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
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Poked at mail, waded through bugzilla entries - filing bugs certainly
creates lots of work. Apparently USB died on my machine, the hardware
flaked which is interesting & unusual. Made some floppy disks to
flash the BIOS just in case that helps - brought back some heady
memories of using Linux for the first time. I should really build
a VM with the DOS games we wrote back in the day in assembler.
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The Microsoft announcement that they will natively
support ODF is at some level encouraging. And better - MS will
join the ODF TC and contribute: which could be really interesting
(be careful what you wish for). Of course this may end up being
really good for ODF: it all depends if the blatant psuedo-technical
competitive marketing continues in the (already dysfunctional) TC context.
We'll at least see if all those who kept chanting:
"MS should build the extensions they need for interop on top of
ODF"
were actually sincere, or whether they now switch to an equally shrill albeit
contradictory:
"They are evily embracing and extending our standard"
Given the feature sub-set problem in ODF, can you have the embrace
without the extend ? Of course, it is possible that MS (unlike Novell) have
no real interest in improving the serious inadequacies around interop. in ODF,
in which case their customers will just get upset:
"why does my document look different when I save as ODF, and re-load it in Word"
or even
"Why, when I select ODF mode, do so many features disappear in the UI"
Can you imagine the synthetic outrage that either of these will generate ?
Then again, perhaps they will want to improve interop. in the standard,
at which point we will inevitably quickly hit the:
"This can't go into the standard because there is no
implementation in OO.o [or perhaps the more sophisticated 'multiple
implementations']"
type argument, or will that be waived - in which case we will hit the:
"OO.o can't load & render it's native file format"
chestnut - which of course has always been true of KOffice's ODF use
and which we keep hearing re-iterated in various forms about Office 12 and
OpenXML.
Anyway - at the end of whatever "pick your own fight" session we're in for,
when all the dazed, confused and exhausted pundits grind to a halt there are
perhaps two lessons that will become obvious here:
- Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to decieve
- Open Standards are good but Free software is far better.
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Woke Florian up, while he was on vacation: drat, should have known he
would travel to some exotic spot. FreeDos fails to boot on the hardware
on which I need to flash the BIOS. Whence, a working DOS boot CD ?
finally found a dusty floppy that worked, flashed the BIOS & USB
returns: amazing.
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Lunch, back - a deadlock in b-a-s: drat; debugged it; it turned out
to be an horribly evil nasty - when do you avoid emitting 'broken'
callbacks in the mainloop when a connection dies.
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Various conf-calls in the evening - found an extraordinary busy-loop
in gnome-keyring-daemon, apparently burning up ten+ seconds during
login: not ideal.
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)
