Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit my employer
SUSE 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:
2012: (
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2011: (
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2010: (
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2009,
2008,
2007,
2006,
2005,
2004,
2003,
2002,
2001,
2000,
1999,
legacy html
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Poked mail, sync. call with Vojtech, misc. patch review.
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Tim Hardek kindly got the slides
of LibreOffice / FOSDEM dev-room up-loaded, and looking lovely
in the wiki (where we have slides). Sadly I missed a few talks myself,
so plenty to enjoy there, nice to see Markus' slides on our new testing
work eg.
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Chased some 3.5 crashers and misfunctions, idly built a couple of
install sets with and without some fairly pointless exception throw/catching
for small allocations: nearly 2% bigger with that there. Reviewed some (great)
German to English translation. Tried to reproduce / poke at some more bugs.
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Out in the evening with the wonderful wife, a delayed valentines day
treat - much fun.
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Off to visit Coleridge school in Cambridge, interesting.
Back, mail, hackery, Lunch. Dug at some statistics, agendas, GNOME
Advisory board call.
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Busy-work most of the afternoon, Lydia over for dinner,
Dave around for the evening / bible study.
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Up, chewed mail, fun call with Martin,Lionel,Charles & Jerome.
Really pleased to see that ByteString
finally died today - our four string classes, turned into three; nice.
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Lunch, account setup, more mail chew, patch review etc. Merged a
completed easy hack improving repeated search (ctrl-g) in the find bar.
Dinner - call with Alan Clark, more patch review / merge / hackery etc.
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Up lateish, off to church, played the vile-din, helped out
with creche. Home for a fine roast lunch with Heather Llwelyn. More
cycle training with E. outside - nominally eight paces of free-cycling.
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Bathed and treated children, dinner. Bed early, sermon, sleep.
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Up lateish, looked after a (still recovering) M. while
everyone else went out to Bury StEdmonds. Interleaved commit
reading with Android damage detection. Finally got it working,
only to discover you need to refresh the whole
ANativeWindow_lock buffer, or second guess the
double buffering. Time to switch to bitmap rendering I think.
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Played M's favorite card-game: 'Rat-a-tat-cat' with her.
Troops returned, lunch. Afternoon of cycling training - coaxed
E. onto a stabilizer-free bike for six free-steering steps.
Played tag with H. and M.
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Out to hoover / clean the church with Solomon & Peace.
Back for dinner, put babes to bed, sat by fire, and got J.
setup with some interviews, lovely to work with her.
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Poked mail, a slow-mail-day: great, merged a patch or two,
interleaved re-building, bug poing, and android stuff - trying to
dig out some particularly annoying basic related dialogs.
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Started analysing commit histories, reading through old
commits is encouraging and interesting, so many wonderful people
to have worked with over the years.
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Up early; mail chew, text bits. Thrilled to see Gert van Valkenhoef's
(more advanced) Easy Hack land, switching us to clucene - which gives much
faster multi-lang indexing at compile time, and far more responsive and
complete help searching. Just cleaning up this area also revealed and fixed
a load of l10n bugs that will improve help in asian locales too; nice.
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Great to have Intel joining
The Document Foundation's Advisory Board today - welcome ! I'm looking forward
to helping to build on that partnership around the office suite of the future.
I should thank some of the heros behind the scenes: Ciaran Farrell, Holger Dyroff
and Camilo Rodriguez whose tenacity and support made this possible. Naturally TDF
is truly independent of any single corporate sponsor, and open to all.
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Lunch, team meeting, ESC meeting, break. Advisory Board call,
grabbed a quick dinner, enjoyed catching up with Mike Leibowitz, read
stories to babies.
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Up early; mail chew, call with Vojtech, more digging
through the code around autosave, patch merging, easy hack
creation etc. Sandy over for lunch.
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More hackery for 3.5.1 rc1, board call. Dinner, out
to cell group.
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Up early, mail triage, dropped babes at school, off to visit
Netherhall in Cambridge, seems a good place; back for a call with
Charles, more mail, misc. mentoring etc. Lunch. Call with Naji.
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More patch review / merging, massaged some text to; chased
graphics manager oddity some more, there is something beautiful about
programs that SEGV, but only when you're stepping through them under
gdb.
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Dinner with Lydia, Dave over for bible study in the evening.
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Up early, chewed mail, merged patches left and right. Thrilled
to see Anders Holbøll's beautiful new download page
complete with one-click goodness.
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Tony over for lunch to discuss schools, poked bugs variously.
Admin / status report writing. More mail poking, dinner, bug hunting /
code reading in the evening around the rather horrible graphics cache.
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Up, to NCC with H. and N. while E. and J. were at home, and M.
went to Burwell Baptist for a birthday bash. Helped out with the youth
work.
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Back for lunch, lazed around much of the afternoon - got N's
airfix spitfire glued up with her - no cement / fingerprints on the
cockpit windshield this time.
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Made the mistake of wandering into the workshop to do some
work on the reprap - deluge of small girls wanting to practise cycling
instead: did that, met Russel & Sophie practising too.
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Babes to bed, some frozen planet-ness, more bits in the workshop:
lathe starting to play up now the drill-press is working beautifully
(drilling a lovely 0.3mm hole with a broken drill). Sermon, bed.
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Up early, more patch review & merging. Breakfast, took
E. to Hannah's party in Mildenhall. Back for lunch, slugged with the
babes, setup old computer for J. to use.
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J. iller than ever, very odd trajectory for this, poor dear.
Mail, patch review, admin. Lunch. Spent much of the afternoon on
patch review - encouragingly many submissions from people. Dinner,
bit of bug poking, and more patch review.
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Read mail, reviewed misc. patches, lots of nice fixes on the
mailing list. Knocked up a patch to inhibit the last two bogus JRE
warnings on windows first-start (without a JRE installed). Lunch.
Team meeting, ESC meeting, more hackery.
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Up early, to work, mail, chat with Marc; call with Norbert.
Lunch, more mail & admin catchup. Dug through various reviews of
LibreOffice, more and less encouraging, looking for nuggets of how we
can improve. Poked a number of people with relevant bugs. Worked late.
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Chewed through mail, bit of patch review and back-porting to
older branches. One of the nice side-effects of the renewed focus on
bug fixing our 3.5.0 release (for the 3.5.1 freezing next
week) is that we've been getting a subset of these into 3.4.6 at
the same time, sharing the reviewing burden.
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Thrilled to see LibreOffice 3.5.0
finally released. We had a beautiful LibreOffice
3.5 new features page created by a kind volunteer: Marc Paré There is
a press
release, with a rather pretty infographic to match, though there is only
so much you can fit into one of those, and we did so much more.
Sadly, due to illness, I've not prepared a condensed: "hackers view" of
all the hard-to-see nuts, bolts and heavy-lifting behind the scenes;
perhaps later. Zonker wrote a really nice review here.
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Lunch; wrote status report, misc. admin, chat with Ross.
Pleased to see Markus'
nice work to automatically add bugzilla comments with commit links,
when git commits are made that
mention
that bug, it makes a developer's life just that bit sweeter.
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Bit better, but substantially sub-par; presenteeism ? chewed
through mail slowly, call with Thorsten & Kendy. Lunch, J. starting
to come down with the lurgy too.
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Reviewed and merging a dozen or so patches, quite a bit of
nice work arrived over the weekend it seems; procrastinated status
reportage.
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Knocked off early, tired. Dinner, bed early with an
unwell J.
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Even worse, slept fitfully most of the day, N. similarly ill;
unpleasant really. Rallied a little in the afternoon, watched some Frozen
Planet prettiness.
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Slightly brighter, visited by a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses, with a
Dan-Browne quality conspiracy theory: that the New-Testament autographs were
uniformly corrupted without
anyone contesting that, or writing a word about it. Justifying your translation
on the basis of other people's subjective decisions (when back-translating to
Hebrew), made a thousand plus years later also seems curious [sic]. Using
J.BeDuhn to try to buttress quality when he condemns this too is odd.
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Slugged, sickly around; fever worse in the evening; slept fitfully.
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Wiped out day, lay in bed sleeping fitfully on and off, urgh.
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Awoke in the night with pins & needles in half of
the scalp, whatsat ? Back to the e-mail in the morning. How does
it back-up so ?
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Chat with Guy, lunch. Wrote Linux Format column. Team
meeting, ESC, did a bit of legacy git repo surgery to avoid
confusion.
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Started to feel pretty awful in the evening; headache.
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Up early, dispatched babes; mail. Pleased to see Josh
Heidenreich's growing work on adding README's to each top-level module
in the source tree and then building a pretty source directory
from that - a pleasant, hacker-friendly place for code overview documentation.
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Pleased to see that Gerv as well
as Hacking for Christ, has duplicated himself; hence the absence from FOSDEM.
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More E-mail thrash, quick chat with Gabriel, then JRB, then
TDF board call.
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Out to cell group in the evening.
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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.
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Idle catch-up; took babes to music lessons, early dinner, J.
out, chat with Kohei, and worked through mail for much of the evening.
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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.
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Eurostar, train, another train - managed to get through
a good bit of the backlog, admittedly in rather a haze of
tiredness.
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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).
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Dinner, read babes stories, bed early, exhausted.
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Up early, breakfast with Lucas off to the conference with a
chap from Cambridge. Caught the end of Garret's talk with Susan.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Gave my: talk on Easy
Hacks: they're easy and they're significant hacks:
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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
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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):
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Up earlyish, attempted to catch the train to Cambridge,
drove instead, slideware on the train to Kings Cross. More happy
hacking on the Eurostar.
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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.
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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.
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Plugged away at keyboard event delivery - not as clean and
obvious as it could be inside VCL; strange. Chatted with the parents,
bed early.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/ and data/ directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of SUSE, 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
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@novell.com)
