Thanks to the superb work of Matteo Zandi the invest applet has undergone some major improvements. If you ever worried about the strange grey square, then the next gnome-applets release if for you.

• The stock-health indicator has been integrated with the main icon, it now looks better and takes less space.
• Spark-lines show recent activity.
• Non-US stocks have better support.
• Column headings are now printed: you don't have to guess what the numbers mean.
• You don't have to right-click in exactly the right place to get the menu.

Matteo has more improvements in the pipeline, but for now here are the before and after shots.

before

after

This pram was the first serious thing we purchased in anticipation of Anya's arrival. Since I've finally downloaded the photo off the camera I thought I'd better let my mother see it.

The first thing of any sort we purchased for Anya was a strange woolen clown that everyone thinks is an octopus. The arms and legs are crocheted spirals that look suspiciously like tentacles. I don't have a photo yet.

Just over three weeks ago, World45's sole investor decided to cut his losses and close the company. From his perspective I suppose this made a lot of sense, but it was rather sudden. The ironic bit is that I think we'd finally figured out how to get the company to the break even point. Unfortunately, the mistakes up until that point hadn't given him a lot of confidence. At the end of the day it was his company and his choice.

There is hope for a World45 Mk II. Mariusz and Lipi are going to pick up the contracts we had lined up and World45 (2008) ltd. looks like it will rise from the ashes. It will be leaner and won't have a lot of money behind it, but we've got a good source of contracts to form a base to our work. If you're looking for experts in multi-core programming and optimisation: see www.world45.com (that bit about "we're hiring" on the front page - probably a lie, but we might be able to find work for the right person).

Personally, I'm back in employment next week - working as a research associate in the local physics department. Back to lasers, atoms and PhD students. It will be a fun, but temporary, diversion. In the meantime I've been painting the house, preparing for the baby and doing all the odd-jobs that I've put off. Unemployment is hard work.

Do you fancy a bit of a challenge writing low-level C code to go as fast as possible on multi-core machines in a bare-metal sparc environment? Or do you like kernel hacking (Solaris and Linux)? Then we have the job for you at World45. Details can be found at www.world45.com. The catch? We want you to start soon, and we'd like you to work in Dunedin, New Zealand. If you can't handle either of these conditions feel free to send in a CV anyway; we're often looking for people for contract work.

Cushla and myself are forming a company to handle the income from our rental property. The critical decision with any new company is choosing the name. Much to our delight we discovered that the name Partners in Crime was still available. We also discovered that the New Zealand Companies Office is quick, efficient, and not at all picky about the name you choose. Officially the company won't be doing anything until the next tax year, so for now it's just a cool name.

A quick survey of New Zealand contributions to the Mii Contest Channel reveals that well over 1% of contributions are Adolf Hitler. Of these, a large percentage believe that his hobby is dancing. I have no idea what this says about the New Zealand psyche.

In hopefully unrelated news, there has finally been a gnome-applets 2.21 release. It more-or-less consists of every sensible patch I could find in Bugzilla for the past few months.

Thanks to Michael Hofmann there is now an updated version of the deskbar calculator suitable for the 2.20 release of the deskbar applet. You can find it as a tarball here, or if you just want to drag it directly into the deskbar preferences pane, try this link. If you have an older version of the deskbar applet, you should still be using version 1.6, which is still available, just a little further down the page.

I must apologise to Michael for taking so long to release this update. He did all the hard work for me two weeks ago, but I was slow about updating my test scripts (which the API changes also broke).

... we have World 45 t-shirts. Available wherever Nicolas decides to promote us next.

It has been a very long time since I wrote anything here. I've started my new job at World 45. It isn't exactly what I expected, somewhat better in fact. We work with Sun's Niagara processors writing offload applications to run in raw (OS-less) logical domains.

Most of my time has been spent writing an offload-system to allow easy communication between an application running under Solaris and the offload application running in its own domain. I've spent time writing application code, Solaris device drivers, and library code in a mix of C and assembler (to talk to the hypervisor). The end result scales pretty well (with up to 12 processors anyway). I believe the plan is for Sun to eventually release it as open source, but I can't let you download it quite yet. It doesn't have a fancy code-name or anything either. One day, maybe.

The end result: I'm actually getting paid to make use of my assembly language and open-source habits. I'd be really happy if it wasn't for the TCP/IP stack I'm currently trying to untangle, but that will pass soon.

I think I've closed a total of three GNOME bugs in the last three months. This is a vast improvement over the previous three and I would hope to do a bit more in the coming months. I'm currently poking at the un-loved parts of gnome-applets.

Today was my last day at IRL. I'm moving back to Dunedin (living with my wife, what a novel concept!) and on Monday I start a job at World 45 doing multicore programming on Sun hardware. Metrology has been an interesting, but brief, career and if circumstances had been different maybe I'd have stayed. I'm neither sad nor happy to be leaving - the people were great, but the corporate environment awful. The new opportunity looks fascinating and it gets me in the right part of the country. I'll be happy.