Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Out for breakfast at Faith's home - great to see her, Jill, Laura and the collective menagerie of children; home to work.
Amused to see the Canonical noise around their new desktop shell. As Dave says writing a functional shell, particularly with a team with a steep technical curve to climb, and few spare resources. Perhaps it will succeed in the long run (where by 'succeed' I mean create a really viable duplication of Gnome Shell which can run and run, dividing developers and users), and perhaps not. Intel also initially made a ton of mistakes in Moblin around copyright assignment and closed development which breed duplication etc. though they seem to be past much of that now. Arguably Novell's development of compiz itself was extremely retarded wrt. open-ness, inclusion and community nous. Making the same silly mistakes left and right is nothing new. The sad thing in the bigger picture, is to see the community of companies grow (and fail) faster than the lessons / experience of past failures percolate through to their leadership. In my experience most people totally miss the most difficult piece of software engineering: which sounds like it should be software - but is really about people - and more importantly - them working together collaboratively in a constructive, friendly, and incremental fashion. Obviously collaboration is not always possible, but in the long run - there is simply no other viable approach than to work well with others, (in my not so humble experience).
Prodded mail, really encouraged to see VOS (a library deprecated for a ~decade) finally expunged from LibreOffice by a volunteer - Norbert Thiebaud - a hero of our time; lots of code review, chunks of testing, and a cleaner, smaller, more consistent code-base. Reviewed and merged a nice patch to use zenity during the build for systray / progress feedback.
Amused to see Oracle's Community Council show its true colors; with everyone except Oracle guys leaving - apparently this non-entity (the council), with no actual legal existence needs change. Sadly its bylaws don't allow for Oracle unilaterally deciding that it doesn't want to hear the elected community representatives say - which is no doubt a bug. To try to portray this as a conflict of interest of the community representatives, there being no conflict of interest for the Oracle guys is a joke. Why should a divergence from Oracle's view be a conflict of interest with the community ? I guess the tactic here is to push the lunacy one level up, and claim that because Oracle owns the trademark (and refuses to donate it to the community) that per-se the 'OpenOffice.org Community' is owned by them - but this seems horribly circular. Some people have not resigned formally until 3.3 is out, since that was their stated intention I think.
Meanwhile Miklos posted his slides from the LibreOffice track at the openSUSE conference. His talk "GSoC project: Improving RTF Export..." is available as PDF. goes over the merger of the RTF export filter into the new combined MS export filter code. This saved lots of lines of code, removed tons of duplication, and resolved a lot of bugs; a couple of larger scale links here:

I am always amused to hear the insinuations of how 'un-professional' and 'low-quality' our code contributions are, but this "Anything in a document after a formula is lost when saving as RTF" bug, present in OpenOffice.org (and fixed in Miklos' work - as well as making these formulae editable by the way) takes the biscuit, though there are a large number of other great fixes included:

See the talk for another dozen examples of key improvements.
More mail, Clarity, Lunch, fixed make_installer breakage caused by including Digest::MD5 in solenv by reverting it; hmm. Debugged an f-spot problem for Stephen. Worked on mail queue, added some more easy hacks.
Lydia and Andy over in the evening for dinner, sat by the fire for a while talking, bed 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.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2010-10-26: Tuesday.