Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up lateish, breakfast, finally got a dental appointment for Mother. Out to Lackford Lakes for a wander, and play in the playground.
Back for a fine lunch, combined with celebrating a near recovered Mother (minus one wisdom tooth). Parents left, watched the Muppets Christmas Carol with the babes. Much excitement at Tie dying of T-shirts with Becky.

2011-12-28: Wednesday

Up extremely late; re-started a funky butterfly puzzle with Becky & Julia. Lunch, bid 'bye to Robert and Ilona; slugged around tidying up & learning new games. Marshalled the babes off onto a cycle ride with J.
Watched Polyanna, put babes to bed, up talking with parents, Tom & Becky by the fire.

2011-12-27: Tuesday

Up late, slugged until an early Lunch. Marshalled babes & brothers to get to Duxford, wandered the air museum at length, enjoying the fine interactive science of aviation display we'd not seen before. Lovely time wandering around looking at all the semi-obsolete hardware including the Eurofighter.
Back for dinner, Sandy & Daniel over to play games during the evening. Read some of Freakanomics, amused to notice the Klu Kulux Klan's rather amusing practise of prefixing many roles with Kl: 'Klansman', 'Kloran', 'Klabee' etc.
Stayed up watching The Frozen Planet (J's present on DVD).

2011-12-26: Monday

Up lateish; set too cleaning N's bedroom for Becky - tons of cruft scattered everywhere, got it into a good state.
Lunch with Becky, tidied up the workshop, adjusted the drill press; lots of washing up. Robert & Ilona arrived, Lunch. Barbara, Colin & Chris arrived later. Out for a walk on the heath together. Buffet dinner, played pit until late, sat and talked to the brothers & girlfriends happily.

2011-12-25: Sunday

Up earlyish, Christmas day - J. discovered Hannah sitting downstairs colouring-in carefully, while watching her filled stocking by the fire: most encouraging restraint.
Much joyous stocking unpacking, exclamations of pleasure, admiring of various gifts. Breakfast, and set off for an early church, minimal shortened service to accommodate turkeys; hmm.
Home, cracked out the sherry and nibbles, by the fire. J. and Mother into the cooking flow. Bruce & Anne arrived. Turkey lunch. Lots of present opening, then desert.
Tried to fit key-less chuck on new drill-press, but stymied by a jacob's taper of the wrong size. E. very pleased with her new dinosaur with a long neck ("so it can eat cheese") - nick-named cheddar.
Up chatting to the parents & Thomas in the evening.

2011-12-24: Saturday

Up earlyish, present wrapping, bed making / preparation for Thomas who arrived for dinner. Lots of sitting by the fire doing not much, and catching up with T.

2011-12-23: Friday

Up lateish; scanned mail idly to keep it from growing uncontrollably, encouraging to see the ministry of absence in action: patches to get reviewed and merged: nice.
Got firewood sorted out and bagged suitably, house tidying and slugging action.
Late call with Ciaran and Camilo in the evening.

2011-12-22: Thursday

Up early; set to work on a lengthy list of tasks to get done. Dismantled upstairs toilet window mechanism - a victim of feeble aluminium casting fatigue. Machined a new gear from a couple of washers welded together, ground & filed into shape: works wonderfully.
Laura & babes over to play and for lunch. Cut down shelf to make childrens reading nest (suspiciously sited right outside my office).
Worked at cutting & mitring magnetic strips for secondary glazing with Father until dinner. Chat with JP.
Somehow (despite wearing goggles) managed to get a metal splinter in my left eye - just towards the nose of the cornea. Started to irritate the eye-lids; read about such things and headed to A&E at top speed. Some tender administration of poking around with a needle, and scanning the eye resulted in its extraction: good. Back to bed.

2011-12-21: Wednesday

Up late - first day of holiday; decided to shut my (now defunct), US based employee stock program E-trade account; attempted to use the website, fell back on phoning. Apparently it is necessary to send them a picture of my passport and a letter to close the account: nothing like making it deliberately difficult to shut an account. Interestingly, they didn't require any form of Photo ID (or other) to open the account, only to close it. Even more amazingly, the steam-powered E-bay appear not to have an E-mail address for sending scanned copies, but demand a fax: no doubt validating the ~one inch signature from my photo-id against another signature in the same fax, both presumably at 150 DPI, is ultra secure. Eventually discovered a rather easier way of closing it to get a dollar cheque.
Out to the Brighty mulled wine & mince pie party in the evening; nice to catch up with the family.
Back for dinner. put babes to bed; David over in the evening for Bible study. Parents arrived too from Yorkshire; up late with them.

2011-12-20: Tuesday

To work, more mail and document review. Tried to address a nasty X / multi-head crasher, but simply can't reproduce it; Xephyr defies my best efforts to create a functioning three-display xrandr setup. Dear lazyweb - how can I get 'xrandr' or gnome-display-manager to give me three displays of arbitrary size with Xephyr ?
Poked at an RTL bug instead; discovered the presenter view has a substantial number of RTL bugs.

2011-12-19: Monday

Mail chew, monday admin bits. Chat with Caolan. Lunch with holidaying bouncy family. Chased a docx bug that crashes MS Office 2007 (odd for an XML document). Dinner, worked late.

2011-12-18: Sunday

Lie-in, breakfast, stayed by the fire with H. in the morning. Out to practise for the carol service in the afternoon, followed by service (M. a reluctant, but eventually triumphant angel; N. a Magi(?), E. a lonesome audience). Party food afterwards; home, put everyone to bed, holiday atmosphere reigning. Movie in the evening, sleep.

2011-12-17: Saturday

Up lateish; fooled about tidying the house and slugging with the babes. Lunch; out for a churches-together angel parade in the afternoon - visited the Methodist church, and then some animals in the garden.
Home, put everyone to bed; H. horrendously sick in the night; much changing of beds, clothes, scrubbing of stuff; urk.

2011-12-16: Friday

Packed babes off for their last day at school. Poked at OpenVPN issues, signing and double signing and other nonsense. Plugged away at stubify and packaging the results to upgrade our legacy build systems, stymied by an old internal glib.
Got my openVPN credentials, tried to match the out of date wiki steps to the changed network-manager UI steps; failed to connect by either of the native openvpn commandline, and or the GUI; clearly unnecessary obscurity and complexity adds that extra sugar-level of 'security' to the system's guts.
Dug out and linked license statements from the archives, fixed a multi-display bug.

2011-12-15: Thursday

Took babes to school, and attended their music assembly, all of them playing something - really good to get used to performing from a young age I suspect. Back to try to unwind some minor cultural mismatch.
Patch review. Lunch, helped Tim with the fence. Team call, TSC meeting, another meeting; posted minutes, misc. admin.
Out carol singing, mulled wine & mince pies later at Mike & Thea's. Back to catch up with Julien until late.

2011-12-14: Wednesday

Poked at an evolution bug or two, set a new callgrind run going. Mmail & patch pull/push. Unwound some test skeleton problems with moggi and rene. Lunch. Tim over to mend the fence, good to see him.
Callgrind still running; ho hum. Dug through the extensions module for Matus, eager to gnumake-ify it.
Final Freedom in Christ session in the evening, an encouraging and helpful course; now over - back to cell groups on Wednesdays.

2011-12-13: Tuesday

Mail, tested docx export - fine, but mis-interacts with import, reviewed and massaged text. Upgraded using zypper dup to openSUSE 12.1 - works really nicely.
Lunch, hacked at an image import issue, disabled gtk3+ support unless in experimental mode. Unsuccessfully chased an odd wizards related crasher on windows, without Java installed.
Lydia over for dinner. Worked late.
You know something is really wrong when callgrind takes several hours to run loading a presentation that should load in seconds. On-line present purchasing action.

2011-12-12: Monday

Up; mail chew; one-to-one with Ralf, off to the pre-school play; more E-mail, status report, admin fluff. Back-ported Lubos' nice docx comment export code to 3.4.5 to avoid data loss there. Prodded annoyingly intermitten sdi compilation / race bug - most odd.

2011-12-11: Sunday

Breakfast at Church, Hannah's dedication service; Claire spoke. Home, applied ourselves to a new jigsaw puzzle with strange 3D / striated pieces - really rather hard.
Watched The Princess Bride with the babes, more applied slugging. Got the new reprap calibrated and the heater going and extruding. Seems there was some code flagging any thermistor showing sub 5 degrees Centigrade as broken and thus dangerous - clearly written by someone from a more temperate climate.

2011-12-10: Saturday

Set off to Sue & Clives earlyish; finished Watership Down in the car; fondly remembered last year's horror snowbound journey. Arrived, Bruce & Anne staying, played with fun sized nephews by the fire, caught up with all & sundry. Excellent roast pork lunch. Out to watch the Christmas steam train passing nearby. Back, for more slugging & family enjoyment, drove babes home late.

2011-12-09: Friday

Up early, parents arrived for breakfast on the way past to Yorkshire with lots of good things. To work. Mail chew, wrote Linux Format column, early lunch.
Call wiht Charles; more mail. Dead pleased to see Bjoern of Canonical fame's latest elite hack - using git bisect on binaries.
Knocked up stubify. Could this be the world's ugliest hack ? it exists to produce a vampire stub library with all the fleshy innards sucked out (particularly dependencies on other libraries), along with matching pkgconfig files and includes. That turns libgtk-3.so from 4.6Mb to 250k; but why bother ? The answer is - that creating linux builds that run on multiple versions of Linux is a massive pain; this is primarily down to glibc's hyper-unhelpful symbol versioning (stubbify doesn't handle that yet). This means that you have to build you package inside the oldest system you want to support. Unfortunately, that makes installing the latest cutting edge libraries: gtk+ 3.2 or KDE 4, practically impossible via an inter-library dependency and technology cascade. Would you re-package the gtk+3 stack for CENTOS4 (the baseline we inherited) ? of course not ! So - by using stubify (when it works properly) we can create libraries that are only there to help the linker be happy, along with the associated headers. That way we can package up libraries that can later be dlopened on systems that include the real mccoy, and life is good; at least - that's the plan.
Dinner, worked late; ran some profiles on libreoffice 3.5 startup.

2011-12-08: Thursday

Up early; prodded mail, chased queued admin. Set about fixing issues in the presentation display switcher: if your presenter view shows up on the beamer for whatever tangled reason, you get a nice button to click to swap it over (will need to fix the beamer mis-detection too shortly).
Lunch, team meeting, TSC meeting. More misc. bug fixing until dinner.
Out to Hannah's christmas play in the evening; rather well done, home - remembered to get into Cambridge to pick up a drill press won on e-bay. Home; assured myself its bearings are still in good order & it drills nice holes: good.

2011-12-06: Wednesday

Catching up with several days of under-attended mail and tasks; urk. Thrilled to see the new workstation build LibreOffice from clean in 45 minutes.
Did some gtk+/broadway handholding to get people up-to-speed. Hacked the services/ directory scanner to ignore backup files - avoiding some really odd behaviour. Nearly killed by laughter reading Michael Stahl's cultural protection request Misc. patch review / merge.
Suffered yet more pain with GWAVA spam filtering hiding mail from me, and worse bouncing mail to have me pushed off / get warnings from misc. open-source lists: hideous.
Freedom in Christ in the evening, interesting stuff. Up late working getting some problems unwound.

2011-12-06: Tuesday

Up too early, train to London; all day partner event - lots of interesting people, stats, etc. Encouraged to read the git logs and see all the nice code cleanups from Kohei, windows installer cleans from Andras, Multi-media embedding in ODF, from Michael Stahl, gtk+ native print dialog interation from David, and various other bits that slipped in at the last minute. Advisory Board call in the evening. Home late.

2011-12-05: Monday

To work, feature freeze tomorrow; certain amount of panic is in order. Spent much of the day wrestling python embedding, with an amazing amount of grief. Wonderful things like: "Import error type wizards.fax is unknown" getting spewed from wizards.fax's own __init__.py included via __import__("wizards.fax") and other miracles. Lots of futile stracing, it seems that exception mostly means 'something went wrong'.
Lots more pyuno exception dumping, tried (somehow) to work out what the contents of an __import__'ed module's dict contains; pwrt. classes and variables defined in files in that directory; totally stumped. Resorted to reading the over-meta, non-helpful documentation on the point. Tried to introspect the module in more depth interactively (without success) - trying to map a set of .py files in a module, to a given content of a module hash presumably requires some C / code-reading. Eventually defeated it by explicit .py file/path loading - which works, only to hit a number of bugs in the python port itself, bother.
Out to Chris & Claire's to baby sit. Worked on getting things merged. An encouraging feel of cameraderie among the other guys working late to get their features in; no doubt there'll be a lot of bug fixing next. Up rather late.

2011-12-04: Sunday

Up, off to NCC, preached. Back for lunch, slugged. Created a new door sill for the workshop to keep out the icy draft, debugged a repsnapper issue improving the serial port setup / debugging API.

2011-12-03: Saturday

Breakfast, read Watership Down to the older babes (all agog) - Bigwig about to attempt escape. Attacked the bathroom with silicone, removed old silicone, glued on tiles with new, etc.
Worked the afternoon and until rather late studying Daniel 5 - the writing on the wall. Interested to read some of Xenophon's Cyropaedia on the topic, fun.

2011-12-02: Friday

Chat with Vojtech, mail processing, good to see Beta 0 getting lots of build / packaging bugs shaken out before the excitement of the feature-freeze and Beta 1. Cleaned the office, setup new hardware, lunch.
Filed a couple of charting bugs; more install / setup. Worked at the presenter view display management, to make it easier to switch displays in the case that we got them wrong.
Spent a good while merging the python fax wizard branch, and trying to untangle the various curious problems associated with that; improved our python/UNO integration debuggability a fair bit.

2011-12-01: Thursday

Teachers back at work; helped dispatch family to their care. Should dig out the advent calendars & start trying to remember the complex turn-based structure necessary to make it fall fair.
Read and responded to mail; dug out some code pointers to help a hacker; more mail. Lunch. Out to N. and M.'s school / nativity play - lots of fun-sized singing: featuring N. the glockenspiel playing angel, and M. one of a class full of singing donkeys.
TSC call. Vojtech's staff call, chat with Dawn; recieved faster server; quick dinner, back to meet Brad; worked late.

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