Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Dug through the overdue mail mountain from last week's exertions. Clarity, status report writing. Boggled at Amazon - apparently so eager to get reviews they stop people being able to do them quickly by demanding that you write a textual review in addition to a quick and easy rating; sillies.
Decided I couldn't cope without being able to merge and test patches to master (given all the great work flooding in). Had a cleanout of the SSD, and got a master build and merged a patch or two.
Dinner, put babes to bed, met up with Jerry and the other PCC lasses, over for a meeting; back to work until late.

2011-02-27: Sunday.

Up earlyish, breakfast, off to NCC - Tony preaching on Town Pastors. Back for lunch with DT & Zoe - rather tired.
Pottered with the reprap later in the cold (ABS makes such a stench, there is no other option than lots of airflow). Eventually got some PLA extruding nicely. Bed.

2011-02-26: Saturday.

Up early. Expanded and laid out memory foam mattress, with incredibly unpleasant smell to match, worse than burning ABS. Off to Church to clean the toilets etc.
Home, for lunch with Bruce & Anne, great to see them. Played with turning Bruce's boat's old acrylic skylight into a truly flat bed for the reprap.
Off to Oak Hill for Stella & Nicky's birthday party with Chris & Joy. Really fine time, excellent food, great company, most enjoyable. Left late with car packed with sleeping babes, bed late ourselves.

2011-02-25: Friday.

Up early, shower, dressed, off to the train: not there, bother. Back home, internet now working, discovered the next train time & caught it. Off to Maidenhead for the ODF plug-fest, hacking on the train.
Arrived at the plug fest; as normal lots of wonderful words about the joys of ODF, from the usual suspects - the audience seemed to be 80%+ choir. Lots of LibreOffice goodness anyway.
Good talk from Adam Afriyie the local MP, on open standards and open data. Quick interview, caught up with Andrew at the pub at the end for a swift pint followed by an over-long train journey home, via a missed station, and lost ticket.

2011-02-24: Thursday.

Read mail, booted off the network by some clowns at the Newmarket telephone exchange (apparently down); recieved a consolation prize from Google - a lovely green blanket / throw the kids will love it.
More merging plod, and got a few test apps running nicely. Lunch. Quick peek at the net via 3G, interested to read a write up on Nokia and open source at the H-open.
Team meeting, call with JP and Norbert, back to merging. J. out with Miriam for a girly drink in the evening, more merging.

2011-02-23: Wednesday.

Another day of merging. Poked at the reprap in the afternoon, got the extruder assembled, mounted and wired - ready for some testing action tomorrow.

2011-02-22: Tuesday.

Up; fetched mail, poked IRC; lost my internet connection. Fixed a silly in bootchart2 with --crop-after. After a while got back on-line; must return home really. Sad to hear Keith Stribley, the Graphite guy died recently on the eve of Graphite2 integration, created an account for Martin instead.
Unwound another reverse hostname DNS lookup that crept into our startup path in LibreOffice. Got on with merging fun, spent much of the afternoon on that, dense, RSI provoking, etc.

2011-02-21: Monday.

Up, cooked breakfast; dug through mail: encouraging to see other people reviewing, merging patches and that process scaling nicely. Clarity, chewed through more queued tasks, wrote status report. Switched my phone to new UK corporate standard: T-mobile (away from O2), hopefully it'll be cheaper for data. Created another commit account.
Fixed a slideshow race condition, buried under a load of UNO-ized nonsense in sd/ no blank slides on start now. Spent a while doing some misc. merging, only to discover Thorsten had already done it; shame.

2011-02-20: Sunday.

Up, packed up, breakfast, more packing of the car, off to NCC; gave sermon; lunch in the car, drove to Bruce & Anne's. Much applied relaxation; children much more able to entertain themselves without breaking everything these days. Watched Antiques Roadshow, and South Riding in the evening.

2011-02-19: Saturday.

Up earlyish, J. off to a training day. Bathed and treated babes in the morning. Admired the wonderful quality PLA Wade's extruder print-out, kindly sent by Rhys - sharp corners, smooth sides, wow.
Lunch; babes watched The Slipper and the Rose for the umpteenth time, while I assembled and tested the geared extruder: looking rather good. Cooked (well mostly heated up) dinner for the babes, and enjoyed it, with J. arriving eventually.
Packed babes off to bed, worked away at sermon on a single thread running through Daniel 1 for tomorrow.

2011-02-18: Friday.

Up earlyish, breakfasted the babes, and set off for Epping. Central line with babes, push-chair to Holburn, and changed to South Kensington - their first time on the tube: seemed to enjoy it.
Wandered the Natural History Museum - packed with school parties, noise and confusion. Information so dense, that very little was taken in I suspect. Lunch in a convenient underground picnic area. Admired the susbstantial animatronic T-rex (terrifying three of four girls), and the enormous (to scale) blue-whale model, fondly remembered from my youth (and apparently unaltered since then).
Walked the tired babies to a local Pizza Express, to expend Tesco vounchers for dinner with Lydia, fun. Tube trains, and drive home, popped babes into bed, slugged exhaustedly.

2011-02-17: Thursday.

Poked mail, continued merging modules misc. more mail, added an easy hack or two. Lunch. Novell / LibreOffice team meeting, analyst call, Libreoffice Tech Steering Group meeting. More working through the mail backlog; discovered a whole wodge of un-answered-over-FOSDEM mail; urk.
Downloaded and burned chunks of MSDN to get new Win32 build machine & Office 2010 analysis underway.
Researched trip to London tomorrow with the family, printed out maps, booked restaurant with the wife, read the news.
Amused to see some bearded idiot giving a talk on video about LibreOffice at FOSDEM. Oh ! and if you feel scared of contributing to improving the code-base, if you can't translate, or program - there is a great way to make a significant blow for Freedom by helping us financially to get a foundation setup in Germany - we have a deadline in around a month after which time it will be UK based (which is obviously inferior, and means I have to do lots more work); so ! if you are a German tax payer, you can help reduce the federal tax take by deducting income tax from your donations too.

2011-02-16: Wednesday.

Up prodded mail quickly; off early to TEAM to see Tom Chapman, and enjoy his sessions on Evangelism. Lunch, great childrens ministry talk from Rich Newman. Home with Mike.
No family, apparently they've abandoned me. Worked until dinner time - still no-one, eventually they returned after a lot of build / merging / admin progress. Bed early, tired.

2011-02-15: Tuesday.

Up; misc. patch fiddling, build fixing, chat with Norbert and Thorsten; misc. patch review. Made some stable test builds, oddness with the incremental stable build griping thus: config.status: error: cannot find input file: `bin/repo-list.in' which is down to (somehow) the build/libreoffice*/autom4ate.cache cache getting out of step with configure.
JP staff meeting; lots of misc. admin. Misc. calls; amused by the idea that it is cheap to staff up rapidly "at a single geographical location". I don't believe you can hire the very best people if you also require them all to be co-located; not everyone will move - particularly to some locations.

2011-02-14: Monday.

Up early, produced the valentines day card to make the wifelet happy; N. ill in bed poor dear. Clarity, long overdue status report writing.
Up-loaded my FOSDEM talk slides essentially an extension of my Plumbers talk. No slides for the Easy Hacks dev-room talk, just talked through the wiki page.
Worked away at git merge / meld much of the day, had some interesting issues with git master, not present in the stable release; reported that, no doubt not in that helpful a form. Worked late.

2011-02-13: Sunday.

J. lie in while I dealt with the babes; off to NCC, J. helped with kidzone, while I creched; home for lunch with Simon, Claire, Tally & Phoebe - good to catch up with them. Puzzled, and watched Jacob in the evening - in the same mould as Prince of Egypt but slightly less catastrophic. Put babes to bed, listened to When God Says No More, on Judges 10, interesting; then some Yes Prime Minister, sleep.

2011-02-12: Saturday.

Lie in, pottered about, got the reprap going trying to print out better Z axis couplings, but sadly the extruder is too intermittent to be able to cope with printing solid objects; badly need a geared extruder, mercifully have an offer of one - in due course.
Peeled potatoes for tomorrow while waiting for misc. printouts, baby sat E. while everyone else departed for parties and friends houses to play.
Worked a little in the evening, listened to Graham's take on Daniel 1 - encouragingly similar, and yet incrementally useful. Bed early.

2011-02-11: Friday.

Poked mail, listened to parts of the Nokia charge into Windows Phone 7. Sounds like a sad day for the Linux ecosystem, or at least a lost opportunity. Things like "We have moved some future MeeGo device designs and re-purposed these for Windows Mobile 7" (though still committed to releasing one MeeGo phone), "R&D as a %age of revenue is too high ... significant job reductions ... v. substantial use of out-sourced talent". On Qt "We will evaluate the role of qt at the low end ... [ MeeGo / Symbian ], but we are not going to put Qt on the windows mobile phone, as an indication of our sincerity ... introducing another dev platform on windows phone could serve to fork the platform ... silverlight, XNA, and other capabilities.... Qt will not be a single technology that abstracts all of the Nokia devices going forward. [ quotes potentially somewhat mis-redacted, my typing is not that fast ]. Elop also extremely bullish on Windows on tablets too it seems, sad.
By some fluke happenstance, gtk3 got released today.
Spent much of the day merging branches. Worked late, while J. did some work for Tim.

2011-02-10: Thursday.

Practise, packed babes off to school in the car; mail skim. Pleased to see a movie about FOSDEM movie featuring the wonderful LibreOffice booth with Cor Nouws (1:30) and Vuntz (2:55) among others.
More digging through the accumulated backlog of FOSDEM tasks. I wonder what you are supposed to do with end-users who insist on mailing you personally, with blindingly obvious suggestions for improvement, and who when you politely point out that there is no shortage of good ideas only developer time (which they are wasting right now), and can they go to the discuss list, instead reply with yet another set of time wasting waffle; sigh.
Lunch, call with JP. Installed a debug LibreOffice Windows version to have a poke at some windows specific nasties. Submitted LinuxTag talk, a tad late, but - lets see. Created several freedesktop accounts.
Dinner, read stories to babes, up late poking at staging repositories and merge tooling with Norbert.

2011-02-09: Wednesday.

Up very early, couldn't sleep; prodded mail, worked away at the backlog tenaciously. Breakfast; off into Cambridge for TEAM. Great morning on the Theology of mission, followed by talk from a great Christians in Sport chap from STAG. Bible study, and home.
Dinner; read mail, boggled at the news. In particular Stephen Elop's leaked analysis of Nokia - which bears a remarkable similarity to my personal (perhaps unduly pessimistic) take; but then, apparently, I have no business sense. I was particularly saddened by:
We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market. [supposed Stephen Elop quote]
That this should be news is itself rather silly; I wrote of my sadness at the demise of the N900 in Linux Format, December 2009:
Finally, Nokia released its (incredibly pretty) N900 - a lovely Linux / GNOME based handset, although it is sadly being pointlessly re-written with lots of delay to use Qt instead. But then, apparently the whole world is about to be pointlessly re-written in JavaScript - that's progress you see.
ie. fair enough adding Qt, but doing a project reset ? that was just madness. And not the first Maemo / MeeGo project reset, with another two coming afterwards: more resets than releases. I griped on about the same issue in June 2010: Time to market ? or are the times changing ? As strategies go for Nokia, for those who understand code re-use, collaboration and time-to-market as key engineering and business concepts, I can see only two options: fork, re-brand, and make Android their own (a winner in my view), and/or get deeply into Windows Phone 7. Of course, I hope to be mistaken - some sexy wild-card (open source) option such as a Windows 7 compatible (via Mono) based on the more open MeeGo stack, with added Android compatibility would be do-able and sexy. Sadly that is more complicated than can be easily explained in a single slide to a financier. Staying tuned with some apprehension for Friday.

2011-02-08: Tuesday.

Up late; less exhausted. Breakfast, a day of rest; set too at the missed husbandly tasks of the weekend - repaired the fence that blew down overnight: great angle-grinding some old steel pipe-work into supports and driving them in.
Lunch, call with Simon. Repaired the hoover again; impressed not only that youtube has a video of how to get the hoover open; but also that I can find it (youtube search is unutterably terrible in my view).
Quick triage of mail; and sent some out, worked away at this and that. Took the girls to their music lessons - then home for dinner, bed early.

2011-02-07: Monday.

Up later; prodded mail very briefly, checked out valgrind; to the train. Poked at a simpler / cleaner trap-door mechanism using weak symbols for valgrind; but frustrated by non-functioning weak symbols when used from non-fPIC executables; bother.
Brain dumped into the TODO, reviewed / worked at adding more easy-hacks, arrived at Cambridge with a ~hour to wait for the train, thank God for 3G, poked mail. Got home; submitted OSCON paper, flushed mail again.
Babes and wife arrived home, played happily with them until dinner, and got stuck back into the bed-time story reading routine with some satisfaction. Bed early, exhausted.

2011-02-06: Sunday.

Breakfast, with (a newly married) Gerv; much slideware hackery, sadly missing several dev-room talks. Taxi to the campus, caught the end of Caolan's great writer internals talk, some rather good attendance - pleasing to see people who want to learn about, and get involved in the real guts of the project.
Gave a talk on our easy hacks, just going through them one by one from most easy, up-wards to a great audience of developers; encouraging - we are going to need many more easy hacks soon I think. Hopefully some people got the git repositories from the passed around USB keys too.
Helped out with Charles's status talk, while snatching lunch. On to give Office track LibreOffice talk, slides to follow; great audience, some good questions, overran a little though.
Back to our dev-room, more sticker distribution, discussion etc. Caught up with Mechtilde, just as we were dismantling everything. Off into town for Pizza with Caolan and co. Caught up with Aaron & the Mono mob, joined by Lennart and Kay too. Onwards to Delerium, to get some time with Kohei, until rather late, then snatched some sync. time with Kendy before his flight. The tragedy of FOSDEM: packed full of great talks, and excellent hackers is that of extreme brevity.

2011-02-05: Saturday.

Up in time for Eben's interesting keynote on open software and devices enabling freedom. Back to the booth to help out, wandered around giving out hundreds of stickers while Cor and many others stuck at the booth and encouraged potential developers, sold T-shirts, and did a great job of being present.
An extraordinarily wonderful vibe around LibreOffice, lots of spontaneous congratulations from unknown well-wishers, and so on, most encouraging. Caught up with Bjorn, really great to have him on the team.
More wandering of the hall-way track catching up with old friends and acquaintances, eg. great to meet the bootchart2 hero: Riccardo Magliocchetti. Somehow ommitted to eat lunch, solved by some generous chip sharing action with Kendy.
Out in the evening for the speakers dinner, and then on to meet up with the burgeoning LibreOffice (and friends) team at dinner. Back to work on slides, bed.

2011-02-04: Friday.

Up early, helped babes to school; packed, and set off early for FOSDEM.
Interested by the concern and uncertainty being created around the mistaken idea that there are some security fixes present in OO.o that are not in LibreOffice. This is not so. LibreOffice contains all the security fixes in 3.3.0 and perhaps more. Why more ? simply as side-effects of our code cleans, application of cppcheck etc. Many 'security bugs' are really just bugs, and we're working hard to improve our code quality. To improve code security many projects do code 'auditing', a big part of which is careful reading of the code with this in mind. In LibreOffice code review is the norm, so we aspire to a higher quality from this perspective over time. Sadly, of course there are always human errors, but as and when they are found, we aim to create fixes and get them to our users more quickly via. our rapid monthly stable releases.
Nice to hear that SLES11 provides the foundation for the IBM 'Watson' Jeopardy playing computer; encouraging for the openSUSE from which it is based.
An insightful article from Bruce Byfield on OpenOffice.org vs. LibreOffice - nice to read his well researched take ie. it is clear that he did some detailed tests on both bits of software.
Reviewed patches on the train, and chewed through older mail, great to see Thorsten doing the new icon cutting and dicing for 3.3.1 (RC1 / code freeze Monday).
Eurostar to FOSDEM, fewer hackers on the earlier train; instead some 'dubstep' DJs off to Antwerp to perform. Read Amanda Brock's latest article on Project Harmony with some interest.
Worked on slideware while people arrived; and out for dinner with Julian, and the LibreOffice lads (with some honored additions). Back to the Cafe Delerium, too much crushing, so moved onto La Morte Subite, for Kriek, and back to Delerium later with Kendy (finally arrived complete with more T-shirts than you can imagine). Bed at 5:30.

2011-02-03: Thursday.

Up too early; train, with Cheryl and Rachel into London. Tube to Cloud Expo at the Barbican. Spent some time turning David Nelson's beautiful website / screenshots into slides, before realising (belatedly) that perhaps a LibreOffice talk wasn't entirely the best fit, so spent half the time plugging Kiwi + SUSE Studio, and the rest on the joys of LibreOffice.
Caught up with the usual suspects manning booths, and home. Quick lunch with J. and E. set to work burning USB keys full of git repositories for FOSDEM.
Pleased to read Max KA's write-up of his research in growing communities; Removing the barriers to entry etc. - all the obvious stuff, nicely stated and backed up by survey data.

2011-02-02: Wednesday.

Off to Cambridge with Mike; continued the Bible overview through Samuel, into the prophets - lots of interesting stuff.
Lunch; talk from Friendship International student's ministry leader, and managed to prep my Bible study to lead just in time.
Home, bathed and read to babes; worked late on talk for tomorrow, and triaged mail quickly.

2011-02-01: Tuesday.

To work; plodded through mail, merged a few patches; researched a few more. The FOSDEM organisers asked me an insightful set of questions, shame about the answers; really looking forward to FOSDEM.
Lunch, chat with Guy, JP's staff call. Prodded at a crasher, and back-ported a fix to help valgrind it, failed to find it - apparently windows specific. Got the LXF column done, polished and out.
Prodded briefly at the new Gnome 3.0 live-CD of Frederic's - interestingly, had to manually launch gnome-shell --replace, but it seemed to work reasonably well.
Call with Andrew; then LibreOffice tech steering call, setup some staging git repositories with Norbert. Worked late.

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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.