Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early; discovered lots of goodness in the spam trap, prodded obscure build problems: its certainly getting better; uncovered and fixed a vicious nodep mis-enablement problem. Boggled at the 'M+ Guardian' spam trap, which appears to catch unfeasible numbers of genuine mails, prodded IS&T about disabling it, which (eventually) they kindly did - nice.
Lots of work prodding mail, pushing patches from volunteers. I love it when we have to up the mailing-list size limit so that people's patches don't get bounced for being too big.
Got freedesktop account creation sorted out once and for all with Tollef's help. Lengthy team meeting frustrated by Nurnberg re-wiring breaking external connection to our Asterix server; IS&T love me today it seems.
Dinner, back to debug some intermittent, binfilter, crash-on-exit memory corruption bug (you have to love them). Thank God for valgrind - particularly since gdb won't work [ OpenOffice.org, like GNOME wants its own python so - the infamous:
gdb: symbol lookup error: gdb: undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS4_FromEncodedObject
strikes again (and I still didn't get to making gdb's python dependency a dynamic one - being lazy and all).
First LibreOffice conference track ...

I forgot to announce, the incredibly prescient OpenSUSE organisation, being, from birth, incredibly perspicuous and wise (cf. Kim Jong Il's biography) - kindly booked LibreOffice its own track at the OpenSUSE conference so we can get some good German beer, meet up, and discuss development, direction and so on. Please come and join us there, Florian Effenberger will be giving an opening talk to rally the troops, then lots of topical development sessions I suspect. For those of a North American persuasion I will be attempting to subvert the GNOME Boston Summit by inserting an informal LibreOffice flavour - it'd be great to meet up with like minded souls there too.
Father arrived to stay at 9pm, sat up talking a while, really good to see him.

2010-09-29: Wednesday.

Up lateish, after a late night of frantic fixing of problems afflicting people on IRC, and encouraging contribution - a good number of patches having arrived (pleasingly).
Very quick breakfast, and off into Cambridge for TEAM training. Lots of great content, dug through some of the early Church Father's views on the inerrancy of scripture, which even today are shared by Catholic and Protestant, Churches of East and West alike. Studied Joshua one, trying to learn to not just read - but observe what is in the scripture carefully, the better to understand it in its context. The last character formation session in the afternoon: most helpful.
Back home with Mike, dinner, put the babes to bed while J. went out counselling. Worked like stink until late, trying to get back on top of all the pending mail, patches to merge.
Grateful for Jim Getty's support.

2010-09-28: Tuesday.

The story behind the story behind the news today

Up early; the marathon is over - and here we are: LibreOffice and the Document Foundation have been announced. Finally we have a project that will be fun to hack on, and not beset with keep out signs (many sadly still invisible to the existing owner). If you want to get involved, there is no better time than now (at the beginning), and there is no better place than LibreOffice.
So, many others have spoken about the sea-change in the community and industry that made LibreOffice possible. And indeed, I'm almost a convert to the idea that total non-developers can provide lots of tangible value now, despite myself. Clearly it took a lot of courage and accomodation to work together as a team, which was for the most part a pleasure. I hestitate to call out any of this rich set of characters I'm growing to love; you can see them here
Having said all that, I'd like to point out some of the super-stars that you won't perhaps see on the web-site with bow-ties, in glorious monochrome. First Jeremy Allison, Bradley Kuhn and Jonathan Blandford, old friends without whose wise counsel and assistence, nothing would have got done; thanks too to Michael Dexter and Karen Sandler who put in lots of hard work behind the scenes. Simon Phipps' whose sage support is much appreciated - eg. tweet of the day: "If the company sponsor stands still and the community moves on, who forked ?", and Christopher Aillon for his indulgence.
Then of course Fridrich Strba and Petr Mladek generating builds for Windows and Linux, (and Thorsten for OSX) - and re-spinning them until late at night, with Peter Poeml doing wonders with mirror services. My entire product management hierarchy were flexible, supportive and decisive under time pressure: Pete Chadwick, Holger Dyroff, Carlos Montero-Luque and more. Finally - in the last minute panic of hourly revisions to the 'final' press release, Guy Lunardi stepped into the breach and over many hours (with help from Christophe) made the website both beautiful, and complete - I'm honoured by his friendship.
Stepping back, it has been amazing to work towards this goal, perhaps unwittingly with a team of great developers around the globe; many of whom have stuck through thick and thin, persisting even when the fashion was against them, to bring us to where we are today.

Initial thoughts

Apparently positivity is a key attribute - so, it must be good that tons of people suddenly subscribed to my twitter feed (that I almost never use), how gratifying. It has been wonderful to get lots of personal mails of congratulation from many including, several ex-OpenOffice hackers, saying they might get involved again. It was great to see a good number of people jumping into the #libreoffice (developers) IRC channel on freenode, helping improve the hackers documentation, downloading and building the code, and getting eager about doing some of the Easy Hacks (nice entry level tasks), and merging some of their first patches.
Similarly, from a web infrastructure perspective, it was great to see a reverse slashdot effect, with the site going slow as (presumably) people refreshed slashdot.org in a loop waiting for the libreoffice.org announcement to hit the wire.
Another pleasure was the first technical steering call planning our next moves and tentative schedule (minutes). We made a number of clean decisions in 30minutes of pleasant, friendly, collegial conversation; something new. It is great to have a solution for every problem, rather than a problem for every solution.
It seems our first patch posted to the list, was by Neil Brown - ace kernel block layer (and elswhere) hacker - (who works for Novell, but whose contribution had got wedged between the cracks somehow), to fix some misbehaviour of the blocks in Impress' disolve transition (fun). After three years of being ignored (interestingly it is still assigned to Thorsten, now at Novell, who left Sun shortly after getting the bug) it finally made it into LibreOffice - go Neil !
In another turn up for the books, the documentfoundation website was slashdotted, and yet continued to serve pages, while at the same time git, bugzilla and mailing list worked normally without interruption. Thanks no doubt to Florian Effenberger's skill and cunning.

The future

LibreOffice is going to be a fun place for developers to live, and strike their blow for freedom - without a doubt. Get involved now, and help to shape the software and the social life for the next decade.

2010-09-27: Monday.

Up early, the final sprint in the LibreOffice saga. Conference call in the morning, followed by long counsel with Thorsten.
More press pre-briefings, really encouraging to talk again with some of the most insightful (English speaking) journalists out there around Free Software. Caught up on all the mail from yesterday.
Went through umpteen 'final' iterations of the press release, how final can final be ? Eventually it got too late for that, moved onto massaging the web-site. Perhaps the mechanics of having to push binaries to mirrors well in advance frees a helpful space for actually finishing the job before going live. Peter Poeml doing a fantastic job of getting the mirroring sorted, Fridrich, Petr and Thorsten having doing builds left & right.
Slogged away at polishing the website with Guy, Christophe and Thorsten until 3am-ish; hopefully despite our mediocre talents the result is good; bed; back to send more mail and empty the mind - tomorrow we go live at 8am BST as LibreOffice; sleep.

2010-09-26: Sunday.

Up late, off to NCC, caught part of the sermon, and creche problems with E. not wanting to be left, for the rest.
Back for lunch, watched an incredibly lame DVD about Santa Claus - with Christ totally removed, and a double dose of sentimentality wedged in.
Dinner. Listened to a great Gordon sermon on Judges and Deborah - a mother in Israel, really good to understand the text in more detail.

2010-09-25: Saturday.

Up early; off to the Dinosaur Adventure Park near Norwich, as always good fun for all. Spirits hardly dampened by plenty of showers.
Back, quick dinner, babes to bed; worked rather late, right up to Sunday.

2010-09-24: Friday.

Prodded at mail, chased an irriating bug with a menu item that, at great length, turned out to be a friendly optimisation gone wrong; hey ho. Did more from-clean builds left and right.
Misc. conference calls, dinner, back to work in the evening.

2010-09-23: Thursday.

Up early, worked through the mail backlog. Bit of hacking, much conference-callage variously, fixed up a malingering bootchart2 issue. Voted in the local elections. Lydia over for dinner, bed late.

2010-09-22: Wednesday.

Up early, prodded mail, packed babes off to school. Out into Cambridge with Mike Geach, to the first day of TEAM. Excessively good, nice to have a NT lecturer from the university Theology faculty, and great teaching on various topics. V. good of Novell to give me un-paid leave to study.
Back home, conference call, worked until late.

2010-09-21: Tuesday.

Up early, prodded mail. Interested to see the Oracle Cloud Office Preview be announced at Oracle OpenWorld. It is now at least public that this is where some large chunk of the OpenOffice org developement muscle from StarDivision has disappeared into: a proprietary web-office product; shame. Interesting too to have a video demo with no release date.
Filed misc. bugs, more mail, chat with Jeremy. Dinner, put babes to bed while J. counselled; more mail, and yet more encouraging mail. Calls with Guy, Pete, Kerry, Ian, etc.

2010-09-20: Monday.

Up early, read mail, noticed Jeremy just extended his GUADEC interview series to include an arch rambler. Poked at bugs variously. Call with JP. More mail.
Dinner, babes to bed, back to the cliff-face of work, while J. did counselling.

2010-09-19: Sunday.

Rest; followed by tidying and cleaning up, dunged out the Barbequeue - and bent the grill out of shape, to fit around my sub-optimal sheet metal-work fixing it. Off to NCC - did creche.
Back in a hurry for Martin's leaving barbeque, managed to get the fire going eventually - John Madden arrived with his awesome south-african grilling skills to cook lots of food.
Much of the church arrived, eat, lots of kids crammed into the castle at the end of the garden, etc. etc.
Helped get John's computer working in the evening (some Ubuntu netbook) - amazingly the window manager was not running (though it did quite well despite that), the network kill switch had no on-screen display (meaning the delay while scanning for networks had confused him into turning wireless off again), and a number of other unfortunate snafus. Spent a while training & repairing. Bed early.

2010-09-18: Saturday.

Up early, into Cambridge for more training in Christian Counselling (course by Manna House). Lovely pastor from Rugby: Steve Hall - lots of useful background on different schools of Psychotherapy, and helpful discussion. Lunch. More lectures, home early afternoon.
Relieved Laura of her six charges, and out to fetch some fish & chips, storied & bed for babes. Prodded mail & the web.
Pleased to see safe root mounting without an initramfs going somewhere (accelerating boot).

2010-09-17: Friday.

Up early, to work. Poked mail. Boggled at the (only) factor of two speed-win that comes from moving the dbus code into the kernel. Amazingly AFAIR, ORBit2 was the same factor of two faster (in the same topology) in many situations, despite not having any significant performance profiling / optimisation since it was re-written, and without any such tricks. How does it do that: just by being less lame, doing no string validation, better iovec construction, having cleaner socket code etc. (though CORBA object references do suck to marshal). C'est la vie - we need to speed d-bus up, but is the kernel really the right place for this ? Surely we could push the same match optimisations down into the user-space processes themselves so they could go direct for some methods.
Spent time thinking about lang-packs; the Power of Babel to inflict pain is quite phenomenal. Back to hacking eventually. Brief chat with Kurt, and JP, more writing up.
Out with Julia in the evening to a training course on Christian Counselling, Zoe kindly baby sat.

2010-09-16: Thursday.

Enjoyed the mail, back to hacking. Discovered SLIC tables in wikipedia - used to tie your OEM license key for Windows 7 to the BIOS of your machine, fascinating; hopefully it will stop un-authorised copying which can only be good for GNU/Linux.
Massaged some verbiage, patch review, IM action, back to hacking, OO.o team call, prodded some obsolete tooling: thank goodness for API backwards compatibility.
Paint chipping and preparation of stairs in the evening: hopefully soon will not live in a half painted house.

2010-09-15: Wednesday.

Prodded mail, boggled at self-serving blogs, poked Seif. Back to OO.o hacking - loving it. Bed early, tired.

2010-09-14: Tuesday.

Prodded mail, and on to some more paper ranking fun - with a Google spreadsheet; I guess for entering simple columns of numbers it could be worse.
Lunch, JP's staff meeting. Back to prodding at OO.o variously. More hacking in the afternoon - fun at last.
Dinner, put babes to bed - H. terrified by some 'Horrible History' story she heard in class at school, quivering with fear and hard to console; makes you wonder what they teach them these days.
On a joint account - why is it, that when I reset my internet credentials, my wife cannot log in and VV. - it reduces the usefulness somewhat if you have to call the call centre anyway each time we switch user.

2010-09-13: Monday.

Took babes to school; read mail, pleased to see at least some sense being discovered from the Oracle / Java debacle no matter how much some people don't like the facts.
Appalled to see Matthew Allum leave Intel, it is a shame for MeeGo to loose such expertise, and experience - warmly applied.
Pleased to see that Google introduced live-search to the UK before I did anything rash. Remembered my gitorious credentials for the packagekit move to there (and all because FreeDesktop has such terrible account creation latency: why !?).
Got a clean OO.o compile setup, send a gdu patch off to David, reviewed a PackageKit patch & begged zypp help with some others. Filled out Clarity, prodded travel agents.
Poked at my previous Python problem, it seems Tom Tromey has done some awesome python work with gdb, which (no doubt) I should check out next bug ... Dinner. Julia having counselling supervision, so worked late.
Interesting to see Anssi Vanjoki - who gave a very strong commitment to Symbian & MeeGo step down from Nokia.

2010-09-11: Sunday.

Up early, tended babes. Off to NCC - Tony speaking on God's building of his church.
Back to ours lunch with Peter & Dianne, Tony & Janice and Lydia. Amused by Peter's stories of falling asleep on trains variously: ending up in a tube maintenance yard, and so on - a chap after my own heart.
Babes watched some insipid Hello Kitty in the afternoon, while we tidied up, dinner, put babes to bed - more paint stripping and cleanup.

2010-09-11: Saturday.

Mini lie-in, awoken - the Met office fouled up the long distance (ie. two days out) weather prediction - switching from incessant rain, to cloudy with sunny spells. Perhaps the BBC should not show their post-code based future weather maps more than a day ahead.
Set off to Bressingham with the babes. As normal an excellent day, much fun on the Carousel riding horses, and singing along to the hits of fifty years ago from some mechanical organ. Steam train rides, wanders in the beautiful gardens. Interestingly perhaps -the- most fun piece for the babes was fiddling in the signal box with some huge signal levers, pushing them too and fro with great exertion.
Back; quick call with Kendy then Thorsten, mail. Set too painting the stairs - after a hiatus of many months, sealed a lot of new plaster.

2010-09-10: Friday.

Up early, poked mail and missed messages overnight.
Interested, though unsurprised to see a new Nokia CEO. Watched his Gartner performance for Microsoft (on Nokia at 30mins, and Linux 36mins). Interesting that he has not been at Microsoft -that- long, and worked for various other competitors. Curious times indeed. Also interested to see the fast ARM CPU analysis - a cheap, low power, 8 core, multi-GHz ARM chip - only 32 bit though, so not really suitable for servers, presumably not low enough power for handhelds either: so when will the ARM desktop arrive ? and can the proprietary world really cope with a different architecture ?
Prodded admin. Interviewed another OO.o candidate. Pleased to see the Wordpress trademark transferred to a non-profit: that's great practise:
Automattic has transferred the WordPress trademark to the WordPress Foundation, the non-profit dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity. This means that the most central piece of WordPress's identity, its name, is now fully independent from any company.

This is a really big deal. ...

It's important for me to know that WordPress will be protected and that the brand will continue to be a beacon of open source freedom regardless of whether any company is as benevolent as Automattic has been thus far. It's important to me to know that we've done the right thing.
Amen. If only all nominally open communities were that well managed, and structured: go Matt Mullenweg.
Irritated by the hype around Google instant search not being available to mere mortals in the UK, with the particularly fun instant re-direction to the UK site you get from the US one. Why should Americans have all the fun ? It is this kind of thing that gives me an insane urge to smoke a Koran (or something). Perhaps if I blackmail all of America by threatening them with a mass of demented, homicidal maniacs I could get on TV, and call for better Google search in the UK ? if it works for others ... Not getting enough respect ? try threatening to murder a few people left & right to build credibility; how offensive.
Finally got to the end of mail, and poked some code at last. Thrilled to see Broadcom apparently finally do the right thing - and open source their drivers: oh what needless pain we suffered, can it really be at an end ? Excellent.
Submitted a paper on bootchart2 somewhat late for the Plumbers Conference, and moved my flight to the right month (being over-eager to meet the august audience that I had it scheduled for October instead of November).

2010-09-09: Thursday.

To work; prodded at clean re-build of everything, and the associated gtk+ build breakage - just a simple deprecation problem. Laboured on, nss not building - some twisted portability code breaking drbg.c:510:5: error: size of array ‘arg’ is negative.
Lunch; eventually discovered that none of that jhbuild goodness really works for stuff that is normally installed in the system; and that the best advice is to update your distro, and use a jhbuildrc that skips difficult stuff like this - it'd be nice if it was possible to detect whether it was even necessary to build these things in advance I suppose.
Dinner, up late talking with Americans: James, Patrick, and Michael, interesting.

2010-09-08: Wednesday.

Prodded mail, gdb crashed; oh dear - I installed a new python to make glib build (via gobject-introspection); now gdb won't run (why does that link to python ?); a non-beautiful outcome: gdb: undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS4_FromEncodedObject
Interviewed another candidate; installed 11.3 to try to get a working development environment. Still failed to run gdb, but could at least use the system python for gobject-introspection. Tried to re-build enough of the stack for the new system libraries to work: oh dear - gtk+ (gtk-2-22) doesn't build: guess what is to blame ? gobject-introspection (g-ir-scanner missing some --strip-prefix mode). Gave up and tried to install the nice GNOME:Factory repositories from OpenSUSE. Lunch.
Back to LXF column contemplation. Discovered that GNOME:Factory is horked and won't install without griping intensely and widely about some random video related dependency. Colin kindly pointed me at his fix and the --disable-introspection configure flag for gtk+.
Got the Evolution:snapshots repository to work eventually, and read mail; urk.
Thrilled to get to the point that the noise on the systemd list is annoying enough to create a filter to get it out of my inbox. fifty+ messages and several patches in a day is a good place to be: go systemd.
Dinner, prodded mail until late.

2010-09-07: Tuesday.

Up too early, got babes practised with time to spare; packed them off to school. Reviewed a PackageKit / zypp backend bug or two, compiled a new Python so I could build gobject-introspection, and thus PK. Prodded and merged misc. fixes.
Lunch. Considered DOS on Dope as a platform for a Web Office suite, particularly with it's lack of known scalability problems (the time-wasting perils of twitter strike again).
Called plumber to get a gas-safety check sorted out.
Interviewed a hacker in the afternoon; interesting. Call with Victoria in the evening, Lydia over for dinner, up rather late poking some west-coast magic.

2010-09-06: Monday.

Overslept, not into the 6:45am waking routine from the holidays yet. Fed, and hurried babes off to school. M. looking so tiny and sweet in her new uniform.
Back to the mail hill, admin, Clarity, tested bootchart2 pieces, merged branches and pushed out a 0.12.4 - with memory graphing from Dave Martin at Linaro, and lots more nice fixes and features from Riccardo Magliocchetti.
Started slogging through abstracts: I know everyone wants their simple calculator-app to be 'more a platform than an app' but apparently they now want to be virtual platforms - perhaps fair enough if it has at least some tenuous link to virtualisation; but if not ?
Dinner, baby stories, more mail thrash. Finished LotR in the evening while J. painted.

2010-09-05: Sunday.

Up early, J. off to West Suffolk to have dressing changed, (why does she so frequently get ill when I'm away). Tended babes.
Off to NCC, ran the creche, which (despite the loss of M.) is more packed with fun-sized people than before.
Home for lunch, with Andre and Lottie - good to get to know them a little better. J. slept a while, while I disappeared into the Lord of the Rings and the babes watched cbeebies.
Dinner, put babes to bed and read to them; J. went out to meet up with Myriam, while I read ever more.

2010-09-04: Saturday.

Slept until midday, swapped places with J. who slept until rather later. Out to buy bread, lunch, played with babes.
Watched a new kids DVD, issue one of What's in the Bible, really rather good. Dinner, bed early.

2010-09-03: Friday.

Up rather later, breakfast with Caolan & Kendy. To the conference, arrived a tad too late for Eike's well attended Calc talk,
Out for lunch with Ray, Marcel & Kendy. Taxi to the airport, plane home. Lovely to see the wonderful wife, and sleeping babies again.

2010-09-02: Thursday.

Up, managed to forget to frank my ticket on the tram and get fined; sigh - if only the lady had been able to sell me a three day pass instead of three singles.
Met Kalman at the conference, and wandered the conference talking to misc. people. On to Stefan's test-ability talk, encouraging to see the unit testing work I prototyped in 2008 (and subsequently broken by the three-layer-izing of OO.o, and tons of stop-energy) is finally being taken seriously, and good progress being made.
Lunch with Rene & Kendy, on to Moritz' talk on bridge building - amusing. On to see some demos of the latest MS Office bling from Moritz (which is impressive), a few amusing bugs in OO.o. Prodded the horrible formula support in MSO 2010 - cut & paste a formula from Word to Excel, and re-size it: you get a low-res bitmap, complete with cleartype artifacts, fun.
Interviewed a great candidate for our OO.o team. Out for an interesting & pleasant dinner in the evening. Onto a pub for somedrinks, and back to our hotel room until insanely late.

2010-09-01: Wednesday.

Up late, breakfast; checked mail. Trammed into town, met up with the guys; on to mba's talk on making OO.o more hack-able. Out for lunch with the lads; back for the new build system talk.
Fine party, and fireworks in the evening.

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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

First LibreOffice conference track ...

The story behind the story behind the news today

Initial thoughts

The future