for a run, but it
appears that my running shorts have been purloined, either
the washing lady swallowed them in a paroxysm of hunger, or
perhaps one_or_all (Nat, Miguel, Taylor) are closet
cleptomaniacs.
- Chewed mail. Tried to build nautilus to replicate
a bug, installed eel, librsvg, got my 1.4 up to date a bit.
- Put a new
gb-0.0.19 release out to help the debian package maintainer.
- Started to kill BonoboObjectClient in Gnome 2.0, it
never was a good idea - apart from (perhaps) the ability to
aggregate ref / unrefs more efficiently.
- Removed a load of unholy crud from libbonobo, ahh
what joy, ported some of the more sane, clean and complete
monikers across.
- Installed gnoetry, off for UNO's pizza with Iain,
Miguel, Alex & Chris.
- Up very late - lay in bed trying to recover
sleep debt fitfully - rather unsuccessful.
- Processed more mail, lots of nice patches
from Martin, a solution from Federico for my netscapee
woes (add to .Xdefaults)
Netscape*selectForeground: White
Netscape*selectBackground: Blue
- Kicked bugs out of package 'bonobo' on bugzilla,
for some reason people seem to love to submit totaly unrelated
bugs to my package, perhaps I'm the default field. Time to
rename bonobo to zbonobo.
- Grabbed some python tar balls from here thanks to
Johan Dahlin - very good looking cooking indeed.
- Released bonobo-1.0.3 with Federico's focus fixes,
George's sensitivity work and some other misc. fixes.
- Grabbed gstreamer
to have a look at what's going on - libxml grief, refused to build -
sigh. IIRC the 'correct' DV solution is to pollute the global include
namespace with 'tree.h' etc. to make it build with both libxml 1
and 2.
- Started a new e-mail chess game with James, Jpr is
working on the gnome-chess bonobo component - so hopefully chess
inside evolution will be there soon.
- Cleared my mail Queue ... onto hacking.
- Built a HEAD gnome 2.0, whilst playing with gcc.
- Finaly got the toy language frontend ported to gcc 3.1
with a minimum of understanding, beggining to get more familiar with
the delightful 'it must build on any C compiler' syntax, complete
with:
extern tree build_function_decl PARAMS ((char *, int));
void
lang_print_xnode(file, t, i)
FILE *file ATTRIBUTE_UNUSED;
tree t;
int i;
{
... etc ...
}
- Got the ggc garbage collection thing working, hacked
around the poisoning of malloc / free ( as auto-generated by
flex ). Uploaded a new mangled toy.
- Up late, lazed around recovering sleep
debt and stuff. Off to 'au bon pain' for brunch.
- Back via. 'the best coffee outside of San
Francisco', on to the Mall to pick up some sweeties for
Julia's cow-orkers.
- Taxi to the airport, sat around reading AIR
and managed to ( foolishly ) distress Julia by trying to
teach her some algebra to understand the article about
the National debt's account number having a large
imaginary component. Sad to see her go.
- Said G'bye, back in a taxi - very slow.
Hacking time. Miguel has been hard at work - excellent
stuff.
- Dinner at the steakhouse with jpr, zog &
elahey-2.7.1.2.3 very amusing.
- Tried to wrack my brains as to what I actualy did
over the last few days.
- Sunday, up late, very quick breakfast & just in time
for morning church, good sermon - on the evil of the tounge, what
a small part of the body it is and what evil it can cause [ also the
fingers mostly in my case ] -
James 3. Rather personaly challenging.
- Lunch in the park by the paddling pool.
- Wandered over to the Charles playhouse to buy tickets
for the Blue Man Group, watched
people pedaling flat bottomed pleasure boats around in the park, and
headed back for a quick guiness in the bar before the performance.
Performance really rather good, a number of rather wry looks at the
information age, art and commentary, lots of good music, and not as
much paint exposure as expected.
- Back through the park, to a short seminar on the
Christian in the workplace - met some nice people and learned much.
- Onto Gorden preaching on the giving of the holy spirit
in
Acts 2:1-21. Very convincing explanantion of the gift of tounges as
free vocalization and thus, the gift of itself not being any more
miraculous than the gifs of teaching, the giving of liberality etc. but
merely the human voice overflowing into the inarticulate langauge of love.
Various interesting points:
- Linguistic analysis of recorded western tounges
reveales that only the 51-52 phones used in western
speech are used - this conflicts rather strongly with
the view that some ancient or existing language is
spoken, since semetic languages, african etc. etc all
use a different phone-set.
- All of Christ's eartly minstries are contined by his
earthly body - the Church - healing the sick,
interceeding for people, preaching and teaching the good
news, fighting injustice etc. But one - speaking in
parables and enterpreting them for the disciples might
seem to have no NT equivalent. Tonges + Enterpretation
neatly fills this hole.
- Tongues as the fullfilment of Moses' wish in
Numbers 11
verse 29.
- The disordered mass utterance of tounges in Acts 2,
as in Numbers 11:25, but they did not do so again
an exuberant sign, of the fulfilled promise - to be
repeated in sensible order with enterpretation in future.
- A parallel miracle of discernment amongst some of the
hearers of Peter that they were able to discern God's
praise in their tounges - while others only said they were
drunk - a fair assesment of someone free-vocalizing probably.
- Met Iain afterwards, bought dinner, sat in the park and eat
bagels again ... back to bed.
- Up late, retrieved the car from the parking lot,
off to Purgatory Chasm via a local Star Mart for a picnic.
- Arrived and wandered down the chasm, and back
round an unexpectedly long and circuitous route. Beatiful
sunshine, company and scenery.
- Off to a river towards Conneticut and sat on a
stone in the river and ate our lunch mid afternoon. J
explained how she would run chunks of flow in a white water
raft - what a clever bean.
- Haphazardly navigated back to Boston, dropped
the car off, and retired to a local restaurant place,
amusingly we got carded, and only I had ID on me. Clearly
J looks too young. Fries and mayonaise - nice.
- Back to bed.
- Picked up hire car, signed to say that I had read
a massive swathe of text I hadn't read - sigh. Why are lawyers
so pernicious ?
- Wow - automatic cars are so easy to drive, the
thing has amazing clutch control. Careered all over the road
whilst I got used to the car - somewhat scary for J.
- Off to Cape Cod. Got to the bottom of the cape and
stopped off in a car park facing the beach - lots of sand. Went
for a walk down the beach in the fierce wind, could see the grains
of sand moving as we walked. A pleasant stroll, as we walked back
our footprints got progressively more faint, until we couldn't
see them by the steps - such are the works of man.
- Onto a park visitors center, mostly empty - off
season - watched a couple of short documentaries on the cape,
J and I disagree about how long it took to form and the role
of glaciation it seems.
- Drove back to some town on the cape and popped into
an Italian joint to have dinner - rather excellent in fact. Walked
to the dock, and had an ice cream on the way.
- More crazy driving home, parked the car in the garage
near the barracks, popped into CBC for a quick ale. Home, bed.
- Up late, J went for a run, looking georgous as normal.
- Off to the Cheesecake Factory, decided not to order an
entree and to share a main course - since previously had been
crippled by the vasy natcho entree, and not finished the main course.
This time we got to the cheese-cake, excellent tender chicken too.
- Booked a hire car for the next day.
- Off to the office for some reason, then to 'Star Mart'
to buy some real food - brie, baguettes and some nice red wine -
and back to the barracks for a sanely portioned European size meal.
- Up early, more gnome 2 thoughts, more gcc reading.
- xrdb -remove saved me from the evils grdb did to
my emacs ( although grdb let me actualy see the selection in
netscape, sigh ).
- Japenese restaurant in the evening with Ben & Amy,
Alex, Aaron, Miguel. Nice Chicken [chicken], instead of nasty
raw fish wrapped in rice and sea-weed.
- Off to the airport to collect Julia.
- To the barracks, au taxi, a pleasing summary of her
time - seemingly successful and back to sleep.
- Discovered that www.gnome.org had not been updating
my log, but canvas.gnome.org had - gack, fixed.
- Up earlyish, went for a run, slogged my guts a little.
- Into the office, for those who live under a rock
Prion or Ximian's Gnome 1.4
release has gone live.
- Inspired with a way to fix the reference counting
issue.
- Dietmar came up with a great resolution to sooth my
worries - wow.
- Banged away at this tedious ref counting bug, got it
conceptualy under control and then Havoc posted this Faq
extremely amusing mis-advice for any budding C programmer.
6.2: I have a function that is supposed to return a string, but when
it returns to its caller, the returned string is garbage.
You probably returned a pointer to a local array. That doesn't
work. Try using a temporary file, instead. For instance:
char *getstr(void) {
FILE *fp = tmpfile();
fputs(gets(NULL), fp);
return (char *) fp;
}
or
6.9: I have a program which mallocs but then frees a lot of memory,
but memory usage (as reported by ps) doesn't seem to go back down.
You're probably not freeing the memory completely. Try replacing
'free(foo);' with
free(foo);
free(foo);
free(foo);
in case the first free() frees the memory only partially. (Unix
wizards may recognize the parallel with syncing three times before
rebooting.)
etc. etc.
- Today some fully paid up Slashdot moron, announced
Ximian Gnome 1.4 there, failing to put a Ximian link and being
somewhat uncharitable - rather depressing, the low standard of
journalism over there now. Still, thankfully there is still The Register which (BOFH)
aside provides interesting stuff.
- Prion release party in the evening, sadly the
sysadmin's had to traipse off to the co-loc., to replace a dead
RAID disk in the server.
- Today Sun released a C UNO binding, unfortunately its
useless for GNOME since it's not even remotely compatible with the
OMG CORBA binding, sigh. Hopefully they can fix that before it's
too late. Read about it here.
- Tried to build bonobo-python, but fell at the 'grab
this patched automake' hurdle - still, it looks like good work is
going in there.
- Continued chewing the weekend mail, partial InputBox
impl. for gb from Julian Froment - always nice.
- Lunch with J' saw her off to Texas at the T.
- Looked at Federico's focus patch, fixed a minor
bonobo bug. Chased a far more nasty reparenting bug from Iain,
discovered yet another issue - gack.
- Big bust up with Dietmar, probably me being an arse
as normal.
- Back to the cave, Anna was ill with a fluey thing,
Miguel [ wunderkoch ] had created a masterful apple pie which
we enjoyed, and watched friends.
- Bed, didn't say 'bye to Anna properly somehow.
- Sunday, up lateish: 10.00. Off to park street - a
very very good sermon from Gordon. Lots of interesting stuff,
on
Genesis 24, lots about Marriage - arranged - all marriages
are arranged by God - who is extremely interested in arranging
them, from Adam and Eve onwards. Though scripture doesn't teach
arranged marriage, it doesn't condemn it the passage gives
interesting hints. Advanced provision for the women to say no
(5), and her having to consent (58). That God cares about people
enough to answer prayer - even those of the (nameless) servant,
his boldness and practicality. Particularly interesting two
pre-requisites for marriage are consent and a common faith.
Interestingly Moses married a Cushite (a black person), and
when people moaned about it God let them know what for in
Numbers 12.
- Lunch in the park, lay around in the shade for ages
and yet somehow got very sun-burned. A lovely relaxing afternoon.
- Back to the office to see if Iain was around, dragged
him off to Church. Good music in the evening, but sermon a dud.
- Got food and sat in the park, in the dark eating it -
still very warm.
- Back t'barracks. Prayed, bibled and bed.
- Saturday, up earlyish - J already awake. Set off to
the Mall.
- Breakfast, and then shopping - had some running shoes,
socks and shorts bought for me, ominous indeed.
- Dragged home reluctantly, changes [ J looks extremely
good in her running kit - making it almost worthwhile ], and went
for a run.
- Turned out good - managed to keep up and not get
overly knackered. A lovely sunny day too, running along the side
of the Charles river with people sailing on the river nearby, and
the grass looking so green ( the pre-burned out look ). Lovely.
- Home, shower, to Park Street. Had a Finagled' bagel
[ they have a circular saw mounted above a conveyer belt to slice
the bagels which is most fun ] and sat around in the park eating
and things.
- Onto the office, tried to buy tickets for the 'Blue Men'
but they had stopped selling them 5 minutes earlier - argh.
- Sat around talking to Miguel and Anna for a while,
good to talk more deeply, learned lots of interesting things.
- Instead went for Mexian food ( same place ) with
Miguel & Anna, Alex & Ffej.
- Left early to go and see Memento, a rather
confusing film, not inasmuch as threading the plot together - that
was somewhat trivial - but getting the big picture seems impossible.
Also, to what extent he could in fact alter his past memories was
not clear.
- Last T back to the barracks with Harold. A rather
prolongued stint of 'drain' unblocking. Whereas a British loo
has an approximately 6" diameter pipe, and a simple U bend [
and almost never blocks ], the American version [ despite the
culturaly rampant big is beautiful maxim ] has a ~ 3" pipe
which proceeds to pointlessly wiggle all over the shop. What fun.
- Bed late.
- Up at 11.00am - an improvement, is the jet lag under
control ? just in time to have to sync up with Julia.
- Shower & off to the office with Miguel, much discussion.
Foolishly bought pizza for breakfast, only to discover the free
Friday lunch at the office - pizza.
- Relaxed safe in the vague impression that Julia was
arriving that evening.
- 1.15pm, checked mail to see exactly when - apparently
1.15pm. Ran to get a taxi, sped ( sluggishly ) through the snarled
up Boston traffic, ran into the airport, feverishly looked for J'.
- J walked through the gate looking georgeous and
quite oblivious to my worries - had been held on the plane due to
a lack of baggage carroselage, or customs fullness or something:
halleluja.
- Off t'office, got the barracks keys, Tim Ney was around
which was great - really good to catch up with him again - a very
nice man. Reccommended a Mexican restaurant by Miguel (Sol Azteca).
- Quick dinner there and off to the barracks. Slept on
the fouton.
- Up shockingly early: 8.00am, snowing - hmm.
- More libbonobo hacking, the tests are starting to pass,
always nice to have regression tests.
- Steamed into various gnome 2 related tasks, stripped out
a load of ugly creeping nastiness when I discovered G_BEGIN/END_DECLS.
- Got libbonobo to build nice and cleanly, got libgnome to
build similarly, removed extraneous libgnomebase dependency from
libgnomecanvas, and made that build sweetly - on a campaign to fold
libgnomebase back into libgnome.
- In case it's useful to get pango to work with the
canvas' freetype stuff I did:
downloaded the Windows 3.1 fonts from www.microsoft.com.
Unzipped them all:
find -name '*.exe' -exec unzip -o {} \;
Then followed
this
did an rpmfind xfstt, and installed.
copied pango/examples/pangoft2.aliases to ${prefix}/etc/pango
and created a ${prefix}/etc/pangorc file containing:
[PangoFT2]
FontPath = /usr/share/fonts/truetype:/usr/share/fonts/ttf
- Off to 'Drinking culture' for an evening of fun,
refused to serve me alcohol - hmm.
- Chatted to various people - loads of people there,
company bought dinner, Natchos - excellent [ I have become addicted
to them ].
- Bed early, super tired - 10.00 or something.
- Up early, no obvious sickeness, excellent.
Hacking by 8.15am.
- Talked to Martin, and got a Gnome 2.0 build
environment up and running and into some sort of shape.
- Hacked a little on print-conf while things
were building, hit another uncertainty and stopped.
- dist-hook build patches to Maciej and Havoc,
committed them both.
- Today all the trendy, high tech officey type
toys arrived, big comfortable sofas, and bar tables &
stools, and all manner of things such as that. Sat on a
big yellow squashy thing, while hacking to improve the
creative juice flow.
- Big direction discussion with Miguel, felt
rather overwhelmed.
- Hacked at libbonobo franticaly, after a while
started to get pins and needles in my legs - too much
banana seat.
- Killed bonobo-xobject, merging it into
bonobo-xobject, for nice cleanliness wins [ keeping full
source compatibility of course ], sweet. Broke
GenericFactory - sigh.
- Harold came round to complain that the new
bonobo wasn't building - wow, the first complaint rolled in
before it had even built for the first time :-) and all
this despite the humungous warning.
- Much more bonobo fixage with Martin, ultra
speed parallel programming.
- Read a chunk of the gcc code base, tested
my BSE agent.
- Back to the cave at 11.00pm.
- Up late, beggining to sicken - so it seems.
- Packed stuff for Boston.
- Robert's g/f Marie Claire, arrived - seemingly
a very nice girl. Had an almost identical car to J's.
- Washed up partialy, and set off for LHR.Managed
to arrive early, check in, have a nice cup of tea, say
goodbye for now.
- On the plane, started chewing mail, examining
code, writing bits.
- As we got off the plane some oldish geezer
marveled at me getting 5 hours work in on the plane, hey.
- Off to the office - got ensconsed in "The War
Room", sucked mail, chewed stuff, hacked some more, prepared
for jet lag. Most of the guys are out - saw Nat briefly.
- By the simple expedient of lurking on #gnumeric
I discovered this
Almer looks good, but ... comedy gnumeric team photo.
- Rusty pointed me at his latest cool
hack
a new camel SQL store or somesuch.
- Several nice bonobo patches from George & DanW,
looks like we build nicely on MacOS X which is good.
- Off to "The Cave" to sleep, met Miguel - very
hospitable.
- Up early, off to church too early, got roped
into singing hmm, difficult to appreciate the service.
- Home with J' for a cracking Easter dinner,
chocolate Easter eggs etc. dragged off to the sea-front
for a walk, notably it didn't rain much.
- Back for tea and cake, then off to the Duke's
Head ( or sim. ) for a drink with J's cousin Georgina, and
her b/f Adrian, and friend Tom.
- Back for tea, watched the last part of a 3 part
BBC program entitled 'Son of God' looking at Jesus' time,
contemporaries and life. Not bad for an agnostic documentary,
not anti-theistic at least. Then a canned episode of 'the good
life' very amusing.
- Bed.
- Up at 6.00 or so, couldn't sleep. Fixed the
dist-hook issue in bonobo, moved onto evolution, fixed
innumerable build issues, onto mrproject, gtkhtml, eog,
libgda.
- 10.00 rang J - not up yet it seems, 11.00 J
up, collected photos of India - look good, bought Easter
eggs, off into Brighton.
- Wandered around the lanes, down the pier, back
again, off to a Mexican pub for lunch.
- To Louise', J got dressed up - wow. On to
Grant and Anne's in Dormansland Nr. East Grinstead.
- Nice log fire, coffee, good conversation,
a relaxing time. J' left early for dinner with Louise,
stayed on for dinner.
- Back home, processed mail, built various bits,
sleep.
- Up lateish, J. had already been for a run -
very enterprising. Cooked breakfast and off to some sort
of Christian march thing round Newmarket.
- Off for lunch with J's sister Sue in her nice
house in Luton.
- To my house, did a manualy pruned version
of bonobo, to remove the generated files by hand - that
sucks.
- Approved a few patches, sorted stuff out,
cleaned the mail queue.
- J picked me up, and off to Louise' for hot
crossed buns and coffee. Onto the pub for Guiness and
raspberry wine.
- Back for more coffee, cocolates and Jenga.
Back to bed. Typicaly there is a really trivial solution
to my autoconf problem, and Frederic Crozat sent me a nice
link to some nice
autoconf documentation that I hadn't seen before.
- Up late - 2.00pm shower, breakfast, shopping,
sucked mail - a modem is a very slow thing after ADSL.
- Committed some EOG fixes from Martin Norback,
and another translation fix I thought I had committed, doh.
- Read a chunk of automake to work out an elegant
way of fixing my bonobo build problem, read the GNU Make
info, struggled.
- Failed to find a nice solution, need to ask the
gnome-hackers.
- Julia arrived back. Went shopping for food, ate,
talked and slept.
- Up at 6.30am ( or so I thought ) feeling totaly dead,
and bleary eyed, off to Hove station where I discovered my alarm
clock was still on Danish time. 1 hour early.
- Slept on train to the Commonwealth Institute. Arrived
extremely early, helped setup stuff. Everyone got glossies PR
stuff, CDs, Monkeys and T-shirts for good questions - being the
bearer of gifts certainly helps.
- Andrew Watson turned up after a while, gave a nice talk
about the OMG, the OMA and CORBA ( and acronyms in general ).
- Lunch. Still feeling dead.
- Gave the first 2 hours - overran slightly. This was
the glazed eyes section, in which I discovered that only 2 members
of the audience were programmers and that they didn't want to know
about GNOME internals - few laughs.
- Then the flashy demos section, showed them Nautilus
and Evolution, talked about the future of Bonobo, Sun's investment,
etc. etc. Much more positive interest.
- Sat around at the end talking.
- Met Julia, and sat in the park for a while, then train
home for an Indian dinner - totaly dog tired, and not paying
attention to life.
- Up early. Wrote thank-you mail to GUADEC organisers.
- Released bonobo-1.0.0, tried to build xst to prepare
my talk for tommorow - still totaly broken, hmm.
- Reveled in my fast ADSL connection which appears to
be much more stable now - partly perhaps because Robert isn't
using it for his 'bang bang' game.
- Released
bonobo-1.0.1 if only POTFILES.in was checked by make distcheck.
- Encouraging mail from Zach Frey, another Christian -
"Learning and holiness are mostly orthogonal" - how true in my case.
- Up until 2.30am writing tommorow's NetProject talk, 4 hours
is a very long talk, the poor audience. Packed up some freebies
to take the edge off their suffering.
- Remembered I had to print the stuff out and stayed up even
longer.
- Reports that there is a bug in 1.0.1 produced by
broken IDL compilation dependency code built into bonobo that we
hadn't seen before.
- Up super, really early - 6.00am. Said 'bye to Rusty,
hopefully he'll come and work for us - if only for a short while.
Breakfast with Chema ( who hadn't slept yet ), taxi to the airport.
- Home by 11. Setup the new server - ADSL modem working
far better, got rid of evil ( and super broken ) Adaptech SCSI card
- for some reasons screwing up the bus.
- Found a nice new super-verbose Speedtouch setup how-to.
- Uploaded my Guadec Bonobo presentation as a tar
ball or browsable
on-line.
- Started mailing people, wrote the Bonobo 1.0.0 release
notes.
- Up early, breakfast in the hotel, off to hear Stallman
speak. I don't like working on Sundays - but its hard to know what
to do really.
- Stallman on patents, a relatively interesting
perspective. Then off for a series of discussions with Erwann about
Bonobo ref-counting, Bill Haneman on Bonobo for accessibility
information transport, Mathieu to clarify where I think Bonobo should
go.
- Darin's Nautilus talk - an entertaining talk, too short,
not enough demo ware. Caught the tail end of the Chema & Lauris'
gnome-print talk.
- Lunch with DV, learned about XSLT - interesting.
- Talked to Owen and Tim with Paolo about Perl bindings,
seemed to aggree everything pretty quickly, including moving the
Perl bonobo sugar wrappers into GNOME::Bonobo. Talked about cunning
ways of trying to reduce the typing neccessary for CORBA.
- Talked to Darin for a while about various issues in
Bonobo, luckily most of them known and non-controversial - excellent,
determined to do a new Bonobo release ASAP.
- Had a short, but intense mind dump to Havoc about my
scheme for a beautiful, small & simple CORBA based GConf API,
re-using ORB cunningness - understood each other better.
- On the train back discussed focus issues with Federico
and Owen ( who claims there is no problem in Gtk+'s plug/socket :-).
Nicely productive though, got a lead.
- Indian food, and then back to the hotel for some lobby
milling actions. Played with porting some of gnome-db to
BonoboXObject to show Rodrigo how it goes - inevitably he uses a
custom servant :-)
- Said g'night to all the guys - bed at midnight. Worked
all day - very bad news.
- Up early, breakfast with DV - a heated, but interesting
debate - as always. Off to the conference centre. Sucked E-Mail.
- Went to Tim & Stephan's ARTS talk, bumbled around, dinner,
Darin's UI keynote, a GStreamer talk. Missed the Gnome Office BOF by
mistake ( argh ). Talked to Jody about Bonobo UI stuff.
- Had a sensibly sized Gnome 2.0 meeting with most of the
core people. Told them my plan for Bonobo for Gnome 2.0 - it seemed
to be approved (by consensus) - horay.
- Off to the Ximian party at 'The Globe' Irish pub. Lots of
nice food and good company. Talked to loads and loads of people, and
some KDE folk - Matthias Ettrich, Ralph, and Torsten someoneorother.
Lots of cool Code-Factory people around which was great. Richard and
Mikael from MrProject,
good work going on there. Too many people to mention, lots of fun.
- Up early, off to the conference, Registered,
breakfast with Alan and Telsa. Semi apologised to Bart, more
confessing action needed.
- Miguel's intro talk, non-confrontational, everyone
introduced themselfs.
- Hacked on my talk and talked to Andew Watson from
the OMG for a long time, in depth - very interesting.
- Panic lunch ( very good indeed ) whilst hacking on
my talk, Rusty & Clahey turned up, talked to Chema - made my
pictures pretty. Apologised properly to Bart.
- Michelle and Rachel lent me our nice projector,
to get 1024x768, setup in the conference room.
- The Sun keynote finished (missed it - drat), and
I got a lot of hackers to my Bonobo talk - really lots,
standing in the aisles. Talk went ok.
- Felt sapped afterwards, wandered into the (tedious)
Gnome 2.0 meeting. Back to the hotel. Off for Mexican food
nearby, very nice. To the hotel.
- Opened the present J gave me, lovely - much like
God it seems she can't be out-given.
- Up at ~6.00am, J already awake, dressed and looking
magnificent.
- Quick breakfast and caught the train to Gatwick/the
city together - a hurried goodbye.
- So early at the checkin, they checked me onto a flight
to somewhere totaly different. Spent a while sorting it out, got
a nice seat out of it.
- Arrived in Copenhagen, got a taxi to the hotel - 10
UKP !, horrors. Met Ravi and we wandered round town buying
various things, also toured the old town hall ( tagging onto a
random guide ) which was nice.
- Back to the hotel, met all the Ximian people - just
arrived, enthusiastic. Met up with Tim Janik and Stephan - went
for some Chineese food with them, lots of fun.
- Back to the hotel, and off for Thai food with a load
of lads, Ettore, Federico, Paolo, 'Owen and Ben' - from England.
- Back to hotel - presentation hacking until late at
night - disturbed by a noisy Mexican next-door, Miguel has
arrived, talked rubbish for a while.
- Walked J. to the station. Sleep.
- ADSL line working again - horay.
- Hacked around at various things.
- Robert got given a job at Sainsburys, good for him.
- J. arrived back early, she had a sleep while I
prepared some music for the evening. Had some bagels to take the
edge off the hunger.
- Off to Mark & Ruth's for cell group, nice lasagne,
good study, encouraging in many ways.
- Back home, packed, talked, slept.
- Up late, chased bonobo bugs and leaks for a little.
- Fixed a worrying slew of bonobo i18n issues - thanks
Kjartan.
- Bill says I should be promoting our book Component Based Software Engineering
so ... I'll just do that. I must say I learned a lot reading only
a small part of someone else' chapter so, so could you :-)
- Hacked away until 6.00 at various things.
- Started cooking, Julia arrived unexpectedly early,
continued cooking - chicked & white sauce + parsley & mushrooms,
rice planned but couldn't find any, fell back to pasta. Pretty
tasteless, sigh.
- Stayed up all night talking and things, very dangerous.
- Hazy memory of saying g'bye to J. slept again
until late. Got up, had a hammer at the DSL connection in
windows - now that is knackered. Spent ages on the phone
practicing being patient with the re-installation police.
Eventualy managed to get them to get BT to sort it out.
Looks like OpenWorld are just not in the business of handing
out IP addresses nicely.
- Chewed mail.
- Reverted OO to a version that actualy builds &
re-build the UDK for more code reading action.
- Got bored and hacked on with the XST print-admin,
sweetened it somewhat.
- Up earlyish, off to Church to play violin.
- Lunch, parents left for Prague leading a school
choir trip of some variety.
- Fooled around early afternoon.
- Practice and service, then off to Mark & Ruth's
for a TV watching fest. Saw 'Son of God' - a BBC historical
documentary about Jesus - lots of interesting insights, even
though it was made and presented by the unconvinced.
- Home, stayed up really late talking and stuff,
awful - J. only got 3hrs sleep before she had to get home.
- Got a good link to the UK ADSL guide, it seems
other people suffer from my problem.
- Up lateish, had breakfast with J. Run 'Weeze and went
for a pub lunch at the 'Shephard and Dog', a lovely pub just under
the South Downs. Beautiful scenery, but a 5000UKP fine for walking
on it - Foot and Mouth.
- Back home Julia let me play with the DSL mahem while
she went off to see Louise. Got the driver to work, the USB hotplug
in action, everything peachy - but hanging at the PPP connection
stage. Got frustrated and even asked for help.
- Dinner & sat around and talked until late.
- Up early, waiting for the ADSL man to arrive.
- ADSL man arrived, connected the line in about 3 minutes
and proceeded to give a very laboured explanation of DSL technology.
Very fast demo.
- Set it up on my laptop under windows - fine.
- Grabbed a spare PC, RH 7.1Beta, spent ages building new
kernels using a very duff, very old set of instructions - as linked
from the Speedtouch drivers. Here
is the best source of documentation.
- Spent for ever re-building my kernel on the slow machine
before building on my laptop and uploading it.
- Julia arrived at 10.00pm, still no joy. Off to a frenetic
looking pub for a drink.
- Robert bought more RAM and a USB card for the new server,
and imaged the old server onto it.
- Chewed mail.
- Started on orbit-uno-idl.
- Merged up a small libole2 patch from some nice
David Kaelbling from SGI, sadly duplicated some of the portability
work in HEAD, released a new libole2.
- Merged up more of Ryan's work on print-admin.
- CDs arrived from John, Robert set to work on my ancient and
dodgy SCSI setup. Crunched mail, some juice.
- Churned out UDK type mail, no real work, sig.
- Lots of patch feeding, in small chunks.
- Uploaded a more sensible here and
updated the other version.
- Had a long mail exchange on the UDK list - it seems that
some people feel that if the API is 'C' - avoiding the horrendous and
perrenial ABI changage in the C++ world, and that they keep away from
using exotic C++ constructs that this is acceptable. Begged to differ -
only pure C for my core.
- Music group practice. Did some XST hacking for fun in the
evening, committed the start of the print GUI.
- Ordered XML distilled and 3 copies of "Thank God it's Monday".
- Up lateish. Ordered RH 7.0 & the 7.1 beta on CD from
John Winters, need to
get a 2.4 kernel machine for the ADSL drivers.
- Chewed mail, lots of SAL to and fro. Amused to read
"Ich bin ein String mit einem A und C und vielen m, m, m, m", nicely
grokkable with even my GCSE German.
- Phoned Dick up to discuss generic marshalling. Noticed I
hadn't read 'gene-pool' since early Febuary - gack.
- Ettore hit Kernel
Traffic with his harddisk woes. Discovered I hadn't read 'Spidermonkey' since
the end of January, gargh.
- Uploaded the first autoconf'd version of sal here
codenamed 'it works on my machine, but nothing else'. Now to feedback
the changes and move onwards towards cppu.
- Watched 're-possesed' Leslie Nielson's mildly amusing
Exorcism horror comedy. More udk list spamming.
- Chat with Miguel, must get round to reading the .Net
System.Drawing API, and arguing it through with Lauris.
- Up rather late - tea for J. - the hour went back, off
to Church, slightly late. Back home for bangers and mash. Talked
lots, very tired, read a chunk of Proverbs 14 - extremely
challenging.
- Drove to Cambridge station, said goodbye quickly,
ran to the train.
- Slept on the train home, and then read some of
"Thank God it's Monday" - a most excellent book.
- Good to see the parents again, caught up with Robert
good to see the lad again.
- Woken by a cup of tea - wow. Up too late, rapid
washing action and sped off to J's parents for lunch.
- Met Sue and Mr & Mrs Griffin, most congenial people. Saw
many of the clever and beautifuly crafted machines ( minature clocks
and mechanical instruments ) that Mr G. had made and sold to all
manner of people, HRH, Sultan of Brunai et al.
- It seems the Griffins live in an area called 'The Warren'
where Rabits proliferate, apparently there is a nice man who comes and
gasses them - problem is, he always leaves 2.
- Lovely dinner, retired to watch the boat race afterwards,
( on video ), confidantly predicted Cambridge's win, which of course
they did in style - even after Oxford could well have been
disqualified at the beggining.
- Off for a walk on the beach, mist and fog - but unusualy
no rain, talked to Mr G. about all manner of interesting things.
- Back home for tea, and sat around and listened to much
interesting Julia background - turns out she is a crack shot with
an air pistol as well.
- Left laden with stuff for Julia. Stopped off at a pub
on the way home, guiness, crisps, draughts. Discussed (post) modernism
in the car - J's explanation is far more complicated than mine with
Meta Narritives and things in it - mine has the downside of being
broadly wrong. Very interesting to share analysis of the contemporary
mind.
- Back home, J. cooked dinner while I hacked - shockingly
un-liberated. Tried to organise my life, but got a gal/evolution
cockup and couldn't.
- Carbonara with cheese and stuff - lovely.
- Talked for ages, told Julia about how stupid I was in
Boston 14/2 - she cried, felt desparately awful. Read the Bible
together & went to bed.
- Up early, made tea for J. played until Sue ( J's sister )
arrived.
- Fried breakfast / brunch thing. Off to see Melanie and
Daniel for a while. Went for a walk on the heath, drink in a pub,
general easy goingness.
- Back home, J went for run, bought a working modem - NB.
never buy a Billinton PCMCIA modem again, and got on-line. Julia
back from running ( raining as normal ), looking rather
georgeous.
- Allison arrived, what fun. Julia changed into a new
outfit, excelling herself again.
- Off to a pub to meet the people from church. Miriam had
been dragged there under the false impression it was James'
birthday - she even bought him a card - in order to give her a
suprise welcome home party.
- On to the Indian restaurant, ordered food as a party
of fifteen - didn't arrive very quickly, got to know Joules'
friends a bit better.
- To a local weatherspoons and then walked home.
- Bed - very late.
- Up relatively early, very pleased to find that after chiding
the xst hackers for not being 'perl -w' clean, that some unknown knight -
Ryan Boren arrived and substantialy fixed the problem with a patch: great.
- Very little interesting mail, replied to John's nice mail from
yesterday, spammed various UDK lists.
- Hacked sal on the train, and read MafMWafV, the implicit
certainty of serious relational failure is very depressing.
- Met Julia at Kings X. Off to Newmarket.
- Off to 'Cell groups together' at 'The Stable', Julia did a
really nice piece on spiritual warfare, a good time.
- Back home, toast and stuff - bed late.
- It isn't today yet. It turned today sometime during the night.
- Up early, started web whacking documentation, reading mail etc.
- Merged up Ed Sesek's gb fixes, another interested person - excellent.
- Started SAL hacking.
- More mail, cooked dinner for cell group. A big blow out indeed.
- Got bored and hacked up the xst printtool replacement some more,
committed the read-only backend.
- Up early, out shopping for tommorow evening, bought scads of
food, back home & washed up.
- To work. Got a really nice mail from Ettore, and John Heard,
and IBM want me to do a Bonobo tutorial on their developerworks site
thing - fun.
- Finished Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine" so I could lend it
to Mark tonight, very amusing indeed. If one could always live at the level
of self conciousness, self awareness and introspection that he reports it
would be a fine thing. If an unexamined life is not worth living, Baker
provides the antidote to over-examination.
- Helped Dad fill out his computer training form - for some
reason the Government would like to train him for free.
- Continued hacking, discovered another idl compiler problem,
( not of my own creation ) fixed in a later version, updated and hacked on.
- Posted preliminary work to Elliot / the list. Found and fixed
the problems with marshaling unions - a bug in the generic marshalling
code, it seems.
- Off to the pub with Mark via his house. Ruth lent me 'Men are
from Mars, Women Are from Venus' - rather puterbed about it being a
"practical guide for ... getting what you want in your relationships" -
surely a guide to what you can give would be better, rather mercenary.
Mark is an excellent chap if I ever met one - and somewhat of an expert
on all matters historical, political, battleical etc.
- Downloaded the Actel speedtouch drivers in preparation for
immenant BT OpenWorld ADSL connection, hmm - brings back bad memories
of neverending kernel re-compilation. Time to pay Robert to learn
something useful.
- Miguel phoned.
- Up early - good. Processed lots of mail, updated my system.
- New approach to ORBit - kill the efficient, but whacked out-ness
of CORBA in the mini-stub, and clean up the generic marshaller.
- Off to the Church hall to help with 'Little Fishes' the play group
for mothers and children the church runs.
- More ORBit chewing. Dinner.
- Played with XST to stop the brain dying, got to like Perl
some more, cleaned various bits.
- Bed.
- Up early. Off to Church, sermon on Acts 18-19
very encouraging. 1 size does not fit all. Some were baptised and received the
Holy Spirit, but Apollos only needed some further explanation. Prayed to be re-filled with
the HS.
- Back for dinner, played piano with Thomas, washed up, sat around and
talked about various things. Didn't see enough of Thomas - bother. Wrote to Owen trying to
make peace, or at least work out if there was in fact conflict.
- Off to Music group practice, saw Ben & had a great practice. Talked to Tim about
women, he claims that if they go to buy you socks, its not because you need socks, but because
they want you to get them some. Contemplated socks.
- Sermon on 2 Corinthians 11:1-15
the importance of the free Gospel of grace. Distracted from the sermon, thought about Adrian Plass'
"Sacred Diary" instead. Realised that I didn't really think heaven was a nice place to be either
at heart - then had this lovely tingling feeling of approval and acceptance, and realized that being
with a God who loves you is a rather georgous thing and that I was being daft.
- After a while realized that, much like in my relationship with J. being too tense, and
worried about being good and making her happy means I don't enjoy it, it's like that with God. Very
pleased and amazed that God can love even me.
- Hot chocolate and Dohnuts after the service - wow it's good going to Church.
- Off to the pub with Ben, cleared the air a bit and had a great conversation
about relationships, life, foot and mouth, the weather. Very encouraged that he's still a good
friend by the following exchange - "... but I never expected to have such an attractive girlfriend",
"indeed, she is extremely pretty; you know what they say? - opposites attract :-)" - so true,
fell about laughing.
- Home, scolded Mother for staying up late and reading instead of going to bed -
the sweet irony of it all, to bed myself.
- Up too early, mail processing, chatted to Miguel,
talked to Chema - must wake up early more often.
- Julia up, georgeous as normal. Breakfast. Drove to
Christ's Hospital
to collect Thomas. Arrived early and wandered around the school,
raining and unpleasant.
- Collected Thomas, who has a very nice 2 machine
Linux setup in his study, carted him home - miraculously didn't
crash into anything.
- Dinner, and off to see 'What Women Want' which was
rather interesting, luckily J. is not as wet as your average
woman, so it was rather re-assuring, frightening in some ways
though.
- Back for dinner, consulted the Atlas to work out how
Texas is arranged, in order to plan J's conference & what to do.
- Nice Pasta dinner, with some 'Sweet Red Wine' from
Australia that tasted like Ribenba.
- Worked out the train times, read from the "Little
Prince", prayed, took J. to the station and waved her off. Felt
very odd without her.
- Up at a sensible time, advancing cold, moving down
to the chest. Optimized Bonobo's memory usage with a couple of
trivial hacks - controls are leaner. If only we could slim the
ORB more - had an idea.
- Spammed Miguel with a big analysis paper. Created a
nice gdk-pixbuf bug report - complete with screenshots, and
discovered that www.gnome.org had been manhandled some, and that
nothing was live anymore - strange.
- Printed out the 'Basic Argument and Result Passing'
Table 1-2 of the C language mapping CORBA spec for the umpteenth
time. It's quite a mystery to me where they disappear to.
- Hacked on XST for a while - nice, nice, nice. Wow,
it's so satisfying programming in Perl, no wonder Damian has a
smile on his face. And the frontends look sexy, so essentialy
lots of result, very little effort - nice.
- Miguel phoned, fun fun, he's ill so needs prayer,
told him how nice XST is inside.
- Updated my scripts to upload stuff to canvas.gnome.org.
- Re-reported my gdk-pixbuf bug, but had no time to
submit it to 'bugzilla' - anything requiring yet another password
is a waste of time. Updated Eog to use bilinear instead of hyperbolic
interpolation by default.
- Picked Julia up from Preston Park in the rain - somehow
it seems to always rain when J comes :-) Bed late.
- Up at 5.00am, earlier and earlier - hmm. Got a cold,
bother.
- ORBit hacking - working through the marshaling tests,
encouraging them all to pass, fixed and variable size structures,
sequences, all base types, anys etc. marshaling and de-marshaling
fine. Just have to persuade Unions, TypeCodes and a few other bits
to play ball.
- Costume drama and bed.
- Up at 6.00am, back into normal time ? Chewed mail, much
of interest happening in the world, started engaging with the Gnome 2.0
discussions. Cooked breakfast - excellent, it pays not to eat dinner the
night before - you get it fried next day.
- Very sobering report
from Eazel, depressing. Mercifuly, few of the developers I know are
gone.
- Chased some outstanding bonobo bugs, fixed the status bar
sizing issue - finaly the size of the window is not altered by the
length of the statusbar text. Reverted the half-cocked AA toolbar
icon code.
- Churned out mail.
- At some stage in the night it changed date - most
inconsiderate.
- Another nice set of patches from Arne to make gb run his
application which apparently it now does ( but it is too slow under
GB ). This doesn't worry me, there are some staggeringly inefficient
bits in there :-).
- Put out a new gb
release, it seems a fair bit has happened without me releasing.
Still trying to get bonobo into shape.
- Bed at 2.00pm, woken by Miguel on the phone shortly
afterwards :-) woken by Mother telling me I wouldn't sleep all night
shortly after that - the deep irony.
- Up extraordinarily awfuly late. Processed
mail - depressed by Dietmar.
- Telsa pointed me at the government's conclusions
on patent
law extension, in good company on the contributors list. Very badly thought out
conclusions, I wonder why they bothered consulting.
- Lots of unread mail on gnome-hackers, stimulated lots of old flamewars.
- Read interesting paper from Rusty, and Owen's paper on Gtk+ 2.0
keybindings, something we could really use fixed. Committed menu merge
acceleration fix to Evolution.
- Talked to Havoc at some length.
- Up early, Church in't morning, roast dinner,
took J. to meet my Aunt and both grandmothers.
- Church in the evening, played with the mixing
desk - quite fun.
- Home with Ben for tea, drove him back home &
grilled him in the car. Stayed up extremely late with poor
J. bed 3.00am.
- Up early - hmm. Chewed mail, commented variously.
- Off to a 'worship group' bash - good to see the
guys again, Julia arrived at 5.00 or so, off to the pub for
a quick guiness and home for baked potatoes.
- Out to Ben's 'Swimware Party' (optional) with
Louise & J. very hot, lots of strange people.
- Back in a Taxi - a wander in the recreation ground
and bed very late.
- Morten and Chen have had a baby: Annalisa Lee Welinder
! wow, and all of this without even consulting me. It seems the
Gnome community is starting a frenzy of birth-rate expansion.
- Got 100 Ximian CDs in the post - Ximian UK's marketing
dept. is being beefed up indeed, felt not too well - wierd.
- Processed mail, considered various patches.
- Bed early.
- Sat around in some seriously uncomfortable seats with
enterprising Indians trying to sell various 'drinks of death' to
me, talked to the nice Nun (or sister) a bit, waited for 9.45am.
- Applied to get on the earlier flight, 4.30am - got
the plane - whopee. Again a very modern plane, but this time we
had an on-board cockroach which was somewhat un-welcome. The pilot
confindant in his own ability, and the impossibility of allowing a
computer land his plane for him ( in fog ) diverted to some other
crackpot airport where we waited until we had missed the connecting
flight. Doh.
- Queued for hours with skill and fortuity, managed to
get back onto the flight I would have got anyway - excellent.
Bought some guinness at the Irish pub to celebrate. Got a free lunch
out of it too.
- ORBit hacking - discovered some particularly stupid
bugs in my code - trying to do too much too soon.
- 7 hour flight to Heathrow - and amazingly my luggage
arrived as well - got on-line and started processing mail.
- Up early, packed - breakfast with Martin & then Damon,
talked about KDE's direction, the importance of investment, and
standards and the possibility of KDE using / co-developing Bonobo.
- Off to the conference, very interesting IPV6 talk,
interesting that although the address space is mostly used up,
there are only ~160 million always on addresses. Mobile devices
need always on addresses to remain connected - not thought of that -
1 bn Indians - that's a lot - India has 3 class B addresses for the
whole country, China has only 8m IP addresses. 18*10^18 addresses
per person on the planet. A talk canceled.
- Rama did a Zope talk, and it was lunch time. Met Ravi
who had been on the other track and got up late.
- Franticaly finalized my talk, remembered to talk about
Medusa and demo it.
- Talk went ok, managed to overrun rather substantialy.
Then onto Damian Conway, an excellent talk on the direction of Perl,
Perl 6 - what might be in it, sounds nice, didn't realize that the
Perl people were seriously upset by Sun's Java - strange.
- Wandered around saying goodbye to all the people,
discovered that the Ximian CDs did in fact escape customs eventualy
and got snapped up instantly. Got a taxi to the airport with a Wrox
guy, met a nice Italian Nun on the plane - most interesting, having
been on a Hindu wigwam (or something), strange.
- Arrived in Bombay and sat in the infested airport, met
some David chap from Germany, a professional tennis player on his
way back to Italy, interesting guy.
- Shopping with Ravi, he was very patient as I
wandered around umpteen shops looking for various trinkets
and necessities such as working shoes. Bought a camera to
take pictures so I don't get lynched by Federico.
- Back to the hotel in a Rickashaw ( not the kind
where you're pulled by a chap, but basicaly a motorbike sawed
in half with a fibreglass shell ) - mad drivers.
- Spent ages trying to get on line - very, very
feeble internet service providers here - paid up front and
got done.
- Went to an IPsec talk, managed to fall asleep
missing slides 8 through 37, gargh.
- Managed to find an internet cafe to sync mail,
nice little place - realized my world hadn't fallen apart
in my absence - which is good I think.
- Totaly knackered, sat around in the hotel
instead of going out to some exotic Muslim eatery for Eid.
- Up early, breakfast at 8.00am - lots of curious
Indian food, eat rather circumspectly - tasted ok.
- Collected our 'speaker T-shirts' and off to the
conference in a taxi with Damian Conway ( Mr Perl II ),
Rasmus Lehrdof ( Mr PhP ), Ravi and myself.
- Wandered round looking at stuff, sat through a
load of sessions.
- Lethal looking, but nice tasting lunch, met
whatnot ...
- Martin Konold's KDE talk suffered laptop
failure and a power cut - poor chap, he coped very well
though.
- Ravi's talk was not helped by the projector -
the source code being somewhat illegible.
- My talk went ok-ish, somewhat tired and slightly
less enthusiastic than normal - unusualy overran. Panel on
encouraging people to contribute to Gnome - lots of good
questions.
- Persuaded Martin to refer to GNOME as GNome
instead of GnomE, to much merriment.
- Back to the Hotel to freshen up, and off to
a local restaurant for food and drink - Martin's getting
married soon apparently, and Frank & Grace told how they
met and married.
- Sleep.
- Lost a day somewhere on a plane - how careless.
- Hacked away at Evolution's UI code a bit,
cmd / widgetifying where that was absent - easy, mind numbing
work.
- Flew to Bombay ( or Mumbai as it is known by the
airline confusopoly ), paid 300 washers to the cab driver to
drive me a stupidly short distance. Had a big argument with
him about how much I was going to pay him - he eventualy gave
up pushing his luck.
- Discovered I had to buy a ticket to Bangalore, did
so and met Martin SomeOneOrOther from SuSe(phone) who is doing
a talk on KDE or somesuch. Nice to have someone to discuss stuff
with.
- Sat next to an interesting Indian guy on the plane,
discussed politics, electricity de-regulation, Hinduism,
Christianity, Islam, Tibet, Kashmir, Demographics - much of
interest.
- Retrieved luggage and met Dan at the airport, back
to a hotel to sleep.
- Up for dinner, met Ravi and his lady friend, gave
them some monkeys, eat lots of strange looking, but good tasting
Indian food. Talked a lot with Martin and Erasmus - Mr PhP. sorted
out Ravi's presentation afterwards.
- Fitful sleep, no Indian driver seems content unless
he is beeping his horn every few seconds as he veers round passing
pedestrians, motorbikes and cows - even at night.
- Up rather early. Train to Victoria - mail, Lutz found a
nasty bug in Bonobo's accelerated cmd / node mapping - doh, NotZed
found it the other day and I worked round it without thinking.
- Got to Heathrow eventualy, clapped out. Amused to notice
a long queue of clearly not disabled people outside a single disabled
toilet ignoring the up arrow sign above the doors to the main facilities
in front of them.
- Nice plane, very nice - seemingly recently re-fitted,
relatively clean and plush, lots of arabic around, large screen
pilot's view of the runway as we took off - the lines painted there
seem to be massively long and fat, to give a false impression of
extreme slowness as you rocket along at 200mph. Touch screen video
things too.
- Dubai - off to the convenient airport Irish pub to
re-charge, air conditioning still in action at night.
- Long talk to an Australian about Dubai - apparently
the natives are idle, and import Indians in cattle trucks and send
them up multi-story buildings in the midday sun where they feint
and fall off. All serving people are foreign, they have no work
ethic seemingly - 30 years ago they just sat around fishing, and
they don't excel at their high powered education. 2.8m locals,
and far more immigrants than natives - predominantly Indian and
Phillipino. A police state, phones tapped routinely, no human
rights for non-muslims etc. Most holidaying tourists apparently
never see it. The Sheik(s) have control - a benign dictatorship
of a couple of tribes. The average local has a tremendous amount
of debt - everyone has the latest mobile phone, lots of flashy
cars - Mercedes everywhere - consumerism with a vengance.
- Hacked evolution around a bit.
- Up at 10.45am to make tea for Julia, she was already
awake and working - woah, lazy me.
- Toast for breakfast, walked into town to check mail
at a convenient Internet cafe, bought a PCMCIA modem. Back for
bacon butties.
- Tried to get modem to work - hurumph, not playing ball.
- Tea and talk and stuff, to station. Hacked on train.
- Arrived home, E-mail informes me I fly to Banaglore
via Dubai and Bombay tormmorow. Started updating everything on my
system, re-building stuff, starting with installing a working IDL
compiler.
- Apparently I'm not high enough resolution, so NotZed
gave me a comedy picture of the
suit wearing phase.
- Stayed up far too late answering mail, building stuff, and
waiting for my battery to re-charge fully - my PCMCIA modem works - horay.
- Up shockingly late. Processed mail. Hacked a tad, breakfast,
off to the station. Train canceled, freezing cold platform.
- Got train eventualy, hacked ORBit around lots. Tube to
Kings X, met Julia & Diana on the platform.
- Pleasant train and car journey to Julia's. Dropped stuff
quickly and off to her house group's pancake party. Met lots of her
friends, Nancy with McKenzie (her daughter), John and Sue hosting,
Jim and Pat, Mario and Teresa, Bill and Barbara, Richard and Jaqueline
and a couple I didn't learn the names of. Nice food, didn't eat enough
though.
- Back to Julia's nice little house, sat around and talked
and stuff until ~ 6.00am. Feeling dead.
- Up too early to go to London to get a Visa for India, what
fun. Discovered I had been unwittingly signed up for COMDEX Chicago,
with another paper deadline on Friday, and that I will be flying from
the US to GUADEC.
- Swallowed my first Lariam tablet - examined hair to see
if it turned green - as per Watchdog's new series entitled
"Scaremongering" - in which the terrible risks of everyday food
products are exposed.
- Churned mail, finaly found India House at the other end
of the Aldwych to that I expected. Realized I needed lots of
referees names and phone numbers: Hmm...
- Springy PCMCIA guard flap snapped off, leaving two springs
inside the laptop ( somewhere ) ... worrying.
- Wandered off down Kingsway and past the excellent PC
bookshop nr. Holborn down Southmampton Row and spotted J's office.
- Partial forgotten how good it was to be with J, very
pleasant indeed, wandered to the British Museum to see their new
covered Atrium, then Pizza at some out of the way placelet. Walked
back slowly in the rain, lunch breaks are too short. Another
mystery present - to open in India ... argh, too lovely.
- Hacked on the train, IDL compiler is churning out nice
interface type information. Choral Evensong on Radio 3.
- To the 'Caxton Arms' for a cell group social bash -
good to see everyone again.
- Lost a load of hours into the bit bucket.
- Spent an unfeasibly long time ( for the 2nd time )
trying to use the brokenness in ORBit's IDL compiler backend
code - ug - victory finaly.
- Home - greeted Dad, great to be home again - a
relaxing pace of life, parents are wonderful things. Back to
the world of the 24Kbps modem. 4 Apologetix CDs to listen to.
- John Harper sent a nice bonobo patch to speedup the
pixbuf encode / decode. Several nice patch fragments from Arne
de Bruijn for gb - the Erase statement, lots of nice fixes etc.
- Worked on the nice ORBit_itype info generation.
- Very tired in the afternoon, stayed awake in order
to phone up J to try and work out what will happen this week.
- Up at midday, leaving the US today, still no news as
to when I'll be leaving for India - hard to plan the week.
- Plundered Ximian bandwidth for a while ... lots of
red-carpetage and RPM downloading. Read some stuff on culture-shock.
Loaded up with Monkeys and T-shirts.
- Lightning meeting with Miguel, off to the airport,
churned out mail.
- Read more of the CORBA spec, began to like CORBA more.
Read a chunk of UNO, began to like UNO more - hmm.
- Up too early, off to Park street. Bagel before
church with Iain and TigerT. Great sermon on Genesis 22
looking only at the aspect of how Abraham was able to do it,
the clarity of the command from God, the Son who he loved,
who was named laughter, who brought joy to a barren household,
the call to radical faith in God and giving ones whole life to God.
- Back to the office, some IRC action. JP pointed me at a
screenshot of his pleasant discovery the other day that gIDE was
rendering his C attachment to a mail prettily
without him asking for it.
- Fire alarm ( yet another ) and off to Church, Gorden
again ( 2x in 1 day - great ), on Acts 2:36-39
again. The meaning of repentance ( a word never used today ) - a new mind, and
the importance of baptism. Copied the words to Paul Mossbarger's - Prayer.
- Back to the barracks. DVD session with Fejj and NotZed.
- "Fight Club" - a rather excellent movie, sympathy with the
motive, as someone
said "Never before in the field of human lending, has so much been owed by so many
to so few". Interesting film, must see it again - apparently the perspective
change on the girl is amazing for the 2nd time.
- Jacob Berkman, persuaded me to watch 'Happiness', an extremely
disturbing and sick film, not least because one can empathise so
directly with the relatively ordinary people, the tragedy is that of
the human condition - not a nice movie.
- Sleep.
- Up extraordinarily late. To work, discovered that
'Hallelu Yah' is Hebrew for 'Praise the LORD', interesting what
you find in a random footnote to Psalm 115
- Read more of UNO, wrote some more docs, read Keith's
document about X selections. Read the OO GDI API,
not good for printing, not at all good.
- Completed the Bonobo C API documentation - less a few
minor tweaks, and some final structure / macro comments. Now onto
the editorial substance, and the IDL stuff.
- Off to a party at Rachel's, lots of drinking and
company, back to barracks rather late. Talked to Lauris about
Gypsies, the Holocaust, the (pleasant) decrease in cultivated
land in Estonia during the Soviet era, and the commensurate increase
in forest which Lauris likes, all manner of other interesting
topics. Clearly the time to start a really interesting conversation
is when you really need to sleep - doh.
- Up very late, to work with Larry - still ill but getting
better. Back to documenting, fun time documenting the UI code - it's
nice.
- Wrote a little script to upload my bonobo docs, which are
available here: bonobo-docs.tar.gz
and on-line here
- More doc writing, off to see Snatch - featuring 'Boris
the bullet dodger' and oodles off dark comedy. Excellent, excellent
movie - dead pan humour appears to be a hit even in the unsubtle and
blunt nation - the republic guilty of inventing the 'Naaot' ( the
early learning version of sarcasm - as seen in "Wayne's World" and
other quality wity movies ).
- More hacking, listening to Iain's super eclectic taste
in music.
- Up rather late, woke Larry up by singing in the shower -
didn't realize he was ill in bed - doh. To the office, chewed Mail.
Nice retraction on the Bonobo UI front comments, 1 reference leak
- over-seriousified; no serious design flaws - good.
- Committed more nice docs, Paolo turns out to have written
a chunk of DTD already for the UI XML.
- Got on with docs, paused to help Darin address a bonobo bug,
had an evil time compiling Nautilus, trivial bug fix - knew what was
wrong instantly - excellent.
- More doc writing - took a T in the snow with some guys,
had Japanese food, realized we had taken the T for an incredibly
short actual distance - walked back.
- Changed my mind, it's definately today.
- More GConf mail, beginning to see some light in Colm's
POV, I hope, and not a peek from Havoc in recent posts.
- More docs, by the time I realized I wanted to go home it
was 5.00am, so hardly worth it, sample the free breakfasts instead.
- More docs ... begginning to shape up slowly, to lunch
with Federico and Rodrigo, discussed the focus problems.
- Tower records, and back to the office for more hacking
action. Responded to the Bonobo UI FUD being spread on gnome-hackers.
- Used my parallel evolution mail environment to do a complex
query on my old mail, wow - it's so nice - and even fast on a huge
un-indexed mailbox.
- Jillians for food, drink, billards, bonding, video games
etc. all on the company - an excellent time.
- Defended my ( and others ) nice Bonobo UI design on
gnome-hackers against allegations of 'major design flaws' and 'still
finding serious bugs in it'.
- Wearily wended my way bedwards, realized I forgot to mail
J at all today - garg.
- Up late, taxi to the office - its that tedious
getting there.
- The first day of free company breakfasts in the office - wow.
- Bonobo documentation, off to find a Pharmacy.
- Fired some shots in the gconf / bonobo-conf war.
- More tedious bonobo API documentation - a staggeringly huge
job is required here, chipping away.
- Talked with Miguel Re: Gnome 2.0, pleased with Dietmar's
bonobo-conf, looking sweet ( even though you need HEAD ORBit and bonobo
to get it to work - watch that man shake the bugs out ).
- More bonobo doc action, sample code into sgml files,
sweetness and light.
- Hacked up some more India talk stuff, took OpenOffice
screenshots, tweaked stuff, hacked bonobo's Echo example to use the
new BonoboXObject stuff, just to cheer myself up.
- Realized there was no good reason for the CORBA_Object
to be inside the BonoboXObject, in fact it was a silly idea - hey ho,
the miracles of frozen software. Either way, the general idea was
good.
- Upgraded to GNOME 1.4 using RedCarpet, which was released
in beta tonight - nice.
- Finished the 2nd batch of slides for India. Dispatched
them - now at last I can sleep. I wonder if J. is awake yet, 8.30am
UK time.
- More bonobo docs hacking, suddenly realized it was tommorow.
- Up at midday, off to the office. All the Evolution
and a few other misc. guests (Lauris, myself) had an inspirational
high energy Nat company talk. Great to get everyone on the same
page wrt. our direction, what we want to do.
- More bonobo documentation changes - it looks like I'm
altering every file in Bonobo - but none of it is code - honest.
- Meeting with Lauris, Jacob, Federico & Miguel - what
fun - we have wall to wall whiteboard in the conference room,
leaving plenty of space for more permanant Ewing/Mena art.
- Damon fixed a nice gtkdoc bug for me, good fellow.
- Fixed up guppi3 for the latest bonobo, back to the
barracks, bit of a hacking session with Larry and Lauris.
Concerned about Ettore.
- Decided it would be nice to pass a CORBA BonoboContext
context around with every method invocation that contained security
and locale information - how best to do it is not clear, wrt.
efficiency.
- Up earlyish, to Church.
- Back to the barracks, watched 'Spies like us', Iain
arrived from Ireland, Ettore woke up and we went to CBC for Nachos
and beer.
- Back for 'the 13th warrior', Larry arrived, and off
to Church.
- God did business with me, strange that he's still
faithful to me, though I am so faithless to my friends and those
I love. A happy / sad time.
- Harvard Sq, for company / Evolution hackers meal,
instead of Fire and Ice we ended up at UNO's. Met a load of super
cool people ( in no particular order ), Radek Doulik and Rodrigo Moya
for the first ( or firstish time ), Jon Trowbridge, TigerT, Jackub,
Federico! etc. etc. We employ so many cool people, it's really
wicked. Met Miguel's girlfriend - Anna.
- Off to see new office, back to old office, baracks,
sat around comparing laptops - mine is the Warpig door stop, but
has the nicest screen. Sleep.
- Up late, getting more and more tired the more I
sleep - worrying - hibernation approaching.
- Uploaded Ettore's picture
of me and Julia tastefuly down sampled in an attempt to make me look
less stupid - not much joy there.
- Michael "NotZed" Zuchi's birthday, off to Harvard Sq.
for an Indian buffet to celebrate - good food & fun. Wrote to J.
- Gathered together some slide material for India.
- Back to the barracks - watched X-men, a classicly
movie. Great plot lines like 'when the XYZ happens I will be
momentarily weakened'. Bed.
- Up extremely early, reported for injections at 9.30am
after far too long of talking to the Doctor and signing my life
away, managed to get 4 shots - none of them significantly painful
and 2 perscriptions.
- Back in time to go bowling with the rest of the guys -
puny little balls, very strange, company pizza and beer.
- Fixed some silly bugs in bonobo-ui-node and
bonobo's Any <-> XML code. John Sheets putting a lot of nice work
into Bonobo documentation - pretty Dia diagrams and all.
- Continued writing Bonobo API docs.
- Bed early.
- Up early, feeling awful, shower, to the
office, discovered another present from J lurking in
my jacket.
- Chewed mail, Luke Plant sent me his nice
CT. Studd quote:
Some want to live within the sound
of Church or Chapel bell,
I want to run a rescue shop
within a yard of hell.
- Got on with stuff, having recently lost my nice
paper diary, started using Evolution instead - pretty pretty
code.
- Daneil attacked me with the clue hammer, and I
eventualy realized that I needed to link vs. libxml2 to use
libxml2 and that building with mismatching headers was a bad
plan.
- Wrote a chunk of Bonobo API documentation -
fun fun. Fixed up eog, discussed stuff with Dick.
- Bed early - super tired.
- Got up late, started processing mail.
- A very painful morning, had to try and do the
right thing and probably blew it with both Bart and Cody,
argh.
- Tried to get Bonobo into shape for a release.
- Still friends with Cody, Bart doesn't want to
talk to me - sigh - a phyrrhic victory.
- Looked at the list of injections for India,
I won't be walking for some time it seems, the descriptions
of all the evil creatures in the food and water there make
ones skin crawl somewhat.
- Slogged on with Bonobo.
- Drinking culture - off to some strange pub near
Davis, drunk far too much, acted like a moronic, foolish,
un-self controlled cretin. Extremely distressing. Zuchi
arrived. Back to the barracks.
- Up earlyish, woken by alarm clock left by some
lovely person so I had a chance of waking up at a sensible
time.
- Mail has gone mad, noticed a discussion on
whether to commit stuff to bonobo since I wasn't responding,
helped fix the patch first.
- Couldn't send postcards home since it seems that
selling stamps in the USA involves applied rocket science.
Ever since the horrific stamp/postcard disaster of 1875 ( where
3 postal clerks badly strained their backs on mail bags,
causing an epic lawsuit ( as portraid in recent film Eric
Brokenfitch ) and the closure of a large US mail operation )
Federal law has mandated that no stamps must be sold within
1 block of a postcard shop.
- Stress, sadness and hassle with mail and Bart Decram.
- Finaly got round to J.
- Woken by a knocking at the door, J arrived. Coffee
in bed to wake up - wow, very spoiled. Lovely chat, sweet
intimacy.
- Showered while J painted her nails glittery pink,
chocolate and quiet time - Amos 1&2.
- Off to the Mall via the office. Huge lunch at the
Cheesecake factory, as usual far too much to eat, and too full
for cheesecake.
- Wandered round the shops, found a toaster for Rachel.
Looked at swim suits for J who needs one, rather too erotic
for me to cope with, very strange.
- To the bookshop for coffee, back to the office,
Taxi to the airport. Somehow got a gate pass without asking
for one. Said goodbye at length and with few words. Given another
pretty present - sigh, and watched the plane push back.
- Back in a Taxi feeling strange, happy and sad.
- Discovered the amusing flame war about the nature
of advertising, and various people getting hot under the collar,
dear oh dear oh dear. Nat wrote a very amusing initial reply with
things like "We also sponsor links on searches for Miguel de Icaza,
but no one thinks that we are trying to confuse Ximian GNOME with a
Mexican hacker", sadly it got pulled and we now have this.
Off to CBC with the lads for drinks and dinner - a great time.
- Said goodbye to Chema, it's been so good having him
around, he flies tommorow early.
- Bed - discovered another present - more shockingly
lovely.
- Sunday, woken by Julia phoning again - woke most of
the Estonian mob too it seems - sorry guys, made a mad dash for
the shower. Hit 'Finagle a Bagel' at Part Street, J wearing a
pretty skirt today and looking lovely as usual.
- Church
excellent sermon on 'Sodom and Gommorah',
Genesis 19 always extremely in depth, addressing and answering modern, liberal
re-interpretations of the passage.
Ezekiel 16:48-50, addressed, yes indeed the sins of Sodom were not limited to
the desire for mob homosexual rape but were all manner of evil, the outcry from
which had been heard by God.
- Conclusions - the sins of Sodom were many, Lot clearly correctly
understood the men's intention [ not just to get to know the visitors ] hence
his offer of his daughters [ what kind of protection was under his roof ! ],
the chapter finishes with his daughters reciprocating his unlovely offer.
- Brief walk in Boston Common, extremly windy and perishing cold.
Lunch at a nasty food court place.
- Bought some coffee, milk and chocolate, back to the barracks.
- Had a very pleasant time together - Steve Chalke's
excellent advice from his "lessons in love" childrens videos - his
three maxims - no clothes off, no lights off, no lying down, along
with the caution against touching bits you don't have. Found them
very helpful in the self control stakes - NB. guidance is not a
set of laws to become enslaved to, an abomination to God's grace.
God rejoices more over a sinner who repents more than 99 who don't
need to.
- To church for the evening service, more boppy, great
sermon on trying to root evil out of society ourselves - the
parable of the weeds. Essentialy, while striving for justice
and truth, in this life we cannot hope to achieve it in society.
In fact, politicizing the church turns the message into an
ideology instead of a proclamation of a living savior and weakens
the church. Persecution of non-believers, the ungodly etc. just
weakens the church.
- To Davis, sat in an Irish pub near Teale Sq. drank
Guinness and enjoyed each others company, watched The Truman Show
without any sound. Remembered recording an interesting
CICCU talk by James
Lawrence - "Christians make better lovers" a parting thought of
which was that love was more about tenderness than technique,
relaxed a bit.
- To Rachel's - she was in, had a brief go on her ergo
I miss rowing, food, prayer, taxi home.
- Woken by the phone - Julia phoned me. Up, quick shower,
feeble quiet time, met her at the Kendal T, by the steaming globe
thing.
- Breakfast at the local bagel store, set off for the
barracks. Distracted by a red trolley bus tour on the way, got
jolted around the city.
- Stopped off at the Museum of Fine Art, enjoyed some
rather fine art, in some ways these museums are always too big,
and have too much in them. I'd rather know a lot about a few
things than a little about a lot of paintings. Wandered round
in a rather comfortably intertwined fashion.
- Waited for the bus and talked about life, very
charismatic bus driver apparently he went to the big dig website and it said
'under construction' - gags.
- Stopped off in the North end for a nice Italian meal.
- Wandered to some large white church something to do
with Revere's ride or somesuch. Listened to the guide's poem
about it all.
- Got the T back to the barracks, got some coffee,
sat around, and talked about life, stuff, improved quiet time.
T to Davis, bought some food and headed off to Rachel's
- managed eventualy to escape the freezing cold by
opening the doors after discovering at length that the outer
door was just a fly screen and was unlocked.
- Tea, bread and honey, 'night and T home. Got home
to meet Lauris in the flesh for the first time - great.
- Discovered a little, wrapped present of sweeties and
scripture under my pillow as I went to bed, shamed by my complete
lack of thoughtfulness at this level - lovely though.
- Sleep.
- Up early, to work early.
- Still blown away by the really cool code Jacob has on
his laptop to render text at higher than screen resolution -
anti-aliasing nothing this uses the physical ordering of color
elements within the pixel to scatter false coloured pixels around
the text to sharpen it.
- Got a Bonobo-0.36 announce out, uploaded bonobo-conf-0.1
for Dietmar.
- Started building and updating lots of software - very
tedious.
- Went to the airport to meet J. Exciting times. Got a
taxi back. Dithered over where to go while Julia availed herself
of an instant headache cure. Off to Harvard for some Vietnamese
food. Had clam chowder instead at a take away place due to the
huge queue then Ben & Jerries.
- Back to the office, and sent Julia far too abruptly
with Rachel. Realized I hadn't fed Julia enough, doh, and didn't
look after her properly.
- Talked with Miguel Re: Life, most interesting.
- Up at 9.30 - the fire alarm [ sounding like an annoying
buzzing, but not at all scary ]. Wandered out to find some gormless
girl had set it off accidentaly, back to bed. Slept until 2.00, not
good - the guys didn't wake me ( they know how badly I need my beauty
sleep :-)
- Hit the office, the move is held up by paperwork, doh.
Crunched mail, reviewed more patches. Fixed up some bonobo brokenness.
- Prepared a new bonobo release, watched Spinal Tap - the
movie - snowing again. Luckily 'the barracks'' heating is now on, sadly
we turned it up extremely high so it's now pretty much 'the sauna'.
- Feeling tired and lackadasical, need another hill to climb.
- Played with gdraw for a bit - off to do washing at the dead
of night. 'Finagle a Bagle' with Jeff.
- Read the preface & translators notes to Utopia.
- Up earlyish, chewed mail for ages. Meeting with Paolo
to decide what needs doing and how long it will take.
- Lots of mail catchup from yesterday, very little of
interest, accumulated fixes for the next point release of bonobo.
- 'Drinking Culture' - JPR leading us astray again,
down to John Harvards for a most interesting evening, good company
bonding time.
- Woken extremely late by Ettore, we both over slept - the
visor seems not to wake him. Arrived to find an overflowing mail
queue, argh. Discussed stuff with Miguel for a bit.
- Fixed a number of bonobo leaks for Morten, continued
transitioning to BonoboXObject.
- Keelyn and Michelle turned out to be a mine of information
on what to do in Boston - and I thought it was just another dull
American city - how wrong can you be. Our employee manual even has
a list of cool things to do / places to go in the city.
- Completed the BonoboXObject transition as far as it goes.
- Indian company dinner, very social, good food - lots of
good humoured arguing about trivialities [ who gets to be near a
window in the new office ] etc.
- Reverted focus problems and released Bonobo-0.35.
- Off to watch Gladiator, rather a good movie I thought,
a tragic ending - unusualy good.
- Byron pointed out to me that I was a month ahead of
myself - the desire to have a frozen bonobo is obviously
overpowering me.
- It's snowing rather strangely, the wind can't seem
to make it's mind up as to which way to blow. Committed the
beggining of BonoboMObject, nearly frozen. A good time for the
barracks heating to pack in.
- Worked all day at the API Bonobo release for
Gnome 1.4, very little joy. Stuck on 2 very silly bugs for a long
time. Finaly got nearer, only a few hours more work. Bed at 2.00am+
- Up very late - got mail from Thomas, too late to
reply helpfully for him. Off to the Food court for crepes with
Paolo and Jeff.
- Back, met Miguel and wandered into some interesting
technical discussion - amply made up for later.
- Sat around reading a paper on
God's truthfulness good stuff.
- Park Street in the evening - excellent sermon ( as
normal ) on the giving of the Holy Spirit, from the perspective
of the timing and the festival of Pentecost, its relation to
the Old Testemant, the chronology of salvation etc.
- Got mail from Jakub who has been playing
with Paolo and me.
- Couldn't contact Miguel so missed the Cinema trip,
more reading - struck by how badly we need
scripture.
- Talked to Rusty about his forthcoming talk, sent
him some great quotes.
- Up late, at midday. Off to the office and then KHoP
with Paolo, and then helped him get settled in / connected.
- Wrote a long and distracting mail to J, talked to
Jody on IRC. Got on with various Bonobo issues. Made oaf-slay
work under Solaris.
- For those that are procmailly inexperienced, one
way to maintain two mail setups is to duplicate the mail before
it gets filtered, putting this rule at the top of procmailrc
does this:
:0 c
/tmp/mbox
Then simply setup a mail source for evolution as
/tmp/mbox and when you get mail it will come from there.
- Uploaded my slides from LWE and also the
handout as a chunk of
text.
- Up at 7.00, breakfast ( they forgot to put cheese in my
'bagels' I discovered in the Taxi ). Arrived, talked to Trent - a
guy working on Python / Mozilla stuff about component merging.
- Did my talk, it went well except for the fact that I
missed Paolo's beautiful Bonobo / Perl stuff off of the handout.
[FIXME: - link to slides here in due course ]. Felt really tired,
less enthusiastic than normal.
- Got to booth eventualy, uploaded mail, perhaps too
late for the English weekend, talked to lots and lots of people.
Keith Packard turned up just as the Monkeys ran out, we got shot
of all our monkeys and shirts and CDs - some pens left.
- Carried the HP box to a Taxi - strange driver, back
to the hotel, out for a company celebratory meal.
- Coach back to Boston - started the hacking for a
fast transition to Evolution - turning off full body indexing
on a load of archive folders so I can import all my mail
instantly.
- No-one responded to my new CORBA plan on the bonobo
list - they all hate me. Imported 190 Mb of Pine mail into
evolution in a couple of minutes - the full text indexing is what
takes the time.
- The road was covered in ice, and everyone was going
really slowly, some lorries on the road ahead were sliding across
the road sideways, and it was pretty hair raising stuff. Luckily
we survived, our driver was really good, although he liked to
drive along the rumble strip to get better grip - rather noisy.
- Unloaded the bus, checked mail, headed off for the
Barracks with Paolo, sleep.
- Up early - groan - need more sleep.
- Got to show, patient mail from J, she is coming - horay.
- Bedlam started, concentrated on media people today, gave
out press kits, got cards, shoved CDs into peoples hands. Did some
beautiful demos of Evolution - it's just so slick, so many nice little
features, E-table etc. etc.
- Pizza for lunch on the fly, important Demos with the
Lady from Sun, and her sidekick - totaly blown away by Evolution,
amazed.
- Knocked off to find a peaceful place to write my talk
for tommorow in and harden the demos if possible. Discovered that
in order to win a 'Best of Show' award you have to register your
product ! - whacked out [ talked to the Judges deliberating in
the speakers room ]. Caught Linus exchanging baby photos with
some other guy there - the "My Baby" backdrop effect.
- Spewed some mail.
- Sat in the corner trying to avoid stuff and work on
my talk - Ashley ( not her name ) [ Mi Yong ] Kim turned up all
the way from Korea just to see me ( or perhaps the show ) which
was lovely to catch up. She's very sweet.
- Show finished, limo to hotel [ ripped off again ],
and then, attempting to follow a conflation of misleading
directions to 'the best pizza place in Manhatten' discovered
some place - upon asking it transpired it wasn't the best pizza
place in manhatten, however the guy at the stove was happy to
confess this so I was sold.
- Back to the hotel to hack on a talk, spent a long
time writing a nice long mail to J whom I have been tragicaly
neglecting during the show.
- Hacked on my presentation, off to Kinko's to print
and photocopy stuff, bed 1.30am.
- Aaron showering at 6.30am, amused, went back to sleep.
Aaron out - nice quiet time space.
- Breakfast, and off to the booth. Lost my exhibitor
badge, amazingly the Security guard let me get on the floor with
a speaker badge without being anal.
- Wandered around talking to random people - great fun,
showing off evolution mostly. De-camped to prepare our panel and
missed lunch - large discussion with Ian Murdock about the evils
of 'Open Source' vs. 'Free Software', I don't think we made much
of a dent in each other, but he is far more clued up than me.
- Got back - more frantic monkey mint dispensing -
giving away of CDs, answering wierd questions. Met Ron Guerin
from NYLUG ( a helpful gb person ) - nice.
- Off to a panel on 'righteous hacks - the future /
trends in Free software' - I forget the title. Honoured to sit
on a panel with such distinguisued luminaries:
- Tim Wiltham from OSDL - lots of wise words from
his time in Intel and the evolution of corporate
attitudes to both hardware and software and the
shifting of the power and responsiveness balance.
- Dereck Neighbours from GNU Enterprise -
interesting, not having heard of the project on
project management and various bits.
- Leslie Proctor - the inimitable - Greenhouse,
and Gnome foundation.
- Tim Ney - Moderating - refused to talk about
himself, despite me probing unscriptedly during the
show.
- Me - doh.
- Ian Murdock - of Debian founding fame, skill and
cunning. Now working for his firm Progeny doing some
very cool stuff with distributed, mirrored, network
filesystems.
- Made random predictions about the future - the future's
bright - the future's Gnome.
- Miguel arrived, straight from Davos in Switzerland -
he is on the committee for helping developing companies with IT,
telecoms etc. apparently "Working for a better world" or some
such trite aphorism. Either way, he was abnormaly happy about his
dinner with the princess of Sweden ( who apparently doesn't use
GNU/Linux ).
- Told him I didn't like him anymore for flaming me
publicly - proceeded to wander off to see Matt Wilson.
- We split up and off to the hotel and onto dinner.
After we had finished Miguel, Ettore and Arturo turned up -
amazing in a city of 14 million both groups hit the same restaurant.
[ In fact the restaurant we walked miles too last year with Jody -
also Ben Kahn's favoured restaurant ] - the Devil's Kitchen.
- A long, long talk with Miguel on all manner of issues
of strategy, direction, technical issues, development, bonobo, lots
of funkyness. Walked to the hotel.
- Amazed Miguel who wanted to meet Julia - amazed that
we would not be sleeping in the same room - knowing me prolly
not a good idea in the same house.
- Extremely pretty bar maid - Ettore concurred, not just
me being mad - time to do some emergency evaluation hacking, had
a drink or two too.
- Struggled with libxml2 without any vestige of success
for 2 hours - vicious binary / header conflicts / incompatibilities.
- Up at the very crack of dawn, no really exciting mail.
- Onto bus - traveled for ages and watched 'The Negotiator',
stopped at a Mc Donalds - bought some stuff, eat part of it and then
tasted my milk - tasted like there was washing up liquid in it - looked
at the date - 4 days past expiration. Hmm, binned the rest of the food
and left.
- Chewed some mail, started fixing Owen's bugs, nailed a
bonobo thinko. Finaly got to the hotel, had a beer with JP, Michelle
et al. To hotel room to hack.
- Off to the Jacob Javits centre, the booth is awesome, a
jungle look - all the other corporate booths are super predictable and
ultra ugly in comparison. We even have ambient jungle noise CDs
playing.
- Spent forever installing software on systems, upgrading
their Gnomes to Ximian GNOME, and building the latest CVS evolutions /
redcarpet / ximian setup tools. Also tweaking the huge plasma display
to try and get a good resolution for the larger demos.
- Met Leslie, and Tim Ney, the Gnome booth will have
fussball tables - wicked.
- Management vacuum, wandered round being officious and
asking people to do things, eventualy got to bed - Aaron had been
sleeping since 4.00.
- Tried to contact Miguel - no joy. Tried to order plane
ticket for J - no joy. Managed to finaly commit misc. Mr Project
fixes - joy.
- Fixed some minor bonobo buglets, started to push some
code up the demo-ability treadmill. Evolution UI tweak, made gnumeric
work for me.
- Did washing, back to hack and chew the cud.
- Very exciting talk to Jody.
- Up early, in time for Church wow, no need to buy an
alarm clock it transpires.
- Excellent sermon, really cracking sermon on
"Experiencing God's forgiveness", I thought of a challenge to
the liberal - the imperfection of human justice:
- Some people's crimes are so utterly evil, merciless,
torture, mass murder, compunctionless killing that human justice
can provide no recompense - even death [ captial punishment is
applied barbarism ] is a release for them. The solution is God's frightening justice.
- The second picture was that of the Cross, which is
(rightly) seen as a symbol of Love, and God's reconciliation with
a sinful world, but it is also more frightening - a symbol of God's
blazing, just, anger with all the things we do wrong. The price
he paid for our freedom was paid there.
- Got the T back - the Charles river is totaly frozen over,
and covered in glittering snow untouched by human feet, except in a few
places ( perhaps the current is stronger there ), the sun was shining
on the river and things looked pretty.
- Lunch with Chema and Bradford - the food court's new
Crepe place, walked beside the Mall, the Lotus building is rather
huge - perhaps we'll need a building that big one day.
- Sat in the office contemplating private mail, listening
to the Cambridge Singers' "Treasures of English Church Music",
excellent.
- Off to Church with Chema, met up with Matthew for
dinner first which was nice, great service - few people there,
most at the superbowl - sermon on prayer.
Hadn't realized how consistantly Luke emphasizes it in his Gospel,
lots of cross linkage.
- Back to the office to see the chaps - more people
chipping away at the block.
- Watched Rounders about poker playing - the gambling life
is a waste of time, the guy chooses addiction instead of love - moron.
- Up early, breakfast & hacking.
- Drasticaly simplified Bonobo Object server creation,
mango nothing - slick.
- Listened to boppy Christian music with Chris L. and
hacked variously.
- Bought some uniform for the booth, tried to find an
alarm clock that actualy sounds an alarming alarm - no joy. Sat
around not feeling like working after such success - marveled at
the memory cost of an object pointer in ORBit.
- Went out for a beer and Pizza with Ettore and Ffej.
- Relaxed and read some stuff before bed, contemplated
starting Utopia, slept instead.
- Up earlyish, got to hacking. Cleaned a few bits,
processed some mail. Thought about Moniker running object table
issues, and reference loops.
- Implemented an 'equal' method on the Moniker interface,
slightly nearer where we need to go.
- Had a really good idea to simplify Bonobo / CORBA / Gtk+
stuff - set to hacking. I knew it was a good idea to remember to pray
about work in the morning - Luke 11:9.
- Chinese food at Mary's, got a new copy of "Annals of
Improbably Research" - 'Mel says ... "It's Swell!"'. "Decoding
the British ack-SEN-triks Movement: A Phonemological Analysis"
particularly good:
...I was told that this movement, if I chose
to write about it, roughly coin-sided with the "Tern of the Century."
But the tip proved an unread herring, at best as I knew nothing about
that bird (the afermented tern)...
- Up at midday - already broken into American time.
- Namespaced the bonobo IDL filenames nicely.
- Mail looks so much more frightening when it all arrives
at once for some reason. Finished processing it at 4pm
- Time for something interesting, hacked on a secret
pet project. Upgraded my entire system to the latest Helix packages,
Sawfish is incredibly sucking, should have stuck at whatever ancient
version I had. Amazing that so much development could break it so
badly - even the most basic things such as dragging a window to size
it - heinous.
- Killed some gnumeric gb plugin bit rot, hacked up a check
for dladdr in bonobo's configure, played with MrProject.
- Up early; to work with Ettore and Chema; hacking
by 8.45am. Processed mail, breakfast with Chema at Twine place.
Chema is managing HST which is cool.
- Fixed brokenness causing Almer's With patch not
to work. Slightly worried no mail from J; it arrived later -
excellent. Got into 'The Nields'.
- Spent ages trying to get my net connection working
again, dhcp badly broken.
- Checked out MrProject sent a load
of comments off to Richard.
- Miguel reminded me not to sacrifice the Important to
process the Urgent - good plans, time for some important reading.
- Committed a trivial UI optimization that should
accelerate some of the issues with Nautilus.
- Added 'Customize' to the toolbar popup menu and
implemented the priority text setting on the toolbars.
- Off for the 'Drinking Culture' meeting with Jpr,
Ettore, Rebecka, Aaron - Guiness and flaffel, too much to
drink. Back to the office to see if I have any interesting mail -
no.
- Up early - not enough sleep. Off to the office
in the snow.
- The eagerly anticipated mail from J turned up,
pondered reply.
- Tried to processes mail, KHoP for brunch; read
a load of bumph. Miguel arrived and we discussed stuff
animatedly for a while, then he disappeared to a trade fair.
- Tried to build guppi3, committed some patches.
- Tried to get my bonobo into a state where I can
commit.
- Started listening through Rachel's CD collection.
- Discovered that WEBM means Web Based Enterprise
Management.
- Reviewed a load of pending gb mail.
- Off to see "Crouching Tiger, hidden Dragon"
rather a romantic film - subtitled so must be cultured.
- Bed early.
- Up early, started packing - must remember
passport! Grabbed mail - will be incommunicado for a while.
- Train -> Gatwick - 30 minutes.
- Realized that partly due to ORBit stupidness the
Bonobo::Print interface neeed fixing. Re-implemented it using
Stream as the transport - no C API breakage. Fixed the
in-memory-stream impl.
- Some fool reccommended that I should watch
'Withnail and I', wait till I discover who it was. A more
putrid, festering, nonsensicaly feeble, self obsessed movie
I have yet to see; drowning is too good for the script
writer / backers - or perhaps now.
- 'High altitude dance' and some attempts at
hacking.
- Arrived; much hand shaking and rejoicing. Tried
to learn the names vs. faces of all the new guys - rather
hard.
- Hacked / mailed for a bit - off to Harvard Sq.
for some drinkage with Jpr, Chris, DaveC and Ffej.
- Back to discover Miguel is speaking at some
Global conference & having lunch with the president of Mexico,
grief - exciting stuff.
- Up early; off to Church after more last minute
tidying. Played violin impotently.
- Back early, helped prep. dinner, Julia arrived,
looking lovely as normal, slightly awkward to start with,
more frightening for me than expected ( keeping the parents
under control ). Very restrained - try not to shock Father.
- Coffee afterwards, and then a drive to the
beach, a truly british romatic moment, the mist hung over the
sea and clung to us as the rain drizzled and the sea roared.
We huddled very cosily under an umbrella, ignoring whatever,
if anything, existed outside our embrace.
- Home for tea and cake, off to practice for the
evening service - musicaly good. Distracted during the
sermon <sigh> missed out on generosity, challenged
about my attidudes - pride basicaly; no. 1 sin - nothing I
have is mine, all demands good stewardship; particularly
intangible things.
- Got a lift home with J, parting was somewhat difficult and
protracted but pleasurable. Lumbered J. with Ryle's Holiness - a
rather definitive book in several hundred pages of small type. [
cf. God's Chosen Fast ~100 pages large text ].
- Mother asked whether we had a long talk in the
car. Hmm, apparently I have a glint in my eye - time to start
wearing dark glasses at home.
- Contemplated a rather interesting modern parable
in which a man tries to seduce a woman by buying her clothes,
wining and dining, all with no success. When he says he has
drugged her she sucumbs, she only discoveres later he had not
in fact drugged her. Recognised a good ploy of Satan's, to
convince one that the situation is hopeless and that to coin
a phrase 'resistance is futile' cf. 1 Corinthians 10:13.
NB. this is a totaly random thought that ideally would be
temporaly disconnected from today.
- Up late; Signed Apologetix
CD - Spoofernatural arrived; very impressive. Vocals quality
much up on the mp3's, extremely good stuff. Wow.
- During the dig discovered the floor looks rather
grim under the piles; found relics of a previous abhortive
mission - a buried duster. Other people's mail and tax stuff
feature strongly.
- After clearing the floor realized that piling on
the bed was not a good long term strategy - in real terms,
minute on minute the floor was in fact clearer than under 18
years of Tory mis-rule, but the situation was substantialy
the same.
- Delicious Jacket potatoe tea - fast and sweet.
- Committed Eog patches, Federico even liked them.
Dom wants to improve libole2 - excellent.
- Up late, merged up new libole2 patch from Dom,
committed Dia bonoboization patch. Chewed mail for ages.
- Tried to help Darin with various Nautilus issues.
- Reviewed a shed load of patches, examined a profile
of Nautilus' Bonobo usage, hmm.
- Fixed bonobo idl build problem, stopped tearoff menu
items appearing in popups unless really wanted.
- Paid my $500 phone bill, sigh, still if I ever have
daughters, I'll be prepared.
- Off to Ben's place for a cocktail party; met a really
encouraging Christian chap 'David', a 1st generation French
Cambodian, who got out of Phnom Penh just before the 'Peoples
Liberation Army' - the Khmer Rouge arrived. And lots of other
relatively interesting, but hard to hear people ( music is so
annoying at these functions ).
- Up early; chewed mail, off to Millbank.
- Tried to fix up CORBA Policy problem thrown up by a
change in a default inside ORBit. Started making an evolution
import filter from my procmail hacks.
- Arrived rather too early at the Tate, sat around and
chatted to some Swedish lady artist. Finally the lady arrived,
looking demure: lots of lovely pinky, reddy, floraly crinkly
stuff.
- We wandered round the exhibition ( apparently the
largest of Blake ever collected ), lots of strange dodgyness
in his art, his pantheon of created creatures was most strange.
- 'The Tiger' ( of burning bright fame ) turned out
to be available in several versions, all extremely small, and
the tigers rather anaemic.
- Hard to focus on the art with a rather more
exquisite specimin nearby. Liked the illustrations of some of
Dante's work also, a rather good scene of the crucifixion from behind
only seeing the reflected glory in peoples faces.
- Suddenly realized it was nearly 2.00, the 1/2 hour
lunch break having gained a rather sumptious extra hour, Julia
had to hurry back.
- Having frowned upon 'petting' in public ( esp.
railway stations ) in the past, rather changed my tune ( parting
on a tube needs more thought ).
- Sandwich on the train and more hacking.
- Got together a new Bonobo release - 0.32, wait for
the paper bag errors to start rolling in.
- Implemented the gb Environ and Environ$ functions for
Scott Blomfield. Committed Matthew's Screen object code. Discovered
a nasty bug in gnome-print's font listing code. Fired off Bonobo
release notes. Got another gb patch from William - today is gb patch
day it seems.
- Providentialy Ben was ill so I didn't go out for
dinner / drinks with him and could thus field several super
embarassing problems in the latest bonobo release.
- Found a most excellent poem at the back of a book
Julia let me have "God's Chosen Fast" [ NB. not hasty, not eating ]
by Arthur Wallis:
They Fasted
On Sinai's mount, with radiant face,
To intercede for heaven's grace
Upon a stubborn wayward race,
He fasted.
Once lifted from the miry clay,
When opposition came his way
This soldier-king would often pray
With fasting
A seer, possessed of vision keen,
Who told the troubled king his dream,
Had light on God's prophetic scheme
Through fasting.
The prophetess in temple court
Beheld the Babe the two had brought;
For Him she long had prayed and sought,
With fasting.
He came to break the yoke of sin,
But ere His mission could begin
He met the foe and conquered him
While fasting.
'Set these apart', the Spirit bade.
A spring, that soon vast rivers made,
Broke ope by men who as they prayed
Were fasting.
So shall they fast when I am gone';
Was this no word to act upon ?
Ask countless saints who fought and won
With fasting.
When we shall stand on that great day
And give account, what shall we say,
If He should ask us, 'Did you pray -
With fasting?'
- Up at midday.
- Chewed mail.
- Fixed ItemContainer, listened to Choral Evensong on
Radio 3, misc. Bonobo cleans, committed Bonobo & Evolution updates.
Created the NEWS file for the next release.
- Fixed up eog's embeddable some more, patch to Federico,
fixed gnumeric's Excel image importing code.
- Cell group, a nice meal at Samie and Kate's, realised
I was supposed to have prepared a bible study 1/2 way through.
Tried to blag it - we missed a lot of coherence until near the end
when we ran out of time. But learned a lot. Split blokes vs. birds
and went to pray together. Had a really, really excellent time of
sharing problems, hopes, trivialities and praying them through,
amazing. Realized that we're all a lot more similar than I thought.
Had a fantastic talk to Samie about how he got to know Kate and
his experiences of proto-relationship in the car home. What a lad.
- Worked out what trains to get / where the Tate is
in relation to me ( strangely rather near one of Blake's abodes
across the river in Lambeth ). Sleep.
- Up late, no route to Boston ( broken
atm5-0.core2.bos1.zen.harvard.net - not suprising Zen routing is
topologicaly challenged ), no route to Mexico ( routing loop
inside uninet.net.mx ), neither the fault of my ISP. Still at
least no-one will be able to deliver any mail either.
- Decided merging was too clever for anyone's good and
arrived at default placeholders again, hacked them up quickly.
- Added the builtin customize menu item to Evolution.
- Finaly managed to extract my mail, via. South
Carolina, off in't car to collect Mum, still throwing it all
over the road. Grandma still appreciating the chocolates I gave
her for Christmas.
- More nice cleans from Dietmar to read.
- Unapproved commit breaks Bonobo shock, got angry,
flamage.
- Nice letter from ApologetiX, very apologetic (doh).
- Music group practice for Sunday morning.
- Put a sheet on the bed Mum slept on top of last
night ( various nasty pains militate against sleep ) and
discovered a large screwdriver that she must have slept on.
Recalled the story of the Princess and the pea with much hilarity.
- Darin explained to me how xml-i18n-tools works; I had
made some false inferences from the changes in moniker's Makefile,
fixed it again again.
- Commited Bonobo work, re-built everything.
- Got letter from Cadbury's - Dairy Milk - Chocolate & A Half.
The Occupier,
[my address],
Dear Sir / Madam,
Thank you for your recent letter, details of which have been
transferred to the Consumer Services Manageer who will be writing
to you shortly.
In the meantime, thank you for taking the trouble to write to us.
Yours sincerely
- With luck the manager will be more imaginative, they
were clearly more circumspect about mis-reading my signature.
- Decided to transcribe a French translation by Frank L.
Warrin of the Jabberwock to celebrate ( oh and for Amaury ).
Le Jaseroque
Il brilgue: les toves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave,
Enmimes sont les gougebosquex,
Et le momerade horsgrave.
Garde-toi du Jaseroque, mon fils!
La gueule qui mord; la griffe qui prend!
Garde-toi de l'oiseau Jube, evite
Le frumieux Band-a-prend.
Son glaive vorpal en main il va-
T-a la recherche du fauve manscant;
Puis arrive a l'arbre Te-Te,
Il y reste, reflechissant.
Pendant qu'il pense, tout uffuse
Le Jaseroque, a l'oeil flambant,
Vient siblant par le bois tullegeais,
Et burbule en venant.
Un deux, un deux, par le milieu,
Le glaive vorpal fait pat-a-pan!
La bete defaite, avec sa tete,
Il rentre gallomphant.
As-tu tue le Jaseroque?
Viens a mon coer, fils rayonnais!
O jour frabbejeais! Calleau! Callai!
Il cortule dans sa joie.
Il brilgue: les toves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave,
Enmimes sont les gougebosquex,
Et le momerade horsgrave.
- Committed Evolution customization stuff, updated
gnome-vfs to get Pavel's locking acceleration updates.
- Got tired, mental note from Rusty: "next time
you're bored start reading about compuational geometry
its interesting" somehow 'The Annotated Alice' &
'The complete works of Oscar Wilde' seem more attractive
currently.
- Committed eog PropertyBag fix, went to bed:
1.30am.
- Up fairly early. Started to fire off E-mail in
various directions.
- Sorted out the mess created by the transition
to xml-i18n-tools; lets hope it's the last of the problems.
- Lovely mail from J, very distracting.
- Big libole2 patch from Dom and the AbiWord team;
set to merging it up. Nice cleanup patches from Ravi for gb,
first gb patch from Matthew Mei, encouraging.
- Realised I had been writing rubbish here for over
a year now.
- Another nice bonobo patch from Dietmar; it's great
to be able to pay him to hack with me.
- Tried to get copies of 'The Consumers good chemical
guide' and 'Living with risk', the former of which is extremely
good - all environmentalists should read it, and the latter as
yet unread, but sounds amusing.
- Still not received my ApologetiX CDs after ~3.5 months,
tried not to write a threatening E-mail about it, probably failed.
- Lots of guff about dynamic keybinding assignment to
Bonobo menus; what a pain tried to disable the broken Gtk+
scheme. Add configuration stuff to the Evolution gui.
- Considered more clever positional attributes in the
XML merging.
- Awoken by B ( Julia's housemate ) going off to
put the horses on a walking machine to exercise them ( her
job ). More sleep.
- Had a wierd dream about drug use, and a police
raid, and a shotgun and other strange stuff. Woken by Julia
passing through to set up church ( in a local school ).
- Break fast, grunted at Alasdair and Julie, off
to church in the car ( which by now had developed an interesting,
expensive creaking noise in the power steering ).
- Lovely group of people, a very pleasant church
service, it's good to have a bricklayer giving the sermon which
while unfocused was interesting; on holiness. Also the free
form praise was rather inspiring and liberating.
- Met some people I hadn't seen for ages; Allison
Thompson and her Mum, good to catch up, she is so much better
than me at the violin now it's a shame, felt cowed. Still she
does teach it and play all the time.
- Drove around for a while seeing the lovely
countryside and trying to find a pub for lunch. Eventualy
retreated home for toasted, bacon and brie, olive bread
sandwiches which were extremely fine.
- Off for a walk around Julia's jogging route,
across some of the training area for the young horses, pretty
skylines in various directions, rather distracted by the matter
at hand. A lovely saunter.
- Back home for tea and chocolates, and then the
farewell and got a lift back into London with Alasdair and
Julie. Had a long and fascinating discussion with Alasdair
about the dangers of post stressed concrete girders and
demolishing buildings containing them. Interesting that
moterway bridges are designed for a lifetime of 120 years.
Julie fell asleep in the back.
- Tube / train home. My laptop decided to suspend
to disk extremely slowly; I was amazed when upon feeding it a
new battery it recovered nicely ( apart from some X screwups
a mode changed fixed ).
- Thought I was doing well with Dad ( being vague ),
but Mum saw through me. Tried to stall with a discussion of
power steering to no avail.
- Mum: "If she less than 6 years older that's fine,
XYZ aunt & uncle were very happily married..."
- Dad: "Does she look like the back of a bus ?" Me:
"Sadly not: extremely pretty when she smiles" Dad: "Very dangerous
these smilers" ( Father's philosophy of women is that ones that
look like the back of a bus don't run off on you ).
- Mum: "You don't want anyone from those awful flat
places" ( born in Yorkshire ).
- Dad: "I don't know anything about this strange piece"
- Mum: "So when am I going to meet her?"
- Dad: "Look what I was lumbered with" etc.
- An evening of general comedy :-)
- Up late; Sean drove us to Grantchester, learning
to drive, but already rather good and confidant. Saw Archer's
house, and went for a little walk near Byron's pool.
- Back home, rang Julia to co-ordinate arrival, Ian
explained the complex location. Then off to Tatties for food,
eat too much, hyper nervous.
- [Julia wrote] The lady arrived to a battle, clearly lost.
The lady (easily confused) was understandably misled. Sean reminded
me of an old friend but kinder. Even so he preceeded to win the
battle without remorse. Julia was streching after her run; and moss was
growing out of a pipe and she noticed a beautiful little plant.[/end]
- Got Julia's flashy car to her house; a confidant and
experienced driver, also an ex white water rafting instructor
apparently. Lovely house; not very small, tastefully appointed
rooms with different themes. Sat around and had tea, and lit the
fire in a box. Very cosy.
- Alasdair and Julie turned up and we eat the meal that
Julia had prepared for us all, despite claims of over-doneness,
it was greatly appreciated.
- Retired to the lounge ( lots of stars and candles )
for a very protacted debate on biblical sexuality, Julie was
putting a somewhat unorthodox position.
- Washed up, eventualy they went to bed leaving Julia
and myself in the lounge with a dying fire, she's shockingly
attractive. Proceeded to bore her with lots of photos of Korea
and Norway, kissed after she had lost the will to live; not
a good strategy.
- Slept (fitfully) on floor in lounge.
- Up late; Dietmar full of good ideas as usual, lots
of mail, no sign of my message to James; wierd.
- Checked train times; updated everything, tried to
get CVS HEAD evolution to work; e-text is stuffed somehow.
Wrote lots of mail.
- Arrived at AT&T labs, met Sean, got an 'Active Bat'
in order to allow easy location of foreign bodies in the labs.
Looked around at the various flash things they are doing, lovely
broad band telephony dojits.
- Off home to meet Abi, admired the new house, Abi
ill and in bed ( caught multiple lurgies from the children
she teaches ).
- Indian food, ordered too much, failed to eat what
was put in front of me: sad. Back to watch 'The Italian Job',
an excellent film. Unconvinced by the steriotype of computer
'boffins'.
- Bed on't fouton.
- Committed gb patch.
- Changed everything to Ximian.
- Received a letter from Muller Dairy (UK) Ltd.
Dear Mr Weeks,
We were most concerned to learn of your complaint
regartind one of our Fruit Corner Yogurts and full details
have been given to our Quality Assurance Department.
We appreciate the time you have taken to bring this
to our attention and would like to accept as a gesture of
the Company's goodwill, the enclosed reimbursment, with the
hope that you have no further problems with out products.
Yours Sincerely,
- A little too pre-fabricated for my liking,
still 3UKP of yogurt voucher's gives a net profit.
- Committed builtin toolbar configuration stuff,
fixed weirdness in ORBit tests.
- My college friend Lee Edmond just got engaged
to a mysterious Jo.
- Looked at Pavel's bonobo profile and did some
nice algorithmic optimization.
- Checked out Mike Kestner's bonobo-draw and sent
a patch off to him.
- Played with gnumeric and dia for a while,
implemented the PersistFile interface and the printing
interface. People insist on doing things in an awkward way
with their model / view abstractions, it's quite strange,
so printing is not
nicely matched to the view.
- Committed bonobo speedup without waiting for
Pavel's re-profile.
- Talked to Lupus, havn't managed to catch up
with him for ages, working on funky Bonobo / Perl stuff
for us. Committed Nautilus patch to allow us to fix the
ItemContainer API without pain.
- Received a lovely CD in the post, started
building OpenOffice from the compiler, through STL, and
onto the main tree... just need to wait a few hours now.
- Mail chewage, fiddled with the toolbar config
dialog, discovered a bug in glade, sigh, leaving known
bugs around is evil, fix it!
- Xpdf fixage, prep for Item container fixage,
patch to Nautilus to give us leeway. Nasty VFS seg fault,
report to Pavel.
- Net connection obligingly died, became a write
only medium, the joys of Freeserve. A tad of gb hacking
while it recovered.
- Up rather late. Almer committed gbrun-menu.c
so frmNumberGame now has a nice little 1 level menu working
which is great.
- Lots of hacking and mail reading; discovered I
had missed 40 mail messages on a company list; sigh.
- Drove Mother to Grandma's, Mum has knitted a
little blue jumper for Grandma's Helix Code monkey ( what
with it being winter and all ).
- Committed more toolbar config code. Jody it
seems has been working on hardcore gnumeric speedups, not
only the new style tree but in idle cell rendering which
is cool.
- Chess game with James continuing with myself
getting a progressively evily cramped development, and
loosing control of the centre, sigh.
- Nice chat to Telsa, idling instead of working.
- Spent a very long time chasing a reference
counting problem, that wasn't there a week ago.
- Up bright and early; got to work on the mail
pile. Lots of nice work happening, Mike Kestner sorting out
Bonobo embeddable canvas items slickly, Alexander let me
commit my Dia patch. Various other misc. patches, bonobo
fixage etc. Jody's doing some excellent work accelerating
the guts of the gnumeric style code an order of magnitude
speedup on average - nice, 2-3 orders for some large sheets.
- Onwards with configurable toolbars, detoured to
help Miguel briefly and added UI support to the moniker test
program; very useful.
- Phone call from John Gill from Renaisance ( a financial
company in Ireland ), clearly a very forward looking chap,
interested in investing some money in gnumeric development.
Reccommended Jon K.H. to him. We need to provide 'Crystal Ball'
and 'At Risk' equivalents apparently.
- Off to catch the train for dinner in London. Got
an even louder red shirt for Christmas, and an extremely
bright yellow tie; excellent - no taste.
- Got to the restaurant - Prism - 147 Leadenhall St.
EC3, managed to walk past it without understanding the
complicated numbering system that the street uses, rather on
time instead of early.
- Lovely room, pleasing plaster work on the ceiling,
almost no-one there which was nice. The lady herself arrived
shortly afterwards, looking wonderful. Had a very pleasant
delve into each other's lives, how interesting it looks from
in there.
- Walked back via. St Helen's Bishop's gate, her
London Church, tube to Kings X, fun fun.
- Train; got on with hacking configuration,
getting there, niceish architecture, almost happy with it.
- Rather confused, meal less expensive than
anticipated though.
- Up early; Church in the morning, a service of
re-dedication, redeem the time for the days are evil.
- Saw Robert off back to Southampton, sad.
- Practice for the evening service, prayed with
some frightened lad (Ash) who came in while we were
practicing. What do you say when they ask "Anything in
scripture on being Jinxed" ? answers on a postcard.
- Up early to go and buy a jacket ( a Christmas present )
in Arundel, feeling totaly dead. Arundel is extremely lovely, with
the polished stone of the castle in the crisp morning sun, wow. Too
tired to appreciate it really.
- Back home, back to sleep, dinner, more sleep.
- A tad of dia hacking, got the bonobo component to run
on my machine without seg faulting and dispatched a chunky patch to
James & the list.
- Up late. Some clown in NYC has broken my connection
to anywhere interesting but theregister.
- Grabbed mail eventualy, decided to process my weeks'
queue of non urgent mail.
- Committed a nicer re-factor, tastefully concealing more
of the UI code from prying fingers. Also the start of the user config
code.
- Cleaned up gnumeric's gb plugin quickly. Hacked printing
support into eog's new viewer component - 2 minutes work; excellent.
- Off to Ali and Guy's for a thank-you dinner for playing
at their wedding. Nice food, played 'Brain Benders' afterwards, the
fatal mistake was Blokes vs. Girls, they beat us hands down.
- Played with potatoe guns ( a wedding present ), washed up
very late to bed.
- Up at midday; nice letter from some lady.
- Lots of mailing, wow, Helix is just growing and growing
and we're hiring lots of the cool people I know, so we better find
some new cool people in this project or we'll soon have no unpaid
volenteers :-)
- Committed bonobo toolbar speedup. Put my first
Copyright 2001 Helix Code, Inc. in a new file.
- Off to London for a spot of dinner with some old school
friends, with the loyal toast and To Christ's Hospital, may
all who love her prosper and may Almighty God increase their number;
Housey!. Hacked on the train.
- Up early. Evolution Wombat fixage.
- More testing of refactoring, looking good.
- Built a new (old) gcc to try out Eazel's profiler
( CVS module eazel-tools ). Profiled the UI code, it seems the no.1
routine is just really stupid, an easy fix.
- Started getting trouble with various modules built with
different compilers, and optimization screwing things up.
- Finaly tagged and committed the UI handler re-factor.
Now for the speed, noticed that Nautilus has got a lot more snappy
in recent times anyway, I suppose that means it's speed is slightly
more my fault now.
- Bowling with the young people from church, towards the end
I realized that aiming helps, strangely I remember having the same
realization somewhat earlier in the game last time I played so I'm
definately getting over the hill.
- Louise was bowling, a friend of Julia [Jooles], hard to
know who'se side she's on, or what she knows. Apparently she is busy
Monday.
- Discovered that some editors had removed the bit about
me being a Christian ( and nothing else ) from my Bio for
publication, how thoughtful - grr.
- More re-factoring bug fixing.
- Recieved a mail I assumed from some diary reading
person on the evils of alcohol demanding a dinner date for a
full apology; wow, apparently
Oscar Wilde said something along the lines of: '
Alcohol has the strange disposition of bringing on all the effects of
drunkenness when taken in large quantities'
- What a state to be in: emotional paralysis.
- Must remember:
A pretty foot is one of the greatest gifts of nature... please send me
your last pair of shoes, already worn out in dancing... so I can have
something of yours to press against my heart.
-- Goethe
- Fooled around writing E-mail instead of hacking - sigh.
- Discovered trying to book a restaurant at midnight is
doomed to failure.
- Found a hole a bus could drive thorough in a foolish
change; reverted it, everything seems peachy at last.
- Up rather late. Started catching up with mailing
lists. Sent my thoughts / patch on Sodipodi to Lauris.
- Fixed gtkhtml's E-browser so people can still build
evolution. Spent some time fixing various unrelated evolution
build issues.
- Continued re-factoring.
- Nearly finished, ideally it does nothing differently
and works first time.
- Bug fixing till late.
- Pleased by the rapid fading of the amateur psephology fad.
- Still trying to recover my love of baked beans,
after last night's 'see how many spoonfuls you can get in your
mouth and still say "happy new year"' game.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/
and data/
directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,
Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),
or anyone else.
It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
pyblosxom