Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up earlyish; house & self, cleaning & tidying. Dropped all the babes off at Laura's (brave lady). Carolyn Bramhall arrived, and some friends & our Pastor Tony & wife Janice to do some training on Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Regardless of the controversy surrounding the issue, a refreshingly simple & hard to argue-with approach of love, affirmation of God's love, and honesty.
Lunch; more interesting insight. Collected the babes, apparently un-phased by their experience (even E.). Chatted to Carolyn much of the evening, fine lady; she has written an interesting account of her life, abuse and recovery. Very enthusiastic too about Freedom in Christ ministries.

2010-02-26: Friday.

Prodded mail, pleased to see Ryan take the GVariant fix, suggested an even better fix. Prodded away at the EDBus binding, got it compiling, and even working (apparently); nice.
Lunch. Back to e-d-s, and evolution - tested various bits, fixed a number of unrelated but interesting bugs; improved the groupwise calendar backend locking, and read the camel folder summary code - interesting. Worked late.

2010-02-25: Thursday.

Up early, scanned mail; poked packaging bits and an interesting calc performance issue. Back to Evolution, submitted a couple of OSCON abstracts. Prodded vuntz idly (apparently working hard at fixing UI issues).
Prodded at Evolution some more, discovered I had configured IMAP-X but was not using it; hence suspicious stability - actually turned it on properly, and got more fun churning debug, but it still worked: surely new code is supposed to break ? Ran my calendar and addressbook daemons under valgrind, which as a side-effect exposes any latency problems rather nicely.
Wrestled GVariant (of a version that works) into GDBus, having discovered that glib's GVariant is still a partial merge-in-progress version. Dinner.
Back for some late-night hackery; seemingly part of my threading problems was a bug in GVariant, and the other part was not initializing dbus threading; fixed that. Renamed everything to EDBus (etc.) for re-use in Evolution 2.29.

2010-02-24: Wednesday.

Up early, set too build Evolution, call with some friendly Intel'ers. Discovered an intriguing xcb re-enterancy problem (apparently) deadlocking my X server when stracing a busy process during a synchronous call; XQueryPointer interrupted by a signal, followed by an XSync; blocks the compositing window-manager quite nicely.
Clarity. Hacked away at Evolution a bit - added a generic way to simplify the UI with conditionals inside XML comments in the UI description files; pushed to 'express'.

2010-02-23: Tuesday.

Up early, feeling iller: no time like the present to work though; prodded mail quickly. Chat with Nirav, then with Chen. Dug at a competitive analysis, and work plan.
Calls with all and sundry. Please to see Andrew 'hero' Haley finally identify the fun in Java causing OO.o to crash with deep stack frames / recursion. Also interesting that (apparently) JITted java methods deliberately touch their maximum expected stack extent as step #1 to catch stack overflow; fun.
Call with Kendy & Jared. Prodded at my reprap in the evening, got the captive nut-fest working really nicely; discovered that there is a rotation axis I need further constrained hmm.

2010-02-22: Monday.

Up; chatted with Seif a man of our time; generated a motto for RDF-ers: "I like to consider my wife as a tuple!". Inserted crazy ideas into their intray funnel.
Zypper is really a pleasure to use sudo zypper up evolution* gtkhtml* resolving at great speed, and just working is a fine thing. Fed up with waiting long periods for mozilla to respond (the awesome bar chewing I/O bandwidth? or just 10x tab browsing, with flash plugins or whatever nonsense). Downloaded chrome for x86_64, which goes against the grain, and was pleased with the multi-tabbed responsiveness.
An interesting, albeit incredibly lengthy conference call in the evening. Aaron persuaded me to create a twitter account; the problem is - even after reading my own page, I still don't know what I'm doing.

2010-02-21: Sunday.

Up earlyish, dealt with the babes - feeling pretty under the weather: some combination of the sendentry life, and standing outside in a cold workshop I suppose. Off to NCC; did the creche.
Back for Lunch with a local lady from up the road; fine meal, wine etc. Out in the afternoon with M. for a peer-party with bouncy-castle etc.

2010-02-20: Saturday.

Lie in; dropped J. down at the market, and collected potatoes. Back home, babes got sucked into iPlayer; and I prodded my mechanical tinkering. Lunch. H. assisted cutting ply-wood; fun.
Hannah & Joni arrived to do some more painting; the picture having been transfered to a canvas meanwhile. Joni assembled my Y axis bearings, and got that all bolted together between bits of ply; apparently novisible / feel-able movement on the axis, and seemingly parallel bars too (presumably cumulative error are easy to see in plastic form).
Nick arrived later, for dinner, then the Bancrofts too - great to see them, whiled away a happy evening talking of this & that.

2010-02-19: Friday.

Half-term allows later waking, a quick breakfast and getting to work on time - enjoyed the last day. Prepped, and had a chat with Kendy & co.
Laura, Claire and innumerable children over for lunch - Olivier's seventh birthday. Prodded blktrace on SP1, either I broke my kernel, or there is some serious badness / ABI change somewhere; how can BLKTRACESETUP on /dev/sda yield ENOTTY ? most odd.
Poked at slideware, chat with Tambet.

2010-02-18: Thursday.

Prodded at the CUPS deadlock provoked by trying to print a set of mendel assembly drawings: fun. It seems ghostscript and some other process (magically renamed to the queue name) are both doing blocking writes at each other (with full socket buffers): clever. CUPS never ceases to amaze me.
Pulled all the latest SP1 test packages, to test the latest fixes. Read about yet more linux kernel tracing / event logging schemes. Amused to see that mmiotrace was created just for Nouveau.
Read up on lttng, and some of the code - looks like something rather sexy (except, that is) that apparently I need to load some module, and then link a library - all to extract some simple, low-frequency string data from 'open' syscalls; seems like a non-starter.
Out for cell-group in the evening - a social dinner, fine food, some Wii playing action etc. good fun, bed late.

2010-02-17: Wednesday.

Prodded mail, tried to plod towards some way of organising the openSUSE / Moblin packages such that we can get integrated into Factory nicely.
Clinton arrived to look at the state of the building work; and RS delivered a lot of components, all but one of which were the right thing; good.
Poked at packages, chat with Vincent, JP . Got a SPAM - about homes missing disaster kits, with an offer of one for $1, and actually clicked the link (interesting) - is this a new battle on the psychology front ? leverage the hysteria around the war-on-terror to improve your spam-list; or I'm just feeling dozy and ill.
Prodded at the machine some more in the evening; getting the y-axis complete is easy enough. It is really unclear to me why the z-axis is packed with complicated pieces and bearings: is the studding (if constrained at the top as well as the bottom) really insufficient (when combined with another two semi-captive nuts) to steady the x-axis by itself ? (picture).

2010-02-16: Tuesday.

Up lateish, packed everything and set off for Suzannah's. Had a lovely lunch with her & Adam; played this & that - JP's staff meeting in mid vacation.
Drove home, absent mindedly, discovering that I'd forgotten to put a nappy on the (otherwise dressed) baby, and left toothbrushes and coats at my parents: bother.
Plugged away at creating a Repstrap fairly convinced that the triangular frames can be replaced by a couple of sheets of MDF, which I have lying around. Set too cutting bits to size, back to work tomorrow.

2010-02-15: Monday.

J. lie in, and off to see the (subset of the) Quaker Tapestry exhibition that my parents have been helping organise in Brighton meeting. Fine needlework, and inspiring material [sic].
On to Maplin's to buy a replacement diode for the TV; popped into Louise Bomber's Walk A Mile In My Shoes exhibition of artwork by children on their experience of trauma and loss; interesting if depressing.
Back for lunch; foolishly poked mail; I see MeeGo was announced earlier than I had expected. The governance is curious - devolved / dictatorship by the (incredibly over-worked) Imad & Valtteri Imad is the director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, and Valtteri is the director of the Technology Strategy of Maemo devices. It remains to be seen what the result will be.
Prodded at the reprap project, contemplated the bootstrapping process; without one, it is hard to make one. Popped down to the Nut & Bolt shop, discovered their rather high prices, but bought some studding and bolts to support them. Home to do much of the rest on-line.

2010-02-14: Sunday.

Lie-in; off to St Lukes, ended up with Miriam drawing pictures. Back for a fine roast lunch cooked by Father.
Slugged in the afternoon; and sat up talking, reading and listening to a history of the world in an hundred objects as a pod-cast later.

2010-02-13: Saturday.

Up earlyish, packed everyone into the car with supplies; and set off to Brighton to stay with M&D. Lunch, out in the afternoon for a walk on the sea-front; returned for tea & cake suitably chilled.
Showed the latest craze off to Father, and disassembled their (rather nice) Thompson television (an ETC210) that (amazingly) seems to come with a rather complete schematic circuit diagram for it's discrete components. Prodded gingerly at the high-voltage interior.

2010-02-12: Friday.

Re-read Lennart's Out Of Memory (OOM) handling bloglet / link. I must say, I completely agree - but, I think it is still worthwhile adding failed-malloc handling to glib for two reasons: firstly, it is not hard to do for some methods, and adds no real performance impact; and secondly - code duplication is worse than bogus and irrelevant OOM handling, and not being able to handled failed mallocs is frequently heard as an excuse to re-write working code ( thus, incidentally also bringing OOM closer by having yet-another linked-list, hash-table, etc. etc. implementation in hot memory ).
Hacked at bootchart2 a little, hugely improved the interactive rendering speed by taking account of the visible area, rather than relying on cairo to crop everything.
Phone interview, admin. Prodded at a new recovery enabled mbr for a different vendor,

2010-02-11: Thursday.

Up early, poked news - appalled to visit slashdot, follow a link to the (apparently totally clueless) International Business Times, whose comment section allows users to insert random javascript: nice. Got re-directed to an apparently benign move-your-window-about-so-you-can't-close-it javascript thing. Tried unsuccessfully to debug it - unfortunately it was downloading what I can only describe as incredibly nauseating images, that it flooded the screen with; nearly retched. How can one tell firefox to black-list ibtimes.com found no way in the preferences, shame: the moral is clear; don't link to clueless news outlets - like slashdot ? shudder, still re-hinging the mind. Pleased to report that after mailing Tim, it was rapidly replaced with a reputable journal, restoring my faith in slashdot.
Prodded impress projecting bug in SP1 betas, in the meantime setup your display before launching OO.o, or tweak the settings. Some surreal mail about vendors installing their webcams upside down in netbooks flipped across my inbox: we really have a requirement for huge device specific tables to flip the image correctly ? doh.
Cedric pointed out that the LWN article How to destroy your community is now free for all to enjoy. In my view a fairly fool-proof set of steps. The 'poisonous people' thing is worth understanding, a technical term: these are not "people I disagree with" - but, more precisely those who endlessly talk, and never do, those who love hindering and coercing others into burdensome process etc. As one who in the past flirted with stupid process initiatives - eg. the 'GEP' nonsense (really a failed attempt to get passive-aggressives to communicate) I have hope it is possible for people to de-poison themselves. For those standing in the rubble of a destroyed, or (somehow non-growing) community, it's mandatory reading.
Dutifully filed FOSDEM expenses in a timely fashion. Chat with Thorsten, then Kendy, then Alan, Kendy, Ralf, Guy, and eventually finished - took refuge from the sound of my own voice.
Out to cell group in the evening, fun.

2010-02-10: Wednesday.

Up early, to work - amazingly Spencer the plumber arrived to do some power-flush and boiler fixing. Plugged away at merging kiwi patches, and misc. paper-pushing administration. Misc. phone call, meetings etc.
Interested by The Product Space and of course a great place to get a PDF to hammer cairo for you via evince, acroread does incremental rendering here which saves it from even worse ignominy.
Out in the evening for a romantic night out with my wife.

2010-02-09: Tuesday.

Up early, prodded mail; pushed my bootchart2 slides:
Pinged by someone wrt. my comment in the slides on Canonical's drive for (C) assignment, of course other companies practise this - and I believe it is sub-optimal there too.
The openSUSE Survey is open, considered feedback much appreciated. Sad to see Oracle lay-off Willie Walker - accessibility hero, and pianist.
Played with the Microsoft Office Live beta, web apps inside Firefox on Linux. Curious indeed: while the spreadsheet zoom-in/out actually worked in the browser - beating Google Doc's feebler attempt here; trying to get a small =SQRT(STDEV($A$1:A1, 3)) type block fill-out; seemingly I wedged the server: "This workspace is too busy. Please try again later" - presumably logged in the backend somewhere. One of the nice things about web services (I suppose) is being able to watch your users, and see what problems they hit, which bits they can't make work and so on - to improve the product with.
Prodded the public Moblin tree, and fixed some annoying build issues vs. 11.2.

2010-02-08: Monday.

A day of non-stop meeting / sync. call goodness; with JP, Jared, Guy, Kendy, Thorsten, and a stream of others. Mildly amused by "Time flies like an Arrow. Fruit Flies like Bananas".

2010-02-07: Sunday.

Up too early; to the conference. Enjoyed the Tor talk, although the ethics of standing nearby a lot of people doing a very diverse set of things (in order to help hide them) are unclear to me.
Amused by Tanenbaum's talk on reliable software, if not completely convinced. It is highly unclear to me that re-starting apparently AWOL individual components will lead to a more reliable system overall, on the other hand - isolation of low-quality third party drivers seems obviously good.
Travelled home via some horrendous interrupted rail journey / bus special. Longer to get from London to Newmarket than from Brussels to London.

2010-02-06: Saturday.

Up somewhat late for breakfast - met some Cambridge guys working on accessible speech synthesis devices. Bus to the conference. Set too manning the booth - Moblin demos, worked on a few build bugs with FunkyPenguin.
Worked on my talk somewhat; despite a deluge of interesting things and people passing by. Gave it; slides to follow. Wandered the floor, demoing things to people.
Out for dinner with some SUSE guys in the evening; and off to the Porte Noir for the GNOME party.

2010-02-05: Friday.

Up early, plugged away at mail for a bit; packed, lunch, and set off for Brussels. Hackery on slides for tomorrow. Arrived, out to the beer event - caught up with a simply staggering number of cool & interesting people, bed inordinately late.

2010-02-04: Thursday.

Up early, more mail prodding, paniced about slides for FOSDEM, and various other un-resolved issues. A day of admin, and conference calls - up very late.

2010-02-03: Wednesday.

Up early, to work - pleased to read Bradley's Not All Copyright Assignment Is Created Equal post; Amen. Prodded mail.
Slogged away at package building, obs submissions etc. Several conference calls.

2010-02-02: Tuesday.

To work, poked more bootcharts, fixed a couple of bugs in bootchart2, and submitted it to Base:System. Implemented horizontal scale zoom in the viewer - to see yet more detail. Dug into a kernel boot time regression, and poked Greg about it.
Meeting heaven - preload all-hands, customer calls, chat with Guy, JP, etc. what fun.
Banged away at my desk in the evening, accepting some slightly damp, pre-planed timber in exchange for speed. Amused by the EvoStick water-proof glue, apparently it "dries clear" - where 'clear' seems to have the value 'white'; odd. Assembled the angle-grinder, and had a go at the steel for the front guard - remembered that you get a lot of fun sparks from such an occupation - and that the floor is covered with fine sawdust, hmm. You really get a good feeling for the speed of a 10k RPM hard-disk, with a angle-grinder of the same speed, somehow failed to set light to myself, loose a limb, or burn the house down.

2010-02-01: Monday.

Walked babes to school. Interested to see the IM 25nm NAND flash, double the capacity in the same footprint. At 167mm^2 (a square 13x13) - 8Gb == 64Gbit; to convert that to the world of hard-disk geometries (all in bits per inch^2 [nice]) is ~1/4 of an inch squared, giving an areal density equivalent of 240Gbit/inch squared (highly contrived without leads, packaging, and/or hard-disk spindles, read heads etc. but interesting). So that gives us - numbers courtesy of man-in-the-pub (wikipedia)

Media Density Gbits/inch^2

CD 0.9

DVD 2.2

Blue-ray 7.5

IM 25nm flash 240

holographic 250

best holographic 250

hard disk 400

Of course, ideally storage densities would be measured in mm^3 (the world is going metric - inch by inch) - and of course, for eg. a backup medium, ultimate density of leaking capacitors is not the key consideration; but interesting nonetheless. I'm looking forward to the next generation of flash-ssds - but, if we could get the (rather good idea) of hybrid disk + some flash in a single box to market fruition things could get better rather more quickly. Incidentally - one reason doubling capacity in the same footprint makes a difference is the fixed cost: ~$1 per chip for etching, sawing, packaging etc.
Tried to book an hotel at FOSDEM on Alasdair's recommendation, I suppose I should at this point insert some graphic suggesting I'm going to FOSDEM: it's going to rock. By some miracle of scheduling, I also seem to have a talk on boot performance Saturday @ 16:15. The abstract for which should read:
A quick expose on boot time profiling tools, show-casing the slightly-less-lame: "bootchart2" - a new and improved boot time profiling tool, and other ways to speed things up. Which of the seven+ 'readahead' tools do you want, and why ? With a summary of recent fixes and wins in the area, and how to get involved with improving Linux boot performance
If you have content I am likely to miss: a new uber-funky boot, ultra-fast boot subsystem (or something) I'd love to hear about it for then.
I don't think I ever realised that Andy Wingo's past before GStreamer was so interestingly Nucular - a fascinating set of insights. I must say that, I'm more optimistic that you can blag money out of the military, and use it to generate something socially useful - the internet might be a case in point.
Poked LXF, odd. Clarity; one-to-one with JP, sync with Aaron. Worked late on git based code auditing tool. Printed out some lovely pictures of the children for their God-parents.

Media	Density Gbits/inch^2
CD	0.9
DVD	2.2
Blue-ray	7.5
IM 25nm flash	240
holographic	250
best holographic	250
hard disk	400

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.