Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
Collabora
Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and
services for whom I work.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on
the LibreOffice Planet news
feed.
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legacy html
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Up early for some Go-Ape goodness with H. in Thetford Forest.
Good fun, and nice to spend some time with just H. before her entry
into the world of upper school. Lunch, played in the playground, home.
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Took a day off with the family; mail chew in the morning.
Off to Anglesey Abbey for a
wander in the gardens, babes played cricket, hide & seek - with
Janine, George & Ben; Lee-Anne wandered around. Picnic.
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Mail chew, built the latest pieces of code, off into Cambridge;
profiled this and that; caught up with Tracie & the office team.
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Great to meet up and talk with Ben & Graham from Linux Voice - got a paper copy of
their magazine - and immediately got a solution for the Windows XP
PtoV migration I so badly need to do to have access to my legacy
testing environment on Linux; great stuff.
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More build, testing, marvelling at the awesome work done by
Markus, Tamas & Kendy. Mail catch up, partner call, TDF Board
meeting.
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Boggled at silver coated Ethernet cables:
one born every minute:
All audio cables are directional. The correct direction is
determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in
every AudioQuest audio cable. Arrows are clearly marked on the
connectors to ensure superior sound quality. For best results have
the arrow pointing in the direction of the flow of music. For example,
NAS to Router, Router to Network Player.
I have no idea how the engineers live with themselves.
-
Built ESC bug stats; turns out Thursday is a public holiday.
Great to see Andrzej's LibreOfficeKit
work for GSOC starting to bear fruit with a Gtk document viewer widget
underway - hopefully for GNOME Documents integration in due course;
exciting.
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Emily over & babes watched Tangled in the afternoon;
partner call in the evening.
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Worked the bank holiday; mail triage, breakfast, call with
Kendy, Tamas, Tor; rendering and import profiling. Worked late.
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Off to NCC, Tony presenting a rather sensible plan on how
to explore accomodating our growing church, at some length. Barbeque
lunch, slugged vigorously and watched a fly on the wall documentary
about waste water treatment; interesting. Bed early, dreaming of
sewerage.
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Mail chew, slogged away at overcoming misc. build problems
on Windows, after a lot of aggravation turned out I had some bogus
glew DLLs in my user directory; fixed up path generation issues
and suddenly the cppunit tests sprung to life.
-
Poked at some GL / event issue for Markus, merged an ODS
import performance fix, and ran some more profiling overnight.
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Booked the Eurostar for the Paris
Hackfest - 27th-28th of June; looking forward to it - it
should be fun.
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SOW review, filed an annoyance as an easy hack. Worked late.
-
Mail chew, contract work, lunch. ESC call, pleasant catch-up
with Chris Halls after a long break. Dinner, stories. Saw that Mat M
has made a great start
on a tool to Find
LibreOffice code from dialog strings which is really neat.
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Amazed at the World's smallest nano motor nonsense; have
they never heard of the amazing, self-assembling nano-electro-mechanical
machine that is ATP Synthase
and so polished there is almost no variation from bacteria to man.
I'll sound like an old bearded hacker: "it's all been done before &
better at that."
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Mail chew; found another 10% silly in ODS load-time thats
worth getting rid of quickly. Partner call. Up late hacking at
a fun parsing test.
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More calc ODS load performance prodding, found another
couple of sillies and plugged away at them. Partner call, catch up
with Philippe, chat with Florian & Sam. Bible study with Arun in
the evening.
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Battled mail left / right, worked through some tasks,
progress review call with Kendy & Markus, 2x team calls.
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Plugged away until late on Windows. Simply extraordinary
that Windows'
dlopen() call LoadLibrary
not only appears to have a 260 character path limit (which we
don't hit), but also a mystical, undocumented size limit based
on the contents of PATH. Staggering, and horrifyingly
awful not to be able to read the busted
mess in-question to try to figure out how to work around it.
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Prodded at some silly performance pieces in calc ODS
loading.
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Church for Hope's dedication service, home for a barbeque
lunch, snoozed in the sun in the garden with J. very relaxing.
Mended a broken swing; attacked babes with cold water. Amused
having removed my soaked T-shirt, to be told by M. that I was odd
because I didn't have any tattoes: o tempora! o mores!
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Off to Wicksteed Park with a set of girls to meet up
with Claire & Alan & their brood. Much fun swinging on
pirate ships, picnicing in the sun etc. Somehow managed to field
2x small, lost children weeping with no mothers in sight, and
packed them off to the staff / police - heart rending.
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Mail chew, and nearly endless contract review; lunch,
more dense verbiage chewing.
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Dropped babes at school; mail chew, train to London. Ran some
profiles of large file LibreOffice / ODS loading - we need to migrate
to the fastparser really. Met up with some old friends at Intel - good
to catch up; on to another meeting, home late.
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Up late, rather groggy from lack of sleep; there is some
irony that yesterday was the BBC's drive on "you should sleep
more". Mail chew - and catchup from a day out. Partner call,
TDF board call.
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Re-fitted the washing machine control electronics;
Fitted new motor and re-assembled the Dyson - finally
approaching the top of the household device energy peak
again.
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Up rather early, drove to Bristol; a series of interesting
OpenCL talks from various people; in particular great to hear about
SPIR
work - doing the hard/slow crunching where it is needed.
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Gave my talk; slides (as Hybrid PDF) here:
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Out for drinks afterwards with a great set of guys from
CPU, to GPU, to FPGA vendors. Drove home exceedingly late for
several hours.
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Mail chew, checked and pushed the i18npool speedup that
should make mixed Asian text input snappier in 4.3. Team meetings
variously. Drove to Oxford to meet Robert, as a way-point to Bristol
for IWOCL.
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NCC: Ben & Miriam speaking on their work abroad -
interesting. Home for lunch with Arun, Henna, Nigel & Naomi,
fun. DVD later, quick tea, out for a drink with Ben, Mike &
Nate in the evening - sleep.
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Up lateish; eggs for breakfast, slugged with the babes.
Lunch, out to see Hannah, Nick & Joni - had a fine wander
around Reach, cakes, back to our house for home-made Pizza.
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Mail chew, admin backlog catchup; chased some bugs, dug at a
performance issue.
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Interested to see the Ubuntu Podcast Bjoern and I were
interviewd in posted; some LibreOffice fodder there.
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Walked babes to school, and enjoyed M's Ancient Greeks
assembly. Mail chew, partner call, mail production. Started work
on an 'infinite monkeys' regression test: find buttons in the UI
and press them, type random text into boxes we find, spew events
left and right etc. Made a start at least - turns out I should have
learned to read asian languages if I wanted to understand random
UCS2 words.
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ESC call; wrote up minutes; worked late.
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Washing machine continuing to wash without making enough
noise (like the startling absence of noise in the Prius - I feel
that a 1k RPM spin should make significant noise - perhaps we
should shake the wall & floor electronically).
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Mail chew, built ESC bug stats & agenda - looks like
we lost a few MABs as 4.1 reached end of life; good.
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Great to see the Hexus
write-up of the great work done by the LibreOffice team from
Collabora / MCW / AMD team on Calc / OpenCL integration and core
re-factoring.
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Got through the admin backlog to the point of boredom;
partner call, merged a few patches.
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Prius+ 12V battery flat - hmm, another instance of Toyota's
preferred (semi-audible) warning noises on exit ? or something else?
Set too charging it in situ.
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DirectLine generously paid both the recovery fees required to
get us home after an initial quibble; the moral - don't assume that
RAC recovery recovers you in case of an accident, and don't assume
that your insurer will pay a recovery fee they did not arrange.
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Mail chew; worked on a proposal; lunch. More slideware etc.
Partner call.
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Dinner, Arun over for bible study; re-plumbed in, and
connected washing machine - amazingly quiet spin: almost no noise
at all: extraordinary, no obvious leaks either.
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Mail chewage; catch-up with Julian. Plugged away at the
washing machine - cleaned the sleeves up and got the new bearings
tapped into place. Lunch, team meetings more mail. Machined some
new metal-work to replace the bits that are rusted through.
Worked until late re-assembling the beastie of a machine - turned
out I'd pulled off the vital spade from the heater element while
disassembling: urgh, eventually M4 tapped the protruding end of
it and bolted the connector on.
-
Off to NCC via picking up N's friend Cassidy. Simon spoke,
back for a big lunch with B & A. Managed to drive one bearing
out afterwards by cranking and grinding the driving rod; attacked
the other - no joy - an hour+ of attacking it together with
grinding wheels later - managed to crack it, and drive it out
too - phew.
-
Poked at the car with Bruce, played with the kids a bit,
tea, put babes to bed, sleep.
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Horrible night, lots of poor young people suffering on
the ward around the place, woken each hour to tend to E. but by
the morning E. getting out of bed and trotting around much more
confidently. Turned my back & found her on a tricycle (doh).
Discharged remarkably rapidly - good; home.
-
Rang round for a bearing puller, no joy until I got to
Bruce - who has four, booked them for tomorrow. David Mansergh
came round, enjoyed playing with the power-washer cleaning the
'scale' off the washing machine innards, and (inadvertently)
cleaning the patio underneath - what a machine. Bed early,
exhausted.
-
Merged a nice patch from Jeroen Nijhof to speedup the
German comment counting - hopefully we can get much more recent
and accurate stats there if we're lucky. Mail chew. Call with
Kendy. Tried whole set of friends and neighbours for a bearing
puller - no joy; will have to make one & weld it in I suspect.
-
Call from J. - E. broken her arm badly and off to hospital
in an Ambulance, operating theatre etc. Collected babes from school,
fed them & hot-footed it to catch up with a brave baby. Stayed
on the ward with her - tending variously to the needs; hourly
checks on fingers. Rather a nice ward.
-
Train to Weybridge with Tim, and back into central London
for a rather encouraging partner meeting; fun. Worked through paper
and legalese on the train back. Read stories, dinner, partner call
late.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/ and data/ directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,
Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),
or anyone else.
It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
