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:
2023: (
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2022: (
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2021,
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legacy html
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Mail and slide chew, tech planning call, more slide
work. Lunch with B&A, partner presentation; visited
bungalow nearby for a tour with B&A - looks good.
Back to work.
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Bible study group in the evening, good to see people
again after a break, Isaiah
40 - good stuff.
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Wrote up my blog alongside a frantically working
M. to support her finishing her EPQ.
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Amused to see right to repair applied helpfully to ice
cream machines by iFixit and others; particularly in light
of Matthias' apparently prescient Ada
& Zangemann book.
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Early partner project call; plugged away at
admin for much of the day. Weekly sales call with Eloy
back. Band practice in the evening with Cedric. Worked
on slides with Andras. Tessa over to see N.
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Catch up with Dennis, sync with Andras, lunch,
Eloy, then Pedro. Dug at project analysis & reporting.
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Planning calls; marketing content call, marketing
team call, encouraging partner call.
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All Saints, played bass & violin; home for lunch.
Babes all out for dinner with Aron - watched all of Citadel -
hmm; got stuck into Dune - better.
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Got some sneaky hacking in on AVX2 optimization of the
RLE code, merged in Caolan's nice XOR to packed bits magic.
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M&D up - breakfast chez-Jules together, and chatted.
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J's family arrived, good to see Sue & Clive&A&J,
Bruce&Anne too. M&D left - went to look at a bungalow for
B&A nearby. Played games with the babes.
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After they'd left - eliminated a branch, eliminated a loop,
and we have an optimized, branch-free loop that chews eight pixels
each iteration: nice. Up late, slept badly - hacking before sleep
considered harmful over-stimulation.
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Partner and staff calls much of the day, catch up
with Deirdre - our in-house compensation expert: great.
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Wrestled RyanAir flights to the Nextcloud conference,
and on to the LibreOffice
conference, and then to Seafile
Seadays too - should be a fun Autumn.
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Discovered that my blog still had an issue with a Swedish
conspiracy,
thanks to Jeff Fortin Tam for noticing -
perl -pi.bak
re-wrote everything to use the wonderful web archive.
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Spent time with M&D between times catching up
with them - lovely to have them to stay.
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Plugged away at normal calls, slideware.
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Chris over for lunch to examine where best to put
solar panels. Nice to have a friend with minute-by-minute
weather data sets: is there more sun in the morning or
afternoon for example, how does that compare with the price:
are west facing panels more valuable than east ? templar is
quite cool.
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Sync with Miklos. M&D to stay, on their way back
from Grant & Anne's.
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Exciting chat with Gulsah, sync with Hubert,
interesting call with lawyer. Worked on slideware.
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Call with Andras, admin, call with Caolan, admin.
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Up late poked at some AVX2 vpermd LUT building and
some mechanics around that.
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Out for a run with J. planning call much of the
morning, admin.
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All Saints, home made pizza, slept a lot.
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M. finished her chess-board, lots of planing and orbital
sanding action; bought some clear varnish for a nice finish - job
mostly done: good.
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Brief Partner call, customer call, admin, partner call.
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Poked at ChatGPT - perhaps it can help me optimize my
code; gave it some RLE code initRow
that could benefit from some love; not impressed. Some great
abstract tips eg.
1. Avoid Unnecessary Dynamic Memory Allocation:
But it came up with a change (complete with comment) that was:
- uint32_t scratch[width];
+ uint32_t *scratch = new uint32_t[width]; // Allocate on the stack
Not ideal. I was hoping for some clever idea around something new
VPCONFLICTD
or better some shifts and VPCMPD or somesuch
to perhaps make performance better. At least
it gave some good factual lookup answers like a prettier technical search engine.
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Mental note to read Paul Graham on How to do great work -
and do better work.
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Read code, chased a bug collaboratively - fun; filed more tickets.
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Technical planning call, perf. call, COOL community
meeting, a round-up of our Hack-week, catch-up with Miklos
and a break from calls to do administration until late
at night. E. got her statistics GCSE results: good work.
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Early partner call, work, same partner call,
weekly sales call, admin. Out for an unusually positive
doctors appointment.
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Catch up with Caolan on performance, and Lubos
too; band practice in the evening.
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)
