Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, called the credit card company - to try to unwind their horrific policy of stopping frequent traveller's cards working abroad. Chappy was eager to know exact flight dates etc. for a full itinery. So - this is Co-Op Bank / VISA stupidity; I wonder if there is better / hard data on card providers that don't screw customers around ? Amex ? Mastercard ? "FooCard: we don't leave you stranded in Turkmenistan with no cash !", perhaps a good marketing strap-line ?
Poked bugs. Jody's latest blog on OOXML is fun, unfortunately Jody no longer works for Novell, FYI.
And more interest today. Today, IBM joined the OpenOffice.org project! which leads to several thoughts (amateur pundit that I am):
- Firstly - welcome, this is an amazing day for both IBM and OO.o. As something Novell has worked hard at (unfortunately behind the scenes) for many months, it's great to see this come to fruition finally.
- Louis Suarez Potts famously re-assured IBM (Don) in Koper that no-one in the community thinks not-releasing your OO.o code-changes is anti-social (or words to that effect). As a person who had spent some time hammering Don on this topic the night before, I was appalled. So I'm happy now to enthusiastically applaud IBM for doing the right thing: releasing all their changes & contributing them to OO.o. It's a great sight to see IBM step out of the proprietary swamp into a world of Free Office Software: following Sun's lead some years ago with OO.o.
- Go IBM ! It takes a lot of courage to start assigning all your code ownership to a competitor. My hope is that as more substantial contributors join OO.o, we will be in a stronger position to make this a truly open project, with meritocratic leadership and ownership (like ~all other successful, open communities).
- Speaking of ownership, here is a trivial spot the imbalance competition (some numbers approximate), just focusing on developers (as of the new world): if we add community translator head-count etc. of course Sun would be swamped numerically (and trying roughly to convert a number of part-time community developers into a guesstimated ~10 full-time equivalents):
- Question for Sun mgmt: at what fraction of the community will Sun re-consider it's demand for ownership of the entirity of OO.o ?
- Anyhow, welcome IBM !, I'm glad to have you involved in OO.o, and I look forward to working with you guys to try to make OO.o a project with lower barriers to entry, that people and companes can easily join; oh, and preferably one that is fun to hack on. Lets (finally) start to make OO.o rock.
Lunch, back to iogrind - I should post some screenshots some time I guess. Wrote my report at length for AMD, including in this the effect of sorting the files passed to OO.o's pagein binary (on Unix) by inode number. The pictures show reads as red blocks linked by red lines; ie. the less scribble the fewer seeks:

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Rather an image-heavy day it seems. Off to visit a clothing solutions consultant.

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.

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Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2007-09-10: Monday