Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, breakfast with Thiery from Airbus working on their interesting avionics, as well as video for Linux. Off to First Baptist's early service; small congregation, but a good sermon. Back to the hotel, phoned home.
Profiled my new sandisk 8GB USB key, it can do the same 25Mb/sec that the built-in EEPC SSD does - good to have that baseline. Off to the airport with Alasdair - good to get some vicarious sight-seeing in.
What with the general disapprobation from kernel people about OO.o's pagein binary (that maps and touches each page linearly), I did a little testing of launching OO.o from flash; interestingly, even with a free-seek medium, pagein gives a win:

type readings average

with pagein 4.160, 4.081, 3.987, 4.023 4.06

without pagein 4.311, 4.759, 4.379, 4.571 4.51

So 10% slower without pagein ie. just relying on the posix_fadvise for shared libraries - even on cheap seeking SSD, and even though the pagein -should- load more data than we actually use; sad.
Interested by the push-back to Greg's talk. While it was perhaps a tad sharp, and could have been more broadly generalised; his numbers reflect my day-to-day experience of the developer community. Perhaps the most encouraging thing is that a lack of up-stream contribution to the shared code-base is now (rightly) seen as a negative thing, and I'm pleased by Mark's recent commitments to resource Canonical's up-stream contribution. It's also interesting how quickly the 'objective' conspiriacy theorists start slinging allegations - personally my bias is clear: if someone doesn't want to use my beloved SUSE for whatever reason, I heartily recommend Fedora to them - if only because of the huge number of developers I respect & call friends that are paid by RedHat, working together with us on projects I care about. In time, I looking forward to being able to recommend Ubuntu for the same reasons, at least to that tiny minority that dislike green colour schemes.
Met interesting girl (Marketa) on the plane from Vancouver (to Prague) from her cruise ship: the Star Princess, an economist and hair dresser / beauty therapist. Managed to avoid any beauty therapy.
Thinking of desktop cold-start times, it's interesting to think how little data we extract from 3Mb of scattered hash files in /usr/share/locale-bundle/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/* an lsof on those shows an interesting picture. Strangely, when I log in. I only see less than a handful of translated strings on my desktop - surely we an do better here. Perhaps some LD_PRELOAD'ed gettext pre-cache might save some seeks.

type	readings	average
with pagein	4.160, 4.081, 3.987, 4.023	4.06
without pagein	4.311, 4.759, 4.379, 4.571	4.51

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.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2008-09-21: Sunday.