Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
Collabora
Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and
services for whom I work.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here. Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on
the LibreOffice Planet news
feed.
Older items:
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legacy html
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Up early; mail chew, code review with Matus; built ESC
agenda. Reviewed / merged a few patches, did a simple size shrink
on our Android branch; plugged away at admin, this & that
until late. Bloated / infected elbow starting to go down (some
horror beastie bit me on it on Sunday).
-
Mail chew, sync. call with Kendy. Poked with wireshark to try
to debug my debilitating, intermittent DNS failures - always succeeding
on the 2nd try, but failing on the first. Dropped an unusual looking
search home site
from my /etc/resolv.conf
,
re-started nscd etc. but still suffering that; urgh.
-
Interested to see Bjoern's nice numbers
on the mergedlibs impact on cold-start time: 3.4 seconds to 2 seconds,
well worth having, all of it making the I/O scheduler's live -very-
much simpler; volunteers to unwind whichever problem in 4.3 is causing
it to break are much appreciated.
-
Worked late; poked at Android builds etc.
-
Breakfast, NCC (at Newmarket Academy this week), back for a
fine roast lunch; out for a walk past the nearby wind-farm; sadly the
farmer has put up lots of 'private' signs to discourage people from
going close to them. Home for tea, baths, stories, bed. Enjoyed a
Gordon sermon on 1 Samuel; sleep.
-
Breakfast with the family, poked mail while homework
happened; got some builds running. Got N's bedroom covered up
for J. to paint; removed the medicine cabinet from the wall;
H. having inadvertently unscrewed the security catch, drilled
a hole in the back; heated a ground steel rod with H. drilled
a hole into it to catch the catch; managed to open it;
re-attach the knob etc.
-
Lunch; poked at some running compilations, finally got
a 64bit NDK so I can link debuginfo; babes out to see The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe as a play by Nomads. Plugged
through some E-mail.
-
Mail chew, Kendy finally defeated the timers; good. Fun
call with Matus looking at profiles. Out for lunch with Bruce,
Anne & Hannah.
-
Returned; can't compile android with debugging symbols due
to being out of address space; need to install a 64bit openSUSE
instead; did that - tried a
cross-architecture in-place distro update; perhaps a bit optimistic
there. After some more disasterous tweaking and repair got back to
something sane; set various source trees building.
-
Unwound a spreadsheet threaded XLSX import nasty with an
extra guard around some editeng funkiness.
-
Mail chew, attempted to join a Microsoft Lync session with
near zero joy; no Linux support: bad but, switch to Windows; doesn't
work in Chrome ? fine - switch to IE ? doesn't work with an already
installed Lync; fine - uninstall that; re-boot for good measure -
(installing updates 1 of 29)...; finally re-install the web plugin
to enter the session extremely slowly - and miss the end: bother.
Must improve my Lync foo.
-
Flawless Google+ interview call; admin foo; lunch. ESC call
in the afternoon - now open to the public; great to have Noel show
up, but partly glad that we've apparently included most interested
people already anyway.
-
Plugged away at writing VCL timer unit tests for increasingly
twisted scenarios to try to reproduce the Windows issues we see.
Finally pushed that.
-
Out in the evening to see Ryan & Nancy back in the UK
for a brief vacation; lovely to catch up with J. too.
-
Mail chew, train into Cambridge; caught up with Tracie
& Andrzej, built ESC agenda & mailed wrt. our first open
call - lets see if it can work. Lunch with Agustin, David, Andrzej
& some interesting Bromium guys.
-
Back for a partner call, paperwork with Rob & Tracie.
Got a number of long pending tasks knocked down together with Rob -
nice. More partner / paperwork review, scoped the server room out
for hosting some more hardware.
-
Caught up with David in the evening; out for a nice pint
together; train home late.
-
Mail chew, interview, partner call; lunch. Partner call,
dug at Kendy's nice timer patch; found a corner case or two causing
grief still, and did some testing; dinner; back to work - pushed
timer patch.
-
Rather pleased with Emma Watson's UN speech;
with an encoruaging leading rebuke; I'd call myself a Feminist if
it wasn't for the dismissive, man-hating, alternative fringe that
she calls out. Still good to hear the obvious re-stated
eloquently and helpfully: that women should be equal and we should
be upset when they are not. Then again, I get tired of the horribly
complicated issue of suicide
being used to make political / gender points.
-
Mail chew, friendly partner call; worked through bugs at some
considerable length with Andras; more mail chew; team call, lunch.
Even more unbelievable admin, another team call. Dinner, put babes to
bed, partner calls until late; reviewed Kendy's nice mainloop patch.
-
Off to NCC, Roy speaking; fine roast lunch, slugging in
the afternoon. Watched the latest Material Science open university
program with the babes; then High School Musical (hey ho).
-
Caught up with Dave; Gordon sermon on 1 Samuel; bed early.
-
Checked mail; played with babes, took a blow-lamp to
broken trampoline spring to the point that it could be re-worked
into a new spring. Lunch; out shopping, repaired this & that
around the house, more mail in the evening.
-
Mail, meetings, bit of hacking today - encouragingly
implemented some "kernel32" alike VBA shims for Linux / Mac to
get high resolution timing data, filed a couple of follow-on
easy hacks, and discovered that Currency (a 64bit integer type)
does not make it through our native code invocation framework.
-
Long day, slogging through mail; ESC call; partner calls.
-
Mail, chat with Tor. Partner call, more mail. Dug
recreationally through the VBA
Lib
implementation
when not on Windows (something like DllImport
in
the CLR). We should stub a few of the more commonly used Windows
APIs (pwrt. high-resolution time) there - of course LibreOffice's
NOW() function helpfully jams some nanoseconds into the low bits
of the double.
-
Mail chew, chat with Kismat, then Philippe, wrote notes.
Profile analysis, SOW construction & review, call with Kendy
& Kohei, then Bob. Dinner & put babes to bed. Built ESC
bug stats & sent proto-agenda.
-
Packed babes off to school; mail chew, stats building. Lunch.
Team meeting, more plugging away at admin, consulting team meeting.
-
Thrilled to see Coverity's Updated
Spotlight on LibreOffice - and I quote The team also reduced
the project's defect density from .8 to .08, far lower than the
defect density for like-sized projects using the Coverity Scan
service ... Zack Samocha, senior director of products for Coverity
[said] "We applaud the LibreOffice development team for their
commitment to creating and delivering high-quality software."
- great work by Caolan and others.
-
J. had a PCC meeting; worked late.
-
Off to Pulborough
Baptist Church. Enjoyed the service, off to Grant & Anne's 50'th
wedding anniversary party: a lovely, meal & interesting family &
friends. Drove home, bed early - very tired.
-
Drove down to Barbara & Colin's - had a lovely late
lunch, and went for a walk to a playground, over a stream -
balancing on a large cast-steel pipe, and more fun. Discovered a
fluorescent pink loom-band in the bed of a nearby
archaeologists of the future will get a nice accurate date with
the loom-band strata I guess. Up late enjoying Barabara &
Colin's company.
-
Mail chew, and more of that. Customer call; Clara over for
lunch - poked away at some irritating PDF signing crasher obscuring
the real issues and nailed it - relaxing; back to the inbox, worked
on a quote & proposal.
-
Built ESC stats, though no meeting this week; turned around
paperwork. Great to see Andrzej's calc tiled rendering work.
-
Met up with Arun for bible study in the evening, finished
1 Samuel together.
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Attempted mail catchup; profile analysis, sync. with Kohei
& Milkos, built proposal, 3x partner calls, chat with Italo.
-
Into London with Tim for partner meetings; lunch by the
Serpentine. Back, via Cambridge - stopped over to re-charge in
the Collabora Office & met up with Nick & Daniel - out for
another partner meeting in Cambridge - dead fun to catch up too.
-
Mail chewage, tried to re-arrange tasks into some sort of
sensible order with Andras, Kendy & Tim's help. Lunch. Reviewed
and merged a rather nice string speedup which was a victim of a
previous String to OUString conversion.
-
Lots of partner / customer interaction backlogged from
last week. Wrote an LXF column. Sam put up a nice
LibreOffice
from Collabora team picture from the conference.
-
To NCC, good to catch up with all & sundry. Lunch.
Out for a run with N. across the heath - fun; lazed in the garden
in the sun suitably.
-
Practised quartet a little, starting to sound quite good
having moved lots of the blacker notes from E. to H. David over
for a fine roast dinner.
-
Up early - packed, set off for the rather nicer AirBnB
venue; team all together - had a conference review / update
with everyone - fun. Rather a late Pizza lunch, review of where
we're at.
-
Off to the airport with Kendy & Lubos, very packed
train. Pleased to see Eliane's link to a new (English):
LibreOffice Video.
-
Lots of travel, eventually got home, bed exhausted.
-
Caught up with Adam & team. In-person Board meeting
in the afternoon. Caught the end of Moggi's talk on 3D charting.
-
Gave a talk on faster XML Parsing with Matus:

Still plenty to do to further accelerate our threaded parser.
-
Final open session with the board, with some useful input
from the attendees - voted thanks to Mathias & team for their
great work.
-
Out to the Indiana restaurant nearby again, and ate in the
street with all & sundry until rather late; fun.
-
Up early, to the university; gave a getting into the code
for beginners talk - always nice to update that each year and dung
out the cruft from the year before.
-
Catch up with Alberto & Caolan, fun. Lots of good talks
on various topics.
-
Out to a rather fine meal with drinks at a nearby University
venue - once again, excellent food & company. Encouraging (as a
sponsor) to see funding applied to supporting collective meals &
drinks through the day.
-
Off to the conference bright & early; worked with
Markus at simplifying my slides & translating to German.
He presented them well auf Deutsch to the German business
track. Then back to the main track.

-
Enjoyed the CloudOn talk; lovely to see them re-using
LibreOffice on iOS for their app. Shachar Binyamin's talk had some great highlights.
They've been deploying LibreOffice as an option for their users
for around a month and:
- ~50% of users opt-in to using their LibreOffice based
editing app (vs. a remoted MS Office from the cloud)
- Of those that switch, 90% choose to continue
to use their LibreOffice app vs. MS Office given a free
choice
- There is better retention for users that use their
LibreOffice based App, than those using MS Office remotely:
most encouraging.
-
Presented a Keynote on what Collabora does for our
customers:

-
Lunch; met a number of interesting guys in the hallway track.
-
Amused by the contagious attraction of the more 'interesting'
definitions of Volunteer (ie. paid full-time to do the job) that
seem to be catching on these days, with so many Russian Volunteer
service-persons in Ukraine; I've seen that problem before somewhere.
-
Rather humbled to listen to some of my guys' talk: what a team !
-
Out for some hacking in the evening, ate, met up with partners,
customers, talked through a number of interesting areas of development
with some bright new students - up v. late talking with Mathias,
Thorsten, and others.
-
To the univeristy for breakfast, meeting with lots of likely
hackerly sorts. Board meetings ~all day - lots of extremely dense
content and rather encouraging updates on all the hard work Florian
& team have been doing for TDF.
-
ESC in-person meeting in the evening, good to hear from the
UX guys. Customer/partner meeting followed by a team meal. Back to
the appartment for some more slide hacking until late, sleep.
-
Up rather early, train to Cambridge / KGX / London City airport.
Sleep, mail chew, slide planning. Arrived, checked into a rather
nice AirBnB appartment. Back into town, collected Kohei. Out for a fine
dinner in the evening with much of the team.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/
and data/
directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,
Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),
or anyone else.
It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)