Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
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To work again, started on the mail backlog. Clarified cgit
descriptions, discovered the 'Trinity DE' project when we got a patch
to support it. Posted SC minutes from Saturday, chat with Simon. Lunch.
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More mail, chat with Kendy, new business cards request. Yet
more mail generation, big swathes of code-reading around anchors
generating a handful of easy hacks (I need to file). Played with
Kevin's nice notes re-work, and moved it to a branch. Filed more
easy hacks.
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Up lateish (except for the hour change), read more of
Watership Down to N. and H. (who by now glued to it).
Off to NCC - helped out with creche.
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Home for a roast lunch, more watership down. Printed
out some nice x-axis slide bearings quite successfully -
encouraging. Babes watched Toy Story <n> - good as
always. Applied slugging.
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Put everyone to bed, read more stories; listened to
a sermon on Judges 13
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Up later, pottered about with the babes; J. out shopping.
Thomas up, and staying for the day - nice.
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Printed more pieces out and assembled them with Thomas,
cut some screws to size etc. finally getting some y-axis PLA slide
bearings into some shape.
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Lunch, played with babes a bit - T. did H's Piano practise
(playing for the Bishop at school next week). Bid 'bye, and set too
at the newly elected TDF board meeting for an hour or so, good to
have had elections.
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Helped J. around the house, watched movie with the babes,
and played with them. Dinner, bathed little people, read stories,
put people to bed. Lazy time; more Spooks (before they expire).
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Up earlyish; J. out for much of the day to hand-hold Sandy.
E. off to Julie's, H. off to Keziah's, took the day off with Thomas.
Pottered with the reprap, for a bit improving it here & there.
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Did some vinegar + baking soda science experiment with N.
and M. to much amusement, then cycling in the road (while printing
knots with various shell thicknesses). Eventually managed to crack
a great hole out of the acrylic bed while removing a knot - not[sic]
ideal. M. learned to cycle a pedal bike though - it turns out that
learning to steer / balance a bike without pedals (just by removing
them) is an excellent way to go (saving a lot of damaged calves).
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Lunch; more poking around at misc. domestic chores - hanging
the washing out, dish-washing, etc. J. back.
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Dinner, put babes to bed, read stories; T. out to dance in
Harlow. Bed early, watched Spooks.
-
Up earlyish, off to dentist for some poking and X-raying of
teeth, inconclusive (on the bright side: apparently I do have teeth),
got a gum-impression instead to avoid grinding damage.
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Back, mail; fixed a gtk related tinderbox breakage, reduced
the warning count for degenerate cases of headless clipping. Printed
& snail-mailed some receipts. Updated the 3.5 features
page another month+ until feature freeze and we're looking good.
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Helped Julian setup #valgrind-dev on freenode a channel for
valgrind developers to work together in. Really pleased to notice
GNOME 3 getting a beautiful desktop device icon right for my gphone
(just in time for the desktop not to have icons on it anymore by
default). Unwound the junk-mail folder.
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Lunch. Team meeting. One talk that was a real eye-opener
from the LibreOffice conference was Laszlo Nemeth's (given by
Andras) Towards
Desktop Publishing - showing off some of the sexy DTP features
in LibreOffice (I hadn't realised we had linked frames, done via
inserting a new empty frame and using the link icon in the
frame toolbar). That combined with pretty graphite2 features gives
a rather nice output (as you can see in the slides). Bounced some
ideas for some easy hacks in this area off the UI advise list.
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TSC meeting & minutes to the list. Thomas arrived,
visiting from Boston. Pottered around comparing notes on life,
electronics, work & things. Dinner, up late talking: brothers
are fun, makes me wonder why I'm so bad at keeping up.
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Up early, more tiresome E-mail, set some builds going in
the background. Fixed a number of bugs, a nice crash-on-start from
Stefan and a version issue from Petr, plugged away at some SDK
testing fun.
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Lunch, bid 'bye to Suzie & boys. Misc. master cleanups
in the afternoon, plugged away at fixing this & that. Pleased that
gtk+ incremental building (with autotools) seems worse than
LibreOffice, problems with .deps, etc.
-
Wrote up some thoughts and background
on how contributing code to Apache OO.o (Incubating) is to help
a corporate minority impose The Apache Way on a majority that
wants to be their own self governing meritocracy (ie. TDF). So of
course, not a nice idea.
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Worked away at gtk+ / broadway's web-sockets implementation, it
seems the protocol got a lot more fun between versions. Discovered the
joys of debug enabled mozillas, and
export NSPR_LOG_MODULES=all:4.
Read some bits of Mozilla code to go deeper; rather readable.
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Chewed mail in the morning; wrote mail - hacking is much
more fun than E-mail it seems. Lunch.
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Pushed feature/gtk3 to master, that should make it easier
for people to find. It touches a large number of the unix VCL
backends, so testing appreciated. It implements:
- implements an (unfinished) but 'pure' gtk3 port
- avoiding direct X library linkage
- enables broadway / web-office prototype
- cleanly re-uses svp for client-side rendering
- churns synchronous debug, performs badly,
is unfinished etc. [ should default to off ]
- improves the svp (headless) rendering code
- avoids direct X library linkage
- thus making targetting Android / iOS possible
- substantially accelerates rendering by working
around many clipping performance issues
- adds damage detection to svp rendering surfaces
- partial / aborted attempt to make svp fully cross-platform,
blocked on an internal freetype or more re-factoring.
- re-factoring / cleanup
- shares lots of code between gtk, svp and gen backends
lots of cut/paste code eliminated
- ports lots of gtk2 code to use gdk wrappers instead of
raw X, to share with gtk3
- re-working of misc. legacy cross-platform code.
Build / run-time testing much appreciated as/when tinderboxen
produce binaries. Chat with Thorsten.
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Misc. idl Windows cross-compile, warning while re-builds
happened. Re-wrote a custom GSource for timer handling to avoid an
annoying warning on older glibs. Downloaded the latest openSUSE 12.1
release candidate.
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Admin, downloaded some SDKs to play with.
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Up early; chewed through mail, renewed my TDF membership
application, apparently it has been quite a year. Filed an easy
hack or two. Finally dispatched Father's birthday present.
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Lunch, Suzie, Adam & James come to stay. Misc. admin.
Pleased that two days after filing my most recent easy
hack it is done (by Olivier) and merged.
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Dinner & relaxed with Sue & Julia for the evening
by the fire - lovely.
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Up earlyish, off to NCC, Tony spoke on Nehemiah 5. Home,
quick lunch, lots of washing up clearing the backlog, while J.
mowed the garden.
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Disassembled and re-assembled the reprap z-axis re-using
some z-axis motor holders I had hoped to save for the new machine,
calibration looking a lot better now; printed out some new motor
holders for the new machine - encouragingly the m8 rods fitted into
the holes without reaming, an improvement.
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Dinner, read stories to babies, Lydia over - hacked at
repsnapper adding a mode to allow 'mm' in the GCode to mean
cold-input-mm (the new way), instead of hot-output-mm (the old
way).
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Up early, let J. sleep. Pottered about the house doing this
& that, played with reprap a bit, calibrated the machine nicely
again and replaced the bed - only to discover that the string (yes)
holding the Z axis in place wasn't an ideal solution; another scored
bed.
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Took babes to a 'Messy Church' even at NCC, home to sleep -
still catching up the Paris sleep-debt (slowly). Collected babes,
back home for a fine dinner with Hannah, Nick & Joni. Up late
enjoying the company: the dangers of social dolphins, and the
swiss-roll membranes in pig's noses etc. fun.
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Up early, chewed mail - interested to see the
Antelink
taxonomy of the LibreOffice code changes vs. OpenOffice, an
encouraging picture (literally).
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Merged a beautiful patch from August Sodora that not only
cleaned out a legacy string class, but included some pretty sexy
unit tests for the StarBasic parser; nice.
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Spent some time struggling with gnumake bits getting up
to speed with the function syntax etc. there. Got Markus' unit test
behaving itself, and added a suitable error in case of the missing
dependencies that caused the issue. Chat with Thomas. Lunch.
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Updated gitdm-config for more @suse.com E-mail address
migration. Forwarded lots of excellent presentations from the
Paris LibreOffice conference to David - makes you realise how much
good work went in.
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Dinner, back for a tad more hacking.
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Chewed mail, worked on some analytics, tried to chase Windows
unit test failure. Lunch. Back-ported misc. bug-fix patches and a
graphite2 update for LibreOffice 3.4.4.
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SUSE / LibreOffice team meeting. Chased vcl related crasher.
Tech. steering call, more misc. compile testing & fixing of VCL
issues.
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Dinner, put babes to bed, while H. went to her first
school disco (year four), and J. to the Pre-School AGM. Prodded
at yet more VCL cleanup, porting and testing quite happily.
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Call with the parents who seemed to have foiled a lead-roof
burglary at the meeting house they were staying at; chat with Thomas.
Did more testing & mailed misc. bugs out.
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More mail chew; worked down the blogging backlog, but didn't
get to slide up-load (yet). Lunch with Helena & Rose. Filed
expenses. Played with EC2 - very impressed by the (low) latency,
and performance; much better than the NOMAD rumours had me believe.
Worked on admin pieces in the evening.
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Up lateish, caught up with mail slowly. Chased what turned
out to be a kernel problem plaguing openSUSE 12.1 and making yast2
un-responsive.
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Re-synched feature/gtk3 to master. Is it only me that
experiences a total-irony-failure when those who repeatedly fail
to meet their commitments to open their code then can't
find other people's that are in plain sight ? Still, I should
straighten out & publish my slides, written in the minutes
before giving them to help out (no doubt).
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Wrote Linux Format column, forwarded deluge of conference
slides to David Nelson (who is helping out up-loading and
organising them nicely).
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Drove to Presdales
School in Ware to see if it is worth moving house, county etc.
to avoid Newmarket College & get a good state school education;
seemingly an excellent school, but probably not worth moving so far for.
Back late.
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Team de-brief in the morning, pizza with the team; only just
made the Eurostar home; poked at mail on the train and slept.
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Home in the evening, good to hug the babies and read some
bedtime stories; deadly pleased to see that Tollef has upgraded the
freedesktop bugzilla to 4.0, great chap. Bed early - exhausted.
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Back to La Cantine for joint talks, great to see Kris porting
LibreOffice to compile with LLVM already (so we can get emulated Windows
compile warnings, far faster than we can on windows). Out for lunch at
an English pub nearby (odd).
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Wrapped up the conference, with sad 'byes to many hackerly types.
And out for dinner with the team; wandered at great length trying to find
another cluster of hackers in a Scottish pub.
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Up early; off to IRILL slightly late for Kohei's talk, but enjoyed
that - good to see some progress on the calc internals. Tried to sync. the
rooms on two floors' schedule, and adapt to last minute program changes.
-
Out for lunch with the Lanedo guys; back for more great hackerly
talks, and a pottage of misc. Lightning talks, some of them arranged only
minutes before we started: lots of useful grist there and great speakers.
Surprisingly pleased by the 'star field' effect from an elderly projector.
-
Gave my web-office talk with
slides,
and
demo
video to make up for the lack of a live demo.
-
On to a curious party venue in the evening, did a bit of hacking
with Kohei, finally managed to draw my dependency thoughts onto a piece
of paper with Eike, caught up with Gabriel, code review with Lior, and
fun with Doug & Simon.
-
Incredible that hot on the back of blaming TDF for their
inability to monitor the security list (that their committers are on,
and are publicly
committed[sic] to monitoring); it is now insinuated
by juxtaposition that TDF is spreading unwarrented information.
It seems that this is related to Team OpenOffice's unexpected
announcement
that OO.o "can't be allowed to die" and needs to "continue
to be professionally developed", which looks like a distraction to me,
and is exactly nothing to do with TDF.
Interestingly the openoffice.org website (as controlled by ASF)
contained
(until recently) encouragement to donate to "Our prime
treasury - Team OpenOffice.org e.V.". Opening up a dialog with
the very guys AOOo are recommending downloaders to send money to
might be a good internal housekeeping policy. Certainly it is not
TDF's problem whatsoever.
-
Stayed up inordinately late happily chatting with Fridrich
& Tibbylickle.
-
Up earlyish, off to la Cantine, somehow just in time for the
start of our talk (with Italo & Florian), annoyingly lost a number
of images from my slides (good to work with the latest bleeding edge
development version).
-
Frantic day of meeting & talking to interesting people,
lunch with Simon & Norbert, gave a GSOC summary talk for Matus
after that. Met up with Mike from Mozilla to talk performance, tried
to compare the Lightning talks session at the end.
-
Talk slides are available:
achievements,
Matus' Google Summer of Code and
new
developers.
-
Off to the party kindly hosted by the Paris Region, fine food
wine, and great news.
Good to see LibreOffice On-Line launched in style. Talked to lots of
interesting people including Mathias, Camilo & Glynn. Out with
the lads for a late drink.
-
Breakfast with the team, and off to La Cantine - nice venue,
quick team / brainstorming meeting while people arrived. Lots of
meeting up with people.
-
SC meeting and lunch, SC Q&A, drinks - did a few demos
of fun / new pieces. Out for dinner with the Lanedo guys.
-
Worked on slides for introductory talk, while Andras slept,
then GSOC bits in stead of Matus, and finally finished a lightning
talk by 3:40am.
-
Up early, restless wife - hopefully recovered enough to cope
with the babes by now. Train to Cambridge, started reading the
Innovator's Dillema - nothing like being late to the party:
presumably by now it paints a useful anti-pattern.
-
St Pancras, Eurostar, random bug fix. Got to Paris, to La
Defence, caught up with the lads; eventually on to the Hotel to wait
for more of them etc.
-
Up; waded through mail all morning, fixed a Mac tinderbox
issue or two on my branch, dug into an interesting unit test bug.
Lunch. More jaw pain, hmm.
-
Plugged away at some pre-conference collateral / slide-ware /
bug fixing, mailing etc. what fun.
-
Dave over in the evening, good to catch up with his Venice
trip, life & times quickly.
-
Up earlyish - babes staying quiet longer in the morning
these days. Breakfast, NCC, preached on Daniel 4 - Pride and
God's sovereignty.
-
Dropped N. off at her friend's house. Back for lunch
with Pete, Dianne & Lydia. J. feeling rather better
mercifully.
-
Applied slugging in the afternoon, painful jaw (somehow),
deferred dentistry catching up no doubt.
-
Up, tidied up / cleaned the house, washing bits while J.
sorted through the piles of paper that spontaneously grow around
the place. I'm convinced that a junk-mail fuelled home-heating
system would keep us warmer, and tidier.
-
Hacked a little at a vcl / headless / svp related
annoyance, isEmpty doesn't detect emptiness in B2IRanges (it
seems).
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Prepped sermon in the evening until late.
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Waded through mail, and media bits, poked at security issues.
Misc. fun - hacked away at the VCL re-factoring, finding and fixing a
number of curious bugs.
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Up early. Prodded mail, call with Kevin Hunter, then Ludwig.
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Disappointed to see the good work being done in LibreOffice
to improve our security & vigilance (as clearly disclosed well
in advance to all related vendors and projects on the multi-vendor
list) twisted by people outside the (necessarily private) lists.
The process, combined with some (lack of) response problems from
Mitre is not perfect, for sure, but hopefully, the punch-line
is clear; if you're not using the latest verisons preferably 3.4.3
or (for the profoundly conservative) 3.3.4 then it would be
helpful to update your LibreOffice.
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Fetched E. from pre-school, lunch, TSC meeting.
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Recently one of our top slide designers: Karlin Stokes
pointed out how annoying it is that color schemes cannot be embedded
in ODP presentations. That means that causal users tend to create bad
presentations not using the carefully selected palette that matches
the corporate artwork provided by the experts. So - during SUSE
Hack Week I spent a while working away at this.
The user interface change being the rather small 'Embed' button
highlighted. That should move into a more useful place soon I hope,
and finding a volunteer to help move this (essentially file based
configuration) into the File->Properties dialog would be wonderful.
-
Much of the rest of my hack-week was overwhelmed with
fixing unit test pieces, patches review, and misc. admin - although
I did manage to get a bit done driving the gtk3/broadway port
forwards.
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Tended J. now chewing antibiotics at a great rate, put the
babes to bed, and back to work. Suffered from the X bell suddenly,
tried to turn it off variously in the settings. Eventually
found
xset -b - an unpleasant blast from the past.
-
Took babes to school to spare J's foot. Chewed mail,
setup Windows cross-compile on my main development laptop,
and wondered if it could be shared with a native Linux
compile to save space; interesting.
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Finally got to splitting out the fixes Markus needs
for unit testing macros during the build. Lunch, back to
build fixing. Enjoyed Alex's app
bundle prototype, looks good.
-
Freedom in Christ course in the evening.
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Parents arrived for breakfast, and dropped lots of
good things off, on their way up north to Yorkshire. Got to
work, chewed mail, chat with Holger.
-
Helped comfort & take J. to the Doctor's after an
unfortunate garden-fork, foot collision.
-
Worked away at debugging some unit test problems with
Markus, seems CppUnit initializes and then de-initializes /
re-initializes much of the LibreOffice core before/after each
test. Encouraging in some ways, that we'd not noticed that
before, re-worked things to fix some nasties.
-
Interview with Italo, got some help on GdkEvent handling
for the best event queue snooping results, dinner. Out to visit
DT in the evening.
-
Mail triage, reviewed / pushed misc. patches. Downloaded
& installed openSUSE 11.2 Beta 1 - looking pretty. Dug out some
code pointers for a new volunteer, nice.
-
Sync. with Kendy, plugged away at re-factoring vcl much
of the afternoon - lots to improve there.
-
Off to NCC, ran creche. Back for lunch in the garden.
Set too at trying to machine / knurl stainless steel bolts with
the lathe etc. (ground a beautiful 3mm plastic thread cutting
tool, and discovered the stainless is way too hard for my
mini lathe). Set too with the angle-grinder cutter and mini
lathe: worked rather well; destroyed my m3 tap trying to
add teeth - hmm.
-
Helped J. a little with her painting, and put up some
shelves. Sermon on Daniel 4 in the evening from Park Street,
bed.
-
Up early; drove to Aldeburgh to see Bruce & Anne,
lovely to catch up with them and Sue & Adam too.
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Re-platinum soldered my wedding ring, and polished the
family's set. Off to Sizewell beach with the babes - a lovely
sunny day. Back for lunch.
-
Plugged away at making reprap nozzles from M6 brass
bolts on Bruce's lathe, got a number into reasonable shape
it seems. Broke all my fine drills from 0.3mm through 0.6mm
(which survived several bolts).
-
Tea, chatted with Bruce, drove home; tinkered with
machinery, caught up with E-mail, bed.
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.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
