Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Teachers on strike, so babes out with J. all day on an educational aquarium trip (to visit some sea-horses). Mail chew; plugged away at postgresql packaging. Reviewed a nice patch, read the git log, dealt with neutral security list bits. Lunch.
• Desktop team call; dug at calc subsequentcheck performance issues, discovered another rats-nest (or 'sleep'-nest) in qadevOOo.
• Freedom in Christ course until late.

• Prodded mail; checked out some travel details. Setup really neutral security mailing list and updated our page - also trying to reduce the flow of bogus bug reports created by poorly crafted Window virus checkers, and random user questions on the list.
• More mail; poked at Lionel's nice postgresql driver work and packaging. Chivveyed people for meeting availability.
• Dinner, water coming through the roof in the workshop, luckily detected before it destroyed plastic printer #3 and it's controlling netbook - urk. Retired to work on software instead - merged / fixed / cleaned up a number of repsnapper issues.

• Dispatched family to school, chewed mail; wrote status report. Lunch. Chat with Charles, Camilo, more mail. Pushed the flattened nlpsolver.
• More mail thrash and build fixing, dinner, put babes to bed; back to work: created commit account for Astron, reviewed Olivier's nice extension manager patch.

• Up lateish; off to NCC, Tony finishing Nehemiah. Back for a quick lunch. Knocked up a heater fixture with embedded thermistor and plenty of thermal grease, finally got that all wired up.
• Practised cycling in the road: M. finally pedalling beautifully, and starting herself. Practised turning with N. and weaving through patterns with H. Back inside for an Alice in Wonderland DVD.
• Bed early, Watership Down going well; listened to Graham sermon on Daniel 5.

• Up earlyish; looked after babes while J. slept. Drove to Bruce & Anne's - good to see them; lunch. Out into Aldeburgh for the lights-turning-on-extraveganza.
• Back; managed to knurl some stainless steel M8 bolts on Bruce's lathe. Pizza tea, bathed & packed everyone into the car. Home again. Poked at reprap endstop wiring and got the axis all working.

• Mail pokeage, read through the git log; thrilled by Bjoern's improvement of 'make subsequentcheck' to help pin down the errors it throws up much more precisely. Patch review, merging.
• Compared notes on my child-count with HR - good to agree on that sort of thing. More patch review and mail creation. Extremely amused by lmgtfy, apparently ideal for people asking lazy questions that havn't found the sweetest search engine yet.
• Amused by the PDP_ENDIAN cleanup / removal from François Tigeot, I'd never noticed Middle Endian-ness before, may it rest in peace. Sync. with Holger.
• Out to the school faire, alone with four babes. Helped to get the pre-school stall setup, and babes through Father-Christmas sausage machine (before it jammed up). Eventually home, got babes to bed.
• A Thanksgiving fund-raising dinner for Hagar - twenty guests plus three helpers (with some great American input on unusual food). Up rather late talking & tidying up.

• Chewed mail, read some dense text, researched database drivers. Was just enjoying the brave-new-world of web-apps filing a github bug, when I again accidentally pressed the "loose all your data" button that Lenovo helpfull place next to the left arrow key: returning to the page, it's not there: lovely ! Apparently authoring in emacs & cut/paste-to-web is still the best way to go.
• Suddenly got a number of patches for repsnapper, exciting times. Team meeting, TSC meeting, call. Encouraging that we now have so many (fast, in-process, compile-time) tests, that we have to start deferring them to 'subsequentcheck' simply for speed reasons; roll on more thorough & useful subsequentchecking.
• Poked subsequenttests, 14 minutes of waiting, and an opaque failure; bother. Dug some pieces out for Tor.
• Dinner; managed (finally) to get a bootloader burned onto my Arduino mega so I can program via USB (without removing the shield). Wired up the Mendel & got all the axis & extruder going, fun. Spent some time sorting out my prayer diary.

• Call with Vojtech; dug through mail, wrote up some code pointers for an exciting new sqlite / base hacker. Poked about openVPN setup. Lunch. Patch review / merge, mail.
• Freedom in Christ course in the evening, and a chat with Jeremy.

• Packed babes off to school; chewed mail, listened to SUSE quarterly update call. Off to Cambridge on the train, lunch with Rob & Guy, good to catch up, train home.
• Caught up with hideous mail / spam-filter / delivery issues making my life quieter than usual; merged a patch, back to digging into passive registration. Found a strange un-necessary activation of the component we had carefully passively registered, removed it - bingo; much cleaner / faster startup - poked Stephan for validation etc. Hopefully this will clean out Windows' users' first-time experience of endless complaints about missing a JRE, and push that back to when an extensions is actually used.
• Interested by Lubos' nice analysis of a Qt threading issue, though I hope we can solve it more elegantly (looking at moveToThread I'm not so sure). I thought it was only ORBit2 that had magic code to check the thread-id we were initialized in and behaved differently there for compatibility (due to missing gmain API way back when).
• Spent a long while trying to get an Arduino Mega boot-loader to load, without success; irritatingly the Pololu AVR programmer seems unusable from the arduino environment. Chat with Legal in the background.

• J. out to meet up with Sue. Slogged through the mail, read the weekend's git commits, more mail, tested a windows package. Patch review.
• Wired up new Mendel electronics in the evening, turned on briefly, got a rather hot stepper driver & off again. bed.

• Set off to Church, only to discover car battery flat; kindly rescued en-masse by Dave & Cathy. Helped out in creche.
• Home, roast chicken lunch, slugged with babes, got a bit of wiring done. Out to the race-course with babes - M. having had her bike seat raised doing some excellent pedalling: nearly 3/4 complete wrt. training to ride a bike. Helped H. and M. climb a tree.
• Back; babes slugged in front of a DVD, while I constructed end-stop cabling. Tea, bathed & put babes to bed, read stories.
• Dismantled the old microwave mining for spade connectors for new micro-switch end-stops. Lots of fun in there, including three ~identical micro-switches (apparently they -really- believe in interlocking microwave doors). Judging by the weight of the transformer, and magnetron - this is a rare pre-substantial-cost-engineering microwave. Soldered up spade connectors & cabling.

• Up earlyish; dropped babes off at Chris & Claires, picked up Claire and into Huntingdon, for the Freedom in Christ all-day whatnot. Remembered just before leaving that I was supposed to lead some songs; took guitar & books & prepared in the car.
• Arrived, sang a bit, some stock course DVD action interspersed with prayer, reflection etc. Bought lunch with Andy at a nearby Greggs.
• Back for some more; drove Cathy, Heather & Judy home; back to relieve Sandy from the child care. Played with babes variously until bed: clock patience, etc.
• Pottered about with the reprap, trying to crimp ferules, make connectors, cabling etc. for steppers. Eventually made some progress.

• Dug through mail, prodded the helpdesk about some bits. Read the git logs, nice to see August's line-number rendering for the basic editor get in, and Lionel's cleaned up postgresql connector merged.
• Installed the latest SLED11 serive pack build to do some debugging, filed a few easy hacks. Reviewed Astron's nice handle patch (at long last) and merged it, glue-points now look far more visible and sexy.
• More admin, patch review, meeting scheduling etc. let Janice in for Friday club, dinner.

Caveats

The caveats. As to my motivation (please remember to play the man not the ball): I do not intend to make anyone afraid, uncertain or doubtful. If graphs scare you - please look away at this point. These graphs are built from estimates, hopefully they are fairly un-controversial ones, I detail them at the bottom. This is probably misleading in all sorts ways I didn't discover yet. My hope is that it provides a more helpful picture of the world today than this history graph that gets a frequent airing. By rendering only the last two years, we de-clutter lots of lapsed projects, and by not rendering version numbers we can use perceptual area for showing something more useful: an estimate of user-base. As/when I discover major bugs I'll update this, it is a work in progress:

A user-base & release picture

Notes:

This is clearly where it gets hairy. I've tried not to offend people, though I've tried to round against my obvious bias. Also, drawing very thin boxes in draw gives some rounding imprecision.

• OpenOffice.org was commonly supposed to have around 100m users, the vast majority on Windows. I collapse the (sweet) Portable variants, as well as Linux distribution versions of both LibreOffice and OpenOffice into their parent project to simplify and clarify.
• IBM announced that Lotus Symphony had 12 million users; I rendered it as 15m, and include it as an open source project on the basis that its opening is promised.
• OOo4Kids has a download counter that reads 1.05m downloads today, so I turned that into 1.5m to be safe.
• LibreOffice has a conservatively estimated user base of 25m (cf. Gartner's 35m Linux Desktop users alone).
• NeoOffice had around three million downloads per year; though they claim a user-base of over half a million. I put them down as 1m.
• OxygenOffice has a couple of million downloads, over 500k in the last year (vs. 2.2m over all time), so I put their users at 0.5m.
• RedOffice is omitted, mainly because I found it hard to find release date information, nevermind estimating user-base. The best stats we have don't suggest a vast Chinese user-base though.

Everything is meaningless

Of course user-base is a poor heuristic for future relevance. That would be driven by features and marketing, as provided by developers and contributors. Potentially graphing contributors in a similar way would be possible, but that was harder to acquire in half an hour. It would be ideal to render more than a rectangle - showing the evolution of the user-base over time, but I don't have that either, and there is some considerable estimation here. Finally, this doesn't include AOOI, which has yet to release a product, it'll be interesting to see how things change when they do.

• To work; poked mail, admired the nice new SUSE careers page. Patch review. Dug at some statistics. Amazed to see Winfried (a native Dutch speaker) translating German comments into English in the code.
• Team meeting, Tor pointed out gdb --tui, which I should use apparently. TSC meeting. Chat with Bjoern, dug out a document for him; investigated the anchor issue some more for Tim. Deleted the (now merged) feature/gtk3 branch.
• Dinner, bit more mail. Managed to program my RAMPS hardware and get repsnapper talking to it - dug through the workshop to dig out some connectors & ferules.

• To work; mail chew, staff meeting with Ralf. Chased some bugs around the (unfortunate) usage of sleepycat db databases to store trivial amounts of data - eventually unwound the problem and discovered a nice speedup hiding behind it too.
• Call with Charles, board call, dinner. Back to work until late.

• Up early; nice to see a blog about the great Visio import work done by Eilidh (Google Summer Of Code), Fridrich, and Valek (frob); it even comes with pretty pictures like this: It will be ship in LibreOffice 3.5; great work guys.
• Mail read / write. Tried to get LeakTracker to install & run; without any joy, poked at tcmalloc with more joy.
• Lunch. Put out a call for people to submit technical, LibreOffice talks for our FOSDEM dev-room.
• More mail chew; and patch review; call with Ralf. Dunged some obsolete patches out, more mail. Babes to bed, dinner with Lydia, Dave over for Bible study - lots of fun; three verses in two hours plus lots of interesting digressions.

• Up; reviewed the weekend's patches - some good cleanups. Poked mail, lots more nice patches to review. Chat with Benjamin. Amused by a reasonably accurate (and thus brave) Steve Jobs retrospective.
• Wrote LXF column, checked business cards, wrote status report. Dinner. Chat with Bjoern, legal review, more mail, bed late.

• Breakfast, off to NCC; Tony spoke on taking the Bible seriously. Home; Matt, Rachel & Levi over for lunch & aftermath.
• Played drafts with H. and M. for a bit, short DVD, dinner. Bed early.

• Up earlyish, breakfast with everyone. Poked at some code - an odd crasher loading Calligra generated odts. Chewed queued up mail from yesterday.
• Amused by LibreOffice not printing on Tuesdays. Good thing I re-wrote that code to use a more portable iso-date/time for 3.5 (as part of an unrelated vcl re-factor) - but really a system bug.
• Lunch, played with assembling the reprap; got it mostly done - with micro-switch end-stops attached etc.
• Out to the race-course with the babes - lots of cycling, M. finally pedalling and steering concurrently for a substantial distance. Lots of minor spills & scrapes, helped the eldest three climb a tree, smearing themselves in green grime - but doing an excellent job of it (despite occasional assertions that they just can't do it). Home.

• Up earlyish, out into Cambridge with Elizabeth - bus from the high-street (great excitement), tried un-successfully to find The Body Shop.
• Wandered happily onwards via walking along the mini Kings Parade walls to the Fitz. Amired statues, wandered the picture gallery balcony, knights on horses; and off for an early lunch.
• Nandos: chicken and chips munching with strawberry yoghurt - back to the Sedgwick Museum - after seeing Night(mare) at the Museum E. is still somewhat scared of bones - despite some acclimatisation.
• Back; another bus - terrible queues for train tickets at the station; finally got a ticket, missed the train - an hour of reading books to E. Finally home.
• Emily over to play with babes, Janice & lots over for Kids Cell, Clara stayed while Joe played with N. - put babes to bed, J. out counselling, Keziah staying for a sleep-over; tiring.
• Caught up with mail, and worked until late - nice to read the git diff after a day away.

• Chewed mail, visited dentist for tooth guard fitting (it fits). More mail, filed several more fun Easy Hacks, from dog-removal, to making life easier for artists.
• Lunch. Dug at a subsequenttest issue, very inconclusive. Team meeting. TSC meeting. Poked at impress filter unit tests.
• Dinner; Lydia, Janice & Dianne over - disappered to hack on impress unit tests. Pushed, tomorrow I'll take off for a day out with Elizabeth.

• Prodded mail, read last night's git log, noticed that mst had fixed the sdi dependency issue before I could file it as an easy hack - lovely.
• Poked at websockets at some length, gotcha'd by big-endian-ness referring to the MSB as bit-zero, fixed that, binary websockets not supported by the latest FF, luckily our protocol is really text. Lunch. Got bi-directional comms going, with masking and enjoyed the dis-connect / re-connect from another browser version to the same app.
• Desktop staff call. Ordered a faster build machine to accelerate my somewhat turgid LibreOffice builds.
• Freedom in Christ course in the evening, then glued up the reprap X carriage, and played with it - just need some improved end-stop holders for my oddly shaped micro-switches.

• Prodded mail, merged patches, looked at compilation issues. Spent much of the day on bug fixing, E-mail, call with Thorsten, Guy (on pink feathers), Charles etc.
• Poked at websockets nastiness in the evening.

• E. watches some cbeebies while I pray in the morning; it seems the Thou shalt not watch live-TV edict has got through to the littlest babe (since we don't pay the license fee) albeit in a slightly distorted form: "Don't click on that ! it's deadly live !". Perhaps some electricity related metaphore, the mind boggles.
• To work; re-fixed the Windows manifest compile / dependency problems fix, so as well as having correct deps, we actually compile the right output as well. Nice to have a mingw build to test that in. Chewed through mail, a number of nice patches to review / merge. Lunch. Chat with Martyn, pushed the fpicker re-work.
• Lunch. More admin, wrote a calc post-it note unit test. Dinner. Glued reprap slide bearings in - each of which slides nicely, but together they're not so smooth, hmm. Bit more mail & hackery in the evening, while J. did her tax return.

• Up earlyish, breakfast and out for band practise with Lydia, played in service, did creche. Back for lunch with David & family, slugging, bid David 'bye.
• Pottered with the plastic printer while babes watched Howel's Moving Castle, tea, put babes to bed & read stories. On-line sermons in bed.

• Pottered around, printed out a few pieces, and squared / aligned the new Prusa Mendel frame while J. sorted the garden out. David arrived in time for lunch, a rainy day.
• Sandy dropped in, set too on a big stamp jigsaw puzzle; Bruce & Anne came over. Chatted variously, and pottered about with David fooling around with this & that in the workshop.
• Up late by the fire enjoying David's company.

• It seems H. has developed an affectionate habit of trotting back for a kiss while leaving for school, as a subterfuge to 'it' her Father; endearing.
• Quick mail prodding action; slogged at the windows gbuild dependency issues, and (I hope) finally nailed the parallel manifest generation issue. Poked at some unit test breakage on windows. Started to push the file-picker code down from fpicker/ into vcl/.
• Lunch. Plodded away at the file picker re-work much of the afternoon. Dinner, put babes to bed. Printed out a nice set of slide bearings.

• Up early; mail triage; more nice patches from Cosimo, perhaps we will ship a working gtk3 backend in 3.5 after all. Patch review, poked at the n'th iteration of my TLB thrasher; I strongly suspect that my cunning plan to allocate 1Gb of memory in one chunk and access it in odd ways, may have been optimised page-table-wise by the cunning kernel; re-worked it to re-discover a factor of two effect; poked a friendly VM hacker for more.
• Early lunch (daylight saving), then TSC meeting, team meeting. Call with Norbert. More mail. Dinner - wash-out of a day hacking-wise.
• Dinner, babes to bed, bit more hacking; Helped J. get involved in bug triage.

• Up early; read mail, started on admin tasks; detour via prolongued timezone mismatch / sanity checking program. Lunch. Advisory Board meeting.
• Thrilled to see Matt's nice interactive word count feature pop, out of the blue, into the code-base, lots of happy users there I hope, and to simultaneously get some beautiful gtk3 code cleanups from Cosimo is a lovely thing.
• Reviewed more misc. patches; realised my TLB thrash code is just junk, and having fixing it the relative win is tiny (I was measuring a cache effect: annoying & odd, more thought needed). Pleased to see Tim Hardek start as an intern on LibreOffice today too. More mail / admin.
• Freedom in Christ course in the evening.

• Up early; wrote to three of my Euro MPs expressing my concerns around ACTA; it turns out that the Vice Chairman of the International Trade committee is my MEP, how interesting.
• Poked at tinderbox logs, and discovered and fixed a number of nice bugs visible in the MSVC++ warnings (annoying). Filed more easy hacks.
• Poked at the drawing object handles code, it seems pressing ctrl-tab with a drawing object (in writer) selected lets you cycle through the control-points using the keyboard, which flash; fun. Nailed the gtk+ timeout burn issue. Lunch.
• Knocked up a small TLB thrashing test case to highlight why memory arrangement of large data-sets can be really important quite apart from cache issues. Noticed during development that I could wedge my kernel repeatably (some no-swap + SSD joy); upgraded to 3.1.0 - the OOM killer seems much more trigger happy and useful; good.