Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up late; watched the royal wedding, beautiful. I was glad to hear Parry's beautiful anthem at the entrance (sung many a time in the C.H. Choir). Some obvious over-emphases possible when associating one's nation with Jerusalem, the city on a hill etc. but at least congruent with singing Blake's Jerusalem: the answer seems to be no to all its questions.
Bite to eat, and out to Noughten Park for a picnic, and wandering through the tree maze, and fine grounds. Why is it that park management feel they have to lop all low-hanging boughs from trees to avoid children climbing them: the children do not appreciate it.
Spaghetti dinner, popped babes to bed; played with my new violin a bit - reviving Robert's skills, and played Cashflow in the evening - Monopoly for the (more) modern era, with an added micro-lesson on inflation (the numbers seem a tad low); fun.

2011-04-29: Friday.

Up early; quick breakfast, today is Royal Wedding day. Despite being a fan of the royals, took advantage of the day to pack the babes into the car, and set off for Wickstead (an amusement park). Arrived - sunny in patches all day despite the morose weather forecast.
Babes have put some good effort into growing taller since last time, allowing N. to go on some of the more nail-biting rides as well as H. lurched around the place variously, roller-coastered etc. Robert & Ilona arrived for lunch.
More spinning on nauseating machines, fake-ice skating, pirate shipping, fake-helicopter pedaling, excessive log-boat riding, and so on - with much fun for all. Home, eventually via the Fish & Chip shop.
Up late talking with Rob & Ilona - lovely.

2011-04-28: Thursday.

Prodded mail, hunted down several pieces of prototype hardware that are needed back; including my reprap controller - hmm. Lunch, misc. calls.
Conf-call, finished the TSC call early (for once) - turns out not sending meeting reminders out in advance reduces attendance. Finally got to finishing my LXF column, and sending that off. A royal wedding national holiday tomorrow: nice.

2011-04-27: Wednesday.

Up early, poked at mail, responded to this and that. Off into Cambridge with Mike for ministry course; excellent, simple pair of presentations on the Trinity. Lunch, another on Malachi, then giving Evangelistic Talks.
Home; flurry of texting - apparently Attachmate completed their acquisition of Novell - good; direction returns, along with opportunity. Dinner. Listened to the jolly webcast, read mail, caught up with some debugging, patches etc. researched a work plan.

2011-04-26: Tuesday.

To work, started on mail - pleased by the amount of elbow-grease put in by Ryan, the down-side being an inbox stuffed with desktop summit paper mail. Chewed other mail, Clarity, status reportage.
Great to see Norbert, Dtardon and others working hard at gnumake-isation, with the growing tail_build module - which can build all of writer, calc, impress, and chart2 fully in parallel - as a big final build.
Set too building the latest stable and development branches of libreoffice. Amused by my inability to decipher Louis' latest blog. Could it be that I've been promoted from a purely malign entity, to an unwitting pawn of other evil powers ? perhaps that is progress. Presumably my sub-concious desire to crush small animals while stroking a white cat is so subtle that even I am unaware of it - thinking instead that I'm working hard to try to sustain, grow and improve Free Software, at the same time.
Chewed through some bug reports; started on LXF column. Put babes to bed, dinner; back to work - valgrinded an odd unit test, admin.

2011-04-25: Monday.

Up earlyish, breakfast. Off to Sizewell beach, dug happily in the sand. Met a set of un-reconstructed hippies protesting (peacefully thankfully) in general against Nuclear power. Having said that, they admitted their own radiation measurements showed the beach by the power station is no more radioactive than any other beach. Chatted to the police keeping an eye, in the sun. Sand castles, stone throwing at waves, ideal.
Back, for a large roast lamb meal; washed the car for once (somehow removing the accumulated moss from the windows), collected good things from Bruce's collection: 8mm diameter rubber piping for plastic printer rollers, drain for a bespoke sink I have planned etc.
Bathed babes, watched nonsense TV, tea, drove home.

2011-04-24: Sunday.

Up lateish, off to NCC, family service for Easter Sunday. Off to Bruce & Anne's with lunch in the car afterwards - leaving Leanne for a barbeque.
Arrived, pottered around a lot, and enjoyed an evening with the inlaws. Stayed up unfeasibly late reading Pride and Prejudice, which is excessively good - see what free Google books, and the ability to easily read until late without a light to disturb the wife do to you.

2011-04-23: Saturday.

Up early, made movies of the babes singing from the tablet, they seem less able to detect it being used and clamour to see themselves in advance. Lazed suitably.
Out to Reach in the evening, caught up with Hannah, Nick & Jonie - but all too briefly; back for a fine dinner with Andy.

2011-04-22: Friday.

Long lie in, up, discovered I was nearly late for the Easter walk of witness through Newmarket. Quick breakfast, and sauntered down into town. Much singing, processing etc. with many brothers & sisters.
Home, lunch, conference call, poked some software and chased some admin, with some more applied slugging to flavour.

2011-04-21: Thursday.

Up early, poked at mail, got a nice new toy in the post: an Android tablet to port LibreOffice to (perhaps), be nice to get the gnumake work finished first, obviously.
Lunch; Joy and girls came up to see us - garden crawling with lots of tiny people having fun, sliding into paddling-pools and so on in a spectrum of shades of pink outfits. Picnic lunch outside, good to catch up.
TSC meeting, followed by SC meeting; more mail.

2011-04-20: Wednesday.

Disappointed at OStatic's summarizing of the tdf blog entry apparently they didn't read the we are always willing to include new members and partners section. TDF should always be open.
Wedding anniversary - nine years of marriage, and still it gets better.
Encouraging mail, admin, call with Holger, reviewed a nice vcl fix, and Andras' template shrink and fix. More mail beat-back.
Leanne arrived to stay for a bit, dinner with her and Lydia. Fixed a number of problems with libreprap causing grief with the latest repsnapper to relax.

2011-04-19: Tuesday.

Started re-scaling the E-mail mountain; reduced the backlog of freedesktop account admin; call with Thorsten & Kendy. Lunch.
More mail reading, fixed a bug in the dbaccess port to gnumake (great to see that on-going), and more mail.
Out for a drink and meal in the evening with the lovely wife - for once in a long time,

2011-04-18: Monday.

After a slight rush; headed out to music lesson. M. first. Suitably 'cello playing, and then took M. out on her ~annual trip with her Father.
Visited Bury St. Edmonds in the sun, admired the somewhat macabre museum for a bit, M. more terrified by the "pretend people". Dressed up and played in the fine children's area.
On to Cafe Rouge for lunch, lots of sitting on the knee and talking, while waiting (endlessly) for food. Ice cream, and drove home. More playing in the garden.
Up late, trying to book the ferry for the next trip (to France) in the summer.

2011-04-17: Sunday.

Off to NCC for breakfast, gave talk, chatter afterwards; home for lunch. Bid 'bye to David.
Applied slugging, tidied the house a little, wondered where the holiday went a bit.

2011-04-16: Saturday.

Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept. Worked away at my talk.
Breakfast, and off to Thetford Forest for a fun time with the babes in a very English state of sunny not-quite-raining-ness. Conference call sheltering by the toilet block (which appears to be a (not very effective in the rain) solar power showpiece as well.
Back to the monster pyramid slide for a picnic lunch, then more wandering between various monsters to climb / clamber / balance on.
Home for dinner. David: introduced to openSCAD, ~immediately produced a replacement plastic clip for a door spring, which, when subsequently printed and fitted solved our malingering cupboard problem.
Printed out a souvenier for David. Finished off talk, and sat up chatting happily,

2011-04-15: Friday.

Up earlyish, off to Ickworth house to help test their tour of the gardens, servants tour (dressed up), and so on. Picnic lunch and play in the playground.
Home picked up Phoebie (over for a sleepover in lieu of baby sitting). Waited for David, sadly delayed by the M25.
Worked away at a sermon on Daniel 2 - mostly focusing on the failure and charlatanism of magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers when compared to the wisdom of God (rather than the second key point: the impermanance and fragility of human Kingdoms).
Interrupted by a surprising call from Simon. Distracted into E-mail / IM, though managed to return to thinking & researching after a bit.
Got the babes dinner down them, David arrived, packed them off to bed, and enjoyed our meal and time together.

2011-04-14: Thursday.

Up lateish, out shopping with E. Removed, and re-concreted the septic manhole cover in the workshop to make it somewhat less odiferous (the burning ABS smell has some uses it seems). It seems the real key to that, is the consistency of the mix - managed not to damage my hands this time.
Tried to finish the model/view split in repsnapper: I'm coming to rather like the C++ sigc:: templated signal fun - although compile times of (fairly trivial) C++ apps are simply staggeringly bad even with fast modern machines: odd.
Transcribed Gordon's Daniel 2 talk, to provide bits to re-use at the weekend, bed.

2011-04-13: Wednesday.

Up, played in the garden, after some practise jumped the stream, and accidentally triggered a quest for long-jumping prowess, the ~five feet, somewhat far off from the Olympic's thirty.
Packed up, and set off to Wendover Woods with Sue, Adam & James. Made a bivouac to have lunch under, played on the children's equipment - and made some good progress in tree-climbing with H. and N. achieving a good height up some trees.
Drove home; bouncing on the trampoline, unpacking and feeding of babes; took H. swimming and met an interesting psychologist parent, and interrogated him. Back, put babes to bed.

2011-04-12: Tuesday.

Up earlyish, breakfast, drove off to Leighton Buzzard to admire Clive's carboard tube manufacturing business, machinery, team etc. Big spinning rolls of cardboard, plenty of glue, and lots of interest there, with some fun machinery.
Back for lunch, pottered in the garden a bit; Georgina Stephanie and Isabelle arrived, out for a walk with them, nice to catch up with the wider family.
Excited to get Thomas VS interested in repraps, and gaining another skilled pair of hands to help out with our feeble software situation. Dinner, James sad in the night with an ear infection.

2011-04-11: Monday.

Up, poked mail, tried to get the inbox further dunged out and the task queue down for a week of holiday starting tomorrow. Status report, Clarity, merged patches.
Watched Italo's talk, and another Flourish panel - interesting analogy greeted with some acclaim beteween assignment based open-source business models and cancer.
Spent a chunk of the afternoon ranking Desktop Summit talks, prodded Bjoern wrt. TSC meeting admin. Prodded away at python trying to create UNO message dialogs. Poked a friendly Italian.
Packed up and drove to Suzannah & Clive's, popped babes to bed, fine meal, sleep.

2011-04-10: Sunday.

Up late; off to NCC - J. spoke nicely about the PCC; Tony preached on the resurrection. Dropped J. and M. off at a party, and back home.
Lunch, played with the babes in the garden in the sun for the afternoon, tidied up. Dinner, put people to bed. Poked at repsnapper fixing a number of annoying bugs - still didn't get to fixing the shell-only mode I need.

2011-04-09: Saturday.

Fine lie-in; entertained children, tried to attach 12V car-pump tyre first to Molex connector for PC PSU, and second to paddling pool in order to inflate it. Failed at the latter - pump apparently inadequate; disassembled, lubricated etc. - some nice castings, while J. manually einflated it.
Looked after the babes, occasionally spraying them with water, bouncing on trampoline in the sun etc. while J. went shopping. Lunch. Knocked up a 'cello spike holder using openscad to print to stl (my first 'thing' on thingiverse).
Out shopping for bread and mortar. Back, to print it out, dinner, tested contraption on Miriam's 'cello - a perfect fit. Sometimes I despair of the craziness of the US patents system as applied to software, but ... while searching for the perfect angle for a 'cello (at a guess ~60degrees), by accident I discovered that the world of live music is utterly mad as well. How can something this mind-blowingly trivial be filed in 2002 ? the base claims seem banal to me, and prior art is (surely) rife.

2011-04-08: Friday.

Up early, discovered my pleas for students have sunk along with my blog underneath all the new Gnome 3 prettiness; hopefully t'will return soon.
Light mail-load allowed me to dig back into the deep past and find some of those things I'd forgotten to do, managed to get the backlog under a thousand items. Did a little work on the freedesktop account admin queue, chased a deadlock. Lunch. Nearly managed to get the mail queue under 500, but failed.
Booked travel to LinuxTag, arriving early on the 11th, leaving evening of the 13th some great talks & speakers lined up there it seems. Prodded my gmake speedup a little more.
Nice chat with Federico. Helped put babes to bed, back to fix some at-spi2 memory leaks while J. out for a run with Sue.

2011-04-07: Thursday.

Prodded mail, and chased nasty kernel wedging issue at some length. Turned out I wasn't starting icecream, and running ~60 g++ processes concurrently makes the machine perform terribly, and the OOM killer doesn't do a good job; not such a surprise, but annoying in itself.
Pleased to see GNOME 3.0 out, with some great images to download and play with, was somewhat scared previously by the reaction to Vuntz' april fool joke.
Finished the mail triage; prodded at removing more obsolete patches from the 'build' module. Lunch.
Plugged away after lunch; Novell LibreOffice team meeting, the first with Andras. Registered as a GSOC mentor finally. Chased a comedy writer crasher with redlining.
Tomorrow is the deadline for GSOC submissions - please get your LibreOffice goodness in soon; I just added an extra sexy Telepathy slide-sharing task too, that is crying out for someone to work on it.

2011-04-06: Wednesday.

Mail prodding; caught up with Julian, who is doing great stuff with helgrind it seems. Fixed an evo deadlock on start in a test patch for the sqlite lockup I'm suffering.
Amused by Bruce's GNOME 3.0 review, apparently no-one can find the force-fallback setting to get the old-style GUI, presumably that is by design, but it makes the reviews tediously predictable: Control Center -> System Info -> Graphics -> force fallback mode is your friend.
Bruce & Anne over for lunch; quick call with Italo; preload staff meeting; more hackery. Solomon around in the evening with various quotes for work. Poked at the reprap fitting new stepper motors that arrived today.

2011-04-05: Tuesday.

Ollie left rather early in the morning.
Up, to work, poked at mail, and got stuck into trying to work out why an incremental make in writer does 700k stat system calls. After some digging, it turns out glob is the culprit, always statting, knocked up a near doubling of performance there in twenty lines or so, still more to go I'm sure, but parsing 50Mb of dependencies (just for writer) is going to take at least -some- time I suspect.
Chewed through the rest of the mail queue. Preload staff meeting; got stuck into Linux snapshot builds, and re-wrote the nightmare of ninja shell that was autogen.sh. Then dug into making relocate cope with the new gnumake deps.
Bed early, feeling awful - the next round in the cycle of coughs & chest infections no doubt.

2011-04-04: Monday.

Up, to work; pleased to read an interview with Petr Mladek - who does such great working packaging LibreOffice for openSUSE, and of course helps to run the LibreOffice tagging / branching / release process.
Dug through bug spam, apparently lots of my reports are now old, and thus hopefully fixed already. Wrote weekly status reports, Clarity etc. Reviewed a patch or two, fixed a crasher. Dug out the key (setq tramp-mode nil) to make new emacs' responsive around file opening / completion.
Read over the discussion about how to improve the LibreOffice easy hacks page which is a victim of its own success size-wise, some good ideas there to improve things.
Fixed some broken image theme paths, reviewed some more nice patches; prodded some python filters/ goodness.
Poked at gnu make to try to work out why it is statting the same files hundreds (over a thousand in some cases) of times. Surely one make instance shouldn't need to protect itself from random other processes updating files (other than itself) while it is running ? Surely the Makefile rules should specify what each command touches and might dirty ? Interested to see, that despite my thesis that syscalls are fast, a warm set of 700k stats to some deep path, take 2 seconds on my machine in the kernel.
Fixed up some help dialog problems in master. Out for a goodbye dinner with our American missionaries at All Saints, up late talking to Ollie.

2011-04-03: Sunday.

Up; fed and dressed babes, played for a while; off to All Saints for school / family service. More fun, stayed for shared supper afterwards - had another couple of extra baby girls over for lunch - which took some herding home. Much trampolining in the sun, and a Barbie DVD.
J. returned from her retreat, good to see her again; dropped babes back to their parents, and home to put ours to bed. Poked at repsnapper, merged the gtk2 branch to master, and fixed a few bugs.

2011-04-02: Saturday.

Mini lie-in, kindly assisted by babies not disturbing their (hard to rouse) Father. Slugged variously, set off to All Saints for the kids Easter party, Saddleback ranch DVD / songs, puppet show, food, easter-egg hunts, good stuff.
Home, via the library and DVD store; watched some Tom & Jerry, fed, bathed babes, read stories; hacked on repsnapper a bit, dropped libconfig++ dependency, and gtkglextmm which seems like one dependency too many.
Ollie home, talked until late.

2011-04-01: Friday.

Up early; took babes to school, to work, poked mail; and worked through some more 'build' patches that needed merging, interacted with a couple of promising students wanting to do LibreOffice GSOC stuff: great.
Lunch, out to do a questionaire with our crosslinks friends in town on people's religious thinking; some fascinating answers - eg. a Muslim that believes in re-incarnation; or a Lady who believes in God, but not an afterlife. Collected difficult questions for the town's pastors to deal with on Saturday (All Saints 6:30pm - I suspect some vandalism of C.S.Lewis' nice boolean consequence tree in the title).
Back; fixed Evolution local addressbook integration issue, and back-ported to libreoffice-3-3.
Julia home early, and left for a weekend retreat with Louise. Fed the babes sausages for dinner, put them to bed, read stories, and back to work. Fixed a glyph fallback crasher, and enabled a number of filter components that hadn't got their XML component descriptions sorted out yet. Bed late.

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