Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

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!

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!

Last week I went to Paris for a couple of days to visit my mentor Benoit. It was a great chance to take a quick look around the city as I have never been before. Thanks to bmibaby I was able to get over quite economically and stayed in a nice, clean (albeit a little small) room in a hotel near Place d'Italie in the 13th district of Paris (not sure if they are called districts or something else). It was quite close to where Benoit lives, close to a Metro stop and within walking distance of central Paris.

I got to Paris on Tuesday evening and Benoit met me at the airport. Once I had checked in to my hotel we walked to a creperie and got a fairly traditional three course meal consisting of different kinds of crepes. I also tried some of the local pear cider. Apparently the crepes weren't as good as they could have been but I really enjoyed them. We chatted about the history of Paris, I made some feeble attempts at French and we also moved onto discussions of my Google Summer of Code project and the bigger goals of the Kalzium/Avogadro project.

Tired from traveling I returned to my hotel to get some sleep with plans to visit the Eiffel Tower the next day. In the morning I went to the Eiffel Tower and had a really good look around. Benoit advised me to get off at the Trocadero stop as the walk down to the Eiffel Tower was much nicer and it was a great tip. I spent most of my morning walking around the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, walking up the stairs to the second floor (it was a far shorter queue) and then I got the lift right to the top. It was very crowded despite getting there early - as I left early in the afternoon it had become far more crowded. There are some great views and it is such an iconic landmark.

I met up with Benoit in the afternoon. He showed me around some of the other sites of the city. We walked around Notre Dame and the Louvre before going to the Japanese district to get some dinner. Before dinner we got some hacking done in one of the gardens near the centre of Paris where we discussed the finer points of transformation matrices, 3d geometry and some of my recent changes to the Painter API in Avogadro. We then went to Paris beach near to my hotel and had a few beers by the Seine. After Benoit went home I had a beer in a small cafe near my hotel overlooking Place d'Italie before retiring for the evening.

My final day on Thursday we decided to head out for Versailles. It is an amazing place and the gardens were a great place to get some more hacking done and have a picnic. We hacked on some eye candy, we discussed a month or more ago, for the navigation and manipulation tools to give better visual feedback on what is happening. We haven't committed it yet as I need to finish it off but I think it is really great work and may be something that can be applied to other tools. It also helped me to see the best way to implement ribbon support as a new view which I think will be awesome. Very productive day and some amazing sights!

Benoit was busy on the last evening so I headed back into Paris solo after dropping off my laptop and camera. I had dinner at a traditional (or at least it claimed to be) French restaurant. I tried some frog's legs and was surprised by how nice they were - I wasn't sure I would like them at all. I was lucky enough to sit next to a lovely Australian couple who were out on a tour of Europe. The lady works for IBM and we ended up discussing open source and my work on Avogadro as well as culture around the world and comparing notes on the sights of Paris.

It was a great couple of days in Paris. It would have been nice if Louise had been able to get some time off work to come out. It is our two year anniversary today so I will have to do what I can to make it up to her today My thanks go out to Benoit for being such a good host and showing me the sights of Paris and teaching me the finer points of the mathematics of 3d visualisation and OpenGL.

Originally I thought I would just attend the aKademy conference on the weekend and return home after that. I submitted an abstract for my talk on Gentoo and KDE and had hoped to meet some KDE developers and see if we could work with KDE better. Later I applied for my Google Summer of Code project working on the Kalzium 3D molecular editor and was accepted. This caused me to change my plans and stay for the entire week and I am really glad I did

I have been to quite a few open source conferences over the years but I have to say aKademy is my favourite so far. There was a great atmosphere and lots of very intelligent and dedicated hackers present. There were also lots of laughs and humour along with important discussions and debates. I got to meet so many people who work on KDE and whose blogs I have been reading for years. My only regret is that I couldn't get out for a few more beers in the evenings...

I thought it would be a good idea to camp as aKademy was in June and the odds were good that the weather would be fair. In the days leading up to my departure Sheffield flooded and I think it rained every day of aKademy (some days solidly throughout the day). On Sunday evening we came back to a rather large pond at the side of our tent that had previously been a patch of grass with a dip in it. I chose where to pitch the tent well though and the tent remained out of harms way

Long time no blog... Life has been really hectic and I rarely have time to stop right now. On 23rd January Louise and I along with four friends went to the Hilton Long Beach Hotel in Hurghada, Egypt for a week. As luck would have it my 27th birthday fell in the middle of our week away (on the 26th of January). I didn't think we were even going to make it out to Egypt in the week leading up to our holiday with the fence blowing down, a client's server going down and the car misbehaving but we got there in the end...

We got to the hotel pretty late on Tuesday, just in time to get a little food and some beer before getting some sleep. As usual I didn't manage to sleep on the plane and so was exhausted. Our room was really nice, all our dive gear made it out with us, we packed lightly enough to avoid excess baggage charges and the weather was great.

On the first full day we went down to the resident dive cetre, Pirates Diving (not a very nice web site), my friends signed up for their PADI open water course and we took our dive gear down to the centre and did a beach dive in the afternoon. They kept us waiting around for a few hours until the divemaster finally turned up. I was getting impatient to hit the water, but he got there after a few false starts, we kitted up and jumped in off the jetty. It was a nice dive, warm water at 22 C but the reef was pretty barren and there was a sandy bottom at about 7 m and so no blue to stare off in to.