Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept. Cleaned and tidied house, and tried (with limited success) to train M. in roller-skating.
• Helena, James and Rose arrived for lunch; vast spread, and sat by the fire, playing games and chatting until tea.
• Prodded at repsnapper some more in the evening.

• Up; feeling extremely groggy, spent much of the day sleeping on the sofa on and off. Helped J. file her tax return (one of two down) while the kids watched Ice Age 2. Attempted to give money to various incompetant charities, how can it be that two payment sites are down, and another requires the horrible 'Stewardship: you have to create an account' nonsense - perennially irritating.
• H. wrote a small python game with me - "guess a number"; fun. Victoria over for dinner, caught up with her.

• Up early - live mouse caught in trap requires dispatching; pondered the problem for a while; not a pleasant job - that'll teach me to leave the back door open.
• Played card games with the babes, poked at my repsnapper port; coming along nicely, and looking much better. Interested to play with gtkmm - missing some things in the binding though; eg. a GtkButton's clicked signal should get a pointer to the button (surely) ? or perhaps I'm missing some easy way to build more detailed closures.
• Lydia, Dianne, and Janice around in the evening. Sometimes I get depressed about the state of the Linux Desktop; and then I'm asked to try to fix someone's Windows machine: using 100% CPU most of the time, fan constantly on, Task-Manager showing nothing using the CPU (is it a self-hiding virus ? - but AVG is installed), network mis-configured, very slow to boot, and horribly unpleasant to fix, etc. fun.
• As the previous cold moves on, the next one is arriving: fun.

• Up early, J. slept a little. Barabara & Colin came for lunch and the afternoon, lovely to catch up with them. Drove home in the evening, good road conditions mercifully, still coughing up alternate lungs.

• Up early, out into town to buy bling for the wifelet. Managed to find some suitable bits eventually, back on a bus a tad late. David Mansergh over for the afternoon. Lunch.
• Babes dropped down into Brighton with Grandma, Rob & Ilona for Cinderella the Musical. Chatted with David, and Thomas, dinner, and played Pictionary / dictionary definition game to much amusement.

• Up earlyish again; tried to go to the HTB plant (St Peters) in Brighton. Arrived, to dicover no service; bother. Played in the park on the level briefly, and home.
• Slugged, while J. went roller-scating with M., H. and Chris. Re-hash of Christmas lunch, Beccy arrived, enjoyed talking with assorted brothers, and playing PIT etc.

• Christmas day; up earlyish, breakfast, off to St Lukes for a service; back for snacks, and a fine Christmas lunch.
• Slew of present opening in the afternoon, feeling pretty groggy, with a hacking cough to match. Played games in the evening.

• Mini lie-in, up, breakfast, off shopping for a present for Thomas with E. Lots of stumping around Brighton with her, followed by an exciting bus ride home.
• Lunch, then out to the park to rid the girls of their 'rush'. Home, slugged about. Robert & Thomas arrived, dinner, Ilona arrived - house filling up.
• Put babes to bed, set too peeling vegetables etc. much fun with the brothers, bed.

• Slugged in bed for a bit; packed the car up, and set off to my parent's for Christmas, excellent roads and travel time - phew. Arrived, lunch. Took the babes out shopping for a present for John and Joan, and a run in the park.
• Much sitting around, talking, started my planned re-factor of repsnapper in the evening while chatting with the parents.

• Up late, at home all day. Ham for lunch. Watched 'How to train your dragon' again with the babes, and took the DVD back; start packing things.
• Prodded at getting a working Sanguino setup going, finally discovered my problems were a missing avr-libc, no longer packaged in the latest openSUSE - hmm.

• Lie in, slugged with the babes, while J. shopped. Lunch. Bert popped over for tea and help getting into his house. Out to the heath with H. N. and E. for some sledging fun down the footpath (the only smooth piece to pick up real speed on) - much excitement for a while, followed by cold-feet induced misery and return home.
• Interested to see Groklaw's take on Novell's work on interoperability.
  • Firstly Groklaw are once again doing a good job at pointing people at things of interest, and having this sort of discussion in the open can only be good. Clearly having a first draft of history to hand is useful, though naturally I'd like to point out some of the more drafty pieces.
  • The context seems to be of a transcription of a Microsoft document from a trial, which outlines Microsoft's response to IBM's ultimately un-successful assault on Windows via OS/2, one part of which appares to be to break compatibility and/or interoperability between Windows and OS/2. This is then transposed to a concern, that Microsoft today wants to create incompatibility in the Office domain, and exploit it to their advantage.
  • Of course, those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and caution is useful, however - the Novell association is via a published agreement whereby Microsoft helps to fund the development of improved interoperability between the Free Software desktop world, and Microsoft Office - which at least on the face of it appears to be the opposite of creating incompatibility.
  • Why would they do that ? and is Novell per-se evil for writing this software ? In part, it is true that having a second implementation of OOXML is helpful to improve the standard, and make it more acceptable. Given their need for that, I prefer a Free Software second implementation (available to all under the LGPLv3) instead of a proprietary alternative. Novell has different needs: to serve its customers, who have real interoperability requirements which this work helps to meet.
  • Another, interesting charge is that this creates private interoperability between only Novell and Microsoft's Office suites at everyone else' expense. Indeed by reading the repeated mention of things like "Novell OpenOffice productivity suite" you could easily be annoyed into that conclusion.
  • Of course, this is not the case. Since we cannot promise something that other people deliver - it is necessary to phrase everything in terms of an abstract Novell Office product; obviously. However, all of our code is publicly available to others under the LGPLv3. Furthermore, there is no private or special information we have on the standard or implementation beyond what is published and public.
  • There is also concern about implementing Microsoft's extensions to OOXML which are published and covered by the OSP (a hard requirement for us to touch them). This extension mechanism attempts to provide a forward and backwards compatible way of serializing both an extended version of a feature, and a compatible fall-back version. The alternative is fairly clear - breaking forward compatibility and/or dropping data on the floor. Implementing this, unarguably, makes a Free Office suite's interop. seem better, for all the cases where a feature is not supported, and the extended object not edited. Presumably that lets us compete more effectively, until such time as the last feature gaps can be closed. For feature gaps in the reverse direction using the same extension mechanism can potentially let MS Office users edit parts of an OOXML document, without destroying ODF specific features embedded in the document. It is not clear to me that the alternatives - loosing data, or permanantly freezing the feature set are better for anyone.
  • There are a few amusing pieces - of the Pope-is-Roman-Catholic variety: that Microsoft wants partners to show up to and participate in related standards forums for example. Emphatically, Novell's presence does not imply uneqivocal support for any standard, and we give our candid opinion, and demos of Free Software in those situations. Finally, there is the historic chestnut about bing.com returning no hits for openoffice; which appears to have been related to a robots.txt configuration issue on openoffice.org, rather than some hideous, partisan, product specific censorship attempt.
  My personal conclusion: an interesting article (for me at least) on the Windows and OS/2 background. However, making Free Software interoperate with proprietary products is not per-se evil. Though it brings some risks it brings enormous benefits to our customers and users. Our position on formats is unchanged with ODF as our default file format, and abstaining on the OOXML standardisation issue.
• Papers committee IRC meeting for GUADEC/Akademy 2011, Lydia over in the evening.

• Up early, dealt with the babes - mini lie in for J. Then off to Ickworth House (a National Trust wonder) - for a family / focus group testing of their new entertainments for all the family for their renovated basement. Lots of fun making mince-pies, examining old clothing, household equipment, lantern making and so on.
• Off to the lake for some fine sledging action, the first ever for most of the littlies. Back in the afternoon - babes watched a DVD, while I set-too soldering together the recently arrived Reprap Arduino Mega Pololu Shield (or RAMPS for short). The 'shield' bit means it sits over, and plugs into a bog-standard Arduino Mega, and wonder of wonders - packs all the electronics (modulo the odd opto-end-stop board), into a single, small sweet package. Quite a contrast to the five separate PCBs required previously.
• Prodded mail in the evening, glad to see that the LibreOffice OIN announcement happened, and that RC2 is tagged, and presumably cooking.

• Up very late indeed; J. having handled babes. Large roast lunch, out to practise the Church christmas / nativity playlet with the kids. Lots of paternal stiffening of N.'s spine for violin solo action - which she did well, and was please (after the fact).
• Party tea, wandered around enjoying people's company and a sequence of excellent cheese & onion wraps. Back. Got the babes into bed, prodded at the web, pottered around doing not much, sleep.

• Up early; packed everyone into the car, and set-off (minus mobile) to Horsenden. Hit snow eventually, which got deeper and thicker, until we were doing some impressive wheel-spinning action at Ellesborough, finally got through to Sue & Clive's despite some hair raising skidding action into their road.
• Had some lunch, dithered, but eventually set out for the Christmas steam train (with Father Christmas), again via some extraordinary slewing and cornering action - apparently the trick is high gear, and not slowing down. Babes suitably pleased, back to Sue & Clives.
• Consulted weather forecast, highways agency, minimum nightly temperatures, traffic loads, the good Lord, etc. set off with some trepidation at 5pm.
• Decided big, flat roads are really the way to go; got to Aylesbury with no trouble, tried to take the A41 south east to the M25: shut by the police, no problem - tried the north east road: A418 - also shut; wow. Eventually escaped north on the A413 to Buckingham. Never seen a car leaning gently against a hedge before showing off its underneath. Had to suddenly overtake a number of lamers who had decided (somehow) to slow down on the hills - and thus got stuck; concerning. Eventually made it to Buckingham, then onto Milton Keynes, by now driving skills on ice improving. Eventually over the M1, and home after only five hours - thank God.

• To work, call with Fridrich, prodded mail and code changes, tried to work out when I need to be at work for misc. meetings during my vacation (Monday until Jan 5th). Long conf-call in the morning, booked vacation. Up-loaded Bernhard's nice new download icons to the website.
• Lunch, poked my cygwin mv dir1 dir2 dir3 newdir command - still running after four hours; it has somehow managed to move only 850 files, all to the same partition / drive; magic, sigh.
• Prodded at scp2 stuff and make_installer.pl with Fridrich, Tor, Petr & Rene until late. Amazed that pre2par.pl took 55 seconds for a simple file on my fast laptop; to turn two ~1000 line files into a 25k line file; turns out it was doing endless re-parsing of both of them. Cleaned, shrunk the code, now it takes two seconds the net compile time of scp2/ went from 11m54 secs to under 3 minutes for identical output. Meanwhile the lads got Windows help-packs building beautifully - great news. Discussed a vcl re-factor with Norbert, seems my vtable slot counter is useful after all.

• To work, via cleaning up after a poor ill H. Plugged away at build testing - finally got around to some of the backlog of administration: updating travel details for the US visa waiver program eg. Lunch.
• More admin, Novell LibreOffice team meeting. Pleased to see that Monty is implementing an LGPL client library for MariaDB / MySQL, neat.
• Did some review on the new layout work that Ricardo committed; fun.

• H. ill still, prodded mail; found the missing link in my incremental win32 (server 20078rc2) build, and suspended/aborted a few scp2 builds. Turns out that is a bad idea - ended up with a file in the (local) file-system un-owned by anyone; and totally resistant to deletion / movement even by the administrator: "You do not have permission to view this object's security policies, even as an administrative user" - apparently re-booting is the canonical solution to this problem; ho hum. The moral is clear: pray harder before building, and/or don't kill processes when they are busy creating files (or something).
• Salivated briefly over an Herringbone Geared Extruder design, and back to mail and build testing.
• Lunch; amused to get a translation of my paper on the problems with Copyright Assignment from Paul Bukhovko into Belorussian, fun.
• Corporate conf call; Jared's staff, more wrestling with the nastiness in make_installer.pl until late.

• To work, lots of mail. Plugged away at windows branding builds some more - what an hideous platform to build anything on; roll-on cross-compilation.
• Reviewed a patch from Kohei, and remembered Caolan's great work with unit testing; knocked up a nice calc unit test for this piece of code. Managed to get my build working, and nsis tweaks in. It turns out to be by far the easiest to test locale specific code using wine: LANG=pt_BR.UTF-8 wine LibreOffice.exe is infinitely less click, re-boot, didn't work, click, click, ... than Win32; nice.
• Lydia over for dinner; plugged away at misc build related bugs into the evening; interspersed with reprap wiring. got my ATX PSU to give me power with a paperclip to short pins 15, 16.
• It seems I had foolishly assumed that when the DC motor drivers failed on the extruder controller they would fail safe ( 'the smoke has already come out' ). Pleased to see my first ever example of a small area of glowing silicon through the (smoking) plastic packaging, amazing; perhaps best to de-solder that before ongoing work (it turned out that driving a stepper motor with two DC motor drivers was a lame idea anyway).

• Up early; down to work, read mail; lots going on. Merged psankar's nice bootchart2 patch to do cumulative I/O rendering, should be rather useful for all those I/O limited bootcharts.
• Did some more size analysis of LibreOffice on Windows; still lots of duplicated licenses, poked at a weirdo dependency problem as well - missing duplicated filenames in a makefile (sadly). Clarity.
• Prodded at the .ott template files; we have 33Mb of zipped files for all the languages, and we blow this up yet further by duplication while building the installer to ~71Mb. Amusingly if you unzip those files, and cat them together, we get 25Mb gzipped, or 2.3Mb (two point three) lzma'd, hmm, quite a jump.
• Calls with JP, then Kendy & Thorsten, back to compression research.
• Installed openSUSE 11.3 on my reprap controlling netbook, so I could build the latest version of repsnapper - its nice to have the required software pieces; printed out a few PrusaMendel pieces, though the slide bushings defeated me.

• Up late; somewhat rested. Off to NCC, Tony preached. Back for a quiet lunch, and sogging with babes.
• Lots more reprap wiring action; finally managed to discover repsnapper's foibles with object rotation and get the Z opto endstop spring printed. Switched the UI rotation units to degrees not radians. Printed an object on my acrylic bed (a thin sheet on ply) for the first time - wow, it stuck down so hard I could hardly remove it: perhaps this is the real solution to my warping problems.

• Up early, Claire & Keziah arrived to baby-sit/play. Set off with J. and Ellis, to drop car for Tyre changes in Cambridge (apparently near the RedHat office).
• Bereavement counselling discussion / notes / outline, discussion of loss etc. interesting stuff. Bespoks lunch, bid 'bye to the fantastic group of guys we've been learning with & missed the last session to go to family party.
• Arrived at Tim & Julie's - rather a mobile-phone, and internet black-spot - thank-God for thick client mail and office clients. Eventually got onto the TDF steering call, interesting but length, finally back to the party.
• Enjoyed catching up, albeit too briefly with Julia's wider family, good to see Bruce looking well after his stroke recently. Julia's cousin Georgina (amazingly) worked for Attachmate seven years ago, until the Workload IQ merger, most curious.
• Home; worked away at RepRap electronics wiring / stepper motor fixing, etc. not confident that underneath the machine is a great place for it, so tacked on the side near two related stepper motors. Looking forward to the much simpler Polou electronics arriving.
• Listened to a great Gordon sermon on Gideon's men and fear vs. faith; v. interesting; then some of a history of the world in one hundred objects - while re-orienting the Y axis ( just before afixing the opto-end-stop, discovered I had assembled it the wrong way around; annoying.

• Up early, dropped the babes off at School. Off into London to visit Intel, cake and coffee, lunch with Matthew & the lads, great to catch up with them all. Onto find The Park Lane (Sheraton) Hotel, via the Dorchester (that is actually on Park Lane), meetings. Train back to Cambridge.
• Pleased to read Henri's nice blog on open projects.
• Popped into Collabora's office for coffee, warmth and table football with Sjoerd on the way; then Taxi to counselling course. Met up with the wife. Last session with interesting prison counsellor, on depression. Back with Ellis, relieved Laura's kind baby-sitting, up late round the fire with some cider & Ellis.

• Up; poked mail quickly, added a few more Easy Hacks - we seem to have a good set of free ones just now.
• Nursed test Win32 builds with Fridrich; Sebastian helped shrink theme wasteage. Lunch, and out to Hannah's Christmas play - very good fun, you can do more with the older children.
• Back, it seems we saved ~70Mb on the LibreOffice Windows install size; down to 269Mb (with sixty languages) from 342Mb, and still plenty more to save. Re-spun my Linux 3-3 build, a great reminder of how things were so much worse tooling wise only a month ago.
• LibreOffice tech steering call minutes, looking good.
• Reviewed and committed a nice patch removing the need for 150 duplicate 'missing icon' icons which should help our install size in the future, a little.

• Up early; dug through mail, tried to respond sanely to much of it. Back to digging into packaging, quick interview. Lunch, more mail thrash, and scp2 prodding, cleaned up the license duplication and the .otp mess, and dunged out the repositories and build structure a fair bit too, fun. Call with Jared, then with JP. Dinner, Clarity. Up late, plugging away at Windows builds.

• Up early read mail, finally caught up on the bylaws thread: starting to look really good. Reprap pieces arrived (Christmas presents) from Joachim's Reprap Source - beautiful.
• Added a run-time gtk+ version check to the quickstarter; fun. Compiled cabextract, and started digging into cab file size breakdowns. Lunch.
• Really pleased to read Jim Getty's detailed explanation of why my Groupwise IM connection reliably dies (due to latency) when I am doing a large download in parallal; something I had often intended to investigate. Time to start the Free Front For Forcing Functioning inFormation Flow ?
• Spent some considerable time analysing our Win32 .cab files to find out exactly which silly duplications of data were the most important size-wise. Lots of fruitful investigation.
• Lydia over in the evening, soldered up reprap opto end-stops and made up cabling while talking with her and J.

• Read mail, got the latest LibreOffice master snapshot built while doing so. Really encouraged to see RC1 announced, great work from the team, testing much appreciated. Quick call with Kendy, more mail processing.
• Reviewed / committed some patches. Chat with Fridrich, more mail thrash / processing. Installed LO RC1 to the system as well from Petr's snapshots. Lunch, call with JP.
• Merged the port to gtk+ 2.10 of LibreOffice's systray code from Christopher Backhouse, nice to remove another tiny library (libegg) from the linking picture, a clean build (only 54 minutes) and all is well.
• I loathe the idea, propagated in the media that Assange, for whatever his moral failings, is an 'outlaw' - as far as I can see he is innocent until proven guilty by a Jury of his peers and is worthy of all the protections of British Law.
• Did my counselling assignment homework, and mailed it off.

• M. ill in the night, nose-bleeds etc. poor dear. Took the others to church; back for a big lunch with Lydia, Tony & Janice, and Peter & Dianne.
• Out to see Solomon & Peace, replaced a fuse, explained the function of convecting radiators, condensing boilers, and prodded a malfunctioning door catch. Tried at great length to find a rough price for gas by the cubic metre: here it is, approx 11kwH in a cubic metre, so ~66p for the first bits, then ~33p afterwards (in todays money).
• Home, bathed babes, put them to bed. Plugged away at repsnapper a little, it seems it has moved to here. Updated old svn/git repos to have a README pointing to there, committed some cleanups to triangle processing.
• Gordon sermon on Gideon in the evening, extremely encouraging.

• Up earlyish; breakfast, out with the two littlest babes, first to the toy-shop (M. got to the end of her sticker chart) - to buy yet-another Tiara (a toy of incredible fragility). On to Homebase to get some acrylic, Ridgeons to try to find magnetic secondary glazing sealer tape, and a Kwik-fit.
• Home, lunch; set too cutting acrylic into shapes to fit over the loose leaded windows in our hall, through which the wind blows. Got that fixed up; replaced broken picture-frame glass too for J.
• Sucked into watching 'Night(mare?) at the Museum' - with the babes, seemingly telling them in advance it was 'very scary' had a positive result: they didn't think it was, good.
• Babes to bed; played with the reprap; cutting ply to shape, soldering fragments of bread-board to cables to get wires connected, all sorts of fun. Bed late.

• Up early. Amused that Wikileaks now has a DNS via twitter feature. Interested in this cautionary tale of the woes of Corporate Trademark ownership. Further confirmation of the intrinsic richness of the Mono environment was found in its Lake. How did we manage to wedge so many evolutionary metaphores into one project ?

  ... Mono Lake is also home to one of the most productive aquatic ecosystems on earth ... Mono Lake water has an unusual chemical brew of sodium, carbonates, sulfates, borates, and even trace amounts of arsenic. Yet, it is astonishingly productive. Sure, you won't find fish, and most aquatic life on earth can't survive in Mono's waters, but if you think it's toxic, spending an hour at the shoreline during summer will tell you a strikingly different story.

  Sad to see the UK Department of Health not grasping their desparate need for Free Software.
• Interesting paper on how to grow your project into an extra-large one, that I suppose re-states the recieved wisdom of truly open-development. Found the nice riastats website pretty - though amusingly you need flash to see, essentially a static image with mouseover tooltips.
• Lunch, reviewed draft TDF bylaws in the wiki, looking good, file un-paid leave. Quick call with interviewee Joseph Powers who has been doing some great work on LibreOffice. Plugged away at reviewing and merging old patches.

• Up early, took babes to school - sliding on the ice here and there in the car. Plugged up every available spare netbook in the area to beef up my icecream build farm; thirteen CPUs (or hyper-threads) going at it all at once - nice quick LibreOffice builds.
• Dug through the surface of the mail queue, fixed configure options so we have the best / easiest defaults wherever possible for new hackers (once again). Great to see Ricardo involved again, hacking away at VCL / layout. Joe wrote a nice review of our progress yesterday it seems.
• Plugged away at Gert's fun OLE object export patch; merged it as an experimental feature for now. Chewed over java bits, it seems we can default to without-java if Kendy's fix really nailed the deluge-of-annoying-you-need-a-jre warnings bug (rather a pre-requisite). Scratched head to produce more easy hacks to be done.
• Did some more python learning / training with Hannah in the evening - not sure if it is the best place to start (urgh), but still I started with BBC BASIC, and then moved onto an assembler-up understanding of the stack, so perhaps it will work out; got the concept of a variable embedded (somehow). LibreOffice call in the evening worked late.

• Up early; packed babes off to school. Mike kindly took me to TEAM again; more Bible Overview goodness on the Law, then onto Revelation, and finally some interesting talk prep pieces.
• Appalled by the ham-fisted approach to Wikileaks advocated by Sarah Palin (hunt him down like [sic.] Osama Bin Laden), and Mike Huckabee - who seems both to have discovered that a (non-US national) can commit treason against a country not his own. Huckabee should have more sense - as a minister, the death penalty, if permissible at all (and there are many practical problems with it), should surely be confined to first degree murder. Perhaps the more worrying thing is that (despite appearances) I don't believe either of these guys are idiots - ie. that they must speak for a very size-able proportion of the (highly polarised) North American constituency - what saddens and interests me is that, often, they speak for the people who have the most irrational (to my mind) fear and distrust of their own government / Beast. So - why, when that same government has egg on its face - are they rushing to prop it up so, with such ridiculous rhetoric ? my suspicion: raw national pride - the death penalty for attracting some reflected silliness to the wider USA.
• Home, and out to the smaller children's christmas play; great execution: singing, wandering on and off stage etc. message-wise a travesty of Norman Vincent Peale proportions.
• Back home, and to work - checked out the new LibreOffice bootstrap / build system, fixed a few issues, and left it building.

• To work; let battle commence - more NSIS digging, trying to understand the madness in the msi output. Uncovered a nice screed of cut/paste perl coding in the NSIS template substitution code, evaporated 80 lines, while adding my feature. Proctologist might be interested to read the NSIS StrStr implementation, (bottom of page) just cut/paste into your code - it is -that- beautiful.
• Joe wrote a great review of sadness in 2010.
• Finally managed to get most of the branding issues fixed; plugged away at an LXF column on systemd. Sorry to see the pattern of claiming corporate ownership of a community continue elsewhere with Hudson, though I'm not a Java fan.

• Up early; snow - and power cut knocked back the heating; cold, adjusted that; packed babes off to school with J. in the car.
• Dug backwards through mail; lots more patches merged over the weekend, encouragingly; got some Windows credentials for rdesktop setup, and prodded at NSIS on a machine in Provo. Repeatedly appalled by the NSIs scripting language; any language that requires this macros vs. functions page, is unbelievable. NSIS: combining the readability of assembler, with the linguistic elegance of Visual Basic. Since there are virtually no useful built in functions - you get to copy/paste big chunks of impenetrable (and unreliable) assembler-like code into your 'script'. Words fail me to describe the incredible life-sink that is NSIS, another day robbed from me debugging this total, unsustainable junk.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, back to the work. Back to battling the evil NSIS, added ever more debugging output for good measure. Did lots of admin, Clarity, status reports etc. amid the hacking, pondered an LXF column.

• Up early, to let J. sleep. Dealt with babes. Out to NCC, Claire speaking in / out to the creche, and ended up with a sleeping baby on me somehow.
• Back for a quick lunch; J. out to visit Bruce (recovering from a minor stroke); played with the babes, cooked dinner, failed to kill all consuming it (somehow).
• Bathed babes, put them to bed. Admired the Prusa Mendel which seems incredibly superior, in terms of removing redundant complexity, to the stock version; and looks great in action. Pleased to note that my wooden repstrap y-axis fixings are very similar to his plastic ones. It is awesome to remove a vast number ~all of the bearings (and even use plastic printed bearings in their place), along with a huge number of different screw-fixings of different sizes and lengths, and several lengths of studding from the design while keeping it functional. I love the idea of stacking eg. vertex components vertically on a single bed too - to break them apart before assembly; neat.
• Listened to a rather interesting sermon on Gideon's fleece; sleep.

• Lie in; breakfast, pottered around poking at the reprap. Discovered that my grounding issue was down to getting the fixings into the z-leadscrew-base the wrong way up, such that they projected below the machine, and thus horribly distorted it when resting; nice. Lunch, Sandy popped over to take H. and M. out for cake making, and various treats at her house.
• Re-assembled machinery variously, with the help (or otherwise) of E. and M. ending up with a Mendel that at least moves smoothly and reliably in each axis (at last). Still wondering when to make the transition and break the working repstrap to make the reprap work.
• Helped tidy up, clean etc. Hannah, Nick, Joni (& Sandy) over for dinner - really lovely to see them again; with an added power-cut for amusement value (luckily the meal was cooked by then). Up late talking & enjoying their company.

• Poked at mail; purchased a heated bed and some PLA for my repstrap - perhaps, together these will solve my warping problems, and allow me to finish my reprap (who knows); Christmas cometh but once per year. Reviewed and merged a number of nice patches and cleanups from various hackers.
• Discovered that upgrading my glib/gio broke default associations, by which I mean getting the wrong browser for links, and Evolution not spawning mailto:'s correctly. Dug /usr/share/applications/defaults.list out of the strace, and fixed it manually.
• Posted the minutes from the LibreOffice tech steering call yesterday. Amused by the Red Molotov T-shirt with the legend: Fat people are harder to kidnap; amusing. Elizabeth on her own initiative decided it was time to get Daddy for lunch, only for me to discover (after dis-engaging) it was an non-maternally-authorised interruption, fun.
• Out to Derek Llewelyn's funeral, at All Saints; a man of great faith & an inspiration to many it seems.
• Chat with Thorsten, quick dinner, out to the School Faire - with the three smallest babes, met a 'Father Christmas' beard-alike, returned fiscally milked. Reviewed some patches - I love to remove these chunks of old, commented code beginning // why do we need the code below ?.
• Dusted off, and setup my Win32 machine again - it has been quite some moons since it was needed. Dug at Win32 / NSIS scripts, bitmap branding, and so on: what fun, the things we do to make Brazilians happy...

• To work; dug through the mail, wrote up an interview, prodded at patches we had overlooked here & there. Dug at UK charity law issues a little. Reviewed and merged a few more patches, dug at some icon work.
• Poked at auto-migration from older versions, to disable it happening multiple times; if migration fails it leaves a 'MIGRATED' stamp file around to stop it happening again. Ever wondered why OO.o doesn't launch when you start it - that would be the migration, then silent exit: you get to re-start it manually; shame.
• Nice interview with new LibreOffice hacker Norbert (shm_get) got published; Cor Nouws is working hard at the next ones already. Hopefully getting to know people helps to build those invaluable human linkages of which a community is composed.
• Reviewed the financial situation in the evening, and closed out Towry Law investments, since they are impossibly lamer than Edward Jones. Now need some good, cheap way of buying exchange traded funds to avoid paying 3% on purchase, to those clowns, and a %age per year - rather a large chunk of the return.

• Up early; helped with babies. Quick mail check, Mike kindly took me to Cambridge. Lots of study, good talk on the Old Testament Law, then double session on Revelation - much more interesting, and less odd than it seems to many (so far). Gave my talk. Amused, on comparing notes that an identical discussion over missing pieces in my 'Big Idea' occured with Mike, but with a totally different thrust; felt vindicated in my defence. Home, dinner, put babes to bed while J. counselled, filed time off.
• Tried to catch up with admin etc. Interested by the mooting of rolling releases; I look forward to seeing how that pans out. Pleased to see Alex's gtk+3 / HTML5 demo - interesting. Got my eleventh anniversary of joining Novell E-mail; that's quite a while. Worked late, interspersed by comforting a sad Elizabeth coughing & crying in her sleep.

• Lie in, feeling poorly, rumbling chest infection on the up. Slogged through mail, Lunch. JP's staff, misc. conference calls of varying interestingness, more mail, boggled at my mobile phone bill, conf-calls from America are worse than possibly imagined.
• Up lateish, prepping a talk on Genesis 2:18-25, lots of careful reading, and re-reading of the text in misc translations, the context, digging out the structure etc. fun.

• Up too early; packed babes off; to work. Plugged through the un-merged patch backlog, lots of interesting things, and starting to get some good questions on the list as well. Really great to see the Beta 3 announcement with nearly one-hundred-and-twenty individuals contributing code since Beta 2.
• Novell announced their merger agreement with Attachmate - a company with one quarter of our employees, and over a third of our revenue; interesting, if the shareholders approve it, we will go private. People, it seems, like to E-mail me asking me what this means: and since I have no idea this just fills my inbox for no good purpose. What I do know is that Software Freedom is the future. If I was a believer in efficient markets, I might speculate that the gap between our stock price now, and the offer price might reflect any vestigal uncertainty as to whether the shareholders, regulators etc. will approve the deal. The SEC filing is quite interesting too.
• Saddened to read the latest hand chopping story out there (apparently with diagram: where to chop), quite a contrast to Proverbs 6:

  People do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy his hunger when he is starving.

  and the penalty to pay back some low multiple of the financial pain in restitution. Quite how depriving someone of their livelihood is a proportionate response I have no idea, and the very idea of deterrence: by acting un-justly in this case we will scare others away sounds like the cure is far worse than the illness.
• Filled out Clarity timesheets; hopefully Attachmate don't require extensive time and motion reporting. Conf call with Frank in the afternoon.
• Pushed out a new bootchart2 release with lots of fixes; apparently it is in OpenSUSE, Debian, RedHat, Maegia, Exherbo and presumably elsewhere now download, and NEWS.
• J. off counselling, and plugged away at the mail / task backlog, prodded at a series of questions for Norbert.

• Lie in, off to St Lukes in the morning - Baptising Charlie's new daughter, good to meet up with old friends.
• Back via nibbles purchasing for a monster family lunch for fourteen, enjoyed getting to know Joe a writer and journalist.
• Packed, drove the babes back home; put them to bed, unpacked, sleep.

• Up early, entertained babes while J. went Christmas shopping. Attended the mele myself, got one gizmo for a daughter, missing another two.
• Back via the playground, a fine lunch with the family though Ilona off at a baby shower. M&D set off to help set-out Barbara's sixtieth birthday bash. Watched Cinderella with the babes, feeling simply exhausted somehow.
• Out in the evening to the party, good to meet up with Andy & meet his interesting fiance Olivia. Fine food, folk-dancing, and family - drove back with Rob, Ilona & a boot-full of balloons for little girls. Bed late.

• Up early, dug through the mail mountain. Lots of exciting things happening - quite apart from the deluge of code still going into LibreOffice. Fridrich merged the newest libwpd code changes to improve our WordPerfect filters, requiring some manual fixes to the build (we should improve our dependencies there). Will Lachance's nice announcement of libwpd-0.9.0 has a great message, as well as screenshots of the new features:

  it's quite unlikely that OpenOffice.org WordPerfect support will advance unless (1) someone volunteers to do it and (2) Oracle drops their copyright assignment policy. The chances of these things happening seem rather low to me. My personal recommendation would be to switch to LibreOffice as soon as the first production version is released. I expect it to rapidly overtake OpenOffice.org in functionality due to its more open participation model.

  Personally, I'm more hopeful that Oracle will see the light, but its great to have Will's support. These improvements (the majority of which are Fridrich's work incidentally) should be included in our 3.3 release shortly.
• Got a nice bootchart patch from Harald, and then a set of four more adding standardized (isn't that a great word!) systemd service files; made him a co-maintainer. Roll on the systemd future where we will be able to maintain and update our hooks in one place, rather than trying to tweak umpteen per-system init scripts. Hopefully in a dracut'ized world we could even do that for initrds too (which would be great). Great to see Harald's enthusiasm, and ideas for graphing (eg.) I/O latency per-app, which should be much more useful than CPU for disk based machines. Harald created a new #bootchart2 channel on irc.freenode.net for the cool go-faster-kids to hang out in.
• Went through the business cards from recent conferences. Added some more Easy Hacks: python gdb helpers, and a simple macro cleanup. It would be great to have some enterprising hacker, and not-yet-hacker to take on those two respectively.
• Got bogged down in more mail, legal pieces etc. Hannah's church friends over for a club in the evening, quick dinner, and drove south to my parents'. Got the sleeping babes unloaded, and re-loaded into their beds. Met new relations Dave & Maureen.

• Up early; taxi with an interesting Nokian to the airport. Wandered questing for Guy, met another Nokian while finding breakfast. Plane back, met Rob + other Collaborans, taxi back with them to admire the new office, lunch, train home.
• Checked mail, caught up with family, bed early.

• Up early; to the conference - signed Christian up for a Wayland un-conference talk in his absence. Disappeared into the free-Lenovo-laptop melee for a while. Back for the (interesting) end of Christian's talk.
• Gave a LibreOffice talk, sparse attendance but some good questions and positive feedback, kicked out, backed to the hotel and out for an abhortive wander, then dinner with Mark, Peter, Guy, Aaron & Gary.
• On to the match; my first football match ! it turned out that (perhaps) it is a game that has a useful role in building the ability to accept delayed gratification in the masses: or put another way - almost nothing seems to happen most of the time. Managed to get excited at the end, when Ireland were playing a really offensive game to try to equalize.
• Wandered off, bid 'bye to the lads, and via a pizza place, to bed.

• Up early, arrived at the conference, grabbed some food in passing on the way to a pair of Telepathy talks.
• Pleased to see Prince William getting engaged, God Bless the future King (unless a better King comes first). Interested to see that apparently confessing: "I am a sinner" - is supporting evidence for stoning you to death (for adultery), but I'm a inveterate sinner and ingrate too. Knowing nothing about the case - I have to wonder: where is the man ? surely it takes two to commit adultery ? not a new blind-ness I suppose cf.: John 8, who casts the first stone ?
• Enjoyed a fine lunch, and some great talks - on KOffice, zypper etc. Tried to catch up with mail, and appointments.
• Off to the Guinness storehouse in the evening - lots of interesting displays, people, food and music; excellent. Back to the hotel late, up rather talking to Guy, Rob and Christian.

• Up shockingly early, off to Stanstead, met a couple of MeeGoCon attendees on the way. Enjoyed some of the keynote demos. The technical steering duo were interesting - Chris Schlaeger announcing AMD getting involved in MeeGo (via up-stream apparently). The second Question was: where is LibreOffice in MeeGo ? which is encouraging.
• Pleased to see Mageia supporting LibreOffice.
• Somehow ended up topping and tailing talks in the Vavasour suite; good stuff. Clarity, unpaid-leave accounting etc. Out for dinner with some great Intel guys in the evening, understood Wayland a little more, and pleaded with Christian (semi successfully) for restraint on texture memory chew. Bed late.

• Up early; J. drove us all to near Reading for Isabelle's party - a great family bash. On to see David Mansergh at his home, enjoyed a too brief visit; and back home late. Listened to a rather interesting talk on 'The God Delusion'.

• Up early, Jill baby-sat all four; out to training - lots of interest during the day, some extraordinary role-plays. Back in the afternoon.
• Played with babes, Fish & Chip dinner; packed them to bed; back to work - wrote LXF column, on-line checkin, etc.

• Prodded mail; really, really pleased to see Samsung doing the right thing - using ARM's Mali 3D core for their phones. Anything must be better than Imagination which appear to have an utter contempt for Free Software drivers that goes beyond ridiculous. Imagination FWIW are the root disaster behind many mobile phones 3D hardware as well as Pulsbo and other miracles such as Intel CPUs that come without full specifications, and missing programming documentation for great chunks of the silicon. Hopefully ARM will show the right way to do this with Mali, and win a lot of traction. Building key parts of your product on top of a complicated, closed, binary blob is just a disaster - how can companies ask their customers to do that ? Update: seems I jumped the gun, and Mali still has a big closed user-space blob; that sucks - fix it !
• Pleased to see Norbert reply to Roberto's curious blog; and despite being a key LibreOffice hacker who rather knows what he is on about, get told:

  "In fact these non functional changes are not a way to get people acquainted with the code - that is something that require time and dedication - but maybe a way to make more complex integrating upstream contributions."

  Interesting the certainty (from a non-developer) that doing small changes is not a way to get acquainted with the code (though in fact this is an excellent way to even learn to program: by reading first. I recall learning the syntax, and love of BBC BASIC by typing in games from magazines). The speculation of some malign intention behind trying to get more people involved which is (maybe) to make our lives more difficult in future is an odd thought indeed; why would we want to make merging changes from Oracle more difficult than necessary ? As for the sensitivity of "cutting bridges with up-stream" - from the LibreOffice side, there has always been an open invitation to Oracle to join, and the bridge chain-sawing seems to be in full swing on the other side. As for the idea that LibreOffice programming changes must be discussed and agreed (with a non-technical audience) before implementation - I'm not convinced that that is a winning strategy for attracting independent contributors to balance Oracle, Novell, RedHat etc. so we get a truly diverse and vendor neutral project. Indeed - the very idea that people who did not contribute to the code, should be controlling its ultimate ownership and licensing is fairly offensive to most developers. Having said all that Roberto makes some good points about the social dynamics; It is my hope that we would have a governance represented by a Community of Practise - ie. a meritocracy of those developing, marketing, and actively working to improve the product and project. With regard to code hackers being "a de-facto minority" - I believe we can change that, and we've made a great start thus far, if only by providing easy tasks (I dispute that these have 'very little value') so people can build confidence in having their work accepted. I completely disagree on his copyright assignment point, and I too talk to very many corporate employees at different levels; let us see who is right in the end.
• Why is it that while you have a FaceBook friend request open you cannot see more of the details of their page. It is ridiculous to have a person about whom you can see almost nothing, asking to be friends with you - surely ? How are you supposed to know if you know them ? (or if you ask that, is it too late anyway). For some reason I loathe ignoring friend requests on principle, and thus agonise over the regular friend/spam traffic.
• Managed to get my counselling coursework done finally; it is frightening to try to answer questions like "Identify areas for possible future self-development / growth" - I mean - with me, where do you start ? it looks like a cliff-face; very useful to understand such erroneous beliefs as "People ought to follow the advice I give" and the impact that believing that can have; anyhow my attempt finished with:

  It appears certain that my prior prejudice about those involved in counselling others: that they are almost uniformly emotional and relational basket-cases, is perhaps simply a reflection of their greater ability to face and talk about their failings, rather than any incipient problem in those drawn to this field

  Still developing that thesis, lets see how the marker takes it.
• Ellis arrived to stay for the counselling corse; Tally baby-sat, set off, A14 closed due to fatality ... teacher absent; drew fun pictures on the flip-chart for a while and returned. Up late talking to Ellis.

• Up early, dropped babes to school (pouring with rain). Back to prod mail, out to collect my missing build machine from the local PC doctor's - fixed a LibreOffice build bug.
• Lunch; tried to clear out the backlog of interesting looking patches. Out to a dental appointment - apparently epoxy filling of fissures is the future: certainly quick and cheapish. Sync call with JP.
• Tried to get to the Counselling coursework; but failed, bed instead.

• Slept fitfully during landing, worked on the trains back to Cambridge. Bus to TEAM, and got on with studying the Bible through a haze of tiredness.
• J. picked me up, home at last - re-united with wonderful wife, and flurry of small babies; set a master build going, dinner, and put them to bed.

• Up early, bid 'bye to a much loved Brother, and kind host. Trokked off to the office, prodded mail, out for lunch with Miguel & co.
• Rob and sub-team popped in for back-massage and back-flipping machinerisation; got to the mail and blog backlog eventually. Off to the airport, watched Prince of Persia (surprisingly good) on the plane & slept.

• Off to the GNOME Summit, caught up with JRB and Christopher. Had a fine tour of the media lab by our friendly GNOME Bengali translator, pleasing to see GNOME running on the "print your head in chocolate" controller demo - if not elsewhere. Lots of interesting ideas on show.
• Out in the evening with Federico & Aaron to see Laura, Lucia and Miguel, and out for dinner with the same later; back to watch a silly movie with Thomas for a bit, slept.

• Up in time to discover the hour has changed, and I'm an hour early for Church, prodded the web instead. Off to Missions Sunday there, really great to see Nancy from Wycliffe in Cameroon (where my wife served, short term), and several others.
• Chatted with the babes back home; lunch with Thomas, wandered the electronics shops - marvelling at the frightening realism of the immersive first-person-shooters that we have today.
• Back, via the summit to Thomas', admired some Ted talk on bonobos; and out to an Ethiopian restaurant with T, B. and Federico. On to the 'Hendrix Experience' - not packed, and with a rather middle-aged bent, but interesting music. Bed late.

• Up lateish, wandered into town, met up with Dave & Srini for lunch, and off to MIT to chat to the mob; great to see Ted again. Back to Thomas', and on to Becky (& Clay & John's) for a lovely dinner, great to see her place & relax.
• Back for a little mail & hackery in the evening, while T&B enjoyed a Divali party; sleep.

• Up early, to the venue; enjoyed a useful discussion between Lennart and Arjan, chewed over bootchart2 for dracut with Harald. Disappeared to finish slide-ware over lunch.
• Gave my talk on LibreOffice (slides). Out to the final party - lots of fun, met interesting new people - dinner with Allison from Canonical, and Chris from TI - enjoyed the hospitality,
• Met up with JRB, and off with James to Finale, via lots of tramping through streets waiting for a table, for a fine port and pleasant desert nibbles dish. Back to bed late, tired.

• Up lateish; breakfast, off to the venue; enjoyed the hall-way track. Prodded at my talk, conf call in afternoon.
• Caught up with Federico and Rob over dinner at CBC in the evening, then back to Porter for late-night slide creation frenzy.

• Up at 6:30, clearly sleepig on the plan is an excellent plan. Worked through some of the mail backlog while T. slept. Off to the conference via getting the bank to enable my card, an ATM, and a taxi (arriving somewhat late for Jonathan's talk sadly).
• On to the init-track-of-awesomeness - which went rather well, gave my bootchart2 talk (slides) and showed off the all new (on the flight) kernel startup tracing.
• Really good to see lots of old friends in the audience, great to see systemd presented well; lunch with more friends. Nice.
• To the desktop track with Federico, then long conf-call with the LibreOffice guys; met BDale in the lift and out for dinner & ice-cream with Keith and himself.
• On to the Aquarium, for some drinks, nibbles, and to admire Linus' scuba-diving skills in the main fish-tank. Thomas and Becky arrived later; home with them, bed.

• Up, breakfast, piano & violin practise with the babes; prayed - off to the train. Read and sent mail there via the miracle of 3G goodness. Met an interesting girl - Becky at security - a trancendental therapist trainee off to India for the first time; discussed life, theology etc. with her and a passing Ben, also off to the plumbers conf.
• Really sad to see Stormy go from the foundation, she will leave a big hole; I wish her all the best at the Mozilla Foundation.
• Interested to read Roberto Galoppini's blog offering buckets of technical advice. Personally, I like Roberto, who has many skills, and much to offer in many areas; however I don't believe that details of coding and growing a hacker community are core competances; lets look at some of the detail:
  • Concerns about code cleanup: - He is concerned about removing the fourth(!) boolean type (FASTBOOL) a change that is already included in LibreOffice, kindly done by a contributor (Norbert) - who has since proved to be a super-star: removing the obsolete VOS library, and digging 'Solar' mutex threading nasties out of the code. Is it really -so- dangerous to remove a single obsolete boolean type ? is it bad and silly to just clean up old code ?
  • Problems merging up-stream changes: - Roberto makes a good point, that the more changes we do, the harder it is to merge Oracle's contributions purely automatically. Having said that - this is true of any change: and being restricted to only small localised changes was a major failure of the past we don't wish to repeat. Better to have more contributors, than restrict and exclude useful changes in my view. Finally, automatic merging should not be the norm no matter who contributes the code.
  • technical debt: - this is a great concept and a good point to raise: Roberto says: coding it is good only if it doesn't increment project's "technical debt". Completely agreed ! However there is an obvious conflict between demanding reduction in technical debt, and criticising cleanups of dirty code. The blog on technical debt, has this good advice: "Refactoring is like paying down the principal" - agreed, but if even the most basic re-factoring: operations such as cleaning up legacy cruft (like FASTBOOL) are a cause for concern, what then for anything bigger ? The argument is self-stultifying here. More good advice might be: "Maintaining an application without any unit tests is like borrowing money each time you add or change a line of code." Problem is OpenOffice has few-to-zero working unit tests. LibreOffice is making adding them a priority, despite the structural problems, and we already have some working properly. Personally, I believe LibreOffice has inherited a vast technical debt from its parent, that we are finally, starting to pay down. A good blog though, worth reading.
  • Copyright assignments: - Roberto says: "While individuals may prefer to avoid the burden of copyright agreements, corporations and companies tend to like them more." - to which I can only respectfully disagree. I am sure that some individuals can cope with assigning rights - since they don't (yet) see why that is dangerous. Corporations on the other hand are really waking up to the problems here. Of course, in general, they desire other people to assign all of their rights to -them- - that goes without saying; but assigning their rights to others: that is a much, much harder sell.
  • Corporate domination: - again there are real risks here; it is fairly clear that Oracle dominates OpenOffice.org - to an extraordinary extent. By having many more companies and (ideally) encouraging and empowering masses of volunteer contributors to dilute them - I hope we will avoid this risk for LibreOffice. Having said that - creating a structure where technical decisions are driven by FUD from non-developers is not a desirable outcome.
  Clearly Roberto makes some good points about self selection of the LibreOffice steering committee - bootstrapping is hard, as is working out whom to include so that things can be moved quickly (StarDivision are past masters at endless rounds of stalling - eg. the 'Corporate Advisory (Delaying) Board'). Thus far we have made a good start in my view. We will have elections and a membership in due course. This however is a fairly normal process - many projects start out as an informal coalition of friends, and like minded people, and eventually incorporate into something formal. In summary some reasonable points amidst some less reasonable ones.
• Eventually arrived in the US, after hacking up a nice new kernel boot-graphing feature for bootchart2, and prodding at my slides for tomorrow. Chatted with Thomas, and got somewhere to sleep setup; bed.

• Up late; prodded mail, Caolan been doing an amazing job reviewing and merging patches over the weekend; read and commented on various fun packed discussions.
• Lunch; annual review with JP - interesting opportunity for introspection. Clarity, fdo account admin, backed up the laptop in preparation for Plumbers / GNOME Summit travel tomorrow - hopefully flight restrictions are not too awful.
• Heard rumours that PLA warps less than ABS when extruded; perhaps this was my mistake - thinking that it was harder than that. Printed out expense reports, and collated for posting.
• Worked late, and packed for tomorrow.

• Up early, dealt with the babes while J. slept. Off to NCC, Tony spoke. Home for a fine roast lunch with R & I.
• Slugged around the house, then out for an Alleluja party (the antidote to Halloween) at All Saints - lots of small people, dressing up as animals, doing all manner of simple games. Out to the pub with DT & Robert.
• DT, Zoe & Patrick over in the evening, crumpets and tea by the fire; talked until late with I&R - sorry to see them so infrequently; bed late.

• Breakfast; off to Sizewell beach to play with the babes - lovely sunny day. Spent lots of time moving gravel into banks to funnel the incoming waves into a deep channel up the beach - fun but exhausting.
• Back via Aldeburgh for a very pleasant fish & chip lunch. Packed, and drove home - unpacked machines. Painted the external doors with a second coat of superdeck - they still don't look an even color (most odd), but at least somewhat better. Perhaps my rolling is too aggressive.
• Robert & Ilona arrived late, helped put babes to bed, and had dinner with them. Up late talking over the world and its troubles.

• Up early, dug through Oracle's amended complaint vs. Google, sad; wrote a bit about it. Very encouraged to see Kay's nice eight second full-boot chart using systemd.
• Dug into a strange dependency problem - that magically compiles files not mentioned in the makefile in some cases. Lunch. Started prodding at the migration code, some most interesting code It is amazing what we do in the SEGV handler - taking locks, writing the document out etc. sadly of course a SEGV can happen at an inconvenient place - such that even calling pthread_cond_signal or somesuch can cause deadlock if the condition is locked - as used to happen to Mono sometimes before it was fixed some years ago.
• Dug through the wife's mind wrt. charity law, good to have an on-hand expert.

• Boggled at Oracle's amended complaint against Google. Havn't investigated the verbatim code copying claims in detail - which are of course fair game for copyright enforcement - but what interests me -far- more are the API copyright claims:
• As I wrote before, I believe that Java has rather weak patent protection, not being particularly innovative or novel really - rather a collection of existing techniques packed together into one (useful) package. With a load of design artefacts in the API that can be claimed as in some sense 'novel' though of little intrinsic technical merit. I wrote a long screed on the background to this: Why Oracle's Java Copyrights Might Matter in August. As I also wrote before: I am not a Lawyer, and have no very deep understanding of the Java situation.
• As if to offer further proof, Oracle now have amended their complaint to include this:

  Android includes infringing class libraries and documentation. Approximately one third of Android's Application Programmer Interface (API) packages ... are derivative of Oracle America's copyrighted Java API packages ... . The infringed elements of Oracle America's copyrighted work include Java method and class names, definitions, organization, and parameters; the structure, organization and content of Java class libraries; ...

  This seems (to me) to be an extraordinary claim.
• As previously discussed, if the claim is that APIs can be copyrighted, the whole world of interoperability will take a staggering step backwards into the dark ages of walled gardens, and pointless differentiation. Perhaps Oracle itself has never, and will never interoperate with others by providing drop-in replacements of a competitor's API - but it seems highly unlikely - though whether estoppal will be kind to them in future in this area is unclear.
• To me this smacks of desperation and highlights the weakness of any patent protection around Java; after all, if there was strong patent case, why include a dangerous chestnut like this? Particularly one that may provide a deeply negative precedent for the wider industry: unfortunate. Hopefully in terms of this case, on this point - that will provide a set of useful allies for Google in the form of amicus briefings on the topic.
• Some questions are left un-answered: how far does this supposed copyright protection go? as an example if you implement a Java Listener interface - you have to implement half a dozen methods with identical method names, identical parameters, definitions etc. to those in the Java listener interface - in your own code, eg. the WindowListener interface. Something like this (and my Java is rusty):
  

  class Dangerous implements WindowListener {
          public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) { do something; }
          public void windowClosed(WindowEvent e) {}
          public void windowOpened(WindowEvent e) {}
          public void windowIconified(WindowEvent e) {}
          public void windowDeiconified(WindowEvent e) {}
          public void windowActivated(WindowEvent e) {}
          public void windowDeactivated(WindowEvent e) {}
          public void windowGainedFocus(WindowEvent e) {}
          public void windowLostFocus(WindowEvent e) {}
          public void windowStateChanged(WindowEvent e) {}
  ...
  }

  Does 'copying' that listener signature give Oracle a similar copyright claim on your code? surely not. What if you implement dozens of listener interfaces all with methods matching Oracle's (supposedly copyright) API - does that give Oracle an ownership right to parts of your code? again it seems incredible. What if you used one of the hundreds of books that comes with sample code that looks just like the above to implement your code ? do Oracle own you ? What if you use the same argument names as the sample in the book ? What if you take the constructor example, and turn those argument names into member variables to store the data in (as people do) ? Then again, you can see this sort of code licensed under a BSD license from Oracle themselves; how much of the supposed API is intrinsic to existing BSD licensed examples ?
• I would point out, again, that the correct way to go about publishing standards (whether openly developed, as they should be, or not) is to submit them to ISO (and/or first ECMA) such that there can be no copyright issues, and that the language / run-time & so on can be implemented by all without fear of bogus API copyright attacks. It is also nice if there is a patent covenant for all implementers from the original creator.

• Boiled eggs and soldiers for breakfast with the babes. To work, plugged away at the E-mail and patches much of the morning. Avoiding expense reports. Lunch.
• Got 'experimental' option patch done, and set-off a new compile to test it; several hours even with the cluster. One of the most curious things about Novell is that they pay their most junior clerical administrators a programmer's salary; or - put another way, they encourage us to spend a solid three hour block of time every now a few times per year simply sorting, collating, and entering expenses into a lameish web tool. Of course, the ideal is to dis-aggregate that so it is not noticed, but somehow - on arriving back from travel, the pressure to work through not only the mail backlog from the journey, but also the exciting / new tasks from the trip is too intense, and the tiresome admin inevitably gets dropped.
• Build finally completed, pushed the new option, more mail, knocked off for dinner. Prodded at UK law in the evening a little, whole schedule knocked off track by administration.

• Up lateish, prodded the mail mound; got my icecream USB bootable build-slaves building (improved studio image to follow), boggled at Twitter's (huge, graphical) "Twitter is over capacity." whale artwork; not that I ever use the thing, so its no loss.
• Another really nice presentation in the openSUSE conference / LibreOffice track was from Jonas - who has done some great work making the OO.o formula editor properly interactive. We are merging this into LibreOffice 3.3 as the first 'Experimental' feature: ie. features you can enable at your own risk, to try out cool new things:
  
  The great news about this experimental feature is that, (of course) while insanely cool, it is not perfect yet. There are a number of easy hacks available just for this piece: starmath is quite a nice, self contained piece to get started in. Other sexy things in Jonas' work (apart from the code) was a keybinding to dump the scene graph to a file, combined with a watcher that throws up a GraphVis graph of the structures: very sweet. I wonder if there is scope for integrating GraphVis into LibreOffice in some useful / WYSIWYG way.
• Dug into some evil visibility annotation problem relating to multiply defined abstract derived class type information afflicting the split out MS word filters.
• Drove to Bruce & Anne's, and re-assembled the compile cluster quickly - cheap netbooks make quite nice, small network-attached CPUs. Discovered that Gnome Shell has a reall nice set of tagged easy hack tasks.
• Finally noticed that Florian's LibreOffice slides are up. Reviewed and merged some more patches, listened in for part of the Project Harmony call.
• First public LibreOffice steering call in the evening, worked late on this and that.

• Out for breakfast at Faith's home - great to see her, Jill, Laura and the collective menagerie of children; home to work.
• Amused to see the Canonical noise around their new desktop shell. As Dave says writing a functional shell, particularly with a team with a steep technical curve to climb, and few spare resources. Perhaps it will succeed in the long run (where by 'succeed' I mean create a really viable duplication of Gnome Shell which can run and run, dividing developers and users), and perhaps not. Intel also initially made a ton of mistakes in Moblin around copyright assignment and closed development which breed duplication etc. though they seem to be past much of that now. Arguably Novell's development of compiz itself was extremely retarded wrt. open-ness, inclusion and community nous. Making the same silly mistakes left and right is nothing new. The sad thing in the bigger picture, is to see the community of companies grow (and fail) faster than the lessons / experience of past failures percolate through to their leadership. In my experience most people totally miss the most difficult piece of software engineering: which sounds like it should be software - but is really about people - and more importantly - them working together collaboratively in a constructive, friendly, and incremental fashion. Obviously collaboration is not always possible, but in the long run - there is simply no other viable approach than to work well with others, (in my not so humble experience).
• Prodded mail, really encouraged to see VOS (a library deprecated for a ~decade) finally expunged from LibreOffice by a volunteer - Norbert Thiebaud - a hero of our time; lots of code review, chunks of testing, and a cleaner, smaller, more consistent code-base. Reviewed and merged a nice patch to use zenity during the build for systray / progress feedback.
• Amused to see Oracle's Community Council show its true colors; with everyone except Oracle guys leaving - apparently this non-entity (the council), with no actual legal existence needs change. Sadly its bylaws don't allow for Oracle unilaterally deciding that it doesn't want to hear the elected community representatives say - which is no doubt a bug. To try to portray this as a conflict of interest of the community representatives, there being no conflict of interest for the Oracle guys is a joke. Why should a divergence from Oracle's view be a conflict of interest with the community ? I guess the tactic here is to push the lunacy one level up, and claim that because Oracle owns the trademark (and refuses to donate it to the community) that per-se the 'OpenOffice.org Community' is owned by them - but this seems horribly circular. Some people have not resigned formally until 3.3 is out, since that was their stated intention I think.
• Meanwhile Miklos posted his slides from the LibreOffice track at the openSUSE conference. His talk "GSoC project: Improving RTF Export..." is available as PDF. goes over the merger of the RTF export filter into the new combined MS export filter code. This saved lots of lines of code, removed tons of duplication, and resolved a lot of bugs; a couple of larger scale links here:
  
  I am always amused to hear the insinuations of how 'un-professional' and 'low-quality' our code contributions are, but this "Anything in a document after a formula is lost when saving as RTF" bug, present in OpenOffice.org (and fixed in Miklos' work - as well as making these formulae editable by the way) takes the biscuit, though there are a large number of other great fixes included:
  
  See the talk for another dozen examples of key improvements.
• More mail, Clarity, Lunch, fixed make_installer breakage caused by including Digest::MD5 in solenv by reverting it; hmm. Debugged an f-spot problem for Stephen. Worked on mail queue, added some more easy hacks.
• Lydia and Andy over in the evening for dinner, sat by the fire for a while talking, bed late.

• Up late, plugged away at mail, call with JP, then Charles, back to JP. Prodded at patches.
• Great to see Cedric's write-up on the LibreOffice contribution statistics for the first weeks. Here is his graph of contributors:
  • Clearly lots of these contributors are pushing fixes and cleanups, not huge features (yet), indeed some of the changes are quite small, but then, of course - you would be mad to work on a huge feature without knowing if you can first get a small fix included; so this is expected. Also by cleaning the code up, we enable yet more contributors in a virtuous circle. Though the Oracle contribution seems to shrink, this is most likely just an artifact of weekly reporting, and the place in the stabilisation cycle - I don't believe they have reduced their investment here.
  • Week 38 is when LibreOffice was created - what changed then ? two similar things: Vendor neutrality, and dropping the requirement for a Copyright Assignment - otherwise that is about it. This combination adds up to true open-ness.
  • The graph does not show that we had sixty-five 'new' contributors (ie. not including existing RedHat Novell, Debian, Oracle etc. hackers), but that number becomes stale daily as new people get stuck in.
  • Really exciting times in LibreOffice, see if there is an Easy Hack you can get your teeth into today.
• It is just so wonderful to be home with the lovely wife after a week away, complete again. Reviewed and merged a nice pam removal patch, build server PSU died taking out the whole house' power momentarily - lovely smell of vaporised electrolyte; thank God for metal PSU enclosures.
• Discovered ace_dent - oh he of the LibreOffice icon compression work - is in fact supervising a PhD student on the reprap project - which is awesomeness in a nutshell. Failed to get all my administration and E-mailing pieces under control, but (mostly) dealt with the urgent patch reviewing task.

• Up lateish, met Egbert - good to catch up with him; breakfast with Fridrich and Thorsten - bid 'bye to them. Off to the office, prayed, enjoyed a rather excellent sermon from Park Street: Don't be afraid: just believe. Met a nice chap: Doc Hodges in passing.
• Out to a cafe for the afternoon with Garret - great to catch up - a pleasure sadly deferred for some years. Off to the airport. Flight; tried to get through the Economist after a frantic week. Decided (finally) to post my reprap pictures

Reprap ?

The reprap project provides the designs and drawings necessary to make a self replicating, plastic extrusion 3D printer. There is only one hitch: self replication; you need a plastic printer in order to make one. Failing that you need to bootstrap your printing world by building a 'repstrap' - something that can (just about) print the pieces.

An ad-hoc repstrap

I have knocked together such a thing from spare bits of floating timber (mostly MDF and ply-wood), which has some unpleasant calibration problems: related to thermal issues, and a lack of an adjustable, (or even better heated) bed. Nevertheless it can be persuaded to print useful things. Indeed - arguably it is easier to cut a nice, rigid sheet of MDF, than to create isometric triangles made of studding with complicated plastic verticees. Anyhow - the beastie re-uses almost all the parts: steppers, controllers, belts etc. from an existing reprap - so you can re-use them in the final product (in theory). It also requires only simple hand-tools (except for the extrusion nozzle, and knurled driver which is a pain generally). It looks a little bit like this:

Notice the horrific warping problems that come from poor print head - bed spacing calibration, and the lack of a heated bed. Still, this is one of the largest, and most problematic prints necessary to bootstrap. I have the vague intention to create useful drawings, and instructions to replicate/iterate it for others with low-precision tooling - but the joys of LibreOffice are ship-wrecking this aspiration currently. Please also note that the all-important safety goggles are just out of frame somewhere.

Making large z axis gears

One of the most fun problems of repstrap construction are the gears. After several attempts - to whittle gears from acrylic rod, to make them from MDF, and so on I hit on a near perfect solution, reproduced here for your gear-constructing pleasure.

It turns out that simple 30mm panel-pins fit rather snugly into the required timing belt, creating a nice firm fixing. So - this makes the construction of the large gears a matter of rough cutting vague disk shapes, (or better using a nice large circular cutter) four disks from thin ply-wood, then using the stencil linked below - marking out the pin locations, drilling them through (as vertically as possible) with a 0.5mm drill, and then simply pressing the pins through. This and a pair of nuts in the centre yields a beautiful, functional z drive, as modelled by my youngest, as she concentrates on reprap assembly thus:

Stencils for gears

It turns out to be remarkably hard to draw gears, or lay them out manually by measurement. Luckily most people have a phenomenally accurate ink-jet printer. Thus simply print out this file: gears.odg - clearly using LibreOffice if you don't have it. Then use a bradawl to make holes to enlarge with a drill in the right positions.

Making stepper gears

These smaller gears present a real problem for ply-wood - which would just crack and split, and not provide enough purchase on the shaft of the stepper. After some initial semi-functional attempts with some aluminium, I discovered that the perfect material for small pin gears is near to hand, and luckily is stocked in your kitchen, it looks like this:

Naturally, it is only a matter of explaining to a suitably patient wife, her desparate need of a new chopping board, and the invaluable nylon is procured. To satisfy yourself that it is indeed a wonder material, try driving a panel pin into it 5mm from the edge, and then breaking it out. Attack the chopping block with a junior hack-saw or some such device, to make an octagonal piece of suitable diameter. Again use the bradawl, stencil, and 0.5mm drill as above. Drill a larger central hole, which should be of a slightly smaller diameter to the drill shaft (which should have flats filed onto it). Simply 'drift' (ie. wallop with a hammer) the nylon onto the shaft for a fool-proof fix. Eventually you end up with something beautiful like this:

Why bother ?

Hopefully, after much more wood hackery, adjustment, suffering, remedial medical treatment and so-on you can finally produce a working 3D printer, and hence something actually worthwhile. While this is only a prototype - and died on the first attempt of a lawyer to bend it, the full (more solid) version has resisted the attempts of a long line of hackers in their eagerness to break the end off; enjoy:

Of course, you really need to use RepSnapper on openSUSE for controlling that sort of thing.

• Woken by a text message, having somehow missed the alarm. Rapid dressing, off on a walking tour of Nurnberg - lead by Stefan Behlert - who turned out to be an expert tour-meister. Enjoyed the sights of this beautiful inner city.
• Sausages in a bun, then off to find some steak. Most impressed to discover Miklos had hacked up a German comment detector overnight, using the OO.o built-in language-guessing code. Hopefully it is not be generally useful for other projects, but invaluable if you have an in-code language problem.
• Off to the office to hack with the lads; worked over some Calc issues with Kohei again, merged some code; dragged from the hacking for dinner (Japanese) with the remaining team members, and back for drinks before sleep.

• Off to the conference venue in a taxi with Mathias & Alan. Enjoyed Gerald's talk, then on to Florian's opening LibreOffice talk, brainstorming / BOF on features with Thorsten.
• Fridrich's (well attended) Win32 / build-service talk, back to the excellent talks from Miklos & Jonas - most impressed with their progress, and (reading the code later) the quality of the work.
• Caught up with journalist friends before heading back to the office, by bus with the lads - out to eat - at the same restaurant with the team, stayed up rather late talking of this & that.

• Up, breakfast with the lads; out to the office, chewed mail a bit, chat with Dave. Off to the conference centre, spent lots of time talking to people, with a snatched lunch in between.
• On to Lennart & Kay's systemd BOF - exciting to see so many interested people, new features in action; and the calibre of the attendees.
• Back for the evening party; sadly missed the food, but spent lots of time talking to the great people we have around the place. Back to some typing very late in the evening, while people hacked at slide-ware for the next day.

• Up, breakfast with the lads; off to the conference with Lubos. Caught up with Andrew, gave him the stage for the Smeegol talk ( since he does all the work it seems only fair ), nice talk.
• Interview with a pair of friendly journalists, quested for Lubos, back to the office, and out for Thai food with the team. Much discussion, charts, movie clips, discussion & fun. Pizza and spreadsheet internals with Kohei (to aid digestion).
• Lennart, Kay, Alex & Federica arrived, caught up with them, and the latest, sexiest bits in systemd. Bed late.

• Up truly early - 4am, staggered to the coach, wandered through check-in and security; used beautiful Android ethernet / 3G tethering to be productive at the airport, reviewing patches, setup another couple of git accounts, and mail.
• Finally saw that the great honour of a Plumbers Conf closing keynote got announced: "The wonderful world of LibreOffice" - with particular reference to plumbers: ie. a bus-load of low-level grot, tooling and fun. Of course, what with the Plumbers conf being insanely cool, it is sold out - so prepare to sell your home, to be able to afford your tickets on the blackmarket in Boston.
• Caught the plane, seated next to a friendly journalist; met yet another as I got off - great guys going to the openSUSE conference, shared a Taxi to the hotel.
• Off to the office, wandered the halls harassing the innocent who failed to escape in time; we have some great guys. Plugged away at some numerical tasks, and then out for lunch with the Czech lads.
• Back, roadmap plotting, misc. meetings, more and more Novell LibreOffice team people arrived, out for dinner in a very cosy place for a fine German meal, bed late after a re-assuring call with Andrew.

• Prodded mail, interested to read Bradley's heated piece on Open Core, also known as 'The valuable[sic] MySQL model'. In my view this model leads, almost inevitably, to community dysfunction, and total corporate dominance of whatever piece it is applied to; perhaps I am wrong, time will tell.
• Booked coach for 4:40am tomorrow - ouch, still really looking forward to the OpenSUSE conference, meeting up with the attendees, and the LibreOffice guys to plan the future.
• Lunch with Lottie, Claire popped over after that. Back to a call with Kendy. Spent a good while reviewing another huge patch set removing bus-loads of non-compiled code from LibreOffice - heavy reading indeed. Chat with Dave Neary to brighten the tedium.
• Annoyed by this somewhat false dichotomy being presented routinely these days on the lists, to try to drive a difference between the LibreOffice community and OpenOffice.org. Now, it seems, there is (sadly) a big barrier of rejection between Oracle and LibreOffice - they seemingly don't want to join yet; but OpenOffice.org should not equal Oracle, and the charge of conflicts of interest cuts two ways. To distort Simon Phipps' quote a little: "If the company sponsor stands still and the community moves on, who has the conflict of interest ?". It is amazing (to me) that some people know the will of the community better than every single elected representative from outside Oracle that is on the council.
• Booked my flight to the MeeGo conference and remembered to register on-line as well. Packed everything into one small bag, and bed earlyish.

• Up earlyish, off to NCC - visiting speaker spoke on troubles, peace, and joy. Home to prep for lunch.
• Chris, Joy & daughters over for lunch from Oak Hill - lovely to see them, fantastic to have sorted relatives. Enjoyed their company for some hours, first fire of the year - starting to get rid of the huge stack of wood left over from the building work.
• Sogged in front of some children's DVD with the babes, light tea to make up for the mammouth lunch; bed early.

• Up early, dropped remarkably reasonable babes off with the Brighty's, and off for another day session again with Steve Hall.
• Studied the Five Circle theory: Physical, Emotional, Volitional, Rational, Spiritual - at some length, most interesting. Ellis' A-B-C-(D-E-F) theory, Did a little self-awareness work - scary enough.
• Back to collect babes, read stories, dinner, bath, bed, lay around talking until late.

• Up early, prodded mail, ran tests builds, did some product analysis. Knocked out my Mannah House homework: "List some of the key elements / concepts of, and differences between Psychoanalytical counselling, Person Centred counselling, and Rational Emotive Therapy." and mailed it off. Lunch.
• Fixed lpsolve dependency problem; $(IFEXIST) doesn't work on directories (it turns out). Analysed the output from another of Julian's wizard valgrind tools run on LibreOffice. Added another easy hack or two. Tried to dig through the torrent of good mail & patches flowing into the inbox.
• Dinner with Mary, out with J. to counselling evening with a new lady - Lynn; amusing evening about pratical counselling, communication, etc.

• Prodded at mail; attacked the build again, made the LibreOffice build script give helpful messages on build failure, and configure warn about expected problems with non-default --with-distro flags, binned obsolete patches.
• Lunch, team meeting. Prodded at systemd a little in the openSUSE 11.4 milestone two into the boot sequence, with a nice wiki page explaining any openSUSE issues. Eventually gave up, and installed it in KVM to avoid lots of re-booting - sadly to save space had to remove my opensolaris image: RIP.
• Conf call, dinner during it; put babes to bed while J. counselled, more work, call with the parents - just got home. Worked late merging patches & fixing associated bits.

• Up early, off into Cambridge with Mike; TEAM training, all day - lots of interesting people, lots of good talks on Galatians, Evangelicalism, and then small-group practice in creating and leading a short Bible study; fun.
• Back for dinner with the babes, played with them, stories, put them to bed, out to Cell group.
• Interested to read Matthew Garret's take on Unicode 6.0, which is of course an encouraging release. What would seems sad to me though, is an outcome where a picture of men, or women holding hands was to come to mean a symbol of a homosexual relationship; straight men are often isolated enough without sterilising a sphere of legitimate and in many cultures (Arab, African etc.) normal form of innocent intimacy.

• Up early; mail poking, interested by the news of IBM joining OpenJDK the real un-answered question is: what sweetheart license terms have IBM extracted from Oracle, or will they be distributing the code under the GPLv2/classpath like everyone else ?
• Prodded at dependency errors in the build; made the unix quick-starter use libpng - since we require it anyway, and made it conditional (only for distro builds: where we have a known libpng we can link to). Made broffice branding disabled by default for non-LibreOffice distros, to avoid surprises.
• Fiddled with the website, spaetz moved the LibreOffice Easy Hacks page to the nicer DocumentFoundation (media) wiki. Prodded the scp2 dependency problems.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, chat with Patrick & Tor. Chat with Mike. Pushed a fix to make scp2 (the installation magic) re-compile if you re-configure LibreOffice with different options. Merged a couple of community patches.

• Up, read mail, re-factored splash, about and shell branding in LibreOffice to allow a single build including BrOffice branding in Brazil; dunged out lots of old / odd code and artwork, and eventually pushed it.
• Misc weekly status admin, reviewed LXF column, more patch review and bug chasing.

• Up early; dealt with babes while J. slept - dropped them at All Saints for the harvest festival. Went on to NCC for Christine's daughter Hannah's dedication - fine service. Back to All Saints to crash the rather fine shared lunch with the family.
• Home, moved shelving up-stairs, and J. got stuck into tidying my office - always a nerve-wracking time. Good to finally get all those useful reference books back into view, and on some shelving.
• Read a fascinating article on Tablet Computing - entitled Tomorrow's Laptops - Pen, Voice, Touch Input, New Displays, New Chips, New Storage Devices, New Visions: ... using the system and its controls is difficult to describe, perhaps because it is so natural ... this is where Slate is headed ... Ease of Use is Key ... - on and on in a 'State of the Art' section. All from BYTE Feburary 1991 - go Go ! (as it were).
• Poked the reprap idly, hmm - where did all the time go that I used to have, to play with it: LibreOffice ? Sermon from Park Street in the evening on Judges - and the calling of Gideon.

• Lie in, set too with the superdeck paint on the (already mouldering) new front side gate. Looks a lot better now. Lunch. Onto paint chipping on the stairs, putting another coat onto the stair-well (finally looking quite pleasant), and then painting the back of the workshop.
• Sat around reading in the afternoon, while the babed played, trampolined a little; read stories, popped everyone to bed. Hacked on this and that in bed - got the broffice splash re-work finally done and working.

• To work, quick mail skim, dipped into fixing a silly in the code, polished LXF column. Plugged through Norbert's nice FASTBOOL patches doing spot sanity checks; looking good, fixed a real nasty in the editeng using a 'FASTBOOL' as an integer loop iterator.
• Added a SAL_N_ELEMENTS macro to sal (long overdue), and added a new easy hack to use it widely. Also added a minutes. Dug at some code with Caolan, merged patches, fun.

• Up late, prodded mail, really pleased to see that Gianugo has been hired by Microsoft - they couldn't hope for better advice on Free Software.
• Write notes, pondered Linux Format column, prodded bugs, chat with Chen. Added a tweak to remind people to source ooenv having done a linkoo - to avoid unexpected startup failures.

• Up early, off to school with the babes, and to Burger King for a pick-up from Nicola to TEAM. Lots of interesting study, started the Bible Overview proper in Genesis, studied tools and techniques for understanding Epistles, with reference to Galations (with Eden Baptists' pastor).
• Home, conference call with the lads; off into Cambridge for Rob's twenty-seventh' birthday party; fun - good to meet his crowd of friends, bus back rather late - a fatality on the train line.
• Pleased to see the LibreOffice Planet spring into being, and looking pretty.

• Prodded mail, and more patches. Call with fcrozat. Plugged away at some admin pieces. Sad to see Ari leave Nokia.
• Chased an e-d-s bug, filed a trace and comments; JP's staff meeting. Call with Pete &amp a partner, then with Jared.
• Created a couple of LibreOffice accounts, and dug through the admin backlog looking for low hanging fruit to fix. Bed late.

• Up early, dropped babes at school, wandered through E-mail. Admired the large patches Norbert Thiebaud is creating, and set too writing a vtable enumeration tool for OpenOffice. But why ?

Re-factoring C++ and the vtable problem

The opportunity

Consider that you have large piece of C++, over many years, for reasons unknown, it has accumulated (at least) four boolean types: FASTBOOL, BOOL, sal_Bool and of course the native boolean type bool. Now consider a class with a virtual method in it:

class Base {       ... virtual void setValue (BOOL b); /* A */ }
class Sub : Base { ... virtual void setValue (BOOL b); /* B */ }

Please notice that these two classes are highly unlikely to be in the same header file, and may even be separated by many leagues of code, so you might never notice.

A small cleanup

Now imagine that we want to cleanup this obsolete 'BOOL' to a 'bool' - that would be nice and pretty; so - since we are hacking on 'Sub' - we change it there, and we change all the callers in Sub's implementation:

class Base {       ... virtual void setValue (BOOL b); /* A */ }
class Sub : Base { ... virtual void setValue (bool b); /* B2 */ }

At this point we have a problem - we suddenly broke the functionality of the Base class, and anyone calling the virtual method A. This is because without realising it we introduced an entirely new method with the same name and a different signature - by the miracle of polymorphism. ie. now we have two virtual 'setValue' methods, and B2 does not override A. That is not good.

Of course, because this is a feature, the compile will just love it, and suddenly, magically compile a completely different piece of code, and better - since the change is almost invisible to the casual reader this will be a nightmare to debug. Interestingly changes such as the above may seem rare, but are only the top of the iceberg - a more common incidence of these crops up in 64bit porting, where there is some mix of different types down the virtual function chain - someone overrides with a different typedef - all of which previously resolved to 'int'.

How to avoid some grief

The (rather dumb) tool I hacked up today tries to avoid this sort of problem. It does this by noticing that when we make this sort of slip, we add a new virtual method to Sub's v-table. Thus - if we simply print-out all the vtables sizes (in slots) before, and then after a change, we can rapidly check if they match. If there is a disparity - we can find the class that changed size, wind back to (all of) its parents, and work out which one is missing a suitable change. This technique was remarkably succcessful in finding 64bit portability problems (by comparing 64bit vs. 32bit builds) when Kendy was working on the original OpenOffice.org port to 64bit architectures. The tool is here

How to re-introduce grief

One final deep joy about C++ is that there is no real need to mark an overriding method as virtual (though most people, most of the time tend to). So we can write the original problem just as well as:

class Base { ... virtual void setValue (BOOL b); /* A */ }
class Sub : Base {    ... void setValue (BOOL b); /* B3 */ }

It is worth noting at this point, C#'s much better, and more readable syntax, mandating an 'override' for B3. Then lets re-add the great change we made before:

class Base { ... virtual void setValue (BOOL b); /* A */ }
class Sub : Base {    ... void setValue (bool b); /* B4 */ }

So - now we have an even nastier beastie - in this case by changing the type, we suddenly stop overriding A, but instead of creating a new virtual method, we create a normal method B4. Worse - this doesn't change the size of the vtable - so it is even harder to notice. At this point, at the moment - you loose.

All is not lost (in future)

Fortunately, this shouldn't be entirely the end of the story; in subsequent iterations, it should be easy to add a 'method count' that can be calculated for each class - and compared before and after, this would allow B4 to be detected rather easily. Perhaps tomorrow I'll expand the tool to do that too. Probably I am missing some other obvious gotchas, but getting this wrong - particularly in deeply inherited hierarchies, with complex interactions can create some particularly nasty problems to debug.

• Up late, sync, with JP, prodded mail, patches and blog entries.
• Update1: Mikael Olenfalk points out that the Mozilla guys have some magic keyword they use for this, along with Dehydra - probably libreoffice should be doing the same; we could add an override keyword that could be enforced by Dehydra, and #define it to virtual + some attribute (I guess).
• Update2: A friendly hacker advised me that the Sun Studio compiler warns about virtual functions being hidden by non-virtual ones, it seems g++ has an equivalent -Woverloaded-virtual -Werror=overloaded-virtual that should be used to detect this case. There is also a nice wikipedia page with the latest C++ standards thinking

• Up earlyish, screwed the finished articles to the ceiling. Father left for Wales, read stories to H. until lunch.
• Light lunch, took three smaller babes off to Sarah's baptism at Isleham a jolly time. Back, tea for babes, packed them to bed, and slept ourselves.

• Up earlyish, dealt with babes while J. slept. Poked idly at the reprap - still not printing gears anything like as good as it used to (possibly the fault of the gears ?).
• Off to Ridgeons with Father to buy fixings and paint; I hate haggling for goods - the Quakers introduced honest pricing in the 17th century - but it still hasn't reached UK builders merchants; despite getting a ~50% discount, I still got over-charged, annoying.
• Back home, set too cleaning the chimney - lots and lots of soot, straining with the brushes; he who has clean hands and a pure heart ? - after removing the soot to the bin, extensive showering and cleaning of the front room: fires possible once more.
• Late lunch, J. returned with H. and M. from a party. Set too with putting up some second-hand blinds, unfortunately too large, cutting down possible, but required metal-work, re-stringing etc. Became somewhat expert (over the next hours), in the (re-)construction of cheap wooden venetian blinds. H. sick; cleaned that up. Bed late.

• A new month; walked the babes to school in new shoes; some not inconsiderable pain in the heels - a little reminiscent of suddenly having to make libreoffice /actually/ build for lots of people, on different systems rather suddenly - and without any excuses.
• Plugged away at the binfilter - unfortunately, corrupting memory in destructors called at exit. Dis-satisfied with intermittent brokenness around heap corruption, fixed (and deferred) the svx part also trivially accelerating startup, Caolan has some similar mutex / thread related crash fixes to go in too. Re-started the build.
• Lunch, came back to a build - the joys of a 6 CPU icecream cluster. Fixed python sillies for installation using system-python (so gdb works), and got a nice working, debuggable build; great. Updated the website to build like that, and without the (now fixed) binfilter. Tested equivalent svx crash-on-exit fix, and pushed it.
• Tweaked the LibreOffice easy hacks page, and added a few more useful pieces. Plugged through a 'self review' in some infernal internal personel management web tool.

• Up early; discovered lots of goodness in the spam trap, prodded obscure build problems: its certainly getting better; uncovered and fixed a vicious nodep mis-enablement problem. Boggled at the 'M+ Guardian' spam trap, which appears to catch unfeasible numbers of genuine mails, prodded IS&T about disabling it, which (eventually) they kindly did - nice.
• Lots of work prodding mail, pushing patches from volunteers. I love it when we have to up the mailing-list size limit so that people's patches don't get bounced for being too big.
• Got freedesktop account creation sorted out once and for all with Tollef's help. Lengthy team meeting frustrated by Nurnberg re-wiring breaking external connection to our Asterix server; IS&T love me today it seems.
• Dinner, back to debug some intermittent, binfilter, crash-on-exit memory corruption bug (you have to love them). Thank God for valgrind - particularly since gdb won't work [ OpenOffice.org, like GNOME wants its own python so - the infamous:
  gdb: symbol lookup error: gdb: undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS4_FromEncodedObject
  strikes again (and I still didn't get to making gdb's python dependency a dynamic one - being lazy and all).

• First LibreOffice conference track ...

  I forgot to announce, the incredibly prescient OpenSUSE organisation, being, from birth, incredibly perspicuous and wise (cf. Kim Jong Il's biography) - kindly booked LibreOffice its own track at the OpenSUSE conference so we can get some good German beer, meet up, and discuss development, direction and so on. Please come and join us there, Florian Effenberger will be giving an opening talk to rally the troops, then lots of topical development sessions I suspect. For those of a North American persuasion I will be attempting to subvert the GNOME Boston Summit by inserting an informal LibreOffice flavour - it'd be great to meet up with like minded souls there too.

• Father arrived to stay at 9pm, sat up talking a while, really good to see him.

• Up lateish, after a late night of frantic fixing of problems afflicting people on IRC, and encouraging contribution - a good number of patches having arrived (pleasingly).
• Very quick breakfast, and off into Cambridge for TEAM training. Lots of great content, dug through some of the early Church Father's views on the inerrancy of scripture, which even today are shared by Catholic and Protestant, Churches of East and West alike. Studied Joshua one, trying to learn to not just read - but observe what is in the scripture carefully, the better to understand it in its context. The last character formation session in the afternoon: most helpful.
• Back home with Mike, dinner, put the babes to bed while J. went out counselling. Worked like stink until late, trying to get back on top of all the pending mail, patches to merge.
• Grateful for Jim Getty's support.

The story behind the story behind the news today

• Up early; the marathon is over - and here we are: LibreOffice and the Document Foundation have been announced. Finally we have a project that will be fun to hack on, and not beset with keep out signs (many sadly still invisible to the existing owner). If you want to get involved, there is no better time than now (at the beginning), and there is no better place than LibreOffice.
• So, many others have spoken about the sea-change in the community and industry that made LibreOffice possible. And indeed, I'm almost a convert to the idea that total non-developers can provide lots of tangible value now, despite myself. Clearly it took a lot of courage and accomodation to work together as a team, which was for the most part a pleasure. I hestitate to call out any of this rich set of characters I'm growing to love; you can see them here
• Having said all that, I'd like to point out some of the super-stars that you won't perhaps see on the web-site with bow-ties, in glorious monochrome. First Jeremy Allison, Bradley Kuhn and Jonathan Blandford, old friends without whose wise counsel and assistence, nothing would have got done; thanks too to Michael Dexter and Karen Sandler who put in lots of hard work behind the scenes. Simon Phipps' whose sage support is much appreciated - eg. tweet of the day: "If the company sponsor stands still and the community moves on, who forked ?", and Christopher Aillon for his indulgence.
• Then of course Fridrich Strba and Petr Mladek generating builds for Windows and Linux, (and Thorsten for OSX) - and re-spinning them until late at night, with Peter Poeml doing wonders with mirror services. My entire product management hierarchy were flexible, supportive and decisive under time pressure: Pete Chadwick, Holger Dyroff, Carlos Montero-Luque and more. Finally - in the last minute panic of hourly revisions to the 'final' press release, Guy Lunardi stepped into the breach and over many hours (with help from Christophe) made the website both beautiful, and complete - I'm honoured by his friendship.
• Stepping back, it has been amazing to work towards this goal, perhaps unwittingly with a team of great developers around the globe; many of whom have stuck through thick and thin, persisting even when the fashion was against them, to bring us to where we are today.

Initial thoughts

• Apparently positivity is a key attribute - so, it must be good that tons of people suddenly subscribed to my twitter feed (that I almost never use), how gratifying. It has been wonderful to get lots of personal mails of congratulation from many including, several ex-OpenOffice hackers, saying they might get involved again. It was great to see a good number of people jumping into the #libreoffice (developers) IRC channel on freenode, helping improve the hackers documentation, downloading and building the code, and getting eager about doing some of the Easy Hacks (nice entry level tasks), and merging some of their first patches.
• Similarly, from a web infrastructure perspective, it was great to see a reverse slashdot effect, with the site going slow as (presumably) people refreshed slashdot.org in a loop waiting for the libreoffice.org announcement to hit the wire.
• Another pleasure was the first technical steering call planning our next moves and tentative schedule (minutes). We made a number of clean decisions in 30minutes of pleasant, friendly, collegial conversation; something new. It is great to have a solution for every problem, rather than a problem for every solution.
• It seems our first patch posted to the list, was by Neil Brown - ace kernel block layer (and elswhere) hacker - (who works for Novell, but whose contribution had got wedged between the cracks somehow), to fix some misbehaviour of the blocks in Impress' disolve transition (fun). After three years of being ignored (interestingly it is still assigned to Thorsten, now at Novell, who left Sun shortly after getting the bug) it finally made it into LibreOffice - go Neil !
• In another turn up for the books, the documentfoundation website was slashdotted, and yet continued to serve pages, while at the same time git, bugzilla and mailing list worked normally without interruption. Thanks no doubt to Florian Effenberger's skill and cunning.

The future

• LibreOffice is going to be a fun place for developers to live, and strike their blow for freedom - without a doubt. Get involved now, and help to shape the software and the social life for the next decade.

• Up early, the final sprint in the LibreOffice saga. Conference call in the morning, followed by long counsel with Thorsten.
• More press pre-briefings, really encouraging to talk again with some of the most insightful (English speaking) journalists out there around Free Software. Caught up on all the mail from yesterday.
• Went through umpteen 'final' iterations of the press release, how final can final be ? Eventually it got too late for that, moved onto massaging the web-site. Perhaps the mechanics of having to push binaries to mirrors well in advance frees a helpful space for actually finishing the job before going live. Peter Poeml doing a fantastic job of getting the mirroring sorted, Fridrich, Petr and Thorsten having doing builds left & right.
• Slogged away at polishing the website with Guy, Christophe and Thorsten until 3am-ish; hopefully despite our mediocre talents the result is good; bed; back to send more mail and empty the mind - tomorrow we go live at 8am BST as LibreOffice; sleep.

• Up late, off to NCC, caught part of the sermon, and creche problems with E. not wanting to be left, for the rest.
• Back for lunch, watched an incredibly lame DVD about Santa Claus - with Christ totally removed, and a double dose of sentimentality wedged in.
• Dinner. Listened to a great Gordon sermon on Judges and Deborah - a mother in Israel, really good to understand the text in more detail.

• Up early; off to the Dinosaur Adventure Park near Norwich, as always good fun for all. Spirits hardly dampened by plenty of showers.
• Back, quick dinner, babes to bed; worked rather late, right up to Sunday.

• Prodded at mail, chased an irriating bug with a menu item that, at great length, turned out to be a friendly optimisation gone wrong; hey ho. Did more from-clean builds left and right.
• Misc. conference calls, dinner, back to work in the evening.

• Up early, worked through the mail backlog. Bit of hacking, much conference-callage variously, fixed up a malingering bootchart2 issue. Voted in the local elections. Lydia over for dinner, bed late.

• Up early, prodded mail, packed babes off to school. Out into Cambridge with Mike Geach, to the first day of TEAM. Excessively good, nice to have a NT lecturer from the university Theology faculty, and great teaching on various topics. V. good of Novell to give me un-paid leave to study.
• Back home, conference call, worked until late.

• Up early, prodded mail. Interested to see the Oracle Cloud Office Preview be announced at Oracle OpenWorld. It is now at least public that this is where some large chunk of the OpenOffice org developement muscle from StarDivision has disappeared into: a proprietary web-office product; shame. Interesting too to have a video demo with no release date.
• Filed misc. bugs, more mail, chat with Jeremy. Dinner, put babes to bed while J. counselled; more mail, and yet more encouraging mail. Calls with Guy, Pete, Kerry, Ian, etc.

• Up early, read mail, noticed Jeremy just extended his GUADEC interview series to include an arch rambler. Poked at bugs variously. Call with JP. More mail.
• Dinner, babes to bed, back to the cliff-face of work, while J. did counselling.

• Rest; followed by tidying and cleaning up, dunged out the Barbequeue - and bent the grill out of shape, to fit around my sub-optimal sheet metal-work fixing it. Off to NCC - did creche.
• Back in a hurry for Martin's leaving barbeque, managed to get the fire going eventually - John Madden arrived with his awesome south-african grilling skills to cook lots of food.
• Much of the church arrived, eat, lots of kids crammed into the castle at the end of the garden, etc. etc.
• Helped get John's computer working in the evening (some Ubuntu netbook) - amazingly the window manager was not running (though it did quite well despite that), the network kill switch had no on-screen display (meaning the delay while scanning for networks had confused him into turning wireless off again), and a number of other unfortunate snafus. Spent a while training & repairing. Bed early.

• Up early, into Cambridge for more training in Christian Counselling (course by Manna House). Lovely pastor from Rugby: Steve Hall - lots of useful background on different schools of Psychotherapy, and helpful discussion. Lunch. More lectures, home early afternoon.
• Relieved Laura of her six charges, and out to fetch some fish & chips, storied & bed for babes. Prodded mail & the web.
• Pleased to see safe root mounting without an initramfs going somewhere (accelerating boot).

• Up early, to work. Poked mail. Boggled at the (only) factor of two speed-win that comes from moving the dbus code into the kernel. Amazingly AFAIR, ORBit2 was the same factor of two faster (in the same topology) in many situations, despite not having any significant performance profiling / optimisation since it was re-written, and without any such tricks. How does it do that: just by being less lame, doing no string validation, better iovec construction, having cleaner socket code etc. (though CORBA object references do suck to marshal). C'est la vie - we need to speed d-bus up, but is the kernel really the right place for this ? Surely we could push the same match optimisations down into the user-space processes themselves so they could go direct for some methods.
• Spent time thinking about lang-packs; the Power of Babel to inflict pain is quite phenomenal. Back to hacking eventually. Brief chat with Kurt, and JP, more writing up.
• Out with Julia in the evening to a training course on Christian Counselling, Zoe kindly baby sat.

• Enjoyed the mail, back to hacking. Discovered SLIC tables in wikipedia - used to tie your OEM license key for Windows 7 to the BIOS of your machine, fascinating; hopefully it will stop un-authorised copying which can only be good for GNU/Linux.
• Massaged some verbiage, patch review, IM action, back to hacking, OO.o team call, prodded some obsolete tooling: thank goodness for API backwards compatibility.
• Paint chipping and preparation of stairs in the evening: hopefully soon will not live in a half painted house.

• Prodded mail, boggled at self-serving blogs, poked Seif. Back to OO.o hacking - loving it. Bed early, tired.

• Prodded mail, and on to some more paper ranking fun - with a Google spreadsheet; I guess for entering simple columns of numbers it could be worse.
• Lunch, JP's staff meeting. Back to prodding at OO.o variously. More hacking in the afternoon - fun at last.
• Dinner, put babes to bed - H. terrified by some 'Horrible History' story she heard in class at school, quivering with fear and hard to console; makes you wonder what they teach them these days.
• On a joint account - why is it, that when I reset my internet credentials, my wife cannot log in and VV. - it reduces the usefulness somewhat if you have to call the call centre anyway each time we switch user.

• Took babes to school; read mail, pleased to see at least some sense being discovered from the Oracle / Java debacle no matter how much some people don't like the facts.
• Appalled to see Matthew Allum leave Intel, it is a shame for MeeGo to loose such expertise, and experience - warmly applied.
• Pleased to see that Google introduced live-search to the UK before I did anything rash. Remembered my gitorious credentials for the packagekit move to there (and all because FreeDesktop has such terrible account creation latency: why !?).
• Got a clean OO.o compile setup, send a gdu patch off to David, reviewed a PackageKit patch & begged zypp help with some others. Filled out Clarity, prodded travel agents.
• Poked at my previous Python problem, it seems Tom Tromey has done some awesome python work with gdb, which (no doubt) I should check out next bug ... Dinner. Julia having counselling supervision, so worked late.
• Interesting to see Anssi Vanjoki - who gave a very strong commitment to Symbian & MeeGo step down from Nokia.

• Up early, tended babes. Off to NCC - Tony speaking on God's building of his church.
• Back to ours lunch with Peter & Dianne, Tony & Janice and Lydia. Amused by Peter's stories of falling asleep on trains variously: ending up in a tube maintenance yard, and so on - a chap after my own heart.
• Babes watched some insipid Hello Kitty in the afternoon, while we tidied up, dinner, put babes to bed - more paint stripping and cleanup.

• Mini lie-in, awoken - the Met office fouled up the long distance (ie. two days out) weather prediction - switching from incessant rain, to cloudy with sunny spells. Perhaps the BBC should not show their post-code based future weather maps more than a day ahead.
• Set off to Bressingham with the babes. As normal an excellent day, much fun on the Carousel riding horses, and singing along to the hits of fifty years ago from some mechanical organ. Steam train rides, wanders in the beautiful gardens. Interestingly perhaps -the- most fun piece for the babes was fiddling in the signal box with some huge signal levers, pushing them too and fro with great exertion.
• Back; quick call with Kendy then Thorsten, mail. Set too painting the stairs - after a hiatus of many months, sealed a lot of new plaster.

• Up early, poked mail and missed messages overnight.
• Interested, though unsurprised to see a new Nokia CEO. Watched his Gartner performance for Microsoft (on Nokia at 30mins, and Linux 36mins). Interesting that he has not been at Microsoft -that- long, and worked for various other competitors. Curious times indeed. Also interested to see the fast ARM CPU analysis - a cheap, low power, 8 core, multi-GHz ARM chip - only 32 bit though, so not really suitable for servers, presumably not low enough power for handhelds either: so when will the ARM desktop arrive ? and can the proprietary world really cope with a different architecture ?
• Prodded admin. Interviewed another OO.o candidate. Pleased to see the Wordpress trademark transferred to a non-profit: that's great practise:

  Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress's identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company.

  This is a really big deal. ...

  It's important for me to know that WordPress will be protected and that the brand will continue to be a beacon of open source freedom regardless of whether any company is as benevolent as Automattic has been thus far. It's important to me to know that we've done the right thing.

  Amen. If only all nominally open communities were that well managed, and structured: go Matt Mullenweg.
• Irritated by the hype around Google instant search not being available to mere mortals in the UK, with the particularly fun instant re-direction to the UK site you get from the US one. Why should Americans have all the fun ? It is this kind of thing that gives me an insane urge to smoke a Koran (or something). Perhaps if I blackmail all of America by threatening them with a mass of demented, homicidal maniacs I could get on TV, and call for better Google search in the UK ? if it works for others ... Not getting enough respect ? try threatening to murder a few people left & right to build credibility; how offensive.
• Finally got to the end of mail, and poked some code at last. Thrilled to see Broadcom apparently finally do the right thing - and open source their drivers: oh what needless pain we suffered, can it really be at an end ? Excellent.
• Submitted a paper on bootchart2 somewhat late for the Plumbers Conference, and moved my flight to the right month (being over-eager to meet the august audience that I had it scheduled for October instead of November).

• To work; prodded at clean re-build of everything, and the associated gtk+ build breakage - just a simple deprecation problem. Laboured on, nss not building - some twisted portability code breaking drbg.c:510:5: error: size of array ‘arg’ is negative.
• Lunch; eventually discovered that none of that jhbuild goodness really works for stuff that is normally installed in the system; and that the best advice is to update your distro, and use a jhbuildrc that skips difficult stuff like this - it'd be nice if it was possible to detect whether it was even necessary to build these things in advance I suppose.
• Dinner, up late talking with Americans: James, Patrick, and Michael, interesting.

• Prodded mail, gdb crashed; oh dear - I installed a new python to make glib build (via gobject-introspection); now gdb won't run (why does that link to python ?); a non-beautiful outcome: gdb: undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS4_FromEncodedObject
• Interviewed another candidate; installed 11.3 to try to get a working development environment. Still failed to run gdb, but could at least use the system python for gobject-introspection. Tried to re-build enough of the stack for the new system libraries to work: oh dear - gtk+ (gtk-2-22) doesn't build: guess what is to blame ? gobject-introspection (g-ir-scanner missing some --strip-prefix mode). Gave up and tried to install the nice GNOME:Factory repositories from OpenSUSE. Lunch.
• Back to LXF column contemplation. Discovered that GNOME:Factory is horked and won't install without griping intensely and widely about some random video related dependency. Colin kindly pointed me at his fix and the --disable-introspection configure flag for gtk+.
• Got the Evolution:snapshots repository to work eventually, and read mail; urk.
• Thrilled to get to the point that the noise on the systemd list is annoying enough to create a filter to get it out of my inbox. fifty+ messages and several patches in a day is a good place to be: go systemd.
• Dinner, prodded mail until late.

• Up too early, got babes practised with time to spare; packed them off to school. Reviewed a PackageKit / zypp backend bug or two, compiled a new Python so I could build gobject-introspection, and thus PK. Prodded and merged misc. fixes.
• Lunch. Considered DOS on Dope as a platform for a Web Office suite, particularly with it's lack of known scalability problems (the time-wasting perils of twitter strike again).
• Called plumber to get a gas-safety check sorted out.
• Interviewed a hacker in the afternoon; interesting. Call with Victoria in the evening, Lydia over for dinner, up rather late poking some west-coast magic.

• Overslept, not into the 6:45am waking routine from the holidays yet. Fed, and hurried babes off to school. M. looking so tiny and sweet in her new uniform.
• Back to the mail hill, admin, Clarity, tested bootchart2 pieces, merged branches and pushed out a 0.12.4 - with memory graphing from Dave Martin at Linaro, and lots more nice fixes and features from Riccardo Magliocchetti.
• Started slogging through abstracts: I know everyone wants their simple calculator-app to be 'more a platform than an app' but apparently they now want to be virtual platforms - perhaps fair enough if it has at least some tenuous link to virtualisation; but if not ?
• Dinner, baby stories, more mail thrash. Finished LotR in the evening while J. painted.

• Up early, J. off to West Suffolk to have dressing changed, (why does she so frequently get ill when I'm away). Tended babes.
• Off to NCC, ran the creche, which (despite the loss of M.) is more packed with fun-sized people than before.
• Home for lunch, with Andre and Lottie - good to get to know them a little better. J. slept a while, while I disappeared into the Lord of the Rings and the babes watched cbeebies.
• Dinner, put babes to bed and read to them; J. went out to meet up with Myriam, while I read ever more.

• Slept until midday, swapped places with J. who slept until rather later. Out to buy bread, lunch, played with babes.
• Watched a new kids DVD, issue one of What's in the Bible, really rather good. Dinner, bed early.

• Up rather later, breakfast with Caolan & Kendy. To the conference, arrived a tad too late for Eike's well attended Calc talk,
• Out for lunch with Ray, Marcel & Kendy. Taxi to the airport, plane home. Lovely to see the wonderful wife, and sleeping babies again.

• Up, managed to forget to frank my ticket on the tram and get fined; sigh - if only the lady had been able to sell me a three day pass instead of three singles.
• Met Kalman at the conference, and wandered the conference talking to misc. people. On to Stefan's test-ability talk, encouraging to see the unit testing work I prototyped in 2008 (and subsequently broken by the three-layer-izing of OO.o, and tons of stop-energy) is finally being taken seriously, and good progress being made.
• Lunch with Rene & Kendy, on to Moritz' talk on bridge building - amusing. On to see some demos of the latest MS Office bling from Moritz (which is impressive), a few amusing bugs in OO.o. Prodded the horrible formula support in MSO 2010 - cut & paste a formula from Word to Excel, and re-size it: you get a low-res bitmap, complete with cleartype artifacts, fun.
• Interviewed a great candidate for our OO.o team. Out for an interesting & pleasant dinner in the evening. Onto a pub for somedrinks, and back to our hotel room until insanely late.

• Up late, breakfast; checked mail. Trammed into town, met up with the guys; on to mba's talk on making OO.o more hack-able. Out for lunch with the lads; back for the new build system talk.
• Fine party, and fireworks in the evening.

• Up at 6am, hiked to Preson Park, train to Gatwick, waited for delayed flight. Extremely impressed with the battery life on this new Duo (with SSD). Caught up with the news variously.
• Read Simon's excellent position on contributor agreements, with relation to the (potentially problematic) Project Harmony.
• Highly amused by an article in The Economist on 'the cost of weapons'. Learned an important new German term: Eierlegende Wollmilchsau or "egg-producing wool-milk-sow" (apparently this is the A400M specification) - could there really be engineering and business problems with a-priori over-specification ? Another priceless quote:

  In Iraq and Afghanistan numbers matter more than firepower. The same applies to warships fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia; a ship cannot be in two places at the same time. As Stalin reputedly said, "Quantity has a quality all of its own".

• Read a nice article on gcc with some helpful reminiscence on the egcs/gcc fork and its resolution.
• Arrived at the conference after paying a small fortune to an evil taxi driver that tried to kill me; with his fake (home-made?) 'meter' in the taxi; hmm - why does that always happen to me ?
• Met up with the lads, out for dinner in the evening; and back late for more food with Caolan, Thorsten & Kendy. Up late.

• Up early, breakfast, out shopping for misc. omitted party items, did some work, lunch. Out shopping again for vegetarian sausages - which live in a carefully camouflagued section of Tescos (in a freezer).
• Back for Miriam's party, barbeque mayhem, playing the guitar for various musical games (log-pot tragically failed in the portable CD player), trying to force feed the assorted children & parents, and so on. Good to see Sue, Adam & James too.
• Bid farewell to them all; Cheryl kindly dropped me to the station, set off - using the new Android device, which (now I'm not in the middle of no-where) seems to have some great Edge/3G connectivity, even on the train.
• Reviewed, merged, and pushed the next set of awesome bootchart2 work from Riccardo. Wondered how I can get an ESRCH (No such process) response from a pread at a valid address, on a memory map of a (live) process' /proc/<pid>/mem particularly when the process is still alive afterwards (with the same pid); most odd.

• Lie in, off to All Saints (NCC not meeting it seems). Max preached briefly, good to walk homw with Bronie & Robin (recently avoiding death in a falling ladder episode).
• Had Effie and Dee over for lunch, lovely to spend some time with them. Set too cleaning the house a little for the onslaught of babies tomorrow. Girls watched the lame children's movie: Stuart Little.
• Got accidentally swallowed by Hannah's bed-time story: the Lord of the Rings; stayed up deep into the night getting Saruman finished off properly.

• Up early, packed everything into the car, roof-box, etc. Off to see Sandra's to swim in the pool again - M. finally shed her fear of the water and started swimming lengths at crazy speed in her swimming ring, good.
• Picked some apples, had lunch, bid 'bye to the parents & thanks for their help, and set off to drive home. Three and a bit hours later (a very clear drive) arrived.
• Unpacked variously, fed the babes, read them stories. Started on the inbox, oh dear ... perhaps a mistake; but it's a bank holiday on Monday too it seems.
• Interested to read that Wheat has been tentatively sequenced:

  The wheat genome is the largest genome decoded to date. It is five times larger than the human genome and is known to be a very complex structure, comprised of three independent genomes.(BBC)

  Interesting - if you were astounded by having an ~identical genome to a chimpanzee, perhaps it is time to get a bigger-is-better inferiority complex going with your breakfast cereal; alternatively - time to start collecting base-pairs (or chromosomes ?).

• Everyone off to Fountains Abbey to admire the ancient ruins of the monastary there. Some spectacular construction and architecture by the Cistercians - apparently they started their first monestary in a swamp - on purpose to make it harder to live there: which as a side-effect made them experts in water management. Lots of wandering in the sun with the babes, admiring the mill's water works, and so on.
• Read the amusing literature, on eg. lead water pipes, something approximately like this:

  "The Monks used lead pipes for their water, but nationally we replaced our lead water piping forty years ago. There are three problems with lead piping - first, hair loss (not such a big issue for Monks), second - loss of short term memory, and third - I can't remember."

• Home in the evening, ice creams from England's (nominally) oldest sweet shop. Watched Howel's Moving Castle with the babes, fed them dinner, and left the parents to baby-sit them.
• Out for dinner with my wife - bliss. Swift pint beforehand, then really an extraordiarily good restaurant The Willow at Pateley Bridge - amazed to find such unusually good food. Back, bed late.

• Off to find a suitable river to muck about in with the babes - to attempt to teach them what rivers are for - and to expunge the Townie "ooh my dress might get muddy"
• Much fun paddling and slipping about in a river, seemingly near an old Roman road. Suitable dam building exploits - fitting considering the rocky terrain. Training in the ubiquity of sheep, rabbit etc. droppings and the necessity of treading on them if you are to make any progress. Much successful de-townification.
• On to an abandoned lime kiln on the moors, and climbed up to an observation point over a huge limestone quarry - completely invisible from the road / nearby - with grass banks concealing and muting a vast pit packed with interesting looking machines. The girls took a great interest in the various mechanical monsters and their roles, but were disapointed by a lack of blasting.
• On into Grassington and through to find a pleasant spot near the river to have a picnic lunch;
• Home, to watch Jurrasic Park together; hmm. Then dinner and packed everyone off to bed.
• Amazed to see the British media reporting news like this

  Doctors with religious beliefs are less likely to take decisions which could hasten the death of those who are terminally ill, a study suggests

  . Odd that the converse is not the news: Doctors with no religious beliefs are more likely to take decisions which could hasten death ... etc. I hope my doctor has a high commitment to (at least my) life.

• Up early, J. app't with doctor. Off to Sandra's to swim again, swum the morning away happily - followed by some fruit picking and lunch.
• Off to Brimham Rocks in the afternoon - much clambering over rocks. Uncle John came over - really lovely to see him, wrecked precious SUSE Labs T-shirt, and one of few remaining intact pairs of trousers while attempting some ridiculous climbing feat with two children - succeeded, but at what cost ?
• Back together for lunch at Sandra's, running about with the babes in the garden - British (touch) Bulldog, Packed them off to bed late.

• Up early, booked an appointment for J. with the local GP, mercifully 20 metres from the house. Off to visit The Forbidden Corner apparently (The strangest place in the world) - discovered on arriving that it doesn't open until nearly midday (oh). Spent some time wandering the pleasant grounds, getting mobbed by hungyr ducks, and admiring a flock of swifts flying fast and close between us as we walked to catch some sort of insect near the ground.
• A snatch of lunch, and we set off to sample the strange-ness. And indeed, as advertised, it was really extremely unusual. a set of fine gardens, with an over-arching maze - some extraordinary follies, a labryinth of underground tunnels of unusual complexity, castle pieces, grotesque statues, and lots of IR controlled water sprays - everything a child could want, and more. Strangely E. was terrified by the relatively mild burping entrance gate, and not by some of the very tight underground spaces. M. sat out a lot of dark, underground twistiness with Grandma.
• Eventually back home, rather late. Fish and Chips dinner, put the babes to bed, and chatted with the parents. Bed earlyish.

• Up early, breakfast, off to Sandra's house; met up with the grandparents. Went swimming with all the family at some considerable length and with much amusement.
• Lunch, then off to visit some caves nearby on the hills. Back for dinner, watched DVD with the babes for a bit, and then enjoyed Runaway Jury with the wife: excellent stuff.

• Lie in, breakfast, off to local CofE Church. Fine puzzle painting experience in creche; discovered our next door neighbour Sue there, and had her over for lunch.
• Off to see Julia's Aunt Nickie, drove over some beautiful moors with the heather in bloom: lovely. Spent some time with her, admired the garden, tea & cake.
• On to see M&D at Sandra's house, wandered the field next-door to see the sheep, and try to spy rabbits; back late - lots of tired babies to put to bed late.
• Up late, finishing To End All Wars - a rather gripping true story of redemption in a Japanese prisoner of war camp building the Burma railroad.

• Lie in, packed the house up into the car; set off north. Good, clear progress up the A1M, lunch at C ... onwards. Arrived at Pately Bridge early afternoon.
• Discovered house still being cleaned out, unpacked the car, and managed to back it into the garage; 25.4mm spare at the back and 50.8mm at the front (Guiness Book of Records measurement-style).
• Took the babes into the high street (20 metres away) to shop, and wandered across the bridge - admiring the extra floodable meadow next to the river, and the water-proof wall around it - with the unfeasibly high depth measuring device in the river.
• Home, out again to buy bits, took the babes to the park, Grandma & Grandad arrived, played on swings and so on. Back for dinner, packed everyone to bed. Watched The Princess Bride until lateish: "When I was your age, Television was called 'Books'".

• Poked mail, code reading. Amused to see SanDisk (a company whose products I rather like) doing the age old trick of creating a new market space to lead in: in this case seemingly a rather contrived space; tut tut.
• Bought the Fluendo DVD player, goes against the grain, but it works nicely seemingly (at least for The Pricess Bride - and after all what more do you need ?).
• Drove Thomas & Becky to the station.
• Dinner, packed babes to bed & read stories. Back to work, fixed an Evolution crasher, dug at bootchart2 netlink oddness around error handling with Kay's hand-holding; seemingly MeeGo fooled me by dying at the first hurdle: on socket (PF_NETLINK, SOCK_DGRAM, 11); - pushed a clean fix to bootchart2. Some nice patches coming in from Riccardo Magliocchetti (xrmx) gave him git/push access.
• Packed for the next weeks off on holiday, backed up the laptop, filled out Clarity for the future.

• Mail, news, Clarity, fluff. Lunch with Jill. Filed misc bugs with traces. Chased an Evo. bug for a while, some odd combination of threading, gdbus, glib signals taking a gstrv, and some unpleasant memory corruption.
• Boggled at Intel buying McAffe - what a strange acquisition, attempted somehow to detect an underlying strategy ... there is clearly a missing piece somewhere.
• Enjoyed Richard Fontana's Copyright Assignment slides from LinuxCon - particularly the conclusion slide which I reproduce:

  • Formal contribution agreements are Bad:
    
    • No real legal advantages
    • Signals basic lack of legal confidence in FOSS
    • Negates social/technical advantages of FOSS
    • Ethical concerns
  • More justifiable if assignee is nonprofit fiduciary
  • Otherwise, best policies are informal, pure FOSS, documented

• Dinner early, conference call late; awaited Tom & Becky who clearly were enjoying themselves too much in Cambridge.

• Prodded mail, moved OOoCon flights to arrive midday 31st, looked into some Evo / Camel reference leaks. Lunch.
• Fixed some bootchart2 bugs for Kay; boggled generally at taskstats not giving data for some processes (or am I just not asking for it somehow). Jared's staff meeting.
• Thomas & Becky arrived late, dinner, and sat up enjoying their company for a while.

• More mail, conference calls, wrote LXF column, synched up with Pete, worked late. Interested to see fires' Open Source car.

• Prodded mail, contemplated copyrights, caught up with JP fresh from his vacation. Drove home got babes packed into bed.

What Copyrights

By now so many, apparently well informed, commentators have noticed and written off the Oracle Java Copyright claims as applying to the open-source implementation, documentation etc. That of course seems weak: how likely is it that Google would have cut/pasted code or documentation into their Davlik implementation, given the intense scrutiny they knew would come eventually. Page 2, Clause 11 of the complaint gives some background:

Oracle America owns copyrights in the code, documentation, specifications, libraries, and other materials that comprise the Java platform. Oracle America's Java-related copyrights are registered with the United States Copyright Office, including those attached as Exhibit H.

And as we go on (Page 8, clause 38) we get to the real grist:

38. The Java platform contains a substantial amount of original material (including without limitation code, specifications, documentation and other materials) that is copyrightable subject matter under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.

39. Without consent, authorization, approval, or license, Google knowingly, willingly, and unlawfully copied, prepared, published, and distributed Oracle America's copyrighted work, portions thereof, or derivative works and continues to do so. Google's Android infringes Oracle America's copyrights in Java and Google is not licensed to do so.

40. On information and belief, users of Android, including device manufacturers, must obtain and use copyrightable portions of the Java platform or works derived therefrom to manufacture and use functioning Android devices. Such use is not licensed. Google has thus induced, caused, and materially contributed to the infringing acts of others by encouraging, inducing, allowing and assisting others to use, copy, and distribute Oracle America's copyrightable works, and works derived therefrom.

'Code' is to my mind only an insignifiant and pointless piece of the picture here. An interesting piece to me is the specifications: is it possible that by simply implementing (and perhaps documenting) a new implementation of parts of the Java spec - you infringe Oracle's copyright ?

A bit of History

Despite all the interest (or apathy) stirred up by the standards wars of yesterday (OpenXML vs. ODF) etc. There are plenty of older, interesting pieces that have perhaps been forgotten. Looking back to before the dawn of time itself (1997), some interesting things crawl out:

Java ISO standards battle rages

Sun Microsystems achieved one thing of note - it was the first ever, and only corporate submitter to the ISO PAS process (this is rather like the quick-on-ramp 'fast track' that ECMA enjoys eg.). There is a great contemporary write-up from b-net here which seems surreal in its contemporary flavour:

Last November Sun Microsystems won the right to become a standards submitter over the fierce, and sometimes mud-slinging protests of competitors such as Microsoft, Intel and Digital Equipment Corp. Microsoft, in particular, challenged the right of one company to serve as the submitter of an international standard, claiming that this approach offered unfair market advantage. ... if the Java platform is accepted as the international norm ... it will become tied into the government procurement process.

Despite the opposition ISO accepted the first ever, and only corporate PAS submitter (Sun Microsystems) to ISO. During the process we got all these great quotes from a Microsoft standards strategist consultant Mr. Willingmyre, that could have been written about OpenXML / ODF only with some company names swapped:

Mr. Willingmyre wants to see Sun Microsystems "follow the rules of the international system. If they will not, they undermine the credibility of the system."

Or try Microsoft Program Manager (Charles Fitzgerald):

The problem with the Java process, to date, as Mr. Fitzgerald sees it, is that "Sun has been clever in using the PAS process to get the sanction of ISO (for its product), while keeping full proprietary control. Why do we care? There is a potential marketing advantage for a competitor. ISO is getting in the business of endorsing proprietary technology."... "If Sun is really the generous, altruistic charity they present themselves to be, then why are they not playing by the process?" Mr. Fitzgerald asks. "Sun has done more to clinically exploit the standards process than any company alive."

Of course in 1997, the whole right-thinking world was on Sun's side - clearly Microsoft had some embrace and extend wheeze going, which was per-se 'A bad thing'. Why should another company be able to get changes into Java that benefited their platform ? After all - in those days - Software Freedom was an idea with far less traction than it deserved: the concept of being allowed to hack about the code as you wished without getting strangled was alien. Anyhow, this struggle set an interesting precedent. As CNET of the time wrote Sun wins Java ISO approval:

Giving a single company submitter status is unusual for ISO. Normally. such status is given to trade groups or consortia. Similar status has been given to X-Open, DAVIC (Digital Audio Visual Industry Council), VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association), and IrDA (Infrared Data Association).

The real question is Why ? - why go to all that effort and fight to get something that no-other company has ever wanted or needed ? What was the purpose ? why not form a Java trade association, or use an existing submitter ? What was going on ?

Now we have it, lets not use it: abandoning PAS

My grasp of the details are sketchier here; but by May 1999 they had abandoned the PAS submission process:

As expected, Sun Microsystems Inc. will use ECMA as its route to the standardization of Java at ISO. In this way Sun hopes to be able to retain control over the future development of Java which it would have had to give up under new rules adopted by ISO's JTC1 committee and applied to the PAS process that Sun has now abandoned.

So - because they couldn't retain ownership, control, and make it an ISO standard they switched track to ECMA. Interestingly (in the same article), the year before Microsoft had shot down another ECMA standard, the Public Windows Inititaive (PWI) - preventing it from becoming an ISO standard - why ? was there some amount of loss of property ownership implied by making it a true standard ?

"The PWI was a Sun effort to get Windows APIs put into the public domain...

And, thus we see in another parallel sphere these (strange) ideas of ownership of APIs (the hot currency of the era) being protected. Thus it was odd that Sun - who fought at length to become the first ever corporate PAS submitter, never submitted a standard, and let that capability lapse; such that they lost it. The good news of May 1999 was this:

"Sun's already submitted a Java 1.2.2 specification to ECMA which will be presented to a meeting of the group's general assembly in Kyoto, Japan on June 24. ECMA is expected to vote on the spec in December. Then it goes to ISO for fast track adoption."

There are still optimistic sounding traces of this around -

This announcement ... fulfills the company's pledge to achieve ISO standardization of the Java technology.

Sun drops ISO Java Standards Effort for good

Unfortunately, the fulfillment of that pledge never actually happened. CRN has a nice write-up from Dec 1999 here

During a meeting last month with an ECMA technical committee, Sun pulled specifications for Java off the table after copyright issues surfaced but was scheduled to resubmit last week.

What !? - copyright issues ? how can you have copyright issues around an open specification ? Who would want to retain copyright to an open specification ? and why ?

The speculation bit

My suspicion is that Java is protected by fairly weak patent protection. Ultimately Java - though it is some nice mixing pot of features, bundled up with a lot of tech marketing with great deployment, is perhaps not incredibly innovative. Those who see parallels between Java and .Net and run around like headless chicken proclaiming immediate patent death around Microsoft and Mono - take note.

Why fight so hard to get Java standardised, and then withdraw it, just before it has to be submitted ? the official answer is obvious, summarised: Only Sun is brave and good enough to create the perfect Java - a standards body would just kill it, or worse let Microsoft, HP, Intel and others have some real say in its development. Of course - there is some truth here, sole control of it means Java could move quickly, comittees tend not to produce beauty etc. We have some great quotes from the time from Scott McNeally (as above)

"There are times when . . . things have to be moved at the speed of light and there are times when we need flexibility. We're not moving Java forward in a secret way, in a non-participative way." ... The company is actually losing money on Java, he said.

The idea of Java moving at the speed of light seems slightly laughable now, but perhaps a nugget of a hint as to why they really don't want an open standard is there. Personally I get a bit sick of this generic "pauper's defense": We are not making money, therefore ... anything goes here ... whether it is not contributing to the engineering or adopting malevolent legal approaches - it is sadly still popular today.

Some alternative explanations might be more convincing; with Java's weak patent protection, and general lack of novelty - a really important piece to allow control (ie. so you can't implement, and then extend this specification), and more importantly to allow monetisation of Java by Sun was, perhaps, copyright. Copyright around the API specifications and associated implementation choices (also, conveniently, critical to compatibility). Surrending Java to be a full ECMA / ISO standard - would mean that the opportunity was lost to monetise all the fairly random decisions Sun made in the Java API via copyright licensing. Thus - the submissions were pulled at the last minute. Oh, and bad luck if you travelled to a standards meeting half way around the world, at which no standard arrived. My suspicion is that this plays into the reason that today we have a copyright and patent lawsuit against Google by Oracle.

Copyright assignment and the 'community' process

Normally companies don't like to actually look that bad, so they come up with some twisted process to 'improve the optics', and thus we do (apparently) get a standards body in the Java Community Process (JCP). Clearly it is necessary to put feel-good terms in the name: 'Community' eg. Nothing could be bad with such a friendly name right ? One notable feature of the JCP (apart from its relative dysfunction) is that you need to sign a hefty assignment before you can take part (oh, and pay money to Sun if you are a company). This of course has heavy-duty copyright assignment language (cf. the toxicity of such things in general). There is also out-bound copyright licensing conditioned on passing the TCK (which is itself tightly tied up with proprietary bailer twine).

Interestingly for those that point to percieved weaknesses in the Microsoft Community Promise around .Net (incidentally big chunks of .Net are ECMA standardized, thus reducing the potential for standard / copyright licensing based aggression) - there are great clauses in the JSPA2 around patents that do the CP's necessary claims language to shame:

"For the purposes of this Section 5.B, patent claims covering the Specification shall mean any claims for which there is no technically feasible way of avoiding infringement in the course of implementing the Specification."

But you can't copyright APIs

Indeed, hopefully not. Having said that, the Java API docs that you can see eg. here have a license that is rather similar to the other terms floating out there - particularly those necessary to join the JCP, and the outbound Java licensing text. Hopefully Sun have published their APIs without a similar license at some stage in the past, but presumably lots of care and thought has been put into this out-bound licensing. Is there anyone that hasn't accepted those terms ?

Conclusion

Quite possibly I am deranged; copyrights around Java APIs, specifications, and documentation are not a real issue, they cannot be enforced, and the Sun drive to retain copyright ownership, and impose onerous out-bound licenses on their specifications was a pointless exercise, unrelated to Java's commercial exploitation. Quite possibly Oracle just wants to go on a wide fishing expedition inside Google with their copyright claims - who knows.

Ultimately though, closed-ness doesn't pay. It seems Oracle are now reaping the harvest of the lack of trust and open-ness that sadly characterised Sun's approach to most of its 'Community' engagement. That of tryingto have your cake, and eat it too. To have an ISO standard, but not surrrender ownership and control to others. To open source something but go around spreading license FUD and demanding proprietary licenses behind the scenes, and so on. Sadly this sort of attitude continues today, and not just in Oracle but many other companies. Would it have been so terrible if some of Microsoft's weirdo extensions to Java had become part of the Java standard, and been implemented / deployed everywhere ? would they even have won a vote in a TC if they were that bad ? Having said that - I have deep sympathy with the view that the political and semi-technical sphere of a standards TC is not a great way to drive product direction.

Of course - many in the Free software community approach problems based on their love of the underlying technology - de-coupled from a love of its current commercial owner. As such, we would advocate decisions that were good for the product, potentially at the expense of its current owner. So - what does this mean for people like us ? Guard your heart ! - try not to fall in love with a technology, and give yourself to developing and improving it, if a single company owns, and controls it. As a corrolary - try to avoid assigning your copyright to companies that might use it to harm you later. And finally - try to choose to support, and use good Free Software that grants wide patent and re-use rights under licenses like the GPL.

• Lie-in, somewhat interrupted by parent's alarm-clock, and Radio 3. Breakfast, out to St Lukes - really good to see lots of old friends there.
• Back for Father's 74th birthday-lunch, lots of friends and relatives over (although missing Barbara & Colin sadly). Fine food, company, etc.
• More movie watching goodness, Rob & Ilona left, sat up with Thomas, Becky & parents until late.

• Breakfast with Sue & Clive, packed the tente eventually and went for a walk & blackberry picking. Pleased to see the linuxtoday editor's note:

  How often do we hear "Someone needs to...." market Linux, fund development, make OEM deals, lobby government, and so on? What they're saying is someone else needs to. For FOSS to succeed it needs a strong, genuine, active grass-roots base, and that means you, me, and every Linux and FOSS user. If we abdicate, then the suits take over and it becomes just another strategic element for big business, and we get locked out. Of course that is ultimately self-defeating for businesses, too, ... If Free/Open Source software supporters are serious about how wonderful and valuable FOSS is, a lot more of us need to get off our buns and figure out how to become contributors.

  I like Andy Upgrove's comment there: "What people look at as community property should be put into non-profit foundations." Amen - though Upgrove's analysis of the copyright issue is I feel naive - can (C) subsist in APIs ? we will see no doubt; that is the crux of that issue.
• Drove to my parents' unpacked everything; feeling pretty awful - sinus wise; watched some of The Sound of Music - caught up with Robert & Ilona, Thomas & Becky.
• Robert - having bought a new shirt in town, discovered later that he had also purchased a free bulky electronic tag, including ink as well; and what with the shops being shut had few options for removing it. Tragically on-line you can buy a simple key to remove thus; after some wrapping with a bag, removing the long handle, and hack-sawing through its centre-line from that direction it eventually yielded (and no ink anywhere in evidence) - fun.

• Up early, thoroughly dripped on by condensation in the night: the down-sides of warm, wet ground and no ground-sheet. Breakfast.
• Read mail; and news. Wow !
  • My optimism around Oracle's general sanity, and Free software friendliness totally evaporated - or is my under-slept mind making things up: Oracle sues Google over Android
  • Does this explain James Gosling's departure ? the world should know. Is it a sign of virility and the promised financials from the Sun acquisition ?
  • Possibly he will be compelled to take the stand to litigate his patent. IANAL, and have not read the claims, but the abstract sounds totally obvious in the light of the extensive, rather similar ELF .plt relocation scheme (section 5-12 of the System V ABI spec (by some irony copyright 1990-96 SCO) - 1996 being the filing date of the 'Method for resolving data references in generated code' patent.
  • Quite apart from the merits of the case, it is an outrage that Oracle is using Software patents to attack the most complete and functional Free-Software phone stack out there (yet).
  • Then again, perhaps this is non-news: it seems the whole handset market is in some kind of patent maelstrom with Apple suing HTC around Android, and Nokia around Symbian & presumably MeeGo, Nokia counter-suing Apple (at least twice), Microsoft signing a patent pact with HTC, and now Oracle suing Google.
  • Eventually all these suits will have to settle. The -real- question is - when they do, for the open-source users, will they settle for everyone ? ( which means by definition, no per-unit cost ), or only for themselves ? ie. will Google settle for all of Android, or will Nokia settle for all users of Qt - or just for themselves and the proprietary version ?
  • Amusingly, one of the rumours I have heard is that Java is not that well protected patent-wise, mostly relying on copyright - hence aborting the ISO standard just before birth, and using the unhelpful JCP to protect those rights. Thus I would imagine the copyright part to be the greater part of the suit.
  • Of course, the by now (somehow) socially acceptable way of grating patent rights only to 100% conformant implementations should be seen as the dangerous thing it is. Whether you are suing for 'compatibility' reasons, or not it is completely un-acceptable to be a software patent aggressor in my view. Lame arguments about 'defending' standards are just that.
  • It is sad to see MoFo's Michael A. Jacobs - having done a great job defending us all (for Novell) from SCO's copyright aggression - to now be representing Oracle in this business idiocy.
  • Full disclosure, I happen to use Google services every day, and am just beginning to enjoy the Nexus One they recently gave me to play with. For a more in-depth write-up Miguel's write up has more grist.
• Poked at glib for much of the day; with more and more reading, and discussion with davidz finally understand most of the concepts; filed misc bugs around the place in glib. Bashed a nice test case into place for the EAGAIN issue, hopefully we can come up with something unutterably beautiful in the end.
• Watched the rain pouring at speed onto the lawn, and the river beside the house accelerating, it's good to be in England.
• Slept in the tent for the final night; less being dripped on, and more crying of children to punctuate the night.

• Up; early. Personally I love the model of servant leadership. Primarily, because (at least in the Church) it is a command:

  "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant"(NIV)

  Pleased to see Miguel flying the flag for that leadership model.
• Got mail under control quite quickly - why does it ease off at the end of the week ? worked through business cards from the incredibly crazy to the more humdrum.
• Got stuck into GSocket - really nice to have acleaner socket abstraction than the GIOChannel of the past; packed babes, tent etc. into the car and set-off to Sue & Clive's at lunch time.
• Call with Aaron, chat with David, Ryan, HP etc. wrt. GDBus, did some idle handler cleanup in passing.
• Erected new monster tent in the garden, in the rain, only to discover we are missing tent pegs, and have only the fly-sheet; fun. Patched something together with Sue's pegs and ground-sheet; put babes to bed, dinner, bed ourselves.

• Prodded mail, wrote long overdue status-report, Clarity. Continued prodding at Evolution master wrt. oddnesses in gdbus; is it right that by default g_bus_get_sync gives you a connection, that when broken - does a raise (SIGTERM); on you ? sounds sensible enough for server processes that live for the bus, but less so for clients; but perhaps session bus death is so terminal and unlikely these days that it is reasonable.
• Fixed Evo search/selection ergonomic problem. Nick and Joni over in the afternoon. Back to work after dinner - lengthy and interesting conference call. Admired J's painting of the house - another two doors down (first coat).

• Slept in, antibiotics for prolongued sinus / chest infection nastiness; prodded at gtk+ - still loading the xim input method routinely, and parsing the huge X Compose file, filed a bug, and prodded at it a bit.
• Poked at Evo startup, doing a ton of ui builder work on every start (why?), I should cut that down a lot. Lunch.
• Discovered that the X Compose issue is hidden on Fedora by having the xim module in a different package that is not normally installed: sounds like a good approach to me.
• Found that 25% of the evolution startup time was burned loading configuration dialogs that are often never shown; re-factored that into factory functions instead. Dismayed once again by seeing libtool burn my CPU doing crazy numbers of 'grep's and 'seds' re-linking things on make install.
• Worked late.

• Wondered if the depth of cynicism in the modern world is not too bottomless to overcome with motivational videos.
• More grist for the heuristic mill on app stores, thus far, the whole OO.o madness of: "don't integrate useful features into the device, push them to the app-store - to drive traffic there" seems not to have got into full swing. No doubt it will become more pernicious with time; ultimately, having lots of good, built-in software and a less capable app-stor-y seems a great direction for free-software.
• Discovered that symlinking Gilouche to my Gnome 3.0 prefix was enough to fix the unfortunate default gtk+ theme. Lunch.
• Prodded at this and that, a listless afternoon, topped off with a very long discussion and some bad news; sad.

• Up in the night for mamouth battle of wills with E. eventually resulting in the desired outcome: dry all night. Got everyone onto the task of cleaning the house before Mother's return with a good will.
• Off to NCC; sad to hear that the ten Christian workers helping Afghans that were killed today, were good friends of a relief worker that we know there. A few interesting points:
  • Though the Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility (apparently owning a Bible in the local language is enough cause to take someone's life) - the police claim it was bandits: though why you have to kill the Christians (and the driver(s?) survive) after robbing them, remains unexplained.
  • It is apparently acceptable to have a law that forbids sharing the reason you are there (to help people in need independent of their race, creed, etc.) If Islam is so attractive, why forbid conversion from it ?
  • The noble Taliban are so brave and cunning, that they can even attack, and kill the un-armed and defenceless, on a medical mercy-mission: that really takes guts. Particularly since they were allowed to operate in Afghanistan when they ruled the land.
  • The love that drives people to trek with pack-horses up mountains to find the needy, and tend to their medical needs in Afghanistan, is apparently not God's, after all it must be weak and foolish to love even those that hate you.
  • It is of course brave, good and strong to simultaneously claim "that Truth stands out clear from error", that there is no compulsion in religion - but just in case, to beautifully harass and kill those who happens to disagree.
  • How ugly and tragic.
  • Now of course, there are large numbers of Muslims who don't appear to subscribe to the more dangerous interpretations of these texts; just as there are vast numbers of Christians who don't believe the Pope can speak infallibly - and who present little danger to modern man, regardless of the merits or otherwise of their personal faith.
• Back home, J. returned eventually to much 'Mummy!'ing. Lunch. Out for a bike ride onto the race-course in the afternoon. Bed early, after sorting and tagging lots of photos.

• Up in the night dealing with E. fed & dressed everyone. Breakfast, read stories, fought battles of the will with E. who has developed an acute aversion to parental obedience; why does potty training co-incide with the terrible twos ? won battles serially, easier each time.
• Trampoline use in between rain; lunch. Off into town to buy a present for E. for general excellence yesterday; who chose a suitably inexpensive pink handbag. Played in the park. M. who had moaned incessentaly about coming ('I want to watch the computer'), now complained about leaving the playground: dis-satistfaction guarenteed.
• Babes watched iPlayer at some length. E. fell asleep, and unhappy when woken. Cooked chicken dinner - much appreciated by babes.
• Bath & packed them all off to bed. Pottered around tidying up - have no idea how J. manages to do this every day; played with the reprap a little.

• To work, prodded mail, played with Evolution master; set about fixing bugs. Out for lunch in Cambridge with dwmw, aph, Ralf Baechle and a number of other interesting people. Apparently, as well as an endless discussion of documentation licensing, rumour has it that the GCC team have decided to turn on --fomit-frame-pointer by default, if true gdb (at best a mendacious and precocious beast), looks set for full deprecation in favour of fprintf.
• Interested to read Richard's article on copyright assignment, and pleased to see Morten's useful XML fuzzer.
• Fixed an annoying Evo signature bug. Tom Tromey reports that in fact gdb works today (at least Dodji seemed to suggest something similar), and (more to the point) that it is worthwhile filing bugs these days: which is exciting in itself; go gdb !
• Presumably though, if you don't have debuginfo installed (or didn't compile with gcc -g) unwinding stacks becomes just impossible. Are we really about to obsolete all those 'crash reporters' that rely on server-side stack annotation unwinding / symbol correlation to get detailed traces; or do we just have to throw the whole stack(s) over ? I wonder what the impact is on hard-to-reproduce bugs - if everything has to be reproduced again with not just relevant debuginfo installed, but -all- debuginfo for anything that might be on a stack frame. Will we see debuginfo become installed by default across all systems ? (presumably not if there is some size penalty for really-correct debuginfo). Interesting.
• Update: Hah - for top marks in total-wrong-ness, I read mjw's nice write up on stack-unwinding. Apparently, I'm just paranoid - .eh_frame does it all: good, and even better if you use -fasynchronous-unwind-tables, apparently.
• Louse arrived, and J. set off with her for a retreat to Quiet Waters.

• Amused to be auto-enrolled in some Oracle marketing list (presumably migrated from a Sun one) - installment #1:

  "Get your FREE Oracle Unbreakable Linux DVD that includes actual software"

  ; pleased to see awesome 'actual software' being advertised.
• Poked at mail, tested MeeGo updates vs. OO.o. Interested to read about the demise of Google Wave; OO.o team meeting, chat with Thorsten.
• Finally got the PK bug nailed; you -really- don't want to set an error, and continue on - it is vital to 'finish' as you set the error; otherwise a feature can start processing another transaction on the same backend in a different thread; pushed a fix.
• Martin over in the evening, pottered about with the reprap assembling this and that;

• Up early; more mail - when will it end ? presumably the consequence of sending it - is to get more back.
• Got stuck debugging a strange PackageKit bug whereby we got multi-threaded backend usage by accident.
• Arriving home meal in the evening: ham, eggs & pots. Read stories to babies in their beds - hopefully life returning to normality. Back to work, sent some pending mails.
• An evening of caulking, painting and so on with the wife.

• Meeting at 2:30am, E. slept amazingly better with father nearby to hush her back to sleep immediately she wakes. Up late. Poked mail.
• Lunch, prodded OO.o on MeeGo, poked into the ospm package that seems to duplicate upower (strangely). Plodded away at mail, and MeeGo bits.
• Packed everything up, and drove home from Bruce & Anne's. Lydia over in the evening; finally re-united with my reprap - squared the axis, got things setup nicely.

• Prodded mail; finally found the openSUSE conference 2010 cfp mail alias to send some paper suggestions to. Prodded Anas wrt. MeeGo build-service federation. Cleared up the Clarity back-log.
• The hot question is: did Venuzela's brand get hurt by the Vuvuzela ? Why not travel to sunny Vuvuzela for some Bolvarian crackers ?; that - and why the GNOME conspiracy file has not yet been extended to deny the (new) French conspiracy - how are people supposed to believe in it, if it has not yet been officially denied ?
• Filed another connman bug - DNS proxying took a dislike to repo.meego.com it seems; how odd. Helped Frederic Crozat get setup with openSUSE tooling etc.
• Had a hack at OpenOffice again, after a while away, while building an evolution bug fix; feeling productive again (for some reason). Missed a DE meeting in the evening, bother.

• Up earlyish, breakfast, off to Aldeburgh Church - a christening service, which was fun; reasonable sermon, fine hymns.
• Back to pootle around; spaghetti lunch outside. Raining, spent much of the afternoon doing a jigsaw puzzle with the family: quantity time.

• Massive breakfast as normal, packed bags, and got to the train station; high speed train, Eurostar to London, tried to catch up with the mail backlog. Always nice to see the people staggering back down the train from the canteen - looking as if they have been robbed.
• Tube to Liverpool St, and train to Ipswich; debugged an interesting Evolution issue on the way.
• Finally re-united with the lovely wife & family, helped Sue & Clive get packed up & leave. Fed babes, and put them to bed, ate with Bruce & Anne, bed early.

• Up earlyish, to get to the Banshee talk; met an old KOffice acquaintance with some curious ideas, and yet-another web/ODF renderer: it is amazing how fast the first 20% is, doing that. Missed the lightning talks talking to Charles. Bid 'bye to all and sundry.
• Sat around filing expenses, and (on the third try) got a correct Hotel Bill. Out for dinner with the Banshee guys, and Scott, rather lovely nouveau cuisine, albeit somewhat wasted on my palette.
• Up rather late playing a new game: Napoleon with JRB, his good wife and others. Tried to learn 'Go' from Jake, and Bradely's cleaning up in Texas hold-em.

• Noticed Dawn published my OSCON / MeeGo slides here kindly saving me the effort.
• Enjoyed the clutter guys' talk - as always doing awesome things in their spare time; the SVG on Clutter impl. being particularly fun, with monkeys and games to match.
• Out to the Collabora party in the evening - excellent: with both free food, and free drink. Cringed internally as those with no knowledge of food hygine heaped chips onto their raw chicken; but very enjoyable. Caught up with Dave Neary.
• Saddened by the negative reaction to (what is IMHO) a great story of vendor diversity and strength around the GNOME ecosystem.

• Fun, intense hall-way track attendance; great to meet up with so many great hackers. Great conference link.
• Luis presented his vision of re-writing the whole of GNOME in JavaScript built on web technologies. Certainly, it would be nice if it worked, performed and was available right now. In the absence of that, the opportunity to invest looks rather like an opportunity to get bogged down in an unworkable mess. Is the innovators dillema that the majority of startups fail ? are fat-client apps the Train or the transatlantic liner - the jet aircraft killed only one of these (so far).
• Off to the Canonical party in the evening, stood outside talking for the most part.

• Up early; off to the Advisory Board meeting, only to discover my clock was out of sync; an hour late. Lots of discussion and old friends much of the day.
• Out for dinner with Bradely, Lennart, Caillon, Dan, and a bunch of other interesting guys; back - for beers with Caillon. Bed late.

• Managed to get a row of seats on the plane, and to sleep for a chunk of the time; shouldn't have watched highly unpleasant film about dragon tattoo'd girl first.
• Got to St Pancras, who (generously) won't let you get into the free-WiFi / seating area until minutes before the train. Interested to see ibm dropping Solaris support, odd.
• Arrived eventually; out for dinner with a host of banshee guys, back to the hotel to talk with Owen & Dan Winship good, met caillon; to see JRB, Chris & meet caillon; got talking with Lefty.

• Up earlyish, T Porter Square to Park Street; fine sermon on the cross from a visiting preacher. T onwards to Fenway; visited Miguel, Laura and tiny, sweet baby Lucia - a wonderful blessing and privilege to be able to see the new family while I was here; caught up with Miguel a little.
• T back to Park St, Finagle a (circularly-sawed) Bagel with Thomas and Becky in the common, wandered the common; dancing with ducks. Rather a pleasant walk to MIT's museum - admired the various displays; particularly the variety of robotic actuators.
• Back to Thomas' via a nice Italian restaurant for pizza, listened to music, talked, packed. Drove to the airport, and the next round of travel madness begins: an intense plane, tube, eurostar, train series to The Hague.
• Highly amused by the Judas Phone art work. I guess there are some downsides to having lots of creative types using your products. Amused by the old phone version - although, reading the definition of smart-phone carefully on wikipedia; it seems clear that we need a new/improved market segmentation. If the Nokia Communicator of 2000 is a smart-phone, it makes me very suspicious of all but "sales in the last quarter" statisticis around phones; or am I just a paranoid.
• Caught up with Eric, and the great OO.o hacking that Jonas is doing, hopefully he'll blog about it soon.

• Up lateish; dressed, Becky came over - lovely to meet her; and drove us all off to Rockport - a beautiful morning of scrambling over granite rocks, admiring a disused quarry come lake, videoing ad-hoc dancing, etc.
• Into town to a fair, via a diving enthusiast's museum, and a story telling performance (substantially focused on raspberries it seems). Fine views & company.
• Dinner in Salem, after missing the museum's opening times, and wandering around the house of seven (arguably eight) gables. Fine meal; back - watched "Thank you for Smoking" - really rather good.

• Up much too early; early flight to the east coast. In awe of Alaska's pleasant seating, and free WiFi (sponsored by Bank of America) - great; now my incoherent ramblings can be dropped from a great height. Ping is at best 150ms to gnome.org, with some huge jitter: >1 second happens often, with 500ms normal; still bandwidth seems great, downloading part of a meego ISO got up to 110KB/sec - but presumably this is some anti-social proportion of the entire plane's bandwidth. Technology seems to be 3G from GoGo. With only 92 masts to cover the entire US; one wonders if a few dozen fibre-connected boats in the Atlantic could cover the main air corridors. If that happens, perhaps I really will have to give up and write web software.
• Read some great points about bugs, hopfully improved governance will fix this sort of thing. It's interesting though how several little bits of closed-ness (internal-only pieces) can have a wider, knock-on effect.
• Less impressed to discover a (very typical) DHCP lease / address exhaustion issue after re-booting; re-entered the previous details as static addresses: all is well.
• Caught the T. from Logan, via an unpleasant downtown crossing (with luggage), to Kendal/MIT. Managed to locate the office in the pouring rain with Aaron's help, and to get into it with a cleaner and Michael's help. Slugged for a bit. Pleased to hear about the mono git migration - go git !
• Thomas arrived, and Aaron too - to demonstrate a machine to hang you upside down (or something); off to an Indian restaurant to meet Jackson's fiance Diana, and her friends. Fine meal, on to the beehive for a Jazz band unconstrained by conventional views on rythm, tonality, or direction. Discovered Miguel & Laura's amazing news - a baby ! Back, to Thomas' to sleep.

• Up early to finish talk; breakfast with James, caught up with Jean Paoli in passing. Met up with Keith Packard, did a chalk talk on MeeGo at the booth.
• Lunch with Keith (and a passing Rob Pike); sat around synchronising the state of the software world, rockets, 3D printers and so on. Caught up with Paul Hudson, then Dirk Hohndel.
• Did my MeeGo conference session - reasonable attendance; no-one spontaneously fossilised through boredom; nice to see Graham again.
• Dropped luggable machines off, and out for a Google dinner in the evening. Despite the predictions of a kernel hacker drought at OSCON, t'was good to see Peter Anvin, James & Linus. Learned a lot about PostgreSQL from Josh Berkus; and learned of interesting Puppet Labs from Luke. Got a Nexus One - lovely.

• Up early; prodded dolefully at slideware; off to the conference for the keynotes; amused by O'Reilly - apparently we are all Gods (it's not just Eric Raymond?) - new: old lies ... Otherwise interesting - Stormy spoke excellently on 'Is your Data Free'; Dirk did a nice quick MeeGo overview.
• Admired the Intel booth, met Auke for the first time, in the flesh - interesting man; and caught up with Dave Stewart; met all manner of interesting people.
• Wandered the floor, met Corbin Simpson and learned a lot about the state of X, Gallium, KMS etc.
• Lunch with Russ Nelson & Auke, saw Simon Phipps in passing. Back to the booth to catch up with Frank Rehgo, and others. Met Armin & Lillian doing hardware demos; saw the awesome AAVA prototype Intel / Atom phone - sexy hardware, modulo the lame-ass closed-source evilness of PowerVR. Intel needs to hire some professional exorcist to rid themselves of that. How is it possible to ship a CPU that has no instruction set documentation for it's built-in pixel-shaders ? Anyhow - a great device overall: if there was an open-source driver: perfection.
• Caught up with Bradley, met Aaron, Karren etc. and split for dinner with them amd some fun HP guys, learned about fossology; had a few queries cleaned up. Back to work on my talk until late.

• Up early, called home; breakfast with James, train to the conference; wandered the hallways meeting interesting people; admired the (curious) advertising laden toilet paper: odd. E-mail.
• Avoided the tutorials, and sat chatting to people; out for dinner with Iain & Stormy - walked there with James meeting up with the famous Taras Glek on the way. Lots of performance optimisation, file-system, I/O discussion; got the MAX back (Portland public transport appears to be excellent).

• Up much too early; train to LHR, flight. Poked at rep-snapper a little. Why would people prefer a singleton global variable over the 'this' pointer ? dunged out a lot of cruft.
• Prodded at constructing MeeGo slideware; ho hum - ended up discussing literature with a lady on the plane instead. Watched Shutter Island - a simply unbearably sad ending. I hate to think what the impact of such psychological dramas is on the mentally unstable.
• Normal visa queueing fun - except the electronic VISA wavier is far sweeter than the paper version, no form filling, and stapling pain. Arrived late; sandwich; bed.

• Up earlyish - awoken by sounds of much screaching, and jumping, it seems the trampoline had the desired effect. Read the instructions carefully. When, oh when, will our Asian manufacturing friends decided to use a translator, native in the target language ? Amused by the "Always consult your physician before attemping physical exercise" - surely that would place rather a strain on the National Health Service ? did someone really litigate on the basis that they had no idea that exercise might injure you ?
• Off to NCC, ran creche. Back via Argos (to purchase a new router - sadly on a Sunday). The previous Belkin effort at least lasted for sixteen months which is somewhat less long than the three years I thought was bad for the last one. Are we all doomed to ever more flaky hardware ? Roll on the days of open-hardware, with (of course) home-made logic analysers to debug it with. I'm nearly certain that someone needs me to have a deep memory logic analyser.
• Lunch, relaxed a little in the garden, and out to an Art exhibition in a chapel nearby, Hannah Webb exhibiting some fine pieces. Popped onto the Webbs, to catch up with Nick, Hannah and Joni. Sat in the playground in the sun for a while, and visited an ancient cluntch quarry now filled with trees.
• Back, bathed babes, put them to bed, packed, and packed for OSCON / GUADEC.

• Up early, tended babes while J. slept. Set the final monster print-out going (the large x-carriage-lower) - a raft, duct taped down, etc. Adhered to the tape beautifully - which then bubbled off the surface - bother. Eventually got a fairly warped but functioning carriage: nice.
• Cycled to the market with the both babes to get soft fruit; back, intense rounds of party preparation, silly game construction, cleaning, egg sandwich preparation etc.
• Lots of babes arrived, interestingly the older they get (H. is seven) the more parents leave their children - without staying to swallow the food and talk (shame). Lots of fun games, J's carrying lego assault course idea a particular success. Party food, and fun.
• Eventually packed everyone to bed; J. out for Erin's leaving dinner; set too constructing monster 10 foot diameter trampoline for the babes. Martin kindly came over to help. Much greasing of the hands, and tightening of bolts, springs etc. later - we have an huge trampoline. Bed late.

• To work; admin. Poked at SUSE MeeGo a little with Andrew. Kicked off a new OO.o 3.2.1 build to play with. Triaged bugs variously.
• Downloaded the Intel meego handset images, and created a chroot to play inside with Xepyhr. Tested laptop projection for OSCON - Intel graphics + SLED11-SP1: plug and play perfection.
• Struggled trying to get a chroot with the MeeGo handset UI running inside it, for some considerable time; mcompositor appears to render blackness, and duihome does nought but a black-and white demo app - odd.
• Set about creating lots of numbered country-names for babes to put into similarly named pots around the house for tomorrow's party.

• Mail; prodded at X drivers, did a 0.12.2 release of bootchart2. Packaged for MeeGo and openSUSE:Factory.
• Onto looking at forward porting our uxlaunch fixes, batched some off to Auke. Dug at mutter non-functioning-ness on my device. It seems setting CLUTTER_VBLANK=none is the solution; now of course - I appreciate that no doubt this is to work around a driver bug; but is it really sane to continue to wait whole minutes for a vblank event to occur ? (and meanwhile to block any compositing). Could we not have a 500ms-and-no-longer approach whereby if no vblank arrived in that time we would give up on further waiting as a bad job (?).
• Federico pointed me at this chap making beautiful goemetric shapes from a rapid prototyping machine - sadly the reprap has no support-material capability yet putting most of these shapes out of the realm of possibility (thus far). Some great stl slicing tests though.

• Mail, finished a write-up, back to boot time instrumentation; further polish to the tooling, variously. Jared's staff call.
• Printed out a replacement bottle opener; useful at conferences.

• Up early, to work, prodded mail. Pleased to merge a helpful bootchart2 patch from Matthew Bauer; and dung out the bootchart2 TODO, halving its size. Call .
• Fell for a Russian spammers bogus 'Facebook' E-mail, how refreshing - the first one that got me in ages: further proof that social media rots the brain.
• Installed / tested some OpenSUSE packages based on MeeGo (status) Andrew 'FunkyPenguin' Waafa has been doing a fantastic job on it, chipping away at the problem; still a few left: missing session integration, and gconf issues - but looking good.
• Another community pair doing a great job are Ricardo Cruz and Atri Bhattacharya on yast2 - both developing and helping package it. I was dead impressed to see (and immediately use) the new "Switch installed packages to the versions in this repository" feature in 11.3, and the speedy incremental search while installing MeeGo.
• J. out baby-sitting, printed out a couple of (only moderately) warped plastic pieces including the x-carriage-lower, taping down a much larger base grid really helps.

• Up early, dropped babes at school; read mail - set too examining boot time, fixed a singularly mindless bootchart2 collector bug of my own creation. One to one with JP.
• Replaced sreadahead with /bin/false - noticed zero impact on boot time; um - is btrfs really just -that- good ? Clarity (after spamming me for not filling it in), finally decided to respond so I could fill in my time breakdown.
• Out in the evening with the lovely wife; ordered an Indian take-away from 'The Lancer' to eat on the heath; had a half-hour drink at the Rutland arms, then back - another 40 minute wait, before giving up in disgust. Wandered back in the dark to another restaurant ('The Old Scotch') [also Indian], and eat at home.

• Up early, tended babes while J. slept and tried to make sandwiches. Set off for my 2nd nephew James' christening at Sue & Clive's house. Fine mini service, lots of family there for food and sun.
• Discovered the Vicar (David Dewick) was an ex. Home Office manderin, and Assistant Secretary to the original Widgery enquiry into Bloody Sunday, interesting chap apparently had some original footage, and bullets in his filing cabinet.
• Caught up with various branches of the Hawkins / Griffin family and friends. Very clear drive back, and bed early.

• Up lateish; pottered about. Set too printing plastic parts out, while helping Father cut the hedge back and chop it into tiny pieces (to cram it into the bin somehow). Discovered a large are of previously obscured garden at the front; neat.
• Dropped H. N. M. and J. down to the severals to get their float organised for the Newmarket Carnival, back for more hedge hacking, lunch. Woke & fed a worried E. and cycled her off to watch the parade, then on to the amusements. Very hot.
• Home, more hedging. Plastic printing machine packed in: no sooner do you have the extruder working, than the whole thing falls victim to some vile comms problem, with errors left and right - presumably another temperature effect on nasty press-fit serial connectors.

• Parents arrived late last night. To work; plodded through mail, did admin: why do people like you to print out, sign, and scan things in again ?
• Lunch at school with all three elder Meeks girls, and Grace Brighty - Myriam's induction day into the Reception class; fun. Back for some more food. Found the drill sharpener manual for Father to get to grips with.
• Conference calls, new installation flow testing; I guess it is finally necessary to write a btrfs implementation of fsdump to see what is going on underneath.
• Admired Father's success in de-cyphering the drill-sharpener instructions, and my newly sharpened drills. Knocked up a steel plate spring to encourage the extruder to get it's pinch right regardless of fillament width, and excentricity in the drive. Managed to print out a gear.
• Sat in the garden with the parents until late, catching up with their American expedition.

• To work, got a chromium setup up and running, and started debugging a particularly 'interesting' Moonlight bug. Sent a patch off for valgrind to tolerate setuid binaries when already run as that UID/GID etc. Chromium also does: execve ("/proc/self/exe", ...); somewhere in spawning it's child sandboxes (which are setuid root interestingly). The setuid helper /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-sandbox seems capable of other funky things: --adjust-oom-score <pid&gt <value> eg. that look interesting; presumably it has been audited to death. Firefox - come back ! all is forgiven ...
• Eventually abandoned the clever-tooling approach, and went back to 'code reading'; could it be yet-another C++ default-constructor bug ? in the end turned out to be everyone expecting everyone else to do proper namespacing - with conflicting symbols left & right. It is just great to know that interposing is such a wonderful feature that the glibc guys find so sexy (because, being at the bottom of the stack they have only benefits and the problems: poor performance, unexpected bugs, and portability grief, are everyone else's).
• Worked rather late, out to cell group in the evening; Martin gave me a rather fine set of files which is nice.

• Woke up, packed babes off to school; back to bed - exhausted. Up later, to work ! Dug through mail, sent more out. Conference calls, and created more meeting pain for myself somehow. Read the rash of unpleasant commenters: give the new Man's vision of turning Nokia around a chance first (surely?). Dinner. Worked late, debugging a nasty video hardware problem, but didn't get to the other blocker bug in the inbox.

• Prodded mail, read news; pleased with a breakthrough in E's (4/4) toilet training, strangely - unlike any other daughter, she loves to play throw / catch of a ball afterwards; could this be the bounce, bounce, bounce, throw that is such a threat to our engineering ecosystem ?
• Call wrt. Evolution, JP's staff meeting; booked my travel and hotel for GUADEC - I guess I'm going immediately after OSCON.
• Once again stumbled over the lose / loose spelling difference, Greek students would empathise no doubt - 'Luo' is just too handy. After successfully injecting fissiparous into an article, my next target word (from Solarion) is (the much under-used) ovovivparous - to make my inner platypus proud.
• Finally got the the admin queue: Clarity, and some bugs,.

Back to the future

The other day the, secret, internal, 'from scratch' re-write of GStreamer integration was announced by StarDivision. You can read the wonderful news on their corporate blog. There is also some amusingly mis-directed marketing effort focused on Ubuntu as well. What does this mean for Linux users ? Nothing. With this great leap forward in Linux support you are unlikely to notice any difference at all; why ? Because all Linux distributions (SUSE, RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and more than I can list) have already been shipping GStreamer support since 2006. That was mostly written by Radek Doulik from Novell, with fixes from Redhat's superstar Caolan McNamara.

The real question is: Why would StarDivision want to draw attention to their traditional feature gap, by making noise about shipping multimedia support four+ years late ? while simultaneously alienating valuable contributors and continuing to tear down its developer community (that would love to help close OO.o's feature gap) ? if that interests you - read on:

Late to the party

Winston Churchill said that some people will always do the right thing ... after they have exhausted all the alternatives.. Now of course, for years I've been fondly wearing the GStreamer T-shirt, and promoting it as the future of multimedia. Sadly my 1st minor contributions were a bit late: in 2001, but the love is there; it's a great technology and a badly needed unifying force in the fissiparous area of media stacks. Did I mention I think it rocks ? it is eclectically owned and apparently developed as a traditional open-source project (despite lots of corporate investment).

Anyhow, despite (to my mind) the obvious-ness of GStreamer as the right backend to pick, StarDivision went ahead, chose and implemented the JMF support that they now admit is horribly inadequate; here is how things panned out:

• 2004-08: StarDivision lands Java Media Framework (JMF) support for Solaris / Linux.
• 2004-08: Simultaneously they commited DirectX support - which is great, Windows had a different, higher performance implementation, with full native platform codec support, etc. Linux is left as a tier 2 platform.
• 2004-10: Noticing that perhaps the situation is not altogether ideal on Linux, (and ignoring my verbal advice to use GStreamer), an effort is made to add Xine support. A nice try of course, but shame about Xine's conflicting GPL license.
• Somewhere around here, StarDivision got slammed for picking the (still proprietary) Java implementation instead of the platform one. As I recall I stood up for them robustly; after all it was technically easier for them to use Java right ? - 'Sun are not evil'
• 2005-02: By early 2005, it is clear that not all is well:

  "I have tried all the dev releases of the upcoming OO 2.0 under Linux. Last I have had in use is the 1.9.77 release. In none of these the native insertion of video file in any format that I have tried (raw, avi, xvid, divx, mpg mpeg4) has worked. It simply can't play any of the formats I throw at it."

  At this point we have Xine and MPlayer mentioned, still the relevance of GStreamer hasn't sunk in.
• 2005-04: Around this time, we get some code contributed from the Helix guys, though it is never merged into mainline.
• 2006: Radek pushes his first cut of GStreamer support, and soon we are shipping something that actually works. Rapidly all Linux distributions pick that code up from ooo-build, or by manually extracting the patches.
• Finally you can play a .ogg inside your presentation, and it mostly works. Admittedly we hard-code a single backend implementation (GStreamer) for Linux, rather than adding a generic, 'select a backend' option.
• four year gap of disaster for Sun OO.o users - during which we try to encourage StarDivision to take our code, either under the LGPLv3 (preferred), or with assigned copyright and a liberal license (less preferred)
• 2010-07: StarDivision announce their re-write as if this is a miraculous advance.

The Bogus Quality argument

At this point, the people trying to market against a branch of the same code, with additional features added, start to cast aspersions on its Quality. This is about the only half-way plausible argument they can have without hurting themselves. After all - ooo-build is intrinsically more feature (and fix) full than the original it is based on.

Of course, this argument foundered pretty horribly on missing features like 'Media Playback', given that our GStreamer integration is fairly robust (no known bugs). Is overall product quality really higher with totally inadequate media playback ? Is it really that much better to have nothing than something ?

The other part of the quality argument is similarly self-serving and goes a bit like this: "Their bug fixes are of terribly low quality !", this is usually helpfully co-joined to "This is because they don't have a slow and complicated QA process !". Then, of course there is the FUD - usually trotted out by non-programmer 'community' gurus and swallowed by everyone "The code-base is impossibly complicated, only the original authors could fix it". Of course there is some level of self-stultification, among the arguments: if the original code is of such high quality, how can it be comprehensible only by its original author ? [ hint, code review, and care in coding is perhaps more valuable, long term, than black-box testing ]. Is the underlying code really -that- complex and impossible to hack on ? (usually not). Of course among the smoke of a FUD war, any meaningful metrics of whether these bug fixes are actually bad is never forthcoming; it is just assumed.

Of course, in my view we fix many more bugs than we introduce (there being no shortage of them despite the heavy-duty up-stream, black-box process), and we always have a feature edge, though it changes over time; in large part because we send a lot of our work up-stream ourselves.

Ultimately, since all code has some level of bugginess, it can be hard to discern, for the man on the street, what the best code is. Luckily the Quality argument boils this down to something trivially to understand and remember, irrespective of who wrote it:

"If StarDivision owns it - the code is of high quality, if not the same code is of low quality"

Community growth

Of course, developing duplicative code, in secret, internally, and then landing it on the world is not a great strategy for growing a developer community:

"Should I bother adding an OO.o feature, or should I hack on this cool game ?
Well - I know if I try to contribute to OO.o, it is going to be grief and pain, and my code will probably be re-written
or discarded; perhaps the problem has already been fixed in secret anyway. Lets get typing games ! ..."

Needless to say, this GStreamer duplication is not the sort of advert that we want out there, that encourages people to contribute. If code is developed in secret, and then dropped from a height on the project - there will be much reduced benefit from peer review, and external contribution all around. Moving in this direction is extremely unhelpful for the future of OpenOffice as an open and inclusive project.

More amusingly, perhaps, there is a cabal of non-developers and business partners who hang around advising StarDivision management on matters of 'strategic' importance, such as this - who of course get advanced notice of these decisions. It is an interesting strategy to empower these people, and not those writing code. It is also curious that, although the revision history of the new GStreamer support is now hidden (with a single code dump), the ten source module file names match our implementation, while differing from the windows, and xine backend pattern; probably just a co-incidence.

Who ?

I use the name 'StarDivision' above, since it has been made clear publicly that OpenOffice is run at arms length, as a nominally separate business unit. Indeed, Oracle's acquisition of it has only just fully completed. It seems a reasonable (if legacy) name. Perhaps it is a shame that some of the good practice and expertise around Open Source projects that Oracle has in-house is not effectively applied in this piece of the company. People like to give Apple all the credit for their control ambitions around language choice for their app-store, banning their competitors from the arena and so on. That seems rather unfair, Open-Office.org seems more of a crucible of software co-ercion innovation: in order to get your code included it appears StarDivision needs not only to own it, but to do so exclusively.

The Business Case

Clearly, I am a Free Software hacker, not a business man; thus of course, perhaps I've missed something hugely important here around control or somesuch, but since these actions are rationalized to StarDivision's own (humane, and clueful) developers with a pressing 'business' rational, lets look at the pros and cons of duplicating this in-house, vs. the alternative: accepting code ownership, under condition that it is also available under a liberal license:

• Pros of Accepting and including existing code
  • Costs: zero dollars
  • Code ownership - means StarDivision can maintain existing contracts
  • Code ownership - means StarDivision can sell indemnity to others
  • No community fragmentation
  • Engineers can be focused instead advancing the state of the art
  • No impression of having spare resources to pointlessly squander
• Pros of Re-writing the code from scratch
  • Exclusive code ownership: anyone that wants rights for this small piece of code has to come to us, there is no liberally licensed equivalent.
  • perhaps macho posture: beat the little guys with glasses up ! it keeps them in line.
  • um ...

Of course, I don't think StarDivision's management is actively malicious, they're certainly not stupid - so it is necessary to pad out the re-writing pros a little - there must be a reason: what is it ? Is it really worth fracturing the development effort, wasting resources, re-writing existing, tested, working code, and driving away contributors, simply in order to ensure that StarDivision are the only owner ? is this 'Open'-ness ? How likely is it that external contributors are going to re-write and improve a majority of the OO.o code-base in the next decade anyway (diluting the exclusive ownership) ? Why bother creating conflict and steam-rolling other contributors to this extent, purely in StarDivision's proprietary corporate interest ?

Of course, ideally we would just get the code into OO.o under the LGPLv3 (the outbound project license), it is a tragedy that such a cost is paid, simply in order for StarDivision to have the exclusive right to avoid its terms.

Please note, that this is not a competitive issue. Notice, I am not promoting Novell's version as years ahead of Sun's here. I truly believe that to get the best product for everyone we need a partnership and collaboration of developers inside and outside companies, to create a better OpenOffice for all.

Conclusion

This announcement is non-news, StarDivision re-wrote a small piece of community developed code, and plan to ship it in six months time (in OO.o 3.4). What little news content there is points to an increasingly closed, secretive, and unhelpful development process. Perhaps there are also clear signs of an unwillingness to compromise at all, and a slow dying of the belief that such a thing as an active, and helpful developer community is possible. Please remember that once we all worked together in a more productive and friendly way !

Of course, I anticipate more non-news, if management loses faith or interest in a developer community, and prefers to waste resources rather than working together with others, there are some obvious next steps: waste even more resources ! Unfortunately, as a side effect this yields the development agenda to others, and just builds more walls between those who have common cause to make the code-base better. What a tragedy.

Personally, I believe OO.o can really only thrive and grow if all the contributors work together. By work together I mean a public, transparent co-operation around well defined, fair rules; not a web of tangled back-room agreements. Absent that, I am not optimistic for the future of StarDivision, though it is perhaps positive that they are starting to take Linux integration more seriously - which could be good.

Finally, at some level, this is a sad thing; this is 2.5k lines of code re-written that didn't need to be written (against the current ooo-build patch set size of ~673k LOC). That is a loss of 0.4% of the ooo-build 'edge'. As OO.o, and it's customers finally arrive (in multimedia terms) where ooo-build users were in 2006, I hope they like the scenery: we have long since moved on, as one example: to multi-slide audio.

Update: Amusingly the announcement blog entry finishes: "Don't hesitate to give us feedback." - but strangely, the initial comments and discussion on the article have all been deleted: amazing - what is there to hide ? - the fact that this is duplication ? the bogus quality argument being deployed ?

Update #2: Comments just got re-enabled, showing the great hype on quality. As mentioned, having a fully-pluggable media backend where you can choose Xine or Mplayer or JMF or GStreamer is a terrible idea; hence hard coding GStreamer support. Though of course the calculus of maintaining features as patches imposes some limits to the re-factoring possibilities too.

• Up early, pleased to read Simon's brief exposition of Open Core. I concurr, but I think it is clear that the danger lies not so much in the core, but in the assymetry between it's licensing and an ownership right. The Apache core eg. is licensed very liberally and accepted by all, whereas the MySQL core is commercially exploitable only by a single entity.
• Visited my doctor to discover that a viral bronchitis + sinusitis does in fact take three weeks to go away, and to chin up / keep going; thankfully things are looking up.
• Un-surprised to see the latest twaddle from David King. I distinctly recall attempting (and failing) to dis-abuse him of the idea that biological computing was only a few years away (back in 1999, when he was Master of Downing College), something that appeared obvious based on the most trivial economic, and engineering considerations. Anyhow - New Scientist will be pleased to have the next 'rocket cars' type article for their modernist audience pre-written for them.
• Got a nice bug report from Andrew Haley - a bog standard OO.o / KDE4 integration crasher, disguised (by a new, more helpful SEGV handler that Java uses) that says 'Java' on it - thus filed in the IcedTea tracker. "It was only then that the idea of hard-coding Jacob Berkman's mobile number into the bug-buddy crash screen occured to him".
• Prodded at the reprap in the evening, the extruder is just a shockingly unpleasant piece to get right - tried replacing the stepper, and got the same slipped steps effect; hmm. Next stop a -real- stepper motor controller instead of the hacked up pair of over-heated DC drivers; more soldering required.

• Up early, pottered off to Church with everyone, discovered still wearing slippers; not a good day. Struggled to stay focused.
• Back to ours for lunch with Peter & Dianne Curtis-Prior, Tony & Janice, and Lydia. A fine spread, good company, fine conversation.

• Up lateish, feeling shocking, chest infection, low lung capacity, bumbled around the house feebly like an older person for much of the day.
• Caught up with the parents on the phone somewhere here: returned from the US in one piece, thankfully.

• Trawled through bugs, tried to decide whether to buy an iPad. "Do you like other people deciding what you can and cannot do ?". Started queueing to buy Miguel's new iPhone app, hopefully it is for sale; of course, it requires buying an Apple product which might hurt, whereas iCoaster was a more plural product, platform-wise; though naturally I prefer the fork.
• Feeling somewhat unwell, heat, poor chest etc. not good. Sandy over for lunch. Fixed a couple of interesting bootchart2 issues for Alex Graf (doing funky things with Studio).

• Up early, packed babes off to school; trains to Millbank for a 'Harmony' meeting, good to see Simon again in his new ForgeRock existence, agitating inside the BCS as well; good stuff. Met lots of interesting, and expert people.
• Good to catch up with Dobey, Rodrigo and JamesH as well, all sprinting to somewhere. Finally my (shocking quality) penny bottle opener met it's match Carlo Piana - a cunning lawyer (using his experience of alternative angles) bent it backwards and snapped it in two. Amusingly ten or so software engineers before him had failed to identify that weak mode. Good to know the FSFE has such expertise to draw on.
• Out late, back on the train - met a lovely great grandmother & daughter on the train.

• Poked mail, Evolution patch merging and packaging fun with Michael and Peter; good to see them on IRC. Spent time prodding at testing SOCKS proxy support.
• J. out counselling in the evening; managed to get much of the 360 X bearing plate assembled and running nicely; worked late poking at PackageKit and patches.

• Up early, mail digging, nursed the gnome-shell build; seemingly building mozilla with a non-system nss is an infernal mess. Why not use pkg-config uniformly, rather than requiring these bizarre --with-system-nss or --with-nss-prefix configure arguments ?
• Moved OSCON flight so I can get to GUADEC on time, call with Jared. It's good to know that "You can't just go around taking photos" according to the MET.

• Mail triage, admin. Tried some more to get jhbuild to build Gnome 3.0 on SLED11-SP1 - lots of problems going beyond the libtool one. The most evil problem is a bogus dependency chain of doom: everything requires gvfs which requires gnome-disk-utility (uh?) which requires udisks (which requires lots of rather recent pieces). Suffered with the retarded setup of 'device-mapper', atasmart, build-your-own udev, latest avahi-ui etc.. Of course - I had no desire to do anything clever with my disks at all. Bad. Interestingly this mirrors some acute madness and package splitting required for MeeGo in exactly this area. Notable examples would be device-mapper's habit of trying to force root user ownership, and gnome-disk-utility's wonderful hard-coding of system paths in Makefiles, urgh: udisks-device-glue.h: /usr/share/dbus-1/interfaces/org.freedesktop.UDisks.Device.xml
• Advisory call with Stormy & co. Martin over in the evening with spare ATX PSU, played printing pieces and catching up at some length.

• Up early, tended babes; while printing plastic springs. Off to setup tents - a very sunny day for church without walls on Studlands Park green.
• Back to collect babes, and water for the masses; church service on the green. Back for barbeque with Chris & Claire + brood.
• Much lying around in the sun, watching assorted babes splashing in the pool etc. Let E. over-sleep, leading to a tragically interrupted night of non-sleep for us.

• Up late. Pottered around printing pieces of reprap out and assembling them with H. for much of the day, got the y carriage assembled. J. out to a party with both babies in the morning, and N. in the afternoon. Played with H. making an assault course in the garden in the sunshine; lovely.

• Dropped babes to school, cleaned church, picked up racking from John; to work. Prodded at a really nasty nasty in g-ir-scanner. Lunch.
• Prodded once more at jhbuild, breaking again in libtool - which is fine at linking things, but gets highly confused by system .la files (it seems), and I refuse to do a bulk delete of my nicely package-managed .la files; eventually caved in and moved them to some safe place for future testing.
• Chatted with David wrt. some Evolution bug fixes, and was amused and pleased to see Alan attribute this sage advice to him:

  "Policy is a poor man's substitute for common sense."
  -- David Woodhouse
  

• Prodded at mail. Rethink Wireless have been spamming me for some considerable time, but I got hooked somehow on reading their updates. Of course, I know nothing about the handset market, but it is sad to see Nokia taking a beating. It remains incredible to me that the huge opportunity presented by the N900 - was abandoned in favour of non-user-visible tech warfare. Time to market ? or are the times changing ?
• Poked at jhbuild, time to have a real, full GNOME environment building instead of working with patches everywhere I suspect. Worked with Joey on image bugs.
• Lunch; booked hotel for OSCON. Boggled at Sam Varghese's latest trolling - refreshingly of Network Manager; apparently manually editing a text file is how all right thinking people should setup networking; and everything else (eg. point and click to select a wifi network, DHCP as default for network address selection) is "high grade bull ... will drive people away ... voodoo world of Windows". Re-assuring that my tenouous grip on the real world (amongst the source files) is stronger than some others'. Perhaps a better article title would be: "I watched the world cup instead of thinking about what to write, so now I have to generate three pages of mindless drivel that will get lots of hits ... what could it be ?".
• Printed out some nice plastic pieces in the evening; slicer seems to be doing its job at least - a reliable extruder is really key in getting a robust shape it seems, far more so than the internal fill spacing. Out to Cell group to distribute leaflets for church on the park on Sunday. Back early to watch DVD with Lydia & J.

• More mail catchup, attempted to organise travel more effectively. Why did my extended family all manage to get born at times co-incident with a peak in the conference season.
• Fixed a nasty PackageKit / zypp crasher or two, and fired off some patches to MeeGo. Managerie of phone meetings in the afternoon; pleased to meet caillon there.
• Re-wrote the repsnapper slicing algorithm in the evening; tragically by removing some hideous bugs (a broken 2D point hash), I managed to make slicing far more accurate, and yet pragmatically worse. Added an orphaned point connector to get the most perfect slicer yet; sadly better slicing breaks Logick's shrinking algorithm; hmm.
• Fell over another joy of C++ - default copy constructors and the pImpl pattern: wonderful to hide your implementation details behind a private pointer; less wonderful to have the default copy constructor duplicating that pointer, causing wonderful crashes via two destructors freeing the same pointer.

• Prodded mail; finished and reviewed LXF column, dug at some bugs with Ben. Read some of Kohei's Ixion. Conference calling action variously.

• Up early, took babes to school with some triumphent six to nine times-tables; perhaps they are finally getting them.
• Prodded mail, triaged meego bugs, Clarity, admin, read news.
• Thrilled to read that Intel finally did the right thing, and dropped the requirement for (C) assignment (of whatever form) to be able to contribute to clutter - making it a truely open project; nice ! I feel a sudden urge to contribute, something, anything now it belongs to us all.
• It seems the H open published an interview based on a not completely separated pastiche of some new bits with some rather older quotes from around the web.
  • To me, the most interesting thing about OO.o that needs fixing - is the developer community. That is still predicated on the Sun guys perceiving that it might be nice to work together with others to build one, and considering careful compromises to help make that a reality.
  • To recap - the problem is that Sun (and some other corporates) simply refuse to include code under the LGPLv3 (which would be our preferred solution) unless they can avoid it's terms by owning the code: nasty.
  • My favorite awful compromise of the month (that retains the well known barrier to entry, distrust breeding ground etc. that is assignment) - but might at least make some progress would be to: (wait for it) - assign everything to Oracle ! so they can own it and do what they like with it - but - only on condition that majority non-Sun written code modules are continued to be made available to others under LGPLv3 plus a more lax license: perhaps MPL/CDDL, Apache, BSD (in order of increasing laxness). That would effectively remove the value of the exclusive ownership of code written by others (for unseemly back-room arm twisting), while at least for the forseeable future, not impacting the proprietary value of the bulk of the code-base.
  • Clearly, by far the best approach is to pick a license you can accept, with a suitable license steward, and go eclectic ownership - letting creativity flourish: the Mozilla approach. This is also -clearly- in the spirit of the (pure) Marketing around the 'Shared' nature of the 'Shared' Copyright Assignment (SCA) : if it is truly shared (it is not), then why not allow it to be available under another license ? And again, it is regrettable that they will not accept code simply under the terms of the LGPLv3; our problem is not with the license - but the assymetry between it and outright ownership of our code.
  • I still hate (C) assignment with a fear and loathing; and continuing it for OO.o drives away the developer help we need; but perhaps this compromise might help re-unite the wider OO.o community, and at least having the bigger corporate contributors working together can't hurt to start with.
• Printed out a gear and (at great length) a new geared extruder housing, which (hopefully) will improve the reliability of the beast, as/when I can knurl the M8 studding involved.

• Up early, tended babes while J. slept. Dropped David into Cambridge for his conference. Home, played with the machine briefly, woke J. and off to NCC. DT preached, and the babes were good in creche.
• Back for lunch, tidied up, lazy afternoon printing pieces of very mixed quality - seemingly the extruder is a tempremental beast and getting the right amount of 'pinch' is quite difficult - currently far too little yielding stringy and fragile output.
• Bed early, programmed on repsnapper in bed for a while, some shapes (even simple ones like z-tensioner_1off.stl appear to have un-cut-able layers missing GCode completely - most odd. Having an SSD makes the laptop -so- quiet, and gives you confidence that your data is stored on something solid, just the tap of the keys for noise.

• Up later; got dressed, babes playing with the play-doh, a result of Guy's bounty. Tried to find horses in an over-crowded town, and dropped Guy at the station.
• Home for lunch, coughing on alternate lungs. David's suspension spring broke in half - leaving him needing a train journey to get here; bother. J. out shopping in town. Prodded at the plastic printing machine a little - and sat at the table assembling it with E. helpfully adding washers here & there.
• Popped out to check on the machine - apparently the thread jammed, purged the nozzle, and turned to see E. fallen down the step, cut her head & crying - grief. Packed babes into the car, zoomed off to A&E, remarkably speedy throughput there too; only 1:30 door to door. Nothing much wrong, glued her up, returned to J. and a rather late lunch.
• Off to Erin & John's house; for a barbeque; good to see them, and Mike & Katy & lots of kids. Tried to stop E. doing all the normal head-banging behaviours: trampoline, jumping off steps, attempting to climb bikes that are clearly far too large for her. Picked up David from the station.
• Home, packed babes to bed, up late talking to David and printing out small pieces to bolt onto the reprap; really good to catch up.

• Up early, still feeling poor. Breakfast, and train/bus into Cambridge to see the lovely Collaborans. Meetings, wandered the streets of Cambridge inclemently. Conference call with Nokians later in a cafe with Guy.
• Back by train, for a birthday (thirty third) dinner with the wifelet & Guy. A most pleasant evening, bed late.

• Up early, fever gone (for now); feeling groggy, got train to London to meet up with Guy & Intel. Wandered between various 'Eat' restaurants before finding Guy. Meetings, out for a fine lunch with Paul & Matthew. Good to catch up with the guys there.
• Tubes and trains home with Guy, enjoyed the garden in the evening, and a little tea. Lydia arrived to meet with J. Bed, tired variously.

• Up early, feeling pretty awful; fuzzy head, painful right lung - normally you have to smoke to feel this bad (surely) ?
• Worked through mail sloowly. Feeling terrible. Bed before the children with a fever.

• Locked out of the house; J. attempted to raise Bert, but eventually had to clamber over and get through a window; downer.
• More mail prodding. Jon pointed out that perhaps a more horrible drop-off around C++ streams for printing things is the lack of sane l10n support due to fragmenting the strings, and not allowing re-ordering; good point.
• Apparently avoiding E-mail during hack-week was bad; I missed the chance to vote in the Foundation election; bother, still (unlike OpenOffice.org) at least I was E-mailed to remind me to vote.
• Poked at evolution packaging, and misc. MeeGo fixes there, submitted an update or two. Boggled at C++'s hash_map (apparently non standard, and with some unpleasant compile-time warning), but it's replacement 'unordered_map' can't be included without other warnings of not-yet-ready-ness (perhaps just a SLE11 issue).
• Off to have the car fixed, hacked from a nearby fitness club with WiFi; JP's staff meeting. On the 'probability clusters' front, got a call from the dear wife - once again locked out - presumably the result of normally having a husband firmly rooted at home.
• Car failed MOT due to a small windscreen crack; bother. Lydia & Janice over for the evening - pottered about with the machine - re-built the extruder securing to be ultra rigid. Printed a test part.

• Read mail, admin pieces. Pleased to see Neelie Kroes make some (apparently) rather sensible statements about the evils of proprietary software. Now if we can only ask governments to encourage / prefer Open-(Source) or Free Software - we can not only reduce our tax burden, and government effectiveness, but have a winning strategy (unlike the 'open standards' game, at which large entrenched monopolies are only too adept at playing).
• Knocked up some screenshots of repsnapper, with package repo for openSUSE: repsnapper. I really need to get all the avr toolchain (and the like) inherited into and available from there, along with the arduino tools and ArtOfIllusion; and an openSUSE / Studio bootable image. Repsnapper looks like this:
  Sadly missing some /dev/ttyUSB0 detection (though Rick is working on it).
• Interesting to do some more C++ programming, and see what fltk is like (not my personal choice, but what was there). What did I learn:
  • It seems the single file, containing GUI and code, that can be compiled into .cxx & .h files by a head-less binary is quite a nice model; why ? because you still have a self-contained binary that doesn't drag XML files with it (across platforms), and it is easy: fluid -c UI.fl is pretty simple to add to a Makefile. We should have done this years ago with glade 1: it would be have been pretty trivial.
  • C++ is not a panacea; it's still easy to mess up memory allocation, cut and paste code, and produce a foul mess that is hard to unwind. A great example would be fltk's sexy void Fl_Widget::label (const char *a); - used to set the label on a widget. As a thing of beauty it stores the raw const pointer value. But - as a bonus there is extra code and lifting for a Fl_Widget::copy_label (const char *a); that does the sane thing. Don't assume other toolkits share good taste in copying conventions.
  • sprintf the C++ way is unutterably lame; at least - as I understand it (perhaps that is the problem). Full of enthusiasm for the C++ way, I wrote this sort of thing using std::stringstream oss;:
    oss << "You are " << setw(2) << years << " years " << months << " months old\n";
    which is all pretty and everything (and notably only a single line). Sadly it turns into five function calls plus frame setup, plus exception unwind tables. Contrast with the standard 'va_args' approach in fprintf - a single function call, and some frame setup. I can only imagine what this does to your code size when you have hundreds of debugging statements around the place doing cunning stuff of the form:
    dbg << "data is: " << a << ", " << b << ", " << c << "\n"; etc. I guess you have to compile them out. A more discerning va_arg version (in C++) could still do nice, powerful object printing (perhaps) but with less of a footprint. Then again, I guess C++'s hidden pointer adjustment makes var arg functions something of a pain static_cast<> wise.
• Mary Rogers over for dinner in the evening - lovely to spend some time with her again.

• Up early; tended babes for a while, while washing up the remains of yesterday's carnage. Off to NCC, Tony spoke on Jesus' arrest.
• Back for lunch with June; managed to print a Y axis mount, albeit with some acute warping; hmm - need a heated bed, or cheap hair-dryer I guess.
• Out to James' birthday party at the Wood's - good fun. Back, tired, put everyone to bed; dinner, tinkering, bed.

• Lie in, off to the market to stock up on necessaries for the party. Light lunch, barbequeing action, lots of fun-sized people arrived to play. Lovely afternoon in the garden in the sun celebrating two lovely years of Elizabeth.
• Prodded at printing plastic in the evening; started to knock up a wooden spindle to hold the filament that might actually be turned by the extruder stepper.

• More bootchart2 hacking, and some repsnapper pieces, fixed misc. bugs, packaged for openSUSE. In a fantastic irony, I spent fifteen minutes chasing a C++ bug whereby I had declared a bogus return type of std::string that I didn't return; it turns out gcc with no -Wall is almost as lame as python in that regard. Discovered a number of other sillies eg. people assuming the compiler will do string uniquification and they can do: if ("Pause" == "Pause") type things (with some added indirection) in C.
• Prepped for E.'s 2nd birthday tomorrow. J. made a fantastic dragon cake.

• Got a certain amount of amused feedback on my python rant; even from some professional sufferers. Patryk Zawadzki kindly recommended pyflakes or pylint. Tried the former on the GUI code. It found a number of unused local variables (wonderful) and imports I didn't need, but not a missing 'return' in a method: nice. Tried the latter: apparently as part of 'sudo python setup.py install' it does a number of web downloads and runs the result (shudder); after that masterly horror - it mentions the method that doesn't return a value has Missing docstring, but nothing else. Of course it generated a ton of false positives - un-loved variable names etc. Tried to clean it up a little, caught exactly zero real bugs; sigh.
• Booked flights for OSCON 2010.

• More bootchart2 prodding, generated and dumped the nice process hierarchy, and started poking at the python to render it.
  • I have to say that a great, great loathing is growing in me for python (and all loosely typed languages - JavaScript, you know what you are !). I feel like adding comments before each method of the form:

    #  CairoContext, Process, ProcessTree, float, float, Tuple(x,y,w,h), Tuple(x,y,w,h)
    def draw_processes_recursively(ctx, proc, proc_tree, y, proc_h, rect, clip) :
    

    And of course just that simple example took me sixty seconds to unwind: dig back to each constructor to be sure.
  • Feeling good about yourself ? time to start using VBA, or it's moral equivalent: python, for a while. You could argue that the way to fix this is to impose 'self discipline' (similar to the just-a-sub-set-of-C++ argument) - and either mangled the type into all your variable names (but I am not Hungarian), -or- to try to use the same variable name everywhere for a given type (until you have two in the same method).
  • Python: it scales to two whole screen-full of code without loosing readability! Python: why write code to be read, when it's so easy to write it new ? Python: great if you can hold the whole program in your head. Now if only Google could target their Java to JavaScript compiler to be a C# to Python compiler ... we might have a readable language, with an incrdibly heavy-to-start run-time (hmm).
  • My next bug-bear was return values. Isn't it magic to have a function call that may not return a value, yet gives no warning (somehow I lost the ultimate 'return' statement in a sub-method - perhaps it still lurks, nicely indented, somewhere else in my code):

    def test:
    	def doit():
    		# some code, conditions, forget to return ...
    	a = doit()
    	if a: # is not None
    		# do something.
    

    Nice; I spent half an hour finding the missing return. As a helpful reminder, here is what a real language would say: doit.c:8: warning: control reaches end of non-void function
    
  • Eventually (by crawling) arrived at the goal of beautiful rendering, despite loosing both feet in the process.
• Dinner, and put the babes to bed, while J. went out to counsel a new client. Prodded at the reprap. After re-working and tightening the X axis yesterday; I turned up the Y axis power (being right on the edge is not so good), for the Z axis tweaked the gear teeth, tightened the belts, applied mini (DRAM) heat sinks to various chips, and ... got my first real, complete print-out, of a coat-hook; generated by repsnapper (nice); fast too.
• Printed out a beer bottle opener, and had an Alsterwasser to celebrate (after mangling it a little by omitting to insert a suitable one cent coin). Apparently rep-straps are sufficiently easy to build that any old idiot can do it. Drawings of ply-wood, and openSUSE packages to follow.
• It seems that repsnapper's optimistic approach of dead reckoning without ever resetting to the end-stops works rather well, and faster too. Surely it is somewhat amazing that the machine can get tens of 0.4mm layers on top of each other reasonably precisely with those means.

• Prodded at bootchart2 much of the day. Re-factored the /proc task list polling, and implemented a threaded netlink based PROC_EVENTS approach instead. That should provide two benefits: first true 'parent' (ie. who forked whom) detail - instead of the ppid fictions: which should provide a much cleaner graph, and secondly far quicker response to get command-line and argument details out of short lived processes.
• Fixed reprap detection; it is not necessary to wait for a board reset to be sure that we are connected. Lydia over for dinner, prodded at the reprap mechanics in the evening, re-building the X axis carriage to be more rigid, and moving the extruder board to the top of the machine.

• Hack week begins; spent much of the day clearing out mail, and admin pieces, bother.
• Fixed up the repsnapper build, tested it on openSUSE, simplified the build process a little, added native file selector support, command line arguments for loading STL files etc. FLTK is quite interesting (and awful at the same time), poked at it variously. Some packaging love tomorrow.
• Poked FunkyPenguin's MeeGo on openSUSE packaging pieces a little.

• Mini lie-in; off to NCC, ran the creche. Home for lunch, with John Madden. Babes played together happy to be re-united. Out to a party with N. Back, prepped the house for a movie and watched "Up" with Lydia, John, Martin, DT, Zoe & Patrick - which was great. Bed lateish.

• Up early, with a pair of small invading the bedroom, and helpfully patting me etc. no doubt questing for the missing Mother. Breakfast.
• Read the note I should have read yesterday, and discovered another set of good things for picnics prepared in the fridge. Spent a considerable time attaching a new baby-seat to my bike, in conjunction with the trailer-bike.
• Cycled off into town by back roads for some play-ground goodness, E. apparently much pleased with her new cycling experience. Picnic, play, ice-lolly, back home.
• E. to bed, M. watching CBeebies videos on the BBC; and demanding 'milk warmed up', and complaining of the service. Fair sentiment, unhelpful articulation. Cleared and cleaned up frenetically for J's return, tea, packed everyone to bed.
• J. returned, Jacket Potatoe dinner appeared to work for everyone, packaged H. & N. off to bed quickly; B. & A. left, bed exhausted.

• Bruce & Anne arrived early to take J. H. and M. off to Rochester Castle and then the Eurostar to France (nominally to practise their French); leaving me with the babies: M. and E. Pottered around; made a packed luch.
• Drove to Norwich, parked in the Castle Mall, walked to the Castle (via several exciting escallator rides). Enjoyed the huge, open keep for a while, though E. terrified of the glass covered well. Then onto various exhibits Boadicea, stuffed animals (as slaughtered en-masse during the colonial era), and so on.
• Out for a picnic lunch in the sun; interestingly you are more aware of slipping discipline when you're with the babes all day. Played on a mini playground & back for more castle-ing.
• Eventually exited via a scary prisoners tunnel to the regimental museum, and back to the car via Maplin & more escaltor rides.
• Sleeping babes in the car at home, warmed dinner, and fed them spag. bog. bathed, and packed them to bed - rather sad not to have their Mother to kiss them to sleep.
• Cleaned up & set too at the reprap; played with repsnapper, and off to hack at the software. Ported HEAD to Linux again (removing a number of Win32-isms), and pushed a git branch Rep-Snapper that really builds (albeit not prints yet). Bed late.

• Poked mail, strained at the build service, unwinding an odd dependency loop. Struggled on trying to work out how ImageMagick gets broken.
• Discovered RepSnapper apparently the solution (at revision 208) to my reprapping software woes; for all the reasons listed by Giles.
• Plugged away at build problems, strace -f'd two parallel osc builds to compare, finally found the answer; duh - ImageMagick + perl is not a good place to be.
• J. & babes returned full of bounce from visiting Joy & Chris at Oak Hill, put the babes to bed; dinner, back to work a bit.

• Poked at interesting mail, wrote an analysis or two. Briefly prodded a fascinating OO.o crasher on MeeGo apparently related to some compiler over-enthusiasm.
• Interested to discover the Janice (our Pastor's wife) is an ace knitter of things, eg. a digestive tract (for teaching purposes of course); encouragingly creative.
• Soldiered on with the repstrap - un-shorted and re-attached the stray thermistor; tried printing gears again; hmm - the in-fill seems a bit over the top; I'm suspicious of the rather over-enthusiastic extruder reverse/return cycle spewing extraneous plastic. Something a bit like a gear appeared though: teeth and all - nice.

• Interested to see the C++ in gcc discussions going on; having done a little hacking on gcc as someone unfamiliar with the code-base; it took a large amount of time to get into. This was seemed un-related to the language choice, and instead to the habit of re-using generic types for everything - presumably (in part) because the garbage collector can walk them without extra effort. If changing the language helps focus people on improving readability, that's all to the best. Of course, C++ has some hideous readability problems built-in: operator overloading, hidden references void non_obvious_mutator (int &x); and so on.
• Mail, and admin, sync call with JP. Nice to see the MeeGo blog entries from Thomas (on zones), and Travis on Telepathy/Empathy. Nice Ars Technica review too with a lot of shots (a shame WiFi didn't work for them though).
• Lunch, quick advisory board call.
• Having heard about the Israeli helicopter raid on the (difficult-to-board) boat, and given that my sentiments are generally with the oppressed, state-deprived Palestinians - who apparently also get regularly attacked by illegal Israeli settlers, I was suitably unsympathetic to the (apparently obvious propoganda) of the Israeli military about how they were beaten by pipe wielding crazies, and so on; and much more convinced by the apparent peace-nicks: "not going to pose any violent resistance" line. On the other hand, I hate being fooled by the radio. For how long will an armed man under attack watch his colleagues get beaten before he authorises a disproportionate response ? Perhaps that is not news. Then again looking for the blamelessly virtuous in the cycle of violence and suffering in the Middle East seems a pretty fruitless quest; sigh.
• Just to exacerbate my strategy of offending everyone concurrently (divide and conquer) - I have some sympathy for Foxconn whose no doubt appallingly normal (for China) working conditions might be only the grit in the oyster of their problem. Could this be a Micronesian Teen suicide type epidemic.
• Pleased and amused to see (finally) some closure on the unusual backwards I/O patterns that iogrind showed at startup, more juciy details from Taras.
• Dinner, Lydia & Janice came over. Plugged away at the repstrap - mounted the bulk fillament somewhat lamely on the ceiling above the machine, really needs a proper spindle & bearing. Calibrated both sides of the Z axis nicely, re-made the Y and X opto end-stops using biscuit tin lid. rather than beer can: for a more durable action, tightened everything - finally got a reasonable print of the bottom few layers of a cube, though eventually (due to a raised lump in the middle) the thermistor became detached; well pleased with progress; and with a very tough square of plastic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Science needs a metaphysical justification. We have to have some warrant for thinking that its apparent successes are real and not illusory. We may be lucky to live in an island of apparent order in a fundamentally disordered universe. If we do not believe this, why not?

    A useful question ? more so to those astronomers that believe that 80%+ of the universe is invisible: utterly transparent, nonbaryonic etc. Quite probably it is so, but acknowledging a philosophical basis of belief there is helpful.
  • Parenthetically, I appreciate that some more thoughtful and humble Atheists find this sort of thing -as- embarassing, as I find some creationist christians. That is, no doubt, all for the best - stimulating thought.
• Installed the latest technicolor MeeGo image, looking good. Poked at Evolution translations a little, apparently translating things breaks the help build (bother). Added a minor feature or two to bootchart2 for Lennart. Bug-fixed, and enabled command-line dumping;
  
  Looks busy and cluttered (good thing its off by default), yet perhaps useful: "which modprobe is taking all that time ?". Presumably by turning off the elision of tiny scripts, we could get a better view of what really happens (crazy-sed-spawning-wise) at boot.
• Merged some translations for Evolution manually, still havn't got the hang of msggrep - how do I lookup the single (exact) string 'Calendar' in an Evolution .po file ? add some code mangling to remove mnemonics from a string to get at a translated version of "Password:"; fun. Pondered also the plague of 'no' files that scp likes to poo across my file-system: who thought I wanted it to do that ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Plugged away at mail; printed expense claims etc. Back to bug triage, and fixing.
• Nice to see Simon Phipp's new company ForgeRock announced. Interesting to see their contributor agreement:

  It leaves every contributor as the copyright holder of their own code, either licensed to the community under the same license as the rest of the project (CDDL in most cases) or shared with ForgeRock so we can license it out under CDDL while we hold it in trust for the community.

  That looks rather positive, albeit somewhat confusing. If the concept of licensing under the CDDL is unpleasant (why I have no idea), it appears you can pick Apache2 as the code license for your chunk instead. I'll be interested to see how it pans out, cf. the FAQ.
• On another front, that of Trademark policies the malign effects over over-rigid control bite; personally I'd love to be an IceWeazel user and know I can fearlessly patch my browser if I need to, naturally with some fair creditation for all the great work the Mozilla project do.
• Lunch, prodded at my extruder; with the I2C bus re-connected, getting a little extruder movement, but not nearly enough - and not regular; annoyingly odd - plenty of smoke and yellowing ABS too; rather a nasty odor really.
• More bug fixing, chat with Vuntz. Managed to find time away from the cliff-face to hack on bootchart2 a bit. Packaged it for MeeGo, and prodded at the improved task logging (capturing all the arguments), proc-events following (to avoid loosing who-forked-whom data), and so on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Prodded mail, back into the bowels of PackageKit, seemingly zypper::sat::WhatProvides returns packages in a random order, and we're assuming the system installed ones always come first - silly; but explains some apparent non-determinism. Wow - a bug that requires some real algorithmic thought.
• Pleased to see the Java / gtk+ file-selector patch get into jdk7 - now I just need to find an evening to back-port & test it; neato.
• Great to see Lennart's Rethinking PID 1 really excited by the prospect of getting a new PID 1 - a really sexy new design; As / when PackageKit is nailed, I must check it out. Also a good contributor policy: "We value your contributions and hence do not require copyright assignment ".
• Into Cambridge for dinner with Christian, really interesting to catch up with him, back on the last train, bed late.

• Up early; pleased to see the interesting technologies that Palm created picked up by a great company like HP - hopefully that means lots more Linux phone goodness.
• More digging at bugs, and libzypp / PackageKit. Clarity. Merged some evolution bug fixes, started reading PackageKit, with some kind help from Richard Hughes.
• Down for lunch to find M's friend Grace; Lydia popped past to show us her fine new pottery, and Sandy dropped in; fun.
• Back to PackageKit. Dear lazyweb - is it only me that sees impossible things (not) happening with dbus-monitor --system ? I expect to see all IPC on the system bus as text on the console, but I appear to miss messages - particularly PackageKit ones, in an unfortunate way.
• Out to cell group.

• To work; mail chew - ever more E-mail, I must be sending too much (or something). Spent much of the morning talking with Kay Sievers - interesting fellow.
• Bug review; lots of bugs. Lunch. Taking a handy business-card I reviewed the fluff-quotient of my keyboards near-to-hand. Of course, testing disturbs the results - but presumably by measuring the inner-diameter of the ball of grey fluff you can extract by sliding the business car across you can detect how long the keyboard has been in active use - or does use disperse dust somewhat ? hmm.
• Dug at zypper issues. Dinner, call with Kendy & co. Janice and Lydia around to meet with J. - pottered around finishing the mechanical construction of my printer; seemingly the steppers now move all the axis - but will they have enough torque to do so for real ? switched to the electronics and software packaging piece. Good to have a netbook to hand for control.

• Off to visit the Dentist - apparently perfect teeth (apart from all the existing damage), J. (who has far more perfect teeth) scheduled for remediation. M. terrified of even sitting in the chair - why ?
• Prodded the ODF converter hysteria / hype - why anyone would want to install most of OpenOffice, compiled as a plugin - when they could easily install all of OpenOffice (for free), and get perfect high-fidelity ODF file exchange, with exactly the same quality MS interoperability I have no idea. More interesting, are the conspiracy theories, which are presumably fueled by considerable opacity around such deals. This The Standards Blog - has this to say:

  Back then, Sun was walking an interesting line: under a court settlement it was not free to openly criticize Microsoft about OOXML, but behind the scenes it was doing a lot to support ODF.

  I assume this is some more-hypothetical-than-real out-of-court settlement; either way I find it hard to believe that Sun would formally constrain their public position on a standard; moreover they had (AFAIR) a reasonably enlightened view on blogging your personal views, at least in some areas of the company. Novell similarly may have a position you disagree with on OOXML - but that view is not for sale.
• Call with Gary & Joey; sync with Aaron, chat with Srini. One-to-one with Jared, core-team meeting. Sent my LXF column off.
• Harrowing discovery of a number of purloined items squirreled away in a daughter's cupboard; upsetting indeed - it is an horrible thing to spend one's time devising a suitably memorable punishment.
• Tried out some stepper-motor gears made of panel pins, in holes drilled through some spare kitchen chopping board made of nylon. Seems like a near perfect material for the job; 'drifts' onto the spindle wonderfully; pleasingly rigid; good stuff.

• Dropped the kids to school, dug at bugzilla and E-mail. Good to see Nat's Everyone dials in blog - good sense written well.
• Really interested to see The IP implications of low-cost 3D printing published. I was unaware of the existing, relative sanity of the law in the UK in this area: still perhaps that is to be expected, cf. non-patentability of Software / Business Process. Hopefully the US is similar, without some "make your own cookie-cutter at your peril !" patent policy on general objects.
• Great to see that Federico tracked down and fixed the gconf-dbus bug with missing notifications that was hurting Evolution on MeeGo, nice work; fixed a nasty in the GConf patch around lists; much better. Got a bus-load of excellent bootchart2 fixes from Kel Modderman - great stuff.
• Lunch. Prodded at LXF column vaguely. My machine hangs when running make update-po in Evolution - nice, the thermal management / software CPU throttling problems of yester-year return (it seems); with a nearby desk fan - life is better. Surely the problem is not sufficiently difficult that we really need to take 10 CPU minutes to crunch it ? or is it ? OpenOffice's help translation takes a similar time.
• Claire came over after dinner, great to catch up with her, and some of her interesting medical engineering problems.

• Up early, dealt with babes, helped E. and N. to climb up and down a ladder in the workshop (hours of fun), while trying to perforate some alumininum plate suitably for a gear.
• To Church, tried to reconcile E. to the fact that it was not completely necessary to have a Father to cling to at all times while in the creche - somewhat un-successfully. Hey ho.
• Back for a soupy lunch; and off to Dee's baptism, lovely to have another lovely elderly lady baptised into the fellowship. Fed everyone lemon-cake, and set off back home.
• Played in the garden, with Mary Rogers and the babes; Tea, put the babes to bed.
• Watched Avatar (2D) "Out-of-focus film of the year!" with a fair host of the church crew; sadly disappointed in my desire to actually see much of the scenery / vistas. It's horrible to imagine all the CPU rendering that is then just thrown away with some ridiculous blur effect. Further amused by the tree-hugging pantheist / animist theology. Perhaps one of the supreme ironies of the ending of this persuit of authenticity or 'living in tune with nature' - is the the real world reality of the final scene. Here actor Sam Worthington gets strongly deprecated by the digital machine: there is no real need to have a specific human actor for the hero anymore.

• Up late-ish; off to try to buy potatoes, and given their absence in the market, returned - to discover a JW doing his door-knocking best. Invited in, glass of water, and had a most interesting conversation. Is the Bible gobbledygook ? (a somewhat concerningly low view of scripture) - perhaps that is why it is vital to have pamphlets packed with banal, lead questions, based on tiny de-contextualised fragment of scripture ? The Trinity may be obviously wrong because it is illogical, but if you've never heard of the Omnipotence Paradox perhaps your adversion to philosophy needs tuning ? Then the shamefully spurious endoresments of the unpleasant sectarian bias in their translation; anyhow - nice chap.
• Back to making some gears - with the accurate drawings, managed to knock up the two main drive pulleys, with suitable pulley-rims (as a bonus feature) - from panel pins driven through ply-wood disks. Affixed, and looking really good - the stepper motors present a more difficult fixing problem though.
• Hannah came over to paint us, good to see her; and popped over to Solomon & Peace's to get a new contract signed. Back for dinner, popped the babes to bed, early night.

• Poked mail, set too at Evolution bug fixing. Slogged away at packaging, and digging at the alarm pieces. Found yet another victim of not initializing dbus threading : why. does dbus not even try to warn you in this case ?
• Grazed on bugs variously, chat with Rob McQ. worked out which repositories to push stuff to; etc. Bruce & Anne came over for lunch.
• J. out with friends in the evening, so contemplated gears at some considerable length. Sadly the postal service (UPS in this case) appears incapable of getting small bits of plastic from the US to the UK in under a month. Re-discovered some Acrylic rod lying around in the shed, which the timing belt wrapped around perfectly. Discovered some panel pins made quite good gear teeth. After some hours found out that the belt teeth only match up when over-wrapped helically - bother. Switched tack, and got an accurate to-size print-out of the gearing underway.

• Worked on a great Samsung bug - they have a really excellent quality control process. As part of that they power off the machine aggressively, at random points, seemingly under load. Using ext3 with writeback ordering we ended up with an exciting ~/gconfd/saved_state file - packed full of random disk blocks: "I wondered where that inkscape SVG went to" eg. neato.
• Dalibor pointed out that JNA is the best answer for clean C# like native invocation in Java; must look into it.
• Committed misc. gconfd / ORBit2 fixes for IOR handling. Conference call with Michael, Luke & Stefan. Cell group in the evening.

• Read mail; why is it that two bugs that have malingered for nearly a decade in libbonobo* get filed & fixed now: odd. Call from a friend: Chris Brighty - encouragingly about getting his software working on some HP / Linux system - hopefully SUSE; helped out.
• Fixed a disappearing E-table titles nasty with Evo; it seems there is a captive gtk+ label used in there to get a style gc, to render with: retro.
• More packaging fun. John Hummerson around for dinner.
• Poked at the reprap software, all written in Java it seems (except for various C tools like gcc being used behind the scenes).
  • Dug into trying to fix the (unutterably awful) file dialogs as used in the reprap (and arduino) software. Turns out they are using some Java thing (nurgh), looked at making them using gtk+ directly instead.
  • Read about JNI wow ! what an horrendous failure compared to the trivial [DllExport()] annotations in C#, I can't face using that; there must be a better way.
  • Poked at ArtOfIllusion, which at least seems to integrate with the gtk+ file-selector - apparently using a deprecated widget; or does it ? pmap shows gtk+ loaded, what loads it ? Seemingly it uses 'buoy' for some pieces, but apparently that just wraps Swing's JFileChooser. Perhaps Swing can do the native selector right (for some old value of 'right').
  • Tried to use javap - oh dear; took me ten goes, three straces, four --help and two man page reads to get it to disassemble a simple class file.
  • Tried openJDK 1.6.2 to see if it fixed it; apparently this bug is still open; though there is at least some code somewhere which look like the long term solution.

• Eighth wedding anniversary - whoot; Christian is stuck in the US, so I can go out with the lady tonight - nice.
• Prodded the Novell Pulse preview; web everything. Tried to grok some new OpenGL tutorial - unfortunately scuppered either by a lack of OpenGL 2.0, or a localised lack of understanding. Pleased to discover that ssh provides a dumb SOCKS proxy.
• Fixed a number of Evo Express bugs, horriby burned finger no longer painful to type with - improving productivity. Fine lunch - with home-made meringue nests & strawberries.
• Watched the Patent Absurdity video - very much to be recommended. How can Bilski's mate be called 'RAND' - marvelous.
• More digging out of the mail queue, and call with Guy. Mary Rogers arrived to baby-sit. Out into town with the wifelet - met Pete & Jackie by chance on the way, popped in for a pint with them; Pizza and back - eight years and climbing.

• All this talk of the terrifying dangers of volcanic ash make me wonder how long it will be before some crazy person weaponizes this. If all it takes is trailing some glassy aerosol across the sky to destroy your adversaries high-tech, but air-cooled jet engines - what price air supremacy ? Of course the equivalent from the last centuary would probably be stocking up on the 'wrong kind of leaves' to put on opponent's railway lines.
• Checked in a new Evo express snapshot with tons of bug fixes; triaged bugs, tried to update the (non-responding) wiki.
• Worked late, while J. had a Pregnancy CC meeting. Call with Federico. Prodded my nichrome wire, managed to get a 6 Ohm length - but it's rather long to wrap around a radio arial.

• Up early, fed and clothed (still exhausted from Friday) babes. NCC, Tony speaking on Jesus the Good Shepherd.
• Back for lunch with Sandy, talked to her, tried to arbitrate between innumerable children's squabbles. Played with stepper motor drivers and got the opto-endstop identified and setup correctly. Children fascinated by the flashing LEDs, and pressing buttons on the computer to move the motor - seemingly endless fun.
• Trying various ways of making the required gearing for the stepper motors; was convinced that adding some bolts to a mudguard washer might do it. A victim of an extremely blunt drill, and a truly amazing blistering burn from touching the washer afterwards - mental note: friction, it makes things hot.
• Dinner. Listened to Gordon sermon, bed early.

• Mini lie-in; up & off to collect cable delivery I missed yestreday from the DHL centre. Back home, made up some cables, got everything connected up. Struggled with a mess of un-packaged Java software, urk.
• Got strange errors left and right:
  

  avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0xff
  avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0xf5

  Eventually discovered that means that (dumbly) I had forgotten that in the absence of any better silk-screen indication a square solder-pad indicates pin-1, and my USB->TTL connector had the wrong polarity; bingo - a programmed device.
• Out in the evening for dinner with Laura & Creighton, most relaxing and pleasant.

• Up early, packed people and picnic, drove to Wicksteed for a fun day of roller-coastering, sliding, driving dodgems and various other forms of buffeting the body. Much fun had by all fun-sized people.
• Fish and chips for exhausted babes in the car on the way back. Packed everyone to bed, and played with the reprap electronics, made up a few cables, having made a crimping tool from some bits of old tin. Got some of the avr toolchain pieces installed from the build-service.

• Worked variously; misc. Evo fixes, a day of endless meetings, customer and otherwise.
• Cell group social in the evening, good to see everyone. Alba stuck in the US by ash hysteria it seems. Pleased to see Miriam's work in Afghanistan in the local paper.

• After a depressing experience with the US Post Office yesterday: amazingly they hand out tracking numbers which cannot be used to track packages (at all): what staggering genius ! Their web-page doesn't mention this though, and just points the finger at the (blameless) vendor, claiming that they havn't given them the pkg yet. Anyhow - today my RepRap electronics arrived, paid some exhorbitant customs fee, requires some assembly tonight.
• It seems Taras had some great success with the PGO code in gcc, which is encouraging - cool as the icegrind work is. And glad to hear he is having the time and inclination to encourage the world of kernel / linker readahead to improve - clearly the patched openSUSE glibc which really helps there masked that somewhat for me.
• Lunch. Meeting wrt. evo express. Pleased to see Simon on top-form as normal, discussing the UK election and IBM.
• Amused by David Cameron's advocacy, though I will most likely vote Conservative, I was amused by the somewhat messianic An invitation to join the government of Britain. The overlap between political and religious themes is a fascinating one O'Shaughnessy interested me in at Cambridge. I should really buy and read The idea of political marketing - but for my ongoing failure to get enough time away from the Economist to finish Dante.

• To work, chewed on mail; merged misc. patches and tagged a bootchart2-0.1.0. Dug out and filed a few batches of expenses.
• An afternoon of conference calls, staff meetings and the like. Prodded at some MBR assembler in the background, it seems I omitted to setup %ds:%si correctly before chain-loading, bother.

• I have always been comforted about the general state of my clothing by the old chestnut about Ambulance drivers knowing an Aristocratic victim instantly by the parlous state of their underwear. Imagine my shock in reading about the sad death of Eugène_Terre (a filthy racist) that he wore perforated green underwear (clearly a key issue) - prompting a re-think of my sartorial strategy.
• Whatever you think about IBM's right to sue anyone, at any time, for anything, it may be rather a shame (or a good thing if they drop the platform ?) for Debian. Last I heard, the absence of reasonably priced and accessible s390 hardware made it necessary to use Hercules to test and develop Debian packages: or at least to fix build breakages there. I also, somewhat boggle at Pamela's sudden enthusiasm for software patent threats: as long as they are against 'bad' (ie. with some tenuous? Microsoft connection) guys. Personally I have sympathy -even- for Microsoft when they are hit once again by some patent troll for an exhorbitant sum, and have to make some ridiculous change to remove some stunningly obvious feature - and wonder why they keep propping up this broken system. When an open-source (though I agree the QPL is really pushing the limits) project is under threat surely our sympathies lie somewhere obvious ?
• Triaged E-mail. Clarity. Lunch. Finally began to grasp my way to more of a comprehending revulsion of the horrible inadequacies of git rebase when mixed with git merge. Hopefully Federico, who most probably can clearly articulate the problem will do so somewhere so it might get improved.
• Call with JP, sent status report. Dinner, put babes to bed and read stories. Tested, and submitted new Evo. package - why is it that you always find lots more interesting problems just before a deadline ?

• Up early, tended babes while J. slept. Off to NCC, J. waylaid for the service; John H. preached on John 14. E. managed to cope in creche without excessive separation anxiety which was encouraging.
• Back for a light ('Special Sunday' - ie. with crisps & juice) lunch while J. took N. to a party. Put E. to bed, and played in the garden with them.
• J. back; cut angle-iron to length for a shelving bracket for the larder, and had an initially frustrating time with the MIG welder from Bruce. Eventually discovered the groove in the wire feed roller was offset from the wire liner causing kinks and jamming inside the feed, and that the roll was selectively rusty at the top (lubricating?) the rollers. New wire, and adjusted roller, and the arc-eye potential was all go. Eventually managed to get it calibrated reasonably enough to produce a good weld: at the cost of lots of angle-grinding. Which makes me wonder - could Extreme Angle-Ironing be the next big thing ? welding during free-fall or somesuch.
• John, Martin, Zoe & Patrick over in the evening for a movie: watched the Spiderwick Chronicles, and discussed marriage; bed late.

• Up lateish, lots of little girls playing happily everywhere. Managed to persuade a very tired H. ("I don't know if I was reading in the night; was it the night ?") to accept not travelling with J. in the car.
• Drove to Ruth & Anthony's - lovely sunny morning, admired the house & garden, put together some deck-chairs. Played football with small boys, bounced on the trampoline with small girls; lunch in the garden; fun.
• Drove home together; bathed the children & got them to bed.

• Prodded work. Unwound some evil build dependency loops in MeeGo packages to get things building from a clean start. Considered what cool hack-fests we could be sponsoring.
• On the "dangers of allowing proprietary licenses to your code" front, I was amazed to hear rumour of Apple's latest innovation in this area; if true they make great recruiting sergants for the FSF's anti-DRM crusade it seems. Yet another wake-up call, that proprietary software licensing can be worse than you might believe possible.
• Prodded the express autoconfig stuff. Fiona and Kate came to stay the night, stayed up late catching up with Fiona, good stuff.

• Children on holidays, fewer night-time interrupts now back at home, avoided the early morning baby-prepping panic. Read mail.
• Interested to see Taras' icegrind work for optimising cold-start; clever chap. OO.o (despite it's speedups) could use even more love there (to remove the preload hack).
• Prodded Evolution, poked sysadmins to host an auto-detection database, chased misc MeeGo bugs. Call with JP. Discussed nuisance "become a fan-of-ers" (bringing a whole new meaning to 'fan-boy') with Aaron. I wonder why that "keep me logged in" button in face-book doesn't function whatsoever for my once-per-week usage.

• Interested in the TIOBE language comparison numbers. As with all such things, numbers subject to interpretation; possibly there are half as few searches for "C++ programming" since it is so syntactically trivial (or perhaps not). I hadn't realised that C was still in the running though - it may require twice as many LOC, but it's ~twice as popular programmer wise ?. Is there a deep masochistic bent in programmers ? Interesting too to see the Apple, and Google languages showing the strongest growth (alongside C) at the expense of Java, Visual Basic (richly deserved) and JavaScript shrinking where C# is growing.
• Slide-ware production. Amused by a NHB's experience of an iPad: "She did, however, like the idea of a small, lightweight, versatile machine to take on business trips. After taking the iPad for a test drive, LW is thinking of buying a netbook." I'm still sold on the "Swiss Army Kitchen Utensil" view of the iPad popularised by the great Design Outside the Box talk (17 mins in).
• Quick sync with Chen. Spent some time playing with gitk, meld and so on, branched Evo. It's a real shame there seems to be no easy way to tag a number of change-sets into a queue to cherry pick in sequence later.
• Poked at OO.o's nsplugin with Rene briefly, nice Debian bug report about absolute symlinks, and the grot necessary to find and bootstrap the environment from the browser there. Tried to persuade IS&T support that randomly disabling IMAP on their mail servers is mind-numbingly bad for business; making it rather difficult to get at the much needed openVPN credentials too.
• Quick dinner and drove home; worked late.

• More lacrimose night-time experiences. Shuffled mail, poked bugs, Clarity, status report.
• Prodded the Ordnance Survey data license and it seems really good; CC-by like license - great. Now if only the Labour Government were not trying to screw us all over by disconnecting people left and right we might have a joined up technology policy.
• Lunch, JP's staff, recovery partition detection poking. Calls with Federico, Kohei & Kendy.

• Up early, tended babes. A morning of making ply-wood seat replacements for our chairs at home with Bruce. Much circular sawing etc.
• Lunch; out to see The Princess and the Frog - nasty dark movie unsuitable for children, in my view at least further confirming (for me at least) Disney's complete loss of direction.
• Dinner; watched Cambridge whip Oxford on University Challenge, bed early.

• Off to NCC, guest service, Tony spoke. Back for lunch, packed and off to Bruce & Anne's.
• Pottered around in the workshop with Bruce making a suitably knurled extruder driver on his lathe; lovely. Dinner.
• Night filled with E. waking up and crying every half hour or so - probably chiming clock related.

• Sowed grass seed in the front garden while Ilona & Robert played with the babes, rolled it in - presumably a feast for the birds; though none seemed to take much interest.
• Lunch; got everyone onto bikes, scooters, tricycles etc. and set off for the race-course; managed to get a good way, and persuaded M. to turn around too. Fine day, good fun.
• Up late enjoying R. & I's company.

• Holiday - long lie-in. Baby sat the infected hordes while J. went to the walk-of-witness. Ordered some ABS plastic and thermistors from MakerBot, pondered the general non-arrival of other required pieces; hey ho.
• Stella, Joy and her babes over for a fine lunch. Enjoyed catching up with them, Easter egg hunts etc. Robert & Ilona arrived rather late.

• Elisabeth sick in the night, to match Miriam recently. N. contracted Chicken Pox, far worse than the other three poor dear.
• Rejoiced at the Government's arm-twisting of Ordnance Survey to release free mapping data for the UK. Tried to download it, discovered that in-fact even the 'license' for the data requires a username / password - with no explanation how to get that. Tried the main web-site: which seems remarkably coy about the new data being made public; what lamers ! Presumably there is an apoplectic Sir Humphery somewhere grinding his teeth.
• Evo status update call; poked MeeGo detection code again. Prodded at MeeGo package building pieces. Boggled at Google Chrome's "integrated plugin" model - Oxymorons like: "compassion with a hard edge" are great I guess. Quite right that plugins are a downright disaster for large scale deployment though.

• Mail; poked disconsolately at the build-service; base system bootstrapping and build-loops are really uninteresting and slow. Lunch. Committed an Evolution tweak.
• Jared's staff, train to Cambridge, bus to Collabora's office fortuitously meeting Daniel on the way. Caught up with Rob. Out for a fine dinner in the evening & train home.

• To work. Double take on Intel's just announced their re-re-re-write of bootchart, sadly not re-using the bootchart2 work. Intel have some exceedingly sharp hackers - it would be nice if they slowed down just a little, in order to work well (and more effectively) with others. In this case, we end up with a new toy tool, in parallel to the existing (more capable) cardboard-cut-out boot-charting tools, instead of a single, better, more polished & bullet-proof tool everyone can standardise on.
• Clarity prodding, more mail reading, tried to chase up a new laptop; a five weeks seems like long enough to purchase and deliver one ? what with all this global emphasis on 'Emaciated' supply-chains and 'Just Too Late' manufacturing.
• Poked at a gnome-breakpad memory corruption bug; just a bit concerning. Manager cadence call. Prodded at the build service with Rudi's kind assistance.

• Packed the babes off to school with J. & Mother. Flushed the mail queue, pushed evo changes, poked at packaging, chat with Chen. Prodded at adding status updates to the wiki.
• Did some Intelligent Workload Management training, and quiz. prodded at an imap-x crasher with Chen.
• Eventually got my packages submitted that I was trying to get done this morning to have some time off with the parents at 6:05pm, urgh.
• Up in the night with a repeatedly sick Miriam - working her way steadily through the laundry cupboard; and feather duvets: cleaning and drying them should be fun.

• Up early, lost an hour ! dealt with the babes. People awoke slowly, packed Meeks + Mansergh into the car, and set off for Church. Tony spoke well, missed the shared supper & home.
• Roasted blow-out with the parents, played in the garden a little & re-located a plastic play-house to it's new, very rough concrete base. Bid a sad 'bye to David.
• Applied book reading & slugging much of the afternoon and evening - cough travelling down to the chest and voice returning.

• Up earlyish. Pottered around cleaning up the house, J. off to dig the front lawn. David arrived, good to see him, toured the recently re-assembled house. Fine lunch.
• Much of the afternoon digging the garden - to re-seed the lawn, with much back-breaking help from David; while trying to stop the children getting squashed as they learned to cycle in the road - lovely afternoon.
• Dinner, chatted for a bit, and played with the rep-strap prototype in the workshop for a while, finally coming up with a pinch-wheel solution after some collective thought.
• Parents arrived, un-loaded and got them installed.

• Up early, dropped the kids at school, train to London, tube to Aldgate. Met up with the Intel lads at their office. Enjoyed the company, hospitality, discussion. Lunch.
• UI call with Matthew Barnes, Paul and Claire. Out with Tariq and the lads for dinner, much Indian food and fun. Trains home variously, with misc. hacking. Bed late.

• To work lateish, prodded mail. Did some file-system analysis wrt. boot-time; wow the situation is really not good. Accepted OSCON slot, sadly missing the SUSE Labs conference in the process.

• Tested & committed misc. Evo bits, send Rob patch for libsocialweb to match. Call with Paul & co. to sync. development. Recalled I forgot to blog the sexy SUSE / Moblin video from earlier in the year - soon with added MeeGo.
• Plodded a bit; stayed up rather late for a MeeGo IRC meeting - now I remember why I don't like IRC meetings. Got sucked into youtube, and trying to reproduce a QDBus problem instead.

• Got side-tracked by Facebook. I keep seeing things these days about the important business uses of social networking: sounds like a skivers charter to me. Anyhow, impressed to see an old friend and fellow String Quartet member: Jeremy Dawson doing some amusingly crazy things with Extreme Cello on eg. Ben Nevis. Humbling things, like that, make me realise I probably put too much into my work.
• Back to mail and fixing Evolution's UI conditionals. More poking (indirectly) at the ext3 file-system layout algorithm. Prodded the release team for a couple of Evo fixes for 2.30.
• Feeling really grotty, almost completely lost my voice - perhaps an improvement overall.

• Took the remaining non-poxed babe: Miriam to school, admired the foundations of the new building work. Back, prodded mail, Clarity, misc. beginning of week admin. Scanned and E-mailed the gas safety certificate to the building controller.
• Poked at Evolution packaging. Lunch. Discussed -Bsymbolic linking with Ryan, it seems he had done some rather careful research for the galias code, and been mislead by someone - but hadn't realised that the linker is clever enough to re-write the assembler to avoid un-necessary indirections for internally bound symbols, and as-such the galias heavy lifting is not needed; good - objdump -D is ultimately your friend.
• Dinner, J. had counselling supervision meeting; I prodded erratic builds, intltool bits - hacking around needing changes there, and caught up with Federico & Matthew.

• Up early, J. lie-in, stayed at home to deal with the babes variously. Cooked the Sunday dinner, babes' Bible study with H. & M. (as requested), cleaned up.
• Lunch; enjoyed the sunshine in the garden; mended leaking guttering, played with babes, disassembled an old electric shower to extract some nichrome wire to make my heater element for the reprap; hopefully it has a nice high resisitivity, a 7kW element yields only a 1m wire it seems.
• Interesting talk from Ravi Zacharias, 'Who are you God', bed.

• Awoke at midday: phoned for the wife and babes to return from Laura's. Lunch.
• Struck by a spurt of initiative and energy, set off to buy grass seed, and the correct size angle grinder cutting disk. Home, and off to Daniel & Michelle's to collect our garden roller: good fun making a ramp for that, and getting the cast steel behemoth up into the car, and out of it safely again.
• Played with the angle grinder: whittling steel fence posts, amazed by how corrosion resistent they appear. still shiny some weeks after the last action. Played games with the babes in the evening, story reading etc. early bed.

• Avoided mail by re-building evolution master. Poked at a mono uri parsing crasher, odd. Prodded other bugs; system recovery's impact on boot performance etc.
• Horrified by another d-bus threading issue until I noticed it was one more instance of not initializing the library with threading enabled; why do we even need to do that ? with a demand-launched I/O thread we can have it on all the time with ~no performance impact (like ORBit2).
• Plugged away at obscure mono problems on Atom; nurgh. Looked after poxy babes while J. took the others swimming. Dinner at desk, worked late - stayed up for a MeeGo meeting that (on arrival) turned out to have moved; nice. Worked on and on.
• Eventually, after a day of pouring over the code with Paolo, Miguel, Rodrigo and Aaron, and however much hair lost: Miguel located the cause of the apparent deep mono brokenness: nothing to do with mono, just some genius 'optimisation' in memcmp so it returns incorrect values in some corner cases. Implemented and checked in a trivial memcmp replacement, and went to bed.

• Fasinating progress of the pox across the two babies, we're hoping the other two get it too, to avoid later-in-life problems; but no signs.
• Amused / saddened by some encouragement from H. (age 7) - "I'm so pleased that you havn't left Mummy yet". Having spotted no signs of impending disaster myself, I imagine this is the over-flow from her peers' repeat horrific experiences of Fatherhood. Tried to re-assure her that no leaving is planned, (beyond sadly hard-to-avoid business travel).
• Sync with Arjan; J. back late from counselling, off to cell group, later.

• To battle, mail perusal; prodded Evolution, and some banshee pieces. Lunch. Chased and fixed broken rpmlint patch ignoring my rpmlintrc. More misc. mono piece packaging.
• Helped by misc. friendly GNOME hackers as to why my git pull --rebase origin master was not working, or at least why the git diff master..origin/master after that was showing me rubbish. Apparently my local origin/master was not really fetched. git fetch made everything consistent; good stuff.
• Dinner, two of four babies getting Chicken Pox; lots of 'Poxy' jokes; smitten by 'ePoxy' (a not very good 'virtual' software version of the same). Bathed, applied camomile lotion, read stories, bed. Lydia popped over to talk with J. Back to work.
• Chatted with a cool Mozilla hacker (Taras Glek) working on (cold) startup time performance optimisation, discovered -freorder-blocks-and-partition and compared notes on lots of different esoteric possible speedups. Chattered happily with the system-tap guys and Federico, prodded Evo some more, bed late.

• Up early; prodded mail, wrote to my MP about the scandal that is the Digital Rights Bill - it would be great to loose my connection to the internet, and livelihood to someone abusing an open wireless connection to download some copyrighted material - seems proportional. Hopefully it will run out of parliamentary time.
• Clarity. Discovered my zypper / C++ bug is in fact a prelink bug with UNIQUE variables.

• Somewhere in the night it turned into Monday; more flight. Hacked up a fun way to get bootchart2 to do it's logging. Instead of using files that we have to get access to - we can instead abandon the process to it's own isolated world of chrooted madness in some initrd bubble; and then use some ptrace cunning to suck out all the data later - (I guess like gdb but automated). Got a nice prototype working quite well, good.
• Train, tube, train, wait - picked up by wife & babes, much joy, returned to the family. Dinner, put the babes to bed. Calls with Federico, Aaron, JP, Jared in the evening, sleep.

• Up too late to go to Church - bother; jet-lag just worn off as I need it. Off to the airport, listened to a sermon or too on-line. Flight, wait, more flight.

• Up lateish; breakfast, . Pushed misc. Evo pieces. Spent an hour merging, and re-merging branches with git - with tens of highly dumb, irritating conflicts, all of my own creation. Apparently git merge is not what you want to do, particularly several times. Seemingly git pull --rebased - which is marked as dangerous and bad in the man page is what you want. This brings back the darkest days of trying to track and update a large, long running cvs branch: but worse. Incompetant git use: no doubt.
• How can it be, that a git pull --rebase would want to apply the same changeset twice ? apparently nonsensical but after skipping a number of such sillies, the diff to the original merge tag evaporated: near victory. Annoyingly Matthew's identical merge went with, apparently no problems, amazing. Dinner, bed.

• Up early, excellent bacon and eggs for breakfast; switched hotel & wandered into town for more discussion & a bit of hacking. Experienced a somewhat amazing bug in g++ with private template class constructors used in static initializers.
• Pleased to see Colin merge my dbus fix.

• Up early, good to see JP & Greg. Discovered a bus-load of MeeGo E-mail in my SPAM / Quarentine folder which I ~never look in: that would explain the eerie quietness of the mailing list. How is it that I suddenly, simultaneously started getting tons of spam coming through, and missing critical things.
• Wrestled with Pay-Pal, which seems intent on demanding my Bank details, and completely unwilling to accept money from my credit card to pay for things. How can it be so extraordinarily unpleasant to send someone money ? who in their right mind would want to attach a bus-sized extra security attach surface to a bank account with any money in it ? and who wants to open a bank account with no money in it just to please some (apparently) dumb payment software ? Spent a frustrating time fruitlessly reading documentation.
• Pleased to see a nice bootchart2 patch from Frederic for Mandriva integration, neat; need to do some MeeGo integration too.

• Up early, great talks and discussions with Guy & Aaron, up very late. Interested to see Simon's leaving blog entry, Simon has to be one of the friendliest, persuasive(ist) and most personable people you could hope for to be a front for your community strategy: particularly if it is one that really makes sense.

• Up earlyish, quick breakfast bid 'bye to wonderful wife and kids; endless series of trains, planes, etc.
• Watched District 9 and loved it, and Up in the Air - which was much sadder. Dug deeper into how dbus manages it's bindings and affairs for Colin.
• Chewed mail, fixed a bug or two, bed horribly late.

• Slept a little better; prodded mail, chat with Noel, Thorsten & Kendy. Prodded at admin, Clarity status reports, flight checkin etc. Forced to change all internal passwords, reminding me of the cartoon of the stumped theif with 39 friends outside the magic cave: I had to change the password, and now I can't remember what it is. Lunch.
• Tried to chase my cups bug some more, only to discover that now (for whatever reason) it decided to work; bother. Prodded at Xapian and notmuch briefly.
• Packed for Portland in the evening, and bed early.

• Off to church, did the crech with Dave - interesting man; strangely although Linus is not convinced that Demons exist, my friend working (for many years) with the criminally insane is of the other opinion; though the precise locus of such behaviour is perhaps arguable, and postulating odd things in every corner is inadvisable.
• Home for lunch; pottered around in the garden - sunny for once, had Helen over for tea, played with plastic printing mechanics while the babes watched a DVD.

• Up earlyish, packed the car, and set off to see Suzannah, Clive, Adm & exciting new nephew James. Lots of driving, cooed at the baby, lunch of sorts.
• Left early to avoid over-loading the exausted new parents. Out for a walk up the hill to the Coombe Hill War memorial on the hill above Chequers. M. decided she was going home 1/2 way through, and wandered off. Eventually after (apparently) loosing her parents over the horizon, repented of her folly with much wailing; only to be caught by her Father.
• Back home; J. immediately called out for an emergency leaving me to feed the children over-cooked bacon bagels. Had a friend over to stay the night.

• Up early, prodded mail etc. Poked at dbus & threading some more, mulled my fix - it seems to fix things, but investigated it more, and with more luck; perhaps it's as easy as changing a single digit, neat.
• Chatted with Carl about notmuch, looks like some interesting things happening there, perhaps we could re-use some in Evolution someday.
• Fired off my dbus analysis; prodded Evo. some more. Pottered around in the evening fixing this and that around the house.

• Up at a saner time; packed babes off to school; prodded mail. Reviewed a nice paper from Saad Aloteibi and Wei Ming Khoo, some great work they're up to on OO.o & valgrind.
• Lunch with Lydia, prodded at dbus threading evilness; side-tracked by a call with Kendy, and chat with JP. Stumbled across some more odd code in the groupwise calendar backend, and fixed it.

• Up extremely early, and to work - cleaned up the Evolution express mode state propagation to a very small change, and made it work for EPlugins (via discovering intltool was chopping off my foot by discarding comments).
• Interested to see more speculation at least backed by a concrete offer this time (Elliot's explanation). Also interested to read Jeremy's RIP article for Sun How Sun's need to control the code cost them the company - Amen.
• Call with Paul, Matthew, Ross, Chen etc. to discuss MeeGo pieces.

• Another early morning, packed the babes off to school; got sucked into the Economist, Bruce & Anne arrived on the way past to see James - Sue & Clive's new baby - tinkered in the workshop with Bruce a bit; to work late.
• Prodded Evolution master's address-space leakage, (via an un-joined thread I suspect). Interested to see Ross' sister planning to cycling from London to Melbourne; fun.
• JP's staff call, and a very late lunch. Got LXF column written and sent, sent off minutes.

• Up early; prodded mail; got my Camel patch merged, booked holiday, filed Clarity, etc. One to one with JP. Chat with vuntz, hacked away at Evolution.
• Out for a drink in the evening with Chris, Max (the local CofE vicar) rolled up too after a bit; a fine evening; bed late.

• Up early, off to Church. J. ran creche. Tony spoke, really encouragingly well on Jesus as the Bread of Life.
• Back to ours for lunch with Christine & Hannah; good to get to know them a little. Watched 'cars' in the afternoon with the babes.
• Bed early, Gordon sermon & sleep.

• Up earlyish; house & self, cleaning & tidying. Dropped all the babes off at Laura's (brave lady). Carolyn Bramhall arrived, and some friends & our Pastor Tony & wife Janice to do some training on Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Regardless of the controversy surrounding the issue, a refreshingly simple & hard to argue-with approach of love, affirmation of God's love, and honesty.
• Lunch; more interesting insight. Collected the babes, apparently un-phased by their experience (even E.). Chatted to Carolyn much of the evening, fine lady; she has written an interesting account of her life, abuse and recovery. Very enthusiastic too about Freedom in Christ ministries.

• Prodded mail, pleased to see Ryan take the GVariant fix, suggested an even better fix. Prodded away at the EDBus binding, got it compiling, and even working (apparently); nice.
• Lunch. Back to e-d-s, and evolution - tested various bits, fixed a number of unrelated but interesting bugs; improved the groupwise calendar backend locking, and read the camel folder summary code - interesting. Worked late.

• Up early, scanned mail; poked packaging bits and an interesting calc performance issue. Back to Evolution, submitted a couple of OSCON abstracts. Prodded vuntz idly (apparently working hard at fixing UI issues).
• Prodded at Evolution some more, discovered I had configured IMAP-X but was not using it; hence suspicious stability - actually turned it on properly, and got more fun churning debug, but it still worked: surely new code is supposed to break ? Ran my calendar and addressbook daemons under valgrind, which as a side-effect exposes any latency problems rather nicely.
• Wrestled GVariant (of a version that works) into GDBus, having discovered that glib's GVariant is still a partial merge-in-progress version. Dinner.
• Back for some late-night hackery; seemingly part of my threading problems was a bug in GVariant, and the other part was not initializing dbus threading; fixed that. Renamed everything to EDBus (etc.) for re-use in Evolution 2.29.

• Up early, set too build Evolution, call with some friendly Intel'ers. Discovered an intriguing xcb re-enterancy problem (apparently) deadlocking my X server when stracing a busy process during a synchronous call; XQueryPointer interrupted by a signal, followed by an XSync; blocks the compositing window-manager quite nicely.
• Clarity. Hacked away at Evolution a bit - added a generic way to simplify the UI with conditionals inside XML comments in the UI description files; pushed to 'express'.

• Up early, feeling iller: no time like the present to work though; prodded mail quickly. Chat with Nirav, then with Chen. Dug at a competitive analysis, and work plan.
• Calls with all and sundry. Please to see Andrew 'hero' Haley finally identify the fun in Java causing OO.o to crash with deep stack frames / recursion. Also interesting that (apparently) JITted java methods deliberately touch their maximum expected stack extent as step #1 to catch stack overflow; fun.
• Call with Kendy & Jared. Prodded at my reprap in the evening, got the captive nut-fest working really nicely; discovered that there is a rotation axis I need further constrained hmm.

• Up; chatted with Seif a man of our time; generated a motto for RDF-ers: "I like to consider my wife as a tuple!". Inserted crazy ideas into their intray funnel.
• Zypper is really a pleasure to use sudo zypper up evolution* gtkhtml* resolving at great speed, and just working is a fine thing. Fed up with waiting long periods for mozilla to respond (the awesome bar chewing I/O bandwidth? or just 10x tab browsing, with flash plugins or whatever nonsense). Downloaded chrome for x86_64, which goes against the grain, and was pleased with the multi-tabbed responsiveness.
• An interesting, albeit incredibly lengthy conference call in the evening. Aaron persuaded me to create a twitter account; the problem is - even after reading my own page, I still don't know what I'm doing.

• Up earlyish, dealt with the babes - feeling pretty under the weather: some combination of the sendentry life, and standing outside in a cold workshop I suppose. Off to NCC; did the creche.
• Back for Lunch with a local lady from up the road; fine meal, wine etc. Out in the afternoon with M. for a peer-party with bouncy-castle etc.

• Lie in; dropped J. down at the market, and collected potatoes. Back home, babes got sucked into iPlayer; and I prodded my mechanical tinkering. Lunch. H. assisted cutting ply-wood; fun.
• Hannah & Joni arrived to do some more painting; the picture having been transfered to a canvas meanwhile. Joni assembled my Y axis bearings, and got that all bolted together between bits of ply; apparently novisible / feel-able movement on the axis, and seemingly parallel bars too (presumably cumulative error are easy to see in plastic form).
• Nick arrived later, for dinner, then the Bancrofts too - great to see them, whiled away a happy evening talking of this & that.

• Half-term allows later waking, a quick breakfast and getting to work on time - enjoyed the last day. Prepped, and had a chat with Kendy & co.
• Laura, Claire and innumerable children over for lunch - Olivier's seventh birthday. Prodded blktrace on SP1, either I broke my kernel, or there is some serious badness / ABI change somewhere; how can BLKTRACESETUP on /dev/sda yield ENOTTY ? most odd.
• Poked at slideware, chat with Tambet.

• Prodded at the CUPS deadlock provoked by trying to print a set of mendel assembly drawings: fun. It seems ghostscript and some other process (magically renamed to the queue name) are both doing blocking writes at each other (with full socket buffers): clever. CUPS never ceases to amaze me.
• Pulled all the latest SP1 test packages, to test the latest fixes. Read about yet more linux kernel tracing / event logging schemes. Amused to see that mmiotrace was created just for Nouveau.
• Read up on lttng, and some of the code - looks like something rather sexy (except, that is) that apparently I need to load some module, and then link a library - all to extract some simple, low-frequency string data from 'open' syscalls; seems like a non-starter.
• Out for cell-group in the evening - a social dinner, fine food, some Wii playing action etc. good fun, bed late.

• Prodded mail, tried to plod towards some way of organising the openSUSE / Moblin packages such that we can get integrated into Factory nicely.
• Clinton arrived to look at the state of the building work; and RS delivered a lot of components, all but one of which were the right thing; good.
• Poked at packages, chat with Vincent, JP . Got a SPAM - about homes missing disaster kits, with an offer of one for $1, and actually clicked the link (interesting) - is this a new battle on the psychology front ? leverage the hysteria around the war-on-terror to improve your spam-list; or I'm just feeling dozy and ill.
• Prodded at the machine some more in the evening; getting the y-axis complete is easy enough. It is really unclear to me why the z-axis is packed with complicated pieces and bearings: is the studding (if constrained at the top as well as the bottom) really insufficient (when combined with another two semi-captive nuts) to steady the x-axis by itself ? (picture).

• Up lateish, packed everything and set off for Suzannah's. Had a lovely lunch with her & Adam; played this & that - JP's staff meeting in mid vacation.
• Drove home, absent mindedly, discovering that I'd forgotten to put a nappy on the (otherwise dressed) baby, and left toothbrushes and coats at my parents: bother.
• Plugged away at creating a Repstrap fairly convinced that the triangular frames can be replaced by a couple of sheets of MDF, which I have lying around. Set too cutting bits to size, back to work tomorrow.

• J. lie in, and off to see the (subset of the) Quaker Tapestry exhibition that my parents have been helping organise in Brighton meeting. Fine needlework, and inspiring material [sic].
• On to Maplin's to buy a replacement diode for the TV; popped into Louise Bomber's Walk A Mile In My Shoes exhibition of artwork by children on their experience of trauma and loss; interesting if depressing.
• Back for lunch; foolishly poked mail; I see MeeGo was announced earlier than I had expected. The governance is curious - devolved / dictatorship by the (incredibly over-worked) Imad & Valtteri Imad is the director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, and Valtteri is the director of the Technology Strategy of Maemo devices. It remains to be seen what the result will be.
• Prodded at the reprap project, contemplated the bootstrapping process; without one, it is hard to make one. Popped down to the Nut & Bolt shop, discovered their rather high prices, but bought some studding and bolts to support them. Home to do much of the rest on-line.

• Lie-in; off to St Lukes, ended up with Miriam drawing pictures. Back for a fine roast lunch cooked by Father.
• Slugged in the afternoon; and sat up talking, reading and listening to a history of the world in an hundred objects as a pod-cast later.

• Up earlyish, packed everyone into the car with supplies; and set off to Brighton to stay with M&D. Lunch, out in the afternoon for a walk on the sea-front; returned for tea & cake suitably chilled.
• Showed the latest craze off to Father, and disassembled their (rather nice) Thompson television (an ETC210) that (amazingly) seems to come with a rather complete schematic circuit diagram for it's discrete components. Prodded gingerly at the high-voltage interior.

• Re-read Lennart's Out Of Memory (OOM) handling bloglet / link. I must say, I completely agree - but, I think it is still worthwhile adding failed-malloc handling to glib for two reasons: firstly, it is not hard to do for some methods, and adds no real performance impact; and secondly - code duplication is worse than bogus and irrelevant OOM handling, and not being able to handled failed mallocs is frequently heard as an excuse to re-write working code ( thus, incidentally also bringing OOM closer by having yet-another linked-list, hash-table, etc. etc. implementation in hot memory ).
• Hacked at bootchart2 a little, hugely improved the interactive rendering speed by taking account of the visible area, rather than relying on cairo to crop everything.
• Phone interview, admin. Prodded at a new recovery enabled mbr for a different vendor,

• Up early, poked news - appalled to visit slashdot, follow a link to the (apparently totally clueless) International Business Times, whose comment section allows users to insert random javascript: nice. Got re-directed to an apparently benign move-your-window-about-so-you-can't-close-it javascript thing. Tried unsuccessfully to debug it - unfortunately it was downloading what I can only describe as incredibly nauseating images, that it flooded the screen with; nearly retched. How can one tell firefox to black-list ibtimes.com found no way in the preferences, shame: the moral is clear; don't link to clueless news outlets - like slashdot ? shudder, still re-hinging the mind. Pleased to report that after mailing Tim, it was rapidly replaced with a reputable journal, restoring my faith in slashdot.
• Prodded impress projecting bug in SP1 betas, in the meantime setup your display before launching OO.o, or tweak the settings. Some surreal mail about vendors installing their webcams upside down in netbooks flipped across my inbox: we really have a requirement for huge device specific tables to flip the image correctly ? doh.
• Cedric pointed out that the LWN article How to destroy your community is now free for all to enjoy. In my view a fairly fool-proof set of steps. The 'poisonous people' thing is worth understanding, a technical term: these are not "people I disagree with" - but, more precisely those who endlessly talk, and never do, those who love hindering and coercing others into burdensome process etc. As one who in the past flirted with stupid process initiatives - eg. the 'GEP' nonsense (really a failed attempt to get passive-aggressives to communicate) I have hope it is possible for people to de-poison themselves. For those standing in the rubble of a destroyed, or (somehow non-growing) community, it's mandatory reading.
• Dutifully filed FOSDEM expenses in a timely fashion. Chat with Thorsten, then Kendy, then Alan, Kendy, Ralf, Guy, and eventually finished - took refuge from the sound of my own voice.
• Out to cell group in the evening, fun.

• Up early, to work - amazingly Spencer the plumber arrived to do some power-flush and boiler fixing. Plugged away at merging kiwi patches, and misc. paper-pushing administration. Misc. phone call, meetings etc.
• Interested by The Product Space and of course a great place to get a PDF to hammer cairo for you via evince, acroread does incremental rendering here which saves it from even worse ignominy.
• Out in the evening for a romantic night out with my wife.

• Up early, prodded mail; pushed my bootchart2 slides:
  Pinged by someone wrt. my comment in the slides on Canonical's drive for (C) assignment, of course other companies practise this - and I believe it is sub-optimal there too.
• The openSUSE Survey is open, considered feedback much appreciated. Sad to see Oracle lay-off Willie Walker - accessibility hero, and pianist.
• Played with the Microsoft Office Live beta, web apps inside Firefox on Linux. Curious indeed: while the spreadsheet zoom-in/out actually worked in the browser - beating Google Doc's feebler attempt here; trying to get a small =SQRT(STDEV($A$1:A1, 3)) type block fill-out; seemingly I wedged the server: "This workspace is too busy. Please try again later" - presumably logged in the backend somewhere. One of the nice things about web services (I suppose) is being able to watch your users, and see what problems they hit, which bits they can't make work and so on - to improve the product with.
• Prodded the public Moblin tree, and fixed some annoying build issues vs. 11.2.

• A day of non-stop meeting / sync. call goodness; with JP, Jared, Guy, Kendy, Thorsten, and a stream of others. Mildly amused by "Time flies like an Arrow. Fruit Flies like Bananas".

• Up too early; to the conference. Enjoyed the Tor talk, although the ethics of standing nearby a lot of people doing a very diverse set of things (in order to help hide them) are unclear to me.
• Amused by Tanenbaum's talk on reliable software, if not completely convinced. It is highly unclear to me that re-starting apparently AWOL individual components will lead to a more reliable system overall, on the other hand - isolation of low-quality third party drivers seems obviously good.
• Travelled home via some horrendous interrupted rail journey / bus special. Longer to get from London to Newmarket than from Brussels to London.

• Up somewhat late for breakfast - met some Cambridge guys working on accessible speech synthesis devices. Bus to the conference. Set too manning the booth - Moblin demos, worked on a few build bugs with FunkyPenguin.
• Worked on my talk somewhat; despite a deluge of interesting things and people passing by. Gave it; slides to follow. Wandered the floor, demoing things to people.
• Out for dinner with some SUSE guys in the evening; and off to the Porte Noir for the GNOME party.

• Up early, plugged away at mail for a bit; packed, lunch, and set off for Brussels. Hackery on slides for tomorrow. Arrived, out to the beer event - caught up with a simply staggering number of cool & interesting people, bed inordinately late.

• Up early, more mail prodding, paniced about slides for FOSDEM, and various other un-resolved issues. A day of admin, and conference calls - up very late.

• Up early, to work - pleased to read Bradley's Not All Copyright Assignment Is Created Equal post; Amen. Prodded mail.
• Slogged away at package building, obs submissions etc. Several conference calls.

• To work, poked more bootcharts, fixed a couple of bugs in bootchart2, and submitted it to Base:System. Implemented horizontal scale zoom in the viewer - to see yet more detail. Dug into a kernel boot time regression, and poked Greg about it.
• Meeting heaven - preload all-hands, customer calls, chat with Guy, JP, etc. what fun.
• Banged away at my desk in the evening, accepting some slightly damp, pre-planed timber in exchange for speed. Amused by the EvoStick water-proof glue, apparently it "dries clear" - where 'clear' seems to have the value 'white'; odd. Assembled the angle-grinder, and had a go at the steel for the front guard - remembered that you get a lot of fun sparks from such an occupation - and that the floor is covered with fine sawdust, hmm. You really get a good feeling for the speed of a 10k RPM hard-disk, with a angle-grinder of the same speed, somehow failed to set light to myself, loose a limb, or burn the house down.

• Walked babes to school. Interested to see the IM 25nm NAND flash, double the capacity in the same footprint. At 167mm^2 (a square 13x13) - 8Gb == 64Gbit; to convert that to the world of hard-disk geometries (all in bits per inch^2 [nice]) is ~1/4 of an inch squared, giving an areal density equivalent of 240Gbit/inch squared (highly contrived without leads, packaging, and/or hard-disk spindles, read heads etc. but interesting). So that gives us - numbers courtesy of man-in-the-pub (wikipedia)

  Media	Density Gbits/inch^2
  CD	0.9
  DVD	2.2
  Blue-ray	7.5
  IM 25nm flash	240
  holographic	250
  best holographic	250
  hard disk	400

  Of course, ideally storage densities would be measured in mm^3 (the world is going metric - inch by inch) - and of course, for eg. a backup medium, ultimate density of leaking capacitors is not the key consideration; but interesting nonetheless. I'm looking forward to the next generation of flash-ssds - but, if we could get the (rather good idea) of hybrid disk + some flash in a single box to market fruition things could get better rather more quickly. Incidentally - one reason doubling capacity in the same footprint makes a difference is the fixed cost: ~$1 per chip for etching, sawing, packaging etc.
• Tried to book an hotel at FOSDEM on Alasdair's recommendation, I suppose I should at this point insert some graphic suggesting I'm going to FOSDEM: it's going to rock. By some miracle of scheduling, I also seem to have a talk on boot performance Saturday @ 16:15. The abstract for which should read:

  A quick expose on boot time profiling tools, show-casing the slightly-less-lame: "bootchart2" - a new and improved boot time profiling tool, and other ways to speed things up. Which of the seven+ 'readahead' tools do you want, and why ? With a summary of recent fixes and wins in the area, and how to get involved with improving Linux boot performance

  If you have content I am likely to miss: a new uber-funky boot, ultra-fast boot subsystem (or something) I'd love to hear about it for then.
• I don't think I ever realised that Andy Wingo's past before GStreamer was so interestingly Nucular - a fascinating set of insights. I must say that, I'm more optimistic that you can blag money out of the military, and use it to generate something socially useful - the internet might be a case in point.
• Poked LXF, odd. Clarity; one-to-one with JP, sync with Aaron. Worked late on git based code auditing tool. Printed out some lovely pictures of the children for their God-parents.

• Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept. Off to NCC, managed to avoid creche somehow - and so hear Tony's sermon on the woman at the well; good stuff.
• Home for lunch, supervised three babes watching Ice-Age2, while J. cycled off with a practising H. to Effie's for cakes. Set too in the work-shop, having abandoned hope of a biscuit cutter - used nails instead - with much glue. Assisted by first E. and then N. helpfully passing nails, and avoiding ricochets from their removed ends. Worked away at it until late and got much of a workbench constructed.

• Inordinately long lie-in until 11:15 - grief. The washing machine has packed in. Ignored the wife's advice that it wasn't turning at all, and set too cleaning out the shocking gunge that likes to build up in the pump / sump. After re-assembling, discovered that - in fact, the motor was not turning; removed the brushes - really pleased with the Hotpoint machine, they seem to care about the hapless service engineer - by smoothing, and folding the pressed steel so there are not sharp edges to practise self-laceration on everywhere. Easy to access, nicely enclosed brushes too - neat. Spares shop shut by the time all this was done: bother
• Fooled around with H. above her bedroom, affixing hardboard against the roof angle, to hold the insulation in place, reduce air-flow, and (with luck) further warm her room. Much interest from small people in crawling around inside. Appalled by the generally feminine and dainty hammering actions of all and sundry. Adjourned after dinner for some hammering practise outside with the eldest three - eventually got the idea that you really want to hit the thing impressed upon them - with some good results.
• Put everyone to bed, and out to the Newmarket Pregnancy Crisis Center fund-raising Quiz - had a great time, Laura & Creighton and Claire, too - fine puddings, good company, and interesting questions. Helped pack up, and back to bed late.

• Up at six, for mens prayer breafast at Church; to work early. Mail prodding, dug at a strange gnome settings daemon issue around multi-monitor bits for Federico. Signed the iPad DRM petition - great to seem them raising the profile of that there.
• Switched from ureadahead back to my hacked up sreadahead - it seems (despite being rather dumber) to be faster; why I have no idea, prolly some mis-interaction with my kernel.
• Amused by Avatar (The making of the bootleg), some great advertising.
• Prodded hal - still taking too long to start in my book; it seems to enjoy parsing the 600k, 18k line /usr/share/pci.ids file, for me it does it 23 times on startup - seems we need a 23 entry persistent cache for another 2x speed win.
• Limbo'd in H's roof-space, trying to get bits of insulation, hardboard, and chip-board, and myself through an extremely small door, into a very small hole. It all brings back the reason why you pay builders in the first place to do [sic] the job for you.

• To work, read mail, and analysis. I didn't pick up the fact that Sun's public-cloud plans (which always seemed a little crazy) are over with Oracle in charge. I guess that is why OO.o is orphaned out of Dave Douglas' "Cloud Computing and Developer Platforms" group - fair enough; OO.o has never been a developer platform (not one that either external (or apparently internal) developers wanted to build on), and it's 'Cloud' credentials always seemed flaky to me. Far better to focus on the value to customers there it seems to me.
• It seems with Zonker's departure; that there is an exciting opening opening up as a community manager for OpenSUSE.
• Watched some of the strategy videos at Oracle wrt. Java and OO.o. Apparently no auto-cue for Michael Bemmer; odd. Lots of emphasis on JavaFX in the Java spiel - which last I checked is still deeply mired in non-openness. OO.o - nothing new, beyond a very fuzzy screenshot of a 'web office' suite in the browser (sigh). It is amazing to me - that the most important predictor of success and adoption for these technologies is not presented: are we going to see genuine open-ness ? will Sun be fixed where it has screwed up ? I suppose only time will tell.

• Up early, to work, read mail for a bit before remembering I have to work all night, and taking the morning off instead. Off to Ridgeons to try to find a biscuit jointing router cutter - a suitable slot on the shelf - but nothing in it; bother. Bought some angled iron (sold as 'fence posts') to practise the welding with; overcame the 2 and 3 inch screw famine of late; etc.
• Home. Discovered the carpenters had only inserted insulation in visible places, carefully leaving several (now inaccessible) places un-insulated - pondered what to do before covering it all with hardboard.
• Lunch, back to work - Jared's staff, chat with Zonker.
• Called into the Sun / Oracle call - enjoyed the boppy music, and video sales pitches. Lots of interest in there. The OO.o slide (in Edward's) talk had this content - with apologies for the lack of prettiness:

  OpenOffice Strategy

  OpenStandards Based Office Productivty Suite
  
  

  • Managed as an independent Global Business Unit
    • Retaining Sun development and support teams
  • Continue to develop, promote and support OpenOffice
    • Including the OpenOffice.org community edition
  • Deliver Oracle Cloud Office
    • Web based productivity suite - integrates desktop, web and mobile user interaction
  • Focus on enterprise customers
    • eg. Integrations with BI and Content Management
  • Enhance the customer support experience
    • Leverage the Oracle Customer Services infrastucture

• And now the analysis: what does it mean ? and of course, this is only somewhat educated guess-work.
  • On the positive side - OpenOffice is at least reporting into Edward Screven - who it seems has real-life experience of managing some sane and helpful engagements with open-source projects. Encouragingly, he also appears to have a strong technical background - all to the best.
  • "Oracle Cloud Office" - oh dear. First unpacking the name - this doesn't sound like an open-source project. Since it seems unlikely that this independent BU will grow staff-wise - this probably confirms or extends the re-deployment of Sun developers away from OO.o onto this pipe-dream [sic]. The technology is what bites here:
    • If this is the same JavaFX idea as before, then the licensing and community issues still need solving.
    • If this is some CSS + JavaScript monster a WYSWYG editor is near impossible - beside the same problem of re-writing (as for JavaFX), but into a lamer language. I'm not convinced that HTML5 provides enough to do this adequately either.
    • This project is presumably the rational for the reduced commit rate from Sun developers, as documented before.
    • Why 'Cloud' ? what a name: loaded with meaninglessness and ambiguity. Clearly adding rich co-editing / collaboration features to OO.o makes lots of sense; squeezing it for a phone form-factor like-wise (though the phone factors seem to be bulging their muscles these days to help) - but some whole-sale re-writing binge ? or is the 'Cloud' meaningless ?
  • BI and CMS integration sounds great, and of course complimentary for Oracle, but is potentially prone to removing developers fighting the tide of bugs, and interoperability problems.
  • Managed as an independent BU - sounds interesting; presumably that makes P&L: margin and profitability extremely transparent - I'm not optimistic that that will be good long term for that group. It may also spawn new attempts to shake-down partners and OO.o developers for cash with negative results.
  • Finally, on the positive side - I was asked to be optimistic about Oracle's stewardship. It is really too early to say how this will all pan out; my guesses are my own - and - most likely highly inaccurate.
• Other random thoughts on the Oracle presentation.
  • OpenSolaris - the Open seems to have disappeared, I couldn't find it in the list of OSS projects. Solaris (to me) always made more sense as a proprietary operating system, perhaps it will go that way - certainly the repeated emphasis seemed to be on Solaris for high end Unix, with Linux for the rest. I suspect this would tend to mean (in practise) sad things for the great desktop hackers at Sun - except that SunRay was featured severally.
  • Nauseation - questions to Larry should not begin 'you are my hero', or 'why don't you run for president'.
  • "Lifetime support" - that's quite a commitment - to promise to support all your software, forever. Clearly, the cost has to get ratched up fairly aggressively if you don't use a reasonably recent service pack, or patch set; interesting marketing though.

• Prodded mail, worked through bugs, wrote a small C# test app to emit XTest keystrokes - interestingly, we ship a Mono's C# compiler where there is no gcc (or headers etc.) installed on our systems, making using C# to drive trivial C interface tests the simplest option.
• Had a poke at an OO.o memory corruption issue; fun. Clarity. JP's staff meeting, one-to-one's with JP and Jared. Plugged away at boot time polish.

• Up early, walked babes to school, chewed mail, call with Alex. Zoe over for lunch, and to try and get some rest from Patrick. Solomon popped around to get some equipment.
• Spent ages chasing a vicious mutter crasher - a race condition, with no apparent rhyme or reason, hard to reproduce too. After adding a spin instead of exit (on a volatile variable) to meta_bug, and getting a different problem instead, and trapping SIGSEGV, SIGBUS, SIGFPU handlers likewise, with nothing, then adding an atexit handler likewise, it started to pique my interest, got it after interposing my own abort method - and discovered I had just screwed up my meta_bug version, bother. Fixed the issue - it seems that combining gdk_error_push/pop with meta_error_push/pop is fundamentally unsafe: don't do it. Eventually found it was a known issue fixed in 2.2.
• Plugged away at various other bits; very sad to see Joe leave the company - what a loss.

• Up early, dealt with babes while J. slept. NCC - Thea spoke. Back for a quick lunch, set too outside at desk making, with some success. Bert over for a cup of tea, burned lots of off-cuts helpfully on the fire.
• More desk making, via a rather walloped thumb; in the absence of a biscuit jointing router cutter, considering other ways of jointing all the 26x6 inch boards into a single board; perhaps milling the grooves in a jig; hmm.
• Gordon sermon in the evening on Isaiah 7 God with us - very good.

• Longish lie in, awoke to find Hannah Webb painting the family downstairs; good stuff. J. out to counsel a lady, listened to a selection of different music with the babes.
• Lunch, and out swimming in Bury St Edmonds - admiring the babies pool complete with Pirate Ship and lots of water features to play in. Rescued N. from drowning: seemingly getting your legs stuck in the water ring, while trying to stand up is a recipie for pushing your head under the water. E. had a wonderful time jumping in from the side, and clapping herself. Much fun.
• Back with lots of tired babies. Much playing of computer games, and experimenting with Moblin on the wife and littlies. Put the (carefully pre-exhausted) children to bed extremely early.
• Laura arrived, and set off to see "Avatar 3D" - which seemed a reasonably interesting film: despite the obvious down-side of putting money in the pornographer Murdoch's pocket: if only he would divest himself of the obscene. In terms of 3D technology, rather irritated by focus issues: perhaps too close to the screen, but frequently wanted to look at things that were out of focus: such as the depth below when looking down from a high tree branch, or a floating thingit closer to one. Is that intrinsic to the 3D projection ? an economy on rendering ? or is it simply my eyes; occasionally annoying whatever.

• Chat with Fong. Bought some new USB keys - hopefully newer ones have faster bulk write speeds for images, though by buying the very cheapest, almost certainly not, at £1/Gb flash seems remarkably inexpensive.
• Lunch with Mike Geach, prodded FATE. Discovered Markus had made kiwi like my USB SSD as installation media - beautiful: much faster installs, thanks to SanDisk.

• Gave up trying to get through to a tax adviser: I guess it is not the best time of year for it, filed anyway.
• Plugged away at cumulative CPU time rendering in my bootchart2. Somewhat unconvinced by the result - still, at least it tries to give the kernel's view of how many ns were spent on each piece, and a graph. I suppose deviations from a straight bottom-left-to-top-right line are a sign of a mis-use of CPU; and there are still some bugs. Still, a pretty picture as of today:
• Finally got to actually optimising the code instead of writing analytics - leaving a few malingering bugs in the rendering code, as always. OO.o team meeting, and Beta customer call.
• Out to cell group at the Parkers' fun; back late.

• More of the day spent poking at bootcharty bits. It turns out to be surprisingly unpleasant to debug and improve initrd stuff, eventually got it all straightened out, released and packaged. Latest code at github. I'd love someone to try integrating it into Fedora / any other distros, sample package here 'bootchart2'.
• Went to a technical call to sate my curiosity around SPICE; played with the white-board instead; shame.
• Chat with Aaron, played with his sexy new osc plugins for maintaining links left and right. Dinner, J. out to baby-sit Laura's babes.
• Struggled with self-assessment, it seems that there is a set of nasties around losses on stocks, taxed as income, but sold (at a loss) as a bog-standard asset. How to offset one years loss against anothers gain ?
• Pleased to see my OpenSolaris bug (#64) fixed, after a couple of years. Perhaps I should have another play.

• Up early; packed babes off to school, skimmed mail. Prodded fate features a little. Surely the EU are rather overdue for officially approving the Oracle / Sun merger - hopefully Russia and China will get there in the end too.
• Spent much of the day re-booting, testing boot-chart things, while massaging SUSE / moblin artwork building, to clean that up and drop the alpha channel.

• Walked the babes to school; poked mail, wrote status report, filled out Clarity. Stumbled across some annoying race with our bugzilla product entry: switch 'Classification' too fast, and there is some wonderful race filling 'Product' - the solution to sub-standard programmers: make them program everything asynchronously in Javascript: so easy to understand.
• Prodded away at loose ends. Lunch, call with Guy & JP. Filed a couple of evo. crashers. Read a brilliant LWN article by Josh Berkus How to destroy your community - simply fantastic:

  ... he also picked up some valuable experience during his stint at "The Laboratory for the Destruction of Communities," otherwise known as Sun Microsystems.

• Up early, dealt with the babes; read Harry Patch's auto-biography - "The Last Fighting Tommy"; some insanely poignant pieces - such as the Tommy's name for Ypres for which they were dying: Wipers.
• Off to NCC, ran creche, made crowns with stickers on and chatted with Cheryl and Lisa. Home, quiet lunch. DVD in the afternoon, while I turned some chunks of timber in the side-way into a substantial work-bench - the frame of it at least.
• Sermon in the evening from Park-Street, really good to hear one after a gap.

• Lie in. Off to the shops to get a replacement camera - bought a nice (pink) Samsung machine, home. Prepped the house at speed for the influx of relatives, set fire to the fire, helped clean up etc.
• The co-incident birthday influx got underway, most of J's side of the family arrived: Bruce & Anne, Sue, Clive & Adam, Georgina, Adrian, Stephanie & Isabelle, Tim & Julie, and Louise. Carved up the lovely meal J. had made, and served everyone. Enjoyed the company, birthday cakes for all & sundry, admired Tim's new car.
• Good to see Georgina's new company Marketing Matters with pretty web-site to match.
• DVD for the babes in the afternoon; set too at more tax paper-work, if only one could bill one's time preparing this stuff to the Government - the process might become rapidly simpler: but wait, presumably that is why paid accountants are even more tax-efficient than you might think. Bed late.

• Up later, breakfast, chat with Tomas about moblin & various window manager hints; good stuff.
• Prodded at my boot-chart; it seems that there may be up to three lots of the 500ms second wait in my boot-chart, previously hidden by the lame-ness of the old-style bootchart rendering. Fixed a couple of bootchart2 bugs.
• Wrote up meeting notes on the train, poked at various bits of code. Read some nice Cg code doing IDCTs in pixel shaders - nice, I wonder if (perhaps with suitable annotation of methods & data structures to identify promising targes) we could persuade the Mono JIT to generate code to run on the GPU.
• Amused to read the FT this morning; China's foreign ministry's spokes-woman Jiang Yu said: "China's internet is open." - a whole new meaning of 'open'ness - or is it ? open-ness with a hard edge ? ...
• Interesting and accessible talk Not your Father's Von Neumann Machine - from the JavaOne conference. NB. the slides update below the video. Sadly, he doesn't mention callgrind's sexy cache simulation, though he should. Also, the horrendous irony of pointing out that "Memory is the new disk" at a Java conference; Java is a case-in-point of hobbling by excessive pointer chasing (cf. .Net's value-class 'struct' concept). Some interesting thoughts though, one of my pet peeves is eg. that most 'sax2' parsers do their parsing incrementally, rather than parsing a big chunk ( nicely warming the branch predictor for the parsing code-paths, the hash tables for interning etc.) and queueing the result to emit; they often parse a single element, then emit that: not a good idea. Volunteers to fix the OO.o 'FastParser' to do this more intelligently (and/or preferably use a different thread to parse, vs. emit the callbacks) appreciated.
• Slogged away at Tax / accounting fun in the evening. Out to visit Solomon & Peace.

• Up at 6am, off to commute to London - wow, I'm glad I don't have to do this daily; met Nick at the station. Read cached news, and bemoaned the state of Evo's "off-line IMAP" which could be better expressed as: "no-attachments off-line". Will file another bug on re-connection.
• Boggled at Man Shot Dead in ASDA car-park - NB. shootings are relatively rare and news-worthy in the UK: clearly the solution to reduce them further is to arm everyone, including kids to the teeth with a pistol and H-bomb (remember - it is not H-bombs that kill people, it is people that kill people) - but I digress. What is notable is the apparent police indifference: "A man has been shot in broad daylight in a very public place ... those responsible have obviously no regard for public safety.". Shocking indeed to disregard public safety during assasinations. The Health and Safety executive should be immediately informed. "Fortunately no other person has been injured and we believe that the victim was the intended target." - how positive and fortunate ! as long as they shot the right guy, who was a baddy anyway - all is well; smells odd to me.
• Arrived, met up with all the usual suspects - great team. Good to see Dirk again, and meet Dave Stewart. Tried to debug my udev oddness from yesterday - found the slow / waiting culprit - in sysfs. It's pleasing to hear that Kay has properly fixed my udev / blockdev device issue.
• Kindly invited to join the Intel guys group dinner - much fine food, company & fun. Up late chatting to Paul, bed.

• Up early, dug out and opened a huge slew of tedious looking correspondance, concealing at least a few more bits for tax purposes that have remained un-opened for many moons.
• Mail pokeage, gave feedback on misc. bugs. Filed travel re-imbursement forms for LF (finally). Booked an hotel for visiting the Intel / London lot tomorrow.
• Interleaved meetings, baby sitting, story reading, and so on.

• Prodded mail; corporate call, prodded an OOXML issue under Wine. An afternoon of fun filled, back-to-back conference calls until rather late.
• Slogged away at tax in the evening, sorted, stapled, and typed in phone bills and bank statements at great length; stumbled upon a memory corruptor in calc spreadsheet saving.

• Up early, Naomi's fifth birthday - much un-wrapping of small gifts, practise, breakfast, took H. and N. to school. Interested to read of Danish children bitterly complaining that they don't have OO.o installed at home; surely that is an easy thing to fix. Students that put more time into layout than content, are perhaps like presenters that spend more hours configuring their transitions, than rehearsing their points.
• Pleased to read the Ars-technica report on Moblin from CES, and glad that our hard work polishing the Samsung N127 impressed.
• Call with Radek around some funky OO.o hacking pieces. Mary Rogers around for lunch, most encouraging, as always.
• Wrote status reports, prodded Clarity - nice to have nearly the full set of up-to-date projets to account things against now.
• Prodded quickly at gslice.c to see how easy it is to add the ability to copy with malloc / memalign failure: looks trivial, and requires ~nothing new on any fast-paths.
• Realised I had a two hour call over Naomi's birthday dinner; only a few minutes in advance, bother. Played with FunkyPenguin's new Studio / Moblin image - looking good, just collecting silly missing packages here and there: X video drivers, NetworkManager etc.
• Up late, unwinding my tax situation; why is it that I always loose at least one bank statement ? Tried to buy a keyboard for Robert, went to 'ebuyer' - a set of uber-lamers it seems. Not only is it necessary to create an "account" instead of having a one-off transaction, (the demand for which would normally stop me shoping with a vendor) - but also, they have that old chestnut of re-checking the "[X] PLEASE SPAM ME" box, having complained about some (bogus?) validation error on account creation. After all that, of course it refused to deliver to my brother's address: nice one.

• Mini lie-in; how is it - that the more you sleep, the more tired you get. Off to NCC, Tony speaking, Ron & Iris were there, visiting from France. Had them around for lunch.
• Lovely to catch up again. Amazed by the (apparent) fairly savage restrictions on free-speech that appear to exist in France, with (apparently) two year jail sentances for (un-licensed-by-the-Mayor) street evangelism, or even busking. Of course, if the Mayor is a communist, that is a difficult one to fix: censorship is apparently just normal. Naturally, hard to believe in such an abominable illiberality without concrete statutes to point to - but concerning that this is the impression of reasonable, Baptist Christians on the street of a small rural French town, and that it siginificantly influences their practise.
• Naomi's birthday party, lots of babes arrived and had a fine time playing various jumping-about, hunting, posting and dancing games. A fine party tea. Bid 'bye to all and sundry, packed babes off to bed and relaxed a little.

• Lie in, packed the car with snow removal equipment, emergency clothing & food - and set off to see Joy & Chris Evans at Oak Hill College.
• Arrived, lovely to see them, tea, playing in the snow - with rather a useful small slope in front of them for sliding down on various unlikely pieces of plastic. Back inside for tea.
• Out for a tour of the college, via an industriously produced igloo and admired the industry of the place. It makes one yearn for the quiet academic life of learning, contemplation, (but not exams).
• Back with Chris for toasted tea-cakes and crumpets; then set off home with the babes being read 'The Hobit' before falling to sleeping in the back.
• Frantic party preparation for tomorrow.

• Plugged away at boot times, and trying to unwind something of a proliferation of different packages and wins, and get them all back up-stream / into Factory / SP1. Installed lots of missing devel package pieces onto my SP1 system.
• Interested by RMS' latest post defending copyright assignment which he calls 'selling exceptions'. His ethical case seems to rest on a supposed conceptual equivalence between X11 licensing and proprietary licensing. Of course, while I have to agree in the abstract - and perhaps some proprietary licenses are reasonable: published, transparent, under F-RAND terms etc. I have yet to see one of these in the wild. Surely the realities of proprietary licensing are massively removed from this. The existence of confidential licenses, with dictated terms, and the commensurate strangulation of the very open-ness that makes Free software (as a social experience) work can never be a good thing.

• Woke the wife up in the night thinking she was a set of shelves - objectification gone mad. Distressingly E. didn't wake at all, with only one false start in the morning before the light came on, so can't be blamed; hey ho.
• To work early, to interact with Taiwan - hit an interesting problem around re-writing MBR's during full system recovery. Dug through the kernel a little to confirm my suspicions. The ultimate moral is: don't trust blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sda - to have re-built the device nodes by the time it is finished; you badly need a udevadm settle there - otherwise, your script can rush on - just as udev is deleting and re-creating the devices. That's easy to see with a beautiful graphical loop after the blockdev:

  #!bin/bash
  
  diskDevice=/dev/sdb
  blockadm --rereadpt $diskDevice
  
  iter=0
  while [ $iter -lt 40 ]; do
  	if [ -e "$diskDevice" ]; then
  		echo -n "*"
  	else
  		echo -n "."
  	fi
  	iter=`expr $iter + 1`
  done

  which yields something like this pretty bitmap, and of course you can't run it on a mounted disk:

  **..........................*****************************

  first you see it, then you don't, then it comes back again; hopefully very obvious.
• Swept snow off the path - very satisfying before it starts to melt - like a dusty powder. Lunch. Filed expense backlog. Call with Kendy.
• Cell group in the evening, encouraging to see everyone again after Christmas.

• Set too, packaging libnih (sigh, I really mean to get around to doing the few glib changes necessary to make that redundant, at least for some subset of method calls).
• Frustrated by Guy / Aaron's selection of cool music, all cropped to the first few seconds - just enough to get a taste and want more.
• Packaged ureadahead, discovered nih's -v default option after more searching, which makes sense, except for the yet-another logging framework.
• Caught an evo crasher; I've often wondered how to get debugging symbols into gdb when it has already crashed; apparently the answer is to install the debuginfo package and do nosharedlibrary followed by sharedlibrary [opt regexp] - lovely.
• Pottered around cleaning up the side-way in the evening; seemingly a lot of condensation on the inside of the polycarbonate roof: nasty - not helped by the snow on the other side no doubt.

• To work. Read boot-charts and suggested things; read mail, prodded mailing lists. Played with an early version of SLED11 SP1 - looking rather good already.

• Back to work ! started chewing mail; there are great benefits to much of the world being on FTO at the same time in terms of a reduced backlog (except of spam); nice.
• Played an electric heater onto my server to warm it; after 10 minutes it decided to turn on again: horay - almost certainly thermally related.
• Downloaded, and built various latest-and-greatest images, tried to burn them variously over my wifi connection - which is rather slow it seems, bother. Located missing, required kernel patch, bad.

• Off to NCC, ran creche. Home for lunch.
• Dropped J. M. and E. at a party for babes; took H. & N. to Laura & Creighton's to play; chatted to Claire & Simon - and lugged bits of furniture around: a new wardrobe for H. etc. Dropped that at home with Creighton's help.
• Back for more of a chat; picked up J. packed the babes off to bed. Cancelled video evening - everyone trying to rest-up for Monday back at work. Chatted to Sam for much of the evening, fun.
• E. back in bed, with repeated stress on the light coming on first before getting up, put her back into bed etc. Tried to persuade M. recently to abandon hope of being allowed to sleep in her dressing gown, and that (despite appearances) Daddy doesn't in fact sleep in his dressing gown - just puts it on each time he has to appear to maintain order at night.

• Up early, dealt with the babes while J. slept. Off to the market to stock up on fruit & veg. Back home via an ill-advised trip to the playground (in the snow), E. bleating about her freezing hands (which she insists on removing from the snug peram's sleeping-bag.
• Back; set to disassembling the packed-in Jig-saw. Discovered that 'Erbauer' is in fact a pseudo-germanic name for Screw-Fix's ultra-cheap tool range - built for hobbiests and obsolesence. Unfortunately, the machine is defunct. Extremely pleased by the ease of disassembly with electric screwdriver (wonder christmas present from the Hawkins): marvelous. Eventually got the switch apart, and discovered it was some charring and bending on the contacts - re-assembled admiring the simple mechanism smeared in black grease. Overall a lovely device let down by a shoddy switch - shame.
• Quick lunch; Nick & Joni popped over to collect the long lost fleece. Packed innumerable (but never quite enough) tools into the car, and set off to Solomon & Peace's house. Removed their rotting pine block-board work-surface around the sink. Spent ages cutting and working the teak, returning home for more tools periodically. Bruce had done a wonderful job of making angle-iron brackets for everything, making the task rather easy. Re-sealed everything with mould-resistant silicon sealer; with luck it might survive.
• Back, read stories to babes, bed very early to write back-blog-entries.

• Up late, put up towel rail, and got some bits together and onto the roof of the extension. Replaced existing, duff extractor fan outlet, with a suitably self-sealing version. It defeats me why they let you insulate your house with 6+ inches of insulation - then drive a 6inch hole in the wall, with no real obsctructions to the outside.
• Despaired of the builders coming to clean the roof, so set too myself. Removed an inordinate ammount of guano-fuelled moss-growth, deposited from the roof above during re-roofing - littered with nails, bricks, and other goodies.
• Lunch, Lydia arrived for it - good to catch up with her. Knocked up a bespoke pot-measuring device (come duck) for her on a whim, simple with a little pine tounge & groove boarding, a router, planer and some space to work.
• Back to the roof cleaning for some hours - trying to scrape moss out of each crack it has subsequently infested. Continued until it was dark, noticed moss freezing to the roof post removal - concerning - as I finished.
• Plugged at the filing, and finances in the evening with J. bed late.