Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Up early; somewhat better; mail chew, lunch, admin, ESC call - sometimes it's good to reflect on what a privilege it is to work with such a truck-load of talented people. Pleased to see Norbert's interview with Coverity about our LibreOffice improvements published. Crunched stats. Good to see RollApp promoting LibreOffice too.
• Poked around the code happily with DavidO in the evening; tried to switch from C++ vtables to C ones for liblibreoffice too before the feature-freeze.

• Up feeling urggh; mail chew, profiling, lunch, partner call, more mail pokeage, board call. Poked the Mortgage to finally setup a payment holiday. Tested & pushed Joel's nice review toolbar, needs a few new icons for it. Bed early.

• Up early, customer call first thing; notes, mail chew; feeling pretty coldy and dead. Lunch. Call with partner, sync. with Cor, ran some profiles. Managed to get a Windows VM working finally, and some code built there. Built ESC stats, bed very early, feeling horribly congested.

• Poked at mail, wrestled with debugging X servers; amusingly connecting from one remote machine to the other provoked another X bug in the other machine; one Intel, one ATI (most likely a stale driver), removed the old ATI piece to debug the Intel driver. Got systems back working - well enough to run VirtualBox & some background Windows builds too.
• Sync. with Muthu, status report, team meeting. Interested to read about Linux Voice on indigogo - sounds like it'll be good, mental note: get myself a subscription.
• Out to the pub with Chris Brighty until late.

• Off to NCC, Claire spoke interestingly on 'Barak'; back for a quick lunch, and off with M. to the Rememberance Day parade in town. Brass Monkey weather, home eventually, babes watched a movie, pizza dinner, out for delayed fireworks at Claire & Chris'. Put people to bed, watched Ambassadors, sleep late.

• Up lateish, off to Bruce & Annes, great to see Bruce home and better; poked at fixing the roof Anne's potting shed partially blown off in the storm. Home, picked up H. from Charlotte's and put babes to bed.

• Mail chew; interested to see Intel baking custom instrutions into it's chips; personally I'd love to see some very tightly integrated FPGA-like stuff inside an HSA model, and I think we could use that with an openCL-style (but clearly more HDL focused language). That would be dead fun: bringing hardware design to S/W engineers - every statement executing concurrently.
• Call with Olivier, and then Muthu, crunched some stats, chat with Kohei, poked some perl with mst, slide chew. Fixed a bug in the Intel / X graphics driver so I could edit my presentation - bit annoying that we touch under-tested code-paths: only in impress ...

• Up early; mail, chewed through tasks, did a tiny bit of hacking on liblibreoffice (and broke some tinderboxes to boot), fun. Lunch. ESC call and posted minutes.
• Pleased to see Caolan's nice blog entry on The Death of UniString - good riddance: you can't have too few string classes; now if only we could use UTF-8 strings everywhere we could save some megabytes of memory, and perhaps improve performance at the same time - but that's going to need much more string functionality in OUString rather than layered above it to be efficient.
• Fine parsnip soup dinner, older babes out to a disco, put 'littlies' to bed, back to work, sync. with Olivier, caught up with Kohei, a little hackery & bed.

• Up, mail chew, spent a while printing signing and scanning documents - tediously slow with my hardware. Filed and/or chased misc. openSUSE 13.1 / evolution bugs. Customer calls variously.

• Up early, mail chew, built ESC bug stats & proto agenda, plugged away at slideware. Upgraded over lunch to openSUSE 13.1, coming soon. Set about trying to restore my system to usability:
  • Impatience extension is obsolete - unclear how to get rid of the annoying animations I don't want for crisp cuts. Apparently re-installing it made it 'just work' which is great - though some vestiges of animations are sadly left even in the best case.
  • Workspace Grid apparently disappeared without trace or replacement, attempted to install an unwanted frippery bottom panel, and got some 2D-ness, with no keybindings and an unwanted panel. Un-installed and re-installed the workspace grid extension several times to no avail, with no sensible error reporting. Kindly pointed to Bitbucket and worked out what to hg clone in the end, built it, and gnome-tweak-tool failed to give any error / notification as it didn't install it; filed some bugs.
  } After an hour+ of time burn (all of it GNOME related, openSUSE 13.1 seems rather good), I nearly gave up. Then started poking in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions, filed a dconf-editor / gtk3 crasher (BadAlloc). Chewed another quarter of an hour trying to debug and port the 2D workspace grid before giving up on that, three sets of API churn down. The software may not be where I'd like it but the community on IRC is really friendly and helpful. Now where ? Tried installing gnome-shell and mutter from 12.3 on top, not working. Installed metacity & gnome-panel - enjoyed the wonderful (perhaps psychosomatic) improvement in responsiveness from metacity, but no mouse pointer, and (somehow) busted 2D desktops there too: wow.
• Tried to get back to the old system, the lack of option to boot it is no doubt an artifact of some grub2 vs. grub, migration in openSUSE 13.1. Marvelled at the complexity of the grub2 config file and gave up trying to resurrect my old partition.
• Back to trying to fix the GNOME javascript to get 2D workspaces going, commented out a lot more API change / breakage, to no avail; what now ?. After my experience trying out Alt-` for a week, I can't afford to sink more time into learning to enjoy being trapped in a thin vertical workspace.
• Installed XFCE. A couple of configuration tweaks later (it clearly has too many options) it did nearly what I wanted, albeit with it's own frustrations. It also seems snappier [ vs. the 'Impatience' set to zero equivalent ]. Very sad. What I saw of GNOME 3.10 looked lovely; I love GNOME, I like the minimal design, I'm prepared to put up with the control center moving settings around between releases like a drunken madman, and re-learning the strangely new positions / arrangements of the panel / app-launcher etc. each release - that stuff is all low frequency usage - a few times per day. However for app / workspace switching, which is a hundreds of times per hour experience, changing my existing wetware is (pragmatically) -much- too expensive to change. I havn't the time to invest in making GNOME 3.10 what I need today, and I can't get back to 3.8 which is annoying more than words can express. Hopefully eventually someone will make the Workspace Grid extension work & I can move back over the next months; that is until 3.12 changes the gnome-shell extension APIs again.
• Hopefully the new Evolution 3.10 (which fixes all known problems vs. 3.8) makes all this pain worth suffering; lets see, early signs are good - and it's great to be on a release worth reporting bugs / fixing things against. Good to read about the rendering improvements in gtk 3.10 too.
• Out for a run. Dinner; Bible study with Arun, worked until 2am making up the lost time - not good.

• Mail chew, wrote status report, plugged through tedious admin, sales pieces, misc. patch review, team meeting, sync. with Markus. Worked late on a pitch.

• Off to NCC, Helen gave a challenging talk, back for lunch with Mary Rogers, misc. slugging variously, Emily over for dinner & some hand-me-down clothes try-outs for H. fun. Read stories, put babes to bed, sleep.

• Up rather late. Breakfast, out to Noughton Park, had a fine time there - picnic in the (unseasonable) sun - babes forgot to bring their coats but survived anyway. Back, watched a horrendous St. Trinians re-make, rather unsuitable, sigh. Bed early, exhausted.

• Up early, meetings with Kendy & Philippe then Rob for much of the day. Really pleased to see South Tyrol making some great choices. Appalled at the 'Rockstar's anti-competitive behaviour.
• Back for a meal in the evening with Kendy & Julia, chatted until later, booked early coach to the airport, bid a fond farewell.

• Slept poorly; train into Cambridge with Kendy. Status / roundup meetings with Philippe, Tracie, Patrick & co. Partner call, Lunch, ESC call, sync. with Italo, tried to get through E-mail. Out for dinner with Philippe & Sana, train home, bed.

• Work, mail chew, worked through action items, updated sales pipeline, lunch, partner call, board call, Collabora internal calls, worked on slides. Dinner, read stories, back to work. Out to pick up Kendy from Cambridge late; bed.

• Up early; 2x partner calls, mail chew, station, enjoyed the delayed train experience into Cambridge; meetings all day. Team meeting to catch up, more meetings through until the evening. Train back. Worked late.

• Up; power (and hence network) failed during breakfast; bother. Laptop battery charged mercifully. Plugged away at admin. Still no internet, worked through my 10k+ line TODO, removing things like meego, jpr, yast, moblin, Make GNU Chess a bonobo control and embed it, boot-time profiling pieces, kvm / nomad, banshee, brainshare etc. Fed the babes (including Suzannah's) by candlelight in the evening, gave up waiting for power & set off to drive home, worked until late trying to catch up.

• Breakfast, off to Church, snicked out part way through a rather long communion service. Lunch. J&Anne off to see Bruce, took babes to the park to play - finished novel; back ot slug with babes, read them bits of their books: LOTR, Tripods, Sword of the Spirits, etc. Fed them tea, bathed, and put to bed, watched The Paradise, Downton & bed.

• Lie in; frantic packing to go visit Anne, dropped babes in Ipswich at the Museum, visited Bruce in hospital; picked them up again, on to Anne's, dinner, read a lot, lazed around, bed early having adjusted clocks.

• Up early, back into the routine; mail chew, call with Andras. Lunch, sync. with Kendy. Tried to upgrade to GNOME 3.10 (ie. openSUSE 13.1 RC1) - filed a non-booting nasty. Plugged away at paperwork until late.

• Up late; mail chew - lots to catch up on - ESC call; caught up with the little babes. Wonderful to see all of the LibreOffice Conference slides on-line from Milan - thanks to Stefan Weigel and Florian.
• Great to see Jonathan's LWN write-up of LibreOffice too, got around to up-loading my slides in response (with the credits). Worked late.

• Up early; breakfast, customer call, sync. with Roi, caught up with Dirk & Martyn at the venue, back for a partner call. Packed, train home: should have booked the ticked the day before - bother. Built ESC stats on the train, and scripted more of that process to save time. Train delayed, home very late.

• Up early; more slide hackery; gave a talk about LibreOffice on Linux - caught up with a number of interesting people with questions at the end. Slides (as hybrid PDF)
• Out for lunch with a set of happy LibreOffice users from an oil company. Back to wander the show meeting old friends variously, out to a conference dinner, and on to a Big Lebowski themed bar for some late night talkery. Back late, wrote LXF column until early, sleep.

• Slept on the plane via LHR a little, onto Edinburgh; bus into town, caught up with the Collabora folks and a number of old hands at the Collabora sponsored food and drinks bash. Managed to get a hotel room sorted out with Guy's help. Out for a drink with the lads; back to work on slides until late.

• Up; chatted with Cedric, checked out, bus to building 40, enjoyed a number of talks. Lunch, off to the airport with a number of other interesting chaps: eg. open-source micro finance at mifos.

• Up unfeasibly early, caught up with Cedric & hacked together in the early hours enjoying the hearty snoring from next-door. Enjoyed breakfast, the opening talks, the hand-shaking event: some rather interesting people about. Lunch. Mary kindly took me for a fruitless attempt to 1225 to find my phone. Eventually got in touch with Milind who very kindly brought it back. Group photo, back to Wild Palms, a fine meal & lovely evening getting to know lots of interesting people.

• Up rather early - jet lag; into the Google offices for a pleasant breakfast with Chris; met lots of great people at the office - including Junio, who pointed out that encouraging Sparkleshare to have some git filters that unzip & re-zip ODF/OOXML files as they go into and out of git might have some good impact on git compression. Read the page on git attributes which seems like it'd be good for this. Filed an Easy Hack to add a 'ooffice --cat [foo.doc]' to make this prettier - another great way to get involved with LibreOffice hacking.
• Mail chew, caught up with Bradley, met up with Cat, lunch. Amused by the write-up of Google's logging[sic] infrastructure in the restroom. Picked up by Milind, and out for a most stimulating coffee & chat, kindly dropped back at Wild Palms - somehow incompetently loosing my phone between Google & here - drat.
• Interested to read this rant about Word.

• Up too early, coach to Heathrow, apart from there being sockets but no power a reasonable ride. Plugged away at contracts & paperwork. Read the IPCC report into the apparently dishonest behaviour of the Police harassing a man who was (and incredibly seemingly still is) a supporter of the police. To quote one officer: if we have got bad apples in our barrel surely we should be doing something about that. - Amen to that.
• Met up with Bradley at the BART, train to Palo Alto, picked up by Jeremy & Sam, home to meet Monika - kindly hosting us; pizza, and a multi-media tour & some interesting tips; bed.

• Up early; music practise with the babes. Reviewed Andras' nice work on OTRS with him, call with Kismat, Markus and review of Matus' work. Partner call, sync. with Kendy, Kohei. Worked late.

• A round of partner calls, sync with Kendy, Markus, Kohei, Tor, Tsahi, Ptyl etc. Lots of good work going on. Built ESC agenda. Worked late.

• Breakfast; helped Anne with various pieces that needed doing around the house & garden. Mail chew, out to Snape Maltings for lunch, and visited Bruce in Ipswich. Home, team meeting, worked late.

• Up earlyish; spoke on Judges on Jephthah's daugther: a living (unburned) sacrifice. Back for lunch, slept somewhat in the afternoon. Drove to Anne's - dinner, experienced the soap-opera in costume that is Downton Abbey from the first time; bed.

• Up late, worked on Judges 10/11 for a while. David over for lunch, out for a walk through some woodland and over the A14, back for tea, more work on sermon, bed.

• Up early, off to another local school: the Samuel Ward Academy - rather a well run outfit it seems, glad the head is taking over the Newmarket Upper School, v. positive albeit too late for H.
• Lunch, to work - sync. with Matus, hacked on a number of parsing speedups with him, nice to do some hacking on a Friday; also dug into some performance silly around document indexing in Windows Explorer.
• Talked with Anne, bed.

• Sync. with Rob, mail chew, Lunch, ESC call, some stats building, dunged out various obsolete git branches. More bits and pieces left & right.

• Up early; mail chew, sync with Jagan, then Florian, some code review, Lunch. Partner call, sync with Tsahi. Caught up with Matus, and Laurent.
• Out to St Bede's open-day in Cambridge. Interesting. Up-loaded my collaborative editing slides (finally) from Milan.

• Up early, practises, mail chew, poked builds variously. Chewed through some code reading around better UNO component instantiation mechanisms. Interesting Bible study with Arun in the evening.

• Up early, music practise with the babes, started on the incoming mail slew; call with Roi, notes, lunch, team meeting. Call with Matus, sync with Tsahi.

• Up lateish, off to NCC, ran the kids group; home, quick lunch, out to Ipswitch to visit Bruce, really good to see him, seemingly better. Drove back late, roast dinner, bed early.

• Up lateish; slugging, Sue arrived & took J. to see Bruce, set about some joinery for H's new room, lowered her bed, removed tons of cruft from the room. Lunch. Out onto the race-course on bikes with Sophie - sadly a race day.
• Back, enjoyed a nice cup of tea with Sue & Russell, and home - J. back, played with babes, dinner; watched the first LOTR movie with M. for the 1st time.

• Up lateish; mail chew, train to Cambridge, sync. with Heidi, Rob & co. Poked at threading pieces. Got some linked-in-alike malware, and realised I click on far too many E-mails from them without thinking.
• Out for lunch with Dick Porter, which was interesting, turns out he works next door to Collabora. Back, chewed through contract pieces; out for David's 35th birthday bash in the evening, fun.

• Up chewed mail, Steve Bell kindly pointed me at a rather encouraging write-up of a first contribution. Poked at travel variously. Out to visit Botisham Village College, one of the best Science displays I've seen - inflating pigs lungs with a pump: interestng. Up late doing project estimation.

• Up early; mail chew; ESC bug stat creation, more mail. Lunch. More mail, call with Markus. Dinner, skimmed the Southern Islands acceleration pieces; interesting.
• Dinner, poked at some horrible multi-threaded intersection of remote UNO, multi-threaded VCL, the horrific 'toolkit' wrapper, as well as atk, SPI and the GDK_THREADS / Solar mutex - with mst - what fun. Bed late.

• Up early; partner calls, mail chew, call with Philippe, poked at salesforce, reviewed financial paperwork with Tracie's expert help. Lydia over for dinner, back to wor; sync. with Tsahi, bed late.

• Up; mail chew, sync. with Kendy. Working through partner mail & backlog, meeting setup bits. Back-ported calc fix to 4.0.x, tried to wade through horrific 'make check' intermittency. Lunch. More mail chew, admin bits.

• Up rather early, to the Central Station for a bus to Bergarno, slept, flight home, slept, read the Economist, train from Stansted to Newmarket. Lovely to see the set of small girls again, rested variously, read stories, put babes to bed, etc. Bed early.

• Up lateish, found some breakfast & Italian cheese for the family. Back for a Collabora team meeting; lots of rambling, questions, fun, task updates, discussion of various bits of hardware etc.: a great team.
• Late lunch, at a nearby pizza place; back to sit in the courtyard until late, planning, sleeping etc. Norbert over, and out in the evening together for a final meal.

• Up early; last day of the conference - enjoyed the CloudOn talks slides following soon I hope. Gave a talk on the latest thinking on / design for collaborative editing; thrilled by the progress Norbert made wrt. draining the GraphicObject swamp. Last-minute 4.1.2 regression caught by Markus, encouraging to see the number of people testing pre-release builds there; pushed a fix (my fault).
• Had a fine celebration of three years of TDF, and thirty years of the GNU Project / FSF - before the final sessions: fine Italian wine, and individual cakes to celebrate. Great participation in quizzing the board at the end as well; a fantastic job done by Italo and the Italian team getting things organised.
• Out for a fine meal with the CloudOn guys, really good to get to know them better. Back; at the hotel bar until late.

• Up early; on to Kendy's talk, gave mine on LibreOffice code overview. Encouragingly some of my slides are/were wrong already due to various code improvements. Enjoyed lots of talks, conversations with some fantastic guys around, signed up a brace of new members who had done a load of work but not clicked the buttons (yet). Encouragingly large group-photo (pixels to follow).
• Reviewed & approved my successful GSOC students around the Android Remote and VLC, nice work.
• Out to the Google hack-fest in the evening, great to have their support. Lots of interesting characters, went through the next round of crazy ideas around the calc core with Kohei and Markus. Back to the hotel, up late chewing things over.

• Up early, off to the conference; meal on the way - enjoyed the initial talks; gave a talk on the wider ecosystem, getting more $ and converting it into more Free Software.
• Synched with Jeremy, helped get Jay's talk setup, and enjoyed a fine taste of what CloudOn is up to. Great to see their commitment to supporting LibreOffice. Fine talk from Miklos on the state of our filters. Out for a intense & interesting CloudOn meeting, back for the GSOC update talk - presenting Minh, Andrzej & Artur's great work on their behalf.
• Wandered off to the CloudOn hack-fest in the evening; had a lovely meal with Jeremy, good to catch up. Back to the hack-fest and caught up with innumerable great guys, good to see lots of people working away in the same room. Back to bed late, worked with Kendy & Markus for a while.

• Ridiculous rising hour, car to Stansted, RyanAir to Milan, caught up with Simon Phipps & met his son Tim at the Central station, off to meet up with the lads at Hotel Mec. On to meet up with the lads at the venue.
• A nearly endless two hour board meeting; a rather more interesting ESC meeting, out to a nearby bar, and on to Italo's house for pasta & meat.
• Taxi back with the guys, sync. with kendy, contract review; quick call with Raghu. Up until 2:30 writing slides, sent out ESC minutes etc.

• Up early, mail check, breakfast, build bits; off into Cambridge. Really pleased to see Miklos' blog about his Select All fix, always nice to see us closing a 10 year old bug.
• Checked out bags / swag, poked at some marketing collateral, and had a partner call. Lunch with David, back for a sync. with Rob. Home by train. Church / child protection refresher course in the evening.

• Up late; off to NCC, Tony spoke, home for a fine roast lunch with Jamie, good to get to know him, wonderful to hear what Jesus has done in his life.
• Played cards, watched a movie, slugged variously; babes to bed early, read long stories; sleep.

• Up early. J, off to visit Bruce in the HDU in Ipswich with Anne; set about cleaning the house in her absence, parallel processing of three sets of homework, a week+ of washing sorting and more.
• Eventually got things unwound, and set about extending my desk to make a private bedroom for H. in the attic. The babes attempted the problem geometrically, and got an answer 5mm out (of 1650mm) before circular sawing commenced; eventually got it setup, started shifting clutter & books around the place to make space.
• J, returned late, pizza dinner, read stories, remembered an un-written LXF column, so set too at that.

• Up early; Violin practise with N. helping with B-major scales. Mail chew. Really encouraged by two announcements in the last days, first: Studio Storti is joining TDF's Advisory Board. This is great news, I'm looking forward to the postive impact their business experience of selling Free Software and services can bring to LibreOffice in Italy.
• Separately - it was also great to see the latest release of the popular VALO CD with LibreOffice 4.1.1 on the CD - the Best of FOSS for Windows.
• Poked Karen. J. kindly made my study beautiful & clean. Started on some detailed estimation task, crawled through profiles, task breakdowns & language polishing. Call with Raghu.

• Up; mail chew, dug through documents; more mail; timecode setup. Fun, chased pieces for the conference. One of the fun pieces about working and collaborating on tons of documents, is that I finally start to use not only calc (for crunching stats) but writer too, and the interoperability code, and LibreOffice is encouragingly good; of course a few minor issues, but great stuff.
• Ran some calc import profiles. Team meeting, ESC call.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, back to work until late.

• Up early; mail chew; crunched some stats, shuffled paperwork, call with Andrew. Lunch, poke into why liborcus is not building - turns out my path /opt/lo/... looks too much like an MSVC /o compiler option; urgh - chased it at length export V=1 is your friend it seems.
• Fantastic to announce that CloudOn has joined the LibreOffice advisory board - a hearty welcome to them, contributing so positively to the LibreOffice ecosystem.
• Built some developer and other stats for others at the looming conference. Loved to see Eben's demo of Wayland and LibreOffice - though sadly the video misses some of the live action.

• Up, mail chew; poked at writer auto-styles briefly; dug at contract pieces. Lunch, built ESC agenda, reviewed Matus' nice linkoo killer patch.
• Suffered WebEx, what an appalling experience; the access code presented was not the access code - but instead the (unusually different) attendee ID was.
• Lydia over for dinner, Vlad over for bible study in the evening. Got back to work until late.

• Early to rise, packed babes off to school; mail chew, GSOC mentoring, code review & cleanup. Artur's updated Android remote looks and feels much better.
• Planned and booked travel to Mountain View for the Mentor Summit for October, with a return to LinuxConEurope in Edinburgh, fun - I wonder whom I should meet with in the Valley.
• Dinner, partner/customer calls in the evening.

• Up late; off to NCC, Dave & Cathy renewing their vows, lots of thankfulness for their lives & ministry, fun. Back for lunch with Mike - good to catch up & relax together. Babes watched Mr Bean, tea, put them to bed early.

• Up late; peeled apples, J. off to see Bruce in hospital in Ipswich, played cards with the babes, slugged, read stories, remembered to remove apples from the stove (an hour too late); lunch, more playing with babes - multiplayer dunelegacy (once again crippled by network disconnection). J. home, bathed everyone, tea, dressed up for Dave & Cathy Staff's joint 40'th wedding anniversary, 90th Birthday party (for Agnes), and 60th for Dave. A lovely night had by all.

• Up early; lots of admin, misc. calls, paperwork & legalese wading. Dinner, more of the same.

• Up early, customer call, minutes & actions, mail chew, team meeting, ESC call.
• Thrilled to notice the great instdir feature work from Matus, Michael Stahl, and lots of others finally land in master; at last - no need to do a 'make dev-install' to get an installed tree that can be run for smoketests, and developers; lovely. Hopefully another huge nail in the coffin of the solver/, and other potentially big simplifications of scp2/. Lovely, it also removes the need for 'linkoo' finally.
• Sync. with Philippe, read stories for babes; Emily baby sat while J. and I went out for a bit.

• Up in the night, read CPU microarchitectural details to get back to sleep, failed: they're quite interesting, sleep; up early mail chew. Admin, calls with team members - all up to great things; more paperwork, interesting call with Paolo, met Shawn. Very early dinner, call with Ptyl around VCL / writer. Out to collect M. from Beavers (with her new swimming badge), put her to bed, back to work - more paperwork.

• Up early; mail chew, worked on this & that, built the ESC bug stats and agenda; a slew of other detail; a bit of long overdue GSOC mentoring as well. Reviewed and merged a patch or two - some coding, prodding at one of my old unit tests from before they were fashionable; fun.

• Up early, prayed, breakfast, work: mail chew; started to make an impact on the backlog. Poked at some estimation / loose ends, pulled together pieces around a project, lots of paperwork to sign / scan / send, all of it encouraging. Pushed some code - if only a trivial fix; chewed through internal process action items. Chat with Kendy, call with Kohei.
• Loved this news item: Pole wakes up from 19-year coma. Bed late.

• Up earlyish, breakfast, read the Economist a bit; out to NCC, helped J. with the kids work downstairs - encouragingly lots of children around. Back with Sam and Leslie for lunch with Emily too; slugged much of the afternoon; Colin over for a bit as well. Dinner, long stories for babes, bed early.

• Up lateish; breakfast, off to Holkham beach, enjoyed the sand, dammed little mini rivers flowing back into the sea; lunch. N. & M. went into the sea, E. asked how deep the 'deep end' was - (~12k feet on average at least).
• Competitive wind-break construction out of sand; by carefully adjusting the moisture content - based on the depth of extraction, we managed rather well. Wandered back for some tree-climbing on the way back. Tea, packed everyone off to bed.

• Up early, mail chew, call with some great Indians, chat with Cor. mail thrash; lunch with Miriam, Ben and May - lovely to see them. On the way to Vietnam, they're expected to meet with old friends in Hong Kong, related to Jackie Pullinger's ministry there. Ben bracing for: You so fat ! You so white ! You so teeth like rabbit ! and other local compliments.
• Back to the cliff of small tasks involved with setup & customers - fun. Sync. with Markus, back after a fun trip.
• Continued migrating individual mailing lists across to new mail address too - makes you realise what a volume of infrastructure: lists, bugzilla, gerrit, etc. etc. is actively used. Dinner.
• Read lots of babes stories, J. out counselling, got an untangled, and a SOW sorted out too.

• Up rather early, mail chew, still trying to get through all the backed up mail, much of it from people I love from SUSE. ESC agenda creation, call with SUSE, team meeting, ESC call, sales-force / process training with Guy. Partner call.

• Up very early; mail chew - a lovely slew of congratulation messages and well wishers from inside and outside SUSE, and some business opportunities too: lovely. An early train to London (caught up with Arun also on the same train).
• Hacked slides on the way, arrived at Campus Party Europe, caught up with Tim Janik, presented. Enjoyed the next talk, back to the speakers' room for some laptop power, internet etc. chewed mail, met Dominic Conner and chewed over lots of interesting spreadsheet insights from the financial industry.
• Home via Cambridge, the bliss of not draining the battery and 3G connection on the station platform at the connection, but dropping into the beautiful Collabora office for power, fast network etc. is wonderful. Caught up with Guy quickly, home, bed late.

• Up early; interested to notice that it's either April the 1st or Microsoft finally bought Nokia: that should re-configure the competitive landscape in interesting ways. Wrote up the Collabora news, while fielding questions, and congratulations variously. Worked on Advisory Board slides at some length.
• Vlad around in the evening to chat & do some Bible study together - fun.

Today we announced the reason why my blog has been more than normally boring for some weeks: the core of the SUSE LibreOffice team is finding a new home inside Collabora (based in nearby Cambridge UK) and providing support for LibreOffice. That's a change that brings huge opportunities - taking LibreOffice to one billion+ Office / Productivity users, more aggressive pricing, and over time, growing the community of those paid to work on and around LibreOffice. It should also make it easier to execute efficiently on the many smaller opportunities in the marketplace.

Good Timing

Now is a great time for this to happen - we've got LibreOffice 4.1 released, and a great minor point release in 4.1.1 out, so the release schedule is calming down. LibreOffice as a product is increasingly excellent in both features and quality, with an impressive set of large deployments and migrations around it. It is a great time too from a Document Foundation (TDF) perspective - with Christian Lohmaier working full-time for TDF, and Florian Effenberger's help all of the core release engineering, infrastructure work and administration around TDF is handled in-house. I fully expect this to have exactly zero impact on LibreOffice's time based release schedule.

SUSE

So - as you can see, I'm excited about this move and all the possibilities, but what about a perspective on SUSE (their announce).

It seems to me that the ability to say 'no' to profitable but peripheral business in order to strategically focus the company is a really important management task. In the final analysis I'm convinced that this is the right business decision for SUSE. It will allow Collabora's Productivity division to focus exclusively on driving LibreOffice into Windows, Mac and Consulting markets that are peripheral to SUSE. It will also retain the core of the existing skill base for the benefit of SUSE's customers, and the wider LibreOffice community, of which openSUSE is an important part.

Over the last weeks, I've been deeply impressed by a unique experience of the level of integrity and concern for all stakeholders including employees and the wider Free Software community that SUSE's management have shown. There is always a sadness to moving on after so many years of service with many friends at SUSE, but it's nice to know that my friends are in good hands.

Working at SUSE and with openSUSE for the last decade plus has been a source of great pleasure and satisfaction, for me at least, and I thank all those I've worked with for their patience, tolerance and kindness. One of the one of the great joys of my role has been getting to know, and working with a broad spectrum of talented individuals across the company and the software stack from the base-system through to the applications. SUSE really has exceptional people across the board, it is sad in a sense to leave them. The good news is that, you can join them: SUSE is hiring and there are open slots, checkout SUSE careers to become part of the ongoing story.

Collabora & TDF

What else can I say ? Collabora's Productivity division is mid-way through day two. Much remains to be decided and done, but it is an exciting road ahead. I'm looking forward to working hard to make doing business with Collabora Productivity around LibreOffice something that is easy to initiate, and beautiful to experience.

The Document Foundation, continues un-disturbed by this, its diversity and stability will become clearer - SUSE will continue to be an Advisory Board member alongside Collabora - a net gain of a seat. Collabora joins a long line of recent additions there, with more in the pipeline. Collabora will also be sponsoring the LibreOffice conference next month in Milan - I look forward to seeing you there.

• Up early, first day at Collabora, mail chew, a fine induction process with Heidi, dug through customer contract setup processes, PR pieces etc. at some length, lots of new things to learn and people to get to know. Drove into Cambridge to meet up with Guy, salesforce / process introduction. Great to see the amount of Free Software used internally at Collabora, up late, ordered in Pizza, drove home to bed late.

• Up late; off to NCC for a summary of a summer camp from Tony. Good to catch up with so many people, back for lunch. Read stories to babes, slugged variously, etc.

• Up late, bit of mail chew; cleaned the house - mended the broken cupboard next to the cooker: glue & screw. Into town to get some essentials, babes set too making sand castles for a competition at Cheryl's chocolate shop. Emily back to play with the babes. David over in the evening, great to catch up with him.

• A day filled with E-mail and calls. Signed up for the Google Mentor's summit.

• Up, breakfast - Miriam's birthday - innumerable presents (somehow). Bid 'bye to Ahmad at the station. Removed the 719 'texlive*' packages clogging up my disk (they have an alarming habit of coming back somehow). Wrestled some annoying network management issue, perhaps a partial update. Lots of work on E-mail, up rather late.

• Into Cambridge for the day; met up with Collabora for various meetings, bank account setup etc. Ahmad from KACST popped over in the evening. Ahmad back to stay with us - interesting chap.

• Up early; mail chew, call or two, poked at bugzilla, built ESC stats. Lydia over in the evening, babes seem to have got into the habit of ganging up on their Father to try to get ice-cubes into his clothing - scary.

• Up early; mail chew; submitted talks for the LibreOffice Conference, it should be good.
• Discovered that after a week of trying, then turning it off, that when I have an alt-tab that does what I expect, I sometimes still use (and appreciate) alt-backtick as something useful; interesting.

• Sleep; off to NCC - lovely to catch up with everyone after a few weeks away - it's a shame to miss the wider church family. Back for lunch. Snoozed much of the afternoon & read the Economist, bed early.

• Up early, mail chew for a bit; set out to Auntie Nicki's - out for a fine walk to a sheltered beauty-spot for lunch. Enjoyed the walk and an ice-cream, finally drove home - unpacked minimally, bed - tired.

• Up in the night; mail chew, pleased to see Julien's work on cppcheck

• Mail chew; slogged away at a rather nasty calc grouping issue; finally came up with a prototype patch. Team meeting, ESC call + minutes. Encouraging to see the Valencia LibreOffice migration. Out with J. for the evening.

• Up early; mail chew; fixed final encoding pieces, cherry-picked Minh's GSOC / VLC work to master, cleaned up a number of issues and provided some feedback on next steps. Lunch. Wrote a LXF column; had a sales / support call.
• Booked my (cheap) flight for the LibreOffice Conference. Finally abandoned trying to get used to GNOME-Shell's alt-tab / alt-back-tick thing; over a week of trying to use it and I still can't get used to the cognitive / muscle-memory shock. Clearly my mind is not as malleable as some other's.

• Up early; mail chew; built ESC bug stats / agenda. Mail, calls, etc. Chased down a calc undo bug, poked at another, fixed another batch of encoding / build problems on Windows & enjoyed using the gerrit build-bot magic.

• Up rather early; started a week of mail chew - while it was fetching skimmed through the ~600 commits in a week, lots of nice work going on. Sync. with Kendy, , triaged mail, and started working through it backwards.
• Pleased to see Fridrich's nice write-up on Writing LibreOffice import/export filters.
• Wondered why gnome-shell's print-screen magic doesn't give a notification about where the screenshot is - apparently ~/Pictures but a pain to google for that. Poked at bug reports variously.

• Up early, examined external cracking with Ilona - presumed to be superficial rendering shrinkage bid 'bye to R & I, out for a walk in the nearby park with T & B, boosted various little girls up trees, wandered about variously; got stuck into some painting with the babes; roast lunch, uncle John over.
• Out to St Michael le Belfry in York; nice to see Tim & Suzie's church. Back for a late tea, put babes to bed.

• Up earlyish, packed the house, off to my parents' in Knaesborough. Great to see Robert & Ilona + Becky. Unpacked, had lunch, Thomas arrived, great to see them all. Much talking & catching up until late - lovely.

• Up earlyish; packed lunch, off to Buttermere to climb Red Pike. Beautiful day, climb up was lovely - though streams swollen by yesterday's rain. Incredibly stoical & happy littlest babes, lunch by a tarn below the summit. Managed the scree at the top somehow - 755m above sea level; lovely views. Return by different meandering / lost paths that seemed indistinguishable from streams at various places. Eventually got back to the car in the rain - seven hours of walking; home for dinner, bed early.

• Late breakfast, rain scheduled for all day; into Keswick for some shopping, and to enjoy the puzzle museum - lots of interesting 3D optical illusions, holograms, etc. dead good. Packed lunch by Derwent Water, home, movie, slugging.

• Up later, breakfast, Decided to attempt a larger hill today - Causey Pike. Babes struggled to the top well, ate most of our lunch there; beautiful weather and views. Set off down again, enthusiastically enlarging and repairing various cairns on the way. Home, J. out to shop & get Fish & Chips, tried to get ad-hoc networking to work with dunelegacy with rather mixed results. Dinner, worked at a fiendish jigsaw puzzle, , bed.

• Breakfast, packed lunch; set off for a walk from our cottage in Braithwaite to the top of Barrow, behind - lovely views, lunch at the top. Babes starting to recognise the neighbouring hills they've also climbed. Back to play on a rope swing, and alter the course of a nearby stream by damming. Home for tea and The Sound of Music.

• Breakfast, and out to a Forestry Commission site nearby (apparently walking in forests is catching), enjoyed the play equipment too, seems there is some Osprey (the real thing) nesting nearby with some CCTV of it's nest to match. Into Kendal to shop, finally got a decentish compass. Back, for a call, dinner, finished North & South; bed.

• Up earlyish, off to church in Keswick, pleasant, albeit application-lite sermon on faith. Coffee & biscuits afterwards. Set out up Cats Bell with the babes, lots of scrambling up rocks: "Every step goes higher" according to E. picnic lunch near the top, eventually got down again, and wandered around the lake and back to the car with some very tired girls. Home for a movie, spaghetti & bed.

• Lazed in, quick burst of mail; off with the family to a lovely museum at Barnard's Castle, enjoyed the mechanical swan, and the playground outside. On into the Lake District, past Keswick to Braithwaite - where we're staying. Stocked up with food, pizza dinner, watched movie, bed.

• Up early; mail bits, prep for vacation. Drove north to Knaesborough for the afternoon, worked in the evening then watched North & South.

• Up early; mail chew, misc. calls; Team meeting, ESC, Vojtech staff.

• Up early, mail chew, feeling increasingly ropey digestion-wise; one-to-one with Vojtech, sync. with Kendy; more mail. AMD call. Bible study with David & Arun in the evening.

• Mail chew; built ESC bug stats & automated that some more. Lunch, lovely to see the family again; Emily over. Fell victim to a well-known glib / dconf bug. It rather reminds me of a similarish ccache bug, created a workaround patch for that one at least.
• Reluctantly switched to gnome-shell, having had my machine mangled; after installing the workspace grid extension, and the 'Impatience' extension (to try to turn off every 3D transitions - though sadly some still persist), and discovering that font settings, and switch caps-and-control are hidden in the (indispensable) gnome-tweak-tool tool, life is approaching normality again.
• Registered to speak at LinuxConEurope, interesting call with Lionel about base. Cleaned up some XFillBitmapItem mess around the place and continued some mechanical fixing.
• David over to stay while house hunting; great to have him around.

• Up early, breakfast, off to the RedHat Office for the GNOME Advisory Board meeting - some extremely positive things going on in GNOME-land it seems, along with a few challenges. Impressed by the results and reach of the Womens Outreach Programme amongst other things.
• To the airport, met up with the Intel crew on the same (delayed) flight, spent some time on the flight mechanically re-factoring horrible GraphicObject lifecycle mess in LibreOffice. Ran out of battery abruptly, and the machine powered off - with a new battery I discovered my dconf file was full of zeros & the desktop non-functioning: urgh ! surely we fsync ? I thought ext4 did something right here ?
• Josh kindly gave me a lift to Cambridge on his way home; somehow caught up with my original coach there; bed v. late.

• Up, just caught breakfast, tempted by this Bruno church but too late; back to bed; sermon from Gordon Hugenberger on the (horrifying story) of Judges 19, challenging & encouraging.

• Up earlyish, breakfast, mail chew, to the conference; caught up with Lionel & others, misc. talks, caught up with Christian. Went to a few talks, encouraged by a rather good talk on keeping bugzilla clean, GNOME has ~45k open bugs the majority un-confirmed; it's somewhat encouraging to have a more tractable ~5k open with ~1k unconfirmed vs. LibreOffice - then again, GNOME has a longer history and ~500k bugs total.
• Enjoyed the reprap, and flying machine demos, interesting lightning talks: Terms of Service Didn't Read sounds awesome: "Itunes TOS are longer than Macbeth". Out to a fine evening food & beer event, good to catch up with so many people, teams etc. Up late with the LibreOffice guys.

• Up early; mail catchup, call; out for lunch with Alberto & the RedHat LibreOffice team - fantastic to meet dtardon in person properly. On to a series of interesting talks. Caught up with Kay & JRB, out to dinner variously. Back to chew mail - pleased to see the impact our generous donors have on libreoffice QA written up by Bjoern, and to have the great work those guys do triaging bugs highlighted !

• Up early, trams nearby - somehow it got hot. Slogged away at slides for a long time; eventually set off to the venue evenutally found it.
• Gave a talk on the latest bits in LibreOffice.
• Caught up with Srini and M.Barnes - demo'd a couple of funky Evolution issues. Met up with Federico, Scott, hpj etc. and off to a GUADEC party; good to catch up with lots of people.

• Up early, mail chew, dunged out an incredible amount of cruft from my laptop bag, packed variously; coach to Luton, met up with a number of Intel & RedHat guys - cunningly sharing the same flight & off to Bruno & GUADEC. Checked in somehow, poked at mail, out late for an ad-hoc dinner & beer with Caolan & the other lads; bed late.

• Up early, mail chew, up-loaded a profile run overnight for Kohei. Set off for home, built ESC bug stats in the car, more mail bits, poked at a somewhat amazing Java performance issue in openSUSE Factory; 13 seconds to parse /proc/self/maps - one char at a time it seems; still I guess using strace -ttt to profile such things does horribly distort the timings - hard to see what the real problem is on that basis.
• Poked at GSOC mid-term evaluations. Dug at GUADEC slides / preparation.

• Up early, mail chew. Pleased to see Karl Fogel have success building LibreOffice - and looking forward to Producing Open Source Software v2.
• Irritatingly discovered (mid-way through writing a rare web-E-mail at E-mail a prisoner) that the wonder ~/.xmodmap goodness to kill the appalling Lenovo 'loose your e-mail' buttons next to the arrow keys doesn't work. I could swear GNOME used to have a beautiful keyboard layout options page somewhere, that seems to have vanished. Seems I need to run:

  xmodmap -e "keycode 166="
  xmodmap -e "keycode 167="

  in my .xsessionrc.
• Mail chew, admin; poked at liblibreoffice a little.

• Up early, off to Holy Trinity Norwich a rather lovely building, good expository preach on the Matthew's account of the cross - weak on application. Friendly people, good kids work. Rushed off to the nearby Dinosaur Park. Arrived, picnic with Sue & Clive etc. much enjoyment of to-scale dinosaur models, clambering & playing on all manner of fine playgrounds, soft-play etc. Petting farm, sheepdog demonstrations etc. good fun.

• Up earlyish; breakfast, got stuck into "four days in June" on the battle of Waterloo (again), horribly gripping. Out into town to visit a sweet shop and cafe with the families; home for lunch, out strawberry / raspberry picking, back, and off to the shell / beach with the babes. Slightly perturbed to not find N. on the beach, only to discover her swimming in the sea; fun. Back for tea, put babes to bed, dinner, bed early.

• Up very early, mail chew, some hackery before breakfast. Merged feature/vlc to master, test builds etc. seems non-invasive if not enabled. Poked at some admin.
• Recently I gave some structural, code overview training to a partner wanting to get more involved with LibreOffice development. Hopefully this stuff is generally useful for people, first a pretty overview of non-leaf modules: which clutters away the cruft and makes things look reasonably tractable. I also produced some slides to talk these through on code structure: (hybrid PDF) and also on low-level types: (hybrid PDF) Hopefully they're generally useful; chunk #3 is not yet written.
• So much more productive on a cooler day somehow; hmm. Got openVPN setup without much problem; encouraging. Poked at Rodolfo's nice images.zip link file optimisation: to avoid duplicating icons for different UNO commands.
• Poked at liblibreoffice a little - got document load / save working nicely; pondered purely virtual ways to expose UNO. Wondered if Godwin's law applies to North Korean analogies too.

• Up early, to work, mail chew, bug fiddling. Set off to Aldeburgh, J. driving, made an OLE embedding test document on the way. Arrived, more mail chew & admin.
• Great to see the LibreOffice 4.1 release arrive - another milestone release. I wrote up a lot about the work you can't easily see in 4.1 - but of course, by now Marc (in particular) has done a great job of making the features more visible here. It's encouraging to see people working on Base to improve that, particularly with the Firebird database support well underway for 4.2 (thanks to Andrzej & GSOC). Some brave souls (mostly Cor) even started to put together a set of Distinctive LibreOffice Features but it's very far from a complete list as of now; particularly in the area of our many interoperability improvements which are very seldom individually screenshotted: something to improve.
• Team meeting, ESC call, Vojtech's staff. Great to see Artur's work on the new Android Impress Remote in the wiki, merged his work to master so it should show up in the tinderbox dev-builds shortly, tinderboxes permitting.
• Birthday dinner for Bruce in the evening with Anne, Sue & Clive, J. and so on.

• To work, children on holiday finally. Mail chew, pleased to see Bjoern's nice blog about libreoffice bug fixes in our stable series - great to see the goodness stacking up for later releases. Built the ESC bug stats / initial agenda. Out for lunch with Colin.
• Call with AMD / MCW. Nice to see Miklos' screenshots of some of his interop work, so much similar work never gets a screenshot, which is a shame. TDF Board call.
• Dinner, put babes to bed, back to chew mail, poke at font bits some more and did a few web bits.

• Up early, mail chew, patch review, wrote Linux Format Column, Tim & Susie Eves over from SIL - talked graphite2, cursors, font rendering and more - great to catch up with them. Dave over for Bible Study in the evening.

• Up early, mail chew. Poked at a few rather annoying release critical bugs for 4.1.0, played with Caolan's fix for impress a bit. Dug away with Lubos at an interesting issue together.

• Up early; J's birthday, made her breakfast in bed, picked up by Lydia to practise at NCC / play in the band - Church - great to have Miriam and Ben speaking about their forthcoming mission. Home to pack up a picnic lunch, off with Dave & Emily up the heath with the family. A fine birthday picnic in the heat; wandered a little in the woods. Back to Dave & Emily's for some cookies & a crossword construction game. Home. Babes to bed, read lots of stories - finished The Silver Sword with N. Set to work finishing H's birthday present: a netball hoop: a certain amount of bashing, riveting of steel - the hoop (made of some spare bits of wooden window blind wet, steamed, formed & glued). Got it all together somehow & affixed to the trampoline. Gordon sermon on the Micah of Judges, sleep.

• Up, set about preparing for Miriam's party - lots of house tidying etc. Friends started to arrive, played games in the garden: balancing plastic food on plates in teams while moving across a shark-infested patch of lawn standing on 'dots' etc. Good fun. Fine party lunch. Brief period of relaxing, played a game with Naomi.
• Hannah's party friends started arriving, more work to setup their party, a round of scientific experiments, no injuries: good. Watched 'Terebinthia' with the babes - rather crushed by it myself; but kids apparently liked it. Tidied up, bed, somewhat exhausted.

• Up early; took some time to actually read the LibreOffice planet - thrilled to see the great work Siqi is doing on the iOS impress remote, and to see Andrzej's Firebird integration land in master: hopefully in 4.2 we'll finally have a fast, internal database, meanwhile Jean blogs about the Documentation Team's great work producing Base + Math books; encouraging.
• Brief power cut, no doubt enough to mess up virtual machines. Amused by the facts behind: "join the army, be the best"
• A kind Nicolas Christener pointed out that it's easy to disable the ultra-dumb 'loose your browser data' buttons on the keyboard on a thinkpad (carefully placed next to the arrow keys) with this in your ~/.xmodmap:

  keycode 166=
  keycode 167=

  .
• Partner call, lunch. Spent a while digging at fonts, fixed up the slideshow screen settings dialogs a bit. Sync. with Artur, spent a while poking at the VLC backend for Minh.

• Up; mail chew, unwound conference plans variously, realised I needed to get GUADEC booked ASAP; luckily direct flights from LTN to Bruno, nice. Submitted LinuxConEurope paper too.

• Up; poked mail, patch review, poked at bugs. Partner call. Lunch, AMD call, board call.

• Up early, tested out new training material at length with some willing helpers; interesting. Great to get Miklos' take on writer too. Dave & Arun over for Bible study and fellowship in the evening: fun.

• Mail chew, worked away at building structural overview documentation for getting into coding on LibreOffice; built a ton of slideware. More mail / admin, calls.

• Up lateish; off to NCC, home for lunch with Nathan, Julie & their two lovely daughters. Played in the garden and chatted for a good while; fun. Slugging variously, bed. Excellent sermon on Samson from Park Street in Gordon Hugenberger's Judges series.

• Up lateish; slugged a little, off to Noughton Park made rope swings, climbed trees, picnic lunch, ran around with the babes in the sun, lots of fun. Home in the afternoon.

• Up early, mail chew; poked at patches; sync. with Jagan, Kohei, misc. calls. Fixed some tinderbox breakage. N's friend Katy over for a sleepover.

• Mail chew, patch review, poked at OpenCL pieces, sync. with Kismat, unwound an unpleasant behavioural change in patch 2.7 under cygwin / windows around line-endings (wow I was suffering patch + line-ending issues in 1996 under similar circumstances - can it really still be a mess ?).
• Dinner, admin, patch review, further 'patch' workaround with Robert; cleaned up action items while J. met with Lydia and Janice.

• Up early; patch review in gerrit, sync. with pepp on main-loop issues; poked at bugs. Productivity somewhat crippled by an horrible internet routing issue, apparently in NYC for 130.x.y.z addresses from the UK. Struggled through L1 support at BT, in time to get an L2 call-back; great. Lunch. Chat with kendy & cnx. resumed - good.

• Up early; mail chew, chat with Tsahi, misc. calls, admin etc. Dug at some openCL oddnesses in a branch. Arun over in the evening for a Bible study.

• Up early; mail chew, worked on AMD pieces for a chunk of the day, worked late reading up on how OpenCL works - discovered there is a nice C++ wrapper that we should be using; sync. with Jagan.

• Up earlyish; off to NCC, helped run the children's group with J. onto to story of Joseph somehow; back for lunch, slugged for a bit; out for a cycle ride onto the heath as a family - E. doing well. Packed tired babes to bed early; read, slept.

• Up late, breakfast, played games with babes; wandered down to the Newmarket Carnival, loaded up the Churches Together float, and set off down the high-street. Enjoyed the carnival - H. N. and M. went on some large spinning 'cage' ride. Home, played games until late with babes.

• Up, mail chew; sync. with Jagan, read parts of formulae editing, sync. with cloph, built some stats. Lunch, poked at Addons impact on startup performance at some length - managed to get it under control in the end. Up playing games with babes until late.

• Up too early, train, tube, DLR to Cutty Sark, University of Greenwich for the EuSpRIG conference - interesting stuff, good people, lots of useful spreadsheet data and contacts. Pleased to see awareness of LibreOffice, and even mentions in some talks as the alternative to Excel - though everyone is still using Excel heavily. Sadly an internet black-hole, dinner with the spreadsheet guys. Lots of good things we can do in the spreadsheet to help users produce good quality sheets. Travel back with Stephen, by boat, train, etc. Bed late.

• Up early, mail chew, call. Thrilled to see the exciting AMD partnership finally announced. Thanks to some incredibly hard work from Kohei (with Markus' assistance bearing the bug load & with code from MultiCoreWare. Some really great potential there for the new HSA architecture and finally making use of all those transistors that are often just sitting idle in business desktops. The HSA model where both CPU & GPU share the same virtual memory model / address-space seems like a massive win for quick data movement to/from the GPU - but of course works best with the increasingly common GPU/CPU chips: APUs. Anyhow - lots of rather significant performance and re-structuring fun going on in calc these days, thanks to AMD.

• Up early, called Samsung - they seemed open to mending the phone; good. Mail chew, misc. bug poking, built ESC stats. Lunch. Few calls in the afternoon. Poked at annoying windows path / linking problems, chat with Jagan. Chased a crash on load down that's not there in 4.0.5. Lydia & Janice over for dinner, worked late - synced with Nlmintl

• Up; early, caught up on E-mail from the weekend, chat with David, chewed through some patches and bugs. Amused by the continuing stream of stories of the form (as the Private Eye renders it) Spy agencies found to be spying on people who didn't know they were being spied on ... and in late breaking news: Pope is also discovered to be Catholic. - finally why anyone would want to spy on EU deliberatons - I have no idea.
• Lunch; more mail churn, dug into bugs. Amazingly the Samsung Galaxy S III of my wife's seems to have bricked itself; this is despite us doing nothing exotic to it at all, whatsoever - no jail-breaking, no weird settings, no odd apps installed: nothing. Returned from Brussels - it had run out of battery, on charging it wouldn't boot. The restore UI makes it rather easy to delete all the users' data but then continues to refuse to boot: nice. Zero diagnostics / ability to put it into a boot-time / verbose debug mode. Tried to use 'kies' to flash it - wonderful intermittent failure to image, complaints about E:failed to mount /efs (Invalid argument) in the 3e system recovery; pretty irritating. OXA is the UK / multi CSC magic three letters it seems. Naturally (as you discover later) the default Samsung addressbook / calendar apps don't store the data in the cloud, and attempting to make them do that is a constant battle to fight the appointment creation app - so: Samsung Galaxy S III - one careful user, and tons of lost data. Seems like 533 pages of other people have the same deep joy. I love Samsung as a company, but this is a bit silly, particularly if the software fix has been known for six months; what's worse is if I was a phone hacker type, it seems like I'd have a backup of the EFS lying around, and not have the problem.
• Worked late.

• Up earlier; breakfast; train & church minibus to IBC Brussels - interesting talk from a chap running Serve the City, met some interesting people. On to the Cinquantenaire Museum to enjoy an eclectic collection of things, lazed in the sun, walked back into town for more chips, some fruit beer, and bid a sad 'bye to Brussels. Eurostar + Lydia home; up late catching up with my parents.

• Up lateish, large cooked breakfast, off to the Atomium, then wandered through Brussels parks, walked back, chips & mayonaise, waffles, relaxed variously; lovely.

• Up early; Mum & Dad over to baby-sit, breakfast together. Lydia dropped us into St Pancras, wandered briefly through the British Library exhibition - then back for the Eurostar to Brussels.
• Arrived, to the hotel, rest; out to Chez Leon for a meal, and the Delerium cafe for a drink: somehow it is saner when it's not FOSDEM.

• Up early; mail chew, poked at some build horrors on different platforms; seems you can get ccache to corrupt it's cache if you reset in just the right way; hmm. Poked at Minh's VLC integration work briefly.
• Team meeting, ESC meeting. Pleased to see Eike's Hamburg Hackfest blog. Packed for a long-weekend in Brussels with Julia - should be fun.

• Up early; mail chew, one-to-one with Vojtech, patch review, merging pieces; partner call, TDF board call. Heated the dinner, Mary kindly over to manage the babes; fed & storied them, put them to bed etc. Did a bit of prioritisation in the evening.

• Up early, mail chew; admin, misc. calls, thrilled to see the KACST Advisory Board Membership finally announced - it's fantastic working with those guys who support the project in many ways; thanks to all who made it possible - particularly Kendy.
• Built ESC bug stats & prototype agenda, some really encouraging stuff going on in the QA world at the moment it seems, and another week of the Bug Triage Contest to go.
• Lydia and Janice over in the evening.

• Up early, practise with babes. Mail chew, poked at a bug, got some -4-1 branch builds going. Pleased to see that Saudi Arabia is switching to a weekend that should help Ahmad join us for ESC calls more easily. Lunch. Plugged away at weekend catchup.

• Up lateish; H. M. and J. off for a netball match with people significantly taller than H. Mended bike, did some metal-work in the workshop with N. and E. played a game or two, cooked lunch. Large lunch, and into Cambridge to Grace Church - talk by the director of the FIEC and caught up with a number of interesting people there. Back, quick dinner, babes to bed, sleep.

• Up earlyish, off to Kelvedon Hatch's nuclear bunker with Naomi - met up with Kismat: good to meet him in the flesh, and enjoyed lunch, then a somewhat frightening trip around the bunker and a vision of the end of the world that (mercifully) never happend; lots of interest. Until you see a ten-foot concrete wall with embedded tungsten rods, you don't know what it looks like.
• Out to a local pub for a quick beer & catch-up, really good to talk. Home with babes, played dunelegacy with little ones in the evening, bed.

• Up early, mail chew, tried to reclaim some of the 6Gb that Visual studio is holding in my Windows 7 VM; removed 'Blend' and Sharepoint pieces, only to discover: no size saving - 6GB for just the compiler + debugger ? Tried to cleanup any unwanted snapshots, no joy; annoying.
• Pleased to see the mwaw legacy filterset in 4.1 (with screenshots). Perhaps you don't have legacy documents to rescue into ODF land, and your memoirs will be the shorter for it, but have you ever wondered why Linux includes amateur radio, a staggering set of device drivers and features, even 386/SX support ? Something to do with a healthy community where contributions are welcomed from everyone I think. Thanks to Laurent Alonso (with Fridrich) for helping to make LibreOffice that much richer.
• Mary Rogers over for dinner in the evening.

• Up too early; tired. Mail chew, dug at an odd Windows compile issue, Team meeting, ESC call, Vojtech's staff, wrote/sent out minutes. Continued to hunt down some 64 vs. 32bit windows nasty - perhaps it's only me that still prefers 32bit versions of code.

• Up early; mail chew, hacked at some calc UI pieces, partner call, board call. Into Cambridge to visit a passing Guy & Rob, out for burgers with Neil, Doree, Herman & Bruno. Highly amused by the unusual Phabricator marketing:

  You can keep track of all the defects and problems in your awful software with Maniphest.

  • Keeps track of bugs.
  • You can assign them to people.
  • Maybe you could fix them eventually.

  etc.

  Home & to bed overly late.

• Up early, mail chew. Poked at an annoying unit test failure in 4.0 with Rene and Stephan - Bjoern's work to dump a stack-trace of the failed C++ for JUnit tests into the log saved a staggering amount of setup time, and lets us catch and fix even intermittent / timing related failures: lovely.
• Filed expenses; built ESC bugs stats. Lunch. Installed memory from Crucial Technology - worked first time: so it was just 'Arch Memory' being clueless. Fixed a MAB around unexpected fontconfig updates.

• Up earlish, staggered downstairs before the babes left for school for a chorus of hugs & beautiful Father's day cards.
• Really pleased to see the announcement of MIMO joining The Document Foundation Advisory Board. MIMO support the LibreOffice ecosystem by contracting developers to fix their bugs and improve LibreOffice for everyone.
• Chat with Cloph, lunch. Chat with Marcos from Brazil, working on improving the equation editor. Fixed up some Arabic / UTF-8 in C++ that I pushed, apparently some compilers can't cope, dug at some bugs, reviewed a patch or two. Mail chew.

• Off to the hack-fest, lots of people there, poked at some horrible performance problem in a participant's monster document; interesting - lots of styles. Michael S. found and fixed an evil writer most annoying bug in 4.1, caught up with Astron, lots of fun. Caught up with Tim as I left, a good hack-fest.
• Lengthy train (must remember to be in the right end of the Hamburg airport train - note to self: listen to Stephan harder); plane; coach; other coach; bed tired.

• Off to the hackfest, great to meet up with a trickle of people old and new coming to hack on fun stuff. Realised that my list of invisible things in 4.1 - missed Eike's great continuing work on langtag / bcp47 etc. Also Bjoern / David O / Norbert's awesome gerrit / on-demand multi-platform build integration: select a sha1 hash to be built on all three systems and wait for the result. Poked at the docs for that with David.
• Pushed Benjamin's patch, got Issa setup with push access and his new flat icon theme included; got Rolf setup with some comment translation. Caught up with the KACST guys, poked at lots of bits of code variously, fixed a number of UI / ergonomic issues. Up until 4am hacking with the hardest of the hard-core guys - struggling with some awful bugs.

• Up early; E's fifth Birthday, present unwrapping and playing with at breakfast - fun. Off into Cambridge with J. and Emily - bus to the airport, plane to Hamburg, caught up with Thorsten, admired his new eco-flat, on to the meal / meet-up in the evening (kindly sponsored by Lanedo) - up rather late talking over this and that.

Rather soon we will be releasing LibreOffice 4.1—currently we're in a Beta phase of that, and we appreciate people getting stuck in and helping with testing. You can download builds from here pre-releases or if you like some up-to-the-hour builds from dev-builds.

( This post is also available in French )

We're still building our list of features and credits. We have a number of new visible features of course with credits against them. Cor has made a pair of beautiful blog entries highlighting UI improvement and the Photo Album features in 4.1. That made me think of the many developers who have been working extremely hard on things that are under the covers and not so easily seen, but are still really important. I'd like to explain just some highlights of that here, (crediting the developers' employer where there is one at the first mention). Often these are tasks that are easy to get involved with, and may seem trivial in isolation but cumulatively add up to a code-base that is far easier to understand and to contribute to.

Build system: configure / make

One of the tasks that most irritates and has distracted new developers from doing interesting feature work on the code-base over many years has been our build system. At the start of LibreOffice, there was an incomplete transition to using GNU make, which required us to use both the horrible old dmake tool as well as gnumake, with configure using a Perl script to generate a shell script configuring a set of environment variables that had to be sourced into your shell in order to compile (making it impossible to re-configure from that shell), with a Perl build script that batched compilation with two layers of parallelism, forcing you to over- or undercommit on any modern builder; it looked something like this:

# old and awful
autoconf
./configure --enable-this-and-that
source LinuxIntelEnv.Set.sh
./bootstrap
cd instsetoo_native
build --all

Thanks to the stirling efforts Björn Michaelsen (Canonical), David Tardon (Red Hat), Peter Foley, Norbert Thiebaud, Michael Stahl (Red Hat), Matúš Kukan, Tor Lillqvist (SUSE), Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat), Luboš Luňák (SUSE), Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), Mathias Bauer (Oracle), Jan Holesovsky (SUSE), Andras Timar (SUSE), David Ostrovsky, Hans-Joachim Lankenau (Oracle) and more—(more details) the 126 thousand targets, and 1700 makefiles are now fully converted to GNU make so we have the significantly simpler:

# LibreOffice configure & make as of now:

./autogen.sh --enable-this-and-that
make

No shell pollution, no 'bootstrap' script, no Perl build wrapper, no obsolete 'dmake' required, just plain GNU make files—and incredible build parallelism—after generating headers, we could utilize a thousand CPUs. This is a clean-cut task with a clear boundary; like the process of removing dead code in previous releases, it is now complete—freeing up developers for more interesting things.

Build system: make dev-install

LibreOffice, in contrast to much other software, is fully relocateable—you can plonk it down where you like, and run it from there. As such we use a make dev-install to create an install set in install/ that you can run in the build tree. This process has traditionally been performed by a Perl script using a convoluted set of pre-processed rules, to achieve what is (mostly) a copying operation. David Tardon has made some great progress moving this to use much simpler file-lists that we auto-generate. So—nowadays we have an instdir/ top-level (on which these file-lists operate) that starts to mirror the install—the hope being to do away with the make install phase for running inside the build tree. So far we have more than 250 file lists, handling nearly 20k files.

This initiative makes it significantly easier to add or remove files from the install, and removes lots of zipping and un-zipping of sets of files that used to happen during the build: thus making packaging a build faster: the SDK packaging went from 90s to 30s or so, while also dropping lots of scp2/ rules. The hope is that, when this is complete we will have an office suite that is runnable out of the box after a make, without an extra install phase.

Code cleanup / linting

A huge amount has been done here to make the code-base easier to understand. Doing this makes it easier and quicker for us to read the code, check it is correct, understand the flow—and so to add features or fixes.

sane includes

In the bad old days each module used to have an inc/<module> directory inside itself where its external include files were concealed. During the build of each module, these were copied to a separate artifacts directory (the 'solver') and the next module was compiled against those copies. This lead to a number of problems with debuggers identifying copies of headers, newbies editing the wrong (solver) headers, performance issues on windows, and more. So—thanks to Bjoern Michaelsen, Matúš Kukan, Michael Stahl for moving all the headers to a single top-level include/ directory and de-crufting the makefiles to make that nice.

tools cleanup

The tools/ module has a lot of duplicate functionality that is not needed, in this cycle we removed a complete duplicate file-system abstraction by writing it out of the code, thanks to Tomas Turek, Krisztian Pinter, Thomas Arnhold, Marcos Paulo de Souza & Andras Timar. It is always good for security to remove yet another duplicate, cross-platform, safe temporary file creation code-path.

String cleanups

We continued to make good progress on the removal of the obsolete UniString class, with a couple more method removals from Jean-Noël Rouvignac & Caolán McNamara. In addition Lubos Lunak did a mass removal of redundant rtl:: namespace prefixes all across the code for OUString and OString - making the code more readable, with a number of other significant performance, and cleanliness improvements. Large numbers of call sites were upgraded from UniString to OUString, had their redundant RTL_USTRING_CONSTASCII macro bloat removed, and used faster ways of concatenating strings—thanks to: Olivier Hallot, Christina Rossmanith, Stephan Bergmann, Chris Sherlock, Peter Foley, Marcos Paulo de Souza, José Guilherme Vanz, Jean-Noël Rouvignac, Markus Mohrhard, Ricardo Montania, Donizete Waterkemper, Sean Young, Thomas Arnhold, Rodolfo Ribeiro Gomes, Lionel Elie Mamane, Matteo Casalin, Janit Anjaria, Noel Grandin, Tomaž Vajngerl, Krisztian Pinter, Fridrich Strba (SUSE), Gergő Mocsi, Prashant, Ádám Csaba Király, Kohei Yoshida—and more I missed in the log (mail me).

component service registration

Noel Grandin continued his indomitable work to cleanup all call-sites that create components with new-style service constructors, with lots of other associated improvements—around two hundred and fifty new commits in 4.1.

Code quality work

Perhaps the least visible kind of improvement is crasher bugs that are not there anymore. Clearly the goal is never crashing, but how do we get there ? Markus Mohrhard worked on a lovely set of automated tests to load over twenty four thousand files—of the most evil and twisted kind: ie. the contents of all bugzillas we could scrape. Thanks to some great work from Markus, Fridrich Strba (SUSE), Michael Stahl, Eike Rathke (Red Hat) for fixing the results, we hope users will enjoy fewer sightings of our ugly crash dialog.

Another source of significant improvement, was the use of static checking tools to increase code quality, and hence reliability. This release a team started systematically going through the coverity data. This yielded nearly three hundred commits—thanks to: Markus Mohrhard, Julien Nabet, Norbert Thiebaud, Caolán McNamara, Marc-André Laverdière (TCS), and others. In addition Julian Nabet got over sixty fixes from the cppcheck tool included. Lastly lint-wise, we continue to use Clang and Lubos' nice plugins to find and remove questionable code as it appears.

Another great tool we that has improved here is bibisect—allowing us to have a git repository with binaries from every few dozen previous commits included inside it. This allows end-user testers to find very precisely where a given bug was introduced into the product using bisection of lots of binary builds crammed into a single git repository. Thanks to Bjoern Michaelsen & Canonical's QA labs for more build hardware here.

We also built and executed more unit tests with LibreOffice 4.1 to avoid regressions as we change the code. These are rather hard to measure, since people like to pile up new tests inside existing unit test modules. By grepping for the CPPUNIT_TEST registration macro we can see that that we added around a hundred such tests to 4.1—the majority of these were added to calc, with significant gains in writer, chart2, connectivity and impress. Thanks to Miklos Vajna (SUSE), Kohei Yoshida (SUSE), Noel Power (SUSE), Markus Mohrhard, Luboš Luňák, Stephan Bergmann, Michael Stahl, Noel Grandin, Eike Rathke, Julien Nabet, Caolán McNamara, Jan Holesovsky, Thomas Arnhold, Tor Lillqvist, David Ostrovsky, Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer (Lanedo), Christina Rossmanith and others for working on the tests.

Calc core refactoring

One of the reasons why Calc gained so many, badly needed, systematic unit tests for previously un-covered code, was the very significant re-factoring work going on in the core. For many years, calc was architected under the delusion that a spreadsheet is composed of cells - which created some serious scalability and performance problems. The end goal of this work is to kill ScBaseCell completely—and move to storage of spans of contiguous data of uniform type down a column. Some of the initial work for this is in place in 4.1, but the full benefit will have to wait at least until 4.2 or even later versions when we can make further adjustment to take full advantage of the new cell storage structure. The aim with 4.1 is to have no visible performance regression, perhaps some minor speedups and memory footprint reductions in some areas, but more importantly, better code maintainability thanks to the separation of cell broadcaster mechanism from the cell storage itself. Thanks to Kohei Yoshida for his great work here.

German Comment Translation

Always encouraging to build the metrics, in the last release cycle we lost approaching five thousand lines of German comment: translated into English. That helps new developers get started on the code, understand it and get developing faster. The rough graph of this (which unfortunately includes a number of false positives for lines of German) looks like this:

With many thanks to Urs Fässler, Christian M. Heller, Philipp Weissenbacher, Luc Castermans, David Verrier, Chris Sherlock, Joren De Cuyper, Thomas Arnhold, Philipp Riemer, and others. Help appreciated from German speakers with translating the last sixteen-thousand lines—it's a matter of checking the code out and running bin/find-german-comments on a module, translating a few lines and mailing a git diff to libreoffice At lists.freedesktop.org (no subscription required).

Completed Wizard conversion to python

Java remains an excellent, if not preferred environment for writing cross-platform extensions. All the existing Java support and APIs remain as before. Having said that—on some platforms Java is not available, and as such using our bundled, internal python runtime makes good sense for built in features.

This release we completed porting the Java wizards, which can be used in the File->Wizards menu, to Python. This should give a better experience for Windows users who are not lucky enough to have a JRE installed. Many thanks to Xisco Fauli, and Javier Fernandez (Igalia)

Linking & startup

One of the key features required to get the LibreOffice prototypes running on Android and iOS was to be able to link nearly all our code into a single shared library (Android) or executable (iOS). This work is re-used with an --enable-mergelibs configure option—which aggregates much of the common code of LibreOffice into a huge, single shared library: much as is done with Mozilla. This is increasingly the default choice for Linux distribution builds, and should yield improved seek and hence cold-start performance. Work remains to be done on code re-ordering, and PGO to further improve startup performance. Many thanks to Matúš Kukan (for the Raspberry Pi Foundation) and Tor Lillqvist for working on this.

Another startup performance feature kindly funded by the Raspberry Pi foundation is to reduce the amount of configuration data pointlessly parsed during startup. One nice win in this area was removing fourteen thousand lines of data for printing sheets of labels from our configuration, and defering that parsing, until someone wants to print a label, thanks to Matus Kukan for that too.

New type format

The programming interfaces that are used in LibreOffice require type information to inform their work, particularly for scripting. In the past this was stored in some ancient, inefficient, legacy binary database. Thanks to Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat) we now have a new, more efficient and compressed binary format, with our main offapi.rdb shrinking ten-fold from 6.5Mb to 0.65Mb, more details in his Well Typed Uno talk at FOSDEM. So far this format is used only for private, internal type information, and we plan to remain fully backwards compatible for extensions that provide old-style type information. Documentation of the format is availble in the source tree: nowadays we have increasingly detailed structural / overview documentation in each module's README file.

Miscellaneous

Other areas showed some great improvements:

Time

The resolution of the time-related datatypes in UNO (LibreOffice's API) has been increased to nanoseconds, from centi- and milliseconds. This is mainly useful in Base, where LibreOffice will not anymore truncate times and timestamps to centiseconds, nor durations to milliseconds, in user data. Lionel Elie Mamane

Base

In a form, DatabaseListBox now exposes the selected value(s) (as opposed to the selected display strings) to the scripting interface. Lionel Elie Mamane

UI migration to Glade XML

The UI migration to Glade layout based XML files continued apace with contributions from many individuals, we managed to go from 64 .ui dialog descriptions in 4.0 to 230 in the 4.1 branch (so far): quite a jump towards completeness at five hundred dialogs—thanks to Caolán McNamara, Krisztian Pinter, Jack Leigh, Alia Almusaireae (KACST), Katarina 'Bubli' Behrens, Abdulaziz A Alayed (KACST), Jan Holesovsky, Faisal M. Al-Otaibi (KACST), Abdulmajeed Ahmed (KACST), Andras Timar, Manal Alhassoun (KACST), Bubli, Albert Thuswaldner, Olivier Hallot, Miklos Vajna, Abdulelah Alarifi (KACST), Gokul Swaminathan (KACST), Rene Engelhard, and others. It is also worth mentioning the great work done by translators to check & update strings here. The most significant benefit of the UI migration is finally making it extremely painless to tweak and improve the user interface.

Debugging output

There are new SAL_INFO and SAL_DEBUG macros which make it easy to add filtered, or temporary debugging output. Our git hooks warn if you leave any SAL_DEBUG statements around on commit too.

Gallery building

LibreOffice has been lumbered with a rather hideous format in which to store galleries. We generally ship the gallery images as standalone files, but have a set of binary resources containing thumbnails of these, and unqiue integers to refer to their translated names which ship in the libreoffice binary. In 4.1 we build most of these on each platform during compile, making them easy to extend, (and avoiding having impenetrable binaries in git), and we translate the theme name with a new .desktop syntax file alongside. This also should make it easy for users to build their own galleries as extensions and ship them with translated names.

Intermediate SDF removal

While we removed SDF from our developer facing translation flow for 4.0—we still generated some SDF files as temporary build intermediates. Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for moving us to a pure .po solution.

Getting involved

I hope you get the idea that more developers continue to find a home at LibreOffice and work together to complete some rather significant work both under the hood, and also on the trim. I've enjoyed hacking on several of these improvements. Our hope is that as the on-ramp to the project gets less precipitous, people will join us, and find out how fun, and how much easier it is to improve the code these days. You'll also be in good company—first in terms of the number of code contributors to collaborate with:

And also in terms of diversity of code commits, we love to see the unaffiliated volunteers contribution by volume, though clearly the volume and balance changes with the season, release cycle, and time available for mentoring:

Of course, we maintain a list of small, bite-sized tasks which you can use to get involved at our Easy Hacks page, with simple build / setup instructions. We now have a cleaner, and safer environment to work on improving the code.

One of the easiest things to do is to help out with bug reporting, and bug triage (confiming and quality checking other people's bug reports), you can be an effective triager with little experience, and good bug reports really help developers out, just grab and install a pre-release and you're ready to contribute alongside the rest of the development team. Even better you could get involved with the fun QA Bug Triage Contest and win a prize.

Conclusion

LibreOffice 4.1 will be another milestone, and we hope a yet-higher watermark for code-quality, design improvement, and incrementally more solid foundations for improving the best office suite in the world. Of course, with so much changing, we really appreciate early testing of our betas and release candidates, which (we hope) should be useful for doing work with - though save regularly and generationally. If you havn't time to test our betas or release candidates, our time-based release plan predicts our final release date at the very end of July. Thank you for supporting LibreOffice.

• Up, pushed a blog about where we're at, technically with our 4.1 betas, and with some credits for our hidden heros. Pleased to see Minh push his first VLC integration work to our GSOC feature branch. Dug into some callgrind traces.
• Team meeting, ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff.
• Really pleased to see the LibreOffice 2012 conference videos show up, you can enjoy them, slides have been up for a long time. Perhaps it's a great time to watch a video and then book for LibreOffice conference 2013 - September in Milan/Italy - to best the see progress.
• Booked coach to the Hamburg Hackfest tomorrow - it should be great. Dinner. Poked at a horrible leak with StarView meta files compounded by piles of architectural lunacy.

• Up early; patch merging, mail catchup, partner call, worked late.
• Disappointed with 'Arch Memory' on Amazon, whose memory did not work work with my W500, even after BIOS upgrades, North Bridge reset etc. and who refused to refund return postage. Tried Crucial instead - lets see if they can do better, or if it's jusy my hardware / BIOS.

• Up early, mail chew, continued to wrestle with cairo canvas & compositing. It seems the bane of my life is VCL's horribly unhelpful design around separate alpha, and some combination of pre-multiplied alpha, bogus 24bit alpha masks and worse. Eventually unwound it all, and a number of un-related issues - now it renders correctly at least.
• Poked GSOC student, built ESC bug stats and prototype agenda, more mail chew.

• Up early; mail chew, tried to test remote-X over ssh behaviour, and ended up falling foul of this ssh / IPv6 issue, worked around that. Chewed through some code reversion / tweaking.
• Pregnancy Crisis Centre annual meal in the evening - rather nice to catch up with all that came and enjoy some food together.

• Out to Church on the Green, sadly not a terribly sunny day: cold even. Back for lunch, watched HSM 2, out for a cycling expedition en-masse. E. managed her full length cycle, and won the babes an ice-cream: finally.

• Up lateish, slugged variously; H. and Charlotte out to netball, and took the babes onto the race-course for more cycling practise; E. nearly got did the whole length of the race-course drive under the trees, but just missed it; great progress though. Home, tea, bed.

• Up early, call; dug away at EMF+ issues with Fridrich & Thorsten. Mail chew, more poking at corner-cases and rendering quality. Charlotte over in the evening for a sleep-over with H.

• Up early, call; mail chew, skype / screenshare / partner help. Chewed through a couple of detailed bug reports. Team meeting, ESC call, chat with Brad, up late working on a customer bug report: EMF+ rendering: don't you love it.

• Up early, mail chew, misc. bug fixing, partner call, wrote up some release details.

• Up early; mail chew, chat with Thorsten, built ESC agenda + stats, lunch. Poked at and fixed up a cross-platform gallery building issue. Poked at the Xray - tool, rather neat.

• Up early; chewed mail, chat with Jagan, then Mohammad. Nailed an annoying impress crasher, and back-ported it variously. Admin; lunch, out for a lightning family dental appointment - packed with parallel form filling. Back, more mail chew, call with Peter L. Patch bits here and there.

• Up late, off to NCC, ran the kids group with J. Home for lunch with Tom, Verity, Angela & Ezra - fun; chatted, and then out to the race-course for more cycling practise: E. managed 33+ tree spacings at a run (increasingly I have to to keep up).

• Up latish, lazed around much of the day; completed dunelegacy - it's still an awesome game, even much later in life (or perhaps I've never progressed); dug quickly through E-mail. Got E. cycling rather well on her bike, more tree climbing on the racecourse in the evening, bathed babes, bed early.

• Up rather early; day off today: To Wicksteed park, fine sun, lovely rides for the babes, good fun - particularly that they can ride with each other and not need us on-board. Home slightly earlier than usual, fine tea, put children to bed, watched movies, relaxed.

• Up early, mail chew, meetings variously as normal for Thursdays, pleasant chat with Joren.

• Mail chew, setup a feature/vlc branch for Minh to get hacking inside with the autoconfiscation already done. Lunch. Partner call, minutes. Out to cell group in the evening.

• Up; thrilled to see the list of thirteen successful Google Summer of Code applicants here and the great projects they're working on. Personally I'm looking forward to working with Andrzej, Artur and Minh myself. Thanks to all those involved in submitting proposals, reviewing, ranking, and running the process particularly Fridrich and Cedric.
• Poked at a bootchart2 oddity, wrote LXF column, poked GSOC students to get them started.

• Up early, mail chew. J. & co. off to the NCC bank-holiday fun-day on the green: free cakes, hot-dogs, bouncy-castles etc. all provided by the Church to bless people; excellent turn-out. Plugged away at E-mail, patch review, admin.
• Programming in the evening with the babes: moving on from scratch (great for simple stuff, but rather limited) - and onto python - really pleased to find the great invent with python material: thanks Al Sweigart !

• Played Violin at NCC, went well. Tony spoke, back for lunch with Iris - really great to catch up with her, Ron back a bit later; lazed in the Sun & chatted: vitamin D.
• Out to the race-course in the afternoon - E. nearly there with pedalling & steering concurrently: good.

• Up lateish; J. out with H. and M. for netball in the afternoon; snoozed a bit, Out cycling with N. with E. making great strides; met up with several neighbours for a conflab in the road: horror planning application for supermarket behind us rejected; good. Out to the cricket crease with Russel, Sue, Bailey & Sophie. Bit of tree-climbing as well. Back for tea.
• Watched West is West in the evening - rather a good time to broadcast it in light of recent events.

• Mail chew, poked at code variously; admin. Got rather into Britain's Biggest Hoarders - thank God for computers - where you can stash your pile of un-read code & E-mail electronically, rather than piling it in bags around your home.
• Attempted a RAM upgrade and getting a disk in a caddy (for some swap & big vmimages), RAM upgrade failed: old W500 has some horrible 1-3 3-1 beep-code, even after upgrading the BIOS and resetting the north-bridge.

• Up; mail chew, hand-held some odd Windows build issues - the old plague of DOS line-endings coming back to bite. Patch review, got the libreoffice-4-1 branch checked out and building.
• Lunch. Team meeting, ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff. Ron & Iris around an unexpected pleasure - sadly interrupted by a call.

• Horrible damage in Oklahoma, encouraged to hear the first response of this guy on seeing his house not there anymore. Call with Vojtech, mail chew.
• Booked travel to the Hamburg Hackfest - which should be great: June 15/16th. Chat with Florian. Lunch. Partner call, filed expenses.

• Up early, maiol chew, poked at some calc performance regression tests Kohei has written, call with him, stats crunching; ESC bug stats & agenda collation; dinner.

• Up early, mail chew; plugged at some make check failures, and tested build pieces on Windows and Linux. Built slideware, Lunch. Back to mail, debugging and patch review for the freeze. Worked late.

• Up lateish; NCC - visiting speaker: empty cross + tomb & occupied throne. Back for lunch, Peter over - caught up with him through the afternoon. Played with babes in the garden and slugged in the evening happily.

• Up earlyish; mail chew, poked at builds, and helped babes with games; M. struggling with the concept of minesweeper. Breakfast, out to Noughton Park for a wander around - various tree climbing feats, and a fine wander. Back for a disgracefully late, large, fried breakfast/lunch thing.
• E. out to Sue's to play with Sophie; checked and re-started a Windows build.
• Pleased to read theregister's take on 3D printed guns - only for the incredibly wealthy, deranged individual that likes to kill at ultra-close range. Annoyed by self promotion and the stupid knee-jerk responses it produces. There is a photo of a far more dangerous, and often cheaper device here, with which you can make a reasonably functional gun that 'actually works(TM)'.
• One of the supreme amusements of life is that as soon as you do anything you think is cool & new you find out it's already been done before: see this neat new 3D printer thing ? turns out you didn't meet the self-replicating "anyone who has a lathe can build a lathe" mob of yesteryear (did you miss the industrial revolution perhaps ?). But wait ! surely these un-controllable, self-replicating 3D tools are a radical threat to the civilised world ? - time to ban the lathe, milling machine, drill-press ... toothbrush etc. ? Perhaps not.
• Dinner. Argh - git submodules just beat me up again when I least needed it - translations module acting stupidly, and refusing to update - combined with trying to remove that submodule (can you even remove submodules? - and failing).

• Up early, mail chew, hacking to the 4.1 feature-freeze. Interested to read Open source is not a war zone. Up late working.

• Mail chew, poked at misc. bugs; Team meeting, ESC meeting, company meeting; worked late - J. feeling unwell, starting to sicken slightly too.

• Up early; mail chew, merged gallery pieces. Partner call / hand-holding, fixed up SDK packaging, fixed a few gallery snafus.

• Up early, packed babes off to school; into Cambridge to finish the patching-up experience; what fun - apparently recovering well: good. Hacked away at mail, and gallery cleanup while being tampered with. Built ESC bug stats. Cell-group with Dave in the evening.

• Up early, mail chew; reviewed fixes for -4-0, built the latest version of that. Plugged away at build problems with galleries; fixed the evil translation code there. J's Pregnancy Crisis Centre AGM, worked late. Nailed a nasty interpoloation problem with the (nice) new high-quality image scaling.

• Up lateish; breakfast, out to NCC, Tony spoke. Back for a large roast lunch. Afternoon of slugging, played computer games with H. N. and M. got dunelegacy going - nostalgia for that - still a really playable game, all these years later - though you need to have the original data files (sadly). Caught up with Robert, somehow.

• Up, breakfast, read the Economist a bit; J. out for a sponsored walk, entertained the babes, did a bit of mail chew / gallery de-lamification. Played Sleeping Queens with the babes, fed them; J. back.
• Emptied one camera and backed it up; emptied Julia's phone complete with photos of T-shirts kept for sentimental value (eg. GUADEC 1.0) that really need to get thrown out to make way for new ones: LibreOffice Conference Paris (1.0) eg. it seems action must be taken before cabinet making is necessary to fix the relevant (antique pine) chest of draws.
• Idly fixed the gnome-vfs / samba problems in 4.0 while babes watched Madeline; tweaked more gallery bits. Bed early.

• Up early, to work; mail chew. Interested to read Lionel's The cost of being convinced. That significantly under-plays the cost of discipleship - of meeting the total moral claims of Christ, and surrendering control of your life to him (though if you're worried about that, do a search on the number of Christian books about how to try to discern Gods guidance outside of clear scriptural commands; we have minds for a reason). In my experience - those moral claims and change of direction, purpose and boss are the primary stumbling blocks. Your view of the sanity of that of choice ultimately hinges on your view of the character of God - a loving, Father, companion, friend - or a petulant, capricious tyrant. Clearly there is no attraction to trusting the latter so I'm convinced of the profound goodness (or holiness) of the God I follow, making anything else rather un-attractive.
• More mail chew; pleased to see Caolan's update on the UI dialog migration work here. Approaching 40% completion.
• Call, lunch. Noticed while dunging out old mail, that the DrMemory had fixed the 5 or so bugs I suffered on Windows last time I played with it: nice. Discovered a load of interesting gmail mail that I'd completely ignored in the past - annoying: seems I missed a load of meals with passing friends at conferences etc. a wedding invite, and more. Will start reading it.
• Poked at lots of hack-week projects, unwinding ones with unclear status, trying to look for commits etc. Dinner. Back to the hackery in the evening.

• Up early, to work, mail chew; sync. with Noel; pleased by the great work the QA team are doing identifying duplicate bugs eg. this one, it's really great to see things cleaned up and associated into clusters like that.
• Lunch, team meeting, ESC call. Vojtech's staff, up late.

• Up early; music practise with the babes, packed them off to school. Mail chew, poked at slides, misc. admin. Dug through the crazy gallery creation / loading code - and with David's help cleaned up lots of building oddities. Up late.

• Up early, music practise with babes, packed them off to school. Mail chew, chased a Linux / samba bug and cleaned some duplicates up. Dave over for Bible Study in the evening.

• Up lateish; a bank holiday. Checked mail a little, chat with Thorsten, spot of work; down to meet Bruce & Anne, over for the day, had a fine banquet spread with them, sunned ourselves in the afternoon; Back to look over the (very good) top 10+ applications - some good proposals have come in it seems; encouraging. Sync with kendy; dinner, some debugging / code-unwinding, bed.

• Up early; breakfast with the babes, off to NCC, helped J. run the kids group; home for a birthday lunch for Lydia, with Dianne & Peter Curtis-Pryor too, great to catch up with everyone. Slugged, watched a movie in the afternoon with the kids. Bed, reading Adrian Plass' Sacred Diary to N. - to much amusement.

• Up earlyish; more extractor-fan work, got the transformer fitted, nice to have a working wet-room again. Read the Economist a little. Lunch. H. off to Netball with J. skimmed mail, reviewed GSOC applications lots of encouraging interest it seems. Manual word-counting to look for a problem.

• Up early; mail chew, bug poking, unwound a number of issues, triaged GSOC proposals and candidates. Plugged away at admin. Spent much of the evening locating, and drilling new holes in a new extractor fan in order to fix it to the existing orrible plaster-fixings; finally got it up.

• Up early, mail chew, crunched a few stats; Windows build completed; good, reviewed a few nice patches; chased bugs. Team call, ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff. Fixed a VBA issue.

• Up early; mail chew, poked at more bugs, installed a Windows 7 VirtualBox to make some progress on some Windows specific issues. As always, astounded by the generally horrendous nature of S/W management on windows, and the impression that trying to do two things at once: install Visual Studio, while doing almost anything else is not likely to work well: managed to get cygwin, and various other pieces installed in the end, but: what a pain.
• Wrote an rather overdue status report, partner call; sync with Kohei; spent a while trying to debug the shower extractor fan - unfortunately a Greenwood 12V AC induction motor fan plus transformer; power all the way to the terminals; dis-assembled the fan, internal relay working nicely, and power to the windings of the fan: massive resistance over the windings though; dis-assembled the windings - drilled out some rivets - only to discover a busted fuse hidden, embedded inside the windings inaccessibly at the bottom of the device: wow, that's bad.

• Up early, mail chew; interested to see Tyndale House's new Bible research software. Filed my address completion Evolution bug.
• Fixed a nasty, and seemingly long-standing linux / presentation display management problem. Tested Muthu's chart-legend fix; built ESC agenda & automated the bug crunching process lots more.
• Spent an unfeasible amount of time writing an automated regression test for what turned out to be an extreme corner-case - automated command-line conversion skips the document layout phase; which can make life more complicated for filters it seems. Poked at a PPTX export most-annoying bug for good measure.
• Lydia over for dinner, worked late, some bugs are really curious.

• Up early; breakfast, practise with babes, bit of work in the office, more from the bed. Upgraded to GNOME 3.8 - turns out that setting the dconf key: /org/gnome/desktop/session/session-name to something other than gnome-fallback is a good plan - otherwise login fails with the 'GNOME' session on upgrade, filed bug, worked around. Tried to get the workspace grid extension to work: no joy, little-to-no feedback on what was wrong; tried unsuccessfully to find out how to debug / find console / warning logs for gnome-shell / javascript extensions. Downgraded just the session piece to continue to use metacity + gnome-panel on 3.8; works nicely after mending Alt-tab (why?) in /org/gnome/desktop/wm/keybindings/switch-windows. Finally using a version of Evolution it's worth filing bugs / fixes against.
• Wrote a Linux Format column on SUSE's hack-week; poked at a nasty table export regression issue, and boggled at the code associated with that.
• Out in the evening with some lads from Church to see Oblivion - which (apart from the scientology silliness: Aliens, hidden memories etc.) had some rather good effects. Apparent 'lack of chemistry' in reviews seems only appropriate - at least I don't switch wives immediately and enthusiastically based on some strange memories.

• Up early, breakfast stayed at home while babes went to Church; read the Economist, attached extras to E's bike, poked at reprap issues, relaxed variously. Dave over for lunch, good to see him; fine roast lunch. Did a bit of reprap callibration with H. tried to get repsnapper to maximise to fill the 1024x600 netbook's screen: no joy, some horror interaction with widget sizing I guess. Babes to bed.
• Gordon (from Boston's) sermon on Terrorism, Calamity and the problem of Evil, asleep early.

• Up earlyish, conslutant visit, pleasant breakfast in bed; slugged around for more IV antibiotics, discharged after lunch, returned home for applied rest and movie watching with the babes. Read stories, put babes to bed, slept.

• Up rather early; off into Cambridge for some minor surgery; Nuffield / BUPA hospital goodness, operation delayed until midday, quite fun counting the seconds from anaesthetic in to out-cold, under fifteen it seems. Very dopy drugged up afternoon, slept on and off, all the fun of the fair: drips, oxygen, antibiotics and more.

• Up early, mail chew; upgraded to openSUSE 12.3 finally; looking really nice; re-spun builds, patch review, back-ported a number of fixes to product branches. Dunged out some old bugzilla issues.

• Mail chew, more admin, dug at misc. bugs, dug down through historic mail, and got my inbox finally under control: nice. Patch review, etc. Out to a cell group social in the evening.

• Up early; mail chew, auditing work, dug at spreadsheet performance variously, simplified the on-line update mechanism to make it more maintainable given the slew of versions we have. Built ESC bug stats + agenda. Lydia, Janice & Dave over in the evening.

• Mail chew, lots of promising GSOC applications, tried to unwind a mail filtering error, and Milan found the beautiful docs for me, though apparently now in dconf /org/gnome/evolution/mail and renamed to filters-log-actions and filters-log-file.
• Pleased to see LibreOffice in the top #10 most active projects registered at Ohloh - we clearly need some "I use this" to improve over our legacy score in the most-popular ranking. At 2212 commits per month, not far off Firefox's 2813 - but of course the number is indeed a bit silly without any idea of the entropy of the commit: I wonder if there is an even half-way good/standard way of determining commit entropy - perhaps some compression algorithm could do that.
• Out for a run, dinner, worked late; bit under the weather.

• Breakfast, out to NCC Simon Matthews speaking, Bryant & Natalie and Phil back for a fine roast lunch & encouraging time together. Mike & baby over in the afternoon - slugged in the afternoon; dunged out an emergency drain blockage in the evening - how does congealed fat & fibre fill a sump quite that badly ? bed.

• Up earlyish; played with babes extensively, cycle training in the road - a lovely sunny day: unused to it, got a red-neck. Busy much of the afternoon , dinner, Lydia over.

• Up early, mail chew, really pleased to see the results of Markus' sexy Automated crash testing for LibreOffice. The idea is to load all the nasty, corner-case / problem documents we have in bugzilla to check for no memory corruption. Markus has load tested twenty-four thousand problem documents from across the components and file-format types. That yields - only sixty failures (0.2%) - even when trying to provoke problems by turning on lots of debugging assertions, checking of invariants and so on, and that from the worst type of documents. Clearly sixty is sixty too many, several are fixed already, if you want to get involved checkout the list.
• Snatched lunch, out to visit the doctor, partner call, back, hacking, dinner, J. out, worked until late.

• Mail chew, lots of patch poking, bug triage, team meeting, ESC call. Really encouraged to see the fdo weekly bug summaries that Tollef has got setup for TDF - showing the true heros of LibreOffice (and freedesktop) QA - great to see lots of familiar name there. Thanks to the GNOME guys for the nice plugin, shows some good things eg. the top 10 bug closers:

  Top 10 bug closers

  Position	Who	Number of bugs closed
  1	Rainer Bielefeld	30
  2	Joel Madero	25
  3	Tollef Fog Heen	17
  4	Jorendc	11
  5	Andras Timar	9
  6	Stef Walter	8
  7	Chris Wilson	7
  8	Lionel Elie Mamane	7
  9	mariosv	6
  10	robert@familiegrosskopf.de	5

• Into Cambridge in the evening for a pint or two with Rob.

• Up early, packed, breakfast at the Azimut is always a great way to meet passing SUSE-ites of interest; into the office to meet up with Astron quickly, to the airport; flight (somehow they have moved the checkin, and the signage is not great - look at the floor).
• Coach home held up by a software error "breakpads failing", apparently just a normal bug in the bus/control (and has new breakpads). Home, mail, catch-up with Kendy, Vojtech, bed late.

• Up early; mail chew, more office sync. customer meeting; met up with Olaf, Frederic, Scott & the other SLED guys, out for dinner together, bed late.

• Up ridiculously early, coach, Ryan-Air, hackery and mail chew on both. Arrived in Nurnberg, somehow it's sunnier in Germany. Caught up with old friends David Faure & Ryan at the freedesktop hack-fest, wandered the office catching up with old friends & checking out the fruit of SUSE's hack-week. Bed early.

• Up earlyish, E. ill in the night, stayed at home with Father to look after her - read old story books to her, and enjoyed the time together. Lunch, packed, drove home, unloaded babes, fed and put them to bed, packed for Nurnberg.

• Up earlyish, set too fixing broken tiles on the roof - such a huge, low span to get the ladder up, it had to be supported by another ladder half-way up. Replaced the tile, fixed the neighbour's as well.

• Up early; mail chew and calls in the morning, fielded more GSOC interest - good stuff, sync with JP. Hacked on slide sorter border rendering, out with J. for a dinner out at an Indian restaurant, enlivened by a fight in the kitchen. Back for some more Hobbit-age, bed.

• Up early; mail chew, partner call, patch review, GSOC student code pointer / feeding, worked through a few bugs. Lunch. ESC call, booked flights, more mail, almost no hacking. Watched the first half of the first movie The Hobbit in the evening.

• Up lateish, mail chew; more people interested in Android remote hackery (rather than say working on iOS, Firefox OS, Tizen, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7) - sadly only one student can win that task - tried to encourage people to do other good things for Android.
• Back to slidesorter wrappery; poked at the lovely new widget / layout work from Caolan: there's something that actually works (TM), bitten again by horror VCL lifecycle issues, made the svidl compiler more verbose and helpful for my corner-case, dunged out some unused code.
• Hacked in the car while J. drove us to my parents; got a slide grouping dialog mostly sorted out, and to the point of needing a backend impl. Up late talking with the parents.

• Mail chew, thrilled to be included in the Google Summer of Code 2013. There is a great list of project ideas for LibreOffice for your viewing delectation. I'd love to have a Gnomey-LibreOfficey type person to hack on liblibreoffice (-lreoffice?) to encourage re-use in all sorts of places, including 'Documents' - could it be you ? Luckily Jack Leigh already helped to get the difficult skeleton / framework setup and ready to go.
• More mail chew; a couple of cheerful chaps arrived to replace two blown double glazing units - interestingly the PVC glazing appears ridiculously easy to replace; should have done it myself, IMHO it's criminal to replace the whole PVC surround etc. just for new glass.
• Lunch. - and finally back to hack-week, digging into the impress code, wrestled the slide sorter a bit, what a curious design. Lydia over for dinner, and studied Judges with Dave until late.

• Up early, mail chew, call with Radek, SUSE Hack Week - set too on some fun hackery. Wrote some more code overview docs. Lunch, removed a poor pheasant that had got wedged in the car's radiator. Upgraded server to 12.3. Wrote Linux Format Column, more partner work. Finally some impress hacking, dinner.

• Off to NCC, ran the kids group on promises to Abraham; made bread with the babes, and more. Back for an informal passover lunch with Emily over; more tidying up of the workshop. Watched Pricess Bride with the babes, tea, put them to bed. Out to look at a larger cello of Sarah's. Rico Tice sermon in the evening, sleep.

• Up lateish, misc. admin, poked music shop wrt. a Cello size increase. Dropped babes at parties variously, collected a cake for Chris. Back to dismantle various pieces of obsolete childrens garden furniture to help with moving - a sad time really - so many happy memories of smaller children in them.
• Sorted scrap metal - consolidated endless pots of bent screws and rusty nails to send to China for melting down; wow there was a lot of junk in the workshop - should setup a webcam there to see if it breeds when I'm not looking (or at least to stop it from doing so).

• Up early, mail chew. Rather pleased to see the Intel NUC thing; been looking for a box we can buy/post to new developers as an icecream slave - to accelerate their builds. Nice to see the tools/filesystem abstraction finally get removed from the code-base moving to a single sal abstraction 23k to 14k ';' lines in tools/ since we started is rather positive. Mentored an easy-hacker.
• Partner call, lunch, mail chew, fixed a bug, poked at Vibe. Dinner, put babes to bed - returned to M. to find an excited: "I've read the whole [Tiara Club] book, even the last page, and the ISBN !" - encouraging.

• Mail chew, patch review, Team call, ESC call, Vojtech's staff, some hack-week planning.

• Calls with Vojtech, Cedric, chewed mail, built misc. stats, poked at some feature analysis. Lunch, worked at adding some code pointers to turn proposed easy hacks into easy hacks.

• Up late, mail chew - worked through the Easter backlog, built bug stats, lunch, internal call. Worked on analytics, dinner, worked late.

• Up early, breakfast, out to make Easter Eggs for a save-the-children fund-raiser in the town. Back for lunch. Packed everything variously into the car. Drove home, spent a while with H. affixing her desk-lamp to her bed. Late dinner, put babes to bed, sleep.

• Up early, off to the local CofE church for the Easter service, a queue to get in 10 minutes before the start - not seen it so packed in recent memory; wedged into the childrens area. Back for an easter-egg hunt in the garden, followed by a fine roast lamb lunch. Out to sizewell beach with the babes, and attempted to build a bridge to the Netherlands from drift-wood; not a great success - but an interesting engineering challenge with the babes; got rather wet. Home for tea.

• Up earlyish, cooked breakfast, spent a while getting Anne's new Windows 8 computer setup - a very encouraging process: a pretty terrible out-of-box experience, first-time setup flow crashed after completion with part of it's work done (eg. Microsoft Account creation), and part not done (eg. stopping the wizard from re-running on next boot). Tons of frustration, re-entering of data, appalling usability glitches all over the shop. One example would be installing and paying for the MS Office 2013 download (sadly bought by my in-laws in a moment of absent-mindedness); the install flow had whole minutes with no visible indication that anything was going on - no visible window, hunting through task-bars, process-managers etc. revealed nothing - before up it would pop - 50 minutes to download something that could/should have been pre-loaded Free Software: sad, yet marginally encouraging. From a usability perspective, there are very significant regressions from the apparent use of a bespoke clutter-style toolkit for things like text entries. Trying to explain to an experienced user that yes 'To' and 'Cc' have a nice rectangular surround denoting a field, but 'Subject' and mail body appear ethereally dis-connected from everything and are (apparently) an insensitive-grey-color but yet can be clicked was interesting. Also vanishing scroll-bars on a screen with plenty of pixel-estate for them lead to: "where did the top of my E-mail go, and how can I get it back", sad.

• Up earlyish, packed off to Bruce & Anne's for an Easter break. Arrived, unpacked - slugged variously inside while it snowed outside.

• Up, mail chew, poked at stats generation variously. Call with Karl about the upcoming edition of his book, ESC call, Vojtech's staff.
• Pleased to see Gnome 3.8 released, and looking forward to updating to openSUSE 12.3 after Easter as well.

• Up early, chewed mail. Document Freedom Day today - free your documents ! Of course, if you're a GNU/Linux user you're prolly doing well here already by using ODF & LibreOffice.
• Early lunch, partner call, fixed button group navigation, made logerrit setup rather more automated. Lunch, worked until cell group, bed late.

• Up early, mail chew, code reading around a new feature or two, built ESC bug metrics. Plugged away at bugs, patch review etc. Added more code pointers etc. to our Google Summer of Code Ideas page to flesh out some tasks a little better.
• Lydia & Janice over for dinner, worked late on misc. bug fixing.

• Up early; mail chew, patch review - great to see lots of good work happened over the weekend. Up-loaded slides from my talk in Budapest. Poked at Javier's nice python / wizard porting work. Lunch. More hackery, call with Jan, Kendy, Thorsten. Dinner, read stories to babes, worked late while Laura gave input on improving the house saleability in photos to J.

• Off to NCC, Tony spoke well on the last of fourty acts. Home for a fine roast-lamb lunch, out to play snow-balling outside at some length; Back inside to get warm, bid 'bye to Dave; sat by the fire trying to burn through the back-log of accumulated firewood before moving. Bit of workshop tidying, bed early.

• Up earlyish, out for music group practise at NCC; returned to meet up with David over for the weekend; good to catch up. Snowing outside, so slugged variously inside - lunch - jigsaw puzzling while babes watched a movie. Scratch programming with H. and N. before bed; stayed up enjoying the company by the fire.

• Up late; mail chew, lunch, more mail chew - a big backlog of good things going on left & right it seems. Lunch. More mail chew, bits of admin. Chased a bug much of the afternoon.

• Up early; quick breakfast with Andras, off to the venue - lots of hacker types around the place. Arrived, unpacked, chewed mail quickly, finished slides - insert Florian's photo. Gave his talk (in absentia) with some of mine slides tacked-on. Gave my talk and some demos of the latest fun things, back to the booth. Hybrid PDFs with slides for Florian's talk are here, and my talk:
  
• Lunch. Talked with various passing people, wrote a status report. Fixed a silly with rsc producing random heap garbage in it's output, caught up with Krisztian Pinter. Out for dinner with the lads, before being kindly dropped back to the airport by Andras.

• Up early, train to airport chat with Vojtech, plane etc. to Budapest - wrote slides. Zsolt kindly gave me a lift to the office, caught up with Andras & Miklos. Presented to the SUSE / Hungarian sales team - a great set of guys to get your LibreOffice / NOWS / any support from. Out for a fine dinner with A. & M., and back to A's home for some mail chew & sleep.

• Up early, intense music practise with the older babes for their exam today. Built ESC bug stats, back to calc hackery. Got some demos going for Thursday. Bible study with Dave in the evening.

• Up early, mail chew. Did some fruitful digging through the calc core - lots of interesting stuff there, got working on some grouping optimisations; plugged away most of the day at that.
• Steve over in the evening to have (his) Windows 7 installed: Linux "too technical" - meaning he couldn't install Windows software easily: fair enough. Worked late.

• Up late, off to NCC, did the kids work downstairs - which was fun, great to meet some of the new people in the Church. Home for a fine roast beef + yorkshire pudding lunch. Tidied up.
• Read the Economist, some house prettification, significantly cleaned up the workshop with a new tool-rack; mended H's bedside reading lamp with a new (wooden) grip.

• Up earlyish; drove into Cambridge, bus from the park & ride; took the whole family to the Cambridge Science Festival which was fantastic as normal. Went with Helena, James & Rose, note to self: don't mention any side-effects of a medication for which your friend is the corporate a lawyer (created an un-necessary trip to work to log it at the weekend).
• Great to see Simon Scott and family there enjoying things, meet some Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, see a series of amazing experiments, and simply extraordinary detail on things like ATP synthase - self assembling electro-mechanical machines: your body has it all by the billion.
• Lunch at Pizza Express, back for more goodness; home in the evening, babes to bed; watched the midwife serial of the day.

• Quick mail chew, dug at PDF oddness. Back to style chasing, plugged away at the brokenness, re-factoring here and there - eventually got something I'm happier with. Worked late. Bed early.

• Dug through mail, poked at styles some more - wrote a unit test to get my head around the problems. Meetings: Team, ESC etc. back to styles, finally removed all the */prj/build.lst relics. More scratch hacking with H. and N. in the evening.
• Nice interview from Jon at ArsTechnica on LibreOffice / Android glory hounds / GSOC students apply within.

• Up early, chewed mail, wedged my kernel thrice with oprofile before giving up - hmm. Chewed at a particularly annoying issue around styles. Couple of interviews. Worked late chasing a regression.

• Up early, chewed mail; thrilled to see that an awesome member of our community: David Ostrovsky has fixed up my somewhat lame library dependency graphing tool and turned it into a cleaner module graph (modules can contain several libraries). That starts to look beautiful, and useful for learning the structure of the code (thanks David):
• Sync. with Kendy, built ESC bug stats, wrote a LXF column. Merged Jack's liblibreoffice work to master and did some testing, knocked up some sample code, partner call.
• Lydia over for dinner, Bible study with Dave in the evening.

• Up early, mail chew, more mail chew - what a day; tons of patches going in over the weekend - most encouraging. Fixed an impress remote bug.
• Christian published the lovely (now sub-titled) video created by my lovely wife on how to setup the Android Remote for LibreOffice 4.0.1, checkout the howto page, and/or the video:
• Plugged away at some code reading & design, feeling rather groggy, some caulking, cutting up of scrap firewood, bed early.

• Up earlyish; breakfast - off to church at St Peter & St. Paul's - met Sandy Millar there in passing, what a parishoner to have. Back for lunch.
• Packed sofa & two chairs into the van, drove them home, and mavouevered them variously on-end, on M's skateboard. Took an older sofa to Maria's, dropped the van back. Home, tea, put babes to bed, sleep.

• Up lateish, breakfast, hired a van and drove to Bruce & Anne's lousy weather - played 'scratch' with H. and N. to much excitement in the afternoon (a great programming / learning environment). More applied slugging indoors, fine food, rest.

• Up early, mail chew, misc. analysis, patch review etc. Installed openSUSE 12.3 on Steve's laptop in the evening - after he had got to the end of his tether with Windows 8 and managed to burn some recovery-DVDs. It seems that even the UEFI BIOS managed to boot Linux if there truly was nothing else on the machine; good. Had to switch to GNOME / fallback-mode to avoid 3D driver bugs (to be filed).

• To school to accompany M. in the music assembly, back; mail chew. Meetings all afternoon as normal, team, ESC, Vojtech. Worked late.

• Mail chew; dug around at module deps some more, rather addictive producing pretty graphs, will have to drop it now. master's 'make dump-deps' produces graphviz output by using the new gnumake work that renders: There are some interesting things to note here:
  • The bottom is very wide - tons of pieces of code depend only on cppuhelper (and usually some external libraries which are elided in the graph); that means there are a good number of 'pure' UNO components in use. Naturally there are lots of run-time dependencies on this lot, but they are broken by UNO interfaces.
  • Looking a little higher up, some components use 'comphelper' - a richer set of UNO component helpers also provides enough for another large set of libraries.
  • While the picture is a little crazy - many of these libraries being required nearly permanently, gnumake also enables a 'merged-lib' mode of building where we compact very many of these libraries into a single object.
  • There is a lot of nice prettification possible though for anyone interested in a little hacking (code) and no doubt some debugging of perl.
• Booked a flight to speak at a ComputerWorld conference in Hungary 21st March. Good to get 4.0.1 out with 120+ bug fixes and more - including some great CMIS and Android Remote improvements.
• Picked M. up from Beavers - her first time; cell group in the evening.

• Up early; mail chew, fixed a nasty with PNG reading, built ESC bug stats etc. Jack Leigh came over for lunch, poked at some prototype liblibreoffice pieces together during the afternoon.
• Worked late; by playing with custom runs of make, encouraged it to spit out enough data to turn into a nice (prototype) graphvis dump of our current (minimal) module inter-dependencies for the soffice.bin executable at least; good.

• Up early, mail chew, crunched some stats, reviewed and merged lots of patches queued over the weekend. Poked Richard's copy-left-next project which looks rather interesting.
• Ciaran over in the evening, while J. had a meeting.

• Off to NCC, band practise; played; Tony spoke. Back for a roast chicken lunch. Out into Cambridge to visit Grace Church - and to see what they're up to. Accidentally crashed their 1st year anniversary service + meal; had a great time.
• Intrigued to see the results of ABS treatment with Acetone vapour, I wonder if there is an equivalent PLA solvent to avoid the horror ABS smell / warping issues.
• Back to put babes to bed; spent time piecing together Cambridge school catchement areas on a map.

• Up late; more house tidying, spent a while wielding the polyfilla at every available imperfection in the plaster-work while E. and M. went to a party with J. Lunch. Much applied slugging in the afternoon.

• It feels like there ought to be more days in February. Mail chew, read and tested dictionaries and spell-checkers variously. Misc. patch review. Out into Cambridge to visit a consultant - positive meeting.
• Dug through conferences and travel opportunities variously.

• Up early, fixed a dependency issue, hired a van for next weekend, more code analytics.
• Really thrilled to see the final commit killing our horrible, legacy, internal dmake - thus completing the migration to gnumake - Bjoern wrote a lovely blog entry about it - well worth a read. I particularly would love to call out those guys who did the bulk of the heavy-lifting: Bjoern Michaelsen, David Tardon, Peter Foley, Norbert Thiebaud, Michael Stahl, Matus Kukan, Tor Lillqvist, Stephan Bergmann, Lubos Lunak, Caolan McNamara, Mathias Bauer, Jan Holesovsky, Andras Timar, David Ostrovsky, Hans-Joachim Lankenau and more - particularly those who worked hard right to the end to finally rip out out custom dmake. Now git master is built by a single make process with precise dependencies; modulo the odd bug still being ironed out - a happy day.
• Team meeting, ESC call, Vojtech's staff; early dinner - out to a parents' talk about key-stage 2 SATS.

• Up early, misc. code cleanup, patch review, tool writing, chat with JRB. Out to cell group in the evening.

• Up early; mail chew, much of the morning reviewing last minute fixes in gerrit. Lunch. Built ESC bug stats, poked at bug lists, did some coverity fixing to stay sane; filed a few more easy hacks in passing.
• Robert over for the evening, lovely to see him. Enjoyed Dave's company as well by the fire. Up rather late.

• Up early; mail chew, patch review for 4.0.1 rc2; mail chew and admin. Lunch. Poked at a couple of regressions, lots of string unwinding, eventually nailed one after dinner.

• Up lateish, off to NCC, Claire speaking. Home for a meal with Dave & Linda, misc. slugging with babes - tidying of house and better sealing of doors / windows. Read stories to babes, bed early.

• Up early; breakfast with Sue & Clive, played games with Adam & James, pottered about variously; packed everyone into the car and home for lunch. Tidied the house, poly-filler'ing action of various places. Emily over to play with N. and for dinner watched LOTR #3.2. Watched how-to-cut-womens-hair videos on the web to up my game, adopted a more innovative approach for J. with reasonable results.

• Up early; mail chew, setup this afternoon's trip to Chris & Lucas' Firefox for Android talk tonight in London - should be fun.
• Plugged away at E-mail, admin, interspersed with a few coverity bits; finally filed my expenses. Train to London; caught up with Chris, Lucas, Bjoern, Alp Toker (!) and all manner of other cool kids hanging out at the Mozilla space. Back to Princes Risborough late - picked up by Clive & J. bed.

• Up earlyish; call with Fridrich, Thorsten; mail chew. After a rather badly cited chunk in my FOSDEM talk on the critical importance of culture, and it's change in China from C18th until today there is a nice quote in The Economist this week about the staggering export-lead economy in China.

  ... "We posess all things," The Qianlong Emperor boasted to British visitors in 1793, and "set no value on objects strange and ingenious.". It is therefore, remarkable that China last year eclipse America as the world's biggest trader ... The Qianlong emperor claimed, somewhat optimistically, that his dynasty's "majestic virtue" had penetrated every country under heaven. China's exporters and importers have now accomplished exactly that.

• Calls: Team, ESC, Vojtech's staff, mail chew, bug poking; chat with Rene. Dave & Emily over for dinner, up late talking with them.

• Up early; out with J. and the babes into town to the market; tried to find cheap shoes for H. how do children manage to walk through the bottom / sides of their shoes so quickly ? Home to play an ancient plastic ice-hockey game en-masse. Lunch.
• Mail chew, partner call; fixed an annoying dictionary bugs; board call; packed car and drove home, bed late.

• Up early; more review / fix merging against the deadline for 4.0.1 rc1. More remote debugging - seems like a nasty hang in shutdown. Fun. Built ESC bug stats. Booked holiday - afternoon off at the Royal Horticultural Society place in Harrowgate - nice, a relaxing evening.

• Up early; to work - avoided mail, worked instead on bluetooth debugging - re-wrote the code to use raw dbus instead of dbus-glib; cleaned a ton of threading bits up, switched to a polling (glib) mainloop in a thread. Fixed dynamic enable / disable of bluetooth, suspend and resume, etc.
• Break for swimming in the afternoon at Sandra's, nice to see Father's bee-keeping stands nearing readiness for some hives. Home, worked through the evening on mail, and Linux / bluetooth fixing. Tried some remote debugging of a guy with odd startup issues, sync. with Matus.

• Up earlyish, pray meeting & breakfast at church; helped J. with the kids work, out to Emily & Dave's for a fine meal & fun with the kids. Home, finished packing, J. drove us to Knaesborough, unpacked, babes to bed, caught up with Mum & Dad.

• Sleep, restrained myself from hacking, tidying up. Took E. to her friend Hannah's pirate themed birthday-party at Church; fun. Back for a movie - some Princess thing; dinner, put babes to bed - watched LOTR #3 part 1 with H. and N.; bed.

• Up early, mail chew, bug review, wrote status report. Built some stats, ran some profiles; more mail chew. Sync. with Tor. Misc. planning.
• Steve Maddox over in the evening to try to install Linux on his brand new laptop: "anything but Windows 8 - it's so awful", as a happy (Nokia) Windows Phone 8(?) user (wow they do exist), that's quite an attitude. Attempted to install Linux - discovered holding down 'Esc' is the new fashion for BIOS triggers, disabled UEFI secure mode, managed to boot Linux from USB DVD (with KMS disabled), first major problem: the partition table. The pre-install uses GPT, and all four of the bootable base partitions are occupied by tiny partitions of dubious utility: a UEFI one, a WINREC one, another tiny one, and something else. That makes getting a boot-loader into somewhere addressible a problem. Eventually trashed the WINREC one for /boot. After more failures installed a MBR loader, a loader in each partition etc. Still no joy - almost whatever you do it boots windows. Owing to the KMS issue - unhappy with more aggressive action to trash Windows 8 until am sure that X / GL etc. will be happy on the device - sad: the combination of sub-optimal out-of-the-box graphics, UEFI and a crammed partition table defeated me. Created a beautiful bootable USB key instead - works fine on other hardware, but hits some immediate black-screen-on-early-boot issue with this machine even with all UEFI security off: miraculous. Encouraged Steve to return to the (nameless) vendor's support helpline and make their UEFI implementation really pay from a support perspective. Pleased nevertheless to see he already had LibreOffice installed and working nicely on his Windows 8.

• Mail chew, reviewed a nice startup speedup patch from Matus, chewed through the incoming patch queue - always encouraging to see so much work coming in, much of it overnight. Lunch with J. - it turns out I got a heart-shaped jam tart for Valentines day - fun.
• Hacked happily away at dwarfprofile with Mark - trying to persuade KCachegrind of the right percentages of this and that - some interesting numbers - kindly shaken out of the fun by Norbert, ESC call, Vojtech's staff. Chat with Charles, sync. with Guy. Lots more mail, patch review etc.
• Up late spending time with J. watching this and that and talking; what a lovely creature she is.

• Up early; lots of mail chew, patch review; call with Vojtech. It seems there are fixes going into 4.0.1 like crazy - eg. Tor fixed Windows bluetooth among many other bugs. Poked at some profiles, fixed a number of bugs. Quick interview.
• Worked late; exciting work from Mark on dwarf based size profiling - poked misc. issues; somehow the urgent-todo ever groweth.

• Up early, mail chew - used bing for the first time in months to be able to cut/paste URLs (without extensive mangling) from the search results. Dug away at de-mangling bluetooth pieces at length. Built ESC bug stats, 4.0 bringing a good few more reports, interesting.
• Dug at synchronous word-count as a bane of writer document loading performance, with some success. Lydia & Janice over for dinner - fine pancakes, Dave over - enjoyed some time together.

• Up early, David Minton around to do some fixing of our wet-room; it turns out that not using cement-board to box in a soil pipe was not the best idea: hopefully that will now be fixed.
• Bit of a crazy inbox, a good number of German comment translation patches via gerrit (thanks guys), a slew of twitter re-tweeting from our release, a number of (rare) un-solicited thank-you E-mails; encouraging.
• My FOSDEM talk now has a video up-loaded: Cleaning and re-factoring a giant code-base thanks to the FOSDEM team; a precursor talk to it at Badar (in Saudi Arabia) with the KACST guys is here with an unusual appearance of a tie. Even better than me rambling - after a bit of cleanup the slides from our Dev Room are available - with tons of great content in small chunks from many key LibreOffice developers.
• Sync. with Matus; lunch. Muktware published another FOSDEM interview around LibreOffice on Android.
• Plugged away at mail, and bits of code / patch review. Dinner, Nicki came over, filed a few more easy hacks idly.

• Out to NCC, Tony preaching on 40 acts though lent. Lunch in the car, and picked up H. from her GenR8 event - which seemed like lots of fun. Home more house de-cluttering, early dinner, babes (particuarly H.) to bed early; Gordon sermon, sleep early.

• Up earlyish; read stories to babes, tidied up, J. went shopping, pottered around the workshop trying to tidy up & throw out unused / obsolete stuff. Lunch, walked M. to a party while J. took E. and N. to another party (the social schedule gets more hectic), back for a coffee with Chris Brighty. Poked mail briefly, stories with babes in the evening. Vacuous TV-iplaying, bed.

• Up early; walked babes to school. Pleased to see the new website wrapper as kindly worked on by Camille Moulin and the great guys at AlterWay - thanks for the support, and for Charles Schultz' organisation work.
• Spent a little while knocking up a wiki page with some tips on getting the Impress Remote to work nicely for you; we're still ironing out a number of wrinkles there for 4.0.1.
• Lunch with Julia, added an iPhone remote to the LibreOffice GSOC Ideas page, and updated the sexiness of the Firebird database backend, I'd love to have a student to work on that.
• H. out to a GenR8 overnight camp in Cambridge, picked up N. from Friday-club, put everyone to bed.

• Up early; mail chew, admin bits and cleanup from travel. Thrilled to see LibreOffice 4.0 released. Normally on such releases I try to credit people who have done some great work that people may not notice - of course, I just pushed a load of slides from FOSDEM with much of that information in them already. Having said that there are a few people I didn't manage to call out there that do very diverse and excellent work - one is Takeshi Abe whose work cleaning the code-base is a constant encouragement. Beyond that it serves only to remind people that 4.0.0 is a point-zero release for early adopters to try out where we're at: as such reading the release notes fine print makes sense. Similarly 4.0.1 is due to code freeze in around a week, (cf. the schedule), and ship in around three weeks from now with more fixes.
• Lunch with the wife; more mail backlogging - pleased that after an initial machine transfer / outage the download site is still up. Call with Simon, dinner with the family, stories, pleasant sync. with David Mansergh, bed earlyish.

• Up early, dispatched babes to school; pulled mail, off to Addenbrooks for some lung tests. Home for lunch, interview. Really pleased to see Tomáš Sedláček speaking to the RSA - still really enjoying his "The Economics of Good and Evil". Plugged away at mail, and 4.0 release issues until late.

• Up early, mail chew, built ESC bug stats, wrote an LXF column about the extremely positive changes ongoing for GNOME 3.8. Pushed a queued up fix. Lunch. Lots of mail, admin, interspersed with interviews until late. Lydia & Janice over for dinner - nice to see them.

• Up rather early, breakfast, packed, to the Eurostar. A multiple hour wait for trains that have no electricity to get from the Depot to the station - hey ho; extended waiting. Eventually set off, finally arrived, more trains, read variously.
• Home to the bosom of the family - there is something extremely pleasant about being at home - lovely to see a whole host of lovely girls again, played, read stories, tea, bed, etc. lovely. Somewhen J. sold a house while I was away - which is great too.

• Early to rise; breakfast with Vuntz and Gerv; Taxi with Kami to the venue. Chatted to the fourty+ attendees in the LibreOffice dev-room for the first 9am talk (wow) while Italo arrived; knocked up some easy-hacks slideware; Markus fixed my Eclipse / Android app nasty.
• Enjoyed a series of rather fine talks - with so much to say, many of the slots were only 20mins long - though perhaps that makes for a rather engaging format ? Enjoyed Stephan's longer talk on UNO type representation re-working and the curious questions.
• More slideware prep; bite to eat, off to talk about re-factoring huge code-bases with community help. Encouraged that Peter Baumgarten a new volunteer from our Munich hack-fest was stuck into the FOSDEM recording team. Slides (hybrid PDF) here:
• Caught up with Italo, got the end of Vuntz' GNOME 3.0 talk; back for some hallway trackery outside the dev-room; cleaning up the booth etc.
• Out for a LibreOffice celebratory meal with honoured guests of Mark Wielard, and Phil Muldoon his Welsh, gdb hacking co-worker at Kasbah - fine Morrocan food. Back to bed earlyish.

• Up lateish, arrived at the venue with Cat to discover a wonder-booth had been setup already, with posters stickers, demo machines, more old friends and Walmart "crushed by falling stack of box" volumes of T-shirts and Hoodies. Spent time distributing stickers, catching up with old friends, taking donations, handing out Hoodies to many of those who have contributed so much to LibreOffice; really fun.
• Snatched late snack lunch with Markus, wandered the halls briefly. More booth fun ( Hoodie / T-shirt supplies running low already ) until close. Piled into a bus with the lads somehow, curious conversation; hotel, mail chew and off to a (full despite reservation) Volle Gas, located a Pizza place nearby instead, food, tired -> bed.

• Slept fitfully; watched some terrible children's Dracula movie from Sony - truly dire. Worked on slideware, arrived, switched planes, more slide hackery, etc. Attempted sleep on the second plane from Abu Dhabi, no joy. Train and walk to Grand Place - somewhat woozy.
• Brief freshening action; call with Ralf, taxi to the GNOME AB meeting - good to see lots of familiar faces, and encouraging progress in the GNOME-world it seems. On to the foundations dinner - fun to catch up with Jeremy, Bradley, Gerv, Cat, Loic, Richard, Pam, Karen, Simon, David, and ever so many other bastions of the free-software world.
• On to try to locate the rest of the team at the Delerium cafe; note-to-self: wearing a laptop/backpack to that event is a disaster for threading nibly through the crush. Bailed out to La Morte Subite with a set of LibreOffice hackers + Federico. Bed at 4am.

• To the conference, enjoyed Alex's talk on the Raspberry Pi, lots of good stuff going on there in education: particularly inspired by the analogy of children needing Physics / Chemisty / Biology to understand how the world works re-applied to a world packed with technological gizmos and hence the need to have some real understanding of Computers beyond mindless word-processing skills.
• Lunch with Neil Brown, lots of interesting people around; enjoyed an open-source firmware talk: what fun there is under the hood. Interesting Ceph talk too. Bid 'bye to those I could find; taxi to the airport, starting the treck back to FOSDEM.
• Flight to Melbourne, found power and an awesome internet connection (perhaps due to not having a conference-full of heavy users next to me). Started sketching / prodding at my FOSDEM / re-factoring talk - questing for bones to put some flesh onto.
• Chatted to a couple of passing girls touring the world - one of them rescued from a grisly fate by the other from some drugged/spiked drink in Thailand. Onto the flight - uncommonly delighted by The Economics of Good and Evil - a wonderful Czech author indeed - ideas are such interesting things.
• Laptop power on the flight: nice; on with slideware. Slept a little somehow - during an extra-long night.

• Up; poked mail & slides. Out to Dave Jones' talk on the trinity fuzz tester: he had a great demo fuzzing user-space using the 'execve' syscall passed tons of random junk instead of parameters - it was good to see 'cp' crash but libreoffice start fine; interesting tool.
• My ongoing general disapointment with Anti-Virus software in general got another data-point: ClamAV claiming that wordml2ooo_draw.xsl contains credit card numbers. The normal handling of this sort of thing is to white-list some specific 'credit card' numbers - leaving a barrel of fun for the next person who will tweak the co-ordinates.
• Enjoyed Sarah Sharp's USB talk - what a bus-load of device-specific failure; most internal mouse/keyboard are I2C to avoid the USB power-drain. Quick sandwich for lunch; gave my LibreOffice talk.
• Met Phil Robb after a nice UEFI talk, caught up with Dirk, fixed a few more impress remote bugs; back to the hotel for some mail chew; pizza, call with J. Read Markus' thought provoking blog on copy-left licensing. Bed.

• Up lateish; pleased to see a lemon tree outside the windows. Dug at fixing some sdremote deadlocks. Poked at slideware; mail chew: hmm. Wrote up some distro / packaging pieces on LibreOffice; off to the venue - caught up with a lot of old friends; enjoyed a talk or two. Gave my talks on governance and packaging, back to the hall. Bus to a fine rotating restaurant for a dinner with lots of fine chaps. Got an interesting pointer to another meaning of ISV - apparently a very liberally licensed (good) translation.

• Quick breakfast, packed, out for a quick lunch; then onto Taronga Zoo, enjoyed the sights and animatronic dinosaurs - it's an incredible location - despite the 15cm of rain doing it's best to arrive in a hurry. Dropped at the airport, and waited for a flight to Canberra interminably delayed; eventually hit the 11pm flight curfew - but our small turbo-prop managed to get through. Eventually arrived in Canberra and met up with Tim Serong, sorted out a room; bed v. late.

• Up early, flight to Sydney - picked up by Richard; home to see Erica & meet Alice; lovely to catch up with them after a decade. Out to a party with Alice - talked to lots of interesting parents.
• Back, chatted, Richard cooked a fine dinner; talked until late - good company.

• Up early; quick breakfast and out to sing at naturalisation service - good fun, everyone gets a plant it seems. Dropped Tom at the beach, coffee with Sue, Brian & Auntie. Back for lunch.
• Out to Dunalley to marvel at the burned buildings and forests, lots of chimneys left, and some houses burned out next to others left unscathed: a spiritual lesson somewhere there. Picked up a pizza and headed to Mark's to admire his fine house. Back to bed.

• Up rather late; out to see Esther, then down to Dover to see Carol & Peter for lunch, drove back via a scenic route - and a fine fish & chip dinner at a floating restaurant.
• Mail chew to try to keep up - really pleased to read Caolan's excellent .src to .ui file conversion documentation. Worked lateish, chat with Thorsten & co.

• Breakfast together, bid 'bye to Kerry, Sarah & Liam - into town with Gerd, skybus to the airport. Mail chew on the plane. Collected by Sylvia & Rolf. Off to their home for lunch. Nice to catch up, out to see Esther on the way to a fun choir practise with a number of interesting friends of the Berners in the evening. Somewhat comic to sing some rather nationalistic Australian anthems. Back to bed.

• Up lateish rested; hopefully will get the body clock to like Australia quickly. Breakfast, played with Liam, read stories to Sarah for a while, enjoyed chatting with Kerry; fun. Bit of mail chew around lunch.
• Out for a brief visit to a nearby family-friendly farm with the babes; balancing along fences and admiring animals, fun. Home to catch up with Gerd, spent a lovely evening together talking until late at night.

• Another overnight flight with optional sleeping. Baggage made it too - always a bonus. Curious at the apparent death-dealing effects of (trigger[sic] warning) meritocracy, though Matthew's experience is/was fascinating & concerning - sadly I hadn't had the pleasure of working with this (great guy) then. Luckily in LibreOffice any formal meritocracy is a binary thing, and we're eager to include enthusiastic contributors into our formal voting membership: the rest is just normal human interaction - weighing the quality and veracity of data from various sources.
• Arrived, internal flight to Melbourne - caught up with my cousin Gerd at Southern Cross, train out to his home via a fine lunch, collecting Sarah & Liam, and a playground on the way to their home. Great to meet Kerry - a most enjoyable afternoon and evening with them catching up, bed.

• Into the office by subway; spent some time chewing over misc. architectural pieces on the edge of my knowledge, X / kernel graphics / Wayland; development tips etc. Lunch & learn about LibreOffice for the office. Poked at some auto-fitting issues with Flex; bid a sad 'bye to the guys. Subway to the station - note to London / transport operators the Beijing subway costs 20 pence to go anywhere; and the airport express UKP 2.50 and appears less crowded at rush-hour despite existing in a city with 4-5x the population - how do they do that ?
• Sorted out a favour blocking a large corporate acquisition involving some rather old personal code of mine.
• Mail chew at the airport; met an interesting Korean travelling to Australia - J. and babes having a day to play, off school due to the snow - sad to miss that. Lots of mail chew on the plane - it's amazing the backlog of hard work going on in the team after only a few days of not watching mail interactively.

• Further touring of the town, this time by bus; lots of friendly people, some teaching, another fine meal; fatal mid-day sleep. Up late enjoying company & culture - somehow it's great to plunder the brains of an expat that loves Chinese & the Chinese. Learned a few more Chinese characters & their fascinating etymology. Bed.

• Up lateish, navigated the Beijing subway successfully for an hour to visit J&K. For all it's apparent confusing-ness it seems like a very clean, efficient, spacious and well signed system: modulo line six being so new that it didn't appear on the hotel map. Dead pleased by the in-tunnel sequential frame / animation strip that morphs into an advert as you move: neat.
• Lunch, and out for a lovely wander through a fine park, admired the scenery, and various ice-skating opportunities, learned some Chinese characters, and lots of interest about the Chinese culture. Fine food in the evening, a really lovely relaxing time.

• Somehow the day turned into Friday while I was working on slides; managed to grab a couple of hours of interrupted sleep somehow. Arrived in Beijing, nice attendant found me the hotel car, got there, freshened; out for lunch with the team (in the same building interestingly) with Felix & Yifan, and on to the office again in the same building (convenient). Slide prep, afternoon meeting.
• Quick dinner while chewing mail, in the hotel, slept like a dead thing.

• Up earlyish, checked out; kindly picked up by Ahmad & Isa, and taken through Riyadh, admired the fortress as stormed by King Abdul-Aziz' just before the 1st world war - starting the unification of Saudi Arabia. Out for a fine Lebanese lunch with our Indian team mates & bid a sad 'bye to all; and Isa dropped me at the airport.
• Chewed through more mail on the plane, poked Android demos - got fields rendering, but no embedded images still: strange.
• On a rather amazing Ethiad Airlines plane - even in coach-class every seat has a (British compatible!) power outlet, a USB socket, and an ethernet jack [wow]; Ethiad: enabling lan-parties in planes. Those extra hours of heavy-duty compilation not just battery-nursing are much appreciated.

• Up earlyish; drove to the office with Muhammad - meetings around Linux Desktop & O/S issues, good to meet new people. More code walk-throughs, hermenutical clues for reading the code, some technical overviews of the problem areas and specific individual bug chasing.
• Very last-minute talk construction, polishing, demo fixing, some horrible issues around slide copy/paste when out of space on the disk - eventually worked around. Arrived, got projecting sorted out and gave a talk; questions / discussion afterwards with a number of interesting guys, one of whom wanted Simon's pointers on Open Source Governance Benchmarking. Dinner with Abdulmajeed, back to the hotel to work until rather too late, built the ESC bug stats.

• Up lateish, kindly picked up by Mohammad and taken to be introduced to the senior guys at KACTS, then met up with the team and walked through both their fine bug fixing work, and the pending/ open set of interesting Arabic/LTR localisation issues. Lunch with Mohammad. Back for some code walk through / bug chasing action - plenty of interesting issues - fun.
• Back to the hotel - tried to sleep; mail chew instead - interested to read an interview with Keith about his pending movie Software Wars. Poked at demos, out for a lovely traditional dinner with Ibrahim and some friends from the OpenSource SIG. Back late - mail chew and slideware creation, call with the wife, bed late.

• Up early, breakfast, study, practise with the girls, prayed with and packed them off to school. Swept snow off the drive - snow ? should make a contrast to Saudi Arabia. Chewed weekend mail, poked bugs, call with JanW. Lunch with J. train to Heathrow. Admin on train, plane etc. Wonderful an under-booked flight, with four adjacent seats to sleep on - less than wonderful: a child that cries un-consolably all night, nearby; wow.

• Off to NCC, Tony spoke on Jesus as God's Son. Scooted home fast, E. going to a party with J. Lunch. Afternoon turned into something like a mini lan-party installing, and playing with the latest (suitable) Free-Software games up-stairs with the girls - fun. Tea, put babes to bed and read long stories.

• Up; N. out with friends for her party; played with small girls, made ham & egg sandwiches. A lovely party lunch, played a few games, watch High School Musical III with babes + Emily, bathed played with, read stories and put to bed. Out for a date with J. while Mary Rogers kindly sat - so lovely to have some time with just her.

• Up early; Naomi's birthday - present opening at breakfast; being eight she got her Linux laptop; fun. To work - mail chew, admin, slide creation; bug poking, crunched some stats. Chased a typically unpleasant mixed UNO, VCL lifecycle issue in impress most of the afternoon.
• Roast duck dinner for aformentioned birthday.

• Up early; mail chew, admin, slide creation; bug poking. Cleaned up some theme versioning pieces for Ruslan. Status report, team call, ESC call, bit of DWARF hacking.

• Up early, mail chew, poked at bugs, dwarf profiling etc. Booked travel back from FOSDEM. More patch review, code pointer extraction, DWARF poking. One of the nice things about doing all this fixing for the 4.0 release, is seeing the volume of fixes (since we're double reviewing them) flowing back into the 3.6 branch as we approach release. Board call, cell group in the evening.

• Back to work, a very extended mail chew; built ESC bug stats and initial agenda. Interested to see Alex's nice hack with Broadway to turn it into a multi-process server. LibreOffice's use-case is a bit different: requiring some authentication / multi-client wrapperage; but looks really good.
• Lunch, code review of Kendy's lovely Personas late-feature (screenshots #1 and #2) re-using another nice Mozilla feature for LibreOffice 4.0; it should be in 4.0.0 rc1 - due soon. Much more mail chew / column polish.
• Spent a while reading up on the DWARF debugging format; I'm eager to write a tool which will tell me: "why is this binary so big" - ie. which clever, in-lined, monster-construct/macro has bloated my binary to being 100Mb small, when it's only 10k lines of code. I think the answer should lie in an easy-to-find way in the debugging info - currently digging for it.
• Put babes to bed, dinner with Lydia. Chat with Mark about dwarf-ness, poked at setting up Naomi's laptop. Installed Windows 8 - didn't create on-line accounts etc. Horrific time starting anything - ran the store, got a beautiful blank grey screen labelled 'Store' - waited many minutes until HDD activity ceased; still a beautiful 'Store' screen with nothing in it, no errors, no warnings, no dialogs - the essence of minimal UI: but no apps either. Eventually right-clicked; got a poorly spaced/layed-out green drop-down toolbar 'Home' and 'Your apps' - selecting Home - returns one to the world-of-grey; Your apps has a 'Sign in to Windows Store' button - extraordinary. I suspect this (perhaps) caused by the 'Chat' app (for which I had a similar experience) having some modal dialog telling me I need to sign in - exiting and confirming that I don't want a Microsoft account in that made the Store come to life on return: hmm. Lots of spinning circle, waiting, agro etc. a poor scrolling experience, and the new widgets really un-polished: how to 'search' in the app-store is really un-clear. And all that in the time it takes to burn an openSUSE DVD. Turned UEFI off, interesting.

• Up early, breakfast - tended babes while J. went for a training day - a round of practises, creation of thank-you cards, out for skate-boarding / cycle practise: a reluctant E. getting the steering/balancing reflex sorted. Jacket potatoe lunch.
• Babes watched a DVD, while I started on some E-mail / LXF column. J. back - out into Cambridge for a hospital appointment - pleased the consultant had heard of LibreOffice. Dinner. Watched Four Lions - a somewhat quirky and sometimes amusing form of black comedy while J. had a meeting. Bed.

• Up earlyish; out to NCC, did the younger youth work with J. Back home for dinner with David - good to catch up with him. Sat by the fire; watch Enchanted - a rather lovely family film with the babes. Tea, put babes to bed, finished wiring up the workshop, chatted with J. by the fire - very amused by The Parable of the Ox. Listened to sermon from All-Souls.

• Up early, showed builder our wetroom tiling problems; poked at E-mail while J. went out. Set too bolting new vice to the workbench - mini fire while angle-grinding the head off a stainless steel bolt (a captive nut gone wrong); eventually got it firmly secured. Lunch.
• Skateboarding practise with M. then N. and H. in the street; whole family, team house tidying. Hannah, Nick & Joni over for dinner - up late enjoying their company.

• Up late, tidied workshop and fixed sorting bins to the wall. Passport arrived back; lunch - Laura & Olivier over. Into town to post post passport again for another visa, tried to get a new zipper (but couldn't), played in the playground for a while. Back.
• More pottering about, dinner, put babes to bed, watched District 9 with the wife, sleep.

• Up late; washing up, cleaning up breakfast mess; J. arrived with new hackers chair: tons of degrees of freedom, lots of money - but will it be comfortable ?
• Mail chew, casual poking at this & that. Trained M. on her skateboard (instruction safely from a position of total ignorance beyond watching a rather fine video tutorial) - some progress. Drilled a hole for an ethernet cable for J. - the WiFi revolution is a litany of dropped connections and broken drivers (as far as I can see), before discovering I don't have a long enough cable. Ordered N's birthday present & dealt with the bank. Dinner.
• Filed tax return for 2011/12 - how fun; stashed away the paperwork portion for another five+ years; at least it's possible on-line and reasonably easy once the numbers are obtained.

• Up early; packed the car, bid 'bye to M&D and Chris. Off to Auntie Nicki's - enjoyed some cheese biscuits and catch-up there before setting off for home. Lunch in the car; back, unpacked tried to get the house into some sort of order. Prodded E-mail for visa details. Dinner, watched LOTR with H. N, and J. censoring scary bits; Pramface, bed.

• Up late, measured up the base for a shed in the garden and pegged it out with Father. Skateboard assembly with M. and youtube watching of how to skate details starting with how to fall off.
• Lunch, followed by a quick trip to a duck-race down at the river, which seemed to be postponed. Walked back via the castle, and some exercise machines. Babes watched DVDs, while I poked at the roof trusses: plagued by tiny loft hatches - what can be done: free-body analysis, and reading of building-regs. Dinner, put babes to bed, read Just William - watched the Human Planet with the family in the evening.