October 2007 Archives

Mon Oct 29 21:55:00 CET 2007

ESC face-to-face meeting in Hamburg

Here are my notes from the first day of our two-day ESC meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

I wake up unusally early, took my computer and together with my wife and son, we went to the airport. I already had a boarding pass because our national airlines are experimenting with Internet check-in. Later I realized they are really experimenting with it, because the printed 3D code was not readable by the readers they had at the gate thus they had to re-type the boarding pass number with an excuse that their readers do not support this code at all 8) Interesting...

The flight itself was OK, the weather in Prague was cold and unfriendly, thus I was not surprised by clouds, fog and rain in Hamburg. Due to the traffic in Hamburg, I was 5 minutes late. Only five minutes. Michael Meeks arrived at Luebeck, thus he was even more late.

The meeting started with objectives and expected outcome. The first presentation was held by Nils F. from Sun about Sun's requirements for the development and development infrastructure. More or less known things, with the exception of "64bits clean code is a priority by definition" and the plans of bundling product based on OpenOffice.org (or directly OpenOffice.org ?!) with Solaris.

Doko's presentation about Ubuntu requirements was also interesting. They do provide several new menu items like "Translate" and "Report an issue". To be able to provide updated translations, they do have OOo sources twice in their source code. Once for the OOo and the second instance is used for building resources 8) They have a requirement that parallel builds should work without hackery around. This is also my requirement, because on the fast machine I use for building now, I had to spend a lot of time to simply make it work directly from the milestones.

Another interesting thing was the issue #i81913# they have created to be able to communicate their problems their users have with OOo. Interesting approach to communicate to the upstream. Good.

Michael's and Redflag presentations. The interesting requirement from Redflag is that OOo works OK for traditional and simplified Chinese. Hope we will cooperate on this ;-)

In the break, I was almost lost on my way to find Ivo's office. Greet all the brave guys from RE (met with Oliver for the first time, IIRC) and then we were talking (for a few moments only, unfortunately) with Ivo about the future (or end?) of localize.sdf files ;-) At the end, I relized that Ivo has everything finished and is waiting for Ause's free time slot ;-)

The next part was about sorting all requirements and having them written down in the spreadsheet. Lot of fun with it ;-)

But the most interesting part was about prioritizing these requirements.

Interesting quote from mba: "Q: Who decides what is a no-brainer? A: It depends on the brain..." ;-)

Late dinner in the local brewery. I was so tired that I left very early and went to the city to see the enlightened town hall and despite the first idea to walk to the hotel, I took taxi because the rain was quite dense.

The hotel Mercure is impressive and very close to Sun offices. Very good choice. Thank you Sabine. ;-)

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: OpenOffice.org

Thu Oct 25 09:55:23 CEST 2007

Diving course

... not me ;-) My sister-in-law likes diving, thus we went to the first lesson diving course. The course was in the small city Mělník, in the evening. The arrival to the city was impressive - the church is very well enlightened and stands just above the city. Really nice.

The pool in Mělník is a typical pool in the small city here in our country. There were many students who want to "actively" relax by jumping into water etc. And now imagine five divers there ;-)

The most interesting experience for us (even for the lector of the diving course ;-) was my son. In the second part of the course (it was very late, say 9pm), the lector has shown to all members of the course how to jump into water. With every new kind of jump, my son applauded with a really loud laugh and I had to repeat every jump divers did 8)

On the way back home, we went to the airport where I picked my ticket for Hamburg next Monday. My son was with me and was the youngest visitor of the airport at that time, for sure ;-) He even received his own ticket from the local airlines representative.

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: Private

Tue Oct 23 22:40:17 CEST 2007

One day at INVEX...

... is enough. Really 8) Interesting meetings with many people.

The weather was again INVEX-like (only those who were more than 10 times there, know).

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: Work

Sat Oct 20 22:22:51 CEST 2007

Small reminder: SW RAID-5 is crap on Linux

Yes, it is unusable. Slow when running in degraded mode and terribly slow rebuild. It took approx. 2 days and 13 hours to rebuild 1TB RAID-5 array with 4 *fast* disks. The system was next to unusable when rebuilding.

This is the second time I realized that software RAID in Linux kernel is unusable. I won't try it again despite what other people are telling me.

And I was so naive that I wanted to wait for the completition of the rebuild...

The next time this happens, I'll announce service outage to do a complete restore from backups instead of rebuilding the array. It will take me an hour or two...

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: Work