Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Out all day at TEAM - the last of this term; finished the overview of Mark - great to get some good insights into the high level structure of the narrative, thematic concerns etc.
Home, fed and put babes to bed while J. took H. swimming; Pottered around in the evening, connected the electric violin to the sound system to verify that - indeed, it still sounds like a violin: but louder.

2011-03-29: Tuesday.

To work; some bug research, dunged out a lot of obsolete patches variously. Finished LXF column. Lunch. Burned a DVD of 11.4 and started sorting, and filing my expense paperwork. I love paper pushing !
Finished the install, interspersed the paperwork tedium with getting it setup variously. Dinner, more work.
Pottered about with the plastic printer in the evening, got some truly poor print-outs. It seems the combination of a duff vertical opto end-stop and melting the extruder well into the acrylic bed while homing the Z axis removed all the thermal grease between the temperature sensor and the nozzle.

2011-03-28: Monday.

Up early; misc. practices with the babes, 'cello & Violin etc. snatched some practise myself; to work. Weekly admin: Clarity, status reports etc. Call with Tor, prodded at iogrind futures as well. Fixed the from-clean LibreOffice build.
Lunch, worked on a proposal; fixed some icon relocation bug, prodded the build a little. Played with GNOME 3.0 and wrote a column on it. Sync with Kendy.
Dinner; everyone out afterwards, tweaked my software & settings, and got really rather a beautiful, circular gear or two out of the reprap - and a bangle for the wife for good measure. Watched some Yes Minister with Ollie.

2011-03-27: Sunday.

Lie-in; breakfast, out to NCC, helped with Creche. Back for lunch with our visiting Americans here for a week of mission in Newmarket: Ollie and Andrew.
Slugging in the afternoon; down to All Saints for the evening service in the end. Home for dinner, bed early.

2011-03-26: Saturday.

Lie-in, up with the babes; breakfast, Sandy arrived. Set off to my Cousin Andy Whitcroft's wedding to Olivia. A lovely service, most encouraging. Back for a fine reception at the Father of the Bride's house. Great to see Martin Bligh again, meet Mel & Sinead, and a number of other interesting folk. Fine food, wine & company. Drove home rather late to relieve Sandy of her baby burden.

2011-03-25: Friday.

Up in the night, couldn't sleep; poked at a build bug, did some research on the Android SDK for some the GSOC: LibreOffice on Android task.
Back to bed to catch up; lunch; back to work - wrote a trivial perl thrash.pl tool to similate the /tmp thrash I get when running a compile and tested Alex's file-selector threading fix, can no longer crash LibreOffice with it included (and/or evolution) - good.
Submitted a couple of Desktop Summit talks on LibreOffice on the brink of the deadline, submitted a repsnapper talk too.

2011-03-24: Thursday.

Up early; dug at odd gtk+ file-selector crasher; looks like some glib async / threading thinko in gtk+, spammed the dev list.
Plugged away at mail, builds, generating some statistics, etc. Lunch, team meeting, poked at some perl in make_installer.pl. Merged the sal string size saving, perhaps some windows testing required, but good to loose a Mb of cruft from the pagein / memory footprint.
Dinner during TSC call, read babes stories; finished up mail, poked at the reprap.
Suffered with gtk+ and gtkmm - trying to create a simple combo box with two entries in it; choose one of 'Fast' or 'Logick' a dozen of lines of odd code apparently serving no useful purpose, and tens or so headers to read. Worse; the simple, old API that would have made it easy: deprecated - progress obviously. All that power, translated into lots of questions and interfaces I don't want to deal with; shame. Oh - and if glade-3 didn't (still) lay out all vboxes as hboxes (when an Ubuntu user has touched the file), that would be just great - presumably there is some good GUI way to create simple models, if that were usable (end rant).
Printed out a 3D knot25 for fun, interestingly, appreciated by the wife.

2011-03-23: Wednesday.

Up early, off to TEAM in Cambridge with Mike; interesting stuff, but felt pretty ropey; left early to come home to bed.
Fed babes dinner while J. taking H. swimming. M. suddenly very interested both in how I chose my wife, and why; also hopeful that I would die before J. and went I pointed out that this couldn't be guarenteed wondered whether I could fight in a war; comic.
Slugged in bed all evening, feeling turgid.

2011-03-22: Tuesday.

Up early, mail triage, misc. bug fixing; wrote to the IET complaining at the lack of fact checking in their august organ; with small boats (erroneously) generating more elextricity than the whole of the UK, 248GW (instead of 24.8GW) of maximum small-scale hydro-power potential in the UK and so on - there seems scope for improvement.
Started to dig back through the admin mountain. Pleased to see my LinuxTag LibreOffice paper accepted. Tried to add 4Linux and Codethink to the TDF supporters page, but realised the infrastructure somehow moved under me, silverstripe it seems.
Fixed a calc resource reading nasty. Preload staff meeting.
Tried to use silverstripe to edit our web pages: really tried ... wow the thing is still unbelievably bad (which I guess is mostly the web being lame). Why have just one scroll-pane, when you can have two controlling the same range of editing ? have magic styles on headings invisible to the magic editor, create anchors you can't delete, make a hash of cut/paste etc. etc. That is before you loose your data by clicking back (the key carefully and helpfully placed next to left-arrow) by mistake which really adds some flavour: roll on web editing for everything ! Arguably it is at least uniformly terrible, frustrating etc. for everyone regardless of competance (even if you end up editing the HTML by hand anyway), which is a great social leveller and thus must be good.
Apparently Religion may become extinct in five nations. What total twaddle from the BBC, many creeds are in the asendancy, not least the kind of Metaphysical Naturalism so increasingly popular in concentric circles.

2011-03-21: Monday.

Up early; to work - triaged the mail somewhat bluntly, while finishing the (Unix only) oosplash.bin re-write which has several goals:
- To provide a spring-board for ridding ourselves of soffice.sh, and its various spawned / shell helpers - helps clean things up.
- Removing the quick-starter conditionality on libpng, we can build without it (as we do for the generic builds) - but just leave the splash to rather later: when the main app launches
- To ensure we get our splash up really early (if at all), before pagein / javaldx start doing tons of I/O. The problem here was made noticeable by the new gnumake code not stripping libraries, giving eg. a 700Mb libswli.so to pagein when debugging - takes time even on an SSD. Nonetheless for those with slow rotating disks, this should make a noticable improvement in time-to-splash.
Eventually got this finished and committed, with all the re-starting if unusual return values are returned etc. tested and apparently working.
Reviewed some bootchart pieces, call with Kendy, setup next TSC call; boggled at the horrors of Microsoft's latest patent aggression, and pleased generally by the insight of the technet commenters.
Worked late; discovered I'm in danger of loosing holdiay this year - LibreOffice kept me rather busy it seems; bother.

2011-03-20: Sunday.

Up lateish, scramble to get to church on time; preached. Home for lunch, David, Louisa & babes around in the afternoon for tea - great to catch up with them.
Put babes to bed, pottered around with the reprap, a bit of this and that; then bed.

2011-03-19: Saturday.

Lie in, out with N. on her day-out-with-daddy; after some disappointment with the Ecotech centre (shut at weekends) - hoping to climb the wind turbine there; off to Lavenham.
Good map-reading from N. and a nice pub lunch. Wandered the multiple extraordinary examples of why ancient houses need lateral cross-bracing; enjoyed the Church. On to Pakenham's windmill - also shut, but at least moving to face into the wind.
Up very late preparing a second sermon on Daniel 1 for tomorrow, mostly on 1:1-2.

2011-03-18: Friday.

Up early; dug at mail, call with Thorsten; reviewed some patches, and poked at the sot OLE2 storage code and a potential optimisation patch.
Lunch; pleasant Call with Markus & team. Back to trying to unwind ordering problems hurting the LibreOffice startup performance; happily converted some stinking chunks of shell into C (unrelated to performance, but helps splash ordering).
Played with the PrusaMendel assembly, made up some aluminium mudguard washers (such a nice material to tin-snip), and got the Y axis, and the frame mostly assembled.

2011-03-17: Thursday.

Up early; off to School with the babes for their music assembly, accompanied N.'s violin piece; provided a human 'cello spike holder for M.'s first public performance; fun.
Home, caught up on the mail backlog. Sad to see the situation in Japan, the tragic irony of a Tsunami stopping them getting enough sea-water into the reactors.
Created a new translations/ repo to store our .po files for Andras, lunch, interview, team meeting. Finally started to catch up with my admin backlog while a clean LibreOffice compiled.
Reviewed and updated the LibreOffice Google Summer Of Code projects page, in hopeful anticipation of our acceptance as an organisation.
Good news - an heroic Riccardo Magliocchetti did a release of bootchart2-0.14.0. If you like to see your boot process, you need bootchart2 - using an array of wonderful kernel probes (if they are there) it can give you insight into the bowels of madness. Lots of good fixes and improvements. My favorites are the reliability improvements from Peter Hjalmarsson has worked on, but of course Sankar's beautiful, multi-colour cumulative I/O latency graphing (to complement CPU graphing) is a must-have as well, for serious boot-charters. Hopefully we can get them out there, and speeding up distros' booting experience quickly, and there is still a lot more fun to be had in the world of boot-charting.
Prodded at some oddness with rsc and gnumake, and valgrinded / fixed a chart related crasher, discovered yet more shocking quality build perl hiding an scp2 error, accelerated it > 10x and added some validation.

2011-03-16: Wednesday.

TEAM course, a very well attended plenary day on Biblical Counselling; interesting, and a rather convincing for broadening the popular application of Christian wisdom to each other. Slightly less convinced of its utility in the pathalogical cases.
Home; fed the babes while J. went out; put them to bed. Out for a beer with Bert next door, a relaxing evening.

2011-03-15: Tuesday.

Finishing the merge; got all the components running nicely, fixed a number of issues, looking good.
Lydia over in the evening. Got stuck into the reprap software - convinced that most of my remaining quality problems are either backlash, software or (probably) a bit of both.

2011-03-14: Monday.

Another day of intense, all-day merging fun; hopefully the last one, finally getting there. Filled out Clarity etc.
Interested, and saddened to see so many good intentions around GNOME turning out wrong, as highlighted variously. Personally, in my view to interact with a community you have to be working inside it, ie. you have to "be there". Existence in Free Software communities is measured almost exclusively in concrete terms: code, artwork, etc. but more than that - concrete things which are actually included into the project / product. Most companies whose management is unfamiliar with Free Software best practise screw this up royally, trying to create proprietary advantage: "we shipped XYZ first", can easily turn into "oh dear, we screwed this up, and no-one else is using it, and now we're lumbered forever with maintaining something with no community support". Novell has been no exception here in the past, and unfortunately in large part because of the free-rider concerns. Of course contributors that don't actually 'exist', and are not really 'there', shouldn't get a huge say in what is going on, that is the basis of meritocracy, no surprises there. So what is the right mix, between semi-proprietary projects, polish and differentiation, and doing everything up-stream ? Probably there is no truly 'right' answer, but the extremes are probably both wrong too.
J. out in the evening to Cambridge, printed out some more pieces here and there, and assembled my PrusaMendel frame with some success. Tried to print out the slide bearings, but no joy - perhaps a shell-only print would be better. Bed late.

2011-03-13: Sunday.

Up; breakfasted, setup Skype Quaker meeting with Mother (apparently using Skype muted to transmit silence, and text chat for ministry). Off to NCC, ran Creche with Cathy.
Home for a huge lunch; tidied up somewhat, and back to trying to beautifully calibrate the printer to have the perfect nozzle separation all over the bed; eventually got there, printed some more - now the most annoying thing is mainly some anti-ooze software tweaking, and some X-axis backlash.
Bathed babes, early tea, put babes to bed, and quick stories. Bid 'bye to the parents, and sermon on Judges in bed.

2011-03-12: Saturday.

Up earlyish; breakfast, spent a while winding PLA onto a drum, such that it can be wound smoothly into the machine by the extruder - instead of requiring me to fiddle constantly with it.
Set off into Cambridge with my parents, N. and E. to get to a music shop. Ended up buying an Electric Violin - with a rather good (closed - ie. no sound holes) carbon fibre & kevlar resonant cavity, and carbon fibre bow; really excellent, have yet to try it with amplification.
Tea and cake to cheer the babes, and back home via. a much loved double decker bus. Encouraging to feel the fingers coming back quickly to the fingerboard after ~15 years of not playing anything. I suspect the ease of recall decreases the more comes back however.
Babes watched "The secret of Moonacre" - a fine film, the book presumably is rather better; printed some larger (makerbot) plates out as it was playing; encouragingly it seems we can run smoothly for some hours - but really require better software.
Hannah's friend Charlotte over for a sleepover, just getting to the aftermath of the escape from Efrafa with H. in Watership Down. Chatted in the evening, interspersed with more Prusa mendel plate printing.

2011-03-11: Friday.

Up early, day of intense merging action all day - with the git history fixed, life is much cleaner and more satisfying. Fun to work with Norbert, Kendy, Thorsten and Bjorn much of the day.
More reprap playing in the evening with Father, who had disassembled the original timber repstrap, managed to get the workshop clear enough to actually see the bench surface - and lots of things re-stacked to make room to move around easily; great. Chatted with the parents in the evening.

2011-03-10: Thursday.

Parents arrived, several calls through the day, merging work ongoing. Played reprap with Father in the evening, printed out some frame verticees with feet. Managed to crack a lump from the centre of an acrylic sheet (missing tape, and fused to the printout), hmm.

2011-03-09: Wednesday.

Up early, off to TEAM with Mike; a final cracking talk on Evangelistic speaking from Paul Weston; finished the Bible overview.
Home, caught up with merge progress, SPI board meeting, sadly without quorum, chatted with Mary Rogers who popped around; played with the reprap, 0.5mm hot end still causing grief, lots of it vs. the more standard 1mm form factor; clearly a lathe would be useful.

2011-03-08: Tuesday.

Up early; to work - mail chew, more merging / patch resolving fun. Lunch, DE meeting - deeply irritated by Elluminate stealing the ctrl-space combination (critical for emacs). Tech Steering call. Dinner - pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, the start of Lent. Chat with Norbert, got a merged draw running in the evening to play with; nice.

2011-03-07: Monday.

Up early, packed babes off to school; to work. Poked more merging and build fixes with Thorsten and Kendy. Lunch, call with Kendy, chewed over mail backlog, admin, Clarity, status report writing etc.
Poked at MeeGo again a little, seems like there are some positive changes going on there; encouraging.

2011-03-06: Sunday.

Up earlyish, off to NCC, Tony preached, met Miriam's friend Ben for the first time (great chap); back for lunch with Laura & Creighton, printed out my patched extruder to demo to Creighton.
DVD in the afternoon, pottered around cleaning up, read stories to babies and put them to bed, etc. Caught up with David Mansergh in the evening; chat with Father about window mechanisms.

2011-03-05: Saturday.

Up late; long day of slugging, prodding at the reprap with E. on hand to help press buttons and make suitable encouraging noises. Z axis coupler managed to come loose, and drop the x carriage complete with heated nozzle into the bed burning a beautiful nozzle-shaped hole through my acrylic covering of the bed), fun.
Discovered that PLA's adhesion to acrylic is strongly based on how high the nozzle is above the bed as it extrudes, presumably melting the PLA into the acrylic creates a bond stronger then the PLA itself.
Prodded at openscad gingerly; and sent my first openscad patch for Greg Frost's Accessible Wade extruder - to parameterise the extruder recess and add set-screws to it.

2011-03-04: Friday.

Inspired by a dead Pakistani Christian (Government) Minister's words - captured on camera:
"The forces of violence, militant banned organisations the Taliban and al-Quaeder, they want to impose their radical philosophy in Pakistan, and whomever stands against their radical philosophy - that threatens them. When I am leading this campaign against the Sharia law, for the abolishment of blasphemy law, and speaking for the oppressed and persecuted Christian and other minorities, these Taliban threaten me. But I want to share, that I believe in Jesus Christ, who has given his own life for us. I know what is the meaning of the cross, and I'm following the cross, and I am ready to die for a cause, I am living for my community and suffering people, and I will die to defend their rights. These threats and warnings cannot change my opinion and principles, I prefer to die for my principle and the justice of my community, rather than to compromise [with] these threats."
A brave man, in a world of people very silent in the face of injustice. The saddest thing, to me - are those giving the bodyguard accused of assisinating the Punjab Governor (for similar reasons) a hero's welcome, and cheering an apparently unrepentant murderer.
Quarterly employee call with Ron. Poked at some oddities wrt. charset conversion in the merge. Finished the writer merge and pushed it, lots of review and testing now required, at least deeply into the more fun compiling and final debugging stage.

2011-03-03: Thursday.

Up early, brief mail chew, reviewed and merged a nice patch from Sebastien to make writer page shadows pretty.
Merging; lunch; merging. Novell LibreOffice team meeting, more merge, dinner, call in the evening.

2011-03-02: Wednesday.

Off into Cambridge on my own, fine day of study, nearly finished the Bible overview, and moved on to giving Evangelistic talks.
Missed the announcement of LibreOffice 3.3 from Novell - with our support (based on 3.3.1 plus some 3.3.2 back-ports), available now for Windows, and of course our Linux Enterprise products. You can buy support for it standalone (for Windows), perhaps you have support for it already as part of the popular Novell Open Workgroup Suite, and of course support is available for LibreOffice in all our SUSE versions. End commercial.
Played with the repsnapper shrinking code in the evening, managed to get a very jagged part of an egg-cup.

2011-03-01: Tuesday.

Up later, finished 'cello practise with M. before school, and managed to forget breakfast. More merging work. Lunch. Team meeting.
Really pleased to see Dave Malcolm's excellent gdb python foo to make debugging LibreOffice cleaner, faster and sweeter.
Wrote, reviewed and sent Linux Format column, chat with Gabriel.

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