Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit my employer
Novell which is an amazing company, and also
Dell who in days of yore provided me with a
free laptop for Gnome development / conferences.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Older items:
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2007: (
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legacy html
- An interesting UE paper Federico linked to:
cgis.cs.umd.edu. Word Processing at the top for the
"Workplace Study causes of frustration". Table 5's average
minutes lost per frustrating experience rather amusing,
and the paragraph below Table 1 In only one [ of 149 ]
frustrating experience did the user consult a manual, and in
only two experiences did the user consult on-line help.
Is it possible the concept of blocking lots of scattered UI
improvements on the availability of UE feedback, and complete,
translated on-line-help is an exacerbating factor in user
frustration ? To paraphrase mhu: Are we retarding optimising
the 98% in order to focus on the 2% ? Perhaps things changed
since 2004 though.
- Dug at mail. Encouraging chat with Michael.
Unwound various package related problems with banshee. Looking
at bying a DLP Projector for personal use to entertain people
with movies at home: needs to be at least 1024x768, so far
the Dell branded beasty seems a good price, am I missing
something ?
- Got two almost duplicate mails from people pointing
out how much OO.o release notes could be improved - hopefully
they'll put in the 30mins / month necessary to fix that.
- Spent all of the hacking morning banging away on STL,
reduced to 'trying' things: depressing, the combination of incredibly
verbose & unhelpful gcc error messages, unreadable and unhelpful
implementation, and 'meta'
documentation that prefers to dispense gems such as
"Antisymmetry is a theorem, not an axiom: it follows
from irreflexivity and transitivity." rather than concrete
samples. Having said that I was wrong wrt. binary sort - Thorsten
put me right & helped unwind some of the more evil problems,
thanks lad.
- Some particularly good news today though, after
a rather protracted hiring process (sorry lad) we got Fridrich
on board with Novell, starting 1st March, and we're looking
forward to having him bring his impressive WordPerfect filter
experience to bear on importing OpenXML. Also, hopefully it's a
sign that hacking on OO.o as a volunteer can pay off (eventually).
- Team meeting after lunch, nice to have JP to run it.
Dinner in the evening. Hacked at yast2 in some spare cycles - got
YGCheckBoxFrame implemented, so it builds again.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Novell, The
Lithuanian Gov't or Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's also important to
realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences,
bio.
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@novell.com)
