Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2012-02-07: Tuesday

2012-02-07T21:00:00Z

Up unfeasibly late, is that the sleep debt ? breakfast, checked mail. It was a sad day when my friend GregKH, veteran of many absorbing SUSE initiatives, decided to leave SUSE for a dream job at the Linux Foundation. Sad (perhaps) to see less of him, though naturally he will continue doing cool stuff at the Linux Foundation. Imagine my surprise and pleasure to see the start of this new, rich seam of awesomeness in his first patch set to LibreOffice which arrived last night. Of course, we value all our contributors, especially new ones - without them we'd be nothing; here's a snapshot of Ohloh's nice statistics (though the 'first commit after two months' stuff is clearly barking): The lines removed/added also shows a rather pleasing direction of change, given that we're adding features. Truly, the easy hacks are easy. Want to be where the cool kids are ? why not try one ? Failing that, simply mentioning that you "use" LibreOffice might help to redress a historical imbalance, and lack of an 'un-use' button.
Idle catch-up; took babes to music lessons, early dinner, J. out, chat with Kohei, and worked through mail for much of the evening.

2012-02-06: Monday

2012-02-06T21:00:00Z

Woken at nine by a request for slides by a dear Behrens; it seems I get to eat breakfast; did that, pushed slides, blog, checked mail etc.
Eurostar, train, another train - managed to get through a good bit of the backlog, admittedly in rather a haze of tiredness.
Home, family not here - odd; flushed mail, poked a bug. Arrival of lots of "Daddy, daddy !" style noise in mid-filing of a kernel issue. Hugs with H. and E. rushed out to play in the snow with N. and M. - lots of fun (and snow down the spine).
Dinner, read babes stories, bed early, exhausted.

2012-02-05: Sunday

2012-02-05T21:00:00Z

Up early, breakfast with Lucas off to the conference with a chap from Cambridge. Caught the end of Garret's talk with Susan.
Spent much of the day at the LibreOffice booth, chatting happily to the steady stream of passing friends and aquaintances. Lots of fun. Eventally, bid 'bye to many a co-contributor.
Out for dinner with Guy, Aaron & the remaining lads. Up until late with Eike, Anne & Markus - onto the Delerium cafe for an even later bender with Kay, Lennart, Pippin & co. Eventually managed to get rid of my USB debugging dongle to Egbert; bed at 5am.

2012-02-04: Saturday

2012-02-04T21:00:00Z

Up early, breakfast, off to the LibreOffice dev-room, good to catch some of Italo's nice overview talk, lots of Lanedo guys, friendly RedHat faces and key members of the team. Enjoyed Caolan's toolkit / layout talk.
Gave my: talk on Easy Hacks: they're easy and they're significant hacks:
Off for a bite of lunch with Caolan, then on to the (packed) Legal dev-room (with Bradley as bouncer) to catch the end of Allison's talk. Then gave a talk: Risks and Benefits of Copyright Assignment
Talked to Michael and a Wiki translation chap a little after that, and rushed off to building K, to see our lovely booth manned & womaned by a great mix of contributors. Tried to get my demos setup - somewhat frustrated by a nasty suspend/resume kernel crasher. Gave a talk: LibreOffice: on-line and in your pocket - with the first Android prototype screenshots (and demo):

Finally relaxed: bit of an intense day, synched with Dawn, Guy, and helped a contributor with his build. Wandered to the booth to hand out stickers, and catch up with the stream of interesting people passing by.
Off to the speakers dinner with Bdale & Keith, whiled away much of a happy evening together. On to the sudden death to catch up with Richard Fontana, Andrew Haley, Simon Phipps and more - bed at 4am.

2012-02-03: Friday

2012-02-03T21:00:00Z

Up early, breakfast, onto Easy Hackery slides, nasty head cold catching me with a vengance. Italo published a beautiful FOSDEM infographic which he has been building.
Slogged away at slide production, banana lunch, yet more bashing of text into rectangles etc. Kendy arrived to help hack on Android-ness, and catch up, ~immediately finding my dumb focus / event delivery bug: nice, the keyboard sort-of-works finally.
Caolan over in the evening, then off to meet the massed LibreOffice team at the hotel Astrid; on (rather late) to the Delerium cafe, to catch up with Lennart, Kay, Alp & many more.

2012-02-02: Thursday

2012-02-02T21:00:00Z

Up earlyish, attempted to catch the train to Cambridge, drove instead, slideware on the train to Kings Cross. More happy hacking on the Eurostar.
Off to meet up with some Mozilla hackers at a beautiful co-working space. Caught up with JP, Julian Seward, Taras Gleck & met a host of others. Out for dinner.

2012-02-01: Wednesday

2012-02-01T21:00:00Z

Up early, breakfast, poked the build; failed to reproduce last night's success, read mail, debugged variously, admin. Lunch. Worked away at slides, while running misc. builds.
Plugged away at keyboard event delivery - not as clean and obvious as it could be inside VCL; strange. Chatted with the parents, bed early.

2012-01-31: Tuesday

2012-01-31T21:00:00Z

Prodded mail, rather a nasty sore throat coming on. Visited Bert to reset his circuit-breakers. Call with Christian & Kendy. Poked at and fixed gtk/broadway so it doesn't leak / jam modifier key state with v7 websockets, submitted to openSUSE:12.1:Update:Test.
Pleased to see Stephan's lovely configmgr API cleanup, that should let us make configmgr access even more efficient in the future, as well as being much simpler and more readable now; nice. Of course, also an easy-ish task to help out with: dunging out much less pleasant, old code in this area.
Horribly frustrated by cups, not only does it insist on pausing the (network) print queue whenever something prints, but finding the un-pause setting [ incidentally hidden in one of two combo-boxes in the printer maintenance page ] was extremely non-intuitive. Filed misc. bugs, eventually got something working, it seems adding ipp://.../ipp?waitjob=false&waitprinter=false is a good idea.
Clobbered some gtk3 theme color issue. Poked Lowell, Ciaran, Gerald. Sync. with Martyn. Dinner with the parents. Hacked on this & that, sat by the fire chatting to the parents and poking android emulators until I got some.

2012-01-30: Monday

2012-01-30T21:00:00Z

Up, practises, babes off to school. Chewed mail, out to a funeral of Jane Hancock (Dave's wife), back to mail, tripple (and more) patch review etc. Admin / status report writing. Lunch.
Poked at the ClamAV signature databases, found main.avd, then dug around for the source for them. Poked Ciaran, chat with Simon.
Dinner, Dave around for Bible study & catch-up, good chap.

2012-01-29: Sunday

2012-01-29T21:00:00Z

Woken by babes being noisy in the morning; off to NCC, Tony speaking. Had Justin & Karen back for lunch & sat by the fire with them for the afternoon.
Babes had a Marx (Engels, Groucho, or & Spencer?) movie while we tidied up, played with & then put babes to bed. Hyperactive slugging in the evening.

2012-01-28: Saturday

2012-01-28T21:00:00Z

Up late, breakfast. Pair of Jehovah's witnesses around for an hour of interesting, and widely ranging dialog & friendly discussion, on the 144,000 Jewish, male, virgins for example. Or why the inspired authors of scripture translated the tetragramaton as kurios: lord etc. and whether 'name' is rather more of a profound concept of identity and goodness than even a profound label can be.
Checked mail, Sue, Clive & family arrived, then Bruce & Anne on much improved form, eventually Auntie Louise. Big family, birthday-time lunch.
Anthony & Tim arrived from the cricket later, in time for H, N, and M's trio. Good to catch up with Tim a little afterwards.
Sandy arrived to baby sit, out to the Pregnacny Crisis Quiz - happily heavily over-subscribed; 65 participants, had to use the creche tables ourselves; much fun (quiz, and puddings) had by all. Bed late.

2012-01-27: Friday

2012-01-27T21:00:00Z

Up, mail chew; pleased to see three guys interested in porting LibreOffice to OpenIndiana (using gcc), poked at misc. bugs. Started working on talk about Easy Hacks for FOSDEM, cleaned up the wiki page. Sudden inspiration for android - pushing all rendering to the main thread; failed - still inexplicably hangs in ANativeWindow_lock.
Switched to use EGL instead eglLockSurface - runs beautifully, returns no errors, and a NULL pointer from eglQuerySurface(...EGL_BITMAP_POINTER..) - stymied again. On to trying glTexImage2D - surely that will get a lot of pixels to the screen fast, lots of error free gl calls, with a blank screen to match; hmm.
Out for a run, read stories, fish soup for dinner (to assist the brain), started adding sample rendering code through the startup process to see where it goes wrong, and reviewing patches in the idle cycles.
Up extremely late, eventually discovered that the problem seemed to be caused by not processing (unexpected) events on the thread's ALooper - which causes aforementioned lockup; nice - finally an up-side-down, wrong color, no font VCL error dialog windows.

2012-01-26: Thursday

2012-01-26T21:00:00Z

Up early; practise with the babes, back to the window locking oddness. Nice post from Fridrich on making the best of FOSDEM.
Managed to get some pixels onto the screen eventually, team meeting, ESC call, Vojtech's staff, pixels no longer going to the screen: meetings are like that it seems ! Dinner.
Switched to EGL rendering to attempt to retrieve pixels from locked up system, no joy there either but more interesting errors. Setup a new cppunit git repo on freedesktop for Markus, apparently it is unmaintained & we really need more features.

2012-01-25: Wednesday

2012-01-25T21:00:00Z

Chewed mail, quick call with Vojtech, then Charles. Finally got around to submitting a LinuxTag paper or two. Lunch. More mail, patch pieces.
J. out for Rosemary's leaving pizza party. Up extremely late poking android's wedging on ANativeWindow_lock - sadly the debugger gives no trace: an thread un-attached to the VM ?

2012-01-24: Tuesday

2012-01-24T21:00:00Z

Up early, misc. mail chew, question processing, patch review, re-building action etc. Inched through more startup problems, Lunch.
Chat with Kendy, more mail cleanout. Lydia over for dinner. Up late hacking android main-loop pieces with Tor.

2012-01-23: Monday

2012-01-23T21:00:00Z

Mail chew, read the git commits over the weekend. Call with Simon, improved the LibreOffice donation page to include a nice image rotation.
Misc. android hackery - got past several unpleasant roadblocks in the UNO bootstrapping. Reviewed slideware. Dinner, babes to bed. J. under the weather, but out to a meeting. Back to the hackery - started on the first-start, user-installation creation code.