Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Worked through the mail, and patch backlog - lots of fun there to get reviewing and merging. Lunch. More mail, admin, code reading, etc. Eventually got to fixing an rsc logic bug hurting our mac builds. Considered and sketched LXF column for tomorrow. Clarity.

• Up; walked babes down to All Saints, J. presenting on the PCC - good to meet up with lots of old friends there. Home for lunch.
• To work on the reprap; managed to make up some aluminimum couplers to drive the vertical Z axis using a PrusaMendel style setup - lovely, smooth, silent, continuous motion. Perhaps now, the bottom and top of a print will no longer be co-incident at times.
• Cheered on Egyptian protesters in spirit; I can empthise, if only in some small way, with struggle against some vast, faceless, injustice.

• Lie in, pottered downstairs; had brunch. Prodded at the reprap a little. J. slept, while I washed up, tidied, emptied the bins, and played with the babes a little.
• Played Chess with H. and J. in the afternoon; taught H. a little logo (implemented of course in Javascript - providing some hideous editing interface) - but passable; taught her a little about degrees.
• Dinner, picked up Rachel to baby-sit. Out to the Pregnancy Crisis Centre quiz - run ably by Janine & Chris - good fun with James & Ruth, Simon & Claire - team ended up second, for the second year running. Bed late.

• Worked through mail; dug at a sqlite / camel locking issue interesting. Created new libreoffice commit accounts, reviewed some of the backlog of nice patches, merged a handful.
• Lunch, back to more mail, patch review etc. More work until late; Miriam violently ill several times in the night; hmm.

• Mail triage from being out yesterday, especially prolongued and ineffective. Fixed build issue, reviewed misc. patches. Added some more easy, and less easy hacks, to try to cope with people fixing them.
• J. out, snatched lunch, back to mail, patches etc.

• Up early; dispatched babes to school. Mike kindly gave me a lift to TEAM, at Cambridge's Eden Baptist. Great morning; Bible overview continued through 1 and 2 Samuel. Preaching Old Testament Narrative - and just scratching the surface; chiasmic structure, narrative arcs etc.
• Lunch; out to (spontaneously) buy flowers for wife with Ben. Back for bible study leadership training; home. Discovered Sandy had dropped in for dinner, and brought flowers too - heh. Put babes to bed, and read more of Watership Down to H.: wonderfully written.
• Back to the computer, brief scan of mail, prodded at win32 cross compiling and Fridrich's great work in OBS.
• Pleased to see that Richard Stallman is speaking to the IET in Cambridge on 1st March, must try to remember.

• Up early; today is release day - what excitement. Plugged away at the website with David, improving the new features page, taking and editing screenshots, cleaning up priorities a little there. Took a break to write a minimal blog myself.
• Lunch; annotated the features I could recall, from the top of the head, as being LibreOffice specific in the new-features page; it seems we are (again) surviving slashdot with good grace; thanks to Florian - indeed, serving pages faster than slashdot.
• Spent an unbelievable time entering LibreOffice speaker / talk data into the FOSDEM web gui; goodness. I'm sure the web is the answer to world hunger - and everything should be re-written exclusively for it; but I fundamentally don't like it (except for watching movies - which is hardly 'the web').
• Phone interview; and back to some E-mail questions. Dinner with Lydia, back to work - reviewed and pushed a nice gtk+ theming patch. Did a little repsnapper hacking to relax, making its autotools funkiness pass make dist; but sucked back to LibreOffice mail eventually.

Today we released our first stable release of LibreOffice. That is really rather exciting ! and a major milestone. Of course, if you have a GNU/Linux or Unix distribution, most likely your packagers already knew our release timetable, and have distribution packages ready for you to use. If you can use those, do - they are likely to be better integrated with the system, and somewhat faster.

If you are a Windows or Mac user though, it is a great time to try out LibreOffice, directly from our download site.

Why LibreOffice ?

Apart from all the obvious reasons - of loving Freedom, Free Software, and fun, open, community development. LibreOffice is just better, much better, check out our (still expanding) New Features page - showing off what people can expect to enjoy in LibreOffice. As I get time, I'll add some highlights of my own appended here.

What next ?

As we work in a much more conventional Free Software project mold, we are releasing a point-zero release. This will not be perfect, but is any software ? what we will be doing is rapidly iterating it, via many minor point releases, towards perfection. We've published our timeline for that. Something you don't like ? some hideous translation or crasher bug ? we can include that fix soon, so do get stuck in and help out.

Perhaps the more interesting piece is the commitment to move to a six month release cycle, that is well aligned with existing Free Software community and distribution release cycles. We hope this will help get the latest, and best LibreOffice into users' hands as quickly as possible.

How do I get involved ?

LibreOffice is a project, almost uniquely suited to scaling to hundreds of people working on it - there are problems, missing features and bugs everywhere. There are millions of malnourished lines-of-code, awaiting your loving ownership, and remedial care - can you help them ? If so, please head to our developer instructions grab the code from freedesktop's git repository, and get stuck in, we'd love to work with you. We have many Easy Hacks designed for beginners to get involved - ranging from zero programming skill required, to some heavier lifting for the elite. As you do that, please do say hello on IRC: #libreoffice on irc.freenode.net, where much of the team hangs out.

Of course, if you want to mirror our binaries - and we are only 11Gb small (compared to 70Gb+ for OO.o), then drop a mail to mirrors@documentfoundation.org, we use Peter's excellent mirrorbrain - we have good coverage, but it can always improve. If you just like web banners that point to us there is just such a image.

Who did this thing ?

Well, in fact many people, far more than I can write down in one place - there are extensive credits here for all of the many individuals that have struck their blow for freedom with us; I am incredibly grateful for their support and friendship.

However, of course, some people have put more than the usual effort into this release - and here is where I forget people and offend at least someone. For various reasons: new packaging, and split help - the Windows build sucked a lot of mental energy this cycle, with Fridrich and Tor bearing the brunt of the pain. Similarly, Kendy battled the split help indomitably at great length, while managing the Novell team too. Then of course, the Steering Committee have put in lots of time with my personal favorite of Italo - creating and massaging press text and briefing many. The poor translation team, worked incredibly well under very tight deadline pressure to make up for the late strings that routinely needed shoving in, with Andras doing fantastic work getting their changes merged. Then finally, the website, its infrastructure, mirroring, scripting, design, artwork, and volume of text, polish, translation and beauty, as always - done on the very cusp of release swallowed much sweat and tears particularly from David, Christian, Florian, Thorsten and Sophie. My profound thanks to all of these, and more who worked so hard to get the release out - oh, and especially to the many un-sung hackers who got really stuck into triple reviewing, and fixing nasty blocker bugs before final code freeze.

• Up early, feeling wan; packed babes off, to work. Mail, and more mail - worked away in circles; reviewed some patches, Clarity, backed up laptop, built latest code, worked on text variously.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, late call. Pottered around the house doing this and that.

• Up early; off to church, enjoyed creche with babes. Home for lunch. Played chess with the older babies, and Sleeping Queens concurrently with M. fun.
• Kids watched some mind-numbing 'Cindy' movie, while I did battle with trying to fit my old, home-made, steel nozzle into my ply-wood extruder, and (somehow) through the small hole in the carriage; eventually concluded it won't work.
• More chess; H. & M. vs. me - fun at the table, while eating tea: is that as bad as watching TV while eating ? perhaps for Sundays only. Put babes to bed, H. starting to have Watership Down read to her, and N. Charlotte's Web.
• Back to the extruder battle; de-camped outside (due to the odor), and got 0.5mm ABS extruding, mostly. Printed enough to see some serious Y belt slippage; hmm. Bed, listened to Gordon sermon on Daniel 1.

• Up earlyish, dropped the rest of the family in town, and took H. to Norwich on her (much delayed, but supposedly annual) outing with just her Father.
• Wandered Norwich Castle, lots to do. Tried some real armour, long-bow, jousting helm, sword etc. on Hannah. Admired the different arrows - mail piercing, armour piercing etc. fun. Wandered the keep variously.
• Out for lunch at Nandos, tasty; back to the muesums, wandered them admiring the various oddities, stuffed families of animals and so on. Through the tunnel to the regimental museum, and back home (via Maplins).
• Pottered around in the evening - sawed down over-long extruder nozzle to a more sensible length - much more joy extruding PLA, stopping, and re-starting but eventually even this jammed. Sadly the ID of the nozzle is 4mm instead of 3.5mm which also doesn't help I suspect. Looked up some facts on PEEK - which seems like a wonder-material. Decided to switch back to extruding ABS tomorrow.

• Up earlyish, off to School to speak to Naomi's class about Why I go to church - an fun packed audience: 5 year olds. Back, read mail, discussed download sizes etc.
• Lunch with Claire (sheltering from a house that is under construction). Merged a patch, sent more mail, re-ran the cab file size analysis, and posted the results.
• Dinner, read some stories, back to work - more mail thrash, bed late.

• Wandered through mail; dug out information for people from left and right. Booked unpaid leave, call with Thorsten. Prodded at an evolution threading issue.
• Call with JP, more mail, tweaked the website, admin task thrash. Miriam over in the evening for dinner, really lovely to catch up with her.

• Up earlyish; packed babes off to school. Mike drove us into Cambridge for TEAM. Much thought on preaching and applying Old Testament narrative to the modern world, writing and leading engaging and useful Bible Studies, and so on. Fun.
• Home in the evening, worked away at
• Struggled with a beautiful, but jammed reprap nozzle, and lots of oozing PLA. Spent a long time trying to force things through with pliars - waiting for the barrel to heat up all the way up etc. Apparently I'm doing something quite wrong - seems I need to cool the rest of the brass barrel: will create some aluminium heat-sinking fins.

• Up lateish; checked mail, great to see Tor nailing the last 3.3.0 blocker, created another new account for a promising contributor. Really pleased to see the great work by ODF Authors on their new book Getting Started with LibreOffice 3.3.
• Lunch; Clarity. Quick call with Matthias N. Voted in the openSUSE board election, and wondered why they are using a first-past-the-post voting system, when even the UK seems to be considering AV, (or even better STV) - fair voting is rather useful.
• Poked at helpcontent2 building; wow it is slow. Prodded at an strace - 25,000+ spawns of 'touch' while building only part of the output.

• Up early, got babes sorted out; mail, reviewed bugs and patches left and right; and left again. Lunch. Call with JP, then with Stefan & Kendy.
• Slugged away at patch review; why do the silly bugs tend to crawl out of the woodwork, just when we want to release ? fun. Lots of good things happening. Set a new Win32 build running.
• Looked at LanguageTool, seems the cvs module is lots of python: interesting. Sat on IRC until late - lots of fun people turning up to help out there: neat ! Pierre-André pushed the start of his work to substantially shrink the binfilter which is wonderful. Worked late.

• Up earlyish; breakfast, off to NCC. As if my some miracle managed to persuade E. that her Father really was coming back if she was left in the creche, and that she could play happily alone; listened to the next installment of James.
• Back for lunch, slugged in the afternoon, while babes watched a movie; then helped H. and N. learn chess piece moves for bishops and rooks (on top of the previously learned knights) while M. built things out of Jenga bricks.
• Packed the babes to bed; nearly at the end of Lord of the Rings with Hannah. Back to the reprap; tried to get the (now working) extruder driver to extrude - PLA (it seems) requires rather more force to get it out; played with temperature but, apparently even a (handy) elephant sitting on it is insufficient to extrude it. Hmm, suspicious of the over-long brass barrel before the insulator in this nozzle. Sermon on Daniel from the archives to consider and write notes on.
• Couldn't sleep, so spent a while affixing an aluminium mounting for the extruder, so two elephants can be applied without forcing the extruder nozzle itself out; still no joy. Perhaps best to go back to ABS for a bit. Bed late.

• Mini lie in; much house cleaning, sweeping, tidying, washing up, etc. etc. to get things in order for N.s sixth birthday party this afternoon. Lunch, perennial egg sandwich creation.
• Influx of children; with only me to entertain them. The tray game a hit - and a lucky dip for prizes even more so. James, sadly ill poor dear. Painted jam-jars (with LED night-lights inside and a wire handle - a prize fit for a king), pass-the-parcel, party tea, more games - blind mans buff being a surprise favorite.
• Opened more presents, put babes to bed, more tidying up. More thought wrt. the extruder stepper; driver fails to drive anything anymore - I killed it ? swapped it for the next victim, and discovered that pulling down the enable pin to GND worked nicely, probably my previous +12V attempt was what dispatched the last A3982. Bed.

• Up much earlier for a mens prayer breakfast at Church; which as a side-effect included a fine cooked breakfast. Prodded at bugs, dug through mail, reviewed patches with a fine tooth comb - we're in triple review mode for the libreoffice-3-3-0 branch.
• Prodded at ICU, and found that our biggest bundled library (containing the ICU data) is substantially unused, filed an easy hack to fix it. Lunch. Dug at an interesting help crasher with valgrind, silly lifecycle problem, been there for years, only popped up now; fixed it.
• Poked at the website, spent a while re-phrasing new features, re-arranging and prioritising content etc. Had my builds bitten by a vicious autom4te.cache problem - whereby (apparently) configure.in was substantially changed (perhaps back in time by git), but configure was re-generated solely from the (now stale) cache: horrible.

• To work; light E-mail, prodded blocker bugs; fixed up the old documentfoundation website for RC3; that site needs some more thought.
• Lunch; internal LibO team meeting, fixed search toolbar evilness in industrial fallback theme; much better. Dug through Dave Richard's strace which looked normal, but for dbus-launch being execve'd after closing 8000 files: clearly someone is missing the magic evil of cloexec, and the horrible workarounds that are necessary.
• LibreOffice Steering Committee call in the evening, late dinner, slugged around exhaustedly in the evening, then revived enough to get my extruder wired up; stepper controller burning hot oddly - but thermistor, and heater working beautifully; manually extruded my first PLA.

• Started to scale the mail mountain again. Downloaded, and tested some builds, only to discover a simple avoidable mistake in my perl tweak; bother. Got a new account setup, and did the five-minute git training, reviewed misc patches.
• Lunch; pleased with results of obscure MSI detail testing; knocked up a blocker bug patch; started a new test build; wrote a partial interview. Sorted out collateral for a LibreOffice talk at Cloud Expo Europe which is surprisingly soon (before FOSDEM).
• Unexpectedly early interview; dinner; baby-set Olivier & Benjy for a bit; back to work until late while J. went out.

• Naomi's birthday, lots of fun - presents at breakfast; and a crying Elizabeth (2) hiding under her folded up top; much heart-rending comforting and re-assurance, that her time will come too, in due course. Gleeful prize unpacking by N. and packed them all off to school with J.
• Prodded the mail, finally got around to replying to some of the queued up backlog. Great to hear that Caolan McNamara (RedHat), and Rene Engelhard (Debian) will be at FOSDEM too.
• Set too building the latest master for a change. Read an exellent article from Dave Neary on community building which hits the nail on the head as far as I can see.
• Reviewed an ORBit2 patch (it's been a while), Lunch. Reviewed Peter Jentsch's nice flat ODF patch, so you can export easily to flat ODF files (which can then be processed easily by various other ODF loving tools) - this is way faster than the previous beast that gratuitously required Java; it even seems to be on a par with (or faster than) writing to the zip encapsulation which is interesting.
• RIP Hudson, long live Jenkins. I didn't realise it was a spare-time project later appropriated by the corporate overlord, that makes the saga doubly unfortunate.
• Lydia over, out to new-years, week-of-prayer meeting in the evening.

• Up early, packed the babes off to school with Grandma & Grandad - after a fine Madeline story; to work. Prodded mail,
• Prodded at RC3 pieces much of the day; J. had a PCC meeting in the evening, so worked at the LibreOffice FOSDEM dev room Schedule. We have a great set of talks, speakers and attendeees, hope to see you there.

• Lie in, off to church, Tony spoke excellently on James 1. Chatted variously afterwards, back for lunch with Mum & Dad. Pootled about not doing much; reading stories, playing with the nearly complete mendel in the afternoon. It seems, getting a light surface that is sub-milimetre smooth to extrude on is more difficult than expected. Measured all available materials that came to hand, ineffectively.

• Up earlyish, [!?] Reprap poking ...

• Up; while (morning) { read stdin; write stdout; }. Eventually got to writing LXF column - about Gnome 3.0, and repsnapper as it turns out.
• Plugged away at the admin backlog, and then onto Windows build / packaging issues: what fun, nailed a couple of sillies, built some test packages, and so on.

• Up early - to work; read mail, commented on an interesting PackageKit / zypp issue in some considerable detail. Rejoiced as my browser (firefox) threw away all my work: moral of the story - placing a magic "throw away your work" button (window left?) right above the left arrow on the Thinkpad keyboard, is perhaps not an inspired idea for those that like to keyboard navigate and edit their comments: rock on the web world. NB. I believe this button goes 'back' ie. it will also auto-log-you-out of most banking websites mid-flow, oh, and Alt-Left-Arrow is also impossibly easy to press. Bus-sized usability problems of this kind are all too common on the web sadly.
• More mail creation and churn, some patch review, merging. Amused to get a mail saying effectively: "We have accepted you for a talk at our conference - can you us what it is about ?".
• Booked FOSDEM travel, we should have a great LibreOffice track, and showing there this year and this is (in my view) the top European Free Software conference, if you can pick just one, go to Brussels early next month.
• Internal LibreOffice team call. Tested some patches for the stable branch, and pushed them. Dinner. Back to work to try to catch up, and catch the GUADEC/Akadamy CfP meeting.

• Back to work; started on the mail mountain, and pile of pending tasks, call with Kendy, got master built (first time, modulo some transient sd/ snafu).
• After some considerable hours of work, managed to get the un-read, un-filtered mail below 1000 items, then finally under five hundred, of course triaging and leaving all the most interesting ones still to respond to. Reviewed and pushed a few patches, fixed an issue with zenity build feedback.
• Really encouraged to see the video creativity produced using impress from Drew.

• Up late, the last of the lazing in, read some of Moonfleet with H. who has been devouring it (a ripping yarn as they say). Breakfast. Pottered around tidying up here and there. Babes watched Angelina Ballerina to rot their brains.
• Poked at repsnapper, mamoth last re-factoring pass to turn the delightfully named 'ModelViewController' class, into a 'Model' class, the 'ProcessController' into a cleaner 'Settings' object, and to get the last GUI bits connected. Listened to "The history of the world in one hundred objects" at the same time. Up late.

• Decided to adopt a strategic approach to the looming end of holiday: wrote list of un-achieved tasks, and started doing ones with a real chance of completion. Much cleaning, washing sorting, office tidying achieved.
• Lunch, dug out all relevant bills, bank statements, credit card reports etc. and filed my tax return for 09-10 - phew. Why is it that the co-op bank does not retain enough previous statemens on-line for the last financial year, to make filing your taxes easy ? I'm always suspicious of the 'you can buy previous statements by clicking here' motive.
• Synched diaries with the wife, signed up for Andy's wedding, collected possible preaching dates; procrastinated counselling homework. Chat with Doko.

• Hunted lost wedding ring sporadically, finding all manner of lots objects, and bits of fluff on the way. Off to Church, played with a clingy E. in creche.
• Home, and walked down to Laura & Creighton's for a fine lunch, and afternoon together - fun; home, fed, bathed, and popped babes to bed.
• Found ring in tub of sweets - and recalled playing with the babes with that; hmm. Discovered too the solution to my sigc slot fun - sigc::bind() - with which you can append whatever arguments you like to your function; neat. Re-hashed repsnapper's interactive reprap control page; nearly done.

• A new fun packed year. Up late, breakfast, read the Economist Christmas Special, saddened by the article on life in Indian villages, interested by eg. the disruption that durable plastic receptacles bring to the 'potter cast' eg. Played with the babes, lunch.
• Put up pictures around the house with the wife, and discovered I've lost my wedding ring (horrors). It shows in photos from yesterday, and typing without it is rather odd; so must be somewhere in the house but where / why / how ? some considerable hunting.
• Relaxed in the evening by much more, intense repsnapper re-factoring, finally the code is coming into some sort of shape at last; expunged a huge swathe of fltk tree awfulness.