Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• 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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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 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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.