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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2012: (
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2011,
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1999,
legacy html
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Porridge breakfast, set the babes to their home-work; J.
out to collect H. from a sleepover; poked at mail, fixed a nasty
vcl VirtualDevice issue hurting slideshow on Windows. Nailed some
more (hopefully nearly the last) multiple dispose / VclPtr
lifecycle re-work issues; ran a dbgutil build to find more issues,
helped Siqi with an Android build issue. Lunch.
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Mail chew, nailed my dbaccess lifecycle issue; another double
dispose issue - this time with horrible manual reference-counting.
Interview. Lunch, helped get Julia setup splitting tiles off the wall.
More mail, review; plugging at new VCL lifecycle bits idly.
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Dinner, read story to E, watched movie with M. and N. helped
J. who has tiled the back-kitchen mostly cut the last few tiles. Back
for some late-night mail / debugging.
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Up - mail chew; chat with Niall; more mail. Poked at x86 /
android SIGILL a little more; perplexing - all .a object files
are i386. Turned around partner paperwork.
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Spent some time chasing VclPtr reference counting issues;
unwound how vcl destruction works in the end; every container has
to explicitly delete its children; non-ideal.
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Home eventually; dinner with Lydia & Janice & Jules;
back to work until late.
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Up early, quick mail chew; set off for Cambridge; into
the office to see Tracie; read a great report. Train on to
Edinburgh, worked on budgets. Extraordinarily frustrating
experience with intermittent connectivity and Evolution on
the train for some hours.
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Enjoyed some of the talks at the Open Source Awards,
and a great meal mid-stream.
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Extraordinarily honoured to recieve from Karen Sandler,
on behalf of Collabora Productivity, the UK Open Source Awards 2015 -
Best Organisation; gave a small acceptance spiel:
- It is an honour: in a Cloud obsessed world to have a
Commodity Client Software company represented. In
a world obsessed by Tablets: to encourage
Free Software that makes your PC/Mac keyboard really useful.
Naturally, we do have a Tablet & phone version making
good progress now (for the paper-haters).
- LibreOffice 80+ million users: more than the UK's
population. A brief correction - Collabora is only the 2nd
largest contributor to the code - the 1st is volunteers
in whose debt we all are. Everything we produce is Free Software.
- Collabora - has a mission we believe in: To make Open
Source rock (ono). We're betting our Productivity subsidiary
on ODF and LibreOffice.
- We're here to kill the old reasons not to deploy Free Software:
with long term maintenance for three to five years; rich
support options - backing our partner/resellers with a fast
code-fix capability; and finally killing complaints - we can
implement any feature, fix any bug, and integrate with any Line Of
Business app for you.
- In the productivity space - innovation is long overdue;
Free Software can provide that. Thanks for coming &
your support
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Mail chew, built ESC stats; mail; lunch. Customer call.
Reviewed the LibreOffice 4.4 feature set to write a LXF column,
rather encouraged.
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Booked train tickets to the great Open Source Awards tomorrow
in Edinburgh.
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Mail chew, 1:1 calls with people, lunch. Team call, sync
with Lubos, mail, hacked a little bit on gtktiledviewer wrt.
zoomed in selection overlay rendering. 2nd team call.
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Lie-in, out to NCC - Claire preached well; back for lunch
with Dean and Moulouia(?) and their fun-sized girls. Quarter practice
with the babes, watched a notably terrible 'Cindy' film; tea, read
stories bed.
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Up earlyish; counted the area for tiles, into Bury to
order just the right kind; to Noughton Park to play with the
babes. Back for lunch.
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Spent much of the afternoon moving more cupboards
from wall A (the wrong wall) to wall B (the right wall).
Considered the plans to create fitted family lockers for the
assorted junk that four babes produce - to match JP's
version we admired in Toronto.
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Mail chew, patch review, fixed an Android crasher, and tried
to avoid a SIGILL running Android/Atom code on my AMD x86_64 machine
in the android emulator: nasty, failed to overcome that with my Core
II Duo. Perhaps new NDK's really generate lots of hyper-new
instructions, odd.
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Took apart my Motorola Xoom which has failed to charge reliably
recently. Very impressed with the non-soldered-in, surface-mount - get
really well secured (by moulding in the chassis) power connector;
removed and tweaked this with a needle to mend it (for now).
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Built ESC bug stats, and created a wiki page for the pending
and awesome Cambridge
LibreOffice Hackfests - May 21st to 23rd.
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H's friend Paris over; lunch. ESC call.
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Plugged at mail, got through a number of the more
vexing task backlog. Contract review, chat with Chris &
Vladimir; partner call. Enjoyed the antics of 'Ludo Backslash' in Assylum, sleep.
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Mail chew, admin in the car on the way to Bruce
& Anne's worked there. Lunch - out for a walk across
the warren with the family. Back, got several more
annoying pieces done. Pancakes for tea. Some hacking in
the car on the way home.
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One-on-one calls, mail chew, lunch. Product team call.
More mail & IM chew, Consulting team call. Poked at vclref
changes a little to relax. Potter movie in the evening.
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Practiced & played at Church, Tony spoke well on 1
Thessalonians 4; pointed out the rather tragic Shades of Grey
release on Valentines day. Romanticising getting pleasure from inflicting
pain seems extraordinarily perverse to me. I feel for those in
relationships whose shades of abuse will get deepened by this.
Also for those wanting to improve their satisfaction with their spouse
it all seems rather self defeating.
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Out to GenR8 to collect a tired but happy M. and N. - fun.
Returned home to drill holes in walls left & right to wire up the
audio for J's sound-system - to avoid it traipsing over the Kitchen.
Back for a Sunday dinner, and put everyone to bed.
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Woke early, unexpected call from a friend. Wrote cards
for daughters, wife, positioned flowers, chocolates etc. Back to
bed. Breakfast.
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Took E. out for her annual trip to Banham Zoo - a wonderful
set of displays, particularly the Amazing Animal display
with a set of trained animals from Rats & Owls to Armadillos
and more. Enjoyed the various feedings of Cheetas, Siberian
Tigers etc. Had lunch together.
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Back for dinner, put babes to bed; did a bit of hackery
trying to get the VCL lifecycle branch that (mostly Noel) has been
toiling at into a better place.
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Started on the task backlog - travel is really bad for
focused E-mail handling / proposal writing. Plugged away and
got some bits turned around. Interview. Dinner.
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Took N. and M. to Genr8 - a Christian weekend indoor
camp-thing in Histon; an emptier house. Detour via Bar-Hill
Tesco with E. to stock up on flowers & cards for tomorrow.
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Breakfast with Guy, ISE early - wandered the floor a bit. Train,
plane, coach, coach home - lovely to see the family, read stories etc.
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ISE show all day, lots of pacing of the floor, some customer
& partner contacts, interesting discussions. Quick tea in the
evening; chewed at proposals; poked people variously. Encouraged
to read Why I ditched Microsoft Word (for LibreOffice).
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Horrible train, bus, coach journey to Luton. Plane to
Amsterdam, eventually got to the RAI, met up with Guy, out for
a fine dinner, back to a fine AirBnB place; bed.
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Mail chew, one-to-one meetings, status report, lunch.
Product team call, customer call, consulting team call. Dinner,
put babes to bed; plugged away in the evening until late - built
ESC stats.
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NCC, played the Violin, ran the older kids group. Home for
a fine lunch; slugged quietly, hair-cut - discovered the fridge's
push-fit plumbing is leaking & rotting the inherited, horrible
fake-flooring; bother. Poked at that. Bed early.
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Late up, J. out to take E. to a soft-play party; tidied the
house, read the Economist; Sue, Clive & family + Bruce &
Anne over. Out to Prezzo for an Anne's birthday treat - much enjoyed
by everyone. Back, enjoyed a chat. Dinner, next Potter movie in the
evening with H. and N.
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Mail chew; call, more mail. Pointed people at Chris Lord's
links to Mozilla
compositing which look fun. Continued to assault the endless
pile of admin. Potter movie with M. in the evening.
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Mail chew; interview; lunch; call with Thorsten, ESC call,
pushed minutes. Plugged away at admin & proposal iteration in
the evening until late.
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Encouraged to see Simon's FOSDEM LibreOffice for Android bug
report reveal a whole category of silly crashers: intents that point
to non-local files fail to load as of now; Tomaz working on a fix.
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Mail chew, call with Chris; admin catch-up; sync. with Tim. Lunch. Call with Vladimir.
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Ran some profiles, chased some loose ends. Partner call. Sync
with Joel. Interested to read Gerv's blog Je Suis... in passing.
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To Beta Co-working (our kind hosts) - started working
through the mail & task backlog from FOSDEM - finally found
a patch to review, caught up with lots of people one on one,
albeit briefly. Train, just caught the Eurostar, trains home.
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Off to Beta Co-working; mail chew while waiting for the
gathering to begin; all-day board meeting. Lots of budgetting &
other discussion. Pizza dinner, bought in - more mail catchup.
Back to the Hotel, caught up with Italo, then Thorsten, bed late.
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More FOSDEM goodness; lots catching up with people; out for
a constructive lunch. More hanging out with all and sundry, caught up
with some old friends; out for a (traditional) Kasbah dinner; up late.
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)
