Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
Collabora
Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and
services for whom I work.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on
the LibreOffice Planet news
feed.
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legacy html
- Up, off to St Lukes, passable service, good to catch
up with lots of the usual suspects. Home, babes to bed, lunch,
presents: a number of interesting books.
- David arrived, good to see him, caught up with current
happenings; good fun. Abandoned by Brothers left / right, watched
Michael Palin / bed earlyish.
- Up, packed car, woke neighbours, made jump leads from
some spare high-current flex, jump started the car ( helpfully the
beast has this magic delayed dimming of the internal lights,
guarenteed to ensure you don't notice you left the internal light
on, and no audible warning of the same ): Toyota.
- Drove to Grant & Anne's - stuck in traffic on the
M11 for a while - got there, lovely lunch - fine to see all my
family, and Bruce, Katy / Ashley, Grant & Anne etc. Wandered
the spacious gardens, sheltered from the pelting rain in the
(newly mended) greenhouse.
- Bite to eat, drove to the parents, stayed up late
playing games: 'pictionary' and 'family row' - much fun.
- Examined 2nd chimney, a far less helpful shape -
considered drilling through the cast-iron facure &
re-considered after consulting Father / the wife on the joys
of gazing at bolt-heads. Eventually came up with a suitably
twisted shape that should stick. Cardboard blank nearly sucked
up the chimny by the up-draft. I hate optimising before
profiling, but how do you effectively & cheaply
heat-loss-profile a room ?
- Sandy came around for tea, good to see her,
bed early.
- Up breakfast, hacked at a new chimney sealing
trap-door for the front-room, to save Naomi sleeping in a
draft & keep the house warm. Removed much soot from the
relevant area; no doubt more will accumulate on the door.
- Off to Chris & Cheryl's for a suprise birthday
party for Chris (only 30mins late), met Peter Wharton,
chatted until late. Home, Gordon sermon while we ate tea,
bed to hack while J. bathed. Read the Vista
Cost write-up, very interesting / amusing / sad.
- Up early, J. lie in. Played with H. & some
plasticine hair-cutting thing while killing the last configmgr
Address sub-classes, killed memorymodel.hxx finally.
- An afternoon of DVD action - first Sindy 'the
movie' less lame than expected (suprisingly), babes to bed,
then Pirates of the Carribean: The 2nd One - good fun,
although, inexplicably the credits showed up 1/2 way through.
- Up with the babes, fine breakfast, out for a walk
along the Sizewell beach with H. (Sue, Clive & dogs) while
the other babes slept.
- Back for lunch, coffee, packed, re-arranged the
house a little & drove home - roads very clear indeed.
Dealt with the snail-mail queue, dinner, bath, bed.
- Up early, Father [sic] Christmas generous this year -
innumerable pink plasticy things appeared. Out to Church for fine
service, more carol friendly one ghastly universalist: Holy is the
name I know carol, but older favorites sound.
- Back for fine blow-out, rest, then present opening -
many interesting books, fine new shoes & so on, great to
celebrate His birthday this way: by giving.
- Played with babes, over excited wrt. tomorrow, but fun.
Sue & Clive arrived for lunch. Out to a crib service with the
babes - good fun, albeit too light on carols.
- Up late, J. handled the children so I could lie in.
Fine cooked breakfast, took Bruce to the hospital nr. Ipswich
to have his knee re-dressed. A little hacking in the waiting room.
- Back, lunch. Out in the afternoon for a stroll on the
beach & to get milk. Popped in to see the
RNLI life-boat, very interesting: great to see some of the
photos of their work in high seas.
- Back, slugging bed.
- Up early, mushroom breakfast, to work. Poked at thumbnailing
problem, onto crasher on an presentation - chased it down to a cairo
clipping issue fixed in 1.0.4, back-ported patch.
- On to the performance issue; 3% spent in 'GetBitmapSize'
of the same bitmap repeatedly, 10% in BitmapEx::GetAlpha color converting
a mask (for some reason). And the other 87% less obviously silly.
- Worked late at various curious recent bugs.
- Up early, to battle. Mail briefly, killed SegmentAddress,
simplified CacheLocation (a struct with a write-only member), starting
to look quite nice in places.
- Out to Chris & Cheryl's for a drop-in party thing,
rather good, albeit horribly cold & foggy. Discovered customer
fire-drill on return, prodded various people, played with the
relevant files etc.
- To work, warning churn reported during the smoketest,
unfortunately it doesn't work unless you use <vituperatives>
EPM, added some direct make_installer magic to the mix, shame
make_installer can only be run from 1 directory, with a very
tweaked environment. Hacked a number of nasties out of the
smoketest script, and now it installs & runs beautifully,
sadly didn't find the reported error though.
- Re-worked the cppuhelper patch to please Stefan,
did battle with templates again; apparently it's trivial to make
simple things more verbose, and far more complicated with them.
- Did more gutting on configmgr, partially rationalized
the 3 types doing the same thing: TreeAccessor, TreeAddress, and
sharable::TreeFragment with some success, more readable.
- Dinner, sogged with the Economist for a bit, more
hacking in bed - scuppered by switching TreeAddress to a POD
pointer type: resulted in several uninitialized members (now
there is no default constructor), eventually nailed that.
- Up early, lots of paperwork this morning, managed to
defeat the multi-hour review that was hanging over me, horay.
Thankfully also the cppuhelper re-build completed successfully,
tests after lunch.
- Lunch, team meeting, poked at cppuhelper crashers.
Poked at the MultiTypeInterface...Int32 - turns out though we
allocate 392 at startup, we don't actually add any interfaces
to them; interesting - tweaked patch for that too.
- Up early, walked into town & back; to work.
Call with Rene. Poked away at this and that all day - in the
breaks got my cppuhelper template evil sorted (thanks
Fridrich), and set that building. Phone calls much of the
afternoon.
- Off to C3 in Cambridge in the morning, a very
slick service as expected; messaged via the main screen to
help Naomi - inconsolable in creche. Back, bed.
- Lunch, watched DVDs with babes in the afternoon,
out to the NCC Christmas / carol service & shared meal,
went very pleasantly.
- Up early, out to the market with stacks of
babies, walked the length of the town questing for various
presents & things.
- Back, babes to sleep briefly, out to Tim &
Julie's for a big family bash - great food, good to see all
the usual suspects, and great to catch up.
- Back late in the evening, bite of tea, bed.
- E-mail-work ~all day, some cppuhelper hackerage
in the evening to prune the (inefficient) hash_map usage
burning a chunk of memory. "STL - ineffiency templatized!".
- Interview in the evening with Scott Mace.
- JP pointed me at Keith Packard's
take on Git which makes me
take it seriously for OO.o suddenly, an interesting read.
- It seems the mail downtime suffered on wal-3 was
a result of some Thunderbird / Groupwise IMAP interaction, and
nothing to do with Evolution at all; sorry for doubting you
Evolution (& team).
- Lunch, poked at misc Gnome bugs. Finally removed
the huge & multi-year old internal-nss cut/paste patch,
required for back-compatibility for systems without some
internal crypto symbol being exported; should shrink the
ooo-build archive nicely.
- Tried to extract E-trade data for payroll; E-trade
is monumentally broken for people without a brokerage account,
for some strange reason I feel insecure finding bugs in a web /
trading application holding my money.
- Banged away at configmgr, ported my re-factoring
to 2.1, resolving tons of conflicts from my (now up-stream)
string re-work.
- Up, poked at mail, out to the pre-school christmas
singing fest, rather sweet. Back, fiddled with uber-cheap USB
keyboard to get an install: eventually renamed NFS install mount
point to avoid hard-to-type keys. Call from NOD - network got
broken (somehow), someone fiddling with cabling: bother.
- Time to look at the configmgr oddness, found the
root cause, some over-enthusiasm in removing (obsolete except
for debugging code) accessors, attached patch.
- More code-reading in configmgr to attempt to find
where the old custom allocator was cleaning up things that were
not freed as part of it's operation. Committed configmgr debug
redux to CWS configmgrassert, Stefan kindly agreed to QA.
- Finally got an install on my small system; it's not
just OO.o that is slow here, YaST & co. are not such fun either.
- Big 'ole Mexican meal in the evening with Cell group,
13 people or so, up late talking round the fire.
- Up early,
Bob Sutor's blog is interesting pwrt. the certainty of ECMA
approving OpenXML, the real question is what will ISO do ? Florian
pointed me at this nice ODF Alliance
Fact Sheet, really a set of interesting questions, laying out the
arguments here.
- Whacked some soda down the bath plug to try to shift
the irritating partial blockage; perhaps the fact that there is
only 4 inches of run off over a 10 foot pipe is related to the bug.
Waited, plunged enthusiastically, no obvious improvement, bother.
- One thing that jrb told me last week, that is most
interesting is that one of Carl Worth's focuses for Cairo
optimisation is OpenOffice.org impress: that's pretty neat, and
if so good news for OO.o.
- Read through a load of ORBit2 / bonobo patches that
Kjartan prodded me about. Lunch, team meeting, good call with
Mathias, internal guy with cut/paste problem phoned, hmm.
- J. out for a party with the lasses, leaving me with
3 babies to look after.
- Our (AMD sponsored)
report into optimisation opportunities in OO.o is now available here
it is only ~9 metric pages long, with some pretty graphs; the
time estimates & rankings are in highly mythical man-days.
- Finally wrote up a report from my travel and sent it,
grabbed a SL10.2 RC1 to GM deltaiso, and set the apply off - if only
I had threaded the right bit of that code it'd be 2x as fast. If
someone wants to integrate
pbzip2 into the 'deltarpm' tool, that'd make a lot of people
happy (some nice graphs on that page too).
- Tried to poke at mail, apparently wal-3 is still
malfunctioning, so while it worked enough over the weekend to get
mail, it's now down and I trashed the cache finding that out, bother.
The joys of a non-production POA, another day of pain.
- Eventually the mail cache decided to work again, both mhu
and rml agree that allocating memory in order to free it under memory
pressure is not a clever move with today's OS This does NOT sound
useful! etc. On the other hand it used to be useful: mhu pointed
out it was great for 16bit windows, and MacOS 8, with simple global
memory management and co-operative multi-tasking. But these times
are long gone and dead. So, don't hesitate to get rid of this.,
neat. Unfortunately - other memory savings tend to require more work.
- Again GrokLaw banging on Novell:
Novell's "Danaergeschenk" once again IMHO confusing tactics with
substance, I had a few thoughts.
- Open Source, over Open Standards (I prefer the
term Free software, but this sound-bite is more chewable).
As in the past, I will bang on about Free Software to people, and
mention OpenDocument as one peripheral (and good) advantage of OO.o.
However a lot of end-users find the Open Standards argument much
easier to understand: after all they create data and not code, and since
they can't even -read- code (written in this foreign language of C++)
they don't value the real Freedom here as much as we hackers do.
Of course, many of my colleagues whom I respect at both Sun & IBM
take a different view, and that's fine, and they have excellent
reasons no doubt. My interest is in re-focusing attention, co-operation
and investment on where the -real- value is: the 1000 man years of OO.o
rather than the <5 man years of the OpenDocument spec. I want the
Free software desktop to succeed - for me if Microsoft adopts OpenDocument
this is not a final victory.
- Real Openness - I am personally impressed at the genuine
openness and neutrality of the OASIS/OpenDocument process, quite apart from
its stark contrast to the ECMA process, which IMHO is reasonably termed
rubber-stamping ( at least for the 1.0 version, though I'm not optimistic
this will change later ). So - this point is at least truthful, OpenDocument
really lives up to the 'Open' part.
- Multiple Implementations - this is less substantial,
by almost any metric there is only one reasonably complete implementation
of each standard. That is OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office. Period.
Now - of course, in order to claim you are a 'standard' it is often thought
necessary to have a 2nd impl. Hence, there are all sorts of "2nd impls" that
minimally fulfill this need, these do not bear detailed scrutiny.
But coming back to my 1st point, there are a plethora of products,
and a diverse vendor community backing OpenOffice.org based products: the
fact that StarOffice, Novell OO.o and Lotus Workplace (to name a few) share
a common code-base, takes -nothing- away from the real value of standards
(for business): multiple-vendors, no lock-in etc. and is an emerging triumph
of Free Software. So again, lets talk about Free Software. For those lovers
of KOffice as the OpenDocument 2nd impl. I quote (with manful restraint) from
the recent LXF88 / Jan07 review of KOffice 1.6 ...(KOffice apps struggled
to open MS and OpenDocument files)... [ do read the article ]. And I
suspect like many reviews, this was based on a small sample.
- Size of Standard - yes a huge & complex standard can be
hard to implement, this is completely true. Of course, this is partly
true of OpenDocument - it's quite big too, we just happen to have
a nice implementation of it already in OpenOffice.org. The general level
of mathematical excellence being shown off here is quite incredible
though. If you divide >700man years of OO.o code by 700 pages of the
ODF spec, you get 1man year/page to implement which seems slightly silly.
Also this new SI unit of specification complexity the metric page is
rather comical. There are lots of largish specs out there (where no PDF is
available, I used print-preview on the HTML in firefox (A4)):
So - we can see there is some truth in the huge standard
argument here, OpenXML's markup lang ref is larger than the approximate
sum of the other standards that OpenDocument references (and of course
it's notable that while OpenDocument "makes use of existing standards"
(which is great) it's often a small sub-set of them; so a simple sum of the
non-OpenXML standards is not a fair comparison. So, perhaps there is a factor
of 5x as much 'stuff' here.
- Impossible to interoperate with MS - this is the argument
whereby we assume the answer and then run around screaming. Of course, it is true
that 100% interop is impossible, but OO.o does a pretty good job, and
increasingly so.
- Screwing Customers - Georg concludes OpenOffice.org
should refuse to add OpenXML to its main branch, and we should avoid OpenXML
while spreading information about the problems as far as we can.. Of
course I beg to differ. The same logic could be re-used for removing the binary
file format support. Is that also proposed ? how would that help anyone ?
Also - it is emphatically not just Novell working here to improve interop,
people with real customers realise this is necessary. Sun of course has been
doing a ton of work to re-factor the core, improve interop, re-write
filter logic etc. and, as-yet Novell has done almost nothing in comparison,
(though of course we're trying to increase our efforts).
- Standards - now this is something I really know nothing about.
What is and is not a standard ? What is a de-facto standard ? etc. Actually I think
(eg.) DVD recording formats are perhaps interesting. Which was first ? which
is a true standard ? which has the moral highground ? why there are various
combinations of +'s and -'s ?. All I know is - I buy the cheapest, commodity DVD
drive I can get, and it (apparently) works with all of them. In the same way I
want to see OpenOffice.org become the obvious choice for the best, most
inexpensive, interoperable, re-usable, flexible office suite that anyone could
want, that also gives you incredible Freedom.
My conclusion is - if you care most about the success and deployment of
Free software on the desktop, everywhere; then it is best to be
up-front about that, and not get distracted by some transient Open Standards
argument. Microsoft can (pretend to?) play Open Standards but they will (or can)
not play Free Software. If our competitors switch to Open Standards that might be
nice, but when they switch to Free Software - we have truly won.
- Lydia over for lunch, good to see her. Call with JP.
- Novell needs to hire several
OpenOffice hackers, if you think you fit the bill, or know of someone else
that does, please encourage them to apply, location shouldn't be a major issue
for the best people. I wonder if any Gnumeric / AbiWord (or even KOffice) people
are interested.
- Quick call with Florian to catch up on his trip - hopefully the
photos will show up soon.
- Up early, J. lie in, off to NCC - Janice speaking,
did well. Out for lunch with Laura & Crayton. Back, put up
Christmas while it got dark, nice. Dinner, bathed babes, put
them to bed.
- Listened to Gordon sermon on
The Image of God, fascinating insights into the Garden of
Eden, as a type of Temple. Also, amusing to discover all these
on-line, having bought the cassette versions of the 1st 4.
xBed late.
- Up earlyish, off to Suzannah & Clive's - long
but smooth drive, sat by the fire, lovely meal, out to see Father
Christmas on a rather fine steam train, mulled wine, mince pies
etc. Getting into the engine & looking in the fire-box is
quite amazing, so big, and so firey etc.
- Back to chat with John & Steph & Sam &
co. quick tea, and set off home again, with pyjama clad &
intermittently sleeping babes. Bed.
- Up early, to work - unfortunately the experimental
GWise POA (wal4-2) is dead, along with all my E-mail - so,
today might be quite productive with no E-mail, will have to
use the spam-overwhelmed & un-loved [email protected]
address instead.
- Tried to do a little analysis on XSLT, of course
Google Trends is rather useful, eg.
XSLT vs. Eiffel, at least they are in the same ball-game,
Ruby kicks it's backside, Haskell is rather comparable, and
Cobol is gamely fighting XSLT. So perhaps my semi-rational
hatred of it can be justified by at least some market
reality.
- Finished the report with some help from Kendy,
switched to the nice new template and sent it, poked again
at the SfxNewHdl issue - seems in fact it implements a hook
for std::set_new_handler, and so is (potentially) useful, if
in fact it is a good idea. Removed some OS2 & ancient MAC
conditionals, cleaned it up, filed the patch, and poked RML.
Had a read of the configmgr code to relax.
- Dinner good to eat with the family again, and read
a bed-time story: "Khyberie: the story of a pony on the Indian
frontier" (good stuff). Coffee & web shopping for Christmas,
amazed by the Boden website
which could almost instantly list the -names- of all houses in
the street from the postcode, including ours 'Revel Cottage'.
- Found Gordon's rather nice
Historicity of the Bible slideshow, while digging for books
to buy.
- 4 adjacent seats to sleep on on the flight back,
better than 1st class. Some work on the train, picked up by
the darling wife & daughters. Home, slept like one dead,
woken by door-bell, J. lost her key, glad I'm home.
- Lunch, Cheryl came over, chatted for a while -
back to work. The unusable kernel with I/O occuring bug
rumbles on inconclusively.
- Chewed through the memprof output for my report /
analysis. Hit a wonder of a class 'SfxNewHdl' that (apparently)
allocates 512 Kb and holds on to it, just in case there is some
out of memory condition, in which case it can free it - to release
some memory to throw up a warning dialog. A cunning plan indeed,
unfortunately a quick glance suggests it is never used. Looking
forward to actually doing the hacking to fix some of this.
- Worked late, finally drew all the bits together into
one document, looking nice, bed 11pm.
- Up at 5am, poked web / mail. Fixed some localtime to
gmt based accounting in my evily hacked perl HTML -> RSS
conversion script, hopefully now it advertises the right day of
the week for a given date.
- Petr did a great job packaging the OdfConverter, now
available for SLED10 at
http://red-carpet.go-oo.org; test docs.
This is of course a stop-gap measure, the goal is not a separate
converter (using XSLT) but high quality built-in OpenXML support,
re-using & re-factoring the existing Microsoft binary
filter code. Of course Mathias Bauer points out the Sun writer team
is doing some great work re-writing the existing code here to be
more flexible & elegant - read Henning's nice post about the
design
here.
- Decided wearing the FUD Fighters T-shirt Simon
Phipps posted me couldn't be more appropriate today.
- Team meeting - an appallingly bad and expensive hotel
line. Met up with Kay afterwards, chewed over various current
issues in the code, lunch, and the afternoon. Read a nice analysis
paper from Noel. Interesting talk with Leon in the afternoon.
- Caught up all too quickly with the Teichman, Berkman,
Garret, Gordon etc. good lads. Synched with Miguel sadly in rather
a hurry, and off to the airport (of course flight delayed).
- Poked at Ricardo's latest yast-gtk work, looking really
clean & nice.
- Up early, meeting all day - initially constructive,
went down hill, lunch, went up-hill. Some great guys though, good
to see JRB again.
- Out for dinner in the evening at the top of the
Prudential tower, lovely view, good food etc.
- Up early, packed frantically, synched critical mail
etc. lovely wife dropped me to the train. Chewed the ignored
mail backlog on the train.
- Call with Kai Backan, interesting, call with (cousin)
Andrew, apparently recovering nicely from his climing accident.
- Virgin Atlantic - typical nanny-airline, insists on
showing you a ton of stuff you don't want to see before turning
on the inflight entertainment 30mins into the flight. Of course,
as normal the system crashed shortly into the 1st movie,
necessitating a total system reset (another 45mins) - yet more
embarassingly one of the odd diagnostic screens shown to all
customers contained the simple legend
Launching ./airsurf, sigh.
- Got on with writing a nice report on the OO.o
resource footprint - good to have the chance to do that all in
one place.
- Landed; to the office - met up with Miguel, once
again amazed by PJ's charged
polemic Novell "Forking" OpenOffice.org - something
that we are emphatically not doing. The 'Patent Office' jibe is
just totally inaccurate wrt. the MS Open
Spec. Promise - which (AFAICS) was inspired by Sun's equivalent
for OpenDocument (more power to Sun). All the work is public wrt.
using the translator, in fact we do no closed-source work
on OO.o. On the other hand, I personally am looking forward to
working on rather better built-in OO.o OpenXML filters, re-using
the existing nice filter logic for the binary file formats: .doc
etc.
- Out for a fine dinner with interesting company.
- Up, off to Rock Baptist in the morning, followed
by lunch with James and Kate Williams. Turns out James has one
of these newfangled blog thins
noearthlycity. Also, a link to his recent
Cambridge Paper on
Humor, Scripture and Christian Discourse. Great meal &
time to catch up.
- Back, cheese on toast for dinner, DVDs for babes in
the evening while knocking out some party invites for Naomi's
birthday.
- Up early, off to the market with a full complement
of babes; stocked up on veg etc. Back, some cleaning up, Barbara
& Colin arrived for lunch.
- Iris came over, helped re-arrange her flights while
watching the Prince of Egypt variously. Talked to Barbara
& Colin by the fire for the rest of the evening, with
occasional programming assistance for Thomas. Bed early.
- Worked on details for Boston trip next week. Some
more profiling of various bits of performance / memory usage.
It seems configmgr2, as expected is still the top of the profile
after linking, must get around to finishing my re-factor there
to make the code readable.
- Bed early, still exhausted generally.
- Up early, talked to Tor - some problems with the mono
staticizer - it appears that though you staticize it still needs
a 'machine.conf' file where it expects it. Slowly calmed the mail
queue down from it's excitable state.
- Wrote some slide notes for Alan Clark (volunteer hero
of the week). Lunch. Plugged away at various things. New
interesting hardware arrived to play with.
- Off early for dinner, back - more misc. IM, started
doing a prolongued install fest on the new hardware. Hacked
relocstat to dump method relocations, assuming that all method
& thunk relocations are vtable related we waste up to ~9Mb
with relocations we shouldn't really need.
- Got some nice cachegrind output for OO.o startup,
really need to have it on SL10.2 though.
- Up in the night, knocked off some mail, back to bed.
Up later - interested to see this
interesting 'strip mining' analogy deployed, in reaction to
this sort of thing.
- Irritatingly my 64bit build machine / file-server
broke-down overnight, next time, I'll buy Dell instead of supporting
the local Mom & Pop shop. Set off some RC1 DVD download
goodness.
- Call with Simon, poked mono list to find
Environment.ExitCode - neato, added it to the OdfConverter so we
can detect failure nicely.
- Lunch, interesting call with Jurgen, Andreas, Stefan
& Noel, call with Alan Clark. Poked despondantly at dead
hardware, bother.
- Started on some fun performance work, measuring things
is always fun.
- Up lateish, dropped Mother & babes at pre-school,
to work - dug at mail variously. , various calls. Lunch, team meeting, more calls.
- Wife arrived home, fed baby (now apparently better)
and went to bed (ill herselt). Did a scad of OMT peer review at
lightning speed, knocked off for dinner.
- Up early, dealt with babes, hacked in the
kitchen while colouring goes on. Today is the "Objectives
Management Tool" (OMT) deadline. In the same way that an
organisation couldn't possibly know what it's
purpose was without a mission statement, employees cannot
work effectively without a formal objectives management
process (or something).
- Put babes to bed, hung washing out, put
nappies on, back to the OMT. The OMT amazingly also
doubles up as an employee patience training device, with
added helpful anger-management experience features.
Not content with being slow & hopeless, it likes to
wait until you've entered a load of text before some
random key combination encourages the browser to loose
it all, stretching stuff. Isn't the web 'paradigm' so
powerful wrt. entering tons of text into text areas ?
Eventually got the nauseating self-praise entered.
- Merged, tested & re-filed Radek's 64bit
converter fix. Woke babes, lunch, off to Addenbrooks.
- Talked to J. for a while - hasn't been
sleeping much poor dear; looked after the children for
a while while she slept - Miriam looking better, and
less feverish thankfully, J. getting a temperature
though.
- Back late, fish & chips, babes to bed,
stories etc. call with Mum & Dad, offered to come
and help: kind.
- Back to work. Poked mail, poked Guy, hassled
JP, poked Miguel / Mono guys on the evils of LLP64 Win64
vs. LP64 Linux, what fun. Toshok kindly pointed me at
FYIReporting
as a nice sample cross-platform SWF / Mono app to demo,
neat. Eventually decided it's better to actually work
instead of hassling people.
- Isolated (thanks to Peter Vandenabeele's
persistence) the OdfConverter bug - to somewhere in the
ParagraphPostProcessor, and fixed it - another trivial
case of the WriteFullEndElement method not getting called
in Microsoft land (for whatever reason), prolly some
deeper evil lurketh here. Up-loaded
odf-converter-0.0.4.
- Mother arrived late.
- Up at 1am, Miriam unhappy, fever recurred, J.
unhappy. All headed off to hospital, back to sleep. Up
early, J. kept in, Miriam on intravenous antibiotics -
unclear what the problem is, no obvious cause.
- Got babes dressed, tried to get the ham stewed
in apple-juice etc. made. Lift with Dave & Cathy
to church, did creche - back with Cathy, enlisted guests in
various washing up / table setting duties. 15 for lunch -
hard without J.
- Cleared up, Mel volunteered to lead the prayer
meeting this evening instead of J. Nick gave me a lift to
Hospital while Jackie baby-sat, nice. Good to see very tired
wife, and baby, fever apparently subsided after a day of it,
reluctantly left them there. Back, bed late, tired.
- Up, a day of construction - got the medicine
cabinet finally up on the wall - horay. Peeled back the
bathroom carpet to investigate the dodgy sounding
floor-boards.
- Out to Daniel's birthday party - interesting
people, lovely food for the babes, fun & sticking.
Back, babes to bed.
- Discovered that mostly the bathroom floor-boards
are held up by the copper piping underneath (urgh),
routed channels out in the boards to accomodate the
piping, attached supports variously to (horribly
inaccessible) joists to support them etc.
- Slugged in the evening, bed.
- Up early, call with Florian & some of the
Writer guys, very constructive. Poked mail, more mail etc.
- J. off to hospital with unhappy sounding Miriam,
left holding the fort. Call with Nat, burned time with IM,
call with JP.
- Managed eventually to hack some more pleasant
exception reporting into Mono's XSLT runtime, now I know
where the problem is but I still don't understand or like
XSLT: time to learn something new.
- Ian Pratt pointed me at the interesting DiskSim
impl. for modelling disk performance, nice man. Hopefully
with some nice condensed application traces and so on, it'll
be possible to model the Linux I/O stack & prototype
changes to various algorithms.
- Up early, off to the Museum, met the various
worthies here, prepped & did a SLED10 demo. Hacked at
the OdfConverter while listening to a 'Why Groupwise is
best' talk. Disappeared into an XSLT morass, urgh, urgh,
urgh.
- More hours of grappling with Mono: the lack
of helpful information on exception with a full XSLT
processing stack-trace dump is particularly painful.
Perhaps few people try to do so many 'unusual' things as
in this converter. Dogged by un-debuggable mess. Switched
to some more productive configmgr2 re-work work.
- Home, dinner, cell group, bed late.
- Up early, noticed I had removed my system
openoffice in a fit of carelessness, fixed that. Got
Ken Muir's nice Netware/Groupwise POA snapshot installed
and even working, along with his new updated alpha
Java client; prepped for
Groupware Users Group conference / SLED10 demos
on Wed.
- The YaST team very kindly lent us Rene
Engelhard for some applied OO.o hacking for the next 2 months;
great, lots of things for him to do here I think, thank you
Edith. Hacked away at talk, call with JP.
- Dinner, finally got to updating & fixing up
various converter conflicts post update. Played with mkbundle,
managed with some linker hackery to get everything bundled
into the one ELF binary, including the ugly libzlibwapi mess.
- Up lateish, off to St Lukes - lovely to see
so many old friends and catch up a little. Back for a
lovely roast meal with the parents, while the babes slept.
Fine afternoon, watched part of Babar on DVD, installed
OpenOffice on parents PC.
- Smooth drive home in the evening, packed
children into bed - Naomi seemingly much happier with her
teeth, cold, ear-infection tripple whammy.
- Up early, breakfast - off out to the park
with the babes, lots of fun there on various climbing
frames etc. Back - put the babes to bed. Checked mail.
- Lunch with the parents (returned from a talk),
had a fine afternoon slugging, admiring the handiword,
fine cake for afternoon tea etc. Didn't sleep so well.
- Up a good chunk of the night / slept with a
little Naomi with very short painful breaths, teething
and with an ear infection - very sad. Off to hospital at
5am, not much sleep.
- Awoken from numbness - checked vtune builds,
better detail from instrumenting a few libraries, but the
tool unfortunately sucks for usability compared to
'speedprof' (or sysprof, or kcachegrind etc.); didn't manage
to find good call traces of where the phenomenal Win32
slowness comes from - however, hopefully can be extracted
from cachegrind on Unix by simple call count accounting.
- Set off a huge download over the VPN, packed
the house & girls into the car, set off for the sunny
south & my parents. A little hacking on the road.
- Conf-call with some great Sunnies, call with
JP / Florian, digging at documents. Got my 1st successful
install-set from the BuildBot [ sadly not from the canonical
SuSE-7.3+stuff ABI base ], but a milestone in itself; neat.
More phone dither. Call with MikeLeib. Dinner, more mail
during dinner.
- More work in the evening. Knocked up a dist:
rule for the
odf converter, now only 170k small.
- Poked mail. Did various queued tasks, re-submitted
XMS expenses etc. Re-started the 'tag-list update' EIS ->
text file script that (seemingly) jammed earlier this morning.
Perhaps should add a cron job to kill it & remove the
tmp files (sigh).
- Manually hacked the 'tag-list' to add my OOE680 CWS,
unpleasant in the extreme, banged the BuildBot again (apparently
tag-list doesn't do the job for non-SRC680 masters). Prodded
column again.
- Dinner - left with the babes to sit on while J. out
to bible study; Myriam letting rip. Unwound an interesting
threading / a11y issue hurting Ekiga for Padraig. Sent status
report. Set win32 builds running
- Up, read LXF for a while - enthusiastic interview
with Nat, nice. Poked at mail. Jdub tells me that the ClassPath
exception is an LGPL-like workaround for the "complete object
files" blurb in the LGPL built on the GPL; sounds reasonable -
but having some harder core description of this exception
somewhere would be most helpful.
- Dug at Pavel's bug, with no success, can't provoke
it in my build, not clear what is going on, downloaded the Sun
build. Finally discovered the solution for the magic
'Quickstarter enabled by default' cases: the 1st start wizard
turns the quick-starter on (magic).
- Good calls with Kelli, then JP. Out to cell group
at Nicki's, got a little carried away by the Bible study &
over-ran a bit. Bed late.
- Up early, to work - plugged away at mail, then
various mono pieces; collected H. from creche. Set off a build
of the 2.1 branch to find the bug Pavel reported.
- Team meeting, spammed people with action items.
Poked at mkbundle, with lots of patient help from Paolo &
Miguel discovered that setting MONO_PATH is the cause of all my
problems, unsetting that, using mkbundle2, using --deps (and
amusingly re-setting MONO_PATH for that command) yield a
beautiful standalone elf binary (well it (sadly) requires one
extra libzlibwapi.so) that converts OOX to ODF and back.
- Kay - revisiting the OO.o Java policy looks sensible
to me - and not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm confused:
Java is GPL not LGPL - and there is a world of difference
and pain here. Of course there is the ClassPath
Exception, but what does that mean for OO.o ? is this
essentially a 'Lesser' (LGPL like license ?) if so, why not
just use the LGPL ? does it mean 3rd parties will no longer be
able to write plugins ? is there a good explanation of the
ramifications of the ClassPath exception ? will Sun be distributing
it's own Java under the terms of the GPL ? the ClassPath licensing
exception page is really rather vague. On the other hand, if this
gets unwound, it's great news that perhaps we can make OO.o more
buildable and usable, and not be so concerned about Java code
drifting into OO.o.
- Wrote LXF column prototype, dispatched team meeting
agenda, more mail, bits of paperwork. Lunch. Lengthy call with
JP. COBE flash training things, hard to remember if the quiz
questions are the same as last time.
- Buffed up the OdfConverter Makefiles a little,
found / fixed the Mono System.Xml bug hurting the nice trick
of packing the relevant XSLT files into the binary itself.
- Dinner, bed early - up in the night - installed
VTune, poked at mail. Ran VTune on OO.o/Win32 - it seems to
show a great whack of configmgr2 burn, but the results seem
rather difficult to interpret unfortunately.
- Up earlyish, fed babes while J. slept, off to NCC
Simon Matthews speaking - on running the race; went through a
(couple of) passages and explained them well.
- Back for a fine lunch, more applied inactivity,
and catching up. David left mid-afternoon, watched DVD and
read to Naomi while J. & co. out at junior Corf-ball
training. New strategy with Myriam - resulted in getting to
bed earlier, nice - read lots more of In Search of
Stupidity, an amusing marketing perspective on the tech.
industry.
- Up early, looked after babes while J. went to the
market, tidied the house. Out to Chris & Carol's for a
'Chocolate Party' for Naomi's 4th birthday. Good to see Chris'
setup and their fascinating house, fine chocolate too.
- Home, David arrived - really good to see him,
slugged by the fire much of the afternoon and chewed life over.
- Up lateish, to work - hacked away at the OdfConverter
- with Florian's XSLT skills working on my brain-damaged debugging
code, and the broken document named "valid.docx" - a miracle we
achieved anything. Eventually though we got the first .docx converted
to .odt and loaded in OO.o: nice.
- Took Florian to the station, and then on to Cambridge
(cancelled train), back - call with JP. Finally replaced my
Icelandic keyboard for a UK keyboard, 6 months to ship the
right keyboard to me ? impressive work from Calyx.
- Up early, a day of talking, trying to understand the
writer layout design, and various other bits.
- Out to Cambridge in the evening for dinner at CB2
with Julian Seward.
- Up early, a new set of
helpful FAQs on the MS/Novell deal as it relates to open-source
arrived: good. Also a more official looking Novell
statement on our OpenDocument involvement arrived.
- Poked at another proposed e-d-s change, of course all
changes to remove (unused) API are good, as long as the major .so
version isn't changed - breaking the OO.o integration. Massaged
bugs, call with Kai. Really it seems software engineering is by
far the easiest piece of the job; fixing or working around
organizational dysfunction is by far the more difficult &
(perhaps) interesting piece.
- Out to NOD to fix their networking, back - call with
Jody.
- Up early, dug at mail, considered life.
- It seems some people got scared (for inscrutable reasons)
about Novell's commitment to OpenDocument, OpenOffice etc. - just
to re-affirm, I'm a huge fan of OpenOffice period. There are
also some really nice things about OpenDocument, and we'll of course
continue to invest in improving it in the areas where it's
deficient. Hopefully that process will accelerate with both
Jody and Florian on-board, and we'll end up with an even better
OpenDocument standard.
- Separately, I was somewhat amazed to see
Simon Phipp's comments on the Novell/MS announcement. For a
while I have been hearing (from Sun) how great StarOffice is IPR-wise
due to Sun's settlement (cross-license ?) with Microsoft. Of course,
at some level Simon is a lone-voice of sanity inside Sun, but it
seems strange to be advertising on on hand the joys of a
proprietary product (StarOffice: with IPR protection) and
simultaneously slating Novell's moves to protect customers
using our Free Software product. Miguel has a nice write-up of various
other
typical coments.
- Poked bugzilla, internal admin, looked at an a11y
leak with Padraig, poked at Unit tests again. Team meeting,
posted action items. Phone call with Boston.
- Up, poked mail, faxed paperwork, poked XMS etc.
Off to Stanstead to pick up Florian, back lunch. Call with John
McCreesh, An hour and a half chat with JP. lots of time with
Florian, no hacking (bother). Dinner, bed.
- Up early, fed babes, off to NCC - quite a good
showing, talk went well (thank God), last of the 10
Commandments.
- Back, lunch, out to see Lenny at Addenbrooks -
poor dear, suffering rather, read with her a little &
prayed. Back - slugged with kidlets, watched (Mole) DVDs,
etc. bed early.
- Up early, off to the market with the babes, vegged
up, home, met Bert on the way - on a walk for exercise to his
wife's grave (so sad). Grandparent's arrived - played with babes,
hung washing out, etc. while J. & Mum went out to a craft
exhibition in town.
- Slept by the fire some of the afternoon, fire-works
in the evening with the Grand-parent - of the non-bangy variety:
lots of showers of sparks etc. Stayed up late writing talk on
Coveting for tomorrow.
- Up early, call with Florian. I forgot to mention
yesterday (amid the bustle of interesting happenings) that he has
joined Novell. Florian (as CTO OpenDocument Foundation) has lots
of experience we want to bring to bear on our OpenOffice.org
development and interoperability efforts, particularly in the
writer core. Florian of course has contributed to OpenDocument
as a member of the TC, and of course I envisage that role
continuing, though no doubt he will also make a valuable
contribution to the OpenXML / ECMA effort. Either way,
it's great to have Florian on board, and back working to
improve OpenOffice.org. He'll be blogging soon.
- Woot. Petr tracked down the evil
Python crasher plaguing OO.o component registration. Hacked
away at some Mono / C# / XSLT code. Re-printed & faxed
updated expense (not a good use of time) - all for some
trivial adjustment, sigh.
- More hackery - got the OdfConverter at least
compiled and run-time crashing; good. Vaguely amused by the
various predicitions of doom and legal nightmares. RIP
Nuclear Power - killed by the heebie-jeebies.
- Up early, N. very upset after her 'duch' was confiscated
in an attempt to stop the process of her climbing up the ladder into
her sister's bed (waking her) and getting stuck up there, remonstrated,
returned to sleep.
- Up early, poked mail, started to see some
hacking at the end of the tunnel - nice. Lunch. Call. Chewed over the
optional arg patch with Eike, need some more tests. Generated some
warm-start numbers for Malte of OO.o:
| WinXP 2.0.4 | Lin 2.0.2 (Nov) | Lin 2.0.4 (Sun) | Lin 2.0.4 (Nov) |
| Avg. Time (secs) | 4.0 | 2.4 | 1.69 | 1.55 |
Clearly we're getting faster, at least on Linux - and clearly
something really dumb is happening on Windows, I suspect configmgr's
locking fetish personally; hopefully VTune will show us something.
- Started doing some hacking with Mono - soon fell foul of
the jumbled impl./interface concept, #mono had some helpful
suggestions, a simple grep 'public' being great.
- The
Announcement (
MS) happened. It's been a privilege to be involved with a small
part of this process, and as always working with
lawyers (those word-hackers) helps sharpen the mind. It's great to
see some of the full scope here.
- Inevitably people will have some really good questions
here, and to save my fingers I thought I'd point out a few points.
- Why help Microsoft with OpenXML interop. ? OpenXML
sucks, OpenDocument Rocks !?. So several thoughts:
- This should not be a surprise - Jody Goldberg (on
my team) has been working hard for months with Microsoft and
others on the ECMA process. At one stage there around 1/2 the
open 'issues' wrt. improving disclosure (and hence the spec.)
came from Jody. I for one am proud of the job that he did there,
an (ongoing) investment that will yield better interoperability
for years to come.
- As I have said for many months now, focusing on
an 'Open-Standard' of ~700 pages written by a small team over
a short period, is to miss the staggering value that is
found in Free software. OpenOffice (as anyone who tried to
start it recently knows) contains millions of lines of code,
and a staggering investment of thousands of man years of sweat,
tears (and perhaps blood). It's localized to umpteen languages,
has deep help, scripting, accessibility, interoperability;
it's just an immensely feature rich and powerful product.
- To re-emphasise this, the value in OpenOffice.org
is not what file format it supports (eg. we want to add good
Lotus Word Pro support) but that it is truly Free software, that
gives people critical Freedoms. An open format is anyhow
implicit in the native file format of any openly
developed Free software project.
- Telling people about open standards, instead of
Free Software is easy - 'normal' people generate data, not
software so they understand, but it sells them radically
short. In my view better interoperability (with any and all
formats) strengthens Free Software, quite without the obvious
pragmatic benefits to users & customers.
- Why do business with these scum ?
- It's true there is a widespread perception of unfair
business practice from Microsoft out there, but my experience of
working in the ECMA process with the developers, has been of
meeting a (to my mind) mis-directed, but equally passionate
world-view based around the love of their technology.
- Broadly, I think it's fair to say there is a certain
kind of person that loves to solve complex, technical problems,
and I like that kind of person. It's also interesting to note that
the average Microsoft (from my small sample) political viewpoint
is -way- to the left of the average Novell Free software developer
(perhaps a statistical aberration but ...). So, in a nutshell,
they're good guys, if mis-directed. The great news is that we can
help change that direction and get these guys addicted to the Free
Software model.
- One couple it was fun to meet, both on the
Office team, obviously in love, confided in me that they had delayed
their marriage to meet the Office 12 schedule: is that dedication ?
Let's hope Wedding 2007 will ship on time; but imagine if we can
help focus these guys on improving Linux <-> Windows
interoperability, and in time Free software for it's own sake.
- What does it mean for OpenOffice ? - my hope is
over the long haul: better interop, more bodies hacking on OO.o,
wider penetration of (Novell's) OpenOffice into the enterprise,
and more individuals able to boldly hack on Free software.
- What does it mean for Hackers ? - of course, I'm
pleased that our team got such a great formal IPR covenant for
individual developers from Microsoft. For sceptics that think
this is a pure gesture, it's always surprising to me how a few
key people seem to pop up again and again in Free software,
and not everyone has the 7 year stamina that can be required,
the RIAA demonstrates the danger well.
- What does it mean for Novell ? - I'm pleased that
it seems Microsoft will be distributing lots of SLES coupons,
the more the merrier. Of course Nat and Miguel who helped
setup the deal have a clearer view.
- What is this Translator ? - it's the early stages
of a open-source project to make a standalone bi-directional
Open XML to OpenDocument converter. See SourceForge:
odf-converter. What is important to me is not the set of
design choices here (a standalone XML to XML converter:
though that may be useful for other Free software projects
such as Beagle, or it's capabilities: a sub-set of Word
only so far). What is important is the end-goal of getting
substantially better MS Office interop. (with OpenXML)
into OO.o.
- Up early, spent an hour trying to unwind some
appalling internal mis-communication, egad. Generated a patch
for Tor to help with some more QA. More mail. Posted interview
questions, decks starting to clear.
- Started doing a round-up / analysis of the spec.
thread - seemingly there is a lot of common ground, and
opportunity to improve. Off to the Doctor's - amazing, you
arrive in good time for an appointment, 15 minutes of waiting
later, no show.
- Cell group, call in the middle, as always lots to
pray for in our little group.
- Up early, poked mail - interesting; clear
communication is extremely difficult it seems. Team meeting,
lots of good things ongoing as always. Lunch.
- Encouraged by the spec. discussion on the OOo dev
list, it looks as if real communication is starting to happen.
Late meeting, bed.
- Children up early, forgot to change their light /
timer back the hour (doh). Poked at mail, knocked up a quick
script to run/quit OO.o automatically. Poked at the
gtkquickstart2 CWS.
- Sold our Vauxhall Corsa after lunch, good to get
it liquidated and the mortgage down a little further.
- More spec. process pokeage, cloph caught me being
particularly dim with my scp2, thanks. Filed expenses
frantically, managing to improve the muscle-memory and get
to grips with XMS's Hotel itemization, nearly in time for
the next system to arrive.
- Off to NCC a full hour early, it seems the clocks
went back (bother). A family service - rather good this time,
better seating, several visitors, fun.
- Back for lunch, slept afterwards, up - took H. &
N. out to watch the beautiful sunset while having a picnic.
Wonderful orange / pink / red colors (much beloved of
little Girls). Nice to see the moon, but too much cloud for
stars.
- Bed delayed by much screaming of small people.
- Up early, out to the market with a full compliment
of babes; bought several lbs of good things, and back. Dithered
about screwing a rather hefty (set) of medicine cabinets to the
(somewhat flimsy) bathroom wall [ half brick, and part thin
cinder-block on timber.
- Left the children playing downstairs while
investigating the finances, eventually went down to discover
the cooker with all rings glowing, oven on and 2 girls
shrieking with delight as they loaded various toys into it.
Spankings all around, confiscation of precious toys, much
heated explanation, repentance etc. It -looked- like Hannah
was conding if not egging on what Naomi was doing, hence the
"You're older & should have known better" adage
familiar to older siblings.
- Babes Mole DVDs in the evening, hacked a little
at yast-gtk while that was going on, can now produce ISOs
that boot and at least render some stuff, screenshots to
follow. Reported Novell Forge downtime, fixage deferred until
Monday (urgh).
- Watched Pirated of the Carribean: The Black Perl
in the evening, emminently watchable.
- Up early, call with Alex (AvengerMojo), poked
mail, more mail, lunch.
- Read the specification thread, tried to be
succinct, broadly failed, read a specification (almost a
1st) noticed it riddled with errors etc. neato - yet
another validation of the concept of (code) review
improving quality more than the generation of yet more
(buggy) content (?).
- Lunch, back to finish off.
- Up late, to the conference - wander the floor
meeting new & interesting people. Good to see Eddie
Bleasdale again. Lunch with Zaheeda, set off home.
- Hacked yast2-gtk on the train, splitting the
wizard help out into a separate dialog with search is
quite a nice touch I think.
- Call with the mother-ship in the evening,
take-away pizza with the sweetheart, and (unusually) out
to the local Pub in the evening with David, bed late.
- Up at 6:30 - off to Kensington Olympia, LWE-UK
time. Tested demos, (all except for the trusty camera),
did a nice desktop demo / talk / thing; went fairly well.
- Out for pizza with Owen & Adam. Interviews
& bits in the afternoon. Good to see Alasdair again,
and chew things over with Ian Pratt: a man with an amazing
knowledge of the workings of disk drives, and some scary
tales to tell.
- Hung out with the Novell lads a little, to
hotel; checked mail, responded to this / that, oddly smart
looking dinner jacket on, off to the UK Linux
& Open Source Awards, good to see Chris DiBona. Sat
with Thomas Wood & his fine lady, interesting evening.
To bed late.
- Up early, mail, lengthy call in the morning, team
meeting. I wonder how global the aphorism Never look a
gift-horse in the mouth is.
- Started to prepare for tomorrow's LWE talks &
meetings rather late in the day, pleased generally with demo
prep - far fewer bugs to fall over than before: clearly not
demoing the cutting-edge this time. Bed late, up in night
with N. being naughty.
- Up early, ORBit2 bug mail triage, Kjartan fixing things /
triaging long-term bugs left & right again.
- Read a little on Quality - it's been a while since I
had to look at some of the formal approaches here; [ health warning:
WikiPedia is dangerous for intellectual's productivity ].
Demming's 14 points are interesting. Particularly amused by point
11. Eliminate numerical goals, numerical quotas and management by
objectives. Substitute leadership.. Contrast that with "Gibb's Law"
(Peopleware) Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some
way that is superior to not measuring it at all Conclusion: the
Quality space is riddled with local maxima, punditry and very different
(perhaps equally good) approaches. Consequently pragmatics has to
prevail, as it does at this
fish wholesaler
- Moved the mail mountain a little. Call with Kai, back
from holiday. Picked up the car from the mechanics - seems better in
several ways. Did some interesting (for once) paper-work. Finally
got round to up-loading the dmesg output for the I/O badness I see.
- Poked at some bugs, split out the 3rd bug from the quick
2nd starter issue - a number of places in the OO.o code inadvertently
use the (unhelpful) UniString constructor:
String(RTL_CONSTASCII_FOO_LONG_MACRO_PARAM("foo"))
which due to the miracle of polymorphism this ends up doing:
UniString( const sal_Char* pByteStr,
rtl_TextEncoding eTextEncoding,
sal_uInt32 nCvtFlags = BYTESTRING_TO_UNISTRING_CVTFLAGS );
with eTextEncoding == 3 == RTL_TEXTENCODING_IBM_437 (or
somesuch); not at all ideal.
- Up early, to NCC - did Creche; God loves Children
tried to convey it to the under 3's - eventually we mostly agreed
that they are in fact children, not sure much else sank in.
- Home for lunch - 14 people around the table + 2 babies.
Good fun, talked late into the afternoon, poked at Chris's SDQS website. Various complaints
from children all over the place, bed late.
- Up at 3am to tidy up some loose
ends from the day. Also got my 1st negative comment on my
photos, so far fairly few spontaneous private comments (from
outside Novell) a complete summary (excerpting & anonymizing):
- Community hacker - thanks a lot for your las
blog entry ... i see i'm not alone
- Code Contributor - I had to just drop by and
let you know your recent blog entries had me ROTFLMAO.
:_D ... You have to laugh, or else I guess you'd cry.
I was pleased recently to see even Sun employee's gawk
at some of the crazy policies ...
- Community hacker - You know, I don't dispute
that specification can be important ... quite
frankly, I don't see it worthwhile to sacrifice my time
away from my family to try to write a spec, have to
debug the basic macro in the template, try to get some
help from Sun, only to find my plea for help silently
ignored ...
- Sun hacker #1 - read your blog, pre-emptively
setup a meeting, produced proposal for improving some
aspect, mailed me about it for comment, CC'd relevant
stakeholders [wow].
- Sun hacker #2 - This is absolutely inacceptable.
... there are a lot of complaints about work done by you
and your colleagues that caused a lot of frustrating work
in our QA and for our developers. ... I'm very
disappointed. - from someone whose opinion I rather
value.
- In the light of #2, reading again, I note two things:
- QA/UE could get upset wrt. big-print / pictures.
The point is simply - that there is no need to patronize
these people, they are competant technical people.
Simple, easily discoverable features (eg. the
quick-starter) should not need a specification.
- Humor - it is clear that my daughter hasn't filed
an issue yet, and this is rather an exaggeration, and
of course some parts of Sun are extremely
helpful and responsive, eg. the GSL team - and others,
indeed wrt. timely patch review the situation is
improving daily. My main complaint is the specification
process - at best - it dramatically hinders lots of
the diffuse 'polish' changes we need.
- Up lateish, into town with babes to buy misc. bits.
Finally repaired the toilet flush - the long-suffering wife
pleased. Lunch, slept a little in the afternoon, poked mail.
- As I was heading to bed last night, I discovered
some wise advice from my (6 week) old daughter Myriam:
Lets hope she lives to see her patch get up-stream.
- Up, poked mail. Set about disabling the quick-start
feature in the up-stream build because it doesn't meet the
demanding standards of beaurocratic process; at least if it's
disabled, people can easily get / ship it, and we don't
apparently have a fork, and Sun gets to write the spec. /
suffer their own pain.
- Relieved on returning to my desk to find the result
of my query to the StarDivision library, a critical document
(note the much-thumbed aspect). Since there is a bug in some
OO.o printing interaction, it'll be good to read up on some of
the background rational, work out if the behavior is already
specified, where to adjust the specification, take some new
screenshots and so on.
Some may call this process unnecessary - but without
this specification (including pictures & big print) how
could User Experience, or QA understand what the feature
should do ? Or worse - imagine coming back to this area, and
not knowing if a bug was even a bug, and whether to fix it.
Remember: there is no process so effective that it
can't be improved by adding steps and stakeholders, and there
is nothing too trivial to be fully specified.
- Got on with some real hacking for once, fixed a
number of issues, cwsaddtask'd them, pasted the number &
description into the commit message (dutifully). If we add
enough process barriers, and consensus generation stages to
the OO.o development process, perhaps we will (eventually)
end up with something
easy to use.
- Fixed several other quick-starter issues, it
starts to look rather polished, marked CWS 'Ready for QA'.
Out to hire a dinner jacket for next week.
- Got an encouraging mail, from a pro-active Sun
employee that cares about improving this relationship -
wonderful. Call with Intel.
- Up early, tried to poke German HR again, somewhat
unresponsive. Finished the queue of individuals to thank / round
up details with from my Nbg trip we employ a lot of good guys.
- Got in touch with HR in the end, dug at
a curious -Bdirect bug afflicting Dirk. Into Cambridge for
a Doctor's app't that didn't materialize; extraordinary.
- Dinner, worked late reviewing documentation, got
into a nasty situation of needing to catch up lots of things,
and still the up-stairs toilet flush is unrepaired since
Germany; and no hard-core hacking for days now.
- Poked XMS & NPP for good measure. Tested a new Win32
build - nice to see Tor's Cairo/Win32 port slide-showing nicely, and
optional arg. support in calc.
- Team meeting, getting rather long, lots of good stuff
going on though, good to sync with Eric Ward at the end: our new QA
person.
- Discovered that
Elluminate managed to very reliabley record 40 minutes
of black/sience for my OO.o training presentation due to some
mis-configuration. Clearly an amazingly useful feature to have,
not only that, but the half-duplex sound support makes for
really poor interactivity.
- Worked late, E-mail and things.
- Up early, to work; I/O discussion going interestingly,
Olaf produced a beautiful test case / numbers to show madvise
misbehaving vs. fadvise / manual mmap/poke: neat.
- Long time on the phone with Florian. Lunch with Bruce
& Anne - generated a nice sample of the I/O starvation problem
hurting my desktop for the kernel guys. E-mail, left & right,
performance bits, wrote LXF column.
- Mini lie-in, off to NCC - spoke on the 9th commandment:
giving false testimony, no incidences of spontaneous fossilisation
in the congregation this week: survival of the fittest.
- Lunch, slept a while, then bounced babies for some time
so J. could sleep. DVD with babes in afternoon, fine dinner.
- Gordon
sermon on
1 Peter 1:3-9 - "Resurrection Joy" in the evening, bed.
- Up early, J. into town to the market, worked on talk
for tomorrow. Sue & Clive, Georgina & Stephanie (and
multiple dogs) arrived.
- Ate a large & lovely meal, wandered onto the
race course - with H. on her bike, a racing day, the place
packed with cars where we want to walk; bother. Back, played
some guitar with Clive, and talked about this and that, very
pleasant afternoon.
- Worked more on talk in the evening, very tired.
- Babes up at the crack of dawn, H.: But I think
you were in Hamburger; N.: Ring Roses, Ring Roses;
M.<smile> - good.
- Removed battery from the new Toyota to put it on
charge, since I also left the side-lights on by accident only
last week it surely must be the car's fault. Supplying a
hearing aid to each customer so they can detect the "you
idiot you left your lights on" 'buzz' would be a useful
innovation perhaps.
- Followed Herr Hopf's advice and got a beautifully
working, suspending, resuming, Xgl-ing laptop display driver:
nice. Started to review & try to prioritize tasks, set off
the Alpha 5 download.
- Out for 3hr meeting with potential new church leaders.
- Up early, breakfast with the team - to the office,
poked at mail & bits - tried to call Florian. Met Lubos
Lunak in person for the 1st time, a hero notable for his
performance work across the board; lots to talk about.
Interesting and positive meeting with Olaf Kirch.
- Out for lunch with Voijtech & Lubos, more
compiler/linker chew with Lubos, accidentally woke Mike Fabian
- deadly ill with the lurgy; another call with Olaf. Chewed
over X with Mathias Hopf, got my laptop doctored by Holger,
demo'd Ricardo's yast2-gtk work to Stano. Bid 'bye to the
lads, caught a taxi. Smooth trip home Stanstead traffic is
light mid-week it seems.
- Up, breakfast with Kelli, JP, Robert - taxi
to the office, talked to Coolo, met all manner of interesting
people. On to the yast2 team, met Stephan Hundhammer - had a
great talk, chewed over lots of issues, out for lunch with the
yast team.
- Back, wandered the corridors, long and interesting
talk with Michael Matz, good man; caught up with Kelli/Nat/JP/
Robert etc. out for a fine Italian meal in the evening, met a
lot of Ste[ph|f]ans and got to know Vojtech a little. Back to
the hotel, via the bar, to bed.
- Up at 5am, sorry 'bye to all manner of beautiful
sleeping creatures; drove to Stanstead. Hacked in the departure
lounge - got a hacked vmplayer image to boot my hacked yast2
installer; nice. The German experience started with fizzy water
by default on the flight.
- Met up with Mike Fabian at the airport, headed out
to the office, talked to Marco at length during the day, demo'd
yast2-gtk a11y, etc. Managed to miss lots of missable meetings.
Out in the evening for fine local cuisine. Got to know Kurt a
little, great to see the team after a long gap, and see new
faces.
- Back to hotel, talked to team, stayed up very
late talking to JP.
- To work, fixed i18npool crasher in new system-icu
patch. Dropped Thomas off at Cambridge station after some quick
yast-gtk hackery. Submitted my yast2-control-center-gnome package
to autobuild's tender ministrations.
- Poked at ISO re-writing, cramfs, and all manner of
similar goodness.
- Up early, off to NCC, J. did creche, lunch, (over)
slept, woke babes up, off to Chesterton Sport's Centre for
baby's Korf Ball practice: a slightly nerve-wracking feeling
being in a sport's centre again after so long; H. seemed to
enjoy it.
- Back, dinner, bed, Thomas arrived, talked a while,
bed.
- Up early, shower, kids to market, back, out to
Andrew's birthday party (at NCC), lots of fine food, home,
slept a little, out to Georg'es birthday party (at NCC) -
lots of fun toys. Back, DVD watching with babes, bed early.
- Poked at the win32 build - cygwin managed to hang
forking it's own 'sh.exe' - embarassing, seems it's related to
it's own mangled paths:
/opt/ instead of
/cygdrive/c/cygwin/opt or whatever.
- Some code review, looks like we can save >1Mb from
libsal by dlopening exotic text encoding translation tables on
demand, at least on Unix where UTF-8 rules the roost.
- Once again stymied by subversion's Wow man,
anything should be possible attitude, that makes it really hard
to do simple things easily; I want to recusively tag the current
directory since I'm about to do something I might later regret;
cvs tag Foo seems to equate to a multi-step process:
- Work out the branching strategy / location
for this repository, branches can be 'anywhere' man.
- Check out the 'branches' directory
(non-recusively -N otherwise presumably you bomb your
disk) to somewhere.
- Now svn copy the source to the new location.
Oh - did I mention that you also can't simply list the
tags that apply to a given sub-tree, you have to go groping around
typing long URIs in repeatedly, and working out where people ended
up copying them etc. SVN while extremely powerful seems highly
unusable for the rather common branch/tag/list-tags operations.
Hopefully manually writing the revision in the ChangeLog will
suffice.
- Reviewed Joerg's helpful comments on my configmgr
refactor, giving some interesting pointers to futher savings.
Hopefully if we can get the front & backend close enough to
each other code-wise, we can understand the intermediate bit
well enough to do something about it. Marveled at the
charismatic pidgeon in the garden raising one wing in the
rain (washing?).
- Spent some time making a nice package for my slab
based yast2 control center, poking pdb, autobuild etc.
- Out to Newmarket Open Door to setup the Linux box,
got the hub in, and (after blowing up 1 network card [ prolly
one of my hand-made patch leads shorted & killed it,
sigh ] ) managed to get all 4 machines talking & connection
sharing: yast is rather good for that.
- Back for a team jolly that didn't arrive. Dinner,
Coleen & kids playing around the table. Back to work to
catch up lost time.
- Dug at the textenc code - it seems there is an easy
1.7Mb to save from 'sal' by ripping the (almost never used)
textenc (encoding translation) code out into a dynamically loadable
library; for those who still have IBM_850 encoded data. While doing
this produced a nice list of used textencodings on startup/edit,
very surprised to discover several (low number) encodings
still in very active use: turns out to be a
vicious polymorphism related problem. Thank goodness most
low enum value encodings look sane in the ASCII range.
- To work, poked at mail, updated some bugs - with
screenshots to beautify. Started doing a number of timing
tests, it seems Linux is doing better than I expected, at least
on my Desktop machine. Took a lot of measurements, drew some
graphs etc.
- It's pretty astounding that OO.o on Win32 takes
13 seconds to cold start, where MSWord takes ~3 seconds; in
fact Word can cold-start quicker than we can warm-start, a
little depressing. I wonder if any good (free) profiling
tools exist on Win32, to see if there is something particularly
dim we're doing, that we could avoid.
- Knocked off for dinner, putting the babes to bed,
good to see Janine & kids, dinner with Mum. An hour of
training NTS on OO.o 8:30 onwards, J. out at a Bible study.
- Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept; to work,
poked mail, posted action items. Back to configmgr - managed to
axe memory::Allocator completely, then after another chunk of
more careful, intricate tedium - removed the 'Pointer' class.
- Posted my configmgr re-factor patch to Stefan B.
hopefully he likes it, mail with various likely suspects, some
progress wrt. up-streaming this & that.
- Up early, read mail - priceless comment from a (much
loved) colleague about the OO.o QA test-tool's promiscuity: ...
the testsuite is very slow (many sleeps around)... (3 days
to get a result).
- Filed expenses at some considerable length, eventually
got them done, missed the 60day deadline for 1/2 of the last lot
though (hmm). Back to configmgr, now crashing - apparently removed
too much too fast this time.
- Team meeting, good work being done left & right.
Poked people about switching to Google SVN & getting gmail
accounts setup. Call with Tor. Petr did some great QA on the
quickstarter CWS, found several problems and nominated it.
- Ripped more out of configmgr: simpleheap, HeapManager,
Heap gone, loads of confusing typedef / renamed types gone, started
the attach on Allocator.
- Up early, fed babes, to work. Mail, poked Stefan,
wrote up some thoughts, bits of admin. Lunch, more mail, urgh.
Grandma arrived at 3pm or so. Hacked at configmgr - bits flying
removed the custom allocator thing, no problems so far (beyond
valgrinding OO.o causing my H/W to lock up (hard to file a bug
report)). Ripped more guts out of configmgr with no ill effects,
neat.
- Up early, breakfast, packed things, drove home.
- Ben Elvidge over for lunch, lovely to see him again
and catch up with goings on Nr. Oxford, lugged some shelving
being slung out from Nigel & Caroline's house together.
Watched some DVDs while J. tried (abhortively) to sleep, Tea early
babes to sleep.
- Tried to get to bed early, thwarted by Myriam who seems
intent on complaining about wind/hunger she doesn't have, poor wife
over-wrought.
- Up early, left the H. & N. with the Grandparents,
set off for Coventry - drove, drove some more, more driving - arrived
in time for the service. Lovely wedding, beautiful bride & lots
of old common friends.
- On to the reception at the Coventry
Guild-Hall. An incredible building, steeped in history, fine
food, good company, very enjoyable. Myriam very good, lots of sleeping
and little complaint.
- Talked much of the evening, then set off back home, drove
& drove late at night, bed rather late.
- Up early, suprised to discover the wife had been
reading 'Peopleware' (even I could understand it), though
I hadn't got to it yet, no Economist - so started; interesting
so far.
- Poked at mail, amused on analysing an OO.o
corrupted my spreadsheet bug to discover a worrying
preponderance of '0x0d 0x0a' bytes, including the 2 terminating
ones, a total lack of 0x00's and a pre-ended " character;
looks like some ninny loaded it in some DOS text editor, then
saved it again. Sadly although some files in OO.o cough
types.rdb could use a similar treatment, it doesn't look
possible to automate a 0x00 re-insertion to restore the
content.
- Long phone call with Kai. Squeezed more memory,
code and performance out of the configmgr, analysed the
duplicated strings again; framework burning > 1/4 of the
reduncancy now (tons of ".uno:SaveAs" type entries).
The reason we have 145 instances of 'ALIEN' unfortunately
turns out to be poor representation of the binary config
cache, shame.
- Up early, dealt with babes, work lateish. Poked at
OpenSUSE10.2A4 - filed 10 bugs around the desktop, most of them
sillies, noticed a few more while responding to queries.
- Drove to Bruce & Anne's, lunch. More mail, poked
at go-oo.org, running out of space. BU employee call. Committed /
enabled my sc-optional work, and poked Eike/Jody for more review.
- Committed the libegg pieces for the systray quickstarter,
updated the CWS, though didn't re-sync it (too painful ?)
- To work, phone interview on time based releases. Interesting
to see a new Sun GullFOSS
aggregator thing spring up.
- Hacked at calc all day - talked to Eike who seems to accept
the approach, which is great. More digging at that, poked at some
StarBasic profiles with Noel - we need a ~2 order of magnitude speed
win in there at least, 3 in some areas - should be fun.
- Coleen, Anna & Ethan around for dinner, good to see
them. Cell group in the evening, last evening with Thomas around - sad
really. Bed late.
- Up early, packed the girls off to 'pre-school'
(ne play-school), and got to work. Vexed by my ethernet connection,
clearly buying the cheapest cable crimper on offer wasn't the best
plan: badly formed cable bent one of the 8 springy pins inside the
expensive laptop: check your cable before use.
- Interesting phone call with KaiB. Talked to travel agent,
booked Nuremburg trip, looking forward to meeting some of the SuSE
hackers I've worked with in person.
- Super-long team meeting, lots of good work going on.
Built DVD ISO from OpenSUSE10.2Alpha4, set off install.
- Up early, poked E-mail, nothing much - hacked at
optional argument patch, beggining to look quite sweet - created
a fairly elaborate regression test sheet, the back-compat piece
is looking good; saving & re-loading ~everything works;
excellent, now for the core hack.
- Out for a run with J. - lovely to talk to have her
to myself for a while, T. left in charge of the babes, with DVD
to assist. Back somewhat later, babes to bed (bible story, prayers,
children's story, sleep), dinner. Watched a Vet movie, sleep.
- Up early, fed babes, off to NCC - Daniel speaking
briefly; Ron encouraged us at the end; had DT, Zoe & Jackie
back for lunch, chatted for much of the afternoon.
- Slugged, Tea, bed, Thomas back, burped babies, bed
again.
- Up early, off to the market, back - potatoe peeling
at length. People started to arrive: James, Kate, Adam & Laura
in the 1st batch, Christian, then Thomas. Badmington, Ham, Egg &
Chips, fine meal, good conversation.
- Lost everyone after a while, rather early, slugged,
read to babes, washed up, bath, a little hacking afterwards.
- A while ago (ok so several years) I read Eric Raymond's
interesting
testimony (an excerpt): That day I was reborn; from a skinny
lame kid with a flute into a shaman and a vessel of the Goat-Foot God,
the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Horned Lord.. At the time
I thought how tendentious some of it was, but clearly 2 can play at
that game; so eventually I got around to creating a less elegant reply Why I am a Christian,
with some of the answers to questions I wanted people to ask, but they
didn't. Still need to finish up my random selection of anecdotes wrt.
other worldviews at the end; it took a long time, but this hacking stuff
has been preoccupying me.
- Hacked a little at the detection of missing opcodes in
ScTokenArrays (seems to be a flattened / parsed form of a formula).
Got somewhere - missing args detected, re-written & substituted
with a string.
- Up early, listened to Thorsten's OO.o to XCanvas
talk while reading mail. Poked at a nice interop problem:
optional (mid-list) arguments in calc, the 'PMT' function isn't
happy; quick chat with Jody.
- Tried to come up with a nice generic way to share
function / argument data between ODF export and the calc core
wrt. missing arguments: sadly rats lurk here. Switched to a more
pedestrian approach.
- Late night VBA call, went ok. Dinner, back to creating
nice missing optional argument test case, reported silly bug in
the ECMA formula spec.
- Mail thrash, it seems IBM are interested in helping
get LWP files importing into OO.o, our efforts to reverse engineer
the format are somewhat stymied.
- Was recently provoked by a criticism of the LGPL into
noticing -just- how successful it is, particularly among large
companies. ~Every application that runs on Linux links to the LGPL
glibc (it's hard to do anything without that) so IBM's DB2, or
Oracle's D/B would be notable here. Also, the number of interesting
companies shipping code licensed under the LGPL is large (some examples):
Microsoft [Interix SDK],
Sun [Gnome],
Sony [NSP1],
Sharp [Zaurus],
Nokia [770],
Novell [OpenSuSE],
Netgear [my router] &
Tivo (of course anyone shipping a
Linux based appliance / device does), gave up extending the list,
doubtless there are a lots more.
- Poked at the Novell Developer Demotivation Tool (the
innerweb provides a number of such things), unsuccessfully. Then
Kelli's staff, then onto FATE - finally used the thing in anger:
hmm, mailed a set of queries off to Klaus & nursed my wrist.
- Hannah now scared of 'tomatoes (with faces)' under the bed,
a progression from the dragon in the shower-room, to 'Skull and
Cross-bones' images (amazingly prevalent), to Scooby Doo [ having
never seen it ].
- Dinner, hair-cut from the wife: "I'm sorry darling I
just assumed you had put the no. 3 on the clippers, you normally
do" - an amusingly severe/cold bit at the back of the head.
Bed early.
- Up serially in the night, N. found twice asleep on
the landing (in crawling position): strange, the dire warnings
about not waking us clearly had some effect, though not of keeping
her in bed, poor dear.
- Call with Matt McKenzie 1st thing, poked mail. Poked
NTS wrt. training again. Listened to Jody's talk - great stuff,
also Thorsten Bosbach's testtool talk. Concurrently poked at a
curious pivot issue. Matthias Bauer's talk also great.
- Poked at some Visio OLE2 embedded in .odt on Win32
issue that Fridrich is in hot persuit of. Suffered Win32 unwillingly,
I thought I had Visio installed, but couldn't find it. Dug out the
DVD, ran setup "upgrade/remove" - apparently it's installed. Eventually
found it languishing on the desktop (one of 45 icons), apparently
putting it there removed it from the 'All Programs' menu (50
items at the root of the tree). Yearned for the searchable, Novell
app-browser on top of Win32.
- Customer conf-call, chat to Kelli & Rob.
- Up every hour in the night with N. seems to be
finally objecting to being usurped as the smallest & most
needy; tiring.
- More mail, action items, write-ups, blah. Upgraded cygwin
(a leap into the dark at the best of times), perhaps that will cure
the plague of crashed shells. Conference calls.
- Up early, looked after babes while J. slept. You
know something is being learned when N. wakes up her mother with
Hello Dorgeous. To the mail mountain, hundreds of unread
personal messages, urk; hard to resign oneself to a ~week of
non-hacking.
- Nice to see the new OO.o build-bot having an IRC
presence. By googling [ couldn't see a link on the OOoCon
official page (go Marketing !) ] managed to find the conference
videos.
- My hot picks (snarfed from the nice Kiberpipa site).
- Watched Michael Bemmer's talk: very interesting, it's
great to hear StarDivision emphasising reducing Barriers to entry
the priority of building community etc. Pleased with Sun's current direction.
Couldn't find Noel's VBA talk, or Fridrich's - both rather good. For
those with hyper-low bandwidth, you can get
slides.
- Tried to fix the HTML to not make the planet barf. Got mired
in some mess as to where pubDates should go & so on; utterly evil.
Desparately quested for a decent DTD link for RSS and got no-where, my
(apparently) valid RSS is unworkable, found this
urk; and (apparently) no DTD too; so xmllint --valid can no longer
save me; grief. Talked to jdub: Atom is (apparently) the sane format
here, and I need to use pyblosxom's static publishing.
- Cached thumbnails on gnome.org & switched 1/2 the video
links to another server; thanks Laurent. Knocked up column for LXF on the
cusp of missing the deadline, generated more copy for Mehran, urk.
- Bought some books on S/W management, lots to learn no doubt.
- Up early, read to children; out to NCC: speaker
from The Leprosy
Mission, on their work & why they do it.
- Back for lunch, slept much of the afternoon,
dinner, children playing with present of dressing up clothes,
including the dangerous favorite: high heeled shoes.
Bed early.
- Read to children, played with them, nondescript day(?)
- Up late, breakfast, some mail poking, very tired,
a little work while babes watched some DVDs; FTO. Interesting
phone call, started to write up some notes.
- Breakfast with the lads, off to the
university - Cedric very kindly provided us with
a room; team meeting much of the morning.
- Into town, lunch, bid 'bye, to the
flight; Zaheda & John on the same flight
again, chewed over some of the conference
developments. A little more hacking, saved more
configmgr strings & memory with a more
intelligent cache.
- Swift passage through Stanstead - although
difficult to get to the pick-up point; J. & crew
picked me up - wonderful to see her again.
- Up rather too early, off the the ODF
keynote / panel thing. Fairly interesting, talked
to Rob afterwards, nice to get a commitment to help
OO.o with unwinding the lwp file format.
- Caught Michael Brauer's talk on ODF,
interesting. Missed lunch while chewing over the
state of the world from IBM's perspective,
with Bob and [fixme]. Got a nice demo of the Lotus
Workplace client, which looks interesting.
- Customer meeting, saw Fridrich's nice
talk on building community (from a developer).
- To the conference, Debra's keynote went
well. Lots of ninja lizard video action. Panic setting
up laptop for Noel's presentation: burned 30mins.
Back to back to back interviews, 1/2 a lunch with
journalists, back to my startup talk (5mins late).
More interviews, finally finished & bid goodbye
to the nice PR folk.
- Caught some of the chart2 and Caolan's
talk, interesting, modularising OO.o at the build
level may solve many of our buildability problems.
- On by coach to the city of Lyon hall,
beautiful art, architecture, fine canope's, good
company - lots achieved. Kebab afterwards with the
lads, tram ride to the hotel, and a pleasant drink
with doko / the 3bclean lass.
- Breakfast later than expected, laptop-time
issue. Walked to the conference, sculled around greeting
the usual suspects. ESC meeting, some good discussions,
though some serious deja-vu; perhaps creating more
formal process will solve the responsiveness problems:
one can but hope.
- Kindly bought beer/cheese by the Neo-Office
guys, with a great offer of letting Novell help do the
grind of getting some pieces of their nice work up-stream.
- On to the Hilton, met Debra, the journalists
etc. on to the (Novell sponsored) boat trip down the
various rivers; back, bed late.
- Up early, fed / burped babes, Thomas kindly
took me to the airport, queued up - Zaheda on same flight,
with John McReesh. Chewed the cud with them. Hacked a little
on the flight.
- Measured the win from switching configmgr to
rtl_uString * from the shared-memory custom string code;
that and a tiny cache of cnames saves > 800k (memprof)
and ~1Mb (pmap), and a net code size reduction: nice.
- Arrived, met Jody in the lobby, Taxi to the Neary
homestead, fine flat, good to chat, saw Elephant's Dream for
the 1st time, pizza & wine. On to the old town to meet
the rest of the OO.o lads, meet/greet, meal, back to hotel
late, fascinating talk with Kai until later.
- Slugged about the house, dealt with babes,
Iris & Lenny came round - great to see her again after
recovering. Watched a vet movie, bed lateish.
- Out to Ickworth house - beautiful gardens,
wandered around in the Sun - lovely time, first trip out
with the baby. Pause to feed baby, and admire ducks &
fish in the lake. Several abortive toilet breaks, with
some success eventually.
- Hacked at presentation, and some content for DA. The
parents left, so good of them to help out.
- Out in the evening for a meal with Cell group at the
Weatherspoons; amazed to hear David Hill: local SpecSavers opticians
say "Yes, we've got this new touch-screen system based on (something
called) Red Hat", "I use OO.o all the time", "I wish I had it at home".
Quite startling for an apparantly non-technical, optician.
- Got het up, call with Nat, calmed down, worked on slides,
and misc queued incoming bug muxing.
- Parents arrived, great to see them, and have them help.
N. slept awfully - croup, had to 'sleep' in her bed most of the night.
- Up early, tried to keep people quiet so J. could sleep.
N. decided today was the day of the major bladder regression: 4+x.
Had a picnic on the gallops: complete with babies, fake food, -some-
real food etc. a pleasant way to pass the late afternoon.
- A little mail chew in the evening, finally did Ricardos'
yast-gtk GSOC html-form-work for him.
- Up early, off to NCC - did creche; Helen speaking.
Back, dealt with babes, Thomas back in the evening - the air-show
thing was a disaster apparently.
- Up early, out to the market - back, put the babes
to bed. Burned an hour+ of my FTO with unnecessarily painful
and de-motivating 'management' related foo, upsetting.
- Up, dealt with babes, out to a play-place Nr.
Thetford. Back, babes to bed, played in the evening. Took
2 OO.o support calls almost back to back: apparently they
go in clusters. Bed exhausted, nasty pain in the neck from
my FFH's curly slide experience, slept really badly.
- Lots of disturbance during the night; Miriam it
appears is nocturnal. Breakfast with the kids while J.. slept,
out to the 'Funky Fun House' for lots of climbing, sliding,
bouncing action.
- Back for lunch, slept for a couple of hours,
watched DVD with the children while J. slept some more; did
a little E-mailage.
- Up early, breakfast until late, off into town with
the children, back, lunch - lots of child entertainment to take
the heat off J. Ran around the garden to wear the children out,
wore myself out too, more exercise required.
- Poked mail a couple of times, thanks to everyone
that sent them for their kind E-mail.
- Up at 3am, woken by labouring wife; attached
electrodes to back etc. Watched back-to-back 'All creatures
Great & Small' while J. contracted.
- Took children to Rachel's, leaving Thomas to
watch over J. Midwife arrived by 8:30am, into the bath
~9:30, lots of valient pushing; gas & air, and
eventually Miriam Julia Mercy Meeks arrived 8
lb 2 oz, at 12:09.
- Bruce & Anne arrived back having collected
the babes from Rachel's and bought a lovely lunch. Tea &
toast in bed, J. slept while we ate & played with Miriam.
Phoned people left & right, missed my staff meeting.
- Up early, unexpected Bank Holiday. Worked at
creating a 'hatch' to conceal the 'scary hole' from which
(it is presumed) dragons come (in the downstairs toilet),
and which puts H. off from using it. "But I've seen the
dragons on the computer!", "But it's dark inside
the hole". Thomas helped, and the new router made it all
possible, good to play with that.
- Out to Ely in the afternoon, played with some
slides / swings, saw a foal, cream-tea at the river: a
lovely day with the babes. Back, bed early. Missed the DE
meeting (somehow).
- Up late, off to NCC - John Hummerson speaking on
Grace, back for lunch - with babes, nice chicken pot lunch.
Slugged in the garden while the babes slept, washed the car,
DVD with babes. Dinner.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 12 - "Extravagent Love".
- Up early, out to the market - buying frenzy,
lugged it all home. Managed to keep J. asleep until 11:15.
Lunch, out to Anglo Saxon reconstruction village (Lackford
Lake) - with new playground, (and Thomas), rather neat.
Walked, played, mini-milked etc. Home with suitably exhausted
children.
- Watched The Interpreter in the evening, rather
good, and not soppy.
- Poked mail, continued memory hunt, drew some
pretty diagrams. Off to Newmarket Open Door - installed SLED,
worked nicely worked out what was needed for infrastructure.
Conference call with Debra & Co. Call with Guy. Dinner,
call with Jim & Will.
- More memory chasing, shrunk by a few more 100k's.
Configmgr looks like the next huge beast. OO.o webinar Q&A
until late.
- Dug at cppuhelper and VCL - 2 places that assume that
stl::hash_map is going to do something sensible: sadly the truth is
anything but. The stl hash doesn't scale at all to small numbers of
items: AFAICS it's minimum size is 53 items (220 bytes or so), and
it's default size 193 items yields 770+ bytes; it seems more people
need to know this.
- To work - created a CWS for ace - great to have him
involved fixing the OO.o artwork up (though he can't touch the
(touchy) up-stream / default artwork).
- Before Ricardo went on vacation for a week, he posted
some more yast-gtk
screenshots / details to the OpenSUSE wiki. Looking pretty nice.
Helped get it into autobuild.
- Did some
analysis of string duplication in OO.o - of the ~730k of strings
we hold post writer startup, 90% are duplicates, interesting: should
be some easy fixes since they're immutable & ref counted.
- Got VOIP conf-calls working with our Chinese hackers.
Poked at the pmap output for a while, and knocked 24Mb off the OO.o
thread stacks (of course not backed by any physical pages, but makes
the numbers look better).
- Up early, banged off an LXF column. The OO.o performance
list (non-collab.net, closed, non-archived but at least functional
since no Reply-To: mangling) just got uppity again. Using collab.net
mailing lists is a dead-end for anyone busy - you have to read all
mailing lists, always to detect replies to messages [ that may come
months later ], since you never get a copy. As a write-only medium
it's great but ... a shame, we do great work on the performance list,
lots of interest - we should setup an archive.
- Poked at Blacksheep's nice yast2 work - the package
selector coming along nicely. Call with Jody - back from Redmond:
ECMA TC meeting and holiday, caught up.
- Upset wrt. the potential mangling of the ooo-performance
list, eventually unwound most of the problem, worse - it seems
most of the problems can be overcome with Evo's thread based
vfolders, must file some bugs there.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 4 - "Sir, Give Me this water". I need lots myself.
- Up early, breakfast, off to NCC - rather a good cell
lead service. Back for lunch, popcorn & DVD in the afternoon
+ lots of tidying up. Slugged 'til dinner, bed early.
- Up late, cleaned & tidied, Father's 70'd birthday
celebration. Lots of family on both sides showed up - great to
see them all, played Boule, Badmington etc. good time had by all.
- J. to bed early, stayed up late talking to the
parents and Robert.
- Poked at my buildbot slave, got the remote hostname
wrong, fixed that, and onto another error; not the easiest thing
to setup clearly. Call with Jakub - hacking away at some beautiful
new Tango icons for OO.o, unwound some cvs/cws problems.
- Read Eike's link to the OpenFormula
wiki page; most of it seems excellent, except the "Doesn't mandate
mistakes" piece. Ultimately good interoperability mandates biting
your fist, and at least supporting the same mistakes as codified in
some staggering chunk of the world's extant spreadsheets. The rest of
the text looks reasonable, but extrapolating the "lets go for 'beautiful'
instead of interoperable" mentality, and adding the "oh but we have to
be compatible with old StarOffice files" (which of course add just a
different set of 'mistakes' and data loss from previous imperfect imports)
may well drive everything into the ground. Of course - since many
implementors are going to have to implement some of these mistakes,
standardizing hints for annotating that would be rather a good idea
surely ?
- Did some analysis of war-pig cold-start strace output, only
29secs to start, hmm. Isolated (& fixed?) an incredible writer (numeric)
table sorting bug. Out to hoover the church, scrub toilets etc.
- Call with Mike & Prasad, chewed over the build-bot, Prasad
fixed my BuildBot problem on the server. Dinner, back to hack, further
improved the writer sort patch. Hacked at my LXF column ...
- Noel got a really nice write-up on his VBA work in LXF 84,
'OOo Basic: Use VBA macros' - nice job. Started to install SLED10 on
the war-pig; so far so good - it can read writable CDs.
- Poked at the OO.o specification process again, to try to
clarify where we're going, hacked at the ScPostIt re-work a lot,
shaking a number of bugs out. Reviewed some marketing material - it's
good to have those guys.
- Wifely haircut in the evening, parents arrived late.
- Up early, poked at a text / type detection bug. Got my
build environment untangled. Hacked at the PostIt memory shrink some
more, rendering bugs fixed, shrunk the CellInfo structure by 16 bytes
by using some simple bitfields. More PostIt hacking, and Kelli's Staff.
- Admired J's construction of a Buzz-Lightyear Birthday cake
for a friend's son; upgraded her laptop in the process - the gnarled
& ancient war-pig got retired to the performance testing graveyard.
- Up early, noticed the intray buckling under the
weight of new administriva. Call with Kai, lunch, team meeting,
wrote up action items. Poked at the BuildBot
setup page. Gary's core team call.
- Reviewed some crazy a11y code, sigh. Re-tested the latest
kernel for my strange music-skipping issue; seems to be gone, hmm.
Dinner. J. out for the evening. Fixed a number of evil quickstarter
bugs, added Dan's transparency work to our egg cut/paste, better popup
positioning, instant apply to avoid evil re-starts, and cleaned up
legends.
- Up early, phone call with Harish - apparently he got
married without telling me; nice work, unwound a number of things,
good to talk.
- Amused in the comments to coverage of some OO.o security blather to see:
The Bad News Is ... that OpenOffice has security flaws.
The Good News is that in the time it takes the suite to open and
load an infected document the malicious hacker has been captured by
the FBI, brought to trial, convicted, and a patch made available.
or was it more that The important news here is that France has a
Ministry of Defence, who can say ? more work on OO.o startup time
required (clearly).
- Poked at Evo ABI issues. Call with Brad Young. Lunch,
dug more at the evo. ABI issue, it seems something even odder happened,
that luckily involves less work to fix it. Poked at FATE.
- Up late, NCC - Cell group led service; interesting. Home,
lunch, slept for a couple of hours, cleaned guttering after torrential
rain, filled with gloop. Cleaned sink U-bend.
- DVD Paycheck
in the evening, rather good.
- Up early, out to the market with the babes while J. slept.
Back, helped pack, drove to Sue & Clives. Met Phil and Julia &
babes. Admired their (huge) new tent. Fine lunch, nice walks - great to
catch up with their various goings on. Drove back late, bed.
- Woke up to a lovely new present yet more
breakage in the e-d-s ABI [ bumped the .so version yet again ].
( huge flame censored for now ).
- Poked other mail, wrote summary of Kai's stay. Poked at misc.
bugs here & there. Read / responded to Harish's mail.
- Read some yast2-installation stuff, apparently the whole
installation process is controlled, and can be customized by tweaking
some nice XML files on the media. Call with Dhananjay.
- Dug at the ScPostIt re-work again, finally some hacking.
- Interested to discover the win32 machine I left
building OO.o last night had (apparently) re-booted itself by
this morning - hrm. Discovered
SharpKeys to map my Win32 Caps-Lock to Ctrl, so I don't go
crazy there.
- Discovered the xplat client also mangled my ML
with spaces in it, tried Win32 instead, updated to the latest
G/W client. Did competitive review for OO.o template re-work.
- Call with Robert Wipfel. Checked my sweet new slab
based yast2 control center into yast2 cvs, and looked at what we
need to do next to make it pretty.
- Dinner, up late battling replacing the plastic front
section of Thomas' car; more challenging than expected (in the dark).
- You know your friends have been creative in choosing
their children's names when H. says "Why don't we call the baby
Fluendo?". Mail churn,
filed evo. bug, the 1st in a while, reduced to using the xplat
client.
- Zoltan came up with a solution for the TLS issue,
which is great. It
seems OO.o is to switch to a 2.x numbering system instead of
2.0.x - I guess that's useful to highlight the fact that we're
integrating (well tested) new features in these (
time based) 3 monthly releases. Hopefully that decision is
being vindicated by the increasing quality, performance and
utility of OO.o 2.0.x.
- After some head scratching, fixed a particularly silly
b-a-s activation failure problem killing my gnome-settings-daemon
in HEAD, also discovered the fd leak fix hadn't got committed,
fixed that, dunged some stale crud out. Kelli (JP's) staff meeting.
Poked NTS to setup training.
- Dinner, tried to coach Gael with her 1st yr. maths
paper problems; mixed success - interesting though.
- Up early, battled the 'Competency Management Tool',
I'd be interested one day to see if the people that wrote it used
it. Team meeting, duct taped the climbing frame back together (with
a splint - urgh).
- Total communication failure with receptionist, perhaps
should have used my French in the last decade to keep it working.
Discovered Rene is not French, but German ( while trying to persuade
him to help do the booking ).
- Call with Sam Heiser; wow - it seems people really
love OpenDocument for it's own sake, over-and above Free software.
- Sorted Julia's tax out finally, watched DVD.
- Weather wet and hot; mail pokeage. Pushed all the
-splash.diff patches out of HEAD ooo-build, and some of the
artwork; shrinks it a little. Remembered to check my under-loved
pop mail / spam-trap address: @ximian.com, 9k unread messages.
- Lots of tedious admin, call with Dhananjay, hacked
at up-streaming the quickstarter, poked tml to QA. Read mail
backwards a little way, more tedious admin.
- Set too at the defunct washing machine - after
poking at the pressure sensor (flawless), got into disassembling
the outlet pump, and rubber tubing, whilst mopping the floor. It
seems that most of a (mangled to mulch) muslin had got stuck in
there. Removing it, and re-assembling yielded a working machine
- thank God it was so easy this time.
- Lie-in, breakfast, J. took Kai & Mira to the station,
been great having them to stay. I welcomed people at NCC.
- Slept much of the afternoon, dinner, bed, didn't
sleep for ages - bother: too many things to revolve in the
grey matter.
- Up early, out to the market with the babes, back,
into Cambridge punting with J., the Backmans, and an excited H.
(her first punting). N.: "Are you going to bed ? No, Boat!"
left in bed.
- Kai expertly punted us much of the way, wandered
around Cambridge - sandwiches for lunch: harassed by wasps,
saw the Eagle / Cavendish, Downing - lovely day for it, walked
to the Station.
- Dinner, talked until late with Kai, bed.
- Up early, poked at mail, worked with KaiB on svn
stuff, Kai hacked the cws tools to use the new EIS boolean
(kaib01), and I hacked svn-pack/unpack to create a
src680-m179-svn.tar.gz that can be untarred & unpacked to
make an existing tree a live 'svn' repo.
- Lunch, new SVN based cws tools amazingly fast: the
'cwscreate' just creates a branch for all modules: takes
O(5 secs), then cwsadd is ~1 sec. Added sw, sc and svx to
svntest15 in 3 secs. So far cwscreate, cwsnew, cwsquery,
cwsaddtask, cwsquery work nicely. Call with Intel - discovered
their nice OO.o
BuildBot page.
- Up early, breakfast; to work. Lengthy meetings
with Kai, talked over the whole playing field in depth. Call
with Zaheeda.
- More talking, small pieces of hacking.
- Up early, poked mail, train to Victoria,
met Kai / Zaheda, wandered the Google offices: sat in on
Julian's Valgrind talk (admired his pretty Google prize),
lunch.
- Chewed over my massif (sic) issues with Julian,
showed him memprof / sysprof. A little hacking, chatted to
Kai a bit, interesting & productive phone call with
Zaheda & Kai.
- Out for Pizza Express with Mira, missed Z.
somehow, train to Cambridge, taxi to Nmkt, bed.
- Poked mail, started trying to up-stream a number of things:
Kendy's
cws-commit-patch script is a dream, deleted the old fpicker cws,
and created a new one with that: easier than resyncing manually.
Of course - Collabnet's IssueZilla is
broken - hmm.
- Split out the
QA team from DomainDeveloper, if Thorsten updated it, it could be
a very useful resource. Poked at strange GtkFPicker sizing issue on 16x9
screens.
- Team meeting, call with Jody. Did a little memprof profile /
strace of yast2 - seems it's not been straced recently - hopefully we can
get a few wins wrt. performance. Pointed Rajesh in the right direction to
hack on the VBA work. Printed 1 set of expenses, looked at the next.
- Poked at the specs wiki to add some
realism. Must be loosing my google touch, took me rather a while to
find the Fedora OO.o
patch set. Caolan agreed to take over the fpicker-multiselect patch,
nice.
- To work. It seems there is some debate about the suitability
of the GPL for OO.o (again). It seems to me that the use of the GPL for
OO.o is deeply unwise for at least the following reasons:
- The SISSL with it's invideous terms - allowing
(antisocial) people/companies to develop their own changes to the
OO.o code without sharing them, and working together with us.
Anyhow the SISSL is now dead, which is great. The LGPL means that
any changes or fixes to the existing code by others in future
-must- be published as they are shipped. This is a huge improvement
to my mind.
- Re-usable components - OO.o contains many pieces (eg.
chart2) that have the potential for re-use across Linux (and
other) desktops. GPLing OO.o, would enfeeble the platform by
not allowing this in many cases. The LGPL allows re-use from
Java, and
any number of other projects / tools. While this is admittedly
not a common use-case now, in future, I'd love to see UNO more
widely deployed [as part of the system], and OO.o's components
re-used.
- The Linux Kernel is a world unto itself. People point
to Linux as a great example of the general applicability of the GPL.
However - this is an unreasonable comparison: the kernel 'links' to
almost nothing. No-one contends that the GNU C library should be
GPL (instead of LGPL) because it interacts directly with the kernel.
OO.o by contrast is a massive linking consumer & producer with
bindings for many languages etc. no problem while LGPLd.
- Competing vs. MS Office - there are a large number of
(small) companies making a living by selling proprietary
plugins, macros, and re-using Office as a component of their
solution. Encouraging these people to not only add support for OO.o
(and hence Free software platforms) - but also to GPL their
(entire) product, seems an unwise disadvantage for Free software.
The LGPL avoids this problem.
- If an end-user is writing macros in eg. Java (ie. a
compiled language), or wishes to password-protect their StarBasic
macros; then if OO.o is GPL'd - (IANAL) - it
appears clear (last sentence) that they infringe the license,
unless they also supply the full source for all their macros. This
is not the case with the LGPL.
Personally, and Corporately, I have no particular axe to grind
here, ( Groupwise/ODMA/COM/Win32 ? ). However, I am concerned about the long
term attractivenes of, and re-use of OO.o. As Fred Brooks infers - if there
is a silver bullet out there, it is code re-use. Thus I applaud Sun's wisdom
in sticking with the LGPL.
Of course - in terms of actually working together with Sun, (and/or
the collab.net infrastructure) life can be incredibly painful, turgid, littered
with (seemingly) arbitrary barriers, conflict and so on, all of which need
fixing (and in many areas things are improving), but licensing is (currently)
the least of my concerns
- Admin work / wiki page massage. Hacked a little on the SourceView
settings - the default font size (10) is ridiculous. Mikhail pointed me at
the docs for STL, Google not helpful
there; and after all those days of tangled, template header reading.
- Dug at Win32 machine to try and do some builds there to eliminate
(potential) warnings that can't be seen on Linux. It strikes me that while the
concept of warning free builds is a wonderful idea - raising the barrier to
entry by another 20 feet: warning free builds on 3 platforms is (perhaps) not
the most brilliant plan wrt. encouraging external contributions.
- Spoke at NCC on the 8th commandment; back lunch,
applied slugging, chatted to Louise, played with the babes,
a relaxing day.
- Up early, navigated the market, bought printer ink,
home - bummed about in the garden, cleaned, slept, fixed up
the front room. Louise arrived, more talking / lazing, reading,
bed early.
- Checked out the latest chart2
snapshot, seems to perform better than chart1 for my .xls
test, (but it's not finished yet). Filed a crasher bug.
- Posted the 2 ways of re-working ScPostIt for review
to the calc guys (avoiding the mailing list because of Reply-To:
munging), with some guidance shouldn't be so bad to finish.
- Polished up the html -> xhtml converter in yast-gtk,
prolly should switch to a static linked GtkHtml, fixed a number of
layout and sizing issues: the Wizard dialogs now look rather good.
- Saw Google's new project hosting site - it'd be great
if we could move a ton of the OO.o infrastructure there; particularly
if the google authentication/account scheme is open, to help integrate
the wiki auth eg.
- Up early, some interesting E-mail: fun. More poking
at the TLS bug - fun indeed, posted my tiny sample crasher app.
Read some Carbon documentation - strange things apparently lurk
in the Mac world '.m' files,
- Reviewed Ricardo's yast-gtk work - it's coming along
really impressively. Read some of the yast ncurses code: stylistically
curious: NCLabel vs. NClabel. Lunch, long talk to Kai. More
yast-gtk hacking, improved my HTML -> XHTML converter, not massively
efficient, but a stop-gap until the ycp can be fixed.
- Realised that my blog posts are truncated by the planet
thing; despite updating the timestamp on them as I update them during
the day, the changes appear not to show up: odd. I guess native RSS
readers won't have that problem.
- Tested the mono TLS fix (apparently) in svn - wow mono
is getting big: an mcs checkout burns NNNMb - it's great to see that
(apparently) much of that is automated regression tests. Sadly TLS
bug still not fixed - could be a glibc issue I guess.
- Committed my scad of memprof fixes to a new 'sled-fixes'
branch there; tried to use the glibc malloc hooks - seems like they're
rather haphazardly implemented, and not that useful for threaded apps;
bother; poked libc-alpha, hopefully I'm wrong.
- Soeren approved committing the memprof bits to HEAD; nice.
Out to Prezzo for lunch with the in-laws, a lovely meal indeed, we all
fat in the car. Spent a good chunk of time updating some next gen PRD
goodness in some random internal wiki.
- Up early, hacked a little, drove to the Griffin's, team
meeting, wrote up notes, more admin landed on desk. Poked at package
bits, sullenly poked at memprof until it finally coughed back into
life on SLED10: wow, it needs constant tending.
- Up early, finished the package re-work, odd things
going on though, re-ran my massif measurements; got annoyed by the
lack of an aggregate 'maximum' heap metric; hacked that up.
- Very curious about massif's space-time output; having
optimised the piece that (apparently) burned 25% of the space-time,
and got it down to 10% or so - I see only a 4% win in the peak
heap space used; bother; I guess leaving the process to run in
the state you're interested in for a few minutes perhaps removes
some of these strange effects.
- Created a small test case - it seems massif managed
to generate a graph showing linearly increasing allocation during
a 30 second sleep; hmm. Started prodding memprof again - that's
the semantic & UI I want (if only it worked).
- Call with Tor, then with Jody, admin.
- All Saints in the morning, lunch, garden bench assembly,
and painting assistance, child-swinging-seat assembly for H. lazed
in the sun a little. DVD in the evening.
- Up very early, drove to Wolverhampton, caught the end of
Christian's talk, met Mike Hearn in person, lunch thanks to Collabora,
spoke on OO.o, caught up with the usual suspects.
- One of the most amusing things, was to see some Ubuntu
compiz package with the 3D effects turned on, but the default 'Novell'
image still present on the top of the cube; a subliminal message wrt.
their desktop investment ? also discovered Ubuntu's OO.o omits all
our quick starter work on every platform (to fix some vague,
unfiled IA64 issue). Drove home.
- Card / present opening / celebrating another year of a
wonderful woman.
- Poked mail backlog; interesting a11y related D-Bus vs.
D-COP vs. CORBA performance
comparison; clearly some under-optimised old version of D-BUS (or
something); has a nice description of the problem space; though his
suggestion of where the problem lurks is, I think, mistaken [ never
optimise before profiling ].
- Day off to celebrate Julia's birthday (tomorrow), off
to Church Farm with the babes - lots of bouncing, admiring of rare
breeds (mostly sheep), and enjoying the sun.
- Back in the evening, out for an emergency present
purchasing spree. Attempts to sleep in the heat.
- Poked at the Gnome performance list; rather some
type checking action on the profiles. Churned through bugs,
tested a build from Radek; rambled on the OO.o performance
list about the false dichotomy between speed and memory usage
in this case.
- Team meeting, tweakd an a11y bug, wrote up action
items, back to the package code. Becoming increasingly convinced
that the STL is way too complicated, trying to use hashtable
directly is just far too nasty - and g++'s template warnings
amazingly verbose and unclear. Short call with Jody.
- Cell Barbeque in the evening: ~20 people or so -
rather good.
- Poked mail, tried to print expenses at some length,
the Epson Stylus C46 refusing to print a black & white page
whatsoever while the color ink is low/gone; bother & the
error reporting is lame / non-existent. As with all Unix'y
things at the end of the day you get to dig at a random syslog.
When a FUSE mount fails, do you get a nice 'EINVAL' and then
have to dig in syslog ? a GError * for all it's failings is more
extensible.
- Registered the #go-oo channel with freenode, a
curious process, recovered ops etc. Abandoned memprof in disgust,
started to use
massif on OO.o - the lack of interactive mining is sucky, but
the numbers are good; saved 2Mb on OO.o start fairly rapidly.
- Poked mail; call with Mehran, bug filing, win32
pokeage, great to have Radek back. Dug at the Mono / TLS
issue again. Wrote some training docs for NTS, burned time on
E-mail, admin, minor ooo-build fixes, bugs etc. Hopefully
hacking happens tomorrow.
- Dinner, re-organised and painted around the parent's
room. Backed up OO.o source to DVD,
bed early.
- NCC - did creche - good thing too, avoided the
pre-mill help-Jews-move-to-Israel chappy speaking. Quiet lunch,
slugged most of the day; read Calvin & Hobbes. Martin round
for dinner, Thomas back late.
- Out to the market to buy fruit/veg, back - applied
party preparations, re-arrangement of house, inflation of baloons,
lugging of furniture, making of egg sandwiches, good stuff.
- Lunch, Hannah's 3rd Birthday Party: attendance good,
lots of sticking / stamping / coloring by fun-sized people; plus
climbing / sliding / swinging / padding, chewing on good things.
A wonderful thing to celebrate her.
- Up, eager for a day of redlining import hacking,
deluged with other things. Bashed out a column for Mehran. Back
to redlining - amazingly the sample document has a chunk of text
that was (apparently) deleted from the document 23 years before
it was added: a neat trick.
- Discovered the noddy programmatic error causing the
issue; a beautiful fix. Party preparation in the evening.
- Lots of mail, an interview; with Caolan's help got
stuck into the ww8 redlining import - got a scary bug there,
with things that should have been deleted showing up; dug into
it in some depth.
- Out to try and setup Newmarket Open Door's
internet goodness; no particular joy - back next week.
- Up very early, unplugged from various orifices;
checked out in better working order: good. J. & co. picked
up, rather tired - to work. Committed chart speedups. Beautified
the ImageList speedup a little, poked KaiA.
- Dug at some bugs, poked in FATE, need to populate it
for the post SLED10 work. Discovered a new US-style verb to match
vacationing ( eg. I'm ~ the mountains): 'Keynoting', presumably
he/she/it is 'keynoting' a conference.
- Cell group in the evening; played some badmington
with Simon for a while to start.
- Up very early, to the Nuffield to get wrenched
about by the Urologist. Nice room; like an hotel - set too
playing with Soren's
sysprof, profiling Thomas's slow spreadsheet. Re-built
everything that might look slow with debugging symbols.
- Much chart hacking - turns out 80+% of the time
is creating / rendering / line breaking, measuring, noticing
it overlaps the last-one and deleting a Row label - per point.
Knocked up a 40% speedup in a couple of lines, before trying
to come up with a more intelligent version.
- Interrupted by surgery - very pleasant anaethasist,
almost painless drip thing inserted - wonderful these flexible
tube things in the vein. By the time the cold (room temperature)
drug got mostly up the arm - knew no hard to believe it had
all got done an hour or two later.
- With a little cunning got ChartAxis::DrawGrids down
to 6% of the profile from 41%, unfortunately now
ChartModel::CalcMaxDescrSize burns 72% of the time. Kludged that,
factor of 5 faster: although still too slow; profile flattening;
sysprof: really nice.
- Visit from the lovely wife, babes and brother -
good stuff. Un-nerving fire-alarm. Wrote a tool to break-down
OO.o object size by source directory; interesting.
- Re-started tunnel to collab.net to get the go-oo
auto-packaging process working again; ug. Dug at an extremely
odd customer problem with OO.o / Alt key menus.
- Fixed my hacked up perl, RSS generator to re-stamp
the date when updating a blog entry. Nailed the Alt handling
problem in menus: turned out to be a gtk/IM interaction issue.
Added more bugzilla milestones. Filed GUADEC expenses.
- Dug at ScPostIt memory saving, re-factoring to a
different scheme - not certain it's any better, but - we can
but hope. Thomas dug out a viciously slow to load, albeit somewhat
simple spreadsheet, must do some profiling. nice.
- Up lateish, off to NCC, Thea speaking, Pete &
Shelly back for lunch with the boys, played with babes, Robert
left, slugged, painted in the evening, DVD, bed.
- Up early, to the market, back, slugged about; got some
paint of the correct colour from the local paint outlet. Lunch, out to
the Newmarket Carnival with Harminda in the afternoon: sad for H.
all the 'bouncy castle' type things were restricted to ages 4+, or
to a couple of inches taller than her. Home for dinner / bed.
- Read mail, interested to understand Jakub's new bitmask
approach for reducing working set during linking - quite a neat idea.
Upgraded/installed code-10 on a load more machines to test OO.o.
- Fixed some annoying checkbutton / menu layout bugs. Did
some cleanup / code-reading and re-factoring of Thomas' ScPostIt
cleanup.
- Robert arrived for dinner, good to see him.
- Poked at mail, Anne (the midwife) around to listen to
the baby's heart-beat, good to see her again. 1/2 hour battle with
CUPS / Citrix / Upbeat to try to print my expenses; sweet. Fixed
eanother round of ImageList bugs - from Rene.
- Tested the latest cut of code-10, looking lovely.
- Extracted Thomas' ScPostIt pointer removal from ScCell
patch for further massage. Turned off -Werror for OO.o in an ooo-build
patch - impressive that the -Wall warning cleanup drive in OO.o is
near it's goal; should improve quality, but not there yet,
perhaps m175 will fix it.
- Chewed things over with Alex in Beijing, good man.
Some fixing of the Win32 / ooo-build pieces, it seems bootstrap
has to be run before sourcing the environment these days instead
of afterwards. Fixed leaked italic tag - thanks Raul.
- Poked at legal work, and Noel's VBA feature analysis
sheet. DVD in the evening, and some masking tape action for immenant
painting.
- The glibc linking change provided a mini-field day for
hashing / trie / complex-algorithm enthusiasts. Poked at Ricardo's
latest yast-gtk code: he hacked up a nice gtk+ RatioBox layout
widget to do the bar graphs.
- Ekiga call with Jody - saved a fortune. J. back from
taking the new (highly reliable Toyota) to have the 'Malfunction
Indicator' light (on since purchase) issue checked out.
- Played badmington with Thomas in the evening, watched
All Creatures Great and Small.
- Prodded mail gingerly; call with Radek. Harish fixed my
Netmeeting evo/itip bug - nice man. After some analysis of why using
a single bit out of the 32bits for .gnu.hash comparison was obviously
the correct thing to shrink the data set into the cache - Jakub
realised that we could use the bottom bit without any loss; nice.
- Up early, off to NCC - Mike speaking with some
story-telling style; fun but brief. Back for lunch, played
in the garden: extremely hot, out to George's party - slugged
in Rachel & Richard's garden for much of the afternoon.
- Back, played badmington in the garden with T.
for a while; bed - hot. Nightmarish frenzy of child illness /
falling-out-of-bed, vomiting etc. in the night: hmm.
- Latest
Cambridge Paper arrived today. 2007 being the 200th aniversary
of the abolition of the slave trade by the British Parliament. The
campaign being spearheaded by devout Christians: faith and works
together. A great dissection of the mind of the abolitionists, and
the fight to affirm equality for African slaves.
"Every reader of Scripture should know, wrote [William] Cowper
That souls have no discriminating hue,
Alike important in their Maker's view;
That none are free from blemish since the fall,
And love divine has paid one price for all."
- Drove to Brighton, popped in to pick up Thomas,
meet Alison etc. on to the UKUUG conference - good to meet a
lot of familiar faces; although attendance down this year.
- Did a reasonable OO.o talk - more enthusiastic
this time. Some Xgl demos - found a use for the water effect:
highlighting things in presentations; poked at various bugs
that people have/had - seemingly the image / re-enterancy
problem bites all components.
- Picked up Thomas' stuff, drove home, bed.
- Up at midday; working tomorrow; J.
nearly better, played with H. while she slept. Out
to
Cambridge Toyota collected our new Corolla
Verso 1.6 (the bottom of that range); paid a small
fortune: drove home; interesting that the 'engine
fault' light is on already: hopefully fuel related:
an almost empty tank.
- Slugged in garden, fed small people,
read the manual, pressed buttons etc. checked mail /
committed various bits / filed queued bugs.
- Breakfast, off to the conference - talked
to the Nokia guys a little, hacked with Ricardo a
little on yast-gtk, talked to Rob some more. Met with
a couple of other Gnome Christians - should have a BOF
next year.
- Really nice to have the occasional insight
that might help someone, but not the pain of actually
maintaining anything too important anymore: no compound
bug reports to process: a great conference.
- Noticed some theaded spam in my inbox -
nice, presumably the next hook for people: some bogus,
generic mail thread discussing the marvels of whatever
product.
- Wow! - amazed to see Jakub has hacked up
a beautiful re-work of my hashvals & dynsort patches
combined - which (since it's to Ulrich's design) has a
great chance of getting into binutils / glibc; really
nice. Read his patch carefully, looks sexy, but we can
prolly squeeze some more time/space out of it.
- Hacked at yast-gtk on the plane, fixed some
YGFrame.cc issues. Home exceedingly late.
- Up early, breakfsat with Rodrigo & some
lads, ran for the bus (missed) and caught Louis' car:
nice. No projectors available for test - bother.
- Talk, went ok - out for lunch with the
Novell lads, and ice-cream with the Intel folk. Didn't
realize Keith was writing kick-ass (Free software)
drivers for the Intel 3D chip-sets: buy Intel !
Missed Joerg's talk somehow, caught the end of Will
Walker's a11y talk: exciting stuff there, finally
it seems to be working.
- Jim's talk well received, Luis did a really
good keynote, lots of clapping. Chewed over the link
time performance improvements with Mathias and Soren,
had a nice demo of sysprof: must poke at OO.o with it.
Out for dinner with Rob, Ben, Nicklas, back to the
camp site; met Ricardo, talked over this & that.
- Up (too) earlyish. Poked at repairing the
laptop, suspending likes to kill the X server (ati binary
driver), and not suspend. Finally got a bus to the
conference, sadly missing Ross' talk.
- Various talks, Federico's keynote:
interesting. Lunch, Chris Blizzard's "do a firefox"
with OO.o, convinced that OO.o is an extraordinarily
different and harder problem - with a huge UI vs.
the browser; but he has some good point; thought
required.
- Out for ice-cream with Tuomas, met Onne
back, caught up with Iain, fonts meeting - interesting
stuff. Re-compiled mono with the pthread TLS code -
seemingly even the saner forms of NPTL TLS are not
happy with late loaded libmono.
- Off to the Maemo party, great to catch
up with the various lads behind everything; good
to sync with j5; out for drinks with Rob, mathrick
& others afterwards; great to hear the PalmSource
story in a nutshell. Back at 1am to work on talk.
- Up way too early, car to Stanstead, EasyJet to
Barcelona. Great to see Kohei doing good work on the solver:
now with i18n support (though no translated strings).
- Poked at FUSE a little - deeply unconvinced by
the whole idea, moving to poorer file system APIs, that are
beyond our control and not cross-platform seems a retrograde
step. Good talk by Robert though.
- Miguel's Mono talk was interesting; out for
dinner in the evening on Google. Talked to JP/Federico
until late, bed.
- Up late, NCC - Cathy speaking on Hope. Home,
lunch. Out to the gallops with H. on her bicycle, she got
a lot better at steering, and was pedalling and steering
happily by the time we got home. Most of her perseverance
was provided by the parents though.
- Out with Judy & Steve to see Lenny in
Hospital, read & prayed with her - the lady's an
inspiration. Back to (now sick) wife. Babes sleeping
beautifully, packed.
- Up early, out to the market with the babes. Back,
slugged, read the Economist in the Sun, put up badmington net
in the garden and played the pregnant wife: not the fairest
match.
- Bed early.
- Poked at mail. Downloaded bits, burned / poked at
RC3, upgraded my cygwin setup; re-tested the ImageList wins,
and committed to HEAD ooo-build.
- Talked to KaiA on IRC - really great to see him
there; poked at this and that. Talked to Jody, forecasted the
travel budget for the next quarter.
- Great to see Tor's nice progress on the evo-win32 work,
after a couple of ORBit2/bonobo fixes it's looking really nice.
Read this
word-to-writer guide - interesting, played happily with
sections and styles.
- Call with Nat, poked at Sabayon bug, back to ImageList.
Fixed a silly with vector sizing causing problems. Wrote a simpleish
perl-script to sort all our icons using the toolbar XML data to
improve the .zip file access pattern on startup; generates a sensible
looking list: good.
- Banged on my ImageList re-work, saves a chunk of code,
no (apparent) performance impact (on Linux at least), reduces memory
consumption ~2Mb? and substantially shrinks the OO.o working set.
Posted for review. Team meeting. Desktop team meeting, JPR's team
meeting.
- E-mail pokeage. Ricardo doing nice work in the yast-gtk
code; added widget destruction, fixing a ton of artefacts - it
seems the yast core likes destroy & construct the same widget
quite regularly.
- Fixed the CSV/calc cell paste problem with not correctly
updating an area's contents on import; updated the bug
15509 it seems we forgot to celebrate it's 2nd birthday
last week. Not bad for a mind-blowingly simple, yet useful patch.
- Filed expenses.
- Up late, breakfast in bed (birthday: 29 today), off to
Church, creche with Janine. Back for reading in the sun, lunch -
fine home-mad sponge, strawberries & cream cake.
- Out to Bury St. Edmonds to the Cathedral gardens, very
pretty, babes played happily. Out in the evening for a pub meal,
while Mary baby sat, a fine day.
- Up in the night - power-cut, H. distraught: no landing
light, slept with us for a bit. Up early, out to the market, back,
slept while the babes slept. Lunch.
- Painted shelf, and door surround, slugged in the garden,
bed early.
- Up early, down a rat-hole. Much of the morning debugging
my extremely curious TLS related Mono (or perhaps glibc) bug. Brushed
up the assembler, got used to the debugger lying about / tastefully
hiding some of the glibc linker internals. After some hours, made up
a small test case, and bailed.
- Poked at some more nice Coverity fixes from Kjartan: the
man is a hero. Back, talked to Paolo some more, read more of Ulrich's
heroic
documentation, turns out Mono is using an inappropriate TLS mode,
for libmono that just happens to work much of the time.
- Updated my curious G/W IMAP bug, interestingly SOAP works
where IMAP does not in this corner case.
- Lift to the conference with Brian. Checked mail,
updated bug reports, lots of good work going on around the place
seemingly. Wandered the show floor.
- Chatted to some partners, customers - had a somewhat
meagre lunch. Off to the station: delayed trains, missed
connections: the works. Reviewed Ricardo's latest yast-gtk
changes, some nice re-factoring.
- Battled the OO.o/mono bootstrap problems in SLED10
- it seems crazy creatures live in there: libstdc++ dies
allocating an exception, in the most trivial of tests;
distressing; and that before we try to do anything too cunning
with C++ exception type-data libraries.
- Did some work on the solver, adding i18n.
- Up early, quick breakfast, taxi to the venue - crazy
demo hacking; mad, worked around a number of evilnesses, prayed
hard - a perfect keynote demo: none of the bugs showed: thank God.
- Lunch, on to 2 back-to-back SLED10 talks, lots of
interesting feedback. Interesting Omni talk on their Userful
licensed
desktop-multiplier which is a really neat idea.
- Back to the hotel for drinks and dinner with Brian
Green, Matt, Sarah and latterly Ian and Adam; good company,
interesting conversation - fine food, bed late.
- Up early, played with babes in the garden, off to NCC,
potential new Pastor preaching - unfortunately, didn't actually get
to the preaching: lots of anecdote before had to leave for station.
Unpleasant in the extreme train journey to Telford - discovered where
Wolverhampton is at the same time, perhaps useful for Lug Radio Live
later. Hacked at slides / demos.
- Walked a couple of miles to the 'just around the corner'
petrol station and back to get some cash, wore in the unusual shoes,
and out the old feet.
- Lie -in, cooked breakfast, off to beach with repaired
scooters with babes - good fun wandering up and down & throwing
rocks into the sea etc.
- Back, poked a little at demos. A fine lunch, paked, then
off to a quadruple-party of some small friends of Hannah's. Met Helen
Snook (ex. ARM lady) interesting, and Pete again. Bounced on the bouncy
castle, causing great danger to life, limb etc.
- Back home, bed early.
- Up early, great to see Srini fixed several of my
evo. alarm crashers: many apparently the same memory corruption.
Spent all day planning, creating and testing demos - and
associated bug filing.
- Up early, poked mail. Drove to Aldeburgh, got connected
there - discovered I'd left my power supply at home: sheer lunacy.
Pinged customer with fascinating bug unreproducible here.
- Drove home & back to get power supply: 3 hours,
bother. Worked late. Realised I'd duplicated a day in error, re-synched
with reality.
- Up, Philistine(?) neighbours having beautiful tree chopped
down (in their garden it's true). Shame - lying in bed and admiring
the fine features (at the limit of visual acuity) against the morning
sky gave great pleasure.
- Reviewed Ricardo's latest work (overnight) - tons of good
stuff, and some pleasant code-sharing re-using GtkTreeView among several
disparate types of YaST widgets. Ricardo has up-loaded some
screenshots of his work, to a new
yast2-gtk page.
- Call with Bill, one with Dhananjay, rush of work at the
end of the day somehow. Cell group - went well, got to the end of the
bible study (somehow). J. not well at all still.
- Poked at yast-gtk, Ricardo implemented another 1.5 widgets
recently: nice, a shrinking stock of widgets left. Booked GUADEC flight.
- Created patch for an evo calendar crasher, sadly can't
reproduce. Fixed my gtkcalendar autorepeat pain, at least, fixed another
evo crasher: D&D issue.
- Next-door neighbour Bert around for dinner, recently widowed,
lovely chap, good to ge to know him better.
- Up lateish, to NCC - no sermon, prayer for various
emergencies & painting of float for town fete shortly.
- Back for lunch, played in garden, filled paddling
pool etc.
- Mark & Mary & the children arrived, really good
to see them all, and fun to be with them; really sad news of Mark's
Lymphoma, much talk of healing, prayed with them. Despite that, great
to be together again, sad to see them go.
- Up early, fed babes & headed to the market - bought
fruit & veg. Got a couple of mp3 players: iPod shuffle (512Mb):
50UKP, and the cheapest: an ALBA 128Mb thing for 15UKP (that takes
SD RAM, has a nice LCD, replacable AAA battery etc. apparently a
rather better spec. the only downside: banshee doesn't like it (yet).
- Out for a lovely picnic for lunch in Thetford forest, and
a walk through the woods & play on all manner of fun children's
things there: really good. Back later, call with the Rye's dropping
in on their way past tomorrow. Bed early.
- Up early: poked at various things. Chronically irritated
by -yet-more- d-bus related fatal crashes caused by API mismatch.
It seems that having not taken my advice some years back to allow
some level of compatible API evolution, we're lumbered with a fragile
situation where, when people change the API, un-modified clients crash.
Since there are no hard (or in particular RPM) dependencies generated
for this stuff, you can trivially update just 1 half of the contract
and things start crashing for no good reason. Urg. How simple it would
be to mandate the toleration of missing/extra arguments - the type-data
on the wire, and in the method signature makes that trivial.
- Embarassingly Jeff Cai from Sun came up with a correct fix
for the ORBit2 deadlock I thought I'd nailed causing e-d-s hangs,
tested, expanded & committed to both branches.
- Ran the Xgl validation tests for the T60p - nearly perfect.
Dug at the gnome login script, poked at the nautilus CD recorder.
- Mail, poked at the image.cxx change - looking rather
easier than anticipated; boggled at the framework/ code - happened
upon an instance of 1100 lines of code cut/pasted ~verbatim then
search/replaced: shocked, poked the author.
- Interesting call, up late working on bugs. Discovered
Kai has vanished only to move house by boat, good.
- Up early, chatted with Ricardo on IRC - good chap, setup a
skeleton for YGComboBox & discussed bits of the design / impl.
Apparently Evo/groupwise not filtering by mailing list is a known bug;
(perhaps related to header reduction), sadly switched back to IMAP.
- Setup NTP / emacs on go-oo for Volker. Suffering in emacs
without any TTF support, poked at xfontsel for some considerable time
without finding anything readable; bother. Finally got firefox to display
at a sensible size: by setting the 'minimum size' thing.
- Poked at chart modification bug, nothing obvious, un-poked.
Dug at the image list re-orientation a little.
- Up early, breakfast, started knocking up a bathroom shelf -
unfortunately, various complex curved pieces are required: note to self,
be careful not to bend next jig-saw blade.
- Out to Bury St. Edmonds to the cathedral gardens with the
babies, poured with rain - great buckets of the stuff. Archetypal English
experience of eating ice-cream while sheltering from the rain; went on some
merry-go-round with H. & N. in a brief break in the weather.
- Poked at IRC to see if Ricardo's awake yet - no sign. Dinner,
finished shelf: pending wifely painting. Dug at crazy/inexplicable
RadioButton yast2-gtk crasher, fixed that, cleaned up the layout code,
made life much more beautiful.
- NCC - Tim from plumbline's church in Cambridge speaking,
top marks for enthusiasm - simple but effective message. Home for lunch.
- Took Thea & Mike for a drive in the car on the way back,
hopefully they'll buy it, wracked brains for all possible caveats.
- Hannah, Nick & Joni around for a beer / play in the
garden after swimming, great to see them. Played in the front room,
re-arranging furniture. Bed earlyish.
- Still fighting my Estonian (or sim.) keyboard - if my
touch-typing (UK style) was perfect, life would be good, but
unfortunately years of mixed US/UK style leave me in a state of
mental paralysis.
- Walked to the market in the morning with the babes; back -
lunch - out in the car later to buy the Lemon I forgot (for a
cheese-cake) - clearly saving the planet requires a heightened state
of alertness.
- Lugged tables around in the afternoon: setup for the
PCC quiz night. Back, dinner, put babes to bed & sat while J.
served food at same. Poked at mail, fixed go-ooo DNS for Fridrich,
but go-oo is my preferred name. Fixed some annoying yast2-gtk 64bit
build issue.
- Hacked a little at a personal rational - poked Fridrich
for advice. Looked at yast2-gtk a little more.
- Up early; raining; could this be "The wettest drought
since records began" (Private Eye) ? Poked at new machine - installed
this / that, filed a number of bugs; pleased that rug seems to be
working nicely from the console.
- Blown away by the Core Duo performance building OO.o,
a substantial & welcome win. The latest yast2-gtk code is now
checked into
Yast's CVS repository
- Amazed to be confirmed as a speaker at LWE San Francisco
without having submitted a paper (that I recall); the good lady being
due 22nd August, it doesn't seem like a good plan.
- Updated the go-oo DNS records to point at the new server
(kindly donated by Intel - thanks
guys). Massaged Jan's nice OOoCon abstract & inserted my bits.
- Wow - got an OO.o build from clean in sub 6 hours, while
doing another build in parallel; nice. Moved evolution mail to the
new box & setup the Groupwise/SOAP code - after guessing a magic
port number, managed to get some mail; filed bugs.
- New Thinkpad laptop arrived; a nice beast indeed;
poked at XP a little, ran the 'create backup / restore CDs' tool,
and fed CDs at it for a while. Poked the Oracle 'recieve' buttons.
- No sign of the successful Ricardo Cruz on IRC - winner
of the GSOC yast2-gtk competition - interestingly yast2-gtk was the
most popular OpenSUSE project wrt. no. of applicants.
- Got Xgl working beautifully on new machine; neat.
- Out for a run in the evening, knocked off Julia's tax
return with her, chatted to Ricardo - who showed up, good man.
Watched Yes Minister - amazing how nothing changes.
- Poked at mail. E-d-s hung, poked at it - an
interesting ORBit2 bug: nice, fixed that. Started downloading
Office 2007 beta2 to have a play, had to upgrade XP too:
interesting. I wonder if Office2007 is the crunch-point for
Wine wrt. not shipping tons of back-compat DLLs.
- Knocked up a column at top speed the deadline
loometh. Did a chunk of bugzilla chew. Relaxed with some
analysis of rotating the image strips.
- Mail chew, call with Richard Lindstedt, nice man.
Tested the biblio fix, looks nice with mixed, Arabic, Greek
& English entries. Poked at an PyOrbit bug for Will - no
joy.
- Fixed crash with context menus, team meeting, weekly
call with Intel. Dinner, finished last year's tax bits &
listened to Simon Matthews' talk on commitment. Charlie Martin
pointed me at a site on
global dimming, interesting I guess.
- Poked at mail where possible. Interesting call
with Caolan, interesting mail from Florian.
- More work on the bibliography encoding issue, fixed
the bug, set off new build. Bugzilla massage. Ran a number of
builds on different machines.
- J. off to bible study, phoned Thomas good to chat;
slogged at Tax forms: hopefully the IRS will be made to regret
ever having sent me that form.
- NCC in the morning - Daniel speaking, on creche.
- Lunch, slugged much of the afternoon, Lydia round
for tea, hopefully an encouraging time.
- Up lateish, reading most interesting book on the 2nd temple
period & the influences on Jewish thought then, good stuff.
- Started on the 2nd set of shelves, lots of work there -
holes drilled in the wall, lunch, J. washed car more shelving. Dinner,
J. painted them while I played with YaST2 gtk again; very much coming
around to the same design as the Qt backend.
- Up early, filed bug, poked mail - and finally to
a little hacking. Pleased to use the (much faster) 64bit machine to
do some OO.o development at last, (warm) startup speed problems are
less of an issue there thankfully.
- Fixed OO.o context menu behavior. Updated my X suspend/resume
corruption bug. Out-patient appointment - only 20 minutes, interesting,
albeit painful. Picked up Simon Tennant on the way back, chewed over this
& that, call with Ryan, good to catch up with Simon, out for a pint
& back for a fine dinner made by J.
- Hacked in the evening. Well pleased to read Jody's nice
cleanup of the OO.o data pilot code, getting us from 3 hours to sub
10 minutes calc time for our sales spreadsheet.
- Poked at the spam littered graveyard that is my @ximian.com
pop mailstore: ~6000 messages: nice. Chased an evil libbonobo issue
provoked by a badly behaved mail-notification process spawning hundreds
'Evolution_Glue' components, starving b-a-s of life &
file-descriptors [ leak now fixed ].
- Reviewed some nice work from Ariel Rios to spawn the at-spi
registry from gnome-session & access it via an X property, so apps
running as root could have a better time of it. Call with Tor.
- Spammed the OO.o performance alias, more ideas than hands
to type with unfortunately.
- Started scaling the mail mountain. Reviewed a load of patches
from Kjartan - wow, some really good work fixing various bugs &
warnings from coverity.
- Did some GSOC ranking, some promising sounding applications:
excellent, sometimes rather hard to choose. Lengthy Ekiga call with Jody:
this thing rocks ! discovered turning off the audio capture from
microphone button in mixer properties stopped it sounding like I
was in echo-box: sweet.
- J. out / baby-sitting, chat with Pete Bowen, interesting.
Poked at the pet project; working from 8am until 11pm is perhaps a
little too hard, must take things easier.
- Back from holiday in France, nr. Cahors - rather fine,
good of Grant & Anne to loan us their house (inc. swimming pool).
Lots of swimming, slugging, reading of novels, relaxing, playing with
the babes etc. A really good & refreshing break.
- Saw an Airbus A380 take off from Tolouse as we arrived,
presumably an experimental version, nice to see it can get airborne,
also some -very- oddly shaped cargo Beluga planes
on the tarmack there.
- Lots of driving to the place wiggly roads, beautiful scenery
etc. Good to spend time with Mum & Dad, and get an evening off for
ourselves without the children - nice.
- Up late, slugged in the garden, hacked on yast/gtk a
little; laid the foundation for combining the layout methods nicely,
committed / poked Federico.
- Late lunch, played with babes, out to Homebase - nearly
lost N. nerve-racking indeed, happily re-united. Back, watched a DVD
with the babes, put them to bed; started packing crazily.
- Mailed Stefan Hundhammer & updated the YaST2-gtk
GSOC frontend with a link to my [ very hackish prototype ] code
to do the same thing. At least there is something to start from:
The source is available from here.
- YaST2 is quite an interesting code-base - easy enough to
work with (so far). Unfortunately - the sticking point I'm still
thinking over, is that yast2 likes to do the layout: so there is a
yast2 containment tree - with size request/set logic - and then there
is the gtk+ hierarcy. Clearly - we need them to play together, but the
current scheme (using gtk_widget_set_size_request) doesn't play
well; really I think we need to sub-class each GtkWidget and clobber
the gtk+ size_allocate mechanism & use our own. Also as you can see
lots of spacing issues to fix - a tied issue, wrt. native containers
not using gtk+ compatible padding logic.
- Off on holiday from tomorrow until the 16th in France,
looking forward to it. Registered as a GSOC Mentor, impressed by the
parts of my brain that the
Captcha used; I wonder how accessible that is. Phoned members of
the team left/right, Tor unfortunately ill.
- Played with ekiga - rather unstable seemingly; unfortunate,
running it in gdb fell foul of the "ptrace is always broken" meta-bug,
after continuing over a couple of SIG33's bad luck for threaded
debugging really.
- Away until the 17th.
- Up lateish, J. ill poor dear, fed the babes while
she slept. Committed some i18n fixes to both branches.
- More i18n work, committed that - a little more &
life will be good. Did some configmgr2 code reading & analysis.
the STL looks so nice, unfortunately - a lot of hashes get to be
100 elements small (base bucket size) by default, of course - we
often have 1, or 2 elements in them which is painful.
- Out to Janine's in the evening to baby-sit; babies
good, read a lot of configmgr2 for an hour or two; came up with
an API proposal of some form.
- Up early, E-mail, updated N bugs, produced verbiage
on demand. Out to test-drive the 2nd hand Verso: a major
improvement on our older Cavalier. Handed over the promise of a
silly sum of money to the cheery chappy, having haggled only
an 8% discount: clearly more practice required.
- Wrote up action items, dug at configmgr some more,
looks interesting. Poked at bugs. Cell group, great to see the
Staffs there.
- Up early, filed bugs. Poked at admin bits, agenda,
roadmap, etc. Wrote a small perl tool to munge translations into
the form I need them.
- Team meeting, poked at performance, elaborated for
Carsten etc. Pizza for dinner, back to the fray. Read some of
Srini's new evo. alarm notification code in search of my crash.
- Poked at i18n issues in our new OO.o features.
- Up early, dealt with babes - interesting sermon on
Genesis 1 at breakfast. Unfortunately raining so didn't go to
the Reach Fair. Slugged inside most of the day, read the Economist
etc.
- Consulted Bruce on cars in the evening, Thomas looks
like he'll be at ARM this summer: nice, Robert starting to see hope
of commission on his gates etc.
- Up early, fed babes, cleaned & tidied, off to Church;
Thea speaking, on creche with Judy - a rather frantic time, cleaning
hands after painting, and only 2 babes this time.
- Back for lunch with Tim & Coleen, Anna & Ethan -
played in the garden in the sun for most of the afternoon. Tidied up
a lot, dinner, babes to bed, 'Narnia story'.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 3 - "God's Love"
- Up late, woken by the phone: bother. Misc. house
cleaning, played in the garden with babes. Lunch, out to
Marshal's in Cambridge, admired various Zafiras & on to
the Toyota garage - still very taken with the Corolla Verso,
setup a test drive.
- Back, peeled potatoes, slugged in the garden reading
various car specs. J. out to baby-sit, poked at memprof: added
a 'Record' button to stop the real-time event spew from OO.o
long enough to actually analyse the profile carefully.
- Started to read the particular framework/config
hot-spot I'd identified, I hadn't believed the reports of
quite how tangled OO.o's configmgr is, until I started to
trace it, and it's quite amazing. Also, at every opportunity
- a lock is taken; I'm sure ORBit2's locking is too granular
we have oh, 5 or 6 locks in there where 1 would be rather
better, but this takes the biscuit: tons of per-object
(recursive) locks being taken & released at any &
every opportunity - as well as (of course) the ubiquitous
(slow) interlocked ref-counting. And I'd put good money on
it all being wasted due to serialization by one or other of
the locked pieces.
- Marveled at the odd brokenness with syndicating this
nonsense in a couple of planets; strange indeed.
- Dug at bugs Thou shalt reduce the bug count.
- Poked at localization - it's somewhat difficult to
understand the path from .sdf, .src to unxlngi/*/*.src to .srs,
to .res etc. and (more to the point) why my self-built .res
file is mostly English.
- Call with Intel, dinner, out for a run.
- Up, mail chew. Distressing XRender crasher / memory
corrupter still plaguing OO.o, Radek in hot persuit. Filed a
number of bugs, updated a number of others - progress is being
made somewhere.
- It seems the
UKUUG conference slightly overlaps with GUADEC, seems doable though
without missing too much GUADEC-ness.
- Constructive call with Stefan & Dan Cutler.
Read bed-time story to H. quick dinner, J. out to study &
poked at various fun tasks / car prices.
- Pondered the temperature of my tea - beggining to be
convinced that putting the milk in before letting it stand rather
than VV. decreases the thermal gradient & results in hotter
tea at the end.
- Poked at Ekiga -
sadly no SL10.1 packages in evidence; built it myself, crashes on
connect: bother - downgrade to a non cvs snapshot. Wrote prototype
LXF column. Tested & committed latest cws-atkbridge: looking
really rather nice with gnopernicus.
- More admin, reviewed an IBM patch to add threading to
the a11y registry; hmm. Team meeting.
- Off to Theresa's funeral, sad but somewhat interesting;
not been to a Catholic one before. Minutes write up, filed expenses,
Kelli's staff. Poked at Jian's writer layout hang fix, and a new
a11y snapshot.
- Poked at Essential XML - understood a little more.
- Up, worked on the mail backlog, filed some bugs, dug
through strata of un-answered mail, back to the dawn of last week.
At lunch discovered enough money to buy a car squirreled away by
the wife in an ISA - wow; God is good.
- Re-built & diffed various iso to pull up 5 CDs
from beta 8 to 9, to RC1, RC2 etc.
- Up early, dealt with babes, washed up etc. Off to NCC - Mike
speaking, J. doing great work in the creche, doughnuts. Back for lunch.
- H. to sleep, screwed the shelves to their battens.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 3 - "How Can We Be Born Again"
- Up late, pre-emptive strike on domestic harmony: out to Homebase
to sort out the long running hose-pipe issue. Watered lawn at length to get
the various poisons into it.
- Lunch, out to used car lot (around the corner) - poked at this
& that. Amazing how much 2nd hand cars cost, in comparison to ones trade-in
price that is. Poked at MPVs, I thought Vauxhall had a nice thing, then onto
the Toyota place: wow, the Corola Verso, built-in seats, folding flat: really
nice. Expensive, slowly steeled myself to the pain, gritted teeth, levered
open wallet, examined moth damage etc.
- Back, slugged in the evening - watched Yes Minister: rather good.
- Up, breakfast with the Goldbergs, to work: collective
brain dumping; interesting. Lunch, poked at the Data Pilot
performance problems, got to the bottom of our specific
performance evil.
- Dropped Jody back at the station, great to have some
time together. Call with Intel. Scattered lawn fertilizer &
weed killer pellets on the lawn in a rather inefficient fashion.
- More meeting goodness. Poked at VTK apparently excellent for
visualization, needs some gtkmm integration I guess.
- Out for drinks & chinese dinner with the lads,
off to the Kings Cross & home with Nomai & Jody. Good
to be back.
- ECMA TC45 meeting all day, great presentation from Steve
from Barclays Capital Mgmt. Out for dinner with Jody &
Naomi, hacked on a simple OO.o / calc importer until late.
- H. shouting 'Mummmeeey' at 6:30am for no good reason,
woke N. and us, bother. Train to Kings Cross, met Jody, out for
lunch.
- To the ECMA meeting at the BL - a somewhat painful
room access process; some interesting people. Brian appears to have
had a close encounter with a blade recently.
- Out for a fine Indian meal, lots to eat & drink,
good company - stayed up rather late.
- Up early, changed & fed the babes, under-coated wood,
played in the garden with the babes: pleasant sun. More slugging, more
painting, etc.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 2-3 - "Born Again"
- Poked at mail, tried to work out what I should be doing
tomorrow.
- Up rather late, off to NCC - Helen speaking, a guest service,
AV equipment, chocolate eggs etc. J. beefed up the content in the creche
for the 1st time, good stuff. Back for a fine dinner.
- A little priming of wood. Julie over with some plants, Claire
& Allen over on the way back from Gt. Yarmouth - really good to see
them, chatted for much of the afternoon.
- Babes to bed, watched Harry Potter - & the Goblet of Foo.
Convinced I only watch it for the love interest; though the good/evil
conflict got more interesting.
- Looked after the babes, took them to Ridgeons - amusing
to have N. toddle around holding my hand between great piles of timber
and building material. Bought an 8x4 sheet of 3/4inch ply, and some 2x1.
- Back, measuring, cutting, drilling, wifely consultation for
esthetic guidance, more of the same. Eventually ended up with several
shelves & battons on the wall.
- Babes to bed, out to get fish & chips, Martin over to
watch 'Raising Arizona': a good lend from James & Kate: very amusing,
the Cohen Brothers strike again.
- Up, had a brief hack; off to Addenbrooks: more scanning,
baby looks normal in every way, thank God. Poked at SL10.1 RC1,
apparently calc has some hideous problem. More admin. Chased an odd
calc bug, filed expenses.
- Got a friendly & helpful reply from Ulrich - though
still silent on his dislike for -Bdirect in general, open to new
hashing approaches: good man.
- Sent in my blue-forms to the ODI project. Poked at
laptops. Ran out of diskspace: odd, freed some up, ran out again:
zmd's 3Gb of log might be to blame; filed bug.
- Credit card expired with ISP, bother - lost 1/2 a day
of net access & hence productivity. Nailed a nasty a11y related
crasher in OO.o causing impress to die on startup; good.
- More conference calling: feeling productive ? arrange
a meeting. Fixed up & re-submitted my local link speedups.
- Up late; amused by the OO.o
userfriendly cartoon (thanks Karl). One of our SLED10
customers' comment was "Only a tiny minority of our users
cannot using OO.o" - the others are all using it; hmm.
- More mail / task chewage, team meeting, lengthy
conference call.
- Home, lovely to see the babes & wonderful wife
etc. slept. Poked at out-of-control Inbox, dug at NPP a bit,
massaged bugzilla. Worked late.
- Up early, off to Park Street; breakfast at
Finagle-a-Bagel, excellent Gordon sermon, great singing,
moving dance thing too.
- Back for some slugging, out to Chompsky / Fisk
talk at MIT with Miguel et. al.; a much larger room than last
time - an hour early anyhow. An interesting talk, with some
fair commentary on the laziness of many journalists: "US
Officials say" instead of "USA Today" or whatever; in other
places polemical / unfair IMHO.
- On to Park St. again, solid talk, to the airport,
much better experience: although still some pathetic "you must
have a printed itinery for our 'security' people" spiel.
- Poked at E-mail / hacked at this/that. Out for
brunch with Guy, Sophie & Ryan, on to the top-of-the-tall-building
restaurant: a fine view. Joined by Pete, off for some pool
playing action, and onto a great French restaurant until
rather late, good company & fun.
- Up early, knocked some slides up. Realised my previous
link to
Captain Action Item was broken - and it's rather a good page.
- SLED11 planning / meetings all day with the usual suspects,
good to catch up with people; out for team dinner in the
evening (?).
- Up at 6:15am: progress with the lag; breakfast,
phoned home - cries of 'Daddie?' from N. & kissing of
the phone; hmm. H. much more interested in Bruce's toys.
- Off to the convention center - very pretty
looking from the outside; pleasant, roomy etc. on the
inside pleased with it. Gave my talk - great to see Stefan
there, interview with 'mimi', wandered teh show-floor with
Guy, talked to Leon.
- Back to the office, showed Guy some toys.
SLEDom have I seen such a beautiful product.
- Up at 5am; bother. Poked at the pet project - off
to the office at 9 - luckily just along the pavement: sadly
snowing. Good to wander round & see the familiar faces &
meet some new ones.
- Re-worked the OO.o 'my 1st hack' page with a hack
that actually really works with 2.0. Ad-hoc 'meetings' with a
number of people: really just wandering around reducing
productivity, good to see the faces.
- Added Ikeleib to the planet, and mug'd Tino. Paniced
a little with Pete & then Tor. Out for dinner with a chunk
of the team.
- Up early; packed, played with babes, to the station:
bid 'bye to the (lovely) wife & children: harder every time.
Train to Cambridge. Newmarket train late, missed connection,
Kings Cross: circle line not working, Heathrow express delayed:
signaling issue, unbelievable queue at security, thank God: made
the plane.
- Eventually arrived, met a nice chap 'Matthew' from
Downing: Fellow of computational Biology at MIT on secondment
from Cambridge, Singaporian Christian, nice chap, shared a cab.
- Met jpr & rml as the cab pulled up, out for
a meal at the top of the prudential: bed rather late.
- Up early; pleased that 'Pardus Linux' is shipping with
my -Bdirect etc. work. Poked at E-mail.
- Committed & sent off my patch to speed up linking.
Massaged column: an extra 15 words required. Fun SRB meeting.
Created a CWS for the fpicker workarounds.
- Up early, dealt with babies, Thea speaking at NCC -
unfortunately crying in creche took precedence.
- Back for lunch, played in the garden a little encouraging
N. to excercise her new & wobbly walking skills. Out to see Lennie
to return her books & demonstrate the same. Back for dinner.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 2-3 - "Is there life after birth ?" - rather good, interesting
bit on the Pharisees & hypocracy being not a disconnect between
public & private life, but between the heart & the externals.
- Up earlyish, breakfast, drove to Birmingham. Lunch &
a joyful wedding: Caroline & Tim. Back to the Botanical Gardens
for the reception, lots of people, talking Parrots, a fine playground
for the babes. Good to see Sean & Abbie too, albeit too briefly.
Back home, long drive, rather exhausted.
- Bright & early morning; to work. Mailed the OO.o
performance list, Kay & Stephan with my 'push all exceptions into
their own library' & load that RTLD_GLOBAL, then link all modules
RTLD_LOCAL (amazingly sucky - but this is what the g++ exception
madness drives us to). Unclear how to tag libraries as being 'clean'
in this way [ only throwing/catching known-at-compile-time UNO
exceptions ]; '.int.uno.so' ? '.iuno.so' ? or something more cunning.
Of course dlopening the library to see how it should be dlopened is
not sensible.
- Improved my un-filed patches statistics by re-assigning
bits, fixing markup, and even filing a few bits up-stream. Upgraded
B9 on the laptop, installed it on another couple of boxes - looking
really nice; filed several bugs.
- Poked Xgl again - working on my Thinkpad / ATI M7 nicely,
but only for the difficult stuff: as long as you want alpha blended,
cubeoidal, sexy switching stuff all is well. As soon as you do
something in the (normal) head-on, single display mode - nasties
happen; poked David.
- Up disgracefully early; train to Cambridge, Peterborough
to pay through the nose for a new passport. Hacked at this & that
on the train. Arrived, handed the beastly thing in; found an internet
cafe eventually.
- Seems I missed an at-spi meeting last night; after weeks
of dithering, it arrived in the middle of the 1 non-negotiable app't
this week. Back-ported OO.o / calc paste i18n fix.
- Poked at the government's on-line tax return filing
system, particularly nasty; every few clicks a warning:
Not enough storage is available to process this command.
not massively encouraging wrt. the fidelity of the whole process.
- Up, poked at this / that. Srini found the problem with
the iCal attachments I get set for ECMA calls; a random byte the end
of the UID field; filed with Shawn but I imagine we have to parse it
anyway.
- Poked at some long-term festering i18n issues in our
OO.o patches; nasty stuff. Poked at an offshoot from the pet project.
- Discovered the XMS system's amusing failure to print
anything useful is related to the browser font-size setting; at
'Medium' things work. Out to get replacement passport photos / forms.
- Nice to see lots of our patches trickling up-stream.
Booked hotel for LWE, Nr. the office in Cambridge. More admin bits.
Finally got a build with performance tweaks.
- Out for a run, watched James Herriot in the evening, very nice.
- Lots of bits of admin; tried to work out a good time for
conf call between Canada, Europe & China not clear when that is.
Installed SL10.1-x86_64 beta8; hmm, some very bad disk badness
somewhere, lost /home (luckily just a backup); been flaking for a
while now it seems.
- Discovered I needed the java-1_4_2-gcj-compat package to
have OO.o / javadoc fun; created team meeting agenda. Up late nursing
an OO.o build & poking the pet project.
- Off to St Lukes, pleasant family service; back for large
roast dinner. Talked to the boys, caught up with T's course etc.
- Played with babies, practiced palming coins etc. Dinner,
long drive home in the rain, somewhat delayed, bed late.
- Up, J. off to see Louise, babies slept soundly; poked at
Father's car: water in the diesel (apparently), a Renault: really rather
unreliable unfortunately. Examined the various improvements to the house
in the last months.
- Lunch, forced march to the park in the rain, took a handy
cloth to wipe slides / swings dry temporarily etc. back; wet. Slugged,
reading Milligan's (amusing, albeit bawdy) accounts of his WW II
experience as a Gunner.
- Poked at Nat's brainshare keynote; looking good.
- Turns out our long running OO.o / Java / gcj crasher bug is down to
using threads not-registered with the GC (sigh); the Boehm approach here looks
really weak. IMHO the only sane design is: have a pair of functions: enter_managed/
leave_managed that use a (hyper-fast) thread variable to determine if the
thread has been registered with the GC already; and use those points to
maintain a (precise) list of stack segments (per thread) that contain
managed objects. Then of course, you need no magic thread registration /
catching & GC is more precise. Sadly, the fix I did for Mono here didn't
go far enough, or get up-stream.
- Chatted to Vincent Untz a little, nice man; posted my lockdown
fix, autobuilded it etc. Updated my favorite ZMD bug. Poked my nose into
Paolo's world of Mono GC / threading again.
- Watched James Herriot's opus on TV; charming. Bed late.
- Easy money
available for budding tech-writers & OO.o developers.
- Wrote & posted next LXF column for internal review.
- More lock-down work; Mike L came up with a nice patch to save
a bus-load of memory for large pivot source data sheets by hashing & eliding
duplicate strings on load: nice.
- Drove to the parents in the evening - much excitement at the
thought of seeing Grandma.
- Looked at insensitive (ie. non-clickable) icons again -
amazing how much of a mountain can be created from the smallest mole-hills.
Wasted a big chunk of time here, even the smallest & simplest change
can take a developer-week once the UI team get involved it seems.
- Call with Alex Lau from Novell China - turns out we have
people there working on OO.o too: nice. More E-mail generation, poked
at lock-down some more.
- Poked at the mono integration work a bit; mailed Jan with some
details. Dug at lock-down some more. Learned a bit of python - interesting
language. Kelli's staff - good fun, how do you do that with a meeting ?
- Poked at mail - great to have Kjartan saving my bacon wrt.
libbonobo leaks, nice.
- Poked at the OO.o issues that the 'UI experience' team have
been blocking, hopefully can get some action there. Often for no (apparent)
reason at all (presumably I paste something random into firefox) - I get
a random page this time the Adventures of Action
Item.
- Did some QA on industrial03 - looks good. Team meeting -
ran out of log space mid-flow; wrote up some action items.
- Chewed over some bugs & mail. Updated/expaneded the
calc optimization
wiki page, to add a few items; of course, more research &
profiling necessary to prioritize all the issues.
- Explained my evolution stack trace more carefully to
those responsible. Battled on with the shared UNO (& exception)
type data library - here be odd dragons:
unresolvable R_386_GOTOFF relocation against symbol `com::sun::star::uno::RuntimeException::~RuntimeException()'
but why use a GOTOFF relocation ?
- Renewed the car insurance, feeling rather down today -
no idea why. Booked flights to France on-line, and car rental too.
EasyJet way cheaper than RyanAir, albeit an hour+ further away.
- Amused while mailing Frank to discover what "The Best
Word Process For Today's Connected World." is (Part No. T04520) -
that's right: Lotus Word Pro 97, marketing: yesterday's
slogan today.
- Up, fed babes; off to NCC - spoke on the 7th commandment:
adultery; off to Dereck & Heather's for lunch. H. enjoyed their
huge collection of 'new' toys: lovely meal, great to catch up with
Kate & Roger.
- Home, dinner, commitment-classes in the evening; NCC's
new statement of faith looks much more reasonable than previously.
Back, bed early, read more of No ordinary book - rather
gripping.
- Lie-in, setup the Griffin's own PC for DSL: Windows 98
a frightening lack of control / diagnostics; it apparently works
acceptably though.
- Took H. to the Sizewell beach while N. slept - made a
sand-castle, taught H. to say 'nuclear reactor' & pointed out
the salient features thereof; mini-milk ice-cream, back home.
- H. to bed, peace; lunch, training session for in-laws
on the internet; played with babes: tea, drove back late. Worked
on talk for tomorrow, bed.
- Poked at bugs - 1 not-really-a-blocker left; good.
Tested the new OO.o fpicker multi-select work from clean; works
nicely with search://; good.
- Drove to the Griffens - hacking in the car: not easy.
Lovely lunch, discovered on arrival I'd forgotten their DSL modem
power supply: nasty. Turns out though preferring 16V it runs fine
with 9.6V (hmm.) Unwound several problems in my codemaker patches.
- Stuck on a particularly nice issue with sharing the
templatized output of polymorphic UNO types. Increasingly impressed
with the progress / interest from up-stream in our patches; this is
a great place to be; it encourages more submissions.
- Watched 'Frost' in the evening, bed late.
- Looked at the 64 .server files b-a-s reads on startup,
seems like at least 25 are easy to fold into others: be nice to get
a 40% seek redux. Poked at B8 with Jan wrt. an OO.o / 2nd starter
silly.
- Fixed the fpicker multiselect problems, committed a
patch, more from-clean build testing required. Filed expenses:
time consuming; why not loan hundreds of pounds to your employer ?
- Re-wrote b-a-s's object-directory-load to use GMarkup
instead of libxml2 [ we don't use the power of XML there ],
performance from 110m cycles to 40m (of course callgrind
pseudo-cycles), committed to HEAD.
- Out for a run - a little more bracing than normal:
hail. Dinner, J. out to Bible study; poked at this & that,
bed late.
- Mail pokeage & creation. Dug around in bugzilla for
a while. Some work on the FilePickerWorkarounds interface.
Transcribed rest of Gordon talk on Adultery in the evening.
- Up early, pleased with N.'s language development &
comprehension; pointed at my nose & muttered: 'spot', encouraging.
- Dug into C++ multiple inheritance in more depth, the
diamond - such a beautiful thing; unclear what happens if the two+
classes above the join class override & implement the same base
virtual method ? fine for abstract classes of course, but ... test
reveal
no unique final overrider for... g++ errors;
fair enough. Unfortunately, (it seems) one can't use this pattern
without touching the base class; something that can't be done.
- Idled at the pet project - got at least something
working, moved on. Team meeting, call with KaiB: some great news
there; call with Nat.
- Kai sent me a MS re-designs the iPod link, is there
a packaging spec. for OO.o yet ? Wrote up action items &
mailed them.
- Poked at mail. Comitted Federico's b-a-s improved
parallelism patch, to drop the lock over factory instance
creation & built more packages with that. Sub-setted &
filed a nice bug from Stefan Hundhammer wrt. impress import.
- Chased some a11y issues, wrote up some -Bdirect
details; poked at paper-work. Quick chat to jrb. Dinner. Poked
at my pet project.
- Up early, collected George, to NCC - rather good
chap (Ken) speaking from Plumbline, enthusiastic with lots of
exegetical background; also interesting speaking of communion as
a time to rejoice / feast, not for slient & sombre queueing.
- Back, played in the garden with the babes - amazing
how much fun running around a plastic car can be. Took George
back. Slugged the afternoon away - J. 1/3rd through No Ordinary
Book on loan from the William's - a great title for a
Biography (of course of some
wycliffe people).
- Bed early, tired: too much running around.
- Up lateish; took H. on an outing; on a Train to
Cambridge: much excitement & jumping on the spot, requests
to bring Dolly / Backpack etc. Double-decker bus into the center
of town. Walked to Heffers: appalled at how lame Heffers
has become: now with a coffee shop, and a shrunken & withered
computer book section that would make an MSCE glad. Theology
section also of diminutive breadth & interest; how the mighty
fall.
- Took H. to see bust of Newton in Trinity Chapel
opposite, chips at Gardies, sandwich at Peppercorns & trotted
home together: much fun. Played with N. in the afternoon.
- Double dinner date with the sweetheart, Kate &
James, fun time - looked up to discover the pub almost empty,
back home.
- Got side-tracked by Federico's analysis of b-a-s causing
problems by serializing activations on login. Turns out that it really
depends how lucky you are - in some cases; nautilus manages to launch
it's VFS daemon before the panel starts launching -really- slow to
start applets (eg. tomboy) and life is good; other times life is less
good; and ~everything is blocked until the panel has finished. Knocked
up a patch to add simple threading to b-a-s, to overcome that. Time
until nautilus is started went from 12 to 8 secs or so (if you're on
the wrong side of the race).
- Re-assured to discover (on filing my ERESTARTSYS leaks
into applications bug) that strace was never meant to work reliably
anyway; glad to have that experience confirmed.
- Bruce & Anne over for lunch; Kelli's staff meeting,
battled activation strangeness until late, fixed some stupidities.
Branched libbonobo for gnome-2-14 & committed to HEAD. Did some
work on my new pet project.
- Up, filed some bugs; set long upgrade running in the
background. Out a rather long Ultrasound appt. in Cambridge; missed
most of a meeting that wasn't there on further inspection.
- Nice to see Pavel's
measurements of the helpex build speedup: 29 minutes to 7 minutes, great work from ihi.
Good also to see more patches starting to get up-stream.
- Generated a lot of E-mail, splitting various up-streaming tasks
into little chunks; hopefully useful. Switched ooo-build to use the
system allocator after getting scared by the built-in one's performance
characteristics in some corner cases.
- Conference call - polished up the link speedup patch,
incorporating some of Kay's size redux ideas too. Just when you thought
things were going well - someone uses a member name like 'major' in a C++
class and does
FooClass() : major(0) { }; the error ?
error: class 'FooClass’ does not have any field named ‘gnu_dev_major’
nice - and I thought it was only libbonobo that had these problems.
- Fixed a nasty b-a-s problem biting us on login, now more
stuff is done asynchronously - we get bitten by it more regularly.
Upgraded to B6.
- Finished write-up of meeting notes up notes from meetings.
Team meeting, divied up action items. Out for a run, 'Barney the Dinosaur'
DVD with babes in the evening; getting good at singing the songs after
watching the same thing N times.
- Dunged out some cruft from ooo-build patches; transcribed
1/2 of the 7th commandment.
- Up, off to Bury Hospital with J. for consultation &
ultrasound. Back to work, mail stacked in big heaps. Appreciated
jdub's advice to do funky new things with OO.o instead of fuddy-duddy
'old' things (like being compatible); fair enough - we need to be more
sexy. OTOH. it's obviously easier to pronounce authoritatively on the
relative complexity of two huge engineering tasks without detailed
understanding of either option.
- Installed the latest beta to give it a go. Built / installed
m5, up-loaded FOSDEM slides: talk
&
tutorial. Fixed a gcc 3.x build issue. Committed some icon fixups.
- Upgraded our CWS atkbridge snapshot to the latest stuff.
Lots of writing up of notes.
- Lie in, NCC - missed Thea speaking in creche - lots of
babies today; chewed pillar to padded post. Lunch, slugged most of
the afternoon.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 1 - "Labelling" - Lots of interesting name related bits.
- Up early, fed the babes & off to the market while
J. slept, some tidying / cleaning. More sealing of holes in the
roof, perhaps warmer but still not warm: then again, snowing
outside.
- Played with babes, read the Economist etc. Bed early.
- Slept until midday; started downloading updates,
starting to file bugs I'd forgotten, following up on things etc.
Call with Jody, call with Noel. Crazy E-mail thrash / noting of
points for later processing.
- Up earlier, breakfast, checked out - to the office.
Described the linking problems & potential fixes to Kai Ramme,
agreed a simple way to get the 40% win up-stream: mangle the
'uses-only-uno-types' data into the lib. name ".internal.so" or
somesuch; nice.
- Wandered the building in search of people to talk to;
Caught up with Oliver Braun: Went over the outstanding VCL patches
with pl & hdu. Long discussion with Lutz, interesting chap.
Lunch on the hoof - chat to KaiB, Zaheda & Stefan. Met Andreas
B quickly - nice chap.
- Taxi / flight / train / taxi with Zaheda; train, taxi
home, bed late, exhausted.
- Checked out, to office - lots of build infrastructure
talking etc.
- Lunch, talk with Mathias Bauer & co. wrt. several
patches - good to get several things nailed down. Back for an
interesting talk with Mathias H. on the custom allocators; then
some of Mike (Intel)'s config speedups.
- Out to a rather nice Indian place for a meal with the
Calc team - on Novell; met Ingrid & Bjorn working on &
excited about chart2: good stuff. Back to hotel very late - found
another hotel; even later.
- Breakfast with the lads, into the office, long and
(presumably) tedious 'community' issues meeting, made worse by my
outline (I guess). Pleased to see CWS evo2fixes nominated; nice.
Kai / Zaheda pointed out an
amusing programming site.
- Lunch, longer meeting on the infrastructure issues.
Meeting with Mr. Bemmer; pleased with ihi accelerating the i18n
docs build: cool - hopefully several hours off the full build.
- More performance talks in the afternoon; out in the
evening for dinner with various lads from the Writer team; bed
late.
- Up early; breakfast with the Intel guys, off with
Caolan to meetings with Sun - lots of constructive work on
threading, performance, KaiR's new 'Environment' model nice stuff.
- Lunch; XML loading / performance talks - got some
traction with my zipped XML parser optimization, low level
tokenizing etc.
- ESC meeting, number of action items, good to have
everyone in the same room (but Volker). A little on the spec.
process: Triage etc.
- Out in the evening for a fine meal sad news from J.,
thanks to Sun, back late.
- Up early; checked out - off to the conference. Got a
connection, Radek fixed my scaling bug ! cool, re-built OO.o.
- Hacked on talk at the OpenSUSE stall - handed out
T-shirts, encouraged people etc. Out for lunch with Karl, back
caught the end of Jon's Beagle talk, gave my talk: lots of good
questions. On to a tutorial - got over-excited by linking;
bother - taxi to the airport; beer with Tor & some guys from
Nokia. Poked at E-mail etc.
- gnome-session code review on the plane.
- Up early, poked at tutorial; breakfast, chatted to
various interesting chappies - managed to miss the taxi rather
apallingly. Registered at the conf - good to see Damien again;
Christian dragged me to RMS' talk - some amusing sound-bites: the
Patent system justified by The Myth of the Starving Genius.
- Lots of sculling around meeting / talking to people,
catching up with various folk - good fun; no internet.
- Speaker's dinner in the evening - got to know Greg
a little better, back for drinks at the hotel bar.
- Up early; Radek up before me fixing my bugs: what
service. Printed out a number of JCAs, moved flight back.
Re-linked OO.o with the various funky options to demo;
re-generated nice kcachegrind screenshots.
- Lunch with the babes & wife - off to the train,
"make sure you call me when you get in" => back home to get
mobile; missed train, into Cambridge.
- Checked out Julian's house, nice. Train / Eurostar /
Taxi together - good to talk over Valgrind / OO.o / glibc /
linking, and misc. topics of interest. Poked at tutorial slides.
- Decided I need to create a pun based critique of the
OO.o philosophy of UI & polish based on 'suffice' vs 'soffice',
'u' could say 'O!' or something; clearly more work needed.
- Poked at e-mail; fixed up / re-marked CWS evo2fixes.
Caught myself doing tons of small, unimportant things from weeks
back to avoid writing my talks.
- Bashed a number of slides together, it's quite exciting
to take a step back & see what got done really. Filed some
evolution bugs. Getting some really fertile impress / cairo canvas
bug seams; good.
- Up early, off to the hospital for a family ultra-sound,
newest pending member looking good; very photogenic; back. Started
debugging the compound problems with my ati radeon experience;
found / filed an nice Xserver compose crasher; a 16bpp color
issue & all manner of good things.
- More issue poking; then started to use the fate fat
client; hmm. Listened to expensive piped music from eTrade at some
substantial length; remarkably good quality to the US even so,
keeps the brain active - re-generating all the frequency ranges
that are chopped by the intervening telcos.
- Customer call, talk sketching, hopefully graunching a
few existing presentations + some random content generation will
suffice.
- Poked at mail, chewed over bugs with Radek. Produced
more verbiage; meeting minutes. Reviewed some bugs, drew pretty
slides etc.
- Started poking at the exception library optimization,
compiled all the UNO exception data into a single 'libexcept' - and
switched all libs to load RTLD_LOCAL instead: (nice to know that the
library API contract is UNO based) - saves 700ms from the link time:
40% faster: looks like a bit more can be pared from that too.
- Conference call-age in the evening.
- Poked at mail & bugs. DNS bug somewhere wiped out my
outgoing mail server; not good, got some numbers from the local friendly
sysadmin. Attempted SL10.1B4 64bit update from SL9.3 - not a good plan.
- Renewed my Economist subscription. Lunch; took a sudden
dislike to people who quote vast E-mails and add '+1' - and a short
amount of additional text. Committed the evo updates. Wrote a prototype
column. Started poking at a customer presentation.
- More presentation work in the evening, hit a number of
interesting X server / cairo bugs. Another huge batch of package
updates. Fitted new Velux blackout blind - the weather must be
improving.
- Up lateish, NCC - spoke on 6th commandment; more than 1/2
way through. Back for lunch, kip.
- Played with the babes, while J. gardened a little. Good to
rest, hair-cut from the wife. Bed early.
- Up early, off to TP to buy some hardboard with H. while J.
went into town shopping with N. watched the fork-lift truck with large,
round eyes for a while. Sawed several 8x4 sheets into twice as many 8x2,
loaded on the car & home.
- Babes to bed, nailed up the board, hard-side out in the crawl
space, reducing the howling gale in there to a zephyr; nice - hopefully
warm the house a little.
- Lunch - onto the dish-washer: like a petulant child it only
works when given lots of attention. This time removed the bottom, analysed
the parts: a beautiful mechanism. Discovered that the 'overflow' mechanism
works by deluging the pump motor itself in water, filling a depression in
the bottom - which causes a piece of polystyrene to float which presses a
switch; thankfully not the problem. Poked at the (interesting) pressure
switch - attempted to re-calibrate, but everything working again, sigh.
Perhaps it not being level causes the float switch not to fully empty,
which makes it vulnerable to changes in atmospheric pressure.
- Worked on talk in the evening.
- Re-worked the easter-egg generation in ooo-build; now generates
a set of tiles from planet size images (58x78 for some reason).
- Noticed Federico's nice file-selector search
integration patch while planet poking. Re-worked it a little to dlopen
libbeagle (locally) instead of adding a dep to gtk+; seems to work nicely.
- Started poking at the OO.o / file-sel code too; some
'interesting' issues reared their ugly heads. Another batch of package
upgrades.
- Mail pokeage. Tested / fixed custom dict install. Was gotcha'd
by running 'cws-extract' too soon after committing & getting an empty
diff (from the out of sync anoncvs server).
- Finally fully unwound all the pending evo issues - the result
is rather nice, filed patch up-stream; how do you administer AddressBook
data sources ? isn't it obvious ?
File->Templates->Addressobook Source->Administrate.
- Enabled -Wl,-zdynsort in ooo-build. Had a fate-full afternoon
in response to aj's frantic clicking. More stale / unused patch dungouts frmo
ooo-build; only 350 or so to go. Reviewed some new OO.o overview docs.
- Discovered -Bdirect was breaking the custom C++ allocator
deep-magic in OO.o, but only for people not using
OOO_FORCE_SYSALLOC=1 like all good developers do.
- Poked at mail for a while - hopefully can start to finish
the N things started but not finished yesterday before being clobbered
by meetings. Phone interview. Knocked up action items from meeting.
- Fixed the patch to remove the Help->'registration' menu
item again (it got stale). Committed the evo. fixes to CWS evo2fixes,
and re-extracted as a single diff; updated build.
- Lunch, fixed a silly off-by-1 error: crash pasting long
chunks of text into writer, filed up-stream. No doubt hidden during
testing by the internal OO.o custom allocator.
- Had another OO.o linking performance 'brainwave' - no doubt
entirely silly, but worth investigating. Poked with Xgl again at some
length - got various things working, albeit with some massive display
corruption - most of that eliminated by
xrandr -s 0 -
turns out there were several mis-matched views about what size the
screen is.
- Chunks of fate E-mail, bugzilla massage. Left b1 building
Cell group in the evening: a good showing.
- Reviewed the e-d-s ABI from 2.4 to 2.6 - looks compatible,
sent some comments to the evo. team. Created an evo2fixes CWS and started
munging / testing the various outstanding evo. fixes into it. Knocked up
agenda.
- Got some common Novell words into a custom user-dict for
us in my new sane format. Spent ages chasing odd menu crasher, with JP
et. al.
- Beautiful dinner with beautiful wife; watched Yes Minister
bed early.
- Up early, refreshed - poked at mail; set off various upgrades
etc. out to buy bits & pieces for St. Valentines day tomorrow -
pondering the non-appearance of the campaign to ban Valentines day as a
divisive Christian anachronism.
- Tested & updated / closed a number of NLD10 bugs.
Poked at evo 2.5 - filed blocker; poked at the OO.o/Evo connectivity piece.
Discovered -Wl,-hashvals can cause problems with the wrong ld - setting a
DT_SONAME to 'ashvals': nasty. Poked at Petr's 2nd-start / quick-starter
problem; urgh - another factory/multi-arg. inconsistency; nasty.
- Chased the main-menu crasher bug around and around. Poked a
little at Rodrigo's nice patch to make the panel applets start asynchronously,
should give a nice speedup. Dinner. Turns out most of the common panel
applets are shlibs anyway, and hence give no speedup for async activation.
- NCC in the morning, Thea spoke well about some of God's
promises, good to see various people afterwards. Back for lunch.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 2:12-25 - "Zeal for your House"
- Carols at Christmas often focus on Jesus as a child:
meek & mild, nothing seems to upset him - quiet in the crib
etc. Often we extrapolate & imagine this was true throught,
approachability, humility & condescension. And so it is,
exhibits self control, patience, forebearance, long-sufferingness
eg. praying on the cross forgive them, for they do not know
what they are doing.
- We'd be eager to create a God that doesn't get upset,
fine - creator perhaps etc. but one who didn't get upset with our
failures / offences. C.S.Lewis - We want not so much a Father in
heaven, but a Grandfather in Heaven. Not the God of scripture.
- God is very angry with people; for ignoring him, and
rebelling against him. Not simply a passionless embodiment of
eastern detachment. Jesus - this prophetic sign: making a whip of
cords, and driving the vendors from the temple. Instead, the savior
representing the drastic consequences of failing to repent - goes
through the temple with a whip of cords, driving them out.
- Still Jesus' anger is troubling - we need a savior from
sin. Problems we associate with anger: the loss of control, lashing
out at innocent bystanders etc. Anger not inherently sinful - but
should be used correctly. We get angry at the wrong time, for the
wrong reasons, and with the wrong amount.
- A fool shows his annoyance at once, but a prudent
man overlooks an insult. (Prov) - we're Angry for too long In
your anger do not sin, and not let the sun go down on your anger.
Eph 4. Anger: God's gift to motivate us to attack problems (not
people), to solve the issue. Anger tempered with love - the next time
Jesus comes to the temple - weeping because they would not repent.
- Not just the fact of the exchange of goods & money
but where it was: the courts of the gentiles. The temple of Jesus'
day: a series of barriers. In the O.T. sure only Levites could go
into the holy of holies; everyone else men, women, children, gentiles
could all go in. In the NT. several class divisions; priests, men,
women, gentiles.
- Jesus did all his teaching in the gentile court - is it
this that infuriates the savior My temple is to be a house of
prayer for all nations. This exclusivism aggravates him on
other occasions Mark 10
Jesus is furious when his disciples stop children coming to him:
let the little children come to me & do not hinder them.
- Interesting; a number of non-superficial applications.
- Up late, pottered around the house - added lots of plastic
& tape to some cold looking bits in the crawl-space; then a load of
hardboard under the tiles - seems to reduce the wind a little; need to do
a more complete job though.
- N. beginning to get to grips with the rewards possible when
one interacts favorably with a potty.
- Up late, packed, breakfast, feeling a little under the
weather, J. drove us badk to the airport; checked in - eager to get
back to see the babes. Smooth homeward journey - good to see H.
& N. again, N. somewhat anxious about another maternal absence
though: cries when she leaves the room. A pleasant break - thanks
M & D.
- Up somewhat before the crack of dawn - drove to
Stanstead, ryanair flight to Dublin, drove south (the 1 hour trip
took 2:15+) to Durrow down the N7/N8. Amazed at the sheer
proliferation of duplicate bridges across the road: in places,
3 road bridges in the space of 100metres - all apparently devoid
of traffic.
- Lovely wedding service in a typically ornate Catholic
church - avoided the unending mass typical at these things: the
groom is Church of Ireland it seems.
- Back to Durrough Castle for a fine reception, dinner,
meet with lots of J. & Lisa's friends, lovely food, bed late.
- Up abnormally early, to work; re-booting / logging in
revealed another N bugs duly filed; updated other bugs - poked at
completed m155 build; tested new fontconfig package: nearly
there.
- Booked trains to FOSDEM / plane to Hamburg; grief -
why does it cost UKP 66 to get a return to Brussels, and UKP 149
to get a single ? a cunning strategy to penalise the honest.
- Parents arrived, lunch, concreted under the window
sill, back to the action. PBU meeting overlapping with customer
meeting; followed by Kelli's staff meeting.
- Dinner in the evening, bed.
- Found the root cause of the vino issue - an unpleasant
GOption related change in gtk+ wrt. GTK_MODULES; improved libbonobo so
multiple inits' arguments are accumulated - prolly a good idea anyway.
- Frantic attempts to process action items, team meeting,
lots of good things going on. Poked at dmake wrt. win32 build slowness,
lots of forking of 'echo', 'pwd' that sort of thing that can't help
anyone.
- Actually bothered to look at the famous cartoons, in
comparison with
previous depictions they seem rather mild, only 1 or two have
amusing content.
- Up early; mail, poked at some odd behavior. Spent a while
digging into a fontconfig silly - isolated the problem patch.
- Back to the curious case of vino activation with a11y enabled;
seems it's all related to argument passing; somehow turning a11y inits
bonobo(-activation) via. a different path, eliding critical b-a-s IOR
pipe arguments; burned an afternoon re-building this & that to
locate the root issue.
- Man came to fix the in-laws computer: new PSU & bingo,
all is well again; good. Discovered N. half way downstairs with the
phone: lead straining it's maximum extension. Apparently came up on
her own & pinched it from our room.
- Up early, looked after the babes; breakfast - off to NCC:
Simon Matthews of plubline speaking, enthusiastic albeit low on content.
- Lunch with Harminda, everyone to bed. A triumph with N. - 1st
true (partial) production on the pot: chocolate appreciation. Subsequently
rather keen on sitting on the thing - perhaps a missing connection.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 2:1-11 - "An Open Bar and the Glory of Christ"
- A disturbing double irony: 34 miracles related in detail
in the NT. Jesus chose to start his ministry in a startling way: this
miracle seems least to do with human need, as the others do.
- A 2nd irony: Jesus turned water into wine. Why not stick with
fruitcake / jewelry ? also the sheer quantity is astonishing,
120-180gallons of wine; 2-3000 glasses of wine.
- Jesus criticised in Mat 11
no matter what you do, you can't win with some people: John the Baptist
called to abstain 100% from alcohol - criticised for that: followed by
Jesus, The Son of Man came eating & drinking, and they say: 'Here
is a glutton & a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and 'sinners'.
But wisdom is proved right by her actions.
- Was it non-alcoholic ? no: new wine clearly
alcoholic - cf.
Acts 2:13-15
- Perhaps no alcoholism in that time ? no:
Isaiah 5:11
Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after
their drinks, who stay up late at night till they are inflamed with wine.
- scripture recognises some people live to drink & drink to live; have to
have compassion, but reject it as God's intention for us. Also passages that
stress the lethal mix of alcohol & youth.
-
Prov 23 - drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes
them in rags. - the ruin of lives & careers as we see now.
Prov 23
goes on to 6 diagnostic questions with excessive use of alcohol:
Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaints? Who has
needless bruises? Who has bloodshot eyes?
- However - Jesus turned water into wine - thus, it cannot be an
unqualified evil; a question of use & abuse. Much like eg. sexual
attraction - wonderful inside marriage, but open to abuse outside; or eg.
'things' - nothing wrong with owning them, but problems when they own you.
- Another lesson is Jesus loves marriage - He thinks weddings are
a reason for celebration. Previously seen John 1/2 paralleling Genesis 1/2,
also a 7 day chronology. Jn Ch 2 - finished the week; the 7th day; Gen 2:
a wedding. What about the 2nd Adam ? his opinion of marriage ? follow his
example ? he never got married - clearly not: a stunning affirmation of
marriage. He & his disciples celbrating & engaged in a wedding
feast. Jesus having fun, parties are good.
- 3rd lesson - the Glory of Christ; he thus revealed his
glory, and his disciples put their faith in him. Not really about
weddings, wine but about Jesus. Mainly because his miracles - not that
amazing; Jesus fed 5000 for 1 day; Moses 1 million for 40 years. Pointing
to himself: I am the bread of life etc. other miraculous signs:
pointing to himself.
- We provide the stone vessels & the water - he does the
rest. Post enlightenment as we are: we have an anti-supernaturalist bias:
religion may help mentally, but don't expect religion to affect the
material world. Jesus didn't hear that view - He spoke the universe into
being, he can change water into wine like that. He can change you too,
transform you into a new creature.
- Slept until late; breakfast, out to buy things with H. back
for lunch. Sealed around the window-frame so you can no longer see out
(around it); discovered a wedge & some newspaper supporting the
bottom where cement should be; hmm.
- Insulation & cutting of metal pipe, board, finger and
board to try to make the best-insulated/yet-coldest room in the house
less cold. [ is this one of the real-world cases where adding insulation
can increase heat loss ? ]
- Yes Minister in the evening, bed early..
- Read news; it's been a while - missed some amusing(?)
attempts at suppressing expression by coercion; death threats for
being Danish ?. Pleased with Boris Johnson's comment:
"If you are a Muslim and your faith is strong and you believe in
God and in your prophet then I don't think you should be remotely
frightened of what some ludicrous infidel says or does about your
religion or any depiction he produces."
"I think we've got to move away from this hysterical and rather
patronising idea that we have got to treat the Muslim religion with
kid gloves and not subject it to all the same rough and tumble that
we subject other faiths to."
After all, who would question that Islam is a religion of
peace & love with a high commitment to honesty & integrity,
open debate & discussion of contentious issues and letting the
truth speak for itself ? I guess at least the Danish Bacon industry
will be unaffected.
- Poked at mail. It seems Petr has unwound some of the
multi-distro ooo-build options problems which is nice. Great to see
Mathias Hopf's nice 1000fold speedup for a cairo/X corner-case hurting
desktop backgrounds.
- Battled Xgl for an hour or so before giving up; strace
is (as normal) broken - changing behavior & locking up X, and
apparently my card is not happy at high res either.
- Unwound a tangled vino/a11y issue on session start with
some nasty interaction; ended up with a patch that should shrink login
time a little, but just works around it - spammed Mark. Now I can
login, it's clear our OO.o/a11y needs more love.
- Phoned BUPA - efficient bunch seemingly. Rodrigo has a
nice plan for a similar win in gnome-panel (after a 1st attempt).
Conf call with Intel, nice work on OO.o happening, more a11y poking.
- Up early, did a B3 install - looking ok, did a B3 upgrade,
filed bugs, filed more bugs, corresponded on bugs - no really productive
work. Persuaded some Novell/Mac chappy to avoid showing NeoOffice under
any circumstances since they won't work with the rest of us license-wise.
- Looked at the PlanMaker demo which (it appears) I accidentally
installed on my machine some time ago & lost - really poor; amazing
the marketing power of picking the tiny overlap of features that don't
work in OO.o and do in Planmaker, taking screenshots & putting them
side-by-side.
- After posting my initial knee-jerk CUPS-is-slight-sub-optimal
(particularly-as-a-standard) E-mail to the printing list; got a nice
response from Michael Sweet, friendly chap. Decided to give it a 2nd
chance & read http.h, more mail - will I ever learn ?
- To mail; X apparently doesn't like -Bdirect; must poke
at that at some stage. Interested to read in the Economist's survey
of business organisation:
Nigel Nicholson, a professor of organisational behavior at the London
Business School, called the matrix structure "one of the most difficult
and least successful organisational forms."
Messrs Ghosal and Bartlett wrote in the past tense, suggesting that
companies had escaped from the matrix corset. But 15 years after the
article was published, many are still trying to struggle free.
glad I don't have to report to 2 people.
- Cut-down & filed nasty export to PPT97 bug, Thorsten
pointed out cpd a
Cut and Paste coding Detector - should run that over OO.o; would be
amusing no doubt.
- Chased strange session problem on login, odd that my
~/.gnome2/session contains all manner of obsolete &
unusual things. Fixed an file / argument handling issue with the
quickstarter, 2 conference calls.
- Dish washer man came around to notice our dish-washer is
miraculously cured (intermittent fault vanished), expensive hobby.
Dinner, J. out (very tired).
- It seems I mistook Hans-Peter Jansen for Hans Petter
Jansson, and accidentally congratulated the wrong one on a recent
arrival; oh dear.
I only open my mouth to change feet.
- Up early, mail pokeage, column polish; out to see an
Urologist - nice enough chap, back for lunch.
- Poked at binutils a little, m152 build finished;
team meeting, call with Jody, core team etc. Visited Alan &
Pat with Daniel. Fixed some evo. related connectivity bugs -
re-enabled patches.
- Poked at mail, most pleased with the binutils lot -
apparently real progress is possible there; nice. Set about
upgrading various pieces to build HEAD ooo-build.
- Discovered a chunk of mozilla stuff has moved to
the
gecko-sdk package; finally got things building.
Wrote column. Tested video output, everything beautiful in
NLD10, lovely cloned output. Left OO.o building.
- Read a little Josephus - 2000 year old gossip: why
the temple of Isis was demolished & it's priests crucified.
- Up early, looked after babes - starting on the washing up
mountain. Printed out talk - NCC / spoke on 5th commandment: Honour
your Father & your Mother.
- Back for spaghetti carbonara lunch, admired crach in Ben's
windscreen, applied slugging, bed early.
- Up lateish, pottered around cleaning the house a little,
while J. helped Rachel deal with her broken car.
- Ben arrived for lunch, good to catch up with him again.
Played with babes, took H. out for a very long (for her) walk with
dolly in pram; rather sweet.
- Sat by the fire & chatted, played guitar, etc. very
pleasant. Bed early, tired.
- To work - why, oh why did I suspend my machine overnight
instead of leaving it building ? PC World service-man arrived (the
shame of it) for the inlaw's machine; nice man - diagnosed the obvious
(but knew which pins to short with pliars on the ATX power connector),
ordered parts & left again.
- Closed bugs incrementally until hit 99 left; good. Decided
that the apalling performance of collab.net's OO.o infrastructure
[ many minutes of waiting to simply file a bug ] must be a cunning
team building tactic: by create a common enemy, one can build camaraderie
amongst fellow sufferers. Of course, perhaps having 1 hand nailed to
the table would do the same, with a similar impact on productivity.
- Did some binutils patch polish to please our maintainer,
whitespace changes: nice. Braved upgrading primary machine... survived
the upgrade experience: rather a fine result in fact; filed more bugs.
- To work, started pulling B2 ISOs - deltaisos are so
nice. If only I had time to finish my threaded makedeltaiso patch to
accelerate their creation (bzip2 has even more intractable cache
abuse problems than linking it seems).
- Wrestled with understanding how to use etrade effectively;
clearly the whole 'task based help' approach hasn't taken root there.
Set m152 building, cries of "go up into daddy's office" heard from
below - investigation & lunch ensued.
- Helped unwind heinous selection problem with B2, removed
a number of auto-generated files from my binutils patches; closed a
few uninteresting / fixed bugs.
- J. out to bible study; transcribed sermon while
installing new B2 image: lots better; filed some bugs, bed late.
- Backed up the laptop in preparation for a monstor
up-grade; poked a few bugs, committed Santhosh & Archana's
nice slideshow patch.
- Had a great call with Tim Janik wrt. various linking
issues; he gave me a great idea wrt. LD_PRELOAD - just disable
-Bdirect altogether: should be trivial.
- Discovered
cp -lR today: and to think of
all those years of ignorance. Posted my .suse.hashvals patch to
the binutils list - got a response which was nice. Re-worked the
-Bdirect patches to use the new OS specific SUSE tags &
renamed sections to '.suse' variants.
- Pleased to see
another ISV with huge linking performance problems - although
rather a corner case it seems.
- Finally finished & sent notes from SIL meeting on.
Created test documents / filed triaged a few bugs. Backed up go-oo
to CD.
- Some QA on qpro03 - nice, fst produced a lovely test
sheet; unfortunately the QPro export-to-old-format code is more
broken than you might imagine, and the old version uses a smaller
formulae-set ergo problems. The concept of blocking a useful
interop feature because it isn't complete is alien to me; but
really if the code needs typing out in 2 forms: C++ and
'text/specification' then fair enough; we can perhaps produce a
C++ to text generator to auto-write specifications.
- Fixed up the visibility situation in HEAD ooo-build,
broken in error. Fixed bug with 'Din' getting mapped to 'dingbats'
in error.
- Set to work on the in-laws PC which (suspiciously) died,
shortly after I fitted a new network card recently; did a jump-start
type thing with a 2nd box, backed all discreet files up & took a
disk image before poking/provoking the PSU. Very odd - hard to know
whom to blame - PSU or motherboard: the joys of ATX power.
- Up early, dealt with babes; people started arriving - off
to NCC for Naomi's dedication; lots of family & friends there - a
reasonable service. Back for lunch - 15 for dinner + 2 babes; managed
to squeeze around the table, lovely food & drink, feasting &
fun.
- People trickled away until just M&D & us left,
sat by the fire, playing & talking, bathed the babies, bed.
- Up earlyish, parents arrived, breakfast. M & D. out
shopping - set to work making a extractor fan outlet housing, cutting
into the weather-boarding & getting it call connected with D's
help. No more open windows & freezing air in the shower; lovely.
- A little slugging, out to get hooks, curtain rail etc.
& roman blind errection downstairs, followed by attaching a curtain
rail to some plaster-board whose support one can only guess at.
- Dinner, sat by the fire, bed late, feeling pretty rotten
still.
- Poked at a simple perl tool for installing user-dicts and
templates; turns out re-using file descriptors in perl is a bad plan
without using
undef $fh; beforehand; unexpected and
unpleasant. Got the tool extending user-dicts in the new format though.
- Discovered the SUSE Kernel team will accept digital photos
of screens with oops traces on them in place of manual transcription:
that rocks.
- Got some hacking done - binutils hacking: really easy,
glibc linker changes: bad, hyper-optimization ignoring algorithmic
problems. Got it implemented, timing tests next week.
- Up at 1am with an inconsoleable, croup-wracked Mouser; took
it for a half-hour drive in the cold air, got it to sleep for 3 hours.
- Up late - tired; amused to see the new emphatic: '[cobe]ing',
as popularized by phrases such as '[cobe] me!', and '[cobe]ing A!' and
so on; an amazing improvement from the Novell Code Of Business Ethics.
- Amused to read the economist report on Saudi Arabia this
morning, particularly since (apparently) some people get offended by Christians
boycotting vendors that (apparently) provoke them: personally one conciously
individually boycotts at least 'The Times': owned by a pornographer [cf. SkyTV]
(though inconsistently not Zondervan) and Nestle: cavalier disregard for lives
of children in 3rd world. Either way it could be worse:
In one particularly odd case, a Najran judge sentenced a 16-year-old
Ismaili schoolboy to death for blasphemy. This was commuted on appeal
to 14 years in prison and 4,000 lashes, to be administered publicly in
80 weekly sessions of 50 blows. Most Saudis are unaware of such
injustices...
Thank God Jesus'
kingdom is not of this world; critical to keep that in view.
- Started triaging bugs old and new, updated the feature
tracker 'fate', amazing how few OO.o bugs people file. ECMA call - some
really nice stuff going into the new Office 12 drawing markup.
Re-generated Kohei's solver in patch form. Spent most of the day
reading bugs, and none coding - tedious indeed.
- Up at 1am - troubled by binutils' hash chain generation,
why should we include undefined symbols in that, they shouldn't be in
the hash anyway surely: would remove 1/4 of eg. gtk+'s symbols. Strangely
readelf shows all the UND symbols as being in the hash & chain - why ?
Back to bed.
- Up late, finished grouting on tiling at Falmouth St. &
cleaned up; back to the fray. Fixed linkoo issue, tried to commit to a
cws: turns out EIS is broken / unusable due to brokenness with ~/.cwsrc
parsing, and the only sol'n is to
export VCSID=<account>
before creating a cws; worked with 'rfc821' who fixed it nicely.
- Fixed the bogus error spew from make_installer, tested with
another cws, works nicely. Re-factored the previous binutils patch based
on Nick's feedback, sent a new patch off.
- Up early; tried to reason with mneptok et. al. wrt. getting
cvs accounts for people (2 weeks of delay so far), acutely & chronically
irritated by the approach to process as king, and maintainers be damned.
Poked the Novell forge people again - before Ross arrived to smooth
everything out: thanks Ross.
- Added Eric to the go-oo planet. Filed the quick 2nd start
piece up-stream & pinged mhu/mba - filed the user-dict re-work too.
Lunch, conf-call with IBM, conf-call with team. Demo run-through call.
- Up early, off to London; meeting / lunch with the
SIL folks, a large team - lots of great guys, good to meet
them. On to Canonical's office for meeting with Mark,
finished - back to Kings Cross - found an Internet Cafe for
ESC conf-call.
- Got a response from Nick Clifton to my binutils
sorting patch: horay: nice man. Amused by people trying to
accelerate their builds by enabling -fvisibility=hidden,
unsuprisingly, not the best idea.
- Up late, to NCC, Helen speaking in the morning,
back for lunch - everyone slept for a couple of hours.
- Dinner at church in the evening - followed by a
service of joining Plumbline - still uncomfortable with that,
and uncertain of the future. Back, bed.
- Up early, J. lie in, out to the market - pram holding
up nicely despite the gypo look of the various plywood / bolts
holding it together: good.
- Lunch, out to Falmouth St. to try tiling for the 1st
time after some battening / adhesive spreading action, and the
consumption of ever so many matchsticks - they seemed to go on
fine. Abandoned house before they fell off the wall.
- Slugged in the afternoon, took dinner around to Lenny
house-bound (hairline fracture of sternum) poor love; back, bed
early.
- Still no action on cvs accounts for ooo-build people, no
idea why it's such a problem for GNOME sysadmins to believe maintainers
that people should have accounts, are good, will contribute useful stuff
over the duration etc. must poke the foundation list.
- Back to chew a futher, nasty bonobo-activation issue - turns
out it's the same problem: the just deserts of not compiling / testing
clearly; re-fixed it properly. Finally got to writing the demo screed
for Kelli; munged through the PRD confirming & denying this &
that.
- Committed a nice pair of patches from Giuseppe fixing some
annoying multiple warning pain.
- Poked at dictionary code; responded wrt. the new spec
process - why over-engineering process is a disaster (cf. my horrible
failure with the GEP). Re-factored some duplicated goodness in OO.o
- Asked downstairs by H. If, you want, to come, down for
lunch, it's fine, ok? - a great stream of verbiage, interspersed
with excitement; lovely.
- ECMA conference call, poked at JP's GNOME hangs-on-login
bug, discovered a vicious problem in b-a-s, nice memory corruptor;
simple fix - turns out it pre-dates back to the 'oaf' days: amazing.
- The dictionary re-write starts to work, good; need to
write the same stuff out & switch to it by default; implemented
a more pleasant tag system.
- Up, early chatted to Guy - good man. Reminded of the
(antithetical) reminiscences of the retiring BBC correspondant to
France recently; must listen-again - but: the importance there of
keeping society together until the next revolution. Amused to hear
of a recalled interview with a striking French Doctor (approximately):
Interviewer: So - it's great that you're willing to sacrifice a day's
pay to strike & make your voice heard in government.
Striker: Oh no, I don't loose any pay, it's my civil right to
strike, the government continue to pay me.
Interviewer: oh - but, of course you have to pay the train fair of
course, that's some sacrifice
Striker: Oh no, the Union pay the train fair.
Interviewer: but of course, you pay that through higher union dues
effectively ?
Striker: Oh no, the government pay my Union membership dues. ...
- Great to see Karl Hong's re-work of my ~1.5Mb (shared) shrink
of i18npool getting done for 2.0.2, good stuff. Lengthy phone-call with
Kai, good stuff.
- Knocked up a noddy & incomplete script for installing
templates. Mouser's birthday today - 1 year old; fine lunch, cake, Bruce
& Anne around - good to see them; a few token presents, such a huggable
chunk of daughter.
- Cell group in the evening - attendance so far: 0 people;
managed to clash with a Churches Together bash.
- Gordon
sermon on
John 1:35-51 - "Jesus meets an honest skeptic"
- Passage bristling with interesting problems;
Finding Philip, he said to him, "Follow me." - should you
follow strangers ? and calls Nathanael similarly a verse later.
This plays into our wish that we can be turned around instantly
and walk the walk from day 1. eg. Acts 14 - we must go through
many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.
- Not the making of instant Christians, but those who
are willing to do his will. Follow me. all that's recorded,
but we should not assume that it's an exhaustive summary of all
that was said; clearly - but that was the most important part.
- Jesus did not say listen to me, or agree
with me, or even believe me., but Follow me..
3 times in the text Come and see - not just an intellectual
assent, but the experience of meeting Jesus; the incomparable
person of Christ himself.
- Nathanael guile-less, doesn't hide his doubt - shows a
key problem: Jesus apparently from the wrong place: Nazareth,
but shows up & checks him out. Being under the fig-tree:
metaphore for in prayer with God.
- At the end - aluding to Jacob's ladder, a stepped
pyramid - eg. mesopotamia in Babylon - 1st step 100ft, next 50ft
etc. Jacob had a dream - angels ascending & descending -
comes down & blesses him. The Son of Man is that ladder -
through whom, God can bless.
- E-mail, got possibly my longest life-history: 8000 words
yet from someone trying to persuade me to work on Gnome Basic, having
tried to encourage them to use Mono; nice try.
- Somewhat perplexed by 1st my
pipe & then a
socketpair not returning from poll (G_IO_HUP)
when the forked child closed their end of the pipe; I could swear it
should do that; fine on remote process death though. After writing some
dummy data to the socket, and using shutdown I got the
expected behavior, odd.
- Finally discovered the huge packages causing the go-oo
backups to explode & remove. Got the quickstarter within inches of
readiness before the play-with-children alarm bell rang; left several
test builds running.
- Dinner, build completed, checked a number of bugs etc.
Investigated dictionaries at some length - amazingly it seems there is
a '.dic' format that is a binary format, containing plain lists of
simple strings: slightly amazing.
- Up early, great to see lots of evolution bug work,
lots of stale reports being cleaned up - bugs getting fixed /
beefed up etc. Also Tor's nice Evolution/Win32
stuff seems to be gaining interest & traction.
- Radek's cairo canvas stuff for Impress got way faster
after switching to use RGB surfaces where possible - nearly as fast
as the VCL canvas for a vicious animated alpha border, bubble ring
- but way more beautiful; good stuff.
- Nice mail from jrb wrt. cvs account creation, apparently
there should be no problems - somewhere, someone is confused. Spent
the morning hacking Kohei's nice solver into an internal piece &
integrating it into ooo-build; 1st cut seems to work well. Set off
a test build.
- Knocked up a short agenda for the team meeting later,
out for a run. ESC meeting, dinner, shower, back. Tried to load
the new specs project template - OO.o hung for hours - seems there
is something too-clever-by-half happening in the template.
- Phone call with Brian Jones, then with David Wheeler -
looking good. Beefier agenda for tomorrow's team meeting. Enabled
the solver in the default (NLD) (ooo-)build.
- Up early, church in the morning Mike spoke on
Phil 3:12-14. Lunch, snoozed by the fire while H. gambled
around / played with her brio trains.
- Set too at pram fixing, got 1/2 way there, dinner,
bath, 'DVD', more pram fixing, bed early. Daily bible reading,
notes:
Phil 3:12-14 - interesting.
- Up late; dropped J. into town, popped to Hobbs to buy
this & that, then off to Ridgeons - glued up broken lamp,
taped up unused extractor fan vent, examined weatherboarding for
new shuttered vent: hmm.
- Off to examine push-chairs at Nippers - nearly bought
a new one on the spur - better idea for how to fix the old one in
the meantime.
- Chatted to Ben Elvidge on the phone - great to catch
up with him after all this time, interesting things going on in
Oxford.
- Mail; wonder how we can get a 11 minute
difference between start time & process time on my SLES9 box,
then again - the H/W suspend/resume thing seems to have created 4
days of difference on another machine; does it really matter ?
Turns out it's fixed in a recent service-pack, updated etc.
- Poked at OO.o's reverse lookups during start -
annoyingly it seems to do them in some cases. Fixed odd bug with
over-long unix socket paths.
- Posted my binutils patch again
after re-generating the test harness, and re-testing on this &
that to get some harder data. Wonder what I screwed up this time.
IssueZilla going extremely slow still.
- Quick startup app going nicely, GtkProgressBar pretty
ugly compared with the nice red line though. Some strange pipe
lifecycle issues: particularly unpleasant that they go away when you
run under strace to debug them; urgh. Conf call with Intel.
- To work, poked at this & that, made ooo-build HEAD
play nice with Debian, tried to file issues up-stream: firefox's
Waiting for www.openoffice.org... is becoming a personal motto.
Why invest a few thousand dollars in robust & well maintained
community infrastructure when you can save them, and burn tens of
hours of expensive developer time & pump the collective blood
pressure ? After counting 80 seconds and the page still not loaded,
looked away and it appeared.
- Poked at misc. patches; added 'base' to the quickstarter.
Continued my ongoing dialog with the sysadmin team about getting CVS
access to commit to ooo-build for several established, external
contributors - apparently it's not possible to have people added,
no-matter how competant, or with large outstanding features / patches
in-hand without having their stuff committed by others beforehand. A
shame. Made particularly less interesting by the pleasure of reading
huge unified double diffs; eg. add 1 line to a file with 20 deltas and
the unified diff of the unified diff explodes.
- Lunch; re-worked column, conference call. Re-worked the
quickstarter to add 'base' - unfortunately via an acutely ugly method,
since the previous person hadn't cleaned up after themselves; filed a
better method up-stream. Worked on the thinner startup / splash /
factory thing.
- Up too early, off to the Cambridge Lea - Ultra-Sounded
in various parts; no obvious cancer - good. Back - poked at mail -
a number of encouraging OO.o hackers arriving from around the place.
- Hit a slew of gcc3.3 nasties in m148's svx - discovered CVS,
the web-site, issuezilla etc. are down. Back after lunch, fixed svx
a different way.
- Played with a new install - filed a number of bugs; wrote
a column.
- To work. Surprisingly little E-mail, good. Committed the
glib API, poked at OO.o some more. Good to see the team back after a
break. Phone call with Tim Eves of SIL
fame.
- Phone call with Radek - plotting the future; another conf
call. Great to see Rodrigo back & looking at performance. Added some
stub graphite support to ooo-build configure.
- Up early, nice breakfast, out to Aldeburh
beach - admired a fishing boat and the life-boat. Back,
packed the car - drove home.
- Slugged in the afternoon, Manserghs arrived, really good to
talk to Fran at least a little more, and catch up with where Andrew is
at; good sorts. J. kindly cut my hair, bed late - reading again.
- Up lateish, breakfast, into Aldeburgh to church - pleased
to find the new vicar younger than the last, and a believer: always good.
Unfortunately missed most of his sermon talking outside to a chap working
for UBS with equivalent noisy child outside.
- Back, helped Bruce's 2nd fixup job on the errant pram -
riveting aluminium door-bolts and steel fittings to the relevant pieces,
gives a good result.
- Fine roast duck dinner. Continued reading the rather
inspiring book ... Watched the end of Mary Poppins in the evening,
bed late.
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.
Michael Meeks ([email protected])
