General

We are back in England after nearly two years away, we landed yesterday morning at London Heathrow. We flew with American Airlines this time (my first time with them), and I must say that I still prefer British Airways - they give you free drinks and I remember the staff being friendlier. The flight went well, and they got us in on time, immigration and baggage claim was all very simple, and so I was pleased the travel went well. William was a little angle on the flight, after letting him run around the airport for a few hours.

This is William's first time in England, so after getting the Underground to St Pancras Louise and I parted ways. She headed up to Sheffield with William, and I headed up to Chester to get my geek on. I will be spending the next couple of days talking with Noel, Tim and Chris about Open Babel development, CMake, Git, Gerrit and open source chemistry software i general. It should be a lot of fun, and while I have not had anywhere near the time I would like to work on open source projects in general, I think some of the things I am doing at Kitware might be useful.

Then Louise and I will be meeting up in London, staying with friends so that we can make our third trip to the US embassy to ask for another visa stamp. All of the forms have changed since we last went in 2008, and our visa type has changed. Hopefully that will all go smoothly, then we will visit another friend before returning up t'North together. I should finally make it up to Sheffield myself on Saturday, but plan on heading out on the Sunday. I have a week of meeting with chemists, physicists and materials scientists, mainly of the computational persuasion, to talk about cool stuff I am doing and what they are doing.

There will be a short intermission on the weekend for a friend's wedding, before continuing another week of talking to scientists. One of these visits will take me down to Cardiff, where Torchwood was filmed. So I am doubly excited by seeing the city where one of my favorite Doctor Who spinoffs was filmed, and meeting with more people to talk about quantum chemistry, electronic structure and visualization. I will be ending my time in England on this trip in Sheffield, meeting with old supervisors, friends and coworkers, talking about what I am doing now and how we might work together in the future.

I am also hoping to squeeze in a generous helping of real ale, some fish and chips, a few full English breakfasts and time to catch up with family and friends. Despite being back for quite a long time, and initially wondering what we would do, I find I don't have nearly enough time to meet with everyone I would like to and catch up with all of my old friends. We should try to make sure we come back more often! I think this post is long enough already - looking forward to getting out and about in England after my long absence. We will be looking around Chester later, before getting down to business.

Wow, I just looked and I haven't written a thing since January! For those of you who might have been worried, or just wondered what I was up to...here is a quick run down. I am going to start with a little advice, combining starting a new family with moving from academia to industry and moving house it tough I have been really focused on work, home and one big conference, and kinda shut down otherwise.

I hope to remedy that in the coming months, and have started by doing some development for Avogadro and Open Babel. I also got Kalzium in KDE trunk ported to use the system Avogadro library, with some help from Pino Toscano. So KDE 4.5 will feature a Kalzium using the system installed Avogadro, this prompted a couple of bug fixes in Avogadro. So after that I tagged and released a much delayed Avogadro 1.0.1 with several bug fixes.

Way back in March Kitware was kind enough to send me out to the March ACS meeting, where I presented a talk on VTK, ParaView and its use in chemistry. I also gave a talk on Avogadro, and its use as a framework in chemistry visualization, which Geoff followed up with a talk on some applications of the Avogadro framework in his research.

The ACS conference deserves a full post of its own, but I feel like it has been so long I will just summarize a few of my thoughts. There were some other really interesting talks on visualization, and how it can be applied in chemistry. I got a general feeling that commercial software still has too much of a stranglehold, and hope to see that change as we develop powerful open source platforms that can be shared by all. There is a definite need for this in chemistry, and I am doing everything I can to seek some funding to further that cause, failing that I will continue to do what I can in my spare time.

I was honored to meet members of the Blue Obelisk for the first time. Saw some great talks about open science, open data, open standards and open access. I especially enjoyed meeting and seeing Peter Murray-Rust talk for the first time, I found that I share many of his ideals. I think we differ in some places, but life would be boring if that were not the case!

Our son, William, is nearly one year old already! He might be a big part of the reason why I have been inactive. The kinds of sleep deprivation torture you go through with children are indescribable He is thankfully sleeping quite well now, and even took his first two steps yesterday.

We had our first visitors in our new home - friends from Pittsburgh and Washington DC all came up for a weekend. I fired up our new BBQ, an enormous American style with offset fire box. Made some amazing ribs, and shared some of the home brew I made - a portable porter, and an English brown ale (first two batches). We are just getting ready for a trip to Pittsburgh, and then William's first birthday (planning a small party at our place).

Then there is work, lots of exciting things are happening there. I taught my first course at Kitware, going through ParaView plugins. The new CMake book came out (I am one of the contributors to the new edition), and the new VTK book came out at around the same time. Kitware is hiring, so please let me know if you are interested in applying. We have some really interesting projects to work on, most of my time is spent on something called Titan. Last Friday I also pumped the tyres up on my bike, and rode into work for "Bike to Work Day".

I have skipped loads of stuff, but already wrote more than I intended. I will see if I can be a little more disciplined and write more frequently. My current problem is finding time to fit everything in, but I have a new strategy I am working on in order to do better. Life after the big 30 is certainly different. I feel energized again, and hope to be writing about more fun and interesting stuff I am doing over the coming months.

The Wednesday before Christmas several of my new coworkers from Kitware went to see the new Avatar movie in 3D. I haven't been to the movies much recently, generally just using Netflix to watch movies at home. I have to say it was well worth it, and I have been trying to talk Louise into going to see it with me again. We saw it at the local IMAX, and the images really popped out of the screen. It was a little off putting that they use linearly polarized light, so that the effect is lost when tilting your head. I would highly recommend that you make the trip out to see it in 3D, and hope to figure out babysitters and all that stuff so that Louise and I can go and see it before it leaves the big screen.

The story was quite engaging, but I did find it really quite lame that the mineral they were mining was called "unobtanium", or that is what is sounded like. They could have chosen a better name, but it at least it seems to have been used tongue in cheek. That said I moved my head out of the way once or twice when an object swung around. It was also amazing how much emotion was conveyed in the characters, and how tough it was to tell where the CG and real sequences were joined.

I would love to have access to 3D of this quality on my desktop. When are the 30" 3D monitors due out with Linux and OpenGL support?!?

It is hard to believe the noughties are over - happy new year! It has been a decade of extremes for me on a personal level. It started with me going back to university, which was very challenging and rewarding. I attained a first class degree in Physics, and enjoyed it so much that I decided to stay and study for a research doctorate in nanomaterials. I was very look to work with Tim Richardson and Neil Cowlam who really allowed me to explore the field and go off on some really interesting tangents.

During my Ph.D. research I found the time to get involved in open source development, first with GentooKDE. I was lucky enough to be selected for a Google Summer of Code project in 2007 right at the end of my Ph.D. research. I spent most of my time working on Avogadro, Kalzium and Open Babel.

After that I was really hooked on open source development, and was offered a position as a postdoc by Geoff Hutchison in his new research group at the University of Pittsburgh in the chemistry department. This was a really big move from Sheffield, UK to Pittsburgh, PA in the USA. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about visas and working as an immigrant in another country.

These were certainly some of the high points of the decade, but it wasn't all good. In the middle of the final semester of my undergraduate degree we lost my little brother. This was a very difficult time for us all, and influenced my decision to stay in Sheffield over the next few years with my family. Then on the day I found out that I had been accepted into the Google Summer of Code program, as I was writing up my thesis for my Ph.D., we lost my sister unexpectedly too. I found out just how trusting and understanding relative strangers in the KDE community could be, and will always be thankful to them. Of course my friends and family were all there for us too.

During all this I met Louise (at the end of the nineties), and in 2005 we got married. Weeks before our wedding I attended a conference in Japan, and London was bombed the day before I returned from Japan. Roughly a week before our wedding Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt was bombed (our honeymoon destination). Even days before we weren't sure if we would be able to go on honeymoon. In the end we had a great wedding and an amazing honeymoon.

So much more happened, I think I have some great material for memoirs. I do worry whether people will really believe it all happened - the noughties were a real roller coaster ride. In 2009 my son was born, the birth did not go as planned, then at nine weeks he got a UTI that turned into E. Coli in his blood. I found out that I am an overprotective father, and that the doctors and nurses at the Childrens hospital in Pittsburgh are very good.

I also attended Camp KDE, met loads of amazing people including my future boss. Even that was far from simple, from an amazing start, to a suboptimal interview (I will tell you over beers), to the decision to hire me, then the visa gauntlet I ran to our eventual move more than six months later.

I have to say that we are extremely happy now we are in Clifton Park, NY. I love my new job at Kitware, the area is great and we have been made to feel very welcome by everyone at Kitware - especially Bill and Naomi. I think the next decade is going to be a good one, and have my fingers crossed for no really bad things.

I wish everyone a very happy new year. I feel very lucky to have such a great job working on open source code, with a generous hardware budget to buy new toys. If I could just talk them into getting an espresso machine everything would be perfect! We are on the look out for more Qties (pronounced "cuties"), and I am hoping to become lead Qtie I am really looking forward to Camp KDE in a few weeks, and all the work I will be doing at Kitware in the new year.

As some of you may remember we moved up to Clifton Park, NY in September. From when I first met Bill at Camp KDE in January he told me about all the snow they got up here. To be honest I was starting to doubt him, and then we got some snow on the weekend and I was really excited. Today I woke up, looked out and saw we got a lot of snow! I am not disappointed, possibly a little overwhelmed...

I think I am going to like it up here, Dax loves it and William is not too sure what to make of it right now. They just plowed the road (not our big drive though), and so I may try to venture into work soon. Of course Dax and I had a big play in the snow, and I think we are going to have to buy a sledge as soon as possible.

On Monday 21 September we packed the majority of our belongings into the back of a Penske truck and made the 500 mile drive (in convoy - Louise, William, Dax and myself) from Pittsburgh, PA to Clifton Park, NY. Since then we have been unloading the truck, unpacking our things into our new home and doing all those things you have to do when you move house, and several things necessary when moving between states and jobs.

This is certainly the most rural house I have lived in since I was very young. We found a nice duplex on the outskirts of Clifton Park, it uses well water and I am the proud owner of the contents of two full propane tanks (no natural gas lines run out to the house). We also have a really nice wood fire in the living room, and I snagged the family room and am using it as a large home office! Thankfully they were able to hook up a cable Internet connection on Tuesday last week, and so I was not offline for too long.

Tomorrow is my first day with Kitware, I will be attending a training course being run by Kitware for the remainder of the week and so won't have my first day in the office until next Monday. I will be working in the scientific visualization group on projects such as ParaView, and have had lots of ideas for future Avogadro development over the last few weeks. I am very much looking forward to working in some new areas, but also to enhancing the previous research and development I have done in the area of visualization in chemistry. I am also looking forward to working on CMake.

August was without doubt one of the craziest months in the last few years. It started off with the normal "getting used to being a new Dad" type of stuff. Then as we were thinking about our upcoming trip to find a new house our car started acting funny. Long story short it was not good, and we made the decision to get a new one. We should have probably done that in the first place, hindsight is always a great thing...

So we had some fun and games as we picked out a new car, checked our already stretched summer finances and finally took delivery of a shiny Subaru Forester on Wednesday 5 August. It immediately produced some awful, loud static noise as we drove it home from the showroom. By Friday they had given us a courtesy car while they figured out what was wrong. Friday night they had it back to us with a new audio system installed.

Then we figured it would be great to catch up with Adam in Washington DC, and to iron out any further car bugs before our house hunting trip. So 8-9 August we stayed with Adam and checked out the Air and Space Museum. We also took William to the White House, and a few other touristy spots. He won't remember it, but he got to see the capital, along with lots of rockets, planes and satellites.

On Monday I went back into work, left a little early and William was making some strange noises. When we got home I felt his head, and it was really hot. As Louise was getting the thermometer William was sick for the first time ever - all over me. When I checked his temperature it was up at 39.8C, in excess of 103F (checked with two thermometers). This scared us so we rushed him to the children's hospital, as any nervous first time parent would.

As they were looking at him we started to realise that it might be quite serious. They ran a battery of tests, including urine and blood tests, cultures, X-rays, spinal fluid and constant vitals. They found a bacterial infection, I have never been so scared and stressed before. I found out that I am a very protective father, and was disheartened as more and more tests came in and we were admitted for an extended stay.

All of our friends were out of town at the time too, which made things more difficult. It turned out he had an E. Coli infection in his blood. We were lucky in some senses, the antibiotic they started him on as we were admitted was one of the best for the strain of E. Coli he had been infected with. His blood only showed bacteria in the first culture they took. Still, they were talking about 14 days on IV antibiotics using a central line as an inpatient.

Thankfully after talking with them they found an alternative oral antibiotic therapy that recent studies showed were just as effective. So he could come home on the Thursday evening. It was great to be home again, although very stressful to have William get so ill so quickly. I had never imagined he could get so ill so quickly, it reminded me off the waiting for them to tell us he was OK after he was born.

After that we tried to get back to life as normal. Until the end of the month when we had our big trip up to Clifton Park, NY to look for houses. Friday went very badly, we saw one house which was terrible and everything else we had lined up had been rented before we got into town. Saturday we saw another house before leaving for Boston - it was OK, but not really what we were looking for.

Saturday afternoon we drove over to Boston, MA to go to Jeff's wedding. It was great to have a break from looking at houses. We had a great time looking around Cambridge and Boston, the wedding was really nice and William managed to get lots of attention. Thanks for inviting us Jeff - it was a really nice day. William's first formal event. Before leaving on Sunday we visited the Harpoon brewery to sample some of their beers.

We found several new places listed on Sunday before leaving Boston, so we set up appointments for Monday. Monday was something of a three bears type of day. The first house we saw was close to work, but too small. The second house we saw was about the right size, good state of repair but a little expensive and too far from work. The third place we saw advertised as we were thinking about how to compromise, saw it at 6:30pm and it was just right.

So in the end we didn't have to extend our stay, found a nice place that is close to where I will work and Louise really likes it. We just had a 500 mile drive back home. That was pretty much August, I did manage to squeeze some time in for hacking on code, taking care of the cluster at work, and general work stuff. September we just need to do our first 500 mile interstate move. It should be relatively simple after an intercontinental move surely

I am very pleased to announce that Avogadro has been nominated as a finalist in the SourceForge community choice awards this year. We are in the "Best Project for Academia" category, and I would like to encourage you to vote for Avogadro.

This is a real honour for all of us, and I appreciate all of you who nominated Avogadro. We are all pushing very hard on polishing Avogadro, getting ready for our 1.0 release. It would be absolutely amazing to see Avogadro win this award, so please vote for us.

There are also some other really nice projects in there too, such as Lancelot, ClamAV, phpMyAdmin and RepRap. So please take a few moments to place your vote, and tell your friends!

Update: You can vote even without a SourceForge account - just enter your email address and verify your vote.

Exactly two weeks ago today my son was born, weighing in at 8 lbs 13 oz and measuring 21 inches long. Louise and I have named him William Aaron Alexander Hanwell, our new addition has been thriving after a bumpy start. I would like to claim first foetal attendee of a KDE conference, getting him off to a brilliant start listening to some great technical talks in Jamaica. I know most people play classical music to their unborn children, but we like to be different I need to find him a KDE baby grow!

You can see him in the above photos just minutes after his birth, and a little more relaxed the next day in his hospital crib. Not wanting to be too run of the mill he was consistently breach, delivered by C-section and had his cord wrapped around his neck 2.5 times. Not a problem for that kind of delivery, but it would have been had we had the natural birth we were hoping for. As he was born in the US he also manages to get dual nationality (US by birth, UK from us), whilst his poor old Dad is still waiting to hear back about his H-1B visa...

I think three days prior Carsten's wife gave birth too, and I believe Mauricio will also be growing his family later this year. So the KDE Edu developers all seem to be expanding their families this year, I guess the greater question is whether this was a coordinated effort As with all true geek babies I will be setting him up with his own blog and online photo album, mainly so that our family and friends back home will be able to keep up with him as he grows.

So far I am really enjoying being a new father, although aware that this isn't the only big change over the summer!

In January I started looking for a job as my postdoctoral position at the University of Pittsburgh was due to end in September. I took a break from this to attend Camp KDE, the first KDE meeting held west of the Atlantic. I gave two halves of two talks (so a whole talk in total) where I talked about two things I work on in the open source world - scientific visualization and packaging.

Bill Hoffman also attended the meeting and gave a talk about CMake. While watching his talk (and I think the same happened while he was watching my talks) it clicked that Kitware would be a great fit. Once I got back to Pittsburgh I sent off a copy of my CV, and they very quickly set up some phone interviews. After that they flew me out to Clifton Park for quite an interview, if you get me over a few beers I might tell you all about it...

The more I learned about Kitware the more I liked it. Their language of choice is C++, they do a lot of scientific visualization, such as ParaView, work with national labs, academics and companies on interesting scientific problems. Then there are the software process, cross platform build, test and packaging projects. They even use Qt, and will likely use it more now the license has changed. Most of their software is released under an open source license too! I really got on with Bill and his family when I met them at Camp KDE, and came away with a very good impression of Kitware after the interview.

I accepted a job offer for the position of research and development engineer at Kitware in Clifton Park, NY. Due to being British, and various visa issues I will not be starting there until October (assuming all the visa paperwork falls into place). My wife and I are very excited about this opportunity at Kitware. So wish me luck, I am leaving academia after quite a long stay. Don't tell anyone at Kitware, but most of the stuff they want me to do I would gladly do in my spare time They are still looking for more developers, especially people with C++ and Qt experience if you are on the job market too.

Recently, Luca made a post comparing the speed of CMake and autotools in which some timings were posted. I have to say that I am not sure I agreed with the conclusion and have had a very different experience with the projects I am involved in. As with anything your mileage may vary, and I have not looked at Wesnoth.

I think it is questionable at best to include the time it takes to build CMake, but not autotools. Seems like this is a one time cost and the build time is not that high for either. All tests were performed on my quad core Gentoo box at work. Each step is for the first cold run as would normally be the case when compiling Open Babel from source. The make step used `time make -j5` and I have listed the real time in each case.

The timings are shown in the table below. They seem somewhat similar to the experiences of the QGIS developers who made this move quite some time ago. All times shown are in seconds and are the real time reported by the time command.

For those interested, on this system the total CMake compilation/installation time (cmake-gui disabled) was 1 minute and 54 seconds. The compilation/installation time for automake, autoconf, libtool, m4 was 2 minute and 14 seconds. I am not sure how relevant either of those times are, other than to show neither of them take that long to compile and install. Gentoo users/developers may or may not have CMake installed, most other developers will install the binary packages for either one and are likely to be much more interested in how well it integrates with their development environment, compile and install times.

As a developer I prefer CMake, and have been using/maintaining the CMake based build system for Open Babel for over a year now. It was originally contributed by the KDE Windows porting team, but I found that I spent less time waiting for it to do things when I was working on code too. Add to that the extras CMake comes with, such as CTest, CDash and CPack I think it makes a very attractive option for many projects. I am also hoping that it will allow Open Babel to drop maintaining a totally separate build system for MSVC.

I am sure the Open Babel autotools build system could be optimized (I never tried), but when you add in the additional benefits mentioned above, support for multiple targets such as makefiles, XCode, MSVC, Eclipse etc, one shared language/syntax for all build files and an increasingly polished competitor to autotools, I honestly think it is a sensible choice for projects to move to CMake. There are a few less well known features such as Fortran module dependency parsing that I think are fairly unique and valuable, in scientific coding at least (and I have used the Fortran module dependency parsing at least once and was pleasantly surprised).

Full disclosure: I recently accepted a job offer with Kitware, and will start in the Fall assuming all the visa paperwork falls into place. The opinions expressed here are my own. I think it is great to discuss issues like this objectively, and hope to be a part of making CMake a better build system. As with most software - there are areas that need improving.

So last weekend Louise and I went on our first big road trip to Canada. Neither of us have been to Canada before, and with Benoit now living in Toronto it seemed like a great opportunity to go and catch up. Back in July 2007 I visited Benoit in Paris during my GSoC where we met for the first time in person. Now, two years on we met for the second time in person and introduced our partners to each other too.

We left at around 4pm on Friday, I think we crossed the border at about 9pm and got almost all the way there before getting lost in Toronto. Our friend's GPS failed us once we crossed the border and Toronto is a pretty big place. I think we finally arrived just before midnight, tired after the long drive. The next day we drove back down to almost the border to check out the Niagara Falls, which we had never seen before. It rained almost the entire day but we still had a really nice day out.

As well as checking out Niagara Falls on the Canadian side in the rain, we found some very expensive shops in Niagara on the Lake, I bought some maple syrup and some maple spread (still not quite sure what to do with that). We discovered that if you get bored of the main attraction you can always check out one of the many casinos too.... We decided to forgo the gambling and instead headed back to Toronto.

Once we had dried off a little we all headed out to get some dinner in Toronto's chinatown. We enjoyed some great Vietnamese food and compared notes on moving continents, life in academia, Google Summer of Code and life in general. It is great to still be in touch with many of the people I made friends with during my Google Summer of Code and I hope others get as much out of it as I did.

On Sunday we lost an hour to daylight savings time, wish we could stop doing the clock change thing twice a year... We decided to head back as Louise was tired (she is conducting a geek cloning experiment for me). It rained for most of the drive back too, we did another border crossing and got back home at around 7pm. I do not think our carbon footprint is looking great for the weekend but it was great to catch up and see where Benoit is living now. My thanks to Benoit and Irene for being such great hosts.

Back to work this week, preparing for a big conference next week. I still love to travel, it was great to avoid the airports for once!

We continue our push forward with Avogadro with the release of Avogadro 0.9.1 on 16 February. There are lots of new features that made it in recently and we are still stabilizing many of them. This release has featured lots of experimentation with CPack, along with me getting more familiar than perhaps I ever wanted to with Windows packaging. CMake makes things easier but there are some things it cannot fix, such as the manifest issues we hit.

This is the second of our final beta series before our 1.0 release. We hope to make a release roughly once a month until we release Avogadro 1.0. During this period some new features will be added. Our main focus will be on improving the API, fixing crashers, ensuring all platforms have stable packages with full functionality and improving fault tolerance. To this end we will be adding to our (currently) quite small test suite and making use of CDash in order for all developers to be able to see issues on all targeted platforms.

Since the release I found a few small bugs and so already want to make a new release. I fixed a bug when calculating electron density cubes from formatted checkpoints - it was one stray line of code! There is a super cell builder that can do rebonding on the super cell in the works and I recently committed some code to use relative paths to find our plugins. This seems to work really well and with a little tinkering should allow us to run off a USB stick without installation.

While working on our Windows build I realized I have been neglecting our Linux build a little. So I have an avogadro.desktop file and some mime type files to give us a menu entry and associate with some file types. I may not have chance to finish them up and commit until I get back on Sunday.

On that note I will likely be offline until Sunday/Monday. I have my first big job interview tomorrow - wish me luck! Like several people on Planet KDE I am currently in the market for a job. I am going to be all mysterious and not give any more details, other than to say I am excited and nervous!

So it is Friday the 13th... At about 5am this morning my server emailed me to tell me one of its disks was down... It is all RAID1 (apart from swap) and so it is mostly OK. I think having half its swap removed upset it quite a bit though, and so almost all services died. I think they are all back up and running again, but if you emailed anything in the last day or so you might want to resend it.

This week has not been my finest - hopefully next week will be much better! Here's hoping nothing else went terribly wrong this week, and that it is just the disk and not the whole server that is having trouble. So much to do, I did not need this.

Camp KDE is over now, I managed to squeeze in a couple of dives before leaving. Our trip back was quite uneventful, the free wireless in Charlotte was nice, and a friend very kindly picked us up from the airport. We got back to a snow covered Pittsburgh yesterday evening. It was good to be back home but the cold weather was quite a shock to the system. I think that Camp KDE was a great success, and thoroughly enjoyed meeting everyone there, and learning a lot from Till and the other Trolls (do they need renaming now?).

It is my birthday today, scarily the next one is the big 30! There were quite a few birthdays in and around the Camp KDE period. I got into work to discover our espresso machine died while I was away - hopefully this will not impact productivity too much... Looks like I have a really busy month ahead of me but will likely take some time out this evening to have a small celebration.

Big KDE 4.2 release tomorrow too - the RC has been working great on my Eee PC while I was away at Camp KDE. The new laptop features are working great and sleep seems to be working flawlessly. I think that 4.2 will be a great release, and on a personal level find that it is now very usable on a day to day basis. I hope Jos and Sebas make it back OK - I think they are the last Camp KDE attendees to leave Jamaica.

For the past couple of weeks Louise and I have been travelling visiting family and friends back in England. It was quite possibly one of the busiest trips I have ever made. Starting out with a good friend's wedding the first weekend we were back where I had the opportunity to take lots of photographs for them. Then down to London on the Sunday for our appointment at the US consulate on Monday. Then we were back up to Sheffield on Tuesday, giving a talk at the University of Sheffield on some of the work I have been doing since I left last year.

On the way back up to Sheffield I managed to pick up a horrible stomach bug and thought I would have to cancel the talk but felt reasonably OK on the day. That was all in the first week back! After that we got a chance to catch up with friends and family. A friend got us a room in the heart of Kelham Island, making it much more convenient to visit several of the best public houses in the city to catch up on some long missed real ale

We managed to catch a nephews birthday and the following week headed north to visit a friend in Leeds and another in Edinburgh. After that it was back down to Sheffield for one last day before spending our final night in England in a hotel in Manchester. We tried a new way back to Pittsburgh which involved three flights and an overnight stay in Philadelphia. We got a flight from Manchester to London Heathrow, spent over five hours in the new Terminal 5 before taking our flight to Philadelphia International.

We arrived late and tired. Thankfully all the visa stuff was fine, arriving in Philadelphia was all OK and the hotel in Philadelphia was pretty nice. At this point to be honest we couldn't wait to get back to our apartment in Pittsburgh and see our dog again. Our first time on Southwest and their boarding system is pretty stupid but they got us home.

Just in time to see the US election unfold. So tonight we have some beers and are settling in to watch it all unfold. I have no vote but do have my fingers crossed that Obama will get in. We will see if I can stay up until it is over as I have been up since 5am this morning. Keep your fingers crossed, it is pretty nice to be in the middle of it all.

Yesterday my wife was supposed to be travelling back to England. She had been planning the trip for over half a year and was looking forward to attending her friend's wedding as well as catching up with friends and family for a couple of weeks. The day started off early as her flight with Delta from Pittsburgh, PA to JFK, New York, NY left at 10:00am.

About an hour after she had left I got an automated call from Delta saying that her flight had been cancelled and they had booked her onto a flight at 6pm that evening! I knew that her British Airways from JFK to Manchester, UK was due to leave at 6:05pm. This was obviously a problem and so we started looking for alternatives to get her there on time.

I called a friend who offered to drive me to the airport to meet her and try to get this sorted out. Delta were less than helpful and claimed weather which apparently means they are not obligated to help. Checking the weather reports confirmed that storms were predicted that afternoon but offered no explanation why they were grounding flights that morning. After talking to them it seemed clear they were not going to get her there in time.

So we called British Airways. We have been loyal customers for years, taken more flights with them than I remember and had always been very happy with the service. We had never had cause to use their customer service but assumed it would be good as every other dealing we had with them was always positive.

After speaking with a customer service agent she assured us that there was nothing to worry about. She advised us to try and get to JFK today, but if we couldn't make it they could put Louise on the flight tomorrow for a fee of approximately $120. This made us feel much better and we thought worst case the journey was just going to be delayed by a day. We abandoned the plan of attempting to hire a car and drive to JFK which according to Google and MapQuest would have taken just shy of seven hours.

After confirming with Delta that there was little chance of them getting my wife to JFK in time for her flight we accepted the flight the next day on the proviso that Louise could get a refund if she found an earlier flight with a competitor. So we headed back home, scoured the travel sites and Louise called British Airways back to see about getting her flight switched to one tomorrow.

To her horror the second representative told her that this was not possible and no changes could be made to her ticket on the day of travel. She then proceeded to very unhelpfully quote that it was in the terms and conditions and that the previous agent was incorrect. We talked with the first person at about 8:20am when we might have had a shot at making it to JFK by car but being at home at around 10:30am we knew that we have no chance of making it.

I made the point that it was their previous agent that had given us incorrect information and that they should take some responsibility and work with us. My wife was obviously really upset by this and so I tried to talk with the woman who just kept repeating that it was in the terms and conditions and that if my wife didn't make it to JFK that day then her ticket would be forfeit and she would need to buy a new ticket.

I quite honestly couldn't believe it and after speaking with this woman it became clear that she thought she was in the right, I couldn't speak to anyone else about the matter and the previous agent was wrong. I was apparently free to make a complaint about this but beyond that she simply didn't care. When I asked her whether she thought it was fair that we pay for the poor training of the previous agent she went on to repeat that it was clear in the terms and conditions. I made the point that the previous agent didn't seem to know it but apparently I should know it myself.

As my regular readers will know I moved over to Pittsburgh, PA in the USA at the end of September last year. Before I left I got some of mine and Louise's family webcams so that we could stay in touch. Then it took ages to sell our house and the shipping nightmare began (which I will try and bring myself to talk about one of these days). Eventually I actually got my desktop computer back (a little worse for wear after the shippers "carefully packaged it").

Going back to my original point, I had been putting off buying a webcam as I wanted it to work well in Linux, and every time I looked into which webcams might be my best bet it seemed that even individual models had multiple chipsets, which may or may not be supported. On Saturday I bit the bullet as Louise had been asking about getting Skype working.

I chose the Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 (photo above) as it seemed to be part of the new USB video class standard I had been reading about and saw there was a healthy Linux UVC project already. I still anticipated having trouble getting it working on Gentoo but thought I should be able to get it working eventually.

Imagine my surprise when I just typed emerge -av media-video/linux-uvc media-video/luvcview, modprobed the new kernel module, ran luvcview and I could see me staring at the camera! Sometimes I worry this Linux thing might be getting a little too easy Another five minutes and I had the microphone working (just usb audio) and was testing it out in Skype. On Sunday we had our first intercontinental video chat with my Mum and two nephews. Skype also integrates into my KDE 4 desktop without any trouble.

I am pretty new to the webcam thing and had resisted it for a while but it was great to be able to chat and see family and friends back home. I would rather use an open source, cross platform video conferencing application but have yet to find a viable one. Open Wengo looks like it might be that application one day but I couldn't get it to work reliably last time I tried (although I did like the look of it). I also don't seem to be able to find a nice application that will let me capture video messages easily.

I was very pleasantly surprised by my experience and am very happy with the performance of the Linux drivers for the webcam as well as the camera itself. Any Linux webcam tips would of course be gratefully received!

UPDATE: Forgot to mention this great blog post I spotted that helped me decide this webcam was probably a good bet...

What a hectic week. I never got chance to record our first all American weekend on the long weekend. We started off on Saturday morning shopping in the sales and found a great BBQ at Wal-Mart. It is nearly twice the size of the one we had back in the UK with a great labour saving ash collector at the bottom. We then loaded up on meat and other BBQ essentials.

Had lots of friends over on Saturday evening and then exposed our American friends to the Eurovision song contest! It was very hard to explain this phenomenon to them but it was as amusing as ever with expert commentary by Terry Wogan

Then on Sunday we went along to our first ever baseball game and saw the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Chicago Cubs. It was a really fun day out, beautiful sunny weekend and then we had another BBQ when we got back. I have always loved BBQs and our new one works great.

This weekend we are heading out on a road trip with a few friends from work. I haven't really taken any photos for about a year now so I am really hoping we can see a little of the country around us and get some photos I can show off. I would love more time for hacking on code too, may be Sunday evening when we get back. I have been seriously neglecting my new game too - GTA IV.

I haven't been keeping up with XKCD since my laptop stopped working - never set up my RSS feeds for the few comics I used to regularly read. I thought I would catch up and this one really made me laugh - I guess geek humour is alive and well!

Along with the one linked to from slashdot about the Googlebomb caused by the died in a blogging accident which I may have just added to now I guess.