Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Analytics work, mail chew, clawed back through some of the queued up patches in the inbox. Built ESC bug stats etc. Lunch.
On the subject of offense; thankfully it seems Jewelfox got less concerned; and Jono posted a longer but useful post pointing out that causing offense is not per-se harrasment. I rather agree. I've mortally offended a much loved survivor friend simply by offering my opinion ('basically a bit liberal') on a Christian music festival - and (apparently) ruined her week. It appears impossible to simultaneously avoid everyone's PTSD triggers: simply being male and being behind someone can be enough to make some feel unsafe, nevermind having a loud voice. Some people have such tragic experiences that you can only thankfully marvel that they did survive. Having said that, some form of proportionate harm minimisation has to be good, even if it is impossible to please everyone. Re-reading the policy, I think an immediate, helpful band-aid might be the insertion of a 'can' (of worms?): Harassment can include offensive verbal comments... making it more of a useful guideline than a hard rule. I'd also love to see verbal comments that people find offensive de-coupled from their juxtaposition with stalking and worse. Thinking around this I've learned a lot - particularly reading the meta-derailing literature. Invoking derailing sometimes seems to me to have a rather malign side-effect of simultaneously asserting victimhood, expert status, and thus exclusive competence: an argument by authority. No doubt some people are just thoughtless trolls, but many are not and get confused by a siege mentality, no matter how justified. I also discovered that my profound moral dismay at the act of prostitution - take for example it's effect on the intimacy, exclusivity and mutual self-giving of marriage - has a new name: "Whorephobia", an amusing label indeed: how did we end up here ?
Prodded the Android build some more, I should try the Intel target overnight I think. Dinner with Lydia, worked late.

2012-06-25: Monday

Mail chew, reviewed and cherry-picked misc. patches. Tested a performance fix, only to find that the performance bug was already fixed, at least it made things no worse. Wrote status report.
Lunch, more mail, call with Kendy, wrote LXF column. More analytics, dinner - J's PCC meeting, worked rather late.

2012-06-24: Sunday

Left J. sleeping, off to church to play the violin; the on-the-park version cancelled due to excessive rain, fun. Shared indoor-picnic afterwards. Home, slept much of the afternoon.
Meal, bathed babes & read stories - Puck of Pooks Hill with H. Bit of repsnapper multi-settings hackery, bed early.

2012-06-23: Saturday

Up lateish, dressed & set-off for Tim's 50th birthday party, lots of family, fine food, mixed weather: fun. Back for a quick tea, put babes to bed, watched LOTR #2 2nd part with H.

2012-06-22: Friday

Up early; mail chew. Patch merging action, more book-keeping scripting, and re-basing work.

2012-06-21: Thursday

Mail chew, slogged away at some auditing work. Lunch. Team meeting, ESC call, posted minutes, Vojtech's staff call. Tried to get the sexy new gerrit instance (which should help further simplify the flow of patches into LibreOffice) to do my bidding. Re-read the instructions to discover that setting up the username is rather important; good.
Tried to unwind BCD's to my mind rather misleading passive approval system which requires approval it seems.
Watched The Italian Job with the wife to see if it is suitable for the babes.

2012-06-20: Wednesday

Poked at mail, a set of concerns from Danielle and jewelfox. It seems my brief critique of the vagueness of 'offense' as a yardstick for harassment is itself sufficiently offensive that (sadly) it makes some feel that people like me don't belong here. That is emphatically not my intention, but remarkably similar to my feelings when reading the policy I was discussing. Sigh, that's why I think we could have a clearer and better (longer) policy that makes everyone feel safe and at home. For what it's worth the short and medium versions of the suggested policy seem fine to me:
- Interestingly, it seems we share quite a lot of common ground. There is a concern about harassment on both sides. Even more encouraging, there is some exemplary casuistic presentation. Who can deny that an extended, un-solicited harangue as from a bus driver ranting at someone about going to Hell is harassment whose equivalent has no place at a conference ? Personally, I think that that is an unloving, profoundly counter-productive and hostile presentation that could easily be codified as a good case of what is unacceptable, in a form that all can enthusiastically agree with.
- Counterbalancing that I enjoy being part of a community of intellectuals - delighted by and interested in diverse ideas. Accidentally forbidding the full exploration of these in dialog seems like it benefits no-one, yet that is how the verbal offense policy reads to me. Mandating a 'politically correct' monoculture, where no differing views are expressed seems both extraordinary and to require adjudication to tax Solomon to work out what is 'correct'.
- I think that Daniele captures what I'd proscribe rather well with: "You can willingly consent to discuss your religion, but you don't have to accept being verbally abused because of it." - I totally agree. If the harassment policy read: "includes verbal abuse" - or somesuch, to cover the pernicious, unsolicited aspect. However I still think a case-based approach with clear examples of unacceptable and acceptable behaviour is much more likely to provide a useful guide for the poor organisers who get to adjudicate, and more likely to get common support from participants than a precise / language-lawyer approach.
- As an example, I agree that sexually explicit imagery and discussion in presentations is completely inappropriate - hopefully that's something that's easy to preclude. Yet, on the other hand - I occasionally show a sample image of my wife & I on our wedding day in my presentations, sometimes I make a tame related comment on the obvious aphrodisiac qualities of hacking on XYZ project in relation to it. No doubt, if you seek it, there is plenty of potential offense to be found - yet I fear a bland world where celebrating one's beloved wife in public gets forbidden in the name of diversity.
- I'm certain that just being me also offends plenty of people; perhaps also common ground. What I don't expect is for people to advocate attempts to censor others (like Gerv) who carefully express their political views - even if they happen to disagree with mine.
So in conclusion, I still believe there is a serious risk in creating this sort of semi-legal enforcement structure in an unclear area of great complexity - which is also land-mined by many tragic and emotive experiences of rejection by family and worse. I'd like to clarify, and proscribe in a more case-based way what is unacceptable and acceptable, preferably in a pleasant atmosphere. I'm not eager for a right to persecute, far from it ! I hope instead for an expectation of open, interactive, sensitive, deep discussion on any topic: including private discussions that can be overheard if sought out. Certainly it is easy to critique the policy (which has raised these issues and gone a long way towards helpfully stating the obvious), but to be constructive I should try to write such a set of pattern and anti-pattern pairs - oh for the time to do so.
Dropped the car off for servicing in Cambridge. Plugged away at various compilation, dependency size, and rebasing issues.
Dave & Emily over for dinner, had a fun time with them.

2012-06-19: Tuesday

Chewed mail backlog much of the morning, generated ESC bug stats, wrote weekly status report. Lunch. Tried to book the GUADEC flight, prodded gitdm with Dave.
Unfortunately, the lame BCD travel planner shows only much more expensive flights that take five hours and require one change, an expensive call to a manual agent finally guarentees the same direct flight kayak would find you, but costing more, and with a booking fee on top: cost saving in action.
Registered for GUADEC, a smooth flow - modulo the general sense of revulsion at the Attendee Policy; no doubt discussed to death elsewhere - but pretty aggravating to me at least. Fair enough getting aggressive against stalking, groping and such horrors; but encouraging censorship of "offensive" verbal comments related to sexual orientation, religion etc. looks like a persecutors charter in the making. What is offensive ? and to whom ? the fear being that -very- quickly such good aspirations slide from "applied common sense" into a militant denial of a basic right to reasonably critique others' world-views. Put another way I'm really happy for people to tell me how wrong-headed I am on any number of engaging topics, and to discuss them in an animated and friendly fashion. I loathe a framework that will discourage people from coming and saying: "your Christian faith seems incomprehensibly stupid to me" (for example), or "the crazy English always fall down the stairs", or whatever. Since ultimately enforcing whatever policy ends up in just the same organisers making a decision, I'd prefer -much- less specificity in a casuistic set of rules. Those would proscribe those genuinely awful things that are within the range of plausibility and are not acceptable, without accidentally forbidding normal, robust, wide-ranging discourse over say fourty or fifty shades of grey.
Plugged away at tooling.

2012-06-18: Monday

Up early, breakfast with the babes - turns out that, after a year of thinking I was 35, today is my 35'th Birthday - perhaps that's good news. An assortment of tools, plastic-printing related goodies, and obligatory socks.
Triaged mail quickly, booked the day off, call with Kendy. Out on an extensive shopping trip: glass merchant, electricians, plumbers, garden centre etc.
Off to Falmouth St' to scrub mould from the house for sale, not ventilating the place: a bad idea. Removed cruft from the loft etc. Home - pottered around attaching mirror'd glass to an (as yet to be heated) bed, and adjusting the Y axis variously.
Toilet filling mechanism re-plumbing action; spent much of the afternoon poking at repsnapper advancing the multi-machine settings support and trying to re-netbook-compress the GUI.
Out in the evening to Pizza Express with the lovely wife, Sandy kindly baby-sitting.

2012-06-17: Sunday

Up early, off to NCC dug into the text variously. Progenitor B's day (or is it A?), RIP Fatherhood. Home for a chunky pork roast. Slept while babes to James' party.
Ate tea with them, read stories, and watched LOTR #2 part one with H. and J.

2012-06-16: Saturday

Up early, E's party preparations today. Strung up flags in the garden, scrubbed the climbing equipment too; considered party games etc.
Influx of large number of fun-sized people, and parents. Much fun, weather: clement, competitive pass-the-parcel playing etc.
Cleared everything away, tea, put most babes to bed. Back to Daniel 7 until late at night.

2012-06-15: Friday

Up early; chewed mail, patch review, more work on perl tooling, fun. Slogged away at that cheerfully. James & Kate over for lunch and a lovely afternoon together, played an ad-hoc violin / piano duet with James, enjoyed their lovely presents; got to understand Chinese a bit better: no tenses eg. good.
Dinner, put babes to bed - back to work, more scripting action. Worked away in the evening at Daniel 7 take #2.

2012-06-14: Thursday

Up early, E's fourth birthday - presents at breakfast, fun. To work, chewed mail, filed a random gdb issue, amused and pleased while filing to see a suggested potential duplicate bug: Message "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that." should be removed marked WONTFIX - neat (but unrelated).
Misc. admin, lunch, more re-basing during team call.

2012-06-13: Wednesday

Call with Vojtech, wrestled with purchasing system, breakfast. Mail chew, more auditing and rebasing work, misc. patch review.
Call with Bjoern, Board call, interview alongside Charles with FLOSS weekly - rather an unusual and interesting format.
Worked away researching Daniel 7, Revelation 13 and more for a sermon this Sunday, fascinating.

2012-06-12: Tuesday

Up early, mail chew, built ESC bug metrics. Sync. with Matus. Got my windows build going again, it seems restoring the previous config and running a plain VirtualBox command without a path to a vbox file works better.
Lots of code auditing and incremental rebasing; Lydia over for dinner, worked late.

2012-06-11: Monday

Up early, music practices with the girls, packed them off to school, to work. Sync with Norbert, chewed mail etc. Wrote status report, did more admin, filed LinuxTag expenses.
Fixed an annoying 3.6 presenter console bug. Lunch, poked at misc. other bugs. Wondered who was using the noisy machinery outside all day, annyoing.
Struggled variously with reprap softare & hardware in the evening, call with Father, bed.

2012-06-10: Sunday

Up lateish; off to NCC, Tony spoke on Philippians. . Home for lunch, bid 'bye to Leanne, practised some singing in Harmony with H. and N. - lovely.
Played fighting games with M. and N. variously. Dinner, put babes to bed - bit of python / game programming with H. call with M&D, bed early.

2012-06-09: Saturday

Up lateish; J. out, chewed mail quickly. Babes arrived back. Pottered around until lunch time. J. and Leanne out into Bury St Edmonds.
Entertained little girls, more cycling training with E. and M. in the road - a little progress.
Poked at FreeCad and after a lot of random frustration managed to get something like what H. needs to replace her broken light grip modelled in 3D.

2012-06-08: Friday

Mail, admin, posted ESC minutes, amazed at the unsual suspect's uninformed backlash to RedHat's (to my mind) rather sensible approach to the (horribly problematic) UEFI / secure boot issue. Of course, it'd be deeply preferable to have eg. the well resourced Linux Foundation, or similar body step in and run a signing program and evangelise it instead IMHO, but if they or similar others don't want to do that, this like the next least-bad thing to me. I'm rather impressed by the progress made by Matthew on this front to safeguard users' ability to choose to manage their own keys.
Dug at holiday entitlement - some kind HR person reminded us suitably in advance of loosing it: neato. Chewed through perl scripts & auditing work. Chat with Kris, dug through VCL meta-files funkiness a bit.
Read the new corporate expense policy; apparently sticking reciepts to A4 sheets is now fashionable instead of stapling them together.
Spent a while threading my git blame double checker, somehow spawning 16 git's in parallel works really nicely on an 8 CPU machine, great to do thirty minutes of work in under five.
Talked with Leanne & J. until late, missing H. out for a sleep-over with Charlotte.

2012-06-07: Thursday

Up earlyish, to work, sync. with Norbert, chewed mail - added bugzilla components etc. Patch review, etc. worked away at some careful auditing all day.
Poked at git tags as notes; wow git notes are unpleasant to use, merging (non-conflicting) changes with others is really non-intuitive, git notes show can't show the note text easily, etc. etc.
Had Dave & Emily, Kerry & Cathy over for dinner, very pleasant.

2012-06-06: Wednesday

Chewed mail, several days of catch-up. Call with Vojtech, knocked up bug stats for ESC call. Looked over Matus' nice work with Telepathy / Collaboration.
It seems that Riccardo did a nice bootchart-2.14.4 release with misc. fixes and python3 support. I suspect that systemd makes bootchart2 increasingly pointless by booting fast enough, becoming ubiquitous and by having built-in charting.
Pleased to see Brennan Vincent's Google Summer of Code project, as well mentored by Fridrich, and Valek, and their blog entry showing off the Microsoft Publisher import - which seems to be going well thus far: Nice to see the LibreOffice 3.7 feature pipeline starting, as the 3.6 3.6 feature freeze happens.
Lunch, Laura over - analysed some stats, call with Norbert. Out for a run, dinner, Janice & Lydia over for a call, talked to Leanne (who is staying for a bit), bed.

2012-06-05: Tuesday

Up, scrambled egg for Breakfast, got sucked into Four Days in June rather a gripping account of the Battle of Waterloo.
Out to the substantial tent for the Jubilee 'Street Party' on the warren - fine food, interesting company, what a celebration etc. Helped to pack everything away in the afternoon.
Drove home, potted around machining the brass heater block, mounting it etc. in the evening; bed early.

2012-06-04: Monday

Packed, off to Bruce & Anne's via West Suffolk Hospital for an anti-tetanus shot; how long can one twenty second injection consume in paperwork and waiting ? hacked in the waiting room for a good while.
On to B&A's for a fine lunch; played machining brass in the workshop for a bit - discovered that my tap set is not tapered enough, which no doubt is a large part of one problem there.
Bit of work in the afternoon, closing out misc. issues for the 3.6 feature freeze today.

2012-06-03: Sunday

Up early, kindly given a lift to Church by Jackie & Peter. Played the violin & latterly the guitar variously; fun. Claire spoke on stealing & covetousness.
Home for lunch, re-hash of the movie, poked at machining some brass - with mixed success - drilling sub-mm holes through larger ones at an angle is a great way to break small drills; you can try drilling the small ones first, but drilling through them tends to annoyingly re-seal them.
J. arrived back to much applause; bathed babes, tea; bed.

2012-06-02: Saturday

Up earlyish, bid 'bye to Rob & Ilona. J. already left to Brighton. Spent time with the babes, disassembled washing machine to mend inadequate plastic spring backing the start button; unfortunately fell down the back step and into a bag of firewood (contining some nice rusty nails) and got a fine puncture wound to the right thumb muscle, drat.
Lunch with four babes, out into town to admire their work displayed at the library and get 'Monsters vs. Aliens' for them to watch. Met a chap 'Mike' distributing Jack Chick pamphlets, it's been a while since I met one of those. Played in the playground with the babes.
Back home, watched movie, lasagne tea, put them to bed, exhausted myself - how does J. do it ?

2012-06-01: Friday

Up lateish, great news from Google around API copyrightability - no doubt the GNU Classpath & Wine guys will be celebrating tonight.
Posted the ESC minutes lots of nice features racing the feature-freeze just now, everyone rather busy. Tor and Iain seem to be making good progress with the Android viewer tangles too, encouragingly. Quick call with Mike.
Claire over to interview J. in the evening; Rob & Ilona popped in to stay for the night, checked out their flashy new car. Nice to catch up with Ilona until late.

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.