Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Lie-in, J. out for a walk with H. and N. Played games with the littlies, Becky, & Ilona - Tom & Rob out to sort out their banking finally. Lunch - Uncles left, set off to Sandra's for some swimming action.
• Lots of swimming - much of it against the stream of a side- mounted impeller - a lovely private pool. Babes reluctant to leave, tea & cakes with Sandra & Arnold - back home for a warmed pizza tea. Put babes to bed, read LOTR to Namoi - getting through the Two Towers slowly.
• Poked at E-mail in the evening to try to unwind visa bits, bed late.

• Up early; Mum & Dad's 40th wedding anniversary: a good innings. Out to chuch at a Cineman in Harrogate the "Life Destiny Church" - a reasonable sermon despite an almost total lack of expository authority and hard work. Back for a light soup lunch.
• Out to setup at the Harrogate Quaker meeting for the big wedding anniversary beano. Lots of family and friends arrived, great to see cousins David & Richard with Sharon & Matthew a decade on from our wedding. Gave a brief talk on my parents' marriage.
• Helped clean up, pack up, and back to M&D's for a buffet / dinner / pizza party for the immediate family and close friends - fun.

• Up earlyish; breakfast with Joy & Chris, enjoyed admiring Chris' garden-study (with unusual foundation / subsidence issues in a rather water-logged garden) - some fine books on display there.
• Bid 'bye, set off for M&D's in Knaesborough; arrived for lunch - with Tom & Becky here too. Rob & Ilona arrived in the evening for dinner. Some present opening, put the babes to bed.

• Up early, lots of packing, roof-box securing etc. bid 'bye to John and Louise. Drove to Oldham. Met up with Joy, Chris & family (curate in Chadderton). Enjoyed fine food, and catching up with them much of the afternoon and late into the evening - the joys of extended family.

• Up earlyish, packed (with Sue & Clive), drove everyone home, got Ilona's present in the town & back to meet up with Louise & John staying at our place. Enjoyed the afternoon with them - walked out on to the heath and made a swing for the babes to enjoy - albeit in the rather cold weather.
• Up late playing scrabble, and getting to know John better, rather fun.

• Up late, out to Sizewell beach - extensive gravel spit creation with the babes - foiled by the tide going out. Back for a fine lunch, kids played happily in the afternoon. Read about diamond mining in the evening - rather a curious affair.

• Lots of child-noises in the night - proximity to tooth grinding, sleep-talking babes is over-rated; up for an excited review of stocking contents with four daughters and two nephews. Breakfast together, one present before Church.
• Off for a short service with Adam. Back for a huge and lovely turkey dinner. Much present opening goodness - got a fine metalworking vice for the workshop, and many other good things. Slugging, in the afternoon watched the Snowman & Dog with the babes. Bed early.

• Up early; packed the car, drove to Aldeburgh, arrived for lunch. Unpacked, caught up with Bruce & Anne, Sue, Clive, Adam & James.
• Out to a crib service with all the kids, Sue & Clive. H. led a procession around St Peter & St Paul - enthusiastic singing, a good time. Home, peeling action with Sue & Clive of vegetables. Tea, put babes to bed - stocking stuffing. Bed ourselves late.

• Woken early by a sick E. couldn't get back to sleep. Up, house cleaning, Jo, Mike & Robin over for a big roast lunch lots of fun getting to know them.
• Bit of a relax, out to the Carol service in the evening, practised for a couple of hours beforehand. Lots of people crammed in, played - helped M. with her Cello music - playing with H. N. and Andrew for a Calypso Carol. Suitable shared-supper blow-out afterwards: good to catch up with Ed, Sam, Gael and more.
• Home to try to get to grips with the un-written Christmas card crisis.

• Up late, substantial brunch with the family. E. feverish. Played games with babes, pottered around tidying the house up, wrapping presents and so on: fun.
• Out to Peace & Solomon's for an afternoon meal - good to catch up with them. Home, booked a series of personal family visiting flights in Australia: if you're in Sydney, Melbourne or Hobart between 22nd and 28th January and not going to LCA; it might be good to meet up.

• Up early; chat with Felix, mail chew, breakfast, form filling, posted Chinese visa bits. Plugged away at a domain-mapper slowness affecting both rtf and docx import (the joys of code sharing I suppose) got somewhere after lots of idiocy, it is remarkably easy to forget how STL containers work after a week away from them.
• Glad to see my work on bootchart2 is not entirely obsolete and is being used for GNOME login profiling at least (warning Big Lebowski / gun image on link) - such graphs make my fingers itchy. Worked in the evening, then a Dr Who.
• Beginning of a two week Christmas vacation, relaxation in a box.

• Mail chew, status report, polished and pushed a TDF blog about our Munich Hack-fest thanking our supporters etc. Also encouraging to get a blog out about shipping on the Raspberry Pi app-store.
• J. picked up M. from school - sick (again). Lunch. Team call, ESC call. Dinner with the babes; put them to bed, J. out for a party. Spent the evening doing some fun profiling / speedup of word-count and i18npool's break-iterators.

• Up early; mail chew, sync. with Vojtech. Poked LCA travel some more. Lunch, into town for passport photos. Back, forgot how soul-destroying dealing with Government beaurocracy is - a few dozen pages of paperwork helps remind one.
• Bits of admin, wrote some blurb. Reading through older-mail, rather pleased with Caolan's description of the difference between a TWIP and an EMU. Poked at some gstreamer testing in 4.0, filed expenses.
• Thrilled to see LibreOffice as the Linux Journal Readers Choice of 2012 - with 73% of the vote, with Google Docs as #2 with 12%, what a sensible lot of readers they apparently have; thanks.

• Up early, chewed mail, fixed a nasty a11y crasher around manages descendants widgets (which were always a bad idea in my view). Built ESC bug stats and agenda. More bug hunting.
• Pleased to note that Tino's rather nice random function improvement and bug fix as extensively discussed on our public lists came up with a beautiful implementation re-using the excellent boost library - one of many great recent improvements to calc from Tino: thanks !
• Watched Kill Bill in the evening - when I remember which crazy told me it was a good film I'll take a hideous revenge on them (or perhaps not). Apparently a movie absent any redeeming features at all - unless you're a samurai who enjoys cleaving people. The exclusive choice of obsolete weaponry for honour's sake seems almost as crazy as the British Army officers spending more on horses (presumably for their prestige) than on tanks prior to world-war two.

• Chewed mail, chat with David, triaged and chased bugs, conference-call much of the afternoon. Nailed a nasty shapes regression - everyone holds weak references on everyone else it seems in svx. Worked until late, filed J's tax return and started poking at mine.
• Encouraging to see not one but two great proposed locations for the LibreOffice Conference 2013 - we'll no doubt get to vote on them: as always hard to choose.

• Up lateish, off to church; sermon on hope from Tony. Back for a lamb lunch, slept for a while. Managed (somehow) to get an ethernet cable (in some sort of state) from my attic, cleated under the eaves around to the workshop - defeating the horrible topology of the house; finally reliable networking next to the reprap. Lots of help from little girls.

• Up lateish; pottered about with the babes, out to NCC with H. N. & M. to practise for the carol-concert next weekend. Home, J. out with the littlies, watched Ice Age for a bit with H. and M. and did some hacking on Android.

• Mail, H. ill and at home still. Poked new year travel. Chased some build bugs, out for an apparently interminable consultant's appointment in Cambridge - traffic is terrible at 3pm it seems. Back for dinner, worked late.

• Up early; chewed mail - interested by Keith's Software Wars fund-raiser / trailer thing: nice to see Greg, Bradley, Karen, Jono, Linus & more interviewed. Voted for the next pair of openSUSE board members. Profiling, call with Jan.
• Lunch, team call, ESC meeting. Chewed away at misc. bugs in the evening between writing Christmas cards - I'd send more if the price of stamps was not so exorbitant this year.

• Up early; mail chew, fixed the selection rendering performance issue, call with PM, lunch. Brief call with Jan, more mail some hackery. Dinner, walked M. to her school play, and back to work until late. Fixed another autocorrection issue.

• Chewed away at this and that, built ESC bug stats; poked away at profiling a nasty page rendering / selection slowness issue with multi-thousand-page documents; interesting. Some data crunching.

• To work early; bug review, misc. bug fixing - fixed a horrible autocorrect slowdown from std::set - not good to insert already sorted items into it it seems. Wrote Linux Format column.

• NCC, helped the kids get their musical effort together. Home for lunch with Mary Rogers, spent a fine afternoon with her by the fire; fun. Tea with the babes, stories, watched Dr Who in bed, sleep.

• Up late; porridge breakfast, Charlotte & co. stitching small animals from felt. Lunch, out for a walk down to the railway, enjoyed playing in an abandoned pill-box. Onto a nearby farm shop / cafe for a hot-chocolate. Dropped Charlotte home. Back for tea.

• Up early; chewed mail - poked at a most-annoying RTF performance bug with Miklos' help. Got a 4x speedup in load-time, with a bit of real hacking at last - fun.
• Out to the school fair to baby-sit the children while J. sold innumerable goodies on her stall. Four small visits to Father Christmas, queueing for face-painting (only to be washed off again shortly after), buying of sweets and more. Charlotte over for a sleep-over, worked late.

• Up early; to work, poked at most annoying bugs variously. Rather encouraged to see that Petr has got 4.0 Beta1 building and it looks good (official test packages to follow). We normally get around 1500 commits each month - but in only two weeks between Alpha1 and Beta1 (the feature-freeze) we got 1350.
• Team meeting, ESC call, Vojtech's staff. Fish & chip supper, and out to N.'s christmas play: some great Waiting for Christmas music from Tearfund. Back for a bit more bug chasing - some interesting RTF issue.

• Chewed mail; started to catch-up with the long backlog; fun. Started looking at the bug backlog, looking at patches etc. Cell group in the evening.

• Breakfast, practise with the girls, sleep. Back to work - built ESC bug stats & prototype agenda; dealt with babes music lessons in the afternoon to give J. some time off. Out to turn down heating at Falmouth Street. Bed early.

• Up early; worked solidly until 7am Tuesday to catch the 4.0 feature-freeze - encouraged to see others doing the same: eg. Markus landed the beginning of his gnumeric importer (as an experimental mode feature) rather early in the morning too.

• H. horribly sick in the night, up every hour or so. Lie-in until mid-day, roast lunch, applied slugging with the babes; bed early.

• Lie-in, breakfast, out to Falmouth Street with a protesting H. to bleed radiators and get the heating into some sort of shape. Back, more work - racing the 4.0 feature freeze deadline. Watched Lord of the Rings with H. and N. in the evening.

• Up early; to work, slogged away all day and until late into the evening.

• Up early, bid 'bye to Robert. Mail chew, lunch, Team call, ESC call, Vojtech staff, minutes etc. Worked late - started to wrestle the travel planning snake around LCA.
• Nice to see an interview with Kohei up (thanks Marc), and also the nice work Laszlo has done around LibreLogo:
  A nice (small) feature for 4.0 that can be really useful in the classroom, with a beautiful Hungarian workbook, using graphics generated by the embedded logo fragments in the workbook itself.

• Lots of administrative slog; TDF board call, Robert came to stay - lovely to catch up with him, up late.

• Mail chew, built ESC bug stats, reset some builds, poked at unit tests. Lydia over, worked late.

• E. sick in the night, there to prod me awake in the morning while J. worked. Back to sleep in time for parcel-delivery to wake me - bother. Fitful pay-back of sleep debt through the day, nursing of E. baby-sitting little people & general recovery. Good to see lots of small girls at tea time, read lots of stories, bed.

• Up early; breakfast, checked out, & headed to the hack-fest. Spent lots of time talking / assisting various people with various hacks, some fruitless debugging of what is apparently a Win32 / DB2 driver bug that shows up in base; chat to Jan W. Met Alex, another new contributor who showed-up, liked Peter's console / build log. Tried to get to the bottom of Moggi's interesting VCL / modality / mouse event delivery issues. More setup with with Markus; walk + train to the Airport, dinner; tired.
• Arrived at Stansted - waited an hour for the cheap National Express bus, got on it, set off - door wouldn't shut properly - back to the airport, sigh. Taxi home instead late - sleep.

• Up early, breakfast, off to the office for some more hacking bliss; reviewed Caolan's nice bug fix for 3.6.4, back-ported to 3-5 thanks to Markus. poked at some comment translation, lovely pasta lunch made by Italo. Florian Reuter showed up with his cute sleeping son; group photo; caught up happily for a bit - back to break an annoying Android version dependency.
• Caught up with Michael who kindly gave me a copy of his book; Pizza for dinner, worked on pointless E-mail instead of hacking: shame, poked at autotools with Cedric's new libcmis unit-testing framework. Got a great demo from Laszlo of his logo work for schools - sweet, his blogs to follow. Poked at the presenter console dbus code with Thorsten.
• Eventually the hack-fest closed at 2am or so - wandered the town looking for a pub to chat in, eventually found a suitably disreputable but quiet establishment & enjoyed some beers in paper cups; bed around 5am.

• Up before dawn, coach to Stansted - ran the normal triage of electronics stores and interrogation of assistants.
  • Lots of Apple products in big flashy displays but (apparently) lower margin for the seller than for Windows 8 PCs - though they do offer discount pricing.
  • Played with Windows 8 a bit - interested to see Intel App-Up pre-installed as well as the Win8 app-store.
  • Chrome-book apparently connected to the wifi but unable to browse the internet - reducing it's demo-ability significantly, also none of the 'docs' type apps work without an account, and no demo account in the image. Sales-person down on the device - prefers to sell a cheaper, more functional Windows 8.
  • Security guard doing baggage scanning not seen a single Windows Surface yet - interesting.
  • Interesting to see how poor many of the pre-canned displays are for all products: clearly an after-thought. Can't even launch the pre-loaded Office on Windows 8: it needs registration, can't install apps with App-Up: requires user credentials - and this pattern endlessly repeated.
• Hacked on the train, walked from the Hbf, nice offices of the LiMux guys - sat and hacked while people arrived variously, good to see all. Nice to see David's huge LibreOffice dependency graph in paper on the wall. Helped out with a horror X server / XErrorHandler conflict between SWING and LibreOffice afflicting Wollmux. Interview with a couple of fun Journalists (met Michael from LWN) with Florian & Italo - fun.
• Caught up with lots of cool hackers streaming in; great to see so many here; a new volunteer Peter just saw the hack-fest advertised and showed up - pointed him to some easy-hackable-bits. Worked with Rob a little improving the bug submission assistant URL construction.
• Poked a little at reading hsqldb binary 'data' streams in C++. Lengthy talk with Thomas, then Fridrich S. Back to the hotel with the lads, talked until late - sleep.

• Off to the Doctor in the morning - my blood is completely normal: despite eating butter endlessly, cholesterol is low; good. Back, mail chew, admin. Read the XAggregation.idl advice fixed my issue; added some code to deprecate the delegator for 4.0; that thing shouldn't be used. Added some theme / version hints to help designers.
• Pleased to see that Zolnai Tamás' nice kill-sdf branch got merged: finally we are clean .po file users without some hideous OO specific nastiness (.sdf files) lurking around - good.

• Mail chew, minute writing, slideware work. Poked BT to work out why they didn't arrive twice - multiple-systems / software error apparently. J. kindly poked at LCA/FOSDEM travel scheduling, how to fit Beijing, Hobart, Canberra & Brussels all into one trip.
• Dug into the reference-counting intricacies of the UNO WeakAggregate object - less than transparently obvious what's up there - J. out counselling; poked at it until late.

• Up early; mail chew, lots of work on stats, analysis, slideware production. Expecting BT engineer to arrive and sever the internet at any stage. Lunch. More admin - positive LibreOffice Advisory Board call.
• Lydia over, out in the evening to poke the other house - back for a fruitless quest for radiator keys - my plumbing supplies appear to have been bagged and taken somewhere else - bother; bleeding radiators with long-nose pliars is really not fun.

• Up early; to work, mail chew - pleased to see Miklos' nice gallery of a few of our recent OOXML improvements in writer with sample files. Paid fedex/taxes. Lunch, attended Falmouth St. to supervise abhortive water-meter fitting work. Worked on slide-ware.

• Up lateish; dropped J. at NCC, collected H, helped with the kids work at church. Had Peter & Joy over for lunch. Encouraged to hear that Joy (a teacher) had LibreOffice installed by her (apparently clueful) Brother - nice work.
• Lydia over later, played with the babes variously - H. and N. learning to sing two part harmony with each other nicely. Lazy evening.

• Up lateish; dropped H. off at a friends for a sleep-over; off to Falmouth Street to mend a cupboard and check the other house. Back for lunch. Watched a Christmasy sort of film with the babes while E. went to a party; dinner, put babes to bed; worked.

• Some .apk analysis / size breakdown work. J. pranged the car - spent a while attaching bolts & washers to various pieces of plastic at the front. Built some stats. Emily over for dinner, up late.

• Mail chew; dug through JUnit tests - which (it seems) find some really nice errors - and are reasonably easy to debug now - (using the nice failure message they produce); lots of code reading. Lunch with Janine. Team call, ESC call, Vojtech's staff call.
• Dinner, read stories, back to work; generated some stats.

• Up early; mail chew, worked away reviewing and polishing the Unity menus work from Canonical / Bjoern / Antonio Fernandez of Aentos. For the curious pictures of this and more are here - it should ship working out of the box in 4.0. [Update:] - turns out I forgot to mention the other heros supporting this nice integration: Alberto Ruiz, Ryan Lortie and Ted Gould - thanks guys !
• Lunch. Baak to mail, admin etc. TDF Board call.
• A few quick thoughts in response to Armin (an IBM employee): Of course we're grateful to all who have contributed code to LibreOffice, and we will do our best to credit them where appropriate as we build out our 4.0 release notes; thanks Armin. We're currently in a 4.0 feature-freeze / release crunch, with the code shaping up really nicely with contributions from hundreds of volunteers. No-one should get the idea that LibreOffice will blindly include whatever gets into Apache OpenOffice into our code-base going forward. That is emphatically not the case - any code that is included will be reviewed rather later, with a priority and preference given to code first contributed to LibreOffice. If you haven't tried it - why not jump into hacking on LibreOffice today: our codebase gets rapidly cleaner and prettier but we're always in need of help. One great live topic of today is the new: Widget Layout work in VCL that makes the UI look significantly prettier.

• Poked mail, tried to track down some (apparent) confusion between system and internal boost breaking some tinderboxes; finally found the issue some missing use_unpacked,,boost dependencies. Built the ESC bug stats.
• Lydia & Janice over for dinner. Worked late; read some blogs - lots of encouraging work going on in LibreOffice - a small fraction of which is being blogged; my favourites today:
  • Until recently it was fashionable to complain about regressions in the RTF filters: the background being that we kicked out a huge scad of old, ugly duplicate code and unified it with the existing MS format filters. Anyhow - as of now, only 1 (minor performance) regression bug remains open that I'm aware of. Miklos has also added a huge slew of features (things like not loosing all the document after the first embedded formula). He just blogged some pretty pictures of these RTF Drawing Object import.
  • Another fun development is Fridrich's (spare time) project to work on the Visio file formats which is yielding some great fruit - he has even implemented Visio 2013 import support before that has shipped: LibreOffice Visio filter at LibreGraphics World.
  • Also nice to see people arriving for the group photo from the LibreOffice conference, hopefully a better shot to follow at some stage: from the LibreOffice conference - lots of happy contributors (and a small number of ODF plug-festers) in a wonderful venue, with many thanks to the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.

• Up, read the raging histrionics around journalism and opinions of software: personally I deeply care about what influential and respected people think of my software - I recognise the reality of thought-leadership, and the criticality of a huge hidden web of relationships to drive opinion forming. I do believe that marketing has a significant role in that process, and that creating valuable brands is often pathologically non-rational - and sadly is rather de-coupled from any positive or negative aspects of the raw design / functionality.
• Then again, we also have such significant usability problems in LibreOffice that it is easier to improve without annoying people, and the scale of the problems and the size of the team makes it hard to change too much at once; then again - with Caolan's sexy Widget Layout work - almost anyone can now get involved in re-drawing and improving the UI.
• Chewed mail miscellaneously; tons of patch review, things to respond to - discovered my make check was failing due to some bustage in ~/.ure - odd. Lunch. Wrote a Linux Format Column while doing a ton of administration.
• Dinner. Back to work - interested by another robust defence of Software Patents from IBM, the sad thing is - that while lobbying against S/W patents myself - I've met Patent Lawyers who sincerely believe this sort of baloney and need disabusing; sad really. Self-defence in a world gone mad is the only legitimate justification I can come up with for them.

• Up early, off to NCC, spoke, home for lunch with Calan, Julie & Emily - fun, sat around catching up. People's life-stories are so interesting. Watched the Dawn Treader with the babes, tea, put them to bed. Bed early.

• Lie-in; breakfast, played with the babes, picked up H. from a sleep-over. Much more reading around Daniel 10, IVP commentary, Wayne Grudem, read a rather useful Powers of Darkness evaluation of Hermenutical approaches.
• Lunch with Jane, Lilly & Harry(?) - fun-sized friends for N. and co. Back to the reading, collation, writing, thought & prayer. Dinner, eventually came up with some explanations; bed.

• Up early; mail chew, dead pleased to discover that the yast2-gtk bugs I've been fretting about for ages have already been fixed by Federico; nice. Tried to get VirtualBox running - what excuse for a custom kernel module is there in the days of KVM ? horribly annoying; tried to re-build the spec. for the latest stable kernel - failure; yuck - what a waste of time. Why is it that I can use KVM without a hassle, but then the VM / disk images are in some uselessly non-exchangeable format ?
• Dug at misc. patches, a CUPS issue; mail. Out for lunch with J. Eventually got a VM setup, now to trying to make GNOME behave well inside it; first fallback mode - rendering needs to be fast; eventually found the gnome-tweak-tool button to persuade nautilus to render the desktop, so I can drop a single, nice big "click here" icon launcher on the desktop; phew.
• Out for lunch with J. in Bury - looked for a better office chair. Fixed a libcanberra issue, and re-visited the osc branch / sr magic with DimStar's kind help. Worked late. Started reading C. Peter Wagner on Spiritual Warfare - substantially unconvinced at his take.

• To work; upgraded my kernel to avoid a nasty memory pressure related X crash; hopefully 3.6.6 will do better. Mail chew, patch review, helped a few newcomers.
• Lunch; Team meeting, ESC call, Vojtech's staff. Posted minutes. Discovered that we have a functioning cisco VPN end-point these days; nice - out of the box, easy, working VPN with NetworkManager; good. Plugged away at the code.

• Poked at the election result, listened to the speeches variously. While still somewhat nauseated by the rampant cult-of-the-state-ness, am more persuaded by Landes that national culture is indeed really important, so perhaps it does make sense to shape and channel that to some positive end. Mail; out to the doctor's for lung capacity measurement.
• Lunch. Wrote some C++ regexp unit tests, after discovering the Java ones were crippled by using the same search pattern as the search string.

• Plugged away at building and testing some re-based code much of the day - some real fun there. Mail chew. Lydia & Janice over for dinner - watched an interesting Horizon program on the earth's core.

• Up early; packed babes off to school with J. - music practises etc. back into the routine after half-term. Poked at a document load profile, some bug triage / review.
• Played with the (very pretty) engineering sample of the Nexus 7 - with many thanks to Google for their support: LibreOffice for Android should look amazingly crisp on this display. Lunch.
• Dead pleased to see Norbert's new drop-in unit test harness for StarBasic - making it easy to add new basic/syntax unit tests for both VBA and StarBasic compatibility modes: very nice.

• Up earlyish; played world-of-goo in bed with the babes; breakfast. Off to NCC, helped J. downstairs with the younger kids; Studying the fall: Genesis 2. Lunch at church, and packing of shoe-boxes for Operation Christmas Child - fun.
• Home, slugged with the babes, a fine chicken pie for dinner, put littlies to bed, read stories etc. Finished listening to Tombstone (BBC book of the week by Yang Jisheng) - simply staggering, a diffuse and systemic taxonomy of failure of leadership.
• Listened to and wrote notes on a couple of sermons on Daniel 10.

• Up earlyish; breakfast, packed everyone into the car - off to Bruce & Anne's for lunch - with Sue, Clive, Adam & James there. Much slugging, enjoying the company, a fine lunch. Out to play pooh sticks at a small (slow) nearby river. Back for dinner and fireworks in the evening - ably setup by Clive. Drove home.

• Up early; off to the Doctor's for a checkup; some blood letting; chest X-ray, all the fun of the fair. Poked at mail. Poked Scott wrt. a SLED L3 bug.

• Up early; mail thrash; sync. with Martyn. Sue, Clive, Adam & James came over - had a fine lunch with them. Caught up with Julien and looked through a few nice bug fixes with him.

• Up late; took half a day off - attempted to go to an activities day on Studlands Park, but managed not to fit in. Out to the racing museum instead in town to draw, and ride an electronic racing horse. Home for lunch.
• Got around to up-loading my slides (as hybrid PDF). Some thoughts on community interaction / anti-patterns:
  
  And some easy-hack pieces:
  
  And a project overview of where we're at now (sadly missing the 3.6/3.7 new feature slides that I didn't get time to build on the train) from the openSUSE conference:
  
• Thanks to the RSA for their great video content.

• Up; re-arranged the office to make it easier to sanely install the BT / infinity magic - interesting to see how it will cope with our phone cabling. Breakfast; mail chew; built ESC agenda & bug metrics. The installer failed to arrive or call in the time-slot; hey ho. Apparently too-busy to call to mention they're not coming - flooding (surely that's in the USA) causing issues.
• Dirk got LibreOffice building nicely on openSUSE / ARM it seems, some minor spec. changes to reduce parallelism were needed. Lydia over for dinner, watched silly movies in the evening.

• Enjoyed the extra hour of sleep somehow left over from the weekend. Mail chew, expense filing. Poured over code much of the afternoon. Bed early.

• Up earlyish - noisy babes; packed, off to Pulborough Brooks Baptist Colin managing the sound setup etc. Enjoyed the service, fine shared lunch, met lots of interesting new people.
• Off to a green in Pulborough, put up a bouncy castle, and encouraged people to have some free bouncing / face-painting / baloons on rather a cold day; bid thanks & 'bye to Barbara & Colin, drove home at length. Fed babes, put them to bed; sleep.

• Up early; breakfast, dressed babes & packed them into the car. Off to Barbara & Colin's house in West Chiltington for a fine lunch. Dressed up in wedding finery, and off to St Lukes for Louise & John's wedding - J. the matron of honour - looking lovely.
• Cake after the service, met an interesting accountant, and drove the babes back to Barbara's - rather late, for tea, and then put them to bed read stories. Quick chat with Barbara & Colin, and drove back to the evening dance, lots of talking and nibbles. Helped tidy the church when all was finished - ivy removal, leaf sweeping etc. Dropped a lady guitarist home with J. and back to Barbara's, sleep late.

• Early up, off to the office, caught up with Petr, chewed over bugs & trends together. Sync. with Kendy, bid 'bye to all, and off to the airport. Once again suckered by EasyJet's "not real leaving time" on the boarding pass; will I never learn ? much too early. Lunch; sat and hacked.
• Back to Stansted, taxi home - relieved Mary Rogers - kindly baby-sitting, read lots of stories, put babes to bed, dinner. Tidied up, bed - exhausted.

• Up early, breakfast, off to the office, got a small lan setup for the team, and set too with a serious icecream farm: Started chewing mail backwards - lots of it.
• Admired Radek's fine photo-taking / printing skills. Bought-in lunch, had some tips & tricks / sharing sessions with good tips from everyone. ESC call, visited the physical servers that help build some of the SUSE LibreOffice products; provide some tinderbox horsepower etc.
• Out for a final meal in the evening to a Greek restaurant - lots of good food, amusing jokery and more, back to bed late & bid 'bye to team-mates.

• Up rather early, quick breakfast, off to meet with the labs team at the central station; train out through some beautiful countryside - got off, and walked through the forest with the team. Attempted to find sites of interest, tried to climb some substantial tree to get to a geo-cache. Wound up in a pub for some food, lots of new kernel insights, discussed missile design.
• Onwards on the train to the river for some canoeing action; shared with Radek - and enjoyed a smooth trip down the river - with a number of watery speed-bumps for some participants. Arrived, quick beer at a pub, train back to prague; quick sandwich for dinner, bed.

• To the conference; tried to get Kendy productive again with the latest GNOME 3.6 - which appears to have killed scroll buttons in the bars - tried to unwind the issue and turn them back on; hunted for options - none, hunted in gnome-tweak-tool: nothing, hunted for themes to use / install - unable to easily find/install one that restored the ability to use evolution with large mail folders. Turned to the gtk theme css to try to tweak it, getting lost in some @url(resource://not/a/path) construct. Eventually begged for help from on IRC (thanks desrt !): apparently the solution is a scroll-wheel (laptop), or a touch-pad with a scroll side-bar (disabled), finally 'discovered' middle-button and nipple drag: urk - the solution is apparently more training - 30 man-minutes+ burned.
• Built ESC bug stats, poked at another area for some profiling. Spent a while reviewing our progress as a team since last year - encouraging to see that some of the significant bugs/features from our brain-storming last year are now closed by either us or the community. Generated a lot more for good measure. Out to a rather fine restaurant near an attractive monestary, wandered back in the dark, chat with Simon.

• To the openSUSE conference early, working with the team in a hacking room; Kohei showed a pretty impressive performance drop-off loading his beautiful LibreOffice structure documentation odg. Did a bit of analysis, and got a 40% win on load (6.5 seconds of 16) and greater than that on save (though harder to profile). Encouraging.
• Lots of hackery on various things, some sort of mail catchup, merged a fix to -3-6. Out in the evening with the team for a Czech meal - complete with Kendy's (least) favourite tune: about a goat and a bush.

• Up rather late at last; missed breakfast at the hotel. Out to buy something for myself and Tor, ate that. Noticed a czech church meeting in the hotel - attended the service to improve my Czech, enjoyed a familiar hymn: Blessed be your name, in Czech. Met an interesting American professor and wife at the end; apparently I need to read The Economics of Good & Evil, 70% of Czech people are Athiests, despite the good work of Jan Hus (a fascinating chap to discover) pre-dating Luther by some significant margin.
• Back to my room to study & pray somewhat in English. Out to meet up with friends at the conference, sat around, caught up with Mirek in more depth. Out for a fine team dinner & to meet / congratulate Petr in the evening.

• Up early, breakfast with the team, got the Berlin to Prague train with team plus Mirek. Hacked on an openSUSE talk, compiled various demos dissected slides etc. Arrived - Kendy bought tram tickets while we ate. Lubos kindly took Tor and myself to the venue, arrived with 15mins to spare - spoke, followed by Tor. [update - slides ]
• Wandered the conference looking at the fun things on display, caught up with Vincent, enjoyed the huge reprap-style 3D printer with a print-volume of ~1m cubed, and also the fine quality of their smaller printed items; neat.
• Back to the hotel with Kendy, then to the old-bridge for a party before; de-camping to a nearby Irish pub for Guiness and food. Back to bed late.

• Up somewhat later, caught some of Bjoern's reflections on UX, then did some lightning talks - for myself just pointing people towards the LibreOffice bug triage starter page, and demoing triaging a bug, live. Followed by a series of fine talks, with suitable ad-hoc nature.
• Helped a new volunteer get his machine setup and building LibreOffice, it seems that if the submodules magic fails during checkout the error messages are rather less than helpful. Caught the end of Norbert's how-to-do-an-easy-hack demo / talk.
• Discussed spreadsheet design with an interesting chap at lunch, and on to Lionel's Improving LibreOffice with Money talk; the punch-line - pay a consultancy (like Lanedo) to implement your pet feature; enjoyed Alexander & Florian's infrastructure talk.
• Then a final board / summary talk - no questions, failed to ask intelligently enough how we can improve the next conference; then again this one was so smoothly run by Jaqueline, Fries Office Deutchland e.v. and others that it seems hard to know how to improve. Cor pre-armed the audience for a rather enjoyable elastic band fight at the end.
• Out for an Italian meal, via witnessing a nasty car collision into a lady on a bike and waiting with Markus for the police to arrive. On to c-base for some drinks, and a tour of the private area - back to bed rather late.

• Up early; arrived in time for Bjoern's talk; gave an updated Easy Hacks talk (pleased to catch up with a number of interested people afterwards, with some build/checkout/system setup). On to the Impress State of the Union talk, then did a quick presentation of Andrzej's great Impress / remote work in the GSOC track.
• Lunch, and catch-up with the Lanedo guys, enjoyed Jutta's talk afterwards, then Otto's. On to a series of shorter talks - catching CMIS, talked about interaction anti-patterns; [update - slides ] heard about WikiHelp, and great to see Peter Jentsch's other great work around Regression Testing.
• Out in the evening, for pizza (again), good to catch up with the interesting people around and hear about all the great work that has been going on left and right; really encouraging to find out about the good things happening in Japan for example.

• Up earlyish, breakfast & out to the venue, security checks minimal and sensible. Enjoyed the welcome speeches & Jeremy's keynote - lots of good things about software freedom. Nice to see the pretty Gource video created by cloph. Interested in Jesus' analytics, gerrit for LibreOffice, the great work the KACST guys have been up to, Stephan's API talk, Tor's Android lessons talk, and Kohei's calc core / performance work. All punctuated by some great hall-way track interactions. One of the luxuries (or sadnesses) about so many good talks, is the hard choices: Widget Layout, or API futures ?
• Group photo, free beer, and fine meal in the ministry in the evening, back to the hotel afterwards with a group and up rather late talking, then even later writing slides.

• Up early, breakfast with Caolan, back to hack a bit; out for some lunch together. Met up with the lads from .cz and off to the conference venue for first a board meeting, then the ESC. Really great to catch up with the wider board, MC and ESC guys.

• Up earlyish, bid 'bye to the lovely family; M&D dropped me into Cambridge to get bus to Luton, E-mail catchup. Hacked a bit on the plane. Arrived, tubes, caught up with Thorsten and Caolan. Out for dinner together with a lot of old friends - fun. Back to the Motel One bar until late.

• Off to NCC earlyish, spoke & managed not to upset my much loved dispensational brothers & sisters, despite preferring a more traditional understanding. Home for a fine lunch with the parents.
• Snoozed in J.'s lap for a bit, while the babes played. M∓D out to evensong at Kings College; tidied the house a little, poked about in the workshop. An evening spent talking with the parents, arranging diaries etc.

• Up lateish; breakfast, out to Noughton Park to wander and enjoy the lovely colours of autumn in the trees - some amazing reds. Home, plugged away for much of the evening at the end of Daniel 9 - finally approaching some sort of comprehension.

• Plugged away at e-mail; more admin. Parents arrived in the evening. Up catching up with them, didn't sleep well, bit of hacking in the night.

• Up excessively early, worked a little; backed up the laptop, walked to the station. Train/Eurostar/Tubeness to Paris / OpenWorldForum - wrote talk on the way. Caught up with Ralf quickly.
• Met up with Dave, Leslie, Robyn and co. found our room; listened to a diverse series of interesting talks, and gave one in the end on communities & relationships.
• Interested by Dave Neary's dichotomy between more efficient tooling for collaboration (taking less time), and the side-effect of decreased personal interaction leading to poorer relationships.
• Quick chat to Dave, Lars, Richard F, Bradley K, and more. Tube to Eurostar. Finally got annoyed enough to do something about the big dependencies problem - elided .hdl and collapsed internal boost headers to a single dep, and - ~50% smaller aggregate deps, so should be faster to load - needs a full-from-clean test build really.
• Spent some time chewing on Daniel 9, with particular help from Gordon Hugenberger's 70 weeks write-up.

• Mail chew, chat with Tor, then Vojtech. Encouraged to see David's unit test for the thunderbird addressbook database backend, our first fast, small, native-code 'base' unit test.
• The parallelism that the new gnumake work is getting as it touches more of the external modules; fixed another set of dozens of parallel ant/javac compiles causing grief with big icecream parallelism.
• Out to the St Bedes open-day in Cambridge with Rachel; pleasing talk from the headmaster, home.

• Up early, chewed mail, built ESC agenda & stats. Started building some slideware for Thursday at the OpenWorld Forum.

• Mail chew, bug processing, built master - great to see Peter's work over the weekend adding Windows 8 SDK support, making mergedlibs work, fixes for VS2012. That's one of the nice things about LibreOffice, checking out the great work done over the weekend by so many. The gbuild-ification is also going well, with around fifty external modules left to go.
• Lunch, wrote a Linux Format column, did some stats crunching. Discovered 'icerun' - a lovely wrapper to use to stop the massive parallelism of icecream's gcc wrapper overwhelming the machine when you get to doing dozens of a javac processes in parallel. Pushed a patch to use that.

• Up early; played at Church, back for a quick lunch. Down to The Severals for a race - J. running 12k around the horse walks for charity, and H. N. M. running as many laps as possible of the green. Helped marshal, hand out rubber-bands for laps, and entertain E.
• The lead runner came in really a lot earlier than anyone else, at 44 minutes in; waited with the babes for various other runners from the school - and cheered 'Mrs Meeks' in with the babes at 1.22:30 - good stuff.
• Taught massed children to fire elastic bands without injuring their fingers: strangely in an electronic generation, with dying terrestrial mail this has turned out not to be an innate skill. Played elastic band fights. Home eventually, fed everybody, put people to bed. Transcribed a couple of sermons on Daniel 9.

• Off to Sandringham with E. for her trip out with her Father this year. Rushed through the house, and museum - with a quick snack to fend off hunger. Back through the lovely gardens to the Restaurant. Had a fine lunch together, played together in a playground nearby. Tractor ride through the estate, wandered back for some snaps of E. in residence. Home. Slugged by a movie in the evening.

• Lots of admin; couple of long, fun design calls with Kohei, worked late.

• Up early; mail chew, lunch. Team meeting, partner call, ESC call, Vojtech's staff, calc patch back-porting and bug poking.
• Out to see Botisham Village College; somewhat disappointed really with their ethos.

• Mail chew, long day of hackery, admin, patch review, research, chased a few misc. bugs. Lydia over for dinner, cell group in the evening.

• To work; mail chew, administrative grunt work, lunch. Backported a fix for a silly comment visibility error in XLSX import (and export). Built ESC agenda.
• Out in the evening with the lovely wife; really great to spend some time together away from the distractions of home.

• Up early, to work - lots of weekend mail chewage; patch review: lots of nice fixes from Markus, testing, more mail, lunch, wrote a status report. Plugged away at misc. tasks - added Petr's rather nice improvements to our startup / wrapper script to substantially simplify the backtrace / strace / valgrind HOWTO for LibreOffice.
• Dinner, interesting call with David, bed.

• Up earlyish; out to NCC, spoke on the first part of Daniel 9 - mostly around prayer. Home for a quick lunch, out to an Education Sunday service in Bury Cathedral.
• Wandered the park afterwards; admired the ruins and discovered a fine poem about the Magna Carta - the Barons swore their oath in Bury St Edmonds it seems. Buns or Ice creams, home again. Bathed & put babes to bed. Lots of church friends over for a movie in the evening.

• Up earlyish; out to Tyndale House for a seminar on same sex marriage lots of interesting grist, and questions. Home for lunch, Charlotte around for a sleep-over with H.
• Set too reading & writing for tomorrow; babes watched The Simpsons movie, up late reading & writing.

• Up early, chewed mail, spent a while digging at the nice new conditional formatting code in calc - sync. with Markus - got a few pet bugs of mine fixed. Back to the tedious admin.
• Transcribed another sermon on Daniel 9 in the evening; interesting.

• Mail chew; good to see the LibreOffice Conference program announced. Lots of interesting talks lined up, and some great guys to work with there too. Registered for the openSUSE conference as well.
• Lunch. Team call, ESC meeting (with minutes). Vojtech's staff.
• I wonder why Google+ sends me E-mails with links that don't work when clicked; that's somewhat annoying. Dinner, back for a bit after some stories, caught up on our all-hands.

• Mail chew, day planning, call with Vojtech, patch review, license statement collation, catchup with Kendy; lunch. Great to see GNOME 3.6 released - nice work guys.

• Up early; mail catch-up, stuck into avmedia - fixed my top few most annoying bugs - horrendous interaction performance problems on slides with embedded media: now very snappy. Added preview / thumbnails of media for GStreamer 0.10 and 1.0 with Wim and Tim's kind help. Hopefully that overcomes people's concern that it is not in fact embedded due to a missing preview.
• Off to visit the Dentist - who surveyed the disaster area, and stuck in stalling mode - better to wait & see etc. babes all enjoyed their checkup except for E.
• Out to see DT & Zoe in the evening.

• Up early, chewed mail, got laptop prepped with a build; got misc. admin done for London train-travel later.
• David created a lovely write-up about his experience implementing the new Thunderbird addressbook driver in LibreOffice - great to see a personal itch satisfyingly scratched.
• Knocked up a status report, walked to the train, onto a LXF column. Partner meeting in london much of the day; poked at avmedia on the way back - plenty of problems to nail there.

• Up earlyish, off to NCC to practise / play, worked with the kids downstairs. Home for a big lunch. Out to Laura & Creighton's in the afternoon - nice to see them, spent some time debugging their 2nd hand sewing machine; neat.
• Home for tea, put babes to bed, red stories & spent time with the older lasses; wrote notes on Daniel 9 for next weekend, bed.

• Lazed in bed for a while, out to band practice; back for lunch. Practiced cycling / balancing with E. in the street for a bit. Wandered into town to rent the The Pirates! and play in the memorial hall gardens. Back to watch the movie, pizza dinner, popped babes to bed.
• Watched Dr Who in the evening as iplayer inches us towards content consumption. Sadly the BBC in their infinite wisdom have geographically locked the Android tablet app so I can't even install it. Spent some time fooling it - landing on firefox's desktop mode to get back to flash.

• Up early, to work; interested to see that the latest gdb disables python pretty-printers (most odd), the trick is to extend the un-breaking-of-defaults that all hackers need in their ~/.gdbinit to include:

  handle SIGPIPE SIGXCPU SIG33 SIG35 SIGPWR nostop noprint
  add-auto-load-safe-path /

  (thanks Miklos).
• Dug around at some nasty package/ zip size issues; it seems creating spreadsheets that are > 2Gb of un-compressed data is rather easy to do. Added some exceptions on save to avoid disappointment on load, upped the limit to 4Gb, and prepped the package/ code for ZIP64.
• Lunch. Reviewed Markus' slew of lovely fixes for 3.6.2.

• Up early, mail chew, patch review & back-porting. Stopped OLE2 storage reading from duplicating the entire stream in memory, and unwound the hideous lifecycle management there. Dug into some valgrind logs.
• One thing that has gone under-reported is the great work that David Ostrovsky has done to implement a native 'mork' parser, such that it is no longer necessary to build/link/distribute an ancient version of seamonkey on Linux. Excellent work, and it just hit master.
• Tested Andrzej's latest nice remote-control bug-fixes, bluetooth seems to be working well on Linux at least; found a few lingering issues. Dinner, late call.

• Up early, walked babes to School. Mail chew. Spent a while digging into some hideous OLE2 structured storage performance N^2, turned a XLS / pivot load time from 100seconds to 20seconds: better. Cleaned the code significantly at the same time; back-ported to 3.6 and set to work reducing the memory footprint.
• Rather a hot Chinese dinner, out to cell group.

• Up early; mail chew, interview, admin, worked on our GStreamer 1.0 support - seems to work nicely, though some more cleanup would be good. Lydia over for dinner; back to work - discovered my javac was too new for Android's DEX to cope with re-writing the bytecode; downgraded to 1.6. Helped Xisco get the python wizards port working again.

• Poked tinderboxen variously, tested new UCB cleanup, sync. with Bjoern, built some stats with Florian, mail chew etc. Out for a run in the evening.

• Up earlyish, off to NCC to play the violin. Back for lunch; pottered around the house - hair-cut; put up some shelves in the workshop to clear some bench-space. Babes watched Shrek. Ciaran & Amy over for dinner - great to get to know them better.

• Lie in; drew up a list of tasks to get stuck into - cleared out the workshop, mended a doll's cot, de-loused our guttering. J. collected H. for her sleep-over at Tina's; Lunch.
• Training of E. to balance her bike in the road. Dinner, bathed little people & put them to bed.

• More mail chew, note writing; bit of bug triage. Played with Andrzej's remote control - nice stuff; worked on slideware.
• Out to the school fair / hog-roast in the afternoon; wandered around chatting to people, playing with the babes; fun.

• Dug through mail. Misc admin, calls, team call, ESC call, Vojtech's staff, sync with Kohei, partner call.
• Encouraging to see the Motah announcement go public. You know you're dealing with a competent bunch when they get nice code reviewed and into the product before even reaching out to talk.

• Another day of admin, misc. calls, re-setup the printer, filed misc. bugs, booked travel to Paris.

• A day of mail, admin, code reading, and such like. Chat with Dave N, and got a talk sorted out for Open World Forum, Paris next month.

• Up early; breakast & music practices variously with the babes; to work, mail chew, call with Thorsten. Tor got a great handle on another two causes of the vile Mac accessibility bug, worked on some fixes together - life should be better in 3.6.2rc1.
• Lunch with J. Chased an icecream scheduler crasher in 12.2 fixing that created some odd incompatibility issue; strange.

Overview

Arriving back from vacation, I read Miguel's thoughts on the state of the Linux Desktop in the race for the consumer market; I happen to mostly agree with his conclusion - that we're still facing a huge up-hill struggle there. While I have huge respect for his experience and insight, I think the causes are larger. My punch-line is that the Linux Desktop faces a huge and multi-factored ecosystem challenge, there is no single simple issue to fix. Over the last decade I've been peripherally involved in trying to tackle many of the problems in this area, here are some of my random thoughts and open questions on the topic, there are no radical new insights:

Our attractiveness to ISVs

Clearly this is a significant factor in our problem. No matter how bad and limited our APIs are, if there is market pressure to port software to the platform - it will come; hacks and all. Yes, the Linux Desktop is a horrifying thing to deal with from an ABI stability / interface perspective. Aside from the diversity of pointlessly different distribution packaging details, the Linux Desktop stack (with existing frozen / back-compatible API/ABIs) is not profoundly different from other operating systems - indeed, arguably it is better for ISVs since we have access to open the lid on the box and work with each other as some are finding out.

Other's attractiveness to ISVs

Often the disguised thought here is that the competition are simply wonderful at producing clean, crisp, working, tested, performant implementations of everything, for which there are no compatibility problems, and life is wonderful. People then often point at Windows XP - perhaps the best understood mature operating-system ever, with a decade of workaround development and integration testing.

How do Windows ISVs get such a great deal ? one thing they do is to distribute much more of the system in duplicate with each application. So for example each app ships it's own libc and gets to try to install it somewhere. This is something that we typically don't do on Linux, but it could be done: some form of application virtualisation would help. Conversely Windows ISVs suffer a lot of performance, scriptability, and repeatability problems that are just not there on Linux.

How about other new successful platforms like iOS / Android which are loaded with ISVs - do they have the world's most beautiful development environments ? given that Xamarin are selling sexy tools to improve the ISV environment there my suspicions is that not all is perfect. Enjoying native code development on these platforms is like enjoying extreme DIY dental surgery - the Linux Desktop is infinitely preferable as an ISV platform. Why do ISV's put up with it ? in my view, it is driven exclusively by the large addressable market. You don't need an MBA to see the trends and opportunity there.

Questions around a better ISV story

There is a lot more to say; but perhaps some of it belongs as questions. Let me frame them in this way; Question: is there something that we (as Free Software lovers) can do to make our ISV story sexy enough that it makes the Linux Desktop an attractive enough platform for developers that it overrides our lack of market share, and makes a Linux Desktop port of each piece of software automatic ? [ notice I'm abandoning the idea of a Free-Software killer-app that sticks to only our platform ahead of time, the market realities will bring it to Windows / Mac even against our will ].

What will attract ISVs to our platform ? what will make them feel at home, and productive producing software for the other major platforms ?

If we make it easy to purchase proprietary software, or to donate money to free software app developers and overcome our fragmentation to integrate this everywhere (a single 'App-Store'), will this bring us back to parity with other OS' or make us compellingly better ?

Attractiveness to (consumer) OEMs

It is often noticed that OEMs pay money to install Windows on their machines, and that the Linux Desktop is an apparently free alternative - so surely our zero cost should make us wildly successful right ? It seems to me there are a multitude of interesting problems here.

Zero is too inexpensive

One of the major business problems of hardware enablement is that it takes a constant investment of real cash to pay excellent engineers to make (brand new) hardware work reliably. Linux has more drivers working out of the box than any other OS - of course we rock; however - the Windows ecosystem distributes that cost among hardware vendors: who write their own drivers (subsidised by the hardware you buy), and the Mac ecosystem ships a very limited set of hardware. Unfortunately, the cost of the Linux Desktop to OEMs has been driven down to a marginal level by somewhat cut-throat competition. That makes enablement development hard to justify without enough volume. Substantially exacerbating this is the habit of consumer-grade hardware of constant switching of components. There is a silent, invisible, gigantic, cost-engineering war going on out there which squeezes cash out all along the chain. In the absence of good standard interfaces, this makes device support much harder for consumer hardware; a trivial but comic example is of custom tweaking batches of hardware to pre-define vflip states for built-in webcams, cf. the kernel.

Zero is not cheap enough

Unfortunately, even if hardware can be perfectly enabled, fully translated, with accurate manuals, support and update plans, integrated with OEM's imaging infrastructure etc. and at near-zero cost, this is still too expensive. Looking at other ecosystems there are substantial flows of cash to OEMs that are not obvious. There are a lot of these:

• co-marketing dollars - whenever you read adverts that feature Foo inc. recommends the latest Baa for home users it means that the cost of that marketing was substantially offset by OEM kick-backs.
• a cut of advertising / sale revenue - arguably the true cost of some mobile-phone operating systems is negative due to the cut of the advertising revenue going back to the operator / OEM. This is a serious consideration in all advertising-interesting or mobile-device segments: there are a limited number of Google, Amazon, Microsoft's out there. Clearly for real advertising / secondary sales related funding, you need relevance and volume, cf. Firefox.
• Upgrade revenue - a simple example is the trial version of Microsoft Office you get pre-installed; that makes it easy to pay $100+ to upgrade it to the full version: but some chunk of that ends up back in the OEM's hands.
• Antivirus revenue - another popular upgrade/trial version fitting the pattern of paying an extra for making up for the OS' lack of functionality. AV vendors pay lots of hard cash, up-front every year to ship pre-loaded on consumer-grade hardware. Arguably the celebrated lack of Linux viruses is an ecosystem problem, no AV vendor can take the credit for that.

Channel issues

Even when the hardware is perfectly enabled, and there is an advertised Linux that works on this hardware - it is frequently extremely difficult to actually buy that model. Often these models are geographically limited, frequently the imaging process is done in the factory, and so the lower-volume Linux version you want is not in stock / is un-available on-line. Clearly by the time you head to an interactive shop display, the expensive (paid-for) display space is unlikely to be used for a little-known Linux variant of the hardware. So, all in all it's usually far easier to buy the device with Windows installed, and image it. Potentially there is a market for OS vendors to sell device-specific to-customer desktop O/S support but the transaction costs are likely to be high and the market small.

Zero can be much too expensive

The cost of supporting shipped hardware can be rather a large proportion of an OEM's expenses. That's particularly so if you image tens of thousands of machines with some crippling issue, or ship an update that breaks updating, or - any of the other software horrors you can imagine loaded on top of the inevitable hardware problems. I recall well being told by a nameless support technician to hold down 'QWER' while powering on a dead machine, not for some obscure BIOS feature - but to help re-seat the loose CPU immediately underneath the keyboard.

Perhaps here is somewhere we could excel - having ultra-robust, translated, cross-distro standardised recovery, re-imaging, disk repair, hardware diagnostics, incident reporting, built-in help-desk agents - which combined with relative virus-freeness could reduce consumer support costs. Re-installing windows is currently a routine lifestyle-choice for some people, nevertheless it is somehow a familiar and re-assuring experience - not something you send your netbook back for: just re-install. My hope is that the base-system consolidation around systemd might bring us some of this critical disaster recovery / re-imaging / rescue functionality in a standardized form.

Attractiveness to the Consumer

So perhaps the consumer is going to ride to the rescue, demand Free Software because it is better, and all will be well - the OEMs will respond to market pressure and produce what people want, and ISVs will respond to that.

If we build it, he will come

It is a nice dream. Clearly we want to make the best product possible for consumers. It is of course possible for an excellent product to spread virally by word of mouth, clever volunteer marketing, and more - but it is hard work. I often hear the idea that we just need to implement XYZ new feature, and people will flock to us. I'm always eager to see new features, but it seems to me that a feature-edge is rather a small part of the answer - we may well already be more secure, more manageable, more easy to upgrade, and lower cost: but unless consumers know about us - with the best will in the world, they can't choose us.

Making it easy to buy

Absent a near infinite supply of enthusiastic local hacker-types to install and maintain Free Software for everyone, your average consumer needs the ability to buy it. Unfortunately, the economics of encouraging high-street shops to position, and advertise it are punitive - a game for the very rich, and the results are not uniformly ideal - cf. Nokia's expensive Lumia displays in every mobile store window in the UK, and the resulting trivial market share. Potentially in an Amazon / web-purchasing world people can buy "one just like my mate has" without going into a shop, possibly media hype and brand loyalty can make people buy expensive new products on-line that they've never physically seen. On the other hand the experience of the rather cool Litl product - is not too encouraging.

Economies of scale in retail often lead to a few, large high-street vendors - whose appetite for across-the-board risk and experimentation with new software/hardware combinations is low.

Revolutionary technology improvement

There are two types of people: those who don't like to learn new things, and what was the other one ?. Persuading people to like change and new-ness is rather difficult - it seems to me, that the more humdrum and non-novel a product is, the more attractive 'new-ness' is as a marketing feature: "new ultra-squeeze toothpaste" turns out to be just the same old stuff in the same old kind of tube. Conversely - "new - radically different approach to keyboard key layout - up to 5x more productive" already doesn't sound like a winner. Apparently some new technologies are just so usable that people are willing to invest their spare time in learning them - perhaps that, or their brands, constructed by expensive marketing, are so powerful that people buy before they try, and feel they ought to catch up with their friends later.

Questions around Consumer demand generation

Can we create and retain a feature edge vs. other operating systems (who will relentlessly copy our killer ideas) for long enough, that we can create a marketing story that reaches enough consumers to build significant demand ?

Can we mobilise, motivate and inspire enough (tech literate) early adopters to evangelise, support and unambiguosly advocate the Linux Desktop ? Can we simultaneously please enough innovators such that they love using the platform to get their tasks done and let us capture a significant proportion of the leading edge of the adoption curve ?

Instead of targetting immediate ubiquity, could we find, and focus on a series of consumer niches which we can grow to become the de-facto solution, in turn growing a community of developers to sustain that niche ? Are there intrinsic strengths of the Linux Desktop that would stop any killer apps moving to other, existing platforms to avoid migration pain ?

Tentative Conclusions

While I've been hacking on and/or using the Linux Desktop it has improved in an simply incredible fashion. It is hopeful that on it's current trajectory it will continue to improve, assuming we can continue to (mostly) avoid the duplication, pointless re-writing, and un-necessary re-invention that plagues Free Software. However from a consumer adoption point I draw these hesitant conclusions:

• There are clearly vast, assymetric, network-effect problems that a new-entrant into the desktop operating-system market faces. Arguably this is one reason why that no new entrant to the market proprietary or free has gained significant market share in the last decade+. The corpses of various different, well funded but failed attempts abound: BeOS, NeXT, OS/2, MeeGo Netbook etc.
• The economics of an excessively cheap product are a difficult fit for the consumer market, and drain money from the ecosystem necessary to invest in development. The relentless drive to a zero cost-point to gain market share in Linux Desktop pre-loading helps to further sterilize the space.
• x Free Software applications, and cloud service integration points are mobile - so the hope for a 'killer app' for linux is unrealistic. Conversely - working on great cross-platform Free-Software applications makes a fully-free system a much more viable prospect, not co-incidentally a great way you can contribute to that is to hack on LibreOffice, or perhaps Firefox / Webkit.
• Ease of use is a laudable goal, but building a rich ecosystem is even more wonderful. Since (in my view) all software should be Free Software, having mind-blowingly-sexy integration with for-pay / cloud hardware services at a desktop level might provide a less transient Linux specific feature edge.

Postscript - the Business user

So - perhaps focusing exclusively on the consumer desktop seems a bit depressing. It is interesting to consider instead the enterprise / business user. There are a number of factors here that make this a much more promising space, and one that I'd love to persuade more hackers to take seriously as they work. A note of self-interest, my employer SUSE happens to sell a fantastic Enterprise desktop SLED. A quick run-down of the salient differences are:

• Enterprises like a constrained / locked-down environment - so a limited set of software from ISVs that can be installed can be a feature-not-bug. Having said that, it is necessary to have the key ISV software - luckily many big ERP/CRM systems use the web anyway. So the ISV problem is much reduced.
• Enterprises typically purchase hardware in batches of at least dozens of new machines of a well controlled, specific type avoiding some of the hardware enablement nightmare. They also try to continue to buy identical / approved machines on an ongoing basis, that helps reduce their support cost - and OEMs provide less crazy component turnover in response.
• Enterprises also dislike their users being badgered by trial-ware, so they pay more for their hardware - and get it imaged in the factory, preferably with a complete set of the (few) applications that they expect to have in their standard install.
• Enterprises are fewer in number than consumers, have highly technically literate staff choosing technologies, have in-house support and hopefully do their own pre-deployment testing.

The net effect of the above is to make the economics far more favourable. Clearly there is still a co-marketing cliff of pain, the hardware manufacturers provide and debug windows drivers 'for free', etc. but the economics are much more tractable. So - what does a strategy for tackling business users look like ? What do business users care about that consumers tend to care less about ? I have a few thoughts, probably others have more:

• Security / Compliance / Encryption / Privacy - businesses like to not leak their critical customer data, relationship information, pricing, trade-secrets, and more. Easy to use auditing, multi-factor access control, encrypted disk, swap, VPN, Tor, DNS etc. are really useful features to businesses.
• Lock-down and remote management; it is no good giving people sexy features without giving an admin the ability to turn them off for almost everyone. Being able to do that centrally is really important, and having pretty tools to build and test policies is also key.
• Very few features: the more features there are, the more bugs and odd configuration options the user will find, enable and then mis-use to crank up support costs.
• Hetrogenous network integration - integrating well with existing policy and authentication mechanisms; eDirectory, Active Directory, LDAP is crucial. Ditto for server services: Exchange, Notes, Groupwise, instant messaging, remote windows share browsing. The same for kerberos authentication, single multi-factor sign-on, secure proxy support and more. All apparently un-sexy integration problems that are supposed to 'just work', but frequently bit-rot.
• Enterprise users like a smooth upgrade path, with well advertised technology deprecations, moving from one high-quality release to another (many refuse to deploy something new until after the first service-pack). They also think they dislike rapid upgrades: every two or three years is enough disruption for their users. For a potentially de-stabilising OS upgrade - Windows-XP's 10 year run is also appreciated.
• Enterprises also want primarily bug-fixes, optional new features, and no re-training costs. Naturally the combination of the need for bug fixes, new/improved features, no re-training cost, no regressions and a multi-year update lifecycle is somewhat toxic to innovation. However it is quite easy for the staff-time, trainer time, and opportunity cost of spending a day re-training each user to exceed the cost of the software itself. We need to justify that by increased productivity: can we persuade people that the upgrade will clearly save much more than a man-day in aggregate each year ? the endless TCO arguments get read by someone at least, and need considering during development. I sometimes hear the meme "no-one needs training to use a Mac" - a quick google for 'OSX training services' (43m hits), vs. 'Windows training services' - (226m hits) is superficially encouraging until you consider the relative market shares. If we care about business users, we need to care about wider cost, and have in-mind the materials / pretty cheat-sheets to help people migrate.

In my view the most hopeful strategy for the Linux Desktop is to make it ideal for an enterprise, while not crippling it for consumers and very early adopters. It is perhaps not glorious - enterprises care little for the bling that doesn't have a direct, unarguable business benefit - and bling is fun to hack on; but surely creating real value, that allows people to work more efficiently, reliably, and speedily has to be a satisfying thing to do as well.

[ This is a live-ish post, that I'll try to update, correct, and cross-link better over time. ]

• Up rather late - 10:15 - and Church starts at 10:30 - bother; luckily the babes had quietly dressed, eaten breakfast, and played happily ('it was boring when you're not around') downstairs.
• Bundled team Meeks into the car, and got there in time to help with the larger kids work. Caught up with people after the service, set off home.
• Lunch; out to Claire & Simon's party, babes spent ages wetting each other in the sun / garden in various creative ways - talked to a number of interesting folks. J. arrived back.
• Home, quick tea, put babes to bed, listened to a Gordon sermon on 1 Peter, sleep.

• Up early; J. leaving for Louise' Hen Party in Brighton. Made a picnic lunch for the babes, and set off to Thetford Forest; police closed the road just above fiveways, diverted to Lackford Lakes instead.
• Picnic lunch, mourned the lack of sisal in the car to build crazy structures with; played in the playground, wandered the park climbing helpful oak-trees whose lower bows have not been removed by the health and safety executive - fun.
• Back; babes watched The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, E. out to play with Sophie, while I worked. Heated the fine lasagne from J. fed the babes, put them to bed, read a full round of stories. Back to work until late - enjoyed Citizen Kahn & Dr. Who - sleep.

• Up early; mail chew, sync. with Ciaran, poked a nasty impress undo bug, discovering some rather quite exciting code in svx at the same time in need of re-writing.
• I love feedback;

  Please consider newbies. In LaTeX you say \documentclass{book}, and ...

  . Setup a freedesktop account, lunch with J.
• More hackery, auditing, admin - dinner, helped J. out with some bits.

• Up early; more mail and some writing; set off some builds, updated server to OpenSUSE 12.2 using zypper dup - bit annoying to manually tweak all the repos.
• Lunch with J. after her first partial day. Team meeting, ESC meeting. Poked at the Android / Bionic linker - looks like bumping a 128 to a 256 and a bit of a re-compile there would be good. Shame the linker is missing the gnu hash style optimisation.
• Pizza for dinner, read babes stories, J. out - back to work for a bit, misc. calls, unwound some un-answered questions on the list.

• Up early; various sync. calls, more mail chew, board call, more mail catchup. E's 1st day at school, and others first day with new teachers, changed classes - lots of tired people in the evening.

• Up early; J. off to her first (Baker) day at work at the kids' school, other larger three babes playing happily downstairs. Started to haul down the mail, and filter it. Quick sync. with Kendy, triaged mail, if you havn't had a response yet - it's really not personal.

• Up early, cleaned the centre until it shone; packed the cars and set off for Raglan castle. Had a picnic lunch there, enjoyed the sunshine, admired the fantastic ruins; now with masonry being restored in places by Cadw; climbed lots of spiral stairs etc.
• Back for a typical M50/M5/M42 driving experience - having to avoid the road by going through lots of smaller nearby roads; stopped for fish & chips at Kettering, home reasonably early - put babes to bed. Good to be home.
• Got the new BT (unlimited) 'unlimited' internet connection setup, improved 16MBit down and 1Mbit up - more money, but apparently a 'truly unlimited' connection; as opposed to the disingenuous Talk Talk product.

• Up lateish, off to an entirely re-built Church in Brecon - an interesting place; cheerful preacher. Back for a roast lunch, out for the traditional circular walk around a nearby green lane. Back for some abhortive badmington practise, Bambi on DVD, tea, put babes to bed with a Just William story, before a final firework or two. Tidied up the house.

• Made sandwiches, Mother rather bitten; off to the saddle-point above Llangorse - just us. H. helped open a gate, but the other remembered and promised gates that needed opening didn't materialise; annoying. Helped push a pair of para-gliders' car out of the mud; parked carefully ourselves.
• Set off up the hill, lunch at the top on the lee side. Lots of para-gliders taking off, a beautiful day. Wandered across the top, added some stones to a cairn. Back to the car, and drove down to Llangorse lake for some rowing-against-the-wind fun, broke the bank with an expensive round of ice-creams.
• Back home, sat on the car-park creating chalk drawings on the pavement - read the start of a Sherlock Holmes story to the babes to get them into crime fiction. Dinner, bedtime stories, up late talking to the parents about the YHA governance of yore.

• Up early, parents out at a kindly local Farmer's. Set off to visit The Big Pit with Father and four small girls. Lots of fun emulating the 'works underground with a lamp in his hat' - interesting displays, rusting pit-props etc. Lots of coal mining history, hard for babes to understand working 12 to 14 hours per day, or working from six years old in the dark, with no holiday for your whole life.
• Drove back, watched The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, with dinner in the middle, up late.

• Up lateish, packed lunch - out to the Elan valley to admire the various dams, enjoyed the visitors centre, and the Mansergh heritage variously. Lunch in the playground nearby. Up the valley to see another dam - this one over-topping beautifully - unusual: the wettest drought since records began. Good to see 15 days worth of water for Birmingham in the wet. Did the mental arithmetic for a pumped power storage scheme here, 120m drop, lots of water, and an easy-ish route to lay a 2m diameter pipe - sadly order 100's of MW and recovery it seems.
• Back to another stream to dam it ourselves with Naomi, Elizabeth and Grandad. Much fun. Back to meet Barbara and her daughter - a succeeding (thus far) Mastermind contestant who had helped buy the study centre when it was setup.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, watched Ladies in Lavendar - an extraordinarily odd film.

• Up lateish; Miriam's birthday - breakfast and present opening. Slugged and played with the babes, got a new mp3 player charged. Played rush-hour with E.
• Out into Brecon to dump lots of bits of rubbish and detritus that won't be used now.
• Lunch, off to swim in Brecon, much fun had trying to get the oldest three to the bottom of the 3.5m deep-end. Sadly the high diving boards are no more in the modern health-and-safety era.
• On to watch 'Brave' at the cinema, quite fun. Back for a curry and birthday-cake; put babes to bed.

• Up late; sandwich making, and out to the Tal-y-bont reservoir, walked over and admired the dam, apparently the Elan versions were designed by David Mansergh's Grandfather. On to climb along a fine river going up Pen-y-fan, spent a good while damning first one stream; then lunch, then another. Admired some waterfalls, forded the stream, much fun. Fed the babes and put them to bed. Dropped down by Father to the Griffin Inn with J. for a fine meal - lovely time together, and walked back under the stars.

• Up earlyish, out to the Dan-y-rogof caves with Rob & Ilona. Enjoyed the caves variously, the Cathedral particularly impressive. Sandwich lunch, admired the heavy horses, and a fine play-barn. Bid 'bye to R & I. Continued to play a bit. Home via Brecon to get some shopping. Babes watched 'Up' while I had a conference-call. Fed & put them to bed. Slugged variously.

• Lie-in, tried to follow the parents to Masseyronen but ended up in Hay on Wye instead; found a church there starting at 11. Back for lunch with the family. Out to Erwood for a fine walk up a hill in the bracken. Surprised lots of quizical looking sheep, picked and ate bilberries, practised skimming flat stones in a convenient lake, and more. Back to the centre, ate dinner put babes to bed. Up late talking with Ilona, Robert & family.

• Up earlish, slugged around until late. Good to see Robert & Ilona who arrived in the night. Out to the Brecon Beacons Mountain Centre. Helped out dry-stone-walling, admired various bits on sale, saw some tents, bought the wrong collapsible chair by mistake, got fleeced for some olives. Watched a long movie about the area.
• Back, via Brecon and slugged - set too on a 3D holographic jigsaw puzzle. Spag-bog dinner, put babes to bed - read Just William to them, chatted with the family

• Up earlyish, packed the car, and set off to Wales. Drove at some length; stopped off in Rugby to see Chris Halls of Credativ - good to catch up with him and see his business.
• On for a longish drive through lots of single lane roads into the Brecon Beacons to Boughrood. Unpacked, lots of excitement from small people. Caught up with the parents, bed.

• Up rather early; quick breakfast, chewed mail, wrote mail; reviewed misc. patches - nice to see the 3.6.x fixes flowing in variously. Call with Noel, lunch. Team call, ESC call, Vojtech's staff, sync with Kendy.

• Up lateish; chewed mail, call with Vojtech, lunch. More mail and admin chew; knocked up a LXF column. Called Talk Talk business to get a MAC code to move to BT - who (it appears) offer a truly unlimited 'unlimited' internet connection instead of a limited 'unlimited' internet connection (I -hate- that). Got an instant offer to more than halve my monthly fee to UKP10/month (incl. static IP) - went for the more ethically advertised product instead.
• More administration, TDF board call, dinner, put babes to bed, back for more mail. Worked late.

• Chewed mail; reviewed patches, submitted talks for the LibreOffice Conference, built ESC bug stats, lunch. More mail chew. Discovered LCA and FOSDEM overlap - not such good news.
• Filed expenses, filled out Andrzej's nice Android / remote GSOC project. More plugging away at cleaning loose ends up. J. and babes back from Suzie's. Lydia over for dinner, and study with Dave in the evening.

• Up early; J. left to her sister's with the babes. Mail chew, poked at a callgrind profile wrt. auto-correction a little. Chat with Mark, more mail thrash - how is there so much of it ?
• Pleased to see Miklos' nice blog on range comments (with pictures), thanks to the OSBA. Worked late.

• Up earlyish, again woken by E. and M. in concert; breakfast, off to NCC played the violin family service; pleased to see Clara's Rise Up Youth Teen stories which are interesting.
• On to the race-cource to wander; made a rope-swing with mixed success - no-one significantly injured.
• Back for lunch, sunned ourselves in the garden & relaxed variously with David who sadly left mid-afternoon. Got babes fed, and to bed, sleep early.

• Woken by a knocking E. in some dispute with M. oh dear. Slugged variously until David arrived, caught up, lunch. Managed somehow to manually inflate the paddling pool, and spent a while playing in the sun with the babes - David getting rather wet.
• Mary Rogers over for a cup of tea, got a barbeque going, lazed in the sun & caught up with David happily while the babes squared their eyes. Dinner, put babes to bed, J. not feeling great, talked until late.

• Up early, mail chewage, administration, calls, a tedious day of non-hacking.

• Chewed mail, bit of patch review, some analysis work, wrote notes, lunch.
• Team call, pleased to see Tor's use of some more (kindly donated) Bytemarkhardware to get Android (X86 and ARM) tinderboxen setup and building. Hopefully we can get them up-loading debugging APKs in a bit.
• ESC call, wrestled with BCD's awful (compared to kayak) travel booking tool variously to book LibreOffice Conference flights. Plagued by errors, and system failures trying to book a return leg; eventually got it.
• Pleased by Ecuador's plucky stance against the incomprehensible gormlessness of the Swedish prosecution. If you want to question the man, go and question him ! in an age of telecommunications, there is simply no need to extradite someone to talk to them. Perhaps we should start a whip-round for the apparently penniless Swedish prosecutors to buy them a plane ticket to get them to London. Cost of one-day round-trip booked today, for tomorrow: UKP 200 - inexplicably lame.

• Up; read mail. Excited to see gcc switching to a more modern language for compiler development; hopefully that will over time not only improve the generated C++ binary output, but also hopefully as a side-effect of re-writing de-foul the horrendous type-unsafe tree tangle in the core. Not being a language-bigot I have no stake in any C vs. C++ wars, it is possible to write clean, readable, maintainable code in both - however the gcc core really needs a big cleanup - and if this is the trigger: I'm excited; go gcc !
• A fair bit of feedback on NEEDINFO bugs that got automatically closed, (sadly in error) multiple times; thanks to all the kind folk who pointed out that the lack of response was nothing much to do with the bug and re-opened real, live issues vs. a recent release: we rely on bug reporters keeping their bugs up-to-date. The reason some of our earliest bugs were in NEEDINFO anyway was a proxy for UNCONFIRMED - a state to which it is (apparently) impossible to return unless you have direct DB access, thanks for your patience; if a bug is still live please just re-open it - and yes, getting involved with LibreOffice QA is a great thing to do to help out.
• Chewed more mail, reviewed patches, responded to bug traffic, turned a number of bugs into easy hacks by adding code pointers. Sent out lots of individual reminders about the canonical git repository moving under gerrit's control.
• Chat with an old friend; dinner, put babes to bed, processed some administration; off for the evening.

• Up early; read mail - most encourage to see Noel Grandin finally finish the move away from the horror/legacy tools pseudo-templates to STL. Wonderful work. There are a few more type-unsafe 'List' and 'Container' class places to remove, but it's really good to see this done: thank you Noel, and Michael Stahl (who did lots of the review). Hopefully, this should allow us to get the unused code list finally down to a real zero, and to keep it there.
• I'm always somewhat curious as to why the canonical Lena image, which has an unfortunate back-story hasn't aroused the massed ire of geek-feminism crew; it seems like a worthy target.
• David wrote a nice blog about how gerrit can help improve our checkin flow here. Bruce, Anne & Sandy over for lunch. Plugged away at an annoying PDF generation issue / workaround for a broken printer for Davidé.
• Built ESC agenda and bug stats: looking good, despite the release. Read the fascinating Gartner Mobile analysis.

• Up early, chewed mail, call with Kendy, then with Marie. Poked at patches, noticed I'd pushed the gstreamer 1.0 work to master by mistake already; sent some notes out on that. Some stat crunching. Babes out for dinner.
• Pleased to see Marco Cecchetti get his freedesktop user space sorted out so it's easy to enjoy his great work on SVG slide export, checkout some svg with lots more samples available.

• Breakfast with & bid 'bye to Georgina, Stephanie & Isabelle. Off to NCC, Helen spoke on wine from water. Back for a re-heated barbequeue lunch. Slugged and read variously, helped E. with her cycling / balancing. Babes watched Polyanna, trampoline action, tea, put everyone to bed; bed early.

• Up earlyish, poor Georgina not slept much; Georgina got some barbeque bits setup, and out into Cambridge for punting, good fun had by all. Lunch on the meadows by the mill, an ice-cream. Park and ride home.
• Barbeque in the sun, lots of fun. Bathed and put babes to bed. Watched the Italian Job with G & S, - mini lovers bed.

• Up early; day off - off to Wicksteed Park with lots of excited babies. Arrived, payed an exhorbitant amount for wrist-bands, and enjoyed an intense day of roller-coasting, pirate-ship riding and more. Met up with Georgina, Stephanie & Isabelle.
• Fish & Chips, then home. Good to catch up with Georgina and her company Pleasetech doing some (proprietary software) for review & co-authoring fun cartoons to explain the problem.

• Up early; dug at mail, three eldest babes all off to a science day out. Plugged away at gstreamer 1.0 issues, interesting problems trying to make catch throw or b __cxa_throw do my bidding; most odd.
• Team meeting, ESC call, Vojtech's staff call, chat with Caolan, more misc. hackery, Android build-ary, and GStreamer integration.

• Up early, chewed mail, poked at a new cppu::WeakObject lifecycle hack / cleanup I have planned. Wrote an update on what I could remember about LibreOffice 3.6 behind-the-scenes. Created a templates git repository for all the nice new templates the design guys are working on.
• J. and babes out for lunch, adminery, lunch; poked at bugs. Dunged out a swathe of obsolete / already merged feature branches in git. Board call. Plugged at GStreamer 1.0 support, seemingly working reasonably well (for the legacy 0.10 support) with a new from-clean master build, interesting.

a

Today we released 3.6.0, checkout the new feature summary and release notes. As always a lot more has happened under the hood than can easily be addressed in the features page; so here are some of the behind-the-scenes bits and some of the unsung heros doing the vital, but more hard-to-see work.

Improving extension registration

For this release we introduced new code to improve the way extensions (and built-in components) are registered and looked up. This dungs out a very old and unpleasant piece of the UNO core, replacing it with a rather simpler and cleaner version that performs better - casual callgrind profiling shows some nice wins here.

Unfortunately, for one reason and another, despite a delay for a fourth release candidate, there are still some circumstances where an upgrade will not re-register some built-in extensions, and silently exit on first launch (just re-run it). On the down-side that can affect spell-checking dictionaries, and (for some) on the up-side disables Auto-COrrection too. This is already fixed for 3.6.1, due in three weeks, and can easily be worked around by removing the extensions/ directory from your user-profile (which will then be re-generated). Better than that as this has been fixed Stephan Bergmann has further dunged out the registration / upgrade code to stop this recurring.

The ESC decided to sticking to our release discipline and cadence to underline the importance of early QA and bug fixing. I'd love to see more people running our daily dev-builds of master and reporting bugs much higher up the food chain, and building good relationships with the grateful developers who just created them. See here for a list of other annoying issues in 3.6.0.

Upgrading the code: dead code

In other areas we've made improvements that are hard to see; one of these is eliminating dead code; here's how we're doing at that: unused methods vs. time - lower is better.

As you can see the task is ~nearly done. The remaining bits are particularly hard and involve finally completing the re-write away from the legacy, non-standard macro-generated template-alikes, to use modern C++ STL templates, that are far more accessible. Many thanks in particular to Noel Grandin for his ongoing work there in this release, and Michael Stahl for reviewing lots of patches, and Caolan McNamara for building the dead-code detection infrastructure.

Upgrading the code: German comments

The ongoing charge to translate our remaining German comments continues to bear fruit. We're around 50% done here - down to around 25k lines (as detected by Miklos' nice bin/find-german-comments script).

With many thanks for this release to Luc Castermans, Philipp Riemer, Julien Nabet, Tomaž Vajngerl, Jesso Clarence – Murugan, Florian Reisinger, Sebastian Spaeth, Philipp Weissenbacher and several others. One of our (encouraging) problems is that comment translators tend to get hooked on code cleanup, and move off to do ever more substantial fixes elsewhere - so it's a great way to get involved in LibreOffice: not unlike the typing-in of BBC BASIC games that got me into code syntax; if you can understand German, you can help out here - but please don't send automated translations, we're eager to have the highest quality.

Upgrading the code: fixing the make system

One profound unpleasantness of the OO.o legacy was the custom version of the unusual 'dmake' required to reliably build the code. Some heroic hackers have been taking on the work Bjoern started at Oracle to convert to using GNU make instead. One benefit of this is exposing massive build parallelism - we now have a global view of dependencies for nearly all of our internal code in one GNU make process allowing an incredible degree of parallelism - thousands wide at times: so if you want to actively stress-test your 1024 CPU machine, we can help you.

Many thanks to David Tardon, Matúš Kukan, David Ostrovsky, Peter Foley, Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer and more for working hard at this; and many others for detecting, filing and fixing any associated bugs. It is encouraging to see David's latest test branch to complete the UNO Runtime Environment migration, nailing the last set of problems before tackling the final chunk of 'external' modules - the around 80 bits of source we download, patch, build and distribute (mostly to enable Windows builds). Hopefully we'll be fully dmake-free in six months time.

Upgrading the code: unit tests

One of the most exciting things that has been ongoing in LibreOffice up to 3.6 is the growth in unit tests. In contrast to the various unreliable automated tests that were present before, these are run very regularly. Some we run on every module build (ie. just building calc), and yet more we run on straight-through builds. We aim to spend some small proportion of our compile-time say under 5% building and executing these as widely as possible:

Many thanks to Markus Mohrhard, Artur Dorda, Daniel Bankston, Kohei Yoshida, Miklos Vjana, Caolan McNamara, Michael Stahl, and many more - who got tired of endlessly re-fixing the same sorts of bug, and did something permanent about it by writing small, fast, reliable unit tests. This is a great job to get stuck into - we have code lying around that could be turned into nice unit tests, and it would be great to have more people involved in that work.

Faster, more readable code

Another thing that can't be seen are the very long overdue improvements in our basic String classes. Traditionally we've had four string classes where one would be best - heroically Caolan McNamara finally killed the ByteString class in 3.6, leaving only three. With perhaps a greater impact Lubos Lunak spearheaded a fantastic improvement in good-taste-based-coding with some tweaks to our OUString class, used almost everywhere. You can see the improvement in this pseudo diff based on real changes:

-    if ( aFlavor.MimeType.indexOf( ::rtl::OUString(RTL_CONSTASCII_USTRINGPARAM( ";Aspect=THUMBNAIL" )) ) != -1 )
-        xPropSet->setPropertyValue(::rtl::OUString(RTL_CONSTASCII_USTRINGPARAM("HelpText")), aAny);
+    if ( aFlavor.MimeType.indexOf( ";Aspect=THUMBNAIL" ) != -1 )
+        xPropSet->setPropertyValue("HelpText", aAny);

This sort of change is repeated many, many times. Interestingly in many cases these make the code not only far more readable, but also produce smaller, faster code by avoiding intermediate allocations of strings; a great improvement. Lubos also has some interesting clang plugin in progress to automatically generate this sort of semantic code upgrade. Using that is naturally blocked by completing the on-going re-basing on the Apache licensed version of LibreOffice.

Cross-compiling code

Other major improvements in 3.6 are the ability to do cross-compiles of LibreOffice - Tor Lillqvist did a lot of work here, initially focused on ensuring that the MingW cross-compile for Windows from Linux worked well. This can be run on very fast hardware as a tinderbox to ensure that master remains buildable always. That work has expanded into cross-compilation to Android and iOS both of which continue to develop and improve in master. At the same time Eilidh McAdam for Lanedo has done some great work at cross-compiling .msi files from Linux, re-using wine code - to improve that install flow and move us towards fully Free Software tooling.

Better builds out of the box

Another nice improvement is the growth of big-machine tinderboxes to ensure that we keep master in a buildable state on many platforms at all times. You can checkout the latest build status. With many thanks to Norbert Thiebaud for his time and CPU horsepower donations, and to ByteMark for their generous donation of a very substantial machine for native Win32 building that really helps.

Easier code contribution

Yet another ongoing initiative, is that of improving our code submission process - Bjoern Michaelsen, Norbert Thiebaud, Robert Einsle, David Ostrovsky and others have been working hard to get Gerrit (an automated code submission system) setup. This lets you convert your OpenId account to git push access to a review branch without any interactions, it also has a fine code review flow for submitted patches, and makes including cherry-picking patches, and providing feedback much easier. We plan to migrate our main repository to this shortly, leaving freedesktop as a read-only mirror.

Conclusions

Well, there is much more to say - so many people have done such a lot of work to make 3.6 better; the QA team has been doing a fantastic job triaging incoming bugs and raising their priority / flagging them as Most Annoying - we couldn't work effectively without you guys. The design team have done some really excellent work in 3.6 as well, overall it's an exciting time for LibreOffice. I hope I've given you a snapshot of some of the things you can't easily see in the 3.6 release - of course, there are also a ton of things you really can see that are visible on our 3.6 new features page - I commend that to you; thanks to Marc Paré for pulling that together.

If you want to get involved in LibreOffice, there has never been a better time, there are more people spun-up to help mentor, we continue to grow our developer base, and there are still plenty of easy hacks to ease you into the code - we'd love to hear from you.

• Big cooked breakfast with K & J, fun. Met Tim Chapman, prayed them off briefly; out to the dentists. A certain amount of drilling later, discovered that, indeed the root in question is cracked, hmm.
• Back, to work for another half-day. Built ESC minutes. Patch review, poked at liblang. Finished early, walked up the heath with the babes and attempted to fly a kite in rather little wind. Home, tea, put babes to bed, Dave over for study - good to catch up.

• Up early, half a day of work - chewed mail, pushed Android, chart merging, and ahunt's GSOC work to master (kindly fixed up by Michael Stahl later). Wrote status report, blog bits etc.
• James & Kate arrived for lunch, had a really lovely afternoon, and evening with them - catching up with where they're at - profoundly enjoyable, up rather late.

• Up late, rush for Church, short service - Dami over for lunch, nice to see her. Encouraged E. into doing some rather impressive cycling runs. Sat in the sun supervising extended archery heats in the road between 4x small girls - interestingly archery (with a shocking plastic bow) is an amazingly age / ability leveler.

• Up lateish; set-too dismantling the PVC french-windows locking mechanism, which appears to have become increasingly hard to lock/unlock. An interesting, reasonably simple mechanism apparently installed incorrectly causing the locking action not to fully engage; silicone lubricant everywhere, hack-saw surgery on mis-placed bits of metal, re-assembly between downpours & a working back-door again.
• J. out with M. out for complimentary underwater photos, lunch. Got E. out in the road on her bike, eventually after a quite staggering amount of spurious complaining she got the general idea of steering to balance, phew.
• Hacked a little on Android-ness chasing down another random exception problem. Got hooked on "White Van Man" on iPlayer, sadly rather profane.

• Up lateish; to work, mail chew. Cleaned up some android / ant rule sharing to reduce duplication, killed Makefile cut/paste problems. Installed android-ndk-r8, which randomly moves more paths around, fixed the breakage from that; finally got gdbserver working on Intel / Android.
• Plugged through a few exceptions, added a few missing libraries, and suddenly - the LibreOffice viewer on Android/Intel is working really slickly, and with far less pain than the ARM port. It also starts in the emulator in ~two seconds - but I suspect that it's cheating just a bit to take advantage of the 3.4Ghz host CPU with 8Mb of L2 cache and everything coming from RAM. Back for more prep, Android & LibreOffice on-line talk: Merged the chart libraries together to try to get under the DSO limit.

• More mail thrash, back to some analytics.
• Pleased that after two years of persecution under a 'hate speech' statute Paul Chambers has been vindicated for telling a joke. The substantial public cost, stress etc. apparently caused because of a poorly drafted law and it's enforcement by the lower court. In their ruling the justices noted that:

  The 2003 Act did not create some newly minted interference with the first of President Roosevelt's essential freedoms - freedom of speech and expression. Satirical, or iconoclastic, or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humour, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it should and no doubt will continue at their customary level, quite undiminished by this legislation. Given the submissions by Mr Cooper, we should perhaps add that for those who have the inclination to use "Twitter" for the purpose, Shakespeare can be quoted unbowdlerised, and with Edgar, at the end of King Lear, they are free to speak not what they ought to say, but what they feel.

  Perhaps interesting for people who like to defend the continuation of much more poorly drafted rules on the basis that they are enforced by reasonable people. It is a great shame such freedoms are widely under threat in private conversation at free-software conferences.
• Lunch, Vicki & family over. Team meeting, ESC meeting. Had a go at editing the geekfeminism wiki. Put babes to bed, read stories. Dinner with Lydia, back to half work, half watch the Olympic opening ceremony - some pleasing hymnody and choreography on display.
• Is it just me or are Captchas getting more clever than I am ? I routinely fail to identify them first time for some reason.

• Up early, started to chew through an epic mail / task backlog. Reviewed patches, poked at python bits for Xisco. Really pleased to see Tollef's work on the sexy "Possible duplicates" work for bugs.freedesktop.org, hopefully will help reduce the QA team's load.
• Call with Vojtech, lunch; build ESC bug stats. Submitted a paper. Dinner, back to work, bed.

• Up rather late; pottered around, lunch. Out swimming to the pirate pool in Bury St.Edmonds, lots of fun with the girls. Back for a fine dinner, sermon in the evening, bed but no sleep.

• Breakfast, talked with the Intel folks, taxi to the airport; dug through mail on the flight, poked at gstreamer-ness a little more, some amazing things going on in hit testing there.
• Train, train, train home - more coding bits. Good to see the family again, lots of excited little girls. Put them to bed, dinner, sleep.

• Up early; more slideware prep, bus to the venue, more hackery. Got various bits working - discovered it is indeed Federico's birthday: apparently his calendar still works as expected.
• I'd love to have some hints as to who it was that tried to grab me just before my talk about finding and killing dead code in GNOME, please mail me, I'd love to talk.
• Gave a talk on LibreOffice and GNOME integration, with some misc. status updates around what is going on in development right now:
• Enjoyed the history talk, had lunch with Andreas; enjoyed the lightning talks about lots of cool new things happening, fell asleep by mistake.
• Caught up with Will & Rob, Tim and hacked on GStreamer 1.0 support, all that dynamic system adaption / detection is always fun. Off into town for dinner with a group of happy Collaborans. Back to Rialta for drinks with may other hackers & friends, traditional game of Napoleon with Jonathan, Rosanne, and j5 - fun. Sang happy birthday for Federico, bed rather late.

• Up late; off to the conference, more catching up with people left and right. Quested for someone with Android skills, before discovering the new compile problem is down to an updated sdk that needs clobbering a different way; it'd be nice if it was not necessary to copy/paste some chunk of ant-ness to override asset compression.
• Beer & fine cheese with Federico, Dave, Jonathan & Rosanne. Out on the bus to the tower, wandered the beaches, found a nice restaurant, much fun. On to the party later to catch up with John. Back rather late. Continued trying to debug the android-x86-ness and started on slides in earnest. Bed extremely late.

• Woken by the wife calling; lovely to speak to her - lots of holiday fun happening with the babes. Bus to the conference, caught Cosimo's Documents talk, fixed the android build there. Lunch, hacked on LibreOffice's gtk3 support with Cosimo for a bit - nailed a few nasty theming / re-rendering alpha issues - looking rather better.
• Enjoyed Rob Bradford's Wayland talk, and seeing gnome-shell on Wayland in Rob/Neil's. Back to the hotel and spent the evening with Agustin & Scott.

• Up early, bus to the conference. Enjoyed Jacob's Tor talk, sculled around catching up with people variously. Lunch with Guy, Jacob, Karen and more. Caught up with Lionel / Lanedo and Lennart. Out for some tapas with Rob, Stef & Lennart before the cocktail party. Back, and discussed the industry until late with Andreas.

• Up rather earlier than necessary; breakfast, back to bed. Out in taxis to Igalia's pretty office. GNOME Advisory Board meeting for much of the morning. Out for lunch together, then back for more meetings. Pre-registration party, up until extremely late talking to and catching up with many friends.

• Up early; packed, got babes packed up, quick mail chew, build ESC bug stats, checked LXF column, set off by train to Heathrow.
• Missed much of the mailing list thrash & excitement of public triple review / nailing of the last blockers for 3.6.0 - to allow rc3 to get tagged & pushed.
• Great to see Las Palmas (exemplary GUADEC hosts of 2009) moving to LibreOffice. Amused by the interesting Skype Upgrades research courtesy of theregister.
• Hacked on slideware and demo pieces in the plane; some progress, arrived at La Coruna, shared a taxi with Germán Póo-Caamaño to the hotel; caught up with the assembled masses, out for a dinner until very late.

• Off to the dentists to pick up a new, harder mouth-guard apparently one that is harder to grind in half. Chewed mail instead of own teeth for a while.
• Misc. release time panicing about bugs variously, lots of patch review, chased the Mac accessibility related crasher. Pleased to read Kohei's nice post about the ongoing calc data structure re-work. Wrote weekly status report.
• More mail & task unwinding. Wrote LinuxFormat column on LibreOffice 3.6. Slugged with J. sadly our evening out postponed by lack of a baby-sitter.

• Up lateish; H's birthday - more present unwrapping action; good to see a little person happy with her gifts. Off to NCC, helped out with the creche; hopefully nearing the end of a creche era. Back
• Roast lunch; watched last Line of Duty - somewhat grisly, while babes watched a Narnia DVD. Out into the road to try to teach E. to ride her bicycle - much improved steering action; good.
• Tea, slugging; sermon on 1 Chronicles from All-Souls.

• J's birthday, up earlyish - banner construction with H. N and M. Tea in bed, breakfast & present un-wrapping. Fun.
• Packed everyone into the car, popped into the estate agent's to ammend a contract; bought some bread & off to Colchester for a feast of live gladiation (with real fake blood), Roman pot-making, chariot racing, over-fiftys-acting, and more; fun.
• Back later, tea, put babes to bed. Somehow hooked with J. to the Line of Duty series on iPlayer, up late.

• Up early, dropped babes to school and J. for a run. Mail chew, design review and code-reading with Kendy much of the morning and early afternoon.
• Tried to chase-down a Mac a11y bug by poking at a similar Linux issue: which is not there, pleasing at one level.

• Up later; mail chew; bug triage 3.6.0 looking in good shape. Lunch. Team meeting, ESC call, Vojtech's staff. Misc. patch review and merging for 3.6.0.
• Great to see Fridrich porting away from the Mozilla ldap code, and work from David O. to parse the (rather simple) Thunderbird addressbook database. With a bit more work: certificate management, Outlook integration, perhaps we can finally kill the big copy of mozilla we build and distribute.
• Nice to see the H-Open's take on the Open Source Business Alliance's investment in improving LibreOffice, an encouraging way to aggregate and apply funding from multiple sources to improve Free Software for everyone; thanks for some great work.
• Out to Falmouth St. to unscrew some shelves for J's wall painting, and replace a few lights.

• To work early, chewed mail, catch-up with Vojtech. Misc. patch review, read some of Andrzej's code, some VCL re-factoring bits, and continued the re-basing slog. Call with Alan, chat with Thorsten, dinner, back to work, inadvertently missed cell group.

• Mail chew; worked away at re-basing, included Jurgen's ucpp re-work of idlc, cleaned some manic perl / drawshape XML parsing used to generate docx vml shape tables.
• Naomi & Grace Brighty over for a sleep-over in the evening.

• Up early, mail chew, patch review, more mail. Wrote status report, poked into a number of Mac accessibility related stack traces. Lunch. Fixed a presenter view silly.
• Poked at x86 Android cross-compilation. Call with Kendy, returned from holiday. Dinner, worked late digging into code history.
• Followed the Microsoft Office 2013 announcement; mildly pleased that they also have problems articulating the scattered new features they have. Further pleased that one of their marquee features is PDF import - you saw it in LibreOffice first. I wonder if they've got to Hybrid PDFs yet (embedding the original ODF inside PDFs). Also interesting is the abandonment of Windows XP - true it's only 25% of the PC market, but we continue to build LibreOffice for Mac and Linux which together are less than that. Of course, we've still got a lot of work to do to overtake on feature / function / performance across the board, but it's a good race to run.

• Up late; out to NCC with Charlotte, helped in the creche; home for a fine lunch; lazed variously. Watched Chariots of Fire with the babes, dinner, bed early.

• Up lateish; breakfast, out to a music group practise that was cancelled, stocked up on light-bulbs instead; home for a quick lunch; out to fit them. On to a kids, orchestral extraveganza in the Memorial Hall.
• Back to prepare for H's party; kids arrived, painted nails, fed, entertained people variously; watched The Italian Job with the bigger girls; Charlotte sleeping over with H. Tried to get them to sleep.

• Up early, bit groggy; Andrzej over to cheer me up - good progress on his Android slideshow remote, planned out the next weeks. Lunch. Bug triage and digging variously.
• Installed the nice x86 Atom version of ice-cream sandwich, installed the kvm package modprobe kvm-intel no idea why that is not there automagically; and bingo - an ultra-fast Android emulator: wow, really nice - I wonder if it is faster than the real devices though; perhaps a risk there. You have to download/upgrade the latest SDK package and re-load the SDK/android tool in order to see the x86 profile.
• Call with Fridrich, Cedric & Andrzej & bid 'bye to him. Dinner, bit more work after that.
• Got stuck into The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes to complement Guns, Germs & Steel, interesting.

• Chewed mail, poked at code, horror cold coming on; Lunch. Team meeting, ESC call, poked at Android remote-control build builds. sync with ahunt on IRC. Hideous toothache in the evening, medicated sleep.

• Poked mail, reviewed reports. Extended the parallelism reduction for linking - it turns out that being able to link dozens of libraries at the same time on the local machine is a mixed blessing. For icecream we want to compile tens of modules wide - since much of the compilation is done elsewhere, yet for linking - serialisation (particularly with debug symbols) is mandatory to avoid running out of virtual memory / swap etc. More work needed here.
• Andrejz arrived narrowly missing some rather substantial delivery of rain. Dinner, out to cell group in the evening.

• Mail processing; visited the dentist, who once again spent his time persuading me not to have any treatment - interesting; new gum-shield. Back for more mail, sync with Thorsten. Out to have lunch with E. on her first trial day at school (starting next term).
• Misc. patch review, building; upgraded hardware in my many-CPU build machine. Built ESC bug stats. Dinner with Lydia, Janice & J. Back to work, caught up with David O.

• Up early; chewed mail - pleased to see Markus doing a new cppunit release after so long.
• Andrezj Hunt arrived, and started to check-in some smartphone remote control related pieces, good to see him. Switched to Google DNS "Talk Talk" appear to not like to resolve names reliably or in a timely way.
• More mail chew, bit of a deluge of gerrit mail. Lunch. Wrote status report, helped Andrezj debug various bits - somehow his machine performs appallingly despite being well endowed with RAM and CPU, odd.
• Dinner, J. with a PCC meeting, back to catch up on my work; Lydia dropped in until late.

• Breakfast, out to NCC, Ben & Miriam visiting - good to see them, spoke on Daniel 8. Back for lunch, slugged a little, out to see an art exhibition nearby, home for tea; put babes to bed.

• Up earlyish; Dave & Emily over to cook an American style breakfast for us: pancakes, syrup and other goodies, lovely. They played with the kids, giving me some time to read up on Daniel 8.
• Out to Newmarket Carnival after lunch. Much British-style driving rain, and a few hair-raising rides, circus equipment to play with, and more. Home for tea.
• Out to watch the Olympic Flame wend its way past our end of town; worked late reading around Daniel 8; Persians, Greeks, Selucids, Antiochus Epiphanes etc. bed late.

• Up lateish, babes off school due to severed water main; toothache; fun. Submitted a conference paper or two, chewed mail. More re-basing work, fixed a number of bugs in misc. compiled code.

• Up; mail chew, call from Novell UK checking I still exist: apparently I do (not going to Bracknell has this effect apparently). Call about new menu design / re-factoring. Lunch. Team meeting, ESC meeting.
• Out with M. for her swimming lessons - impressive progress. Back, fed babes, put them to bed; back to work until late.

• Up, chewed mail, overnight builds finished nicely; call with Thorsten. Fixed a basic IDE crasher, started bisecting a Presenter Console bug caused by some change elsewhere out of the codebase. Pleased to see the gcc guys tackling their unintented c++11 vs. c++08 ABI incompatibility.
• Built ESC bug stats, wrote up Android blog bits, more code crunching. Worked late while J. filed a job application.

This last week, Tor Lillqvist handed me the task of mentoring Iain Billet for his Google Summer of Code project. He is working hard to make a nice viewer out of LibreOffice for Android. Rafael Dominguez's new templates dialog blog post provoked / inspired me to give a quick status update on where we're at. To re-emphasise, the bulk of this is Tor's work, with viewer bits by Iain; I just took some screenshots.

What is done already ?

For those unlucky enough not to have been at FOSDEM / LinuxTag to catch the latest status, and see the live demo fun - here is a quick snapshot of the current state of affairs:

• Cross-compilation to Android (and iOS) works rather acceptably, almost the entire code-base cross-compiles out of the box for both 3.6 and master.
• Basic system functions and bootstrapping works. The UNO run-time is running nicely, we dynamically binary patch the bugs in the ARM STL implementation to make C++ work, and all that good stuff.
• Packaging, signing, installing and running the mix of Java, C and C++ code works reasonably reliably - though an un-install before a re-install helps avoid some operating-system leaks.
• We can run a number of the new LibreOffice unit tests that exercise eg. the calc core intensively. These pass, as expected just like on a normal linux system.
• We have a basic VCL / toolkit backend proof-of-concept to allow rendering windows to an Android NativeWindow, and capture event input for a Frankenstein demo.

What does that look like - well, that gives a fairly horrific, bolts and all, barely usable (even with keyboard and mouse) office suite on your tablet; here is a picture of it under the emulator:

As you can see the rendering is reasonable, albeit with the odd silly re-draw artifact but the user interface is otherwise utterly horrible for a tablet device.

Current state

As part of the Google Summer of Code, Iain Billet is working hard at building a Java viewer UI for LibreOffice, that will integrate nicely into the platform, and provide fast pan / zoom / page-flip browsing, and all that good stuff you expect. Tor meanwhile (modulo having just left for vacation), is working on tiled page rendering to textures. That will allow us to quickly render portions of document content at any scale, asynchronously in a background thread, to suit the viewer. This is going reasonably well.

We have a viewer / file-manager shell to allow managing and selecting your documents on the sdcard. Hopefully this is iterating slowly towards the beautiful design from the design team:

And the initial viewer UI with page selector is coming along nicely too, again targetting the design:

The code for the viewer is in the git / master branch in the android/experimental/LibreOffice4Android directory. It should build out of the box with a make clean all install run, of course after you have followed the compilation instructions and Android how-to. Help much appreciated improving and extending this to other components: calc, impress etc. The test-files above are (for interest) 1, 2.

Ongoing viewer work

As you can see, lots of the heavy lifting is already completed, and the stage of fertile hacking is arriving, with smaller incremental forays from something working, to something better. There are still a largeish number of things that need doing / cleaning up though, some of these will help other platforms & products too:

• Move to using the cunning Mozilla faulty linker not only to get faster startup, and avoid the need to de-compress and duplicate libraries from our 70Mb install onto internal flash.
• Complete and expand the page rendering abstractions for spreadsheets and presentations, to allow better async rendering / zooming and navigation of these different document types.
• Target Android - Intel/x86, not only to take advantage of a faster / accelerated emulator and thus quicker development iterations, but also to target Android/x86.
• Optimisation: profiling, with valgrind on android or better begging a profile from someone with a beefier machine already setup.
• Optimisation: removing irrelevant pieces from startup, such as parsing dimensions for many thousands of different kinds of print-able sheets of labels.
• Optimisation: continuing the move to a single shared library already in-place with the --enable-mergelibs configure option to reduce link time and allow better optimisations such as global code re-ordering. This is also good for desktop users of course, and getting everything into one DSO is a pre-condition for the iOS port.
• Tons of UI / viewer improvements, 3D transitions, pretty page flips, and more. Improved, distinctive artwork for different file-formats (we support so many) etc.

Help much appreciated with any of that, please do mail the developers list if you want to get stuck in somewhere there.

Future editor work

Of course, a viewer, even one that handles the full breadth of formats that LibreOffice can handle, is not enough. The plan in the deeper future is to add editing functionality. That brings plenty of challenges, particularly around re-using existing code and widgets in a tasteful way.

One thing that really needs working on is a liblibreoffice.so model. That would allow developers to link a single shared library and do a small amount of platform/toolkit integration work to re-use the LibreOffice core and renderer. That is something that is reasonably do-able today in fact, indeed - it would be rather excellent to fully split the rendering core from the presentation / scrolling etc. internally. That would also allow a new, native linux, viewer client, which in turn would accelerate prototyping of what is needed for mobile. Currently a slow build, re-package, install, run appears to be required for native Android development.

Finally if you want to hear, and see more, and get involved with what we're up to, a great way to do that is by coming to:

• Up, chewed mail, overnight builds finished nicely; call with Thorsten. Fixed a basic IDE crasher, started bisecting a Presenter Console bug caused by some change elsewhere out of the codebase. Pleased to see the gcc guys tackling their unintented c++11 vs. c++08 ABI incompatibility.
• Built ESC bug stats, wrote up Android blog bits, more code crunching.

• Up early; mail chew, and more mail. More re-basing, patch merging, misc. build improvement. Built Matus' latest tubes branch, wrote status report, patch review etc. Left lots of code building overnight.

• Up earlyish; off to NCC - helped in the creche. Back for lunch, slugged variously on the sofa with J. and babes. Out for George Wood's party, and a walk onto the heath in the afternoon, fun.
• Soldered up George's motor in the evening; read up on the latest reprap-ness, sleep.

• Woken early by M. talking of 'school trips', back to sleep. Up, and off to Thetford Forest with M. for her annual day-out-with-daddy, Go-Ape Junior - for the over 1m tall's. Lots of fun and bravery on display from a small person high above the ground. Lunch at the cafe. Played on more machines, home.
• De-briefed M. with the family, read stories to the other three, slugged variously. Bit of mail chew, thrilled by J's office tidying spree. Bathed babies, tea. Watched LOTR #3 part 2 with H. until Lydia arrived: locked out. Set off with H. and a ladder to get through a window, and got the door opened - a triumph for H.

• Up early; mail chew - plugged away at windows build issues: the cl.exe /EP flag generating pre-processed output without embedded line-number markup is great.
• While playing with the Android build - hacked at the Java viewer a little. More code audit pieces. Out for a run before dinner, caught up with some google-IO-ness. Watched LOTR #3 part 1 with H. & J. later.

• Up early, mail chew, more auditing and re-basing work. Lunch. Normal round of meetings, Team meeting, ESC meeting minutes. More plugging away at helper tooling. Dinner, worked late while J. counselled.

• Chewed mail backed up machine, and upgraded hardware. Crunched some stats. Lunch. Spent a while re-working our use of cppunit to simplify that.
• Emily, Dave & his charming family over for dinner, had a fine evening together, bed late.

• Analytics work, mail chew, clawed back through some of the queued up patches in the inbox. Built ESC bug stats etc. Lunch.
• On the subject of offense; thankfully it seems Jewelfox got less concerned; and Jono posted a longer but useful post pointing out that causing offense is not per-se harrasment. I rather agree. I've mortally offended a much loved survivor friend simply by offering my opinion ('basically a bit liberal') on a Christian music festival - and (apparently) ruined her week. It appears impossible to simultaneously avoid everyone's PTSD triggers: simply being male and being behind someone can be enough to make some feel unsafe, nevermind having a loud voice. Some people have such tragic experiences that you can only thankfully marvel that they did survive. Having said that, some form of proportionate harm minimisation has to be good, even if it is impossible to please everyone. Re-reading the policy, I think an immediate, helpful band-aid might be the insertion of a 'can' (of worms?): Harassment can include offensive verbal comments... making it more of a useful guideline than a hard rule. I'd also love to see verbal comments that people find offensive de-coupled from their juxtaposition with stalking and worse. Thinking around this I've learned a lot - particularly reading the meta-derailing literature. Invoking derailing sometimes seems to me to have a rather malign side-effect of simultaneously asserting victimhood, expert status, and thus exclusive competence: an argument by authority. No doubt some people are just thoughtless trolls, but many are not and get confused by a siege mentality, no matter how justified. I also discovered that my profound moral dismay at the act of prostitution - take for example it's effect on the intimacy, exclusivity and mutual self-giving of marriage - has a new name: "Whorephobia", an amusing label indeed: how did we end up here ?
• Prodded the Android build some more, I should try the Intel target overnight I think. Dinner with Lydia, worked late.

• Mail chew, reviewed and cherry-picked misc. patches. Tested a performance fix, only to find that the performance bug was already fixed, at least it made things no worse. Wrote status report.
• Lunch, more mail, call with Kendy, wrote LXF column. More analytics, dinner - J's PCC meeting, worked rather late.

• Left J. sleeping, off to church to play the violin; the on-the-park version cancelled due to excessive rain, fun. Shared indoor-picnic afterwards. Home, slept much of the afternoon.
• Meal, bathed babes & read stories - Puck of Pooks Hill with H. Bit of repsnapper multi-settings hackery, bed early.

• Up lateish, dressed & set-off for Tim's 50th birthday party, lots of family, fine food, mixed weather: fun. Back for a quick tea, put babes to bed, watched LOTR #2 2nd part with H.

• Up early; mail chew. Patch merging action, more book-keeping scripting, and re-basing work.

• Mail chew, slogged away at some auditing work. Lunch. Team meeting, ESC call, posted minutes, Vojtech's staff call. Tried to get the sexy new gerrit instance (which should help further simplify the flow of patches into LibreOffice) to do my bidding. Re-read the instructions to discover that setting up the username is rather important; good.
Continued to poke at dependency reduction around .hdl and .hpp files - which make up some ~50% of our dependency weight after the huge chunk of boost-ness is removed. Discovered my Android build was being scuppered by an unwanted -Werror, good.
• Tried to unwind BCD's to my mind rather misleading passive approval system which requires approval it seems.
• Watched The Italian Job with the wife to see if it is suitable for the babes.

• Poked at mail, a set of concerns from Danielle and jewelfox. It seems my brief critique of the vagueness of 'offense' as a yardstick for harassment is itself sufficiently offensive that (sadly) it makes some feel that people like me don't belong here. That is emphatically not my intention, but remarkably similar to my feelings when reading the policy I was discussing. Sigh, that's why I think we could have a clearer and better (longer) policy that makes everyone feel safe and at home. For what it's worth the short and medium versions of the suggested policy seem fine to me:
  • Interestingly, it seems we share quite a lot of common ground. There is a concern about harassment on both sides. Even more encouraging, there is some exemplary casuistic presentation. Who can deny that an extended, un-solicited harangue as from a bus driver ranting at someone about going to Hell is harassment whose equivalent has no place at a conference ? Personally, I think that that is an unloving, profoundly counter-productive and hostile presentation that could easily be codified as a good case of what is unacceptable, in a form that all can enthusiastically agree with.
  • Counterbalancing that I enjoy being part of a community of intellectuals - delighted by and interested in diverse ideas. Accidentally forbidding the full exploration of these in dialog seems like it benefits no-one, yet that is how the verbal offense policy reads to me. Mandating a 'politically correct' monoculture, where no differing views are expressed seems both extraordinary and to require adjudication to tax Solomon to work out what is 'correct'.
  • I think that Daniele captures what I'd proscribe rather well with: "You can willingly consent to discuss your religion, but you don't have to accept being verbally abused because of it." - I totally agree. If the harassment policy read: "includes verbal abuse" - or somesuch, to cover the pernicious, unsolicited aspect. However I still think a case-based approach with clear examples of unacceptable and acceptable behaviour is much more likely to provide a useful guide for the poor organisers who get to adjudicate, and more likely to get common support from participants than a precise / language-lawyer approach.
  • As an example, I agree that sexually explicit imagery and discussion in presentations is completely inappropriate - hopefully that's something that's easy to preclude. Yet, on the other hand - I occasionally show a sample image of my wife & I on our wedding day in my presentations, sometimes I make a tame related comment on the obvious aphrodisiac qualities of hacking on XYZ project in relation to it. No doubt, if you seek it, there is plenty of potential offense to be found - yet I fear a bland world where celebrating one's beloved wife in public gets forbidden in the name of diversity.
  • I'm certain that just being me also offends plenty of people; perhaps also common ground. What I don't expect is for people to advocate attempts to censor others (like Gerv) who carefully express their political views - even if they happen to disagree with mine.
  So in conclusion, I still believe there is a serious risk in creating this sort of semi-legal enforcement structure in an unclear area of great complexity - which is also land-mined by many tragic and emotive experiences of rejection by family and worse. I'd like to clarify, and proscribe in a more case-based way what is unacceptable and acceptable, preferably in a pleasant atmosphere. I'm not eager for a right to persecute, far from it ! I hope instead for an expectation of open, interactive, sensitive, deep discussion on any topic: including private discussions that can be overheard if sought out. Certainly it is easy to critique the policy (which has raised these issues and gone a long way towards helpfully stating the obvious), but to be constructive I should try to write such a set of pattern and anti-pattern pairs - oh for the time to do so.
• Dropped the car off for servicing in Cambridge. Plugged away at various compilation, dependency size, and rebasing issues.
• Dave & Emily over for dinner, had a fun time with them.

• Chewed mail backlog much of the morning, generated ESC bug stats, wrote weekly status report. Lunch. Tried to book the GUADEC flight, prodded gitdm with Dave.
• Unfortunately, the lame BCD travel planner shows only much more expensive flights that take five hours and require one change, an expensive call to a manual agent finally guarentees the same direct flight kayak would find you, but costing more, and with a booking fee on top: cost saving in action.
• Registered for GUADEC, a smooth flow - modulo the general sense of revulsion at the Attendee Policy; no doubt discussed to death elsewhere - but pretty aggravating to me at least. Fair enough getting aggressive against stalking, groping and such horrors; but encouraging censorship of "offensive" verbal comments related to sexual orientation, religion etc. looks like a persecutors charter in the making. What is offensive ? and to whom ? the fear being that -very- quickly such good aspirations slide from "applied common sense" into a militant denial of a basic right to reasonably critique others' world-views. Put another way I'm really happy for people to tell me how wrong-headed I am on any number of engaging topics, and to discuss them in an animated and friendly fashion. I loathe a framework that will discourage people from coming and saying: "your Christian faith seems incomprehensibly stupid to me" (for example), or "the crazy English always fall down the stairs", or whatever. Since ultimately enforcing whatever policy ends up in just the same organisers making a decision, I'd prefer -much- less specificity in a casuistic set of rules. Those would proscribe those genuinely awful things that are within the range of plausibility and are not acceptable, without accidentally forbidding normal, robust, wide-ranging discourse over say fourty or fifty shades of grey.
• Plugged away at tooling.

• Up early, breakfast with the babes - turns out that, after a year of thinking I was 35, today is my 35'th Birthday - perhaps that's good news. An assortment of tools, plastic-printing related goodies, and obligatory socks.
• Triaged mail quickly, booked the day off, call with Kendy. Out on an extensive shopping trip: glass merchant, electricians, plumbers, garden centre etc.
• Off to Falmouth St' to scrub mould from the house for sale, not ventilating the place: a bad idea. Removed cruft from the loft etc. Home - pottered around attaching mirror'd glass to an (as yet to be heated) bed, and adjusting the Y axis variously.
• Toilet filling mechanism re-plumbing action; spent much of the afternoon poking at repsnapper advancing the multi-machine settings support and trying to re-netbook-compress the GUI.
• Out in the evening to Pizza Express with the lovely wife, Sandy kindly baby-sitting.

• Up early, off to NCC dug into the text variously. Progenitor B's day (or is it A?), RIP Fatherhood. Home for a chunky pork roast. Slept while babes to James' party.
• Ate tea with them, read stories, and watched LOTR #2 part one with H. and J.

• Up early, E's party preparations today. Strung up flags in the garden, scrubbed the climbing equipment too; considered party games etc.
• Influx of large number of fun-sized people, and parents. Much fun, weather: clement, competitive pass-the-parcel playing etc.
• Cleared everything away, tea, put most babes to bed. Back to Daniel 7 until late at night.

• Up early; chewed mail, patch review, more work on perl tooling, fun. Slogged away at that cheerfully. James & Kate over for lunch and a lovely afternoon together, played an ad-hoc violin / piano duet with James, enjoyed their lovely presents; got to understand Chinese a bit better: no tenses eg. good.
• Dinner, put babes to bed - back to work, more scripting action. Worked away in the evening at Daniel 7 take #2.

• Up early, E's fourth birthday - presents at breakfast, fun. To work, chewed mail, filed a random gdb issue, amused and pleased while filing to see a suggested potential duplicate bug: Message "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that." should be removed marked WONTFIX - neat (but unrelated).
• Misc. admin, lunch, more re-basing during team call.

• Call with Vojtech, wrestled with purchasing system, breakfast. Mail chew, more auditing and rebasing work, misc. patch review.
• Call with Bjoern, Board call, interview alongside Charles with FLOSS weekly - rather an unusual and interesting format.
• Worked away researching Daniel 7, Revelation 13 and more for a sermon this Sunday, fascinating.

• Up early, mail chew, built ESC bug metrics. Sync. with Matus. Got my windows build going again, it seems restoring the previous config and running a plain VirtualBox command without a path to a vbox file works better.
• Lots of code auditing and incremental rebasing; Lydia over for dinner, worked late.

• Up early, music practices with the girls, packed them off to school, to work. Sync with Norbert, chewed mail etc. Wrote status report, did more admin, filed LinuxTag expenses.
• Fixed an annoying 3.6 presenter console bug. Lunch, poked at misc. other bugs. Wondered who was using the noisy machinery outside all day, annyoing.
• Struggled variously with reprap softare & hardware in the evening, call with Father, bed.

• Up lateish; off to NCC, Tony spoke on Philippians. . Home for lunch, bid 'bye to Leanne, practised some singing in Harmony with H. and N. - lovely.
• Played fighting games with M. and N. variously. Dinner, put babes to bed - bit of python / game programming with H. call with M&D, bed early.

• Up lateish; J. out, chewed mail quickly. Babes arrived back. Pottered around until lunch time. J. and Leanne out into Bury St Edmonds.
• Entertained little girls, more cycling training with E. and M. in the road - a little progress.
• Poked at FreeCad and after a lot of random frustration managed to get something like what H. needs to replace her broken light grip modelled in 3D.

• Mail, admin, posted ESC minutes, amazed at the unsual suspect's uninformed backlash to RedHat's (to my mind) rather sensible approach to the (horribly problematic) UEFI / secure boot issue. Of course, it'd be deeply preferable to have eg. the well resourced Linux Foundation, or similar body step in and run a signing program and evangelise it instead IMHO, but if they or similar others don't want to do that, this like the next least-bad thing to me. I'm rather impressed by the progress made by Matthew on this front to safeguard users' ability to choose to manage their own keys.
• Dug at holiday entitlement - some kind HR person reminded us suitably in advance of loosing it: neato. Chewed through perl scripts & auditing work. Chat with Kris, dug through VCL meta-files funkiness a bit.
• Read the new corporate expense policy; apparently sticking reciepts to A4 sheets is now fashionable instead of stapling them together.
• Spent a while threading my git blame double checker, somehow spawning 16 git's in parallel works really nicely on an 8 CPU machine, great to do thirty minutes of work in under five.
• Talked with Leanne & J. until late, missing H. out for a sleep-over with Charlotte.

• Up earlyish, to work, sync. with Norbert, chewed mail - added bugzilla components etc. Patch review, etc. worked away at some careful auditing all day.
• Poked at git tags as notes; wow git notes are unpleasant to use, merging (non-conflicting) changes with others is really non-intuitive, git notes show can't show the note text easily, etc. etc.
• Had Dave & Emily, Kerry & Cathy over for dinner, very pleasant.

• Chewed mail, several days of catch-up. Call with Vojtech, knocked up bug stats for ESC call. Looked over Matus' nice work with Telepathy / Collaboration.
• It seems that Riccardo did a nice bootchart-2.14.4 release with misc. fixes and python3 support. I suspect that systemd makes bootchart2 increasingly pointless by booting fast enough, becoming ubiquitous and by having built-in charting.
• Pleased to see Brennan Vincent's Google Summer of Code project, as well mentored by Fridrich, and Valek, and their blog entry showing off the Microsoft Publisher import - which seems to be going well thus far: Nice to see the LibreOffice 3.7 feature pipeline starting, as the 3.6 3.6 feature freeze happens.
• Lunch, Laura over - analysed some stats, call with Norbert. Out for a run, dinner, Janice & Lydia over for a call, talked to Leanne (who is staying for a bit), bed.

• Up, scrambled egg for Breakfast, got sucked into Four Days in June rather a gripping account of the Battle of Waterloo.
• Out to the substantial tent for the Jubilee 'Street Party' on the warren - fine food, interesting company, what a celebration etc. Helped to pack everything away in the afternoon.
• Drove home, potted around machining the brass heater block, mounting it etc. in the evening; bed early.

• Packed, off to Bruce & Anne's via West Suffolk Hospital for an anti-tetanus shot; how long can one twenty second injection consume in paperwork and waiting ? hacked in the waiting room for a good while.
• On to B&A's for a fine lunch; played machining brass in the workshop for a bit - discovered that my tap set is not tapered enough, which no doubt is a large part of one problem there.
• Bit of work in the afternoon, closing out misc. issues for the 3.6 feature freeze today.

• Up early, kindly given a lift to Church by Jackie & Peter. Played the violin & latterly the guitar variously; fun. Claire spoke on stealing & covetousness.
• Home for lunch, re-hash of the movie, poked at machining some brass - with mixed success - drilling sub-mm holes through larger ones at an angle is a great way to break small drills; you can try drilling the small ones first, but drilling through them tends to annoyingly re-seal them.
• J. arrived back to much applause; bathed babes, tea; bed.

• Up earlyish, bid 'bye to Rob & Ilona. J. already left to Brighton. Spent time with the babes, disassembled washing machine to mend inadequate plastic spring backing the start button; unfortunately fell down the back step and into a bag of firewood (contining some nice rusty nails) and got a fine puncture wound to the right thumb muscle, drat.
• Lunch with four babes, out into town to admire their work displayed at the library and get 'Monsters vs. Aliens' for them to watch. Met a chap 'Mike' distributing Jack Chick pamphlets, it's been a while since I met one of those. Played in the playground with the babes.
• Back home, watched movie, lasagne tea, put them to bed, exhausted myself - how does J. do it ?

• Up lateish, great news from Google around API copyrightability - no doubt the GNU Classpath & Wine guys will be celebrating tonight.
• Posted the ESC minutes lots of nice features racing the feature-freeze just now, everyone rather busy. Tor and Iain seem to be making good progress with the Android viewer tangles too, encouragingly. Quick call with Mike.
• Claire over to interview J. in the evening; Rob & Ilona popped in to stay for the night, checked out their flashy new car. Nice to catch up with Ilona until late.

• Mail, begged QA guys for help testing the beamer fixes in the latest master snapshots. Reviewed and merged some nice gtk+ theming improvements. Slogged away at auditing the last 0.3% of commits without clear license statements.
• Watched 2nd half of 1st LOTR movie with H. in the evening.

• Mail chew; tried to distract myself from re-reading the ALv2 by hacking on the presenter console and the sorry state of 'primary' vs. other monitors in LibreOffice; in theory you should project your slides by default on the external VGA output - how hard can that be ? Finally got it done - the longest standing, lamest ESC action item bits the dust... Out to cell group in the evening.

• Chewed mail, and more mail, wrote LXF column on the latest wonders of systemd. Chat with Sjoerd. Lunch. More mail, and unwinding of git history afterwards - it's fantastic to have fast, local history, --numstats logging and more. Lydia over for dinner in the evening.

• Up lateish; prodded mail. Really pleased to see the printerd project getting underway; having just removed the custom SEGV handler we had just-for-CUPS to try to overcome it's behaviour when mis-configured, getting a decent, well-architected, thread-safe (or async), modern printing API on Linux cannot come too-soon. Better, having something that does sensible logging by default, provides reasonable error messages, does hot-plug well, and preferably is worked on by people with a low-tolerance for abominable user-experience issues would be wonderful.
• Posted hybrid PDF slides for LinuxTag talks.
• Annoyed by VirtualBox writing it's own settings in a version that it apparently can't re-load (yet another reason to never quit it I suppose). "Error in VirtualBox.xml (line 3) -- Cannot handle settings version '1.2-linux'" is not ideal; each time I hack that file about re-create the settings, and on exit they're busted again; I wonder why.
• Pushed the latest set of Android fixes to master. More mail, and cleanup. Dinner.
• Machined some brass bits with H. read some bedtime stories; watched the 2nd half of the Lord of the Rings movie.

• Something of a lie-in, breakfast, off to NCC - Tony spoke on Philippians. Home for a lazy lunch in the heat of the day. J. & all but E. out to messy-church; poked with machining brass blocks for repraps, tapping PTFE tubing, a tapped PTFE tube in a brass block forms an extremely strong bond at least at room temperature; nice. Machined new needle nozzles of various sizes.
• Tried to catch up some of the sleep debt; woke for tea with E. put babes to bed; watched the first part of the first half of LOTR on DVD with H. J. and Sandy. Dug through the UK legal verbiage to try to unwind the law behind a '12' rating. It >seems that (12) is the same as (12A) such that while renting/selling to 12 year olds is forbidden, parental discretion is allowed showing these to younger children. Luckily the first in the trilogy is a PG.

• Up later; to the conference, manned the booth much of the day, answering questions, handing out free beer, and in between trying to read the mail backlog. Good to have Andreas, Florian, Jaqueline, Thorsten and more helping out.
• Lunch with Rene, Tim, Thorsten, Cornelius & Lars. More booth duty, until the end - helped pack up, bid 'byes & train + plane back to Stansted, bed rather late.

• Up early; breakfast on pleasing top-floor restaurant with a fine view of the city. To the conference, in time to catch Dirk and Jurgen's interesting talk; quite a contrast to Italo's following it.
• Apparently we need to switch to using the Intel version of Android for much faster emulated behaviour - which would be rather a pleasant speedup.
• Met Daniel Naber of languagetool fame, discussed grammar checking. Plugged away at my talk variously, fixing misc. bugs, getting the demos to work nicely, writing more slideware. Sad to look out over the car-park where, last year I was sitting trying to persuade Luke Kowalski to do the right thing. Quick interview with golem, chat with Jurgen.
• Back for more prep, Android & LibreOffice on-line talk:
• Long discussion with Philip about rcs and more. Lunch. More work, Svante's talk, my collaboration talk + demos:
• Talked with an exciting new hacker who can translate German comments afterwards, and then a lengthy and fun discussion with Svante about composeable operations, change tracking etc.
• To the booth still talking, caught up with Tim Janik at length and managed to miss the free beer party; off with the rest of the extended LibreOffice team to a BlockHouse for a fine steak, good company etc. Back to the hotel, sync. with Thorsten, bed.

• Up at 3:45am lovely; taxi to Stansted. Pleased to see that, as predicted, there is nothing fundamentally innovative enough in Java to justify significant patent protection. Hopefully that will encourage the use of OpenJDK in various remaining contexts. It is interesting to see the contrast to that in the UK where they are reminded that:

  "To members of the jury. Her Majesty’s judges remind you of the solemn obligation upon you not to reveal, in any circumstances, to any person, either during the trial or after it is over, anything relating to it which has occurred in this room while you have been considering your verdict.

• Taxi to airport, flight to Berlin; DB to Spandau; checked into the hotel; to the venue. Met up with a besuited Kendy, and Italo, Jaqueline, Florian & more. Lunch with TimJ too, fixed a rich seam of silly bugs in the Android backend.
• Back for booth duty, met a number of people, gave some demos. Eventually went off to the LinuxTag party. Good to see lots of familiar faces and catch up with them. Started hacking on slideware for until late; taxi back with Jaqueline, Florian & co. Bed rather late.

• Up early; mail chew, call with Vojtech, seemingly the SUSE Labs conference is adjacent to the LibreOffice conference.
• Discovered that the nice Oracle expense filing application pre-fills historic exchange rates these days, but only if you leave them blank. Booked travel for tomorrow early.
• Needles arrived, machined a beautiful 0.3mm nozzle out of a 23 gauge needle by grinding off the end, and half of the side higher up creating (I hope) a beautiful stainless steel mixer fitting for multi-colored printing. Potentially a 22 gauge might be better. Lunch.
• Poked at a 3.6 crasher, and more android demo work, got the launcher working sensibly named, and a number of annoyances cleaned up.

• Up, poked at the Android build, fixed a number of sillies to the point that it works again nicely, inasmuch as it works of course. Chased bugs and misc VCL / broadway backend issues.
• More LinuxTag preparation / slide-ware bits. Lunch, filed queued expenses. Did a bit of hacking on a collaboration demo mode in case of missing / slow conference wifi.
• Dinner with Lydia, Janice & Dave over for study - good to catch up after a while.

• Up early; bought some PTFE tubing for making bowden extruders from reprapworld. Poked mail. Mildly amused to read an interview with Rob W. accompanied by a substantial google advert for LibreOffice thanks to go-downloads.com, nice.
• Tried to persuade the gtk+ team of the general loveliness of enabling getting threading right inside the toolkit rather than dozens of different applications. Wrote status report.
• Dug at the Android build a bit. Dinner, out to the local council meeting to discuss the proposed plan - the council recommended against them; home - lit fire for counselling supervision meeting; back to Android poking.

• Up lateish; off to St Ives for a Plumbline service in a fine set of barns. Hog roast afterwards, bouncy castle in the adjacent grain barn, lots of fun. Back later for another spin of the Tintin with the babes.
• Out for a drink with some other planning victims.

• Up lateish, slugged in the house for a bit. Took the babes into town to get Tintin out for the babes including H. to watch. Tried to buy a 23 guage needle to try to make a new type of reprap / mixing extruder I'm hoping to make; couldn't buy one at Boots - odd.
• Took the babes to the playground, back for lunch. Checked mail; watched Tintin with the babes, fine homemade pizza dinner. Lydia over to watch Tintin in the evening - hacked on repsnapper at the same time. Bed.

• Up early; mail chew, great to see the good work that David(s), Matus etc. have been doing on the gbuild conversion - switching away from a plunging 'dmake' compile to a pure gnumake version which has a ton of parallelism advantages.
• Encouraged too to read the list of bugs fixed in 3.5.4rc1 release - rapidly ratcheting up the 3.5 quality, with several misc. improvements not captured by the generating script either.
• Joined linkedin to try to hunt a few quiet ones down, and curious at the number of people it immediately identified as potential links; I wonder how - I didn't let it see my gmail addressbook.
• Fine dinner with the babes in the evening. Back to work for a bit afterwards.

• More mail, pleasant call with Sean, an old friend, lunch. Team meeting, ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff meeting, call with Brian Green. Dinner, back to some typing.

Today IBM seems about to deliver on their promise of opening up the Symphony codebase. That is a good thing. It represents an important way-point, in the middle of a long process.

A long journey

I recall well meeting Don Harbison at the OpenOffice conference in Koper in 2005, and a memorable party during which I no doubt bored him to death by re-iterating the importance of working with the community, in the open and contributing your code. Then around April 2006, IBM Workplace 2.6 arrived: a proprietary product based on a version of the OpenOffice.org 1.x code-base. That was enabled by the non-copy-left SISSL license variant the code was under at the time. Fast fowarding to September 2007, Lotus Symphony appeared in beta, complete with an interview "IBM joins OpenOffice to widen it's reach" with Doug Heintzman, promising:

"IBM will dedicate a core team of 35 programmers in China to the OpenOffice project, but more people will be added as needed around the world, he said."

Around this time, we got some contributions of parts of the Symphony feature-set thrown-over-the wall. Sadly these were mostly vs. an obsolete code base, and were mostly not maintained or forward ported (though LibreOffice's current Lotus Word Pro filter was rescued from that dump). At the time I confess I was eager for IBM not to contribute anything towards propping up the fundamentally unjustly managed and structured OpenOffice.org project, with which I'd become utterly disillusioned.

As time passed, the waiting and suspense continued to build, in November 2008 at OOoCon Beijing I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Karasick, whose (keynote) gave an apologetic score-card for this contribution, and promised "we will be contributing". More time passed. By July 2011, the donation of the code was announced in a press release "IBM Donates Lotus Symphony Source Code to the Apache OpenOffice Project", and still no code.

Then, this week Don Harbison announced that IBM have signed a software grant agreement to the Apache project for the code, which is planned to appear in svn as a single, flat, code dump. At last ! the code will be read and the valuations independently assessed. I have fond memories of working together with Doug, Michael & Don, and I'm certain their commitments were sincerely given and meant on each occasion. I suspect the primary cause of the delay is degrees of embarrassing frustration inflicted by part of a corporate machine fearful of, and unused to the transition costs of open, community based development.

Every day, open and engaged ...

Of course, it is great when code that has been proprietary and closed is finally opened, and licensed in a way that LibreOffice can include it. While there is some sad level of duplication vs. work done in LibreOffice, there are also some nice sounding features that should be useable for our next release as/when we have re-licensed.

On the other hand, one of the real pleasures of working in LibreOffice is the collegial, interaction and co-operation with my much-appreciated colleages from Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, Lanedo, Google and the hundreds of developers and other supporters that have contributed to the project since we started ~eighteen months ago. The credit these guys deserve, for their outstanding effort defies praise. In my book what looks like the boring, every-day, long-haul work of open interaction to achieve shared goals is worth immeasurably more. It may take time to hammer out results that I don't always agree with, but it is good.

Playing well with the community seems to me to mean a lot more than a one-off code-dump. It also means being willing to compromise and work constructively with others of differing ideological viewpoints, encouraging and motivating people to work together.

It means that companies should not horde their changes, to try to be first to the market. There should be direct contribution of the totality of bug fixes and improvements, as they are made, to an appropriate branch. Unfortunately, licensing is a factor here too. The Apache license, by providing you with the choice of when to release your code: "now ? later ? never ?" creates an economic incentive to horde and create a saleable, proprietary feature-edge. That in turn creates a disincentive for others to share. In contrast, a weak copy-left license pushes people inevitably towards sharing, working together, and a service & support based business model.

Hoping for good corporate citizens

So, what does this mean, if anything ? if this move signals a genuine change of heart, towards working collaboratively with the developer community in a sustained and non-proprietary fashion - releasing code changes as they are made and working fully in the open, that is good news. Of course, the most convincing way to make such a commitment to work well as peers with the community, is to join with the existing majority of the developers around the code-base, who are eager to work with IBM as part of LibreOffice. Indeed, more than that - I (and I suspect others) are anxious to make room for our friends from IBM: Peace, Love, LibreOffice ! However, that will inevitably mean making a few real compromises, working in community always requires that. One would be formalizing that intention to contribute well in the most convincing way: using the form of a source-code-license like the MPLv2 or LGPLv3+ which codify such good behaviour. That helps to ensure timely, collaborative code contribution from all players, protecting everyone independent of scale. Is it hard to make such a binding commitment ?

Failing that the option of competing with that community, while trying to build a track record from scratch as an enthusiastic believer in open development, collaboration, compromise, working as an equal, etc. may prove problematic. One canary here may be how this substantial code dump is treated. Will it be split up into individual, digestible features & commits, which can be merged individually into the existing Apache OpenOffice codebase. Or will a single, big, un-documented code commit be attempted ?

A conclusion or two

It looks like IBM will release six+ years of work by their development team; that is a good thing, it will be interesting to see what their sharp team has been up to over that time. Opening previously proprietary software is almost always a good thing, and it may provide our users with some improvements in due course.

In this historical context actions speak much louder than words, but are much harder to extrapolate into the future. Will we see a positive, constructive engagement moving forwards ? the best sign of that would be positive interaction with, compromise and re-unification with the vast majority of developers. An ongoing sadness for me is the lack of even contemplation of that.

Still, in the meantime the LibreOffice community is having fun preparing for it's 3.6 freeze with steady hacking progress; a prototype new feature page is in the process of getting built, though I suspect completing that will need to wait for some last minute features to get pushed. It's a great place to have fun, make a difference and get involved with Free Software, why not try an Easy Hack today ? every little helps.

• Mail chew, call with Vojtech; more trawling of statistics, E-mail, and wiki editing; minor patch review. Interview. More admin.

• Up early, more mail chew, generated some bug metrics for the ESC. More patch review / merge, worked at slideware. Continued licensing work.
• Advisory Board call in the evening. Dinner with Lydia & J. out for a beer with Chris - good to catch up with him as he prepares to go into the Anglican ministry.

• Up early; mail chew, created another commit account, patch review variously for the 3.5.4rc1 freeze today. Pushed a substantial grammar checker speedup - removing an un-necessary annoying hang on first-typing (basically caused by poor design of the linguistic/ APIs).
• Wrote/sent status report, spent some time on slideware. J.'s Pregnancy Crisis Centre AGM in the evening, hacked away at this & that.

• Up late, off to Church, N. off to a party. Ruth spoke on holiness. Chatted to people afterwards; Emily & Beth over for lunch, played in the garden with the babes.
• Got everyone kitted up, and tried to train E. to steer a pedal-less bike in the road, against fierce resistance. Finally got somewhere at least, no injuries.
• Watched the Princess Bride with the babes; put them to bed, did a little hacking on repsnapper, and up late talking to J.

• Up early; packed the babes in the car and set off to Aldeburgh, dropped J. off near Ipswich. On via a diversion to Anne's. Cup of tea.
• Out to the boating lake, Bruce had kindly made up four boat-hooks for rescuing model boats (far more fun than the boats themselves it seems); much fun had by all. Went to throw stones at the sea - as you do.
• Back for fine lunch, and off to pick J. up, then to hospital in Colchester - went to see him. Home - packed babes off to bed.
• Worked until midnight looking at an obscure OLE2 file format / fat chaining issue causing performance issues, the trivial fixes defeated by our regression tests; finally got it.

• Up, more gut-wrenchingly tedious mail, commit license auditing, wiki statement list updating, etc.
• Lovely steak dinner with babes, put them to bed. Worked late.

• Up, enjoyed H's PGL assembly - on their adventure activity holiday with the school year recently; fun. Back to E-mail. Lunch. ESC meeting. Dug into Caolans' nice fix for an OLE2 stream reading performance regression caused by some more aggressive security related stream checking, good stuff.
• Created an account, more scripting and careful digging through license mails.

• Up lateish; mail, patch review, merge, cherry-picking etc. Dug into grammar checker related slowness from Daniel's nice notes. Poked away at scripting, and mailing people, worked late.

• Up, poked mail, worked through license E-mailage, updating the wiki etc. Got idly curious & poked my pile of perl at my Apache OpenOffice (incubating) git repo. Omitting Rob Weir's checkin of everything, hdu's removal of tango and Andrew Rist's changing of header licenses, it's interesting to see out of the ~66k files in the repo, less than 4k have any other changes: 6% of files changed even slightly, filtering just for .[ch]* the same number - 6% - ho hum.
• It is amusing to me that the "developers from over 21 corporate affiliations" advertised by Apache OpenOffice (incubating), are never enumerated; presumably many are co-incidental employers of free-time volunteers rather than official supporters of the project; and odd given the 23 committers in the last year that Ohloh suggests.
• Matus got his collaborative editing session going, so we're all set for some Google Summer of Code goodness. Worked away until Lydia & Janice over for dinner.
• Worked through bugs with patches in the evening, pushing them to people for review, and merging a good few.

• Up earlyish; packed everyone into the car and off to the Dinosaur park near Norwich. Played outside on the wonderful climbing facilities, enjoyed the various trails. Had a picnic lunch.
• Enjoyed the farm / zoo, sheepdog demonstration, goat feeding, hand-washing, stamping of sheets etc.
• Back to the soft-play area - really an impressive new addition to the park: a set of three drop-slides and play areas - in a world where the nanny state bans ever more fun things, big drop-slides for three-year-olds is one thing I didn't enjoy as a child - fun.
• Fish and chips on the way home, bed.

• NCC in the morning, back for lunch. Slugging, and house tidying; threw out some huge stack of obsolete CDs, paperwork and un-necessary electronic bits.
• Played a shape-tracing game on the little girls to much amusement; after N's successfull guess of a hexagon, E's square was guessed to be a 'Mexican', hmm.
• Poked at repsnapper in the evening - looking really nice - Martin "hurzl" Dieringer has done some simply fantastic cleanup of the core, threading the slicing, adding all manner of infill modes eg. hexagonal, and producing some beautiful gcode, wow !

• Up late, breakfast; out to Claire & Simon's for lunch, caught up with them happily. Home for some slugging. Dug at the planning database, it appears that a vile property speculator has submitted plans to build a petrol station adjacent to our house. Sadly, it appears that UK planning law appears to have no means of compensating owners for the reduction in their property value as a side-effect of the next-door speculator's substantial gain. Drat.
• Justin & Karen popped by for a meal, and talk around the fire in the evening.

• Up early, mail chew, more scripting and admin work - how I prefer substantial C/C++ hacking to perl-ness. Bid 'bye to the parents, lunch. More scripting in the afternoon, digging out this and that - Friday club over at our house - dinner, put babes to bed, more hacking and mail.

• Up early; mail chew, call with Vojtech. More scripting. Amazed to see Nokia suing others for patents, yet another terrible sign of their corporate vitality.
• Parents arrived in the evening, up late catching up with them by the fire - fun.

• Up early, packed babes off to school, chewed over some code with Matus, chatted with Andre too. Andre pointed out a local geocache which we tried to find; took them to the bus.
• Chewed mail, merged patch, created new account, call with Kendy, lunch. Enjoyed Xamarin's beautiful Android in C# idea, in an amusing twist, Mono is protected by a real standardisation effort, with its surrender of copyright, that Java never had.
• TDF board call, more administrative and scripting grunt work of deep tedium. Dinner, back to work.

• Up early, chewed mail; beavered away at auditing and scripting. Lunch. Further obsoleted the go-oo website, setup a new commit account, reviewed text: admin. Got my SUSE/VPN password reset/changed, still failed to make the ultra-meta-secure openVPN magic to work, hey ho.
• Matus (my GSOC student for LibreOffice / spreadsheet collaboration) and his friend Andre arrived in the evening - good to meet them in person; up late enjoying the company.

• Up lateish, still feeling pretty awful; urk. Chewed mail. Worked on scripting and some stats. Interested to see Mirek's blog about the design team seeking designs for several of the GSOC projects.
• Lovely to have H. back in one piece from her wall-to-wall fun PGL holiday, encouraging stuff.

• Off to NCC, helped out with creche - surprisingly fun. Home, lunch, slugged & watched Tintin with the babes. Much relaxing action. Bed early.

• M. sick over several hours in the night; urgh. Up reasonably early. Out to Norwich Castle on a day-out with N. - examined lots of exhibits; Nando's for a pleasant lunch - back to enjoy more of the museum and displays in the basement of the keep.
• Home; dinner, put babes to bed, watched Tintin - really rather impressed with the animation.

• Up, packed babes off to school - H. leaving for a PGL holiday with the school for her first few days away from home - exciting times.
• Encouraged to see the City of Largo switching to LibreOffice with some nice touches, such as new-feature lists - I wonder if we could do that in the core application as an on-upgrade document view, as/when we get our template/document translation story fixed; hmm. Good to have Dave in the wider QA community too.
• Encouraged too to see all the great systemd progress. Wrote Linux format column. Lunch. Reviewed LXF column after lunch.
• Spent some time digging at an evil yast2-gtk sizing problem afflicting the latest releases, nailed most of it - took longer to get cmake to set it's prefix to /usr, and yast2 to show debugging info than to fix the issue.
• Dinner, out to see Falmouth Street in the evening with Solomon, got various bits cleaned out & inspected, met the lady next door.

• To work, quick mail scan; published work. Poked at a performance bug that Korrawit had kindly generated a profile for - incidentally doing the profiling is something a user can easily do for their pet slow-ness, making developers much more productive (especially when a wall-clock noticeable win is expected from an improvement). ~Halved the autocorrect loading time for big tables killing an N^2. Lunch.
• Team call, ESC call, more scripting goodness. Dinner, read stories - H. away at pgl holiday tomorrow. Posted ESC minutes, chat with jrb, bed.

Update 2015-06-05: this is now deeply obsolete; checkout the updated sixty page version instead.

As the date of the Apache OpenOffice release approaches, and the final release candidate wends its way through a couple of rounds of approval / voting, I thought it might help clarify the current situation to have a side-by-side summary of what is in each suite. I'll update this entry in response to feedback, please do mail me with corrections if I've got things wrong.

Let me say, straight off, that I think the 'removal of copy-left' code (or at least its replacement) has been done reasonably well. Potentially rather a confusing description though: there are still great big gobs of copy-left code as hard requirements for a useful Apache OpenOffice but these are category b copy-left, instead of the category x licenses: (including the LGPL) that Apache excludes. The functionality loss from this removal is modest, as new versions of dependencies have been selected or system dependencies added, with even some rule-bending around shipping GPL dictionaries.

On the other hand, thus far, there are rather few really new features in the release that did not come from Oracle's existing work; that is outside of some pleasant drawing improvements, which we hope to merge into LibreOffice for our next major release.

A (very) potted history

So - what has been going on in these projects:

• 2010-06-24 - OpenOffice.org 3.3 feature freeze
• 2010-09-28 - OpenOffice.org community launches The Document Foundation, with website, lists, beta binaries etc.
• 2011-01-25 - LibreOffice 's first - 3.3.0 release
• 2011-01-26 - OpenOffice.org 3.3 release (a day later)
• 2011-02-28 - OpenOffice.org 3.4 Beta 1 ready for release
• 2011-04-15 - Oracle announces moving OpenOffice.org to a community project
• 2011-04-20 - Oracle Office Global Business Unit shutdown, all developers on leave
• 2011-06-01 - Oracle donates OpenOffice.org trademark to Apache and re-licenses their code.
• 2011-06-03 - LibreOffice 3.4.0 release
• 2011-08-24 - OpenOffice.org 3.4 code copied over into Apache svn.
• 2011-10-12 - Inaugural LibreOffice conference in Paris.
• 2012-02-14 - LibreOffice 3.5.0 release
• 2012-02-17 - The Document Foundation formally incorporated as a German Stiftung.
• 2012-05-01? - Apache OpenOffice 3.4 release

Of course, that misses a huge amount of detail out, a huge team of developers, translators, QA guys, infrastructure / sysadmin, conference and hack-fest work that people have done on the LibreOffice side: a simply staggering job, building a near-complete infrastructure and community that relentlessly execute against our time-based release plan. I can't begin to itemize or call out everything that has been achieved by so many.

On the other side work eventually started at Apache OpenOffice Incubating. Here - there were a few star developers from the Oracle Office BU that, despite having just been fired, continued to help Apache fix up what was left post Beta-1 by that hasty exit. They did so, not because they were required by their employer, but because they felt bound by duty to the project and the codebase. Prominent among them were Mathias Bauer, Eike Rathke and Michael Stahl, the last two of whom we enjoy the company of as active LibreOffice contributors today.

Rob Weir of the Apache project also produced an infographic on the project's progress which is worth checking out.

A side-by side comparison

I spent a little while building a side-by-side comparison matrix to make it reasonably easy to see what is going on and what is in each of the three versions involved. I collected my data from the Apache OpenOffice 3.4 new features page which is helpfully split into those from the beta, and the new ones. I merged some subset of the distinctive main features from LibreOffice: 3.3, 3.4, 3.5 until I gave up.

Perhaps the biggest single chunk of the work we've done is hidden behind just a couple of bullet-points: MS Office 2007+ import / export. While all right-thinking people demand ODF, there is a sad reality of people using Microsoft's formats that Free Software users need to interoperate with. Having said that, the LibreOffice team has done some amazing work building other file filters to migrate legacy formats into the ODF future. Other features mentioned are a bit passé, SVG import has been shipping to GNU/Linux users, and many others since around 2008. Anyhow - here it is (also as an odg):

Some thoughts

One of the most curious things about the OpenOffice.org brand, is the loyalty that users have to it, despite the 3.3 feature freeze being twenty-two months ago, having lost much of its development community, and having had no new release since January 2011 - users are still downloading this increasingly old and creaky release at top speed. Getting the LibreOffice message out: about the new, exciting, much more featureful, and fun suite is important - and much appreciated. Existing profoundly clueful GNU/Linux communities already know about the best free office suite ever others don't yet.

So - re-merging the projects; what is the sticking point ? In large part this comes down to licensing; do you believe that large companies will contribute their changes in a timely and constructive fashion without the encouragement of the license requiring that ? do contributors 'just want to see their code used' ?, or do they really 'just want to work together with others towards a common goal' ? who can say; only time will tell. Interestingly, there is perhaps a middle ground in the category b license. This type of copy-left license can allow binaries to be distributed under eg. an Apache license - but only after all of the source code is contributed back.

Interestingly, Apache OpenOffice Incubating already has a heavy dependence on code under this license; LibreOffice plans to move wholesale to the category-b Mozilla Public License (MPLv2). For me, going further to the Apache license would break faith with that significant proportion of our large developer community who see enabling non-contribution of core fixes and improvements as anathema, encouraging proprietary software creation. LibreOffice's weak-copy-left licensing is a compromise, enabling all sorts of awful proprietary things to be created and sold alongside, and embedded into LibreOffice, yet it requires contribution to humanity of changes to its core. That is good for interoperability, and community dynamics. Sadly, most end-users care remarkably little about licenses - clicking through them without even reading; that is something we should try to fix.

Another possible development, is the ongoing hope that IBM's commitment (of nine months ago) to donate whatever improvements Lotus Symphony has made to the code-base will finally materialize; which may help to close the growing feature gap to LibreOffice somewhat in places.

Ultimately, I would strongly prefer to have all of us working happily together in a community chosen by the active developers, and governed by a license that defines and regulates our co-operation. I'd like to think we have a good and growing track-record of being a flourishing, dynamic and stable foundation in The Document Foundation today. Certainly, we can't compete for length of track-record with the Apache pedigree, but in terms of attracting and inspiring developers to have fun together and produce a predictably great product I think we're excelling.

The Document Foundation is a diverse meritocracy, open to all contributors with plenty of room for new parties. We will share the same category-b licensing style that Mozilla and Eclipse have. There is no reason for more companies not to get involved. I'm happy with where LibreOffice is, but we can always be better - why not get involved today and become a key part of the future.

• To work, mail chew, lunch. Call with Charles & Sophie. Chat with Jonathan, did some research variously. Worked at some scripting pieces. Dinner. Back for more scriptage.

• Up early, prodded mail, created an MS Publisher repo for Fridrich & Valek's GSOC project to produce a nice LibreOffice filter, knocked up a new commit account. Mail, call with Gabriel, then Noel G., lunch.
• Great to see we have ten GSOC students this year, with some great proposals between them, encouraging to see their introductions on list. Built an ESC agenda.
• Ranked a number of GUADEC papers (other than my own on LibreOffice). Reviewed a nice patch from Caolan for an unusually unpleasant bug. Call with Thorsten & Kendy.

• Chewed mail, and more mail, reviewed misc. patches, got builds going. Lunch. Chat with Julian & Rob, sync. call with Kendy, wrote status report.

• Up early; to NCC; spoke on Daniel 7 - with an emphasis on the fullfilment of prophecy, rather an inaccessible topic - next time hope to have time to build some helpful slideware of statues with clay feet etc.
• Back for lunch with the family & David, lots of left-overs to eat up, bid 'bye to all and sundry; slugged around watching Mad Hot Ballroom (a curious gift from a friend) with the babes. Bed early.

• Up early, out to Waitrose to collect food, glasses etc. Home - packed food, and more food, and yet more food and drinks into the car, wow - J. has been hard at work. Games, toys, mini chair for kids, coloring materials, the works.
• Off to drop J. into Moulton Village Hall, and back to collect the babes. Returned to find everyone getting setup, tables out, banquet nearly spread etc.
• Fine family lunch to celebrate 10 years of marriage; chatted to all & sundry. The hog-roast man arrived, with lots of bread & hog; Stow Folk arrived and the band setup, around a hundred & fourty friends & children arrived and set too eating, dancing and talking over some fine food & puddings. A lovely time to celebrate ten happy years and a day of marriage.
• Finished in reasonable time for babes to get to bed, kindly helped by a stalwart few to get everything torn down, and loaded back into the car: apparently more full returning - is it a packing artifact ? or more puddings.
• Home with Dave, Robert & Ilona, M&D, Chris to unpack, stayed up late finishing some champagne, and talking.

• Mail triage, parents over, lots of preparation for 10th wedding anniversary tomorrow.

• Chewed mail , misc. admin. Lunch. Team meeting - how can POTS be worse than VOIP; ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff.
• More time digging through Daniel 7, the idea of preparing far ahead of time, makes you realise how much more time could easily and helpfully be absorbed.

• Poked mail, chat with mjw, pleased to see Jakub doing some great work shrinking the size of debuginfo. Poked at the UK open-standards consultation briefly - the conslutation starts from a rather encouraging place at least if not mandatory RANDZ.
• Filed some more easy hacks, including removing the cookies.
• Lunch, created another new commit account; poked at registry accesses, apparently we grope around in types.rdb for the most amazing things - initializing enumerations eg. PropertyState in Any's, every single queryInterface we do, etc. seems like there is some scope for some real improvements.
• TDF / Board call. Pleased to see Noel Grandin finally kill the obsolete/non-standard tools/table pseudo-template in favour of STL; nice.
• Spent time digging through Daniel 7, and listening to two of four excellent sermons from Gordon Hugenberger on the topic.

• Up lateish, read mail, GSOC proposal review - some encouraging submissions. Lunch with E. and J. chat with Simon. More mail, patch review, bug work later.
• Lydia & David over in the evening for study.

• Up late, mail chew, lunch with Thorsten, Anton & Linus lovely to have a chance to practise my awfully rusty German. Kindly dropped at the train station. Dug through the mail backlog a little on the train.
• Mail on the plane; analysed the large images digging out the worst offenders in the ugliness / uselessness stakes, quite a nice way to find old & dead code it seems.
• Home late, via bus & taxi. Lovely to see J. again.

• Up, train to the club with Bubli & Kendy. Breakfast, misc. hackery, happily caught up with some passing friends from the old world. Poked at shell background mis-rendering, only to discover it's a (previously fixed) clipping bug in the Intel X backend.
• Bid 'bye to people variously, caught up with Astron a little and tested some bits with him. Out for a quick dinner and some beer in town with Bjoern, Miklos & Andras, joined by Kay Sievers
• Back to Thorsten's rather late, up even later talking; sleep.

• Up early, off into town with Thorsten to the Chaos Computer Club's interesting home. Got tables & chairs set out, rolls buttered and familiar with the place. Lots of cool kids turned up eventually.
• Thorsten opened, and set too catching up with people, and helping with pointers to code and skeleton fragments of this and that variously: PDF export features with Andreas, medical imaging bits with Christina etc.
• Long & interesting discussions with Benjamin about the future of gtk, and how to fix our theming bugs. Demo'd the rather regressed Android port.
• Fine pasta from Italo, mini board meeting, stayed up until dead late, finally got an fsync issue fixed.

• Up lateish, breakfast, chatted with Thorsten, got to the hacking worked on re-accelerating the XML service rdb directory reading. Met Thorsten's interesting Father, lunch with Anton.
• Laboured at service registration corner cases much of the afternoon. Out in the evening to meet up with the lads & lasses at a restaurant by a train station, lots of fun & new faces to put to names, really enjoyable. Drinks very kindly sponsored by Lanedo.
• Back to Thorsten's with an army of couch-surfers, got everyone sorted out, bed late.

• Up early, breakfast, dropped into Cambridge by the lovely family. Chewed mail on a nauseating bus to Luton Airport, smooth EasyJet flight (despite their ploy of using 'last call' as their first boarding message - another horrible victim of inflation).
• Trains to Buxtehude, picked up by Thorsten, and flushed mail, worked while he dealt with his sons , Bubli arrived, fine curry dinner, up late talking with Thorsten, bed.

• Up with the babes, packed the car variously, set off home. Made good time - 2:45 or so. Lunch, random business call arrived during it, took that. Out to buy some milk, started on the Private Eye, and Economist backlog in the garden. Lost at the African stones game vs. H.
• Worked out travel for tomorrow, got belongings together, and laptop with a building source tree (useful for hack-fests). Bed earlyish.

• Up early dealt with babes while J. slept; set too in the Garage, got one garage door permanantly shut, and book boxes stacked high against it (having lots of heavy books is a good thing in the abstract at least). Managed to rid ourselves of lots of bulky and light chairs etc. on top of that.
• Lunch; out into the town, tried out some random exercise machines in the park, admired the old church, wandered down to the river, underneath the bridge. Contemplated the daylight robber selling ice-creams suspiciously - back up to the castle & home for tea.
• Watched 101 dalmations with the babes, put them to bed, and out on the town with J. Pint of guinness, and an Indian meal at SO! Fine meal, minor annoyance that the pint of lime+soda silently morphed into a pint of wine+soda (rather different). Home, chatted to parents, bed.

• Up late, set too working at shifting boxes from A to B in the double garages, got some larger, lighter bits into the attic, and considered the problems of cutting spider-trusses to enlarge roof hatches.
• Lunch. Trip to the tip to lighten the loads and onto Sandra's (past the interesting Menwith Hill base).
• Swum at Sandras happily for some time, back for a pizza dinner, put babes to bed, and caught up with the blog.

• Up lateish, off to the local Methodist Church, large building pleasant service, application-lite sermon. Back home for a quick lunch. Poked at boxes, managed to make another way through the piles in the double garage to the doors.
• Out to Brimham rocks with the little girls, Robert, Ilona & Father. Much clambering over the rocks, hoisting of little girls, fun, hiding in caves, etc. No significant injuries despite the significant drops. Lots of alive, obedient little people. Fun jumping over big gaps holding hands.
• Home for a pasta dinner, Rob & Ilona left, watched some James Herriot, bed.

• Up late, more cleaning of house, vacuuming etc. Preparation for house-warming party. J. took babes to the pie shop (in response to much demand from E.).
• House warming party, John & Jean, Sandra & Arnold, Ted, Karen & Poppy, Brian & Rona - fun. Greatly enjoyed the Cambridge vs. Oxford boat race. Light tea after substantial meal earlier.
• Stayed up late with Grandma catching up with Robert.

• Up lateish, box moving, unpacking, re-arranged the Garage further.
• Out to Coldstone's Cut - a rather pleasant stone sculpture thing, overlooking the (rather more interesting) industrial quarry. Into Pately Bridge for lunch, trip to the sweet shop, play in the playground etc.
• Back home, more box moving, Robert & Ilona arrived, dinner, put babes to bed, chatted variously.

• Prolongued attempts to put up shelves, discovered that the B&Q spring-loaded plaster / wall fixings were utterly inadequately tapped and could be trivially pulled apart in the hand.
• Into Harrogate, to B&Q to get them refunded - ever wondered why B&Q have two help/refund queues for four checkout queues ?
• Bought some 'heavy duty' B&Q splay plasterboard fixings instead. Returned home, amazed to discover our repeat naivety - B&Q fixings again utterly inadequate, not only (apparently) a cheap Chinese copy of a working splay fixing, but multiple failure modes and no success: much more torque required to splay the fixing, than can be provided by any plasterboard, having held the front steady, the fixing twisted itself around the bolt, a third failure-type was the end thread failing, not a single fixing worked.
• Caught up with the babes and wandered through Knaesborough looking for them, admired the castle, substantial viaduct over the river etc.
• LibreOffice ESC call in the afternoon. Out to Travis Perkins instead - bought some Rawlplug fixings that 'actually work (TM)' - and were significantly cheaper.
• Finally got the shelves up, parents fell asleep in front of ;the life of plants' in the evening.

• Up earlyish, packed car, quick breakfast - set off for Knaresborough in some terrible driving conditions. Arrived in time for lunch - not so bad.
• Admired the parents' new house, and set too getting shelves erected, boxes moved, and helping out variously. Babes out to wander some local park-land, while battling boxes and shelves.
• Board call in the afternoon, good to see so much progress.
• Applied blow-lamp, wire-wool, flux & solder to the plumbing to re-arrange the cranked washing machine outlet, and got that plumbed in.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, lazed in the evening.

• Up lateish; to work, mail chew, poked at some patches, nursed a windows build.
• Really pleased to see Fridrich and Valek's beautiful Corel Draw import. The filter adds (for the first time) historic Corel Draw file format filters, but - almost better than that it also supports the updated binary format (v16) used in their new version released less than a month ago. Another nice new feature for LibreOffice 3.6, itself going into feature-freeze in a couple of months. I recall using Corel Draw as part of my Design & Communication GSCE many years ago; it's wonderful that LibreOffice provides an excellent Free-Software alternative, and great that we can help migrate people's legacy proprietary formats into ODF, read the full story.
  Perhaps more importantly, there are two, Google Summer of Code slots open to work with Fridrich & Valek in this area this summer. First to improve and extend this Corel Draw filter, and secondly to work on a Microsoft Publisher filter with the same team. Having started my (serious) contributions to Free Software in the form of file filters (for gnumeric), I'd love to be a student again and work in a team with Fridrich & Valek as mentors - there are only a few days left to apply.
• Chat with Martyn, more mail. Lunch, patch review, paid some friendly lawyers, did some more licensing paperwork.
• Built the ESC agenda, thrilled to see Markus Mohrhard (moggi)'s work on calc regression bugs - down to only two open - an amazing result - particularly given the unit tests designed to keep it that way. If only we had some other sharp volunteers to give this degree of tender love to writer and impress.
• Filed a number of easy hacks. Really pleased with the work Lubos has done to cleanup the rtl::OUString mess, and make it much easier to move to a world of UTF-8 strings in future (if that makes sense):

  -        rtl::OUString foo(RTL_CONSTASCII_USTRINGPARAM("foo"));
  +	 rtl::OUString foo("foo");
  
  -        if (foo.equals(rtl::OUString(RTL_CONSTASCII_USTRINGPARAM("baa"))))
  +        if (foo == "ABCD")

  much more readable and comprehensible.
• Poked at Andrew's nice about box improvement patch; aborted half way through the review for a week of vacation over Easter - back at work next Wednesday or thereabouts, but reading mail in between times.

• Up later, babes on holiday. Poked IRC, lots of good things going on spontaneously everywhere, re-generated last month's commit stats - positive trends in committers per month continue. Wrote Linux Format column on collaborative editing. It seems rnagy's horrific bug is down to a aliasing / compiler issue in our sequences; nasty.
• Lunch. Poked at pointless string allocations, and came up with a trivial patch or two. What application has nearly 20k copies of the string "/" in UCS2 stored in memory ? Chat with kendy.
• More plugging away at mail, patches, admin, cherry-picked some calc re-factors from 'tubes2' to master after a make-check.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, finished the pidgeon-proof frame for J's vegetable garden. Back to some more mail and hackery, got much closer to one of the horrors I've been hunting for, good.

• Awoke; the dawning of Q2, late breakfast, off into Aldeburgh for church service. Wandered around the church following a donkey & waving (suspiciously reed-like) palm branches; good fun. Some hymn singing, mini-sermon missing some application; curious interview with passing Royal Anglian Regiment (Vikings) leader, some hymns, and back home for lunch - via petting the donkey.
• Out for a walk down to the beach with Clive & dog, met up with the rest of the babes boating, ice-cream. Home, admired Bruce's new creations, pizza tea, drove home.
• Notes on a G. Beynon sermon on Daniel 7, sleep.

• Up earlyish, breakfast. Off to Walberswick to catch some crabs, this achieved by throwing weighted bags of bacon into a very murky river, and then hauling them out - with crabs still grabbing on with a pincer. Fun despite the freezing cold, wind, and complaints from smaller people. Returned crabs to the mud - no doubt some of them are on their third flying trip of the day through the air, in their high-octane, Bockover-style bacon-fueled existence.
• Picnic lunch huddled in and between Sue & Clive, and our cars. Back home via the Long Shop Museum - lots of wonderful engineering-style mechanical contraptions, tools, and gnarled old hands talking about them. Where else in the world can you discover a working steam engine, taking children on rides to and fro - down a 30 metre (it's entire length) railway track.
• Back to the Griffin's for tea, bit of string related libreoffice hackery; fish & chip shop trip to stock up. Dinner, put babes to bed, fine tea, chat with my parents - recently moved into their new home (no longer homeless); talked, sleep.

• Poked at misc. mail, bugs, Regina's interesting dependency problem, more mail, some analysis work, poked at tubes2 compile issues. Lunch. Backed up mail.
• Dug at some simple string analysis to shrink footprint. Drove to Bruce & Anne's - back for more work & hackery. Pleasant evening, nice to see Sue, Clive & babes too.

• Up, to work, poked at misc bugs, mail, and hacked around some vile toolchain problem. Lunch. More admin & writing. ESC call, Vojtech's staff.
• Poking at a gnumake dependency problem - was amazed to see how shallow the pwd concept is in the face of symlinks, it seems your 'cwd' is a realpath at all times, and the shell just pretends, passing PWD from one process to another - interesting.
• Out for a run in the evening, dinner, put babes to bed; knocked up some netting frames for J's vegetable garden. More mail, bed.

• Up early, excited to see Norbert's new high-speed (minimal) Windows tinderbox beating some Linux ones in tests and catching individual problem commits in some cases, neat.
• Crunched some statistics, dug into some very unusual compiler / toolchain issues with rnagy. I like Simon's Document Freedom Day post explaining the joys of embedding ODF inside PDFs.
• Drew & Cloph kindly re-worked Will's collaboration video to something with both voiceover, translated captions, and pixels to boot, available here.
• Amused by the How to marry Bill Gates' daughter school of business ethics. Watched a BBC / Dirk Gently repeat in the evening.

• To school with the babes - Music Assembly. Assisted babes with their instruments, setting up the music; they played a pleasant trio - violin, 'cello & piano' fun.
• Home, chat with Ciaran, lots more mail & patch chewage. Lunch. Did some sysprof profiling, wondered why it produces quite different results to callgrind, dug into a curious document issue. Put together an ESC agenda.
• Lydia over for dinner, prayer & study with Dave.

• Up early, chewed mail, synched with Will & Eike, wrote up the hack-fest, misc. admin, tried to push embedded iframe / video playback into gnome planet, failed. Tried to push the 'old style' embedding, failed - nasty.
• Relaxed in the evening, watched a BBC / Dirk Gently thingit, sleep.

One of the last, big missing features in LibreOffice is collaborative editing, to fill this hole Eike Rathke (of RedHat) has been working for some weeks getting Telepathy code hooked into the LibreOffice core. This was chosen to allow us to setup a channel for multi-way communication over existing Instant Messaging (IM) protocols, without requiring any form of server.

A mini hack-fest

With the lovely Google Summer of Code coming up and this Collaborative Editing task on the menu, we thought that it would be good to break the back of the problem, so we had a basic design agreed, some of the heavy-lifting done, and an awareness of the problem areas, so that we'd be good mentors for that task (though please apply for other tasks too, since we suspect this will be rather a popular one, there are a load of other great things to get stuck into in the project list).

Using some quick funding from The Document Foundation, it was possible to get Eike to Cambridge, with Collabora sponsoring us providing office space and Will; getting all the brain-power we needed into one place: Will, Eike, Myself & Rob.

Outline / progress

The kernel of the collaborative approach chosen here is to realise that, as long as every user of the suite applies every change in exactly the same order, it doesn't much matter what the result is; users will get used to resolving occasional conflicts, as long as they can deterministically see the results, and know that this is what everyone sees. Naturally, more complicated designs are possible, but this at least provides a simple, initial approach while we tease the code apart to extract real controller objects.

Telepathy provides a powerful instant-messaging framework that allows the creation of abstract 'tubes' that tunnel invisibly over the IM protocol - allowing arbitrary new protocols to piggyback on your existing IM chat. Perhaps, even better than that, the Jabber protocol provides multi-user chat-rooms, where the order of messages is defined and consistent - meeting our collaboration requirement. Extending that to one-to-one connections we can select a master to ensure ordering, and for local LAN / auto-discovery we have low enough latency that we can do likewise.

So after some initial design overview from Will, we hacked away happily - I spent much of my time re-immersing myself in the calc core code. It is easy to forget how heroic the hackers that work on the top of LibreOffice are - after all, the lower layers of the system are shared, and have more use and polish. I dug at the view code, and ensuring that the ScDocFunc object, was used - splitting large operations (such as cell entry) into a series of smaller, simpler operations in an undo transaction on the model.

Eike meanwhile worked to get our unit tests working with various main-loop integration horrors under control, and the basic communication channels created and sending messages from A to B. Then he connected that to my lame demonstration protocol work to get messages and co-editing flowing.

Will - providing invaluable design input, hacking help, debugging assistence, API work, an 'Approver' to handle incoming connection requests from mission control, chased down obscure g_signal and C++ exception mis-interactions, provided non-stop enthusiasm, and was an exemplary host.

We spent much of the week, Monday to Friday, from early until late at night closeted in a remarkably pleasant sunlight room hacking away, heads down - with occasional frustrated noises, shaking of the head at code in dire need of discipline and so on.

What does it look like

(awful image hack linked to movie above to avoid iframe/planet troubles). For those who dislike screencasts, a more shaky, real-camera and two side-by-side laptops version, where you can see rather less you can go here, failing that perhaps you'd like a much higher resolution, non-dubbed webm of the above.

Thanks

To Collabora (where dreams solidify into reality) for hosting us, and providing the invaluable advice, support and enthusiasm of Will Thompson - thank you: Rob McQueen, Philippe Kalaf, Guy Lunardi, Neil McGovern & team. To RedHat for Eike's time & of course to SUSE who pays your humble scribe.

Also to all those who supported LibreOffice financially, your generosity makes this sort of strategic travel possible, thank you.

What's next

This is really just a prototype, there is a lot of work to turn this into a product, ie. you will not be seeing this anytime soon outside of some Experimental feature in any shipping LibreOffice - so unless you actively want to help hack on it - please don't bother the developers with questions.

Next, is the Google Summer of Code, there are a lot of rough edges here for this demo, the instant-messaging contacts list needs finishing, connection setup and negotiation needs re-factoring and pushing down into the framework. Then of course, big chunks of re-work to slowly tease out a controller concept from the code, and ensure that it is interposed correctly between the Model and View / Scripting.

Another area that will need more work, is encouraging the Empathy client onto windows, and providing the telepathy framework in an easy-to-consume form there.

Of course, if you want to play with this, and/or see what new exciting things will come out of the next LibreOffice Hackfest, it would be fantastic to see you at:

For some good German beer, sausages, excellent company, and some intense co-editing of the code.

Get involved

Are you a developer ? do you want to get involved with LibreOffice ? Now is a better time to start than later. It's a good idea to get a generic build first, and do an Easy Hack to get confident that we welcome code contributions, and love to have new people involved.

Then if you want to hack on the telepathy integration - assuming that it has not been merged to master by now (if so the branch will be gone) you want to checkout the feature/tubes2 branch, build it and ask on the developer list which bit you could best work on.

• Up, breakfast, NCC - Taui's dedication - attempted to explain and apply Daniel 6 to the assembled mob. No particularly grist-worthy questions at the end, but - an opportunity anyhow.
• Downstairs for a big shared lunch with Maria's family & much of the church. Home, applied slugging - more house tidying, made some tin concertenas to concrete into the floor, taught H. to mix and spread the stuff, and filled the offending giant, hole.
• Dinner, bed-time for babes, stories, read news around the web, caught up whith J. bed early.

• Up; J. out to Bury with H. and M. for a music workshop. Pottered around, Eric and Brian (some JW friends) popped in to explain themselves. Went back and read De Buhne with them, having done my research; in particular comments on their 'speculative emendations' of the New Testament.
• Back to cleaning the house, washing up & tidying to result in a happy wife on return; lunch, pre-emptively changed all the clocks backwards.
• Plugged away at some research on Daniel 6 for sermon tomorrow, dug away at the text, literary structure, context, for an hour or two. Took a break to tidying out the larder and locate the large hole that supplies a near endless series of mice.
• Dinner, bathed babes, read stories put to bed. Back to Daniel 6 - struck by the rejection of the ideal boss implied in the whole plot. Laboured on reading around the subject and collating thoughts until rather late.

• Up early, into Cambridge to the Collabora offices. Discovered that yesterday's curious signal emission re-starting corruption was down to exceptions getting thrown across g_signal emissions; hmm - nasty.
• Yet more rather smoother hackery; finally got all the pieces together and some simple collaborative editing happening, more details later.
• Out to show Eike some bits of Cambridge, it'd be a shame to stay a week and not see any beautiful turf and suspended masonry, had a walking lunch through misc. colleges.
• Back to the station with Eike, and back to the hacking with Will, more encouraging progress, bid 'farewell to Will & the guys assembled for an overlapping browser hack-fest; Collabora: home of cool hack-fests. Train home.

• Up early, into Cambridge, another intense day of hackery with Will & Eike for most of the day, lunch in the office. Worked until late - another 12 hour day - fun. Train home, bed.

• Up early, into Cambridge, even more hackery with Will & Eike much of the day, another enjoyable lunch with Christian too in the Bottanical gardens.
• Progress, and board meeting, train home earlier for dinner. Chatted with Claire, played guitar with Eike - bed.

• Up early, into Cambridge, hackery with Will & Eike all day, enjoyed lunch at the Bottanical gardens, out to a pub for dinner in the evening with Neil as well. Much code reading and general thrash. Train home, violin playing, bed late.

• Up early, mail thrash, patch review for the 3.5.2rc1 branch point lots of good fixes going in there. Lunch. Off to Cambridge to meet Eike - arriving for a mini Collabora / RedHat / SUSE collaboration hack-fest. Met up, off to the office.
• Met up with Neil, Rob, and worked with Will through the afternoon, hacked at fun things until late. Out for a fine Indian meal with Rob & Vincent until past the last train, kindly taken home by Vincent.

• Up, spontaneous mothers-day toast in bed for Mother from the babes, lovely & thoughtful. Off to NCC, Tony spoke. Home, roast lunch, snoozed on the sofa with M. and J. N. out to a party, while everyone else watched 'Up' (again - really an excellent film).
• Attempted to mend my 'Ideal Standard' hot water tap (how can you find cement wedged in your hot water ?), discovered in a fit of irony the highly non-'standard' washer required; annoying. Phoned Mother to catch up.

• Up reasonably early, quick breakfast. Into Cambridge for Science Week - headed to the Downing site for an extremely fun-packed biology session - with microscopy of your own stained cheek cells, blood vessels you can crawl through, statistical duck counting games, and much more.
• Out to Browns for lunch with Dave, Anne & David Camp - really great to catch up after many years, fince meal too. Happily wandered the colleges with Dave & family for the afternoon.
• Home for tea, babes to bed; bit of reading & youtube-ness. Wrote notes on another sermon on Daniel 6.
• Amused by the awesome HUD of the future.

• Up - poked at mail, bit of profiling, reviewed a number of patches for 3.5.2, rc1 coming out soon. Got some more drmemory logs on Windows for that cleanup easy-hack. J. out for lunch at school.
• More admin bits, patch review, license statement collation, patch review. Dinner. Bathed kids, put them to bed.
• Booked flights to the fun LibreOffice Hamburg Hack-fest (April 14-15th), should be there midday 12th (by some administrative error) to midday the 16th; hope to meet, eat and hack with many cool kids there.
• Thrilled that LibreOffice was accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012 - we have a fantastic list of mentors with some great ideas lined up for students who love to make an impact, thank you Google.

• Up early, chewed through mail. Annoyed once more by Rob's timeline with the central Removal of Copyleft item, quite aside from the general problems with that, the reality is that to reliably build the code, you need a copy-left dmake, core functionality like document encryption needs NSS code, hunspell is used for spell checking, graphite for complex text rendering, and much more - of course, semantically it is accurate, these 'category B' licensed pieces (in Apache terms) can have their binaries shipped under liberal licenses - but the project is still dependent on copy-left code from top to bottom; and so it should be.
• Quick chat with Fridrich, about zip structures. Sandy's birthday, J. out for lunch. Off to the Dentist - missing misc. conference calls. Dug at some more analysis tasks. Dinner, back until late.

• Up, packed babes off to school. Chewed mail. Interested to read Rob Weir's blog with an attractive looking timeline of nearly a year of work, which is worth some detailed reading and analysis. He makes a curious assertion though:

  To give a sense of the magnitude of this interdependence, the libreoffice.org domain contains 13,281 links to webpages hosted on openoffice.org domains.

  • I'm encouraged by Rob's approach - he doesn't simply re-hash this old chestnut based on some ~25 links in the wiki help (now removed), when translated to a hundred languages, for some tens of versions. That is encouraging.
  • I'm amused at the 'Guinness Book of Records' precision - "13,281" is curiously precice a number, without an equivalently precise date or explanation - our website evolves and grows rapidly.
  • I was discouraged by my attempts to replicate this "magnitude of interdependence". My first attempt, was to use a google link search: site:libreoffice.org link:openoffice.org - which gives me 4980 hits(today), interestingly if I search for link first I get 5170, so perhaps there is some +/- 10% thing going on.
  • Digging through those links, what immediately jumps out is the sheer weight of false positives - that demonstrate no inter-dependence. Apparently our home-page and donations page link to OpenOffice.org, but I can see no trace of that. Then there are myriad mentions from bugzilla (which shouldn't be crawled I think) that helpfully cross-link to the archive of many tens of thousands of historical bugs. It also appears that our mailing lists are indexed which also here and there refer to the legacy project.
  • Checking vs. link:apache.org, we get 31k hits, which starts to get to a similar ball-park, but again all the same problems - false positives, hits inside documents attached in bugzilla bugs, E-mail etc.
  • It is an interesting idea to extend this idea and judge inter-dependence by looking at mutual referals. Perhaps it yields interesting results for the industry. These are webhits I took

    Relationship	A links to B/khits	B links to A/khits
    google.com vs. microsoft.com	1960	38
    oracle.com vs. ibm.com	68	21
    kde.org vs. gnome.org	30	10
    apache.org vs. freedesktop.org	41	0.5
    libreoffice.org vs. apache.org	31	7

    So - is Google overwhelmingly dependent on Microsoft ? is Oracle more dependent on IBM than vv. ? personally I'm skeptical. It really feels like this should show us something interesting, but it's an extremely crude, noisy, and misleading metric, particularly when LibreOffice development is split over two sites. I suspect the hit counts also vary wildly depending on locale, and the state of mind of the hard-working mechanical turks that produce the nice-ranking / hit count metrics.
  • Some conclusions
    • Such hit counts are a very blunt and misleading tool, it is unclear if they accurately reflect any true "sense" of interdependency.
    • Inasmuch that they show some interdependency it is unclear to what extent this is just a legacy problem. It would be appreciated if Apache's hosting of the hundred-thousand plus legacy bugs, or other big chunks of historical material that they did not produce and our linkage to them are not used in this way. Hosting copies of legacy information is not particularly taxing.
    • Together these confirm my feeling that if Apache OpenOffice disappeared tomorrow, it would have little-to-no impact on LibreOffice at all, perhaps the converse is true too. To me - that is a true measure of interdependence from first principles, though of course as a project - I imagine we're eager to re-unite around a single weak-copy-left code-base and to meet IBM's legitimate needs; so perhaps one disappearing could be a positive thing.
  [ I'll update this entry as/when I find any errors. ]
• Lunch, meeting with pension fund provider. Attempts to explain why a pension with a higher charge structure are better than one with a lower one couldn't be answered: ask your company, attempts to explain how Scottish Widows can manage cash funds around twice as badly as Friends Provident proved fruitless.
• Dug into some research for a while, call with Rob Taylor.

• Chewed mail, amused to notice that the Oracle / Google case is now being pleaded like this:

  "While this case awaits trial, more than 700,000 Android-based devices are activated every day, all fundamentally built around the copyrighted Java APIs"

  It's clear that this is a far more significant case than a simple patent feud as I noted at the start, surely Oracle won't pull down the API interoperability edifice on their own heads ?
• Dug at pensions, amused to discover that the 'better', 'new' corporate pension has a 10% higher (0.75 to 0.85%) commission rate, and pays a small fortune to the intermediaries annually, more than I've ever seen before. Who negotiates these things ? set out to find out.
• Downloaded and played with Dr. Memory - Google's (gratuitous and unfortunate) re-write of valgrind - still, it works for windows, and it shows another huge slew of issues we need to incrementally fix (destroying GDI objects in the wrong order eg.):
  drmemory -no_count_leaks -ignore_asserts -no_check_gdi -no_check_uninitialized -- soffice.exe
  Got me a useful trace, though drmemory itself seems incredibly crash-prone, making it a delicate task to get through to the point of the real bug, eg. exiting the file-selector crashes it. Finally found the Uniscribe code doing some bad things.
• Unamused to see Gerv getting duffed up for being different; apparently 'diversity of opinion' is proving unexpectedly hard to embrace in some parts of Mozilla land.
• Really pleased to enjoy Jesus' video about How to Debug LibreOffice on Windows, extremly helpful. Jesus windows hero Corrius also started building and up-loading LibreOffice Windows debug builds which should be extremely helpful.
• Met with Dave in the evening, much fun & Bible study too.

• Chewed mail, re-built everything. Continued a windows full-symbols build to chase a nasty crasher. Had to enlarge the virtual machine partition, it turns out that using the GParted live CD makes this really sweet. Overall rather pleased with VirtualBox so far, though I'd love to use a non-(C)-assignment soft fork if there is one.
• Nailed a smoke-test failure caused by my fsync bug-fix. Worked until late.

• Up earlyish, off to NCC, Tony explained part of Ephesian's 3 well - back for a lazy lunch. Lots of cycling practise in the road, and visited Russell & Sue for tea, and to play.
• Robert & Ilona visited again on the way past for a fine tea, and stayed up chatting. Bed.

• Up rather early, gave Emily a lift to Epping with H. and tube into the Science Museum. Enjoyed lots of wonderous toys, fine shows on the science of Rockets, and another on Explosions. Out to Pizza Express for a nice lunch together.
• Back to the fray - lots of space rockets, aeroplanes, snow-cats, energy games, interactive displays and more to excite & exhaust. Off to St Pauls, met up with Emily & her visiting cousin Kimber & friend . Enjoyed evensong together, tube home, bed early; tired.

• Slogged through mountains of cruft - E-mail, patches etc. Worked away at a particularly evil Windows crasher, trying to get a debugging environment setup that works well.
• Robert & Ilona passed through in the evening on the way to some dancing, and had Emily for dinner too; good to see them and have a meal.

• Worked through the mail and patch review backlog, prodded some build issues & a bug or two. Bruce & Anne over for lunch. Worked on bug-stats for ESC meeting.
• Team meeting, ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff meeting. Bid 'bye to Bruce & Anne. Posted my analysis of the problem of the growth of exception unwind information in LibreOffice; 48Mb of unwinding vs. 75Mb of winding (.text), surely there must be a mistake somewhere.

• Up extremely early, can't sleep, back to work for a bit. Pushed babes off to school. Quick mail check.
• Out with DT & Mike in Cambridge listening to Mike Reeves on The Trinity - it's impact on theology and our lives, an encouragingly winsome approach to the Living God. Bought the book of the talk The Good God.
• Home, house tidying, baby handling, avoided computers and rested, nice to have much of the day off.

• Dug through mail, wrote initial Linux Format column. Lunch. Continued cleaning up some high-level documentation of the code, some minor cleans to stay sane, polished LXF column. More mail.
• Lydia over for dinner, worked late.

• Up early - an all-day mail day, and still no progress, bits of admin, status collection.
• Dinner, babes to bed, worked late - and still didn't get to any fun hacking, wow. Call with parents.

• Up earlyish, off to NCC to practise, played in service; Mike preached on the whole of Hebrews. Home for lunch with Emily.
• Lazy afternoon, relaxed somehow, bed early.

• Up at midday; breakfast, babes made some substantial stage-coach / carriage out of most of the kitchen chairs, blankets, cusions. Pottered around cleaning up, lunch.
• Out to Lackford Lakes for a pleasant wander through the countryside, dealt with E., played in the playground, fun.
• Home, put babes to bed, poked mail / hackery in the evening.

• Up early, mail thrash, misc. admin, planned the day, etc. Generated stats, sync. with Ciaran, poked at OOXML custom shape import. Lunch.
• More poking at auto-generated custom shape code compiliation. With a few tweaks, got a minor compile-time win (on windows), from twenty three minutes to compile, down to six seconds - the moral of the story ? optimisers like to do expensive operations at the method level, so if you produce a single 20k line method, it will not compile incredibly quickly.

• Up in the night, hackery / patch review & merging, back to bed, up for lunch. Calls much of the afternoon. Got Windows virtual machine building LibreOffice nicely there, to chase some odd bugs.
• Out in the evening to see H. and N. performing at a concert at Newmarket College.

• Poked mail, sync. call with Vojtech, misc. patch review.
• 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.
• 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.
• Out in the evening with the wonderful wife, a delayed valentines day treat - much fun.

• Off to visit Coleridge school in Cambridge, interesting. Back, mail, hackery, Lunch. Dug at some statistics, agendas, GNOME Advisory board call.
• Busy-work most of the afternoon, Lydia over for dinner, Dave around for the evening / bible study.

• 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.
• 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.

• 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.
• Bathed and treated children, dinner. Bed early, sermon, sleep.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.
• Started analysing commit histories, reading through old commits is encouraging and interesting, so many wonderful people to have worked with over the years.

• 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.
• 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.
• Lunch, team meeting, ESC meeting, break. Advisory Board call, grabbed a quick dinner, enjoyed catching up with Mike Leibowitz, read stories to babies.

• Up early; mail chew, call with Vojtech, more digging through the code around autosave, patch merging, easy hack creation etc. Sandy over for lunch.
• More hackery for 3.5.1 rc1, board call. Dinner, out to cell group.

• 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.
• 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.
• Dinner with Lydia, Dave over for bible study in the evening.

• Up early, chewed mail, merged patches left and right. Thrilled to see Anders Holbøll's beautiful new download page complete with one-click goodness.
• 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.
• Reviewed and merging a dozen or so patches, quite a bit of nice work arrived over the weekend it seems; procrastinated status reportage.
• Knocked off early, tired. Dinner, bed early with an unwell J.

• Even worse, slept fitfully most of the day, N. similarly ill; unpleasant really. Rallied a little in the afternoon, watched some Frozen Planet prettiness.

• 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.
• Slugged, sickly around; fever worse in the evening; slept fitfully.

• Wiped out day, lay in bed sleeping fitfully on and off, urgh.

• 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 ?
• Chat with Guy, lunch. Wrote Linux Format column. Team meeting, ESC, did a bit of legacy git repo surgery to avoid confusion.
• Started to feel pretty awful in the evening; headache.

• 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.
• Pleased to see that Gerv as well as Hacking for Christ, has duplicated himself; hence the absence from FOSDEM.
• More E-mail thrash, quick chat with Gabriel, then JRB, then TDF board call.
• Out to cell group in the evening.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 ?

• 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.

• 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.

• J. dropped me to NCC to practise with the band, service, Thea spoke. Back for lunch with Keziah over. Out to a service of Christian Unity in the town. Back. Played games, lazed on the sofa. Tea, told stories to babes, put them to bed & read more stories. Sermon from Hugh Palmer, silly Naked Gun movie, bed.

• Up earlyish, H. and N. off to Bury to do music & book buying. Cleaned the house up, hacked a bit at some androidish pieces: discovered some problems with unit tests not being compiled.
• Lunch, Mary Rogers over in afternoon, sat by the fire and played with babes. Lydia over in the evening - more hacking at sal/ stopped readLine corrupting/writing to it's input buffer and crashing and fixed misc. build issues.

• Chewed mail and misc. vcl fixing - and finally calc unit test runs to completion on Android (great work from Tor); getting the process slowly better documented in README.Android and no pixels yet of course. Chat with Simon, then Charles.
• The LibreOffice FOSDEM Devroom Schedule went live - a really great set of shortish talks (to get the most grist we can into eight hours) and some great speakers, I'm really looking forward to it.
• Planned my day, interspersing the tedious stuff with fun hackery, so that at least -some- tedious things get done. Lunch.
• Filed a few more easy-hacks around cleaning up the horrible old tools/ - a duplicate system abstraction that still malingers underneath LibreOffice. Hid a few more unused locking methods in SvStream, and made the FSysRedirector more obviously a no-op. There are big blocks of easy-to remove cruft in tools needing a beginner or two.

• Poked mail, fixed misc. build problems, poked at and spent the morning extending the tools/ stream abstraction also fixing some build issues. Nice to finally get some hacking done.
• Chat with Jonathan, lunch, SUSE team meeting, LibreOffice ESC call, Vojtech's staff, discovered I'm late at my travel budget planning; bother.
• Pondered the LibreOffice team. There is one set of very skilled hackers that perhaps people don't notice. As of today, we have quite a chunk of people working full-time on LibreOffice that used to be on Sun's OpenOffice.org team (in order of migration): seven guys: Caolan McNamara (RedHat), Noel Power (SUSE), Thorsten Behrens (SUSE), Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical), Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Eike Rathke (Redhat), Michael Stahl (RedHat) - making (I think) the largest concentration of full-time ex. StarDivision hackers on any project with a nice cluster in Hamburg still. It'd be great to grow that list of course.
• More hackery and build fixing; late call with Camilo. Read babes stories, J. out for a run, final emulator hackery and bed.

• Up lateish, call with Vojtech. Dug through the mail, until finally, in the afternoon - got to a little Android hacking; fun.
• In connection with the somewhat irritating MS Office 2010 issue I mentioned last Tuesday, I was somewhat startled to see Rob Weir change tack to a new attitude about standards:

  I have no wish for the ODF standard, like the US Constitution or the Bible, being used as an excuse to justify stupidity. ODF is a specification for document exchange. If you are using it in a way that decreases interoperability then you really need to step back and ask yourself if your literal interpretation really makes sense.

  Of course, amazingly the implication is that it would be 'stupidity' to follow the spec. and produce documents that are valid ODF 1.2 (as LibreOffice 3.5, and the Apache OpenOffice 3.4 pre-release builds do.
  Then we have this gem:

  If a program does not meet user expectations then it is a bug. If you want to be compatible with Microsoft Office then you need to play by their rules. ...
  In any case Seeing responses like this from LibreOffice makes be very optimistic about the future of Apache OpenOffice. Whatever the cause, the fact that LibreOffice ships with this problem shows either a woefully inadequate QA program, or total indifference to real world requirements. Even testing a single LibreOffice document in Office 2007 would have shown this bug. Is that too much to expect?

  This is really a deep & rich lasagne of irony, I'm really trying to work out which bit is most tasty, could it be - first the aggressive, purist, open-standards champion advocating deliberatly writing non-conforming output, and making ODF 'play by' Microsoft's rules ? Or - could it be the fact that (apparently) the TC chair hadn't bothered to validate or test changes to his standard in 'real world' office suites, but rather prefers to deflect attention at 'woefully inadequate QA' to a single implementor: LibreOffice. Or finally could it be that he hasn't noticed that his own Apache OpenOffice implementation actually does the same thing. Hard to choose really; mystifying; checked colour of the moon to make sure: apparently not blue.
• Of course, personally, I'd love us to have a good solution that ensures maximum interoperability while conforming, no doubt we'll find some way to work out what that is in the end. It is clearly not just as simple as removing that single version attribute: forwards compatibility is somewhat tough - but starting with backwards-compatibility is prolly sensible. Since ODF 1.2 is not completely backwards compatible with 1.1, knowing what the version is is rather useful for correct interpretation.
• Emily & Sarah around to read stories, share dinner & sit up late to chat - lovely to spend time with them.

• Crawled from bed, practise with babes, rapid mail triage, into Cambridge for interview at Sticky Beaks, dropping obsolete computers & electronics off at reboot on the way - somehow I feel like I lost something; the CPU count is substantially down, but cat swinging is possible. Lunch & home.
• Dug at some bugs, Roger W. kindly dug out a PPTX test document to isolate a performance regression. Put babes to bed, Lydia over for dinner. Chewed through getting the LibreOffice dev-room schedule into Pentabarf, phew. Poked mail, worked rather late.

• Up early, mail chew, patch review, license statement collation in the wiki. Chat with Holger. Lunch. Split out multi-screen / display fixes and back-ported to -3-5. Poked at detecting old file-systems to avoid fsyncing on them.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, call with Pete , worked late.

• Up; off to NCC, Tony speaking on Truth. Back for lunch, lazed around, out to a Baptism (or two) of Charlotte & Jane. Back for more slugging, watched some Marx brothers comedy.
• Put babes to bed, tidied the office with J. while listening to a Rico Tice sermon on Psalm 1. Dunged out lots of obsolete electronics and boxes of things no longer needed in the modern world.

• Up, took H. to try out some choral and brass music lesson / practise goodness in Bury; hacked away at multihead work while there. If only we didn't have two types of integer indexed screens, both called 'screen' in the code, with tangled nomenclature everywhere. Started to push through some big cleanups.
• Home for lunch, tidying and prepping for Naomi's party. Helped games: guessing things in pots from the smell, pass-the-parcel, party food, and expended a four-year-old box of fireworks from my parents - lots of smoke.
• Put babes to bed, back to hacking multi-display issues.

• Up early; walked babes to school. Chewed mail, watched Bryan M. Cantrill's Lisa talk on Illumos, it's always nice to listen to someone that gets it - Solaris users look like they'd do well to switch to Illumos (to me). Particularly amused by his take on Apache as a template (27:00), Oracle (34:00), the closing OpenSolaris (41:30) and more; wow.
• Mail, patch and bug bits, lunch. Spent the afternoon working away at a vile multihead bug of my own creation around the gtk3 port busting gtk2 as well. Worked late.

• Mail chew; poked at systemd socket cleanup again, a new attempt at beautification, more mail, patch review and misc. bugs. Estate Agent came over to value the house.
• More mail, patches. Team meeting, TSC meeting, wrote up minutes, worked away at FOSDEM dev-room scheduling - an encouraging set of speakers this year, really looking forward to meeting up with them.
• Emily kindly over to baby sit for us; J. out to swimming with Miriam; out for a drink & an Indian meal with J. - lovely.

• Mail, call with Vojtech, another with Pierre-Yves, dug at my systemd tmpfile cleanup issue sent off a patch. Lunch. Call with Pierre-Francois - exciting to meet so many interesting & helpful new French people.
• Out to cell group in the evening, good to catch up with the crew after a long break.

• More mail, and admin. Surprised and saddened to see that MS Office 2010 has a built-in allergy to ODF 1.2. Worked through a FOSDEM interview.
• Lunch, call with Tor, a little hacking, chat with Philippe Desmaison. Dinner, Lydia & Janice over. Spent some time struggling once more - trying to get simple VCL samples to run: once again the endless life-sucking experience of UNO bootstrapping.

• Chewed mail, poked at the perennial fsync issue, chased my sudden socket death issue - it seems our compile doesn't kill the sockets. Wrote status report & other monday admin.
• Dumped graph, booked FOSDEM travel arriving midday on the 2nd, leaving midday on the 6th. Out for a run, dinner, J's pregnancy crisis group over. Prodded at the android sdk/ndk with some success, and tried to get Eclipse installed, despaired of my inkjet, and bought a color laser printer.

One of the unfortunate things that LibreOffice inherited, as part of the several decades worth of unpaid technical debt, is unused code that has been left lying around indefinitely. This was particularly unhelpful when mingled with the weight and depth of the useful code we have around the place. Caolan McNamara of RedHat wrote a beautiful tool callcatcher that identified these unused methods, and in recent times in LibreOffice we've had an unusedcode.easy file in our toplevel with a list of methods that should be removed. It's pretty easy to find and expunge a method or two, with a quick git grep, and dropping a patch to the developers mailing list. To escape from a pile of administration recently, I knocked up a pretty nasty perl script to parse the git numstat output, to see how we're doing. That produces a fun graph:

It seems that over half of our unused code has now bitten the dust. Uunfortunately as we remove more, more wasteage tends to be revealed, which explains some of the upward jumps in the graph, nevertheless the trend is clearly down. One of the side benefits of the unsung heros working at the conversion of our old-style macro driven generics to modern STL is that this looses us several unused methods per class converted.

If you want to get involved with LibreOffice development, it doesn't get much easier than this - please do check out the code and have a go. For the more adventurous finding an unused destructor, without a matching unused constructor is proof of a leak that needs chasing, of which there are a handful.

Failing that, why not run Caolan's callcatcher over your project to see which nooks and crannies are surplus to requirements.

• NCC, Tony spoke on the Way - back home for lunch with Claire, Simon, Phoebe & Tally good to see them. Andy & John Madden around for dinner (the latter sadly moving away to Exeter tomorrow), spent some time writing up some chunks of his interesting biography.

• Lazy day, slugging, and lots of house cleaning preparing for a valuation; amazing amounts of 'stuff' get stuffed everywhere over time. Ruthlessly pruned baby bits, sorted many workshop items cleaned all those potential metal splinters out of the zone. Out to Newmarket Open Door to drop things off, business until late.

• Up early; mail chew, into Cambridge for Lunch, back, wrote LXF column, chased some tango / artwork licensing. Dinner. Interested to read about the future of CouchDB. Built some tooling to generate statistics on our dead code removal.

• Up early; more mail reading and backlog unblocking. Some patch review, commit account creation, and account management. Lunch.
• More slog; team meeting, TSC meeting, posted minutes. Chat with Ross, built some stats. Dinner.
• Tried to buy Deutche Bank Ethical ETF's (listed on the LSE interestingly) using Barclay's wunder-trading website. Seemingly not possible - it appears they list only some subset of funds they happen to like - que ?

• Up rather early - the iron routine of school is back again; to work. Waded through mail. Bitten once again by finding my gnome-keyring totally non-functional, filed a bug - it seems systemd's over-enthusiastic cleaning up is to blame; after 10 days it appears to do the moral equivalent of rm -Rf /tmp/* destroying the gnome-keyring socket in the process. In the meantime:

  sudo systemctl disable systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer
  sudo systemctl stop systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer

  No doubt just a mis-configuration that can be cleaned up; I wonder if it trashes ORBit2's sockets too - though perhaps it ignores sockets.
• Chat with Frederic, caught up with Norbert & others on IRC; started digging through the mail backlog with vigour. Read the git commit logs over Christmas - lots of nice work and fixing. Lunch.
• Noticed a new and rather sexy General Polygon Clipper library with the boost license. That looks lovely for repsnapper's slicing code; and Martin "Hurzl" Dieringer already uses it, neat - roll on faster, better slicing.
• Prodded the bug lists variously; set some fresh from-clean builds going.
• Saw that Luis (good to his word) and Gerv finally got the MPLv2 out - which is lovely. That gives us an AL2 compatible (and more importantly) GPL* compatible weak-copy-left license; more in the FAQ. A crisp read too. Hopefully there is no longer a need for CDDLs in today's world.
• Dave & Emily over, put babes to bed, dinner, sat around and talked by the fire. Finished the spreadsheet and filed tax return.

• Last day of the holidays; frantic tidying, cleaned out an unpleasantly blocked U-bend, fixed the heated towel rail, re-attached a malingering door-handle etc. Lunch. Tried to dig a tiny metal splinter out of Hannah's foot (most odd) with no real joy.
• Pollyanna in the evening, and tax filing afterwards.

• Up earlyish, off to Bruce & Anne's, nice to see them. Lunch, out for a walk on Aldeburgh beach, unseasonably temperate, and queues for fish & chips - amazing. H. feeling unwell. Caught up with David M. in the evening.

• Up earlyish, drove to Hertford, preached, talked afterwards with some interesting people; back to Helena & James' for lunch with Rose, Mike & Anne - lovely food, fine company - home late.