Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

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.

2014-09-28: Sunday

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.

2014-09-27: Saturday

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.

2014-09-26: Friday

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.

2014-09-25: Thursday

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.

2014-09-24: Wednesday

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.

2014-09-23: Tuesday

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.

2014-09-22: Monday

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.

2014-09-21: Sunday

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.

2014-09-20: Saturday

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.

2014-09-19: Friday

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.

2014-09-18: Thursday

Long day, slogging through mail; ESC call; partner calls.

2014-09-17: Wednesday

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.

2014-09-16: Tuesday

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.

2014-09-15: Monday

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.

2014-09-14: Sunday

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.

2014-09-13: Saturday

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.

2014-09-12: Friday

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.

2014-09-11: Thursday

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.

2014-09-10: Wednesday

Attempted mail catchup; profile analysis, sync. with Kohei & Milkos, built proposal, 3x partner calls, chat with Italo.

2014-09-09: Tuesday

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.

2014-09-08: Monday

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.

2014-09-07: Sunday

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.

2014-09-06: Saturday

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.

2014-09-05: Friday

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.

2014-09-04: Thursday

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.

2014-09-03: Wednesday

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.

2014-09-02: Tuesday

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.

2014-09-01: Monday

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.

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