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.
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Prodded mail; really, really pleased to see Samsung doing
the right
thing - using ARM's Mali
3D core for their phones. Anything must be better than Imagination
which appear to have an utter contempt for Free Software drivers
that goes beyond ridiculous. Imagination FWIW are the root disaster
behind many mobile phones 3D hardware as well as Pulsbo and other miracles
such as Intel CPUs that come without full specifications, and missing
programming documentation for great
chunks of the silicon. Hopefully ARM will show the right way to do
this with Mali, and win a lot of traction. Building key parts of your
product on top of a complicated, closed, binary blob is just a
disaster - how can companies ask their customers to do that ?
Update: seems I jumped the gun, and Mali still has a big closed
user-space blob; that sucks - fix it !
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Pleased to see Norbert reply
to Roberto's curious blog; and despite being a key LibreOffice hacker
who rather knows what he is on about, get told:
"In fact
these non functional changes are not a way to get
people acquainted with the code - that is something that require time
and dedication - but maybe a way to make more complex integrating
upstream contributions."
Interesting the certainty (from a non-developer) that doing small
changes is not a way to get acquainted with the code (though in fact
this is an excellent way to even learn to program: by reading first.
I recall learning the syntax, and love of BBC BASIC by typing in games
from magazines). The speculation of some malign
intention behind trying to get more people involved which is (maybe) to
make our lives more difficult in future is an odd thought indeed; why
would we want to make merging changes from Oracle more difficult than
necessary ? As for the sensitivity
of "cutting bridges with up-stream" - from the LibreOffice side,
there has always been an open invitation to Oracle to join, and the
bridge chain-sawing seems to be in full swing on the other side. As for the
idea that LibreOffice programming changes must be discussed and agreed
(with a non-technical audience) before implementation - I'm not convinced
that that is a winning strategy for attracting independent
contributors to balance Oracle, Novell, RedHat etc. so we get a truly
diverse and vendor neutral project. Indeed - the very idea that people
who did not contribute to the code, should be controlling its ultimate
ownership and licensing is fairly offensive to most developers.
Having said all that Roberto makes some good
points
about the social dynamics; It is my hope that we would have a
governance represented by a Community of Practise - ie. a
meritocracy of those developing, marketing, and actively working to
improve the product and project. With regard to code hackers being
"a de-facto minority" - I believe we can change that, and
we've made a great start thus far, if only by providing easy tasks
(I dispute that these have 'very little value') so people can
build confidence in having their work accepted. I completely disagree
on his copyright assignment point, and I too talk to very many
corporate employees at different levels; let us see who is right
in the end.
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Why is it that while you have a FaceBook friend request open
you cannot see more of the details of their page. It is ridiculous to
have a person about whom you can see almost nothing, asking to be
friends with you - surely ? How are you supposed to know if you know
them ? (or if you ask that, is it too late anyway). For some reason I
loathe ignoring friend requests on principle, and thus agonise over
the regular friend/spam traffic.
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Managed to get my counselling coursework done finally; it is
frightening to try to answer questions like "Identify areas for
possible future self-development / growth" - I mean - with me,
where do you start ? it looks like a cliff-face; very useful to
understand such erroneous beliefs as "People ought to follow the
advice I give" and the impact that believing that can have; anyhow
my attempt finished with:
It appears certain that my prior prejudice about those
involved in counselling others: that they are almost uniformly emotional
and relational basket-cases, is perhaps simply a reflection of their
greater ability to face and talk about their failings, rather than any
incipient problem in those drawn to this field
Still developing that thesis, lets see how the marker takes it.
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Ellis arrived to stay for the counselling corse; Tally
baby-sat, set off, A14 closed due to fatality ... teacher absent;
drew fun pictures on the flip-chart for a while and returned. Up
late talking to Ellis.
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)
