Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, wound new heater element while J. slept and the babes gambolled. J. iced cakes variously, and then off to the NCC Monday Fun event on the studlands estate (a Bank Holiday fixture).
Met lots of interesting new people, lots of cakes, fine hot dogs, bouncy castle & so on. Simon did a stirling job refereeing a vast contingent of boys playing football.
Back - testing the new nozzle at last; discovered that I had inadvertently wedged the internal bearing - which might explain some of the lack of motor-driven extrusion. Cut out the ply a little more; fitted, heated, extruded ! nice - a beautiful stream of 0.5mm diameter plastic - wonderful. It seems the interface between the hot 3.5mm hole, and the insulating 3.5mm hole is absolutely critical to the process - something I was perhaps missing before.
Tried to time the amount of plastic extruded per second, and get it to stick to the table. Tried extruding onto ply-wood, then nylon chopping block: no joy - seemingly kapton-tape on ply is reasonable. Managed to print a few layers of a very awful 40mm cube before the nozzle started to drag it around the place - some accurate calibration required, clearly.

2010-05-30: Sunday.

Boiled eggs for breakfast, and off to Thorpness Meare for a row with Sue & Clive, and our respective broods. Amused by the initial critique of the parental rowing technique (indeed my skills are highly questionable though somewhat practised in eights). The criticism was drastically muted by the impact of personal experience as we merrily circled, caught crabs, drifted into the bank and so on under their masterly control: much fun.
Back for for a fine roast lunch; Bruce meanwhile having made a reprap extruder nozzle out of some steel studding, with the insulating from an old piece of phenolic resin (a pan handle by any other name). Looks like just what the doctor ordered.
Washed up, had coffee, and set off for home; gave the babes tea, and set too in the workshop - adjusting the fixtures (designed for a rather thinner barrel) to accomodate the new hot end. Bed early.

2010-05-29: Saturday.

Up early, off to the Alive conference near Woodbridge with the family. Parked the eldest two with kids workers; and had a talk on a single verse: "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field". That the kingdom being wonderfully valuable - like treasure; that it is not always necessary to have a systematic search to find it - as a gift; the joy of discovering and living in the kingdom; and it's cost - everything we have, but no more.
Myriam off to her activities; E. being very patient; on to a talk: how to deal with "Difficult People" by Sara Savage - based on Integrative Complexity. Fascinatingly her early research on the moral reasoning of both fundamentalist and liberal Christians showed that, in fact, while the latter had a land-grab (in the popular imagination) on the 'broad minded-ness' meme, in fact both groups the same proportion of people ~80% were unable to ~entertain the views of the other side.
Collected babes, had lunch in St Johns; more babe management, and on to a talk on the general slide in society's moral framework from the Christian Legal Centre - interesting. Finally played with E. through another talk while J. went to Elaine Storkey's talk on our societal obsession with sex, almost accidentally when really intimacy is sought.
Drove on to Bruce & Anne's for dinner, Sue, Clive, Adam & James also staying: happily crowded. Babes didn't have a good experience of trying to get to sleep, four to a room, but eventually succumbed.

2010-05-28: Friday.

Prodded mail; interested by Philip's link to The Secret Powers of Time, most fascinating; whatever happens at school; I like to sit around the table with the girls, encouraging them to leave the nicest things on their plate to eat last, in order "to build up their eschatological perspective". Hopefully that enables some level of rational decision making in the future present. Should we all focus more on the humble pea ?
Prodded valgrind's autotools setup with Julian. Listened to the Q2 corporate financials. Nicholas (an old Romanian friend) dropped in for lunch.
Reviewed wmz's paper, prodded bootchart2 too, fixed up yet more initrd related oddness, and up-loaded 0.11.4.
A quiet day, until the evening - J. took everyone to the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge to see nights, play with ancient artifacts etc. Put tired happy babes to bed, slept early.

2010-05-27: Thursday.

Up early, prodded mail gingerly. Pleased to see that MeeGo 1.0 has finally been released at least for Netbooks. Novell did a lot of work on that, a big chunk of that was around Evolution Express. Wrote a separate article about that, and pottered off for lunch.
Had a go with the wound, aluminium beer-can extruder nozzle; interestingly - it worked rather better than the radio aeriel - although the nozzle came undone at the bottom after a bit; and still too large to get a very solid piston effect; hmm.
Admired Aaron's nice MeeGo netbook Media Player blog.
Bus to Cambridge, read The years before the Hiding Place happily. Met up with Rob & enjoyed Collabora's hospitality at the beer festival, a fine evening of discussion and fun. Great stuff; back late.

2010-05-26: Wednesday.

Prodded mail & bugs. Discovered that the file ~/.local/share/tracker/data/tracker-store.journal does indeed grow without limit (at present). That is particularly nasty if you write something like this:
while true; do echo "foo" >> ~/foo.txt; sleep 10; done
If tracker-miner-fs is indexing your ~ - foo.txt ends up getting appended (in it's entirety) to your journal, that is pretty exciting if we log N lines (of say 4 bytes), we expect to append O(N^2) lines to the journal - taking only ~one day to fill a 2Gb journal. It is unclear how this gets limited to 1% of your disk space (or whatever your selected limit is). If you keep the file open and log things to it (perhaps a more common use-case), life is better.
Filed misc accumulated bugs. Amusingly hit a rather unpleasant bug similar to the above, with an N^2 in firefox. It seems firefox likes to leak (re-use?) a gtk+ file-selector, and since I save a lot in /tmp - if I start to compile OO.o, I get a flood of tmp-file creation there, which (by the miracle of inotify and live updating) then kills my browser - desparately trying to update a live view of /tmp that is not visible via some horrible algorithm. Strangely we fixed this in the past: how did it come back ?
Lunch, updated my evo crash - looks like it tries to use gconf from multiple threads concurrently (not good).
Call with Kendy, Jared's staff, mail chewage. Dinner.
Started a new attempt at extruder construction, this time using a rolled-up beer can; by rolling it tightlyaround the plastic filament I hope to have a better diameter to get a good piston effect. Made a nozzle by hammering a (pre-broken) 1mm dril into the end, and strategic bending; wound and wired up the heater element and thermistor - testing tomorrrow.

2010-05-25: Tuesday.

Valgrinded evolution for some time this morning; pleased with the combined performance of valgrind, and the W500. Also pleased that the Evo mailer seems very valgrind clean, though filed a few calendar bugs.
Prodded some oddness in a different build service behavior at some length. Dead pleased to see the awesome SUSE build service being used for extreme goodess with Fridrich's Evolution on Windows tinkering.
Prodded openSUSE 11.3 boot charts with Stephen / vuntz - it seems compiz' session management is partly to blame.
Lydia & Janice over in the evening; played plastic extrusion - further frustration (it doesn't extrude). Discovered the #reprap channel on freenode - neat; further discovered that Larry Ewing has been doing interesting things in this area too - encouraging.

2010-05-24: Monday.

To work, admin, dealt with the weekend workers. Set too at an LXF column, spent several hours researching the current state of Linux network management; go Network Manager ! late call.
Discovered I had broken bootchart2 - it seems we have to dung ourselves out of the initrd by move mounting ourselves. Had a brainwave: move the polling for a writable /dev into bootchart2 itself, and move mount / chroot ourselves when it is; it might even work.
J. having the PCC AGM this evening, lots of fine cakes lurking around the place. Avoided this, in favour of wiring up, and finishing the new extruder. Sadly - no better than the old one, plastic can only be extruded by applying a vast force to the barrel, bother. Probably the (4mm) diameter hole is too large. Found a nice FAQ, and considered matters.

2010-05-23: Sunday.

Dealt with babes while J. slept. Off to NCC, Tony spoke mostly about his recent trip abroad visiting some missionaries.
Back for lunch, Mum & Dad appear to have finished the chair re-covering, leaving us with functioning, well padded, comfortable chairs at the table: wonderful.
M&D + H. went to Kings College' Evensong. Poked at the new electronics. Retained the old stepper drivers, and got the axes working nicely. Back to battling the extruder, got the stepper working nicely in the end.
Ended up re-building the extruder barrel - at some length, this time with a brass nozzel - fairly concerned that there is not enough of a thermal mass (with the aerial based extruder to get a good, uniform, stable temperature: ie. it heats much too quickly, and (presumably) not uniformly.

2010-05-22: Saturday.

Up earlyish, off to ParcelForce to pay my customs fee, and collect new electronics. Home. Side-tracked by the more critical chair re-covering task being kindly prosecuted with vigour by Mum & Dad
Spent a good while removing tacks from ancient chair bottoms, with assistance from several sets of girls, eager to learn about leverage (the genuine sort) while sitting on daddy's knee in the sun. Got some new ply-wood seats formed to the contours, glued and screwed down too.
Off to Nowton Park nr. Bury; for a walk in the sun and picnic tea with everyone. Managed to rush some of the children's energy off in the gardens and playground.
Back; tired. Popped around to Peace & Solomon's to pick up my old electronics stashed at their place. Extracted a handy ATX PSU for driving the (sexy) new MakerBot electronics.

2010-05-21: Friday.

Prodded mail, sync call with Kendy, hacked at some verbiage. Tried to use skype; it really replicates the mobile telephony experience faithfully: "sorry, can you speak up ?", "You're breaking up", "Lets try using a land-line"; sigh.
Wondered what all the fuss is about Google recording tiny snippets of information that other people are broadcasting un-encrypted to everyone. If you shout something private in a crowded room, can you really expect to erase that from each listener's memory ?
Parents arrived, pottered around with them in the evening, played with prototype reprap - while doing so the TechZone extruder board lots it's smoke [ correctly wired etc. not being stepped either ] - bother. Luckily the MakerBot version should arrive tomorrow.

2010-05-20: Thursday.

Prodded mail, listened to a talk by Scott Berkun (of Confessions of a Public Speaker prepping for giving a good OSCON talk. An unusual, albeit obvious, approach - trying to make your speakers' talks better beforehand. Rather a good talk too.
Stumbled upon rather a sexy turing machine. Prodded at bugs.
We released SLED11-SP1, which is rather sexy; and with a substantially refreshed GNOME stack, keeping it relevant and fixing ever more bugs. It's working really well for my hacking workstation (at least).
Tried to get excited about 'Draw Muhammed' day; of course, taking a stand for free speech sounds like a good thing; but then I don't like gratuitously offending people, as a matter of course; also - I can't draw for toffee - so this will have to do. Muhammed: O:-#. I can see why a minority of Muslims might find that offensive, if so, apologies; I like Muslims as well as Atheists, and other-eists. Yet the right to free expression is a bedrock of a liberal democracy, and is too precious to lose to a new tyranny of self-censorship.
Poked at PackageKit some more; apparently dbus message timeouts are (as well as being extraordinarily unhelpful) not so good for slower machines.
Transferred the OO.o code-base across to the new machine, should really do some speed trials there.

2010-05-19: Wednesday.

Browsed mail, and events variously. Amazed, and disappointed to see Microsoft attacking one of the totemic 'Cloud' vendors (in the hype-jargon of today). Threats supposedly started in 2009 (shortly after the launch of Azure). Is it possible that winning Salesforce to Azure was a cherished pipe-dream ? Interestingly they appear to use (or have used) Linux on Dell. In that context, perhaps it is somewhat positive, that this is not (on the face of it) a TomTom style attack on Linux per-se.
Prodded at file-system layout a little, how can a hard-disk cloning system subtly change only some of the layout ? odd. Prodded a new & interesting bootchart2 bug.
Lunch; cut my micro-controller code down to the very bone for testing the stepping extruder; apparently connecting the other stepper controllers to the main-board 'causes' the extruder controller to glitch and die, urk. At times like this, one needs a friendly local hardware company with spare storage scope around to decipher the entrails after the event; hmm.
Back to Evo issues, creating a meeting without mail being setup is rather a problem it seems. Well pleased by Petr's hat-trick. Amused by Fridrich's suggestion to normalise all time keeping to a uniform 'milliseconds-since-creation-of-universe', hmm.
Meeting with Intel; Dinner. Lydia & Janice over in the evening, chatted with them, and poked with the RepRap electronics, learned several useful things, most of which probably should be obvious.
- If you accidentally touch the crystal (or whatever it is) when trying to see if the micro-controller is overheating you will glitch/stop the clock. This has the unfortunate side effect of making everything seem flakier than it really is.
- A cheap 12V laptop power-supply is under-powered to drive four NEMA 17 stepper motors, unless you adjust the stepper controller pots carefully to the minimum level necessary to drive them. Doing that hugely reduces the (inferred) voltage spikes killing the extruder controller cpu.
- Grounding everything vigorously is good; adding a meaty ground line direct from the USB connector housing to the PSU ground improves live measurably.
- The reprap controller firmware has a toggle button marked 'Extrude', don't be fooled - what it really appears to mean is "extrude for a bit, then stop" (at least, I hope so).

2010-05-18: Tuesday.

Prodded mail, fixed a couple of bootchart2 sillies kindly reported by MajQ and eikesauer; did a 0.11.2 release. Got mail from people amused by a flood of acceptances of long-dead appointments - sigh.
Amused by P. Van-hoof's charm offensive - with a helpful transcript of the hammed up polemic.
- The advocacy of the quest for scientific truth is great, who cannot sign up for an enthusiastic war on ignorance ? The amusing irony of the mumbo-jumbo packed spiel, specialising 'dumb', and blaming all the world's troubles (even environmental destruction) on believers is amazing.
- I know no-one who believes without question, or has faith without facts. My experience of meeting those who advocate killing those of a different belief is (sadly) limited to a few Muslims; eg. the head of the ISOC at Cambridge during my time would kill even his own son, or so he said. That I suspect is a sentiment shared by only a small proportion of Muslims, many of whom are peace-loving.
- Then we have the extraordinarily tendentious "Only Morons can destroy life and claim a higher purpose" - (this is not a definition of 'Moron' by the way, 'Morons' are believers). Is that really so ? The existence of mercenaries would suggest that life destruction can be justified, in the non-religious, by such banalities as personal enrichment. Just War - in essence elevates the duty to protect a neighbour in need, over the duty to preserve the life of an aggressor; while Augustine may have had a lot to say about the limits on war (that it must be 'just') - it is unclear that all Atheists have substantial ethical disagreement over its necessity in extremis. Then of course today's post-Christian society destroys life of both the un-born and elderly at a staggering rate; the higher purpose there: personal convenience. The assertion is manifestly and self-servingly false after only a minute of thought.
- As for following in the footsteps of some really smart people, it looks like Kneller's Isaac Newton features in the graphics. Interestingly "Newton wrote more on religion than he did on natural science." ... "Thus, the clarity and simplicity of science was seen as a way to combat the emotional and metaphysical superlatives of both superstitious enthusiasm and the threat of atheism,...".
- Albert "I am not an Atheist" Einstein, provides some great name recognition to support whatever view you like. His understanding of God was not one I share, and at least slightly congruent with the Atheist as viewing faith as a childish suspicion. Nevertheless, he says: "In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views." - go Astronomers ! aggravate the dead man.
- Also, in case it is not obvious, while being a convinced Christian (or 'Moron' in the parlance) - I am not a "base, merciless, killer" (lol) - nor do I want to destroy the planet. Quite the opposite, I have rather an affection for P.V.Hoof, and I like debating with him in person. It is much, much better to talk about things than to censor and hide them, I tend to be an advocate for free expression. Furthermore, in my not-humble-enough opinion there are some points of view that speak far, far more about their holder, than perhaps they intended: "Shakespeare can't write for toffee", "The Bible is rubbish (though I never read it)" etc.
- Finally, in my view the antagonism from which this comes, is an almost total rejection of the liberal arts, in favour of the apparent certainty of hard science. I used to share a distain for the waffling classes, until I saw the UK's Chief Science Advisor to the Government, make a complete fool of himself with an arrogantly un-substantiable, dismissive attitude, in a lecture from a Philosopher (from the History and Philosophy of Science Dep't). For those of a more inquiring frame - I wish I had more time to read eg. Trigg.
  Science needs a metaphysical justification. We have to have some warrant for thinking that its apparent successes are real and not illusory. We may be lucky to live in an island of apparent order in a fundamentally disordered universe. If we do not believe this, why not?
  A useful question ? more so to those astronomers that believe that 80%+ of the universe is invisible: utterly transparent, nonbaryonic etc. Quite probably it is so, but acknowledging a philosophical basis of belief there is helpful.
- Parenthetically, I appreciate that some more thoughtful and humble Atheists find this sort of thing -as- embarassing, as I find some creationist christians. That is, no doubt, all for the best - stimulating thought.
Installed the latest technicolor MeeGo image, looking good. Poked at Evolution translations a little, apparently translating things breaks the help build (bother). Added a minor feature or two to bootchart2 for Lennart. Bug-fixed, and enabled command-line dumping;

Looks busy and cluttered (good thing its off by default), yet perhaps useful: "which modprobe is taking all that time ?". Presumably by turning off the elision of tiny scripts, we could get a better view of what really happens (crazy-sed-spawning-wise) at boot.
Merged some translations for Evolution manually, still havn't got the hang of msggrep - how do I lookup the single (exact) string 'Calendar' in an Evolution .po file ? add some code mangling to remove mnemonics from a string to get at a translated version of "Password:"; fun. Pondered also the plague of 'no' files that scp likes to poo across my file-system: who thought I wanted it to do that ?

2010-05-17: Monday.

Up early, babes to church; home. Played with new laptop, experienced the umpteen-step Windows XP setup - presumably still shipping, and having to support XP is a maintenance disaster in a box for Microsoft.
Seems the new thinkpad (W500) comes with WiMax support - which is great. Encouraged to see the diverse set of people sending patches to systemd on the list; nice. Reviewed misc bugs / patches while downloading SLED11-SP1 install media for new machine, went through the 'Receiving' process; Clarity.
Spent some considerable time dunging out all the ancient meeting requests that I never accepted, but just showed up in my calendar. An unfortunate side-effect of Groupwise is that if you don't use IMAP you have to accept or reject appointments in order to de-clutter your inbox. Now I have to spend time testing the non-IMAP SOAP protocol, which (sadly) means tons of obsolete appointment spam - apologies if that was you.
Up late prodding at this extruder controller; seemingly intermittent horrific lock-up, triggered by (who knows what). Seemingly the processor looses its way, and goes into some hard loop and/or even looses it's program - trying to debug dodgy hardware without a logic analyser is somewhat frustratingly pointless. Consulted wife for advice, ordered some new hardware from MakerBot - hopefully they test their electronics before shipping it.

2010-05-16: Sunday.

Up early; packed everyone in the car, and drove to NorthChurch Baptist for a service, met up with Claire and old friend of J's. Managed babes in the creche.
On to the White Heart at Nettlebed for the fiftieth birthday party of J's cousin. Lots of interesting people, and a fine bash. Back late.
More struggling with reprap electronics; extrusion appears to stop a little while after being started - why ? hopefully more of a software problem; various bits of diagnostic micro-controller hackery; bed.

2010-05-15: Saturday.

Unpacked new laptop; just arrived - oddly a 16x9 screen - will that equate to more side-by-side emacs buffer goodness ?
Plodded away at the RepRap electronics - made new connections for the step/direction pins; eventually gave up and hacked up some new ultra simple firmware for the extruder controller - just exercising the stepper.
Played with M. in the road, trying to get her internal steering feedback loop tuned. Chatted to Russel a bit.
Babes watched Shrek, tried to explain the relevance of Taylor Mali's speak with conviction poem.
Packed them into the bath, then bed. Ran my stepper test program only to discover that the TechZone electronics are essentially not working and apparently un-tested. Soldered an LED up, but iron too big. Popped down to Chris Brighty's to have several other pins on the A3949 DC motor drivers soldered: the moral ? don't put vias through solder pads. Now drives it the extruder stepper motor.

2010-05-14: Friday.

Trains variously to Intel's London office. Lunch, plugged away at evolution bugs. Chased one particularly fun one down through gtk+ client-side-window changes, and into cair, neat.
Pies for lunch; back, hacked & talked; really good team here. Out for dinner, missed several trains, caught the last one (just).

2010-05-13: Thursday.

More bootchart-ing distraction; I guess I need to understand the netlink interface a tad better to write a clean, mixed taskstat and proc_events user.
Jill + daughter over for lunch; installed the Groupwise cross-platform client to accept all my calendar recurrences once each instead of individually; hmm.
Cell group in the evening.

2010-05-12: Wednesday.

Evolution hacking, got distracted by bootchart2.
Merged the ptrace code - some considerable debugging. Started to get it to work. The idea is simple - when you are boot-charting in an 'initrd' - you have the issue that there is no-where obvious to write the data you collect: clearly it needs to be logged somewhere where the run-time system can get it, but where is that ? /dev is a good choice - particularly if you happen to be lucky enough to have a mount --move to move that into the new system, but that is not everyone. The solution is simple: use ptrace (a-la gdb) to hook the data out of, (and kill) an already running process. That combined with some duplicate daemon avoidance re-using the same code substantially cleans things up: a much simpler shell-script wrapper, with the hope of killing the wrapper altogether: nice.
Came to the conclusion my extruder / stepper problem may be a ground issue between the two micro-controller boards. Lydia over in the evening; up late talking to her variously.

2010-05-11: Tuesday.

Plugged away at mail; printed expense claims etc. Back to bug triage, and fixing.
Nice to see Simon Phipp's new company ForgeRock announced. Interesting to see their contributor agreement:
It leaves every contributor as the copyright holder of their own code, either licensed to the community under the same license as the rest of the project (CDDL in most cases) or shared with ForgeRock so we can license it out under CDDL while we hold it in trust for the community.
That looks rather positive, albeit somewhat confusing. If the concept of licensing under the CDDL is unpleasant (why I have no idea), it appears you can pick Apache2 as the code license for your chunk instead. I'll be interested to see how it pans out, cf. the FAQ.
On another front, that of Trademark policies the malign effects over over-rigid control bite; personally I'd love to be an IceWeazel user and know I can fearlessly patch my browser if I need to, naturally with some fair creditation for all the great work the Mozilla project do.
Lunch, prodded at my extruder; with the I2C bus re-connected, getting a little extruder movement, but not nearly enough - and not regular; annoyingly odd - plenty of smoke and yellowing ABS too; rather a nasty odor really.
More bug fixing, chat with Vuntz. Managed to find time away from the cliff-face to hack on bootchart2 a bit. Packaged it for MeeGo, and prodded at the improved task logging (capturing all the arguments), proc-events following (to avoid loosing who-forked-whom data), and so on.

2010-05-10: Monday.

Nice to see the nascent web-site for systemd, subscribed to the mailing-list.
Dug at the weekend mail, why does it seem like there is always more mail on Mondays ? do other people work at the weekend, or have I been freed from the concept of spending multiple hours reading and actioning E-mail each day over the weekend, only to get shackled to it again.
Nokia's escalating Software Patent war against Apple (much as I loathe the latter) really doesn't build confidence in their business; shame.
Plugged away at Evo Express. J. at PCC prayer meeting in the evening poked at the reprap electronics. Managed to get the temperature readings back to the mother ship - but at the cost of the I2C bus that (it seems) drives the extruder's stepper; bother. Spent happy minutes pushing molten and re-solifidied ABS down a tube manually with pliars - getting a lovely filament out, and lots of vapour.

2010-05-09: Sunday.

Up early; lie-in for J. off to NCC; Janice spoke on exuberant worship. Took N. to Cassidy's party out in a village. Home to catch up with Katie & co. over for lunch.
Pottered about with the babes a bit. Solomon arrived to collect keys to try in his padlock, and angle-grinder in case that failed; paint and other bits too.
Lots of people around in the evening, to watch To End all Wars - rather good, nice to have Bert too.

2010-05-08: Saturday.

Mini lie-in, breakfast, lots of jigsaw puzzling action, then watched the Muppets Treasure Island with the babes & James & Kate; bacon sandwiches for lunch, and dropped them back into Cambridge.
Home, prodded at the reprap for a while, got the extruder wired up, and after prodding at my SCL and SDA pins, learned how simple the I2C bus is really; neat.
Tea; while prodding away at the electronics, realised I was getting smoke from the extruder, manually turned the stepper and got my first working 1mm diameter extruded plastic. Apparently this is what happens when the thermistor is not wired up to get temperature feedback working properly (or something). Bed early.

2010-05-07: Friday.

Up early, took the babes to school; snarfed some fine ply-wood left over from the creche re-building from a skip; to work. Prodded bugs.
Mailed the IET, a tad annoyed by their hype around electronic voting - which as far as I can see is a nightmare. I love the FSF's item in the GPLv3 FAQ: "We believe that computers cannot be trusted for voting. Voting should be done on paper." - Amen.
Sue, Clive & Adam dropped in in passing for a quick lunch.
Finished PK / zypper bits, submitted new package, and back to Evo Express, pushed new, updated packages.
Interested to see Wayne Grudem in the (virtual) flesh, rather than just reading his theological works; though how likely people are to pay lots of money for such content on DVD is unclear to me in a world with so much free material out there.
James and Kate over late afternoon; lovely dinner with the family and stayed up late enjoying their company.

2010-05-06: Thursday.

Up early, prodded mail; merged and tested PackageKit fixes, nailed a nasty around prompting in the core. Claire came around for lunch, out of action with a painful shoulder.
Cycled M. around to the polling booth, explaining the process. Voted for the Conservative party: no I don't think justifying Government waste simply to keep people employed is an acceptable policy position, nor do I understand the Labour hysteria and fearmongering, and I loathe the cult of over-regulation; the Liberal's policies seem somewhat unfortunate, and/or simply a vote for a hung parliament with Labour still in place; end of story.
Great to see Collabora join the GNOME foundation.
Cell group in the evening at the Hummerson's.

2010-05-05: Wednesday.

More mail, bug and PackageKit fun. Took N. to Addenbrooks for a routine check-up, all well. On to ParcelForce to pay tax on a reel of plastic: amazing.
Much more PackageKit work.
Home, apparently the knurled extruder works really impressively well - great grip, got a first cut of the heater underway. After a couple of nights of terrible tooth-fueled baby crying every half an hour, got a good night's sleep.

2010-05-04: Tuesday.

Discovered my plastic and thermistors are held up by customs fees at ParcelForce; hmm. Plugged away all day at PackageKit, and it's zypp backend - lots of bugs and issues fixed, some polishing too, starting to look rather better. Worked late.

2010-05-03: Monday.

A bank holiday - lie in; more reprap prodding, got all the axis' wired up, and working; re-made the original aluminium gears with nylon chopping block & MDF - the best gear yet; nice. Everything working rather nicely.
Played in the road a little with the babes, teaching them to ride their bikes; slugged variously.

2010-05-02: Sunday.

Up early, fed and baby-sat babes, while cleaning many weeks of accumulated muck out of the workshop; off to NCC; Simon Matthews speaking.
Off to Pete, Shelly & Isaac's afterwards for a fine dinner and afternoon of fellowship. Great to see them in their home before Pete heads off back to vetinary academia.
Put babes to bed on return, poked at the electronics, got Z and Y working, with opto-end-stops fitted correctly, and bits of bent beer-can fitted to suit.

2010-05-01: Saturday.

Up lateish, feeling awful & groggy, nasty cold coming on. Off to Linton Zoo for a picnic lunch to celebrate Patricks' birthday (yesterday) with DT, Zoe, their friends, and of course some animals.
Unfortunately, despite our best efforts the children far preferred playing on the climbing frames, sliding down slides poles etc. to seeing the animals. A very fine lion sat within five feet of us, and was very obliging at looking, growling etc. lovely.
Back - prodded at reprap in the afternoon / evening - got all of the stepper motors in-place, with belts fitted, and some of the electronics wired up for the Z and Y axis.

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