Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, pleased to see the fantastic cross-compilation work from Tor, Kendy, Fridrich & others. What with it being SUSE hack-week Kendy's been working on getting the resulting binaries to run; which they now do (under WINE etc.). So we finally have a live Linux -> Windows cross compiled version, built entirely with Free Software tooling, inside a repeatable Linux environment. If you have Kendy's hardware, that means you can build from scratch in under 15mins cf. tsc minutes. Hopefully this'll mean more frequent Win32 developer snapshots and more reliable. Played with the build - finally the chance to test some Windows specific improvements that I've wanted to hack on for a while. With Lanedo to work on MSI packaging, hopefully we'll have a complete cross-compilation story for Windows for LibreOffice 3.6 / 4.0.
Chewed & spewed more mail. Slogged away at a silly with calc unit tests and locale setting. Finally got around to writing and sending my candidacy for the TDF board elections.
Up late talking with Chris & Max.

2011-09-29: Thursday

Quick mail chew, really pleased to see the Android / LibreOffice cross-compile building up to ~the end - although of course no GUI porting work as yet. Set about growing my VCL re-factor to make that possible - rooting out bogus X dependencies that have crept in around the place.
Quick lunch, chat with SUSE's PR guys. Hacked away, got the X dependency out of the headless code, at least at link time. TSC meeting. Discovered a load of unix dependencies in the headless code - need to spend some time cutting those out.
Out to see Soham Village College with Rachel; thoroughly pleased with the excellence on display. Home to the wife. Fun call with Jeremy Allison until late.

2011-09-28: Wednesday

Up early; took E. to pre-school, this time no tears - progress indeed. Prodded mail, re-started Windows cross-compile. Happy birthday LibreOffice - only a year ago LibreOffice was born ( hitting the ground running, with working test builds for umpteen plaforms, repositories to work with, and fun to be had ). What a difference a year makes to the project's maturity, growth, feature depth and (invisible to users) code quality, it's fantastic to see the positive difference that SUSE's investment has made.
Lunch, interview, re-factoring unit tests to prune duplicate code, and make them small & sweet.
Hacked away at misc. regressions from unit test code-sharing, until everything looked pretty, and compiled. Switched to gtk-broadway lots of cleanups there, finally got very much better behaviour.
Freedom in Christ course at our house in the evening.

2011-09-27: Tuesday

Chewed mail; call with sb, worked with Moggi on VBA unit tests, fun. Setup a cross-compile environment with Kendy.
The process of removing and/or re-writing LGPL dependencies to be under an Apache license is a pretty odious one. Since when has it been acceptable to call this "IP Remediation" - my code does not need remediating.
Worked on more code cleanup. Out for the first time in ages with J. while E. baby-sat, lovely.

2011-09-26: Monday

Up early; chewed mail quickly, tried to clear the decks for hack-week, fixed a number of warnings & issues around the propertylist cleanup. Created Lucas' commit account. Lunch.
Hacked away at misc. re-factoring and tried to clean the fallback / slab menu up for openSUSE.

2011-09-25: Sunday

Lie in, picked up Emily & NCC, Roy Wheeler spoke enthusiastically. Back for lunch with Emily + family, and talked, played with babes, went for bike rides + tree climbing on the heath afterwards - much fun.
Late tea, babes to bed, listened to Gordon sermon on Judges 12 - interesting stuff.

2011-09-24: Saturday

Up early, pottered around, fixed up more compile issues, tested & pushed my cleanup. Off to play with babes, and fool about in the workshop making shelves for more books.
Bit more LibreOffice hacking & bug fixing before lunch. Dropped H. to Phobie's for a party. Back for bike training in the road. M. seems to have cracked steering, and N. starting by herself.
Managed (finally) to get the drill-press + vice to produce a reasonable reprap nozzle - my first, now for a good drive gear, bed.

2011-09-23: Friday

A day of hacking at last, dunged out mail, and set too re-factoring the color / property-list code. Discovered a total rats nest of lifecycle problems - a wonderful 'DontDeleteColorTable' virtual method on an abstract dialog factory (etc. etc.). Dunged out lots of complicated, fragile code - 500 lines down, more robust, fixed some leaks, much more abstraction, clearing the way for the next big cleanup here. Satisfying, worked late at it, stymied by the three-layer reduction so couldn't test & push.

2011-09-22: Thursday

Up early, plugged away at some research / writing topics much of the morning, presented in the afternoon; back to queued mail and tasks.
Got a beautiful callibration print from skeinforge of translucent beauty. It seems - good callibration, and nice callibration shapes are apparently the key to good printing.

2011-09-21: Wednesday

Dropped babes to school, and E. to pre-school (weeping piteously to break a parent's heart) - of course she returns full of bounce, not interested in coming home & with a fist-full of paintings but ... even so.
Chewed through mail, reviewed a patch or two. Amused by Olav's graph of Fedora dropping their CLA seemingly a rather significant difference.
Worked late while J. put babes to bed, marshalling facts, trying to pull thoughts together etc.

2011-09-20: Tuesday

Dropped into Cambridge, meetings, lunch, Simon kindly dropped me back - fun. Plugged away at bugs and e-mail in the afternoon. Got the most beautiful printout yet from the reprap in the evening - translucently thin and fragile, lovely.

2011-09-19: Monday

Started working through an un-blocked freedesktop mail-backlog, encouraging to see all the progress. Reviewed and back-ported a couple of patches, lunch. Set too writing LXF column.
Fixed up some (apparently missing) git notes I needed, and re-ran some analytics. Wrote status report for the week. Got column sanity and accessibility checked and sent.
Up rather late writing customer presentation for tomorrow.

2011-09-18: Sunday

Lazed in, breakfast, NCC, Helen speaking. Back for a lamb lunch with Clara & April over to play. Movie for the babes later, fixed another repsnapper issue, and played with another python / skeinforge mess.
Tea, read stories to babes, J. out, watched the Freedom in Christ introduction session (by mistake - wrong one), and dug at some Old Testament texts and their contemporary interpretation in some more depth.

2011-09-17: Saturday

Up early, J. out for a training session on running pre-schools. Baby-sat my four, before gaining another two fun-sized people to play with. Fed six hungry little mouths with some help from the bigger girls.
Richard & George, then Rachel & J. arrived - ate with them too & caught up until the Steering Committee call intruded.
Plugged away at LibreOffice / SC issues for a while, out into the sun to teach babes how to cycle: balancing by steering, starting off, signaling with the hands etc. fun.
Dinner, put everyone to bed. Plugged away at printing things ineffectually.

2011-09-16: Friday

Day off, turned spare kitchen work-surface into a 'clean' bench to work at (for ~finished rep-rap pieces). This required cutting and welding some handy fence-posts into brackets - my welding skills are really not helped by the complete opaque blackness setting that ~all welding glasses appear to specialise in; totally safe and utterly useless. Created welds with more spatter than weld (that held at least). Played with the babes variously. Started to get tidied up a little.

2011-09-15: Thursday

Started digging through mail, and trying to unwind ongoing mail delivery problems that broke libreoffice-dev delivery. Pleased to see Libreoffice win InfoWorld's Bossie Award.
Pushed a fix to enable hybrid ODF inside PDF export even if we don't have the filter included to import them - it must be a moral good anyway. More missed actions.
A great interview from Fridrich and Elidh on the awesome Visio reverse engineering / import work that they did for Google Summer of Code with lots of pretty pictures.
Lunch, TSC meeting, created new commit account and repo for Caolan. Put babes to bed, worked late cleaning up loose ends.

2011-09-14: Wednesday

Up early; off to Greg's kayak construction talk - off to finish the slide-ware, met up with Linux User & Developer's Russel.
Jan H. had found and was fixing more bugs LibreOffice found in the latest gcc / LTO work with some lovely automated test-case reducer, that would randomly remove lines looking for a minimal document exhibiting the error. Fun.
Gave my talk on LibreOffice and SUSE (hybrid-pdf):
Wandered hither & thither saying 'bye to all the fine hackers types. Plane-ride with Russel & Richard back to Gatwick.
Poked at an interview on the train, looked at E-mail backlog a little.

2011-09-13: Tuesday

Up, dug through mail until Michael Miller's marketing keynote. On to a series of fine talks on Gnome 3, systemd, and Hackerspaces.
Met Tomas Chvatal and got his commit access setup, finding some other wedged account requests at the same time. Spent some time porting libslab / gnome-main-menu to Gnome 3, seemingly it is redeemable.
Back to the hotel to work on gitdm statistics and misc. slide creation.

2011-09-12: Monday

Enjoyed talks on static code analysis, SSD caching, and much of the hallway track. Lots of interest here, impressed with Dirk & the QA team's progress. In particular Bernhard's OpenQA using KVM, screen diffs and OCR - to build videos of installations, and/or really any interaction (for any OS), with scripts, and videos, and re-starting failed scripts after tweaking them etc. neat.
Caught up with Henri and Midgard, Mathias, enjoyed the unusual music in the evening, bed late.

2011-09-11: Sunday.

Up earlyish, off to the conference. Enjoyed misc. talks, particularly Jan Hubicka's on Link Time Optimisation, and caught up with a selection of the good guys wandering around. Fine talk around samba analytics too.
Out for dinner to a German place (in a high quality thunderstorm) with the Desktop guys.

2011-09-10: Saturday.

Up very early, breakfast, Mother dropped me at the station. Train to Gatwick, checked in. Discovered that what used to be a spacious jet is now a turbo-prop, how long before cheap, direct Nurnberg flights bite the dust ?
Arrived, hacked away much of the afternoon adding the pallete et. al. embedding feature to LibreOffice. Eventually set off to the venue, tempted by the lure of pizza.
Helped Pavol get his reprap setup, and repsnapper going, bit of bug fixing. Talked with vuntz and fcrozat until late.

2011-09-09: Friday.

Up early; kick-started stalled travel planning. Fixed more bugs in the Paris conference schedule, back to gitdm wrapper improvements; finally worked out where the bogus create tag was and moved it, misc. cleanups and done.
Lunch, train to Brighton on the way to the openSUSE conference tomorrow. Worked until dinner. Caught up with the parents and the state of packing (and the container based naturete of modern inter-house storage) until late.

2011-09-08: Thursday.

To work, started digging at the statistics generation which needs quite an overhaul for our new git repository structure. Slogged away at that, learned about and added various new git notes that were required (in place of tags).
Team meeting, TSC meeting, customer call - more gitdm wrapper hacking.

2011-09-07: Wednesday.

Quick mail spin, booked train to Paris for the LibreOffice conference. Plugged away at the conference schedule, re-arranging, talks and trying to cram them all in.
Tony over at lunch time to discuss forthcoming Freedom in Christ course we're running next week; call with Charles, program massage & audit to make sure all the talks are there. Call with Caolan.
Bought lots of ETFs for my new Barclays ISA thing - tax-free losses (I hope).

2011-09-06: Tuesday.

Up early, now Apache have some code available, I did a quick analysis of the LibreOffice diff to Apache's codebase - which is fairly large and growing: looking only at C++ files (*.?xx) we have:
- We removed ~678 files (though some small proportion of these are simple movements to improve encapsulation and/or re-use). A hundred or so of the removals are obsolete binfilter pieces, 55 from OS/2 code, 50 from adabas and evo1 connectors, 38 from soldep, 36 from killing vos, but many more bits of unused cruft gone.
- We added ~914 new files modulo movements the single biggest chunk is : 380 files is (IBM's) lotuswordpro filter (forward-ported by us), then it gets bitty: VBA improvements, the re-written RTF import filter, the ODMA and KDE file pickers, OpenXML filter work, new unit tests, gtk3 pieces, AIX UNO bridge, svg filter and lots more.
- These numbers compare with 21.5k common files overall. As a reasonably useless statistic - but perhaps one that points helpfully to the likelihood of merging conflicts we have ~2 million lines of diff -u output over 7.7 million newlines of code.
- More concretely, having elided the code changes from the (automated) emacs & vi modelines (to make editing much easier) which touched each file, and looking only at common files we have: minus 526k lines - always good to measure the negatives first: we ripped and replaced a lot of cruft. And then we added 290k lines back again.
- Naturally, lots of feature work was done in the new files we added, so the net work input is much larger, the above number is only looking at the common files; to gague the degree of code-change. raw data (11Mb).
What does that all mean ? well it is a lot of code-change and cleanup. It is also a lot of scope for conflict when merging changes. Seemingly there is an assumption, that code committed to Apache OpenOffice will inevitably and automatically appear in LibreOffice. This looks increasingly unlikely. Instead I suspect we will end up cherry-picking and porting only those things that justify the effort, as/when/if there is any such thing.

Pain in jaw (again) - an annoying intermittent wetware bug. Re-based feature/gtk3 branch and built it. Did some hacking on windows to try to unwind some unit test breakage, remembered again why I hate using that thing. File URLs that look like file:///c:/foo/baa which inevitably break when ported from unix Incremental (no action) re-make time of the order of a minute instead of a handful of seconds - amazing.

OS	Hardware	incremental 'sc' make	with glob fix	incremental tail_build	same with glob fix
Linux (openSUSE11.4)	2.5GHz Core2 Duo	6.8 seconds	4.5 seconds	32 seconds	22 seconds
Windows 2008R2	2GHz Dual core Xeon	118 seconds	14.8 seconds	597 seconds	80 seconds

Of course, no doubt cygwin has a lot to do with the slowness, but wow life is painful without that glob fix (which saves a ton of un-necessary I/O). It -really- looks as if we should be building with our own make snapshot on windows.

Tested Moggi's nice merged cells movement / undo/redo fix - lovely. Poked at Bjoern's nice gerrit instance - looks easy to get going at least.
Poked at the GTS library to see if it could be used for 3D shrinking / slicing for repsnapper, looks rather impressive (though apparently sadly unmaintained).

2011-09-05: Monday.

Poked mail, fixed windows / URL related unit test error; fixed up palette work before finally realising how fairly pointless it is without export support, defer it until 3.5.
Removed duplicate dummy rules from dependency files. Lunch. More hackery to cleanup color & theme loading information.
Setup share trading ISA with Barclays in the evening, interestingly they've pipelined / bootstrapped the anti-fraud, heavy-lifting legal regulatory stuff, so it happens later.

2011-09-04: Sunday.

Up lateish, off to NCC, Tony speaking on fasting. Back for a fine chicken dinner; out to Simon & Claire's to admire their extended home & catch up with them.
Back, put babes to bed. Hacked on repsnapper - fixing multi-shell shrinking, and cleaning the slicing code variously; still badly needs fixing - and prolly a polyhedral shrinking re-write to boot. Appalled to discover that CGAL is using the 'QPL' (in this day & age) as part of some mis-guided strategy to drive commercial licensing.
Did a little research on Exchange Traded Funds in the evening, it looks like you have to trust BlackRock; still - I suppose the same is true for unit trusts - except that they also charge you a fortune in fees.

2011-09-03: Saturday.

Up earlyish, much house cleaning and preparation for M.'s fifth birthday party. Lunch. Lovely sunny day - lots of babes arrived, so happy with their unstructured playing that even lucky-dips with prizes didn't tempt all to play the various silly games.
Dropped Brighty's back, and admired Chris' lathe, Cieran & Amy's wedding invites etc. Home, put babes to bed.

2011-09-02: Friday.

Dug away at making filter tests work (during the build) in LibreOffice, after some extended pain - missing components throwing obscure exceptions, configmgr needing re-configuring, and the filter code doing strange things all eventually defeated.
Poked at the LibreOffice conference schedule - looking good. Dug at the MPLv2 a bit too. Stumbled upon what looks like a rather nice gnumake speedup to acclerate incremental re-building; knocked 30% off an incremental tail_build/ make with nothing to do.

2011-09-01: Thursday.

Up early, started on the mail queue - lots and lots of nice work being merged, most encouraging. A morning of mail while building the latest code. Laura & kids over for lunch.
Team meeting, worked through an amazing number of google+ 'adding' spam which got wedged under a pile of un-read gmail mail somehow - an encouraging number of cool kids there it seems. TSC call, sent out minutes.
Plugged away at a cleanup / refactoring killing a few hundred lines of cut and paste cruft. Dinner, put babes to bed. More cleanup after dinner.

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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.