Monday, April 16, 2018

The domain our house is in decided to install a new gate, and that forced us to move our own gate about 5 meters further down the road. This leads to a lot of work within the garden (new road, new gate, new electrical setup, changes in the way water arrives at the house, etc).

During the week-end, I drew new electrical cables in the garden and installed the new interphone. This required shutting down electricity a couple of time, the discovery of a few unexpected quirks in how our 1958 house is wired internally. Why is there a 4-wire electrical wire crossing my garden, what is it for? I can't measure any voltage there, but I can't rule out that it's one some breaker I did not activate...

It turns out the interphone wire in the wall was placed to low, because the contractor did not take into account the slope of the road. So on the screen, instead of the face of the visitor, you see their belly. Weird. Asked him to fix that today.

Also spent two full days outside doing a lot of heavy lifting. I'm not used to that So I feel exhausted, and welcome sitting back at my keyboard (with sore hands).

Libcommon unit test fix

Isolating the self-tests that set the environment so that the environment variable is set correctly.

Annoying issues with SPICE

There are still a few issues with today's version of SPICE that annoy me on a regular basis:

1. Before the streaming agent starts, the mouse does not scale correctly by default. I cannot reach the screen corners. There may be a patch somewhere that addresses that, but I don't know it.
2. It's still all too easy for lag to build up, and I still don't have the right tools to understand what's going on. That frustrates me.

Ran into a bug today where I tried to login just as the screen faded to black to activate the screen saver. The screen faded back, but there was no keyboard focus, and with the mouse issue, no obvious way to get the focus back to the login widget. Waited patiently for the screen to go black again, then I had the screen saver screen which gave focus back to the login screen correctly. Bug to file.

Misc

Filled a corporate survey... They tell you "five minutes". and this once, it was probably correct.