• All Saints in the morning, Pizza lunch, LOTR in the afternoon. Plugged away at soldering with H. for her Pi2 controlled light-strip.

• Took H. to practice the Organ and tried but failed to buy stamps. Spent some time trying to fix a VIVE controller, failing to pair - much dis-assembly later no closer; wish there was more sensible and detailed console output to allow real diagnostics. Neverending Story in the afternoon - not as good as it seemed 25 years ago.

• Started working through list of pending tasks. Sealed kitchen worktops - removing one item from the side, while J. dunged out E's clothing mountain.
• Out to see the Brighty's for a nice lunch, on to Ickworth for a walk.

• Drove to Aldeburgh for lunch with B&A, Sue, Clive and babes there too - played variously. Out for a walk along the beach to the Martello Tower, back for more slugging. Fairground candy grabber given to Anne for Christmas making an horrific racket during serial uses. Home; watched Extant with H.

• Watched the falling snow & chatted with M&D, much of the morning, lunch - bid 'bye to them. Played with babes, watched Les Miserable - a wonderful musical. Put babes to bed.

• Breakfast, R&A left early - lunch, out for a walk on the heath, H. played the organ for M&D, Chris, Cheryl & girls dropped in for a while - replaced H's malfunctioning ATX power-supply driving her LED light strip with Chris. Up late talking with M&D.

• Woken by babes at 8am top open stockings in our bed - joined by R&A&M, fun. Breakfast, out for family service in the morning.
• Back for a fine roast turkey lunch - B&A arrived - lots of fun, present opening - fell asleep and work up surrounded by the oldies: in something of a haze of tiredness.
• Played 'family row' with Tom & Becky in the US via the internet. Up late talking.

• Played with family in the morning; David over for lunch; out for a walk - All Saints crib service. Back for a jacket potatoe dinner, and games until late feeling increasingly unwell. Packing, wrapping etc.

• Up late, tidied the house. Lunch, out for a walk on the nearby dyke in the afternoon; Rob & Amelia arrived when we got back. Up talking to them.

• Parents arrived for a late breakfast; spent a chunk of time summarizing the commercial year for CP. for the team. Cut out a chunk of mouldy old silicone sealant & replaced it.

• Up early, mail chew, poked at this and that. Thrilled to see CODE 3.0 released with the start of our rich dialog support; update your docker / packages & get stuck in with hacking it.
• ESC call, posted the minutes. New floor fitted in upstairs toilet - bought some stainless screws, and a new seat for good measure.
• Admin, dinner, mail chew. Re-plumbed in the toilet & screwed it down (holes at the back only, hmm).

• Up rather early, into London for meetings, Ben and then Lunch & Tony - interesting people, fun times. Some IRC & E-mail bits.
• On the train opposite Rowan Williams on the way back, avoided disturbing him.

• Up early, mail chew. When I look at some UFO footage I see an out-of-focus insect inside a sensor - what is wrong with me ?
• Mail chew, sync. with Andras & Jona. Patch review, fun. Commercial call, filled paperwork, confirmed FOSDEM talk.

• Mail chew; sync. with Miklos, consulting call. Lunch. BoD call. Plugged at admin, sync with Kendy, partner call. Dinner, sync with Timar & Jona.

• Up late, trained N. in cleaning the shower trap; worked with H. on toilet plumbing. Watched National Lampoons Xmas - sadly more vulgar than I recall. Out to the All Saints Carol Service in the evening, very well attended - N. did a reading. Back for tea & bed.

• Up lateish, checked mail, house tidying left & right, Sue & Clive and babes, and B&A over for a lovely lunch together; really good to see them and to catch up. Out for a walk with J and S&C.
• Bid 'bye to all; slugged a bit, did some work on memory sharing in the lounge; took H. to Charlotte's party. Talked to lots of parents of friends.

• Out for a run with J. chewed mail, poked partners, estimations, customers worked on letter. Team call. Sync with Jona in the evening.

• Mail chew, sync with Kendy, amazed to read on slashdot : in 2013 ... that 14.7 billion people visited [PornHub] - obviously the aliens are watching us - but I didn't realize what they're watching.
• Looked at switching to clang for building LibreOffice - fed-up of wasting scarce CI horsepower just to fall over one of our increasingly awesome set of clang-based checking plugins. I have a soft spot for gcc: the FSF heritage, etc. despite them taking two years to review my first patch to it - but needs must. Discovered that icecream appears not to work with our clang plugins: bother.
• Call with Eloy, and a customer, admin. Lunch. ESC call, more admin. Poked some code with kendy late.

• Mail chew, call, sync with Jona. Pushed custom allocator pieces, poked at URL launching in online.
• Off to Ely Cathedral to play in the Soham Village College orchestra, packed cathedral (but not noticably warmer for it), and some great music.

• Mail chew. Built ESC stats, poked at ESC stats building to simplify some of the more annoying tweaks.
• Mended vive controller in the evening - the small rubber pad on the micro-switch moved - re-glued it into the right place & re-assembled. Lydia & Janice over.

• Mail chew, consulting call, mailed customers, worked through admin queue, customer call, dinner, sync. with Kendy, managed to finish my string dumper and analyze the ~64k UCS2 strings we allocate on startup, with ~1 million chars - so at least 3Mb of heap. Some gems in there, 6k copies of "en-US", 7k strings starting "com.sun.star.". Hopefully can use the string pointers to make sense of more apparently random chunks of memory that are un-shared in error.

• Fed and entertained small girls of various kinds, tried to get them to eat crumpets as well as playing in the snow (some bare-foot). Dispatched them to parents, packed instruments, cooked roast-potatoes, and more - and off to All Saints.
• Service; Max spoke on courage, faith, redemption and example of the four women in Luke's genealogy of Jesus. Church family Christmas dinner afterwards - lovely, All Saints 'got talent' featuring H' on the Organ, a quartet, and lots of other fun bits.
• Home; some slugging, watched LOTR #2.2 with the babes. Wrestled tired people to bed.

• House tidying action, took H. to practice the organ, brief shop afterwards. Home for lunch, got her RPI / LED light-ness sorted out with Elize.
• Friends & families arrived for parties, good to see Jan & Roman, Silver & Maria and Tania as well as the normal host of smaller girls. Various babies got to bed extraordinarily late.

• Took E. to school, mail, admin, catch-up, mail backlog processing. Booked FOSDEM Eurostar. Finally got annoyed enough with X crashing to file a bug.
• Dinner, larger three went ice skating; played with E. Bit of hacking, and some patch review - nice.

• Mail chew, re-built code, train into London for a customer meeting. Good to see Bob again, out for a fine Indian meal, enjoyed the company late into the evening, Thai dinner, trains home.
• John & Louise over in the evening, stayed up rather late catching up with John, fun.

• Sync with Dennis, collected data, admin, lunch. Customer call, more slideware work. Plugged away at calc bits & report writing until the small hours.

• Mail; admin. Lunch with J. Commercial call. Spent much of the day doing the things that are supposed to be quick & get done before you work on larger tasks - but somehow fill the time.
• Out to the Hopbine in Cambridge in the evening with J. for a lovely Collabora Christmas party, good to catch up with the local part of the team.

• Mail chew, consultancy call, synched with Dennis; admin: customer, partner contacts, variously. TDF board call.

• Up, NCC - played the violin - goodbye service as we leave the church, sad in many ways - 17 years of service there; moving on to All Saints for now.
• Home for lunch with Sandra & Lydia, played games & music with the family, out to practice the Organ with H. Read God's Smuggler to E. + babes in the evening. Watched Extant with J. before bed.

• Mail chew, Elize over to make christmas present with H. Played games variously, lunch. Out for a walk up the heath in the afternoon with the family, lovely. Home, movie, bed.

• Plugged away at memory sharing amidst admin bits. Found lots of likely looking pages and improve the loolmap tool significantly. Turns out allocating 1 byte with the internal LibO allocator gives you a minimum of 32bytes as we configure it. Hacked up a custom arena for Online pre-initialization.

• Mail chew patch review, bug pokeage, customer call.
• Pleased to hear from Tim Farron again.

• Up in the night; worked on un-shared page dumping. Back to bed, up to practice with the babes. Mail, call with Dennis.

• Mail chew, built ESC proto-agenda, started (early) on 6.0 under-the-hood stat building - merging 5.4 and 6.0 into one; admin.
• Spent some time looking at heap sharing in LibreOfficeKit after a pre-init; read pagemap docs and added support too loolmap to print bitmaps of your heap.
• Mike over for dinner & catch-up.

• Mail, status report, consultancy call. Caught up with Eloy, sync. with Andras. Lunch, plugged away at paperwork. Poked at writer page border rendering - something that's annoyed me for a while (before seeing the memory it can waste).

• Slept in, off to All Saints; Abraham from Christian Aid talking about their work to reduce maternal & infant mortality in rural Kenya, talked to Max. Home for pizza lunch.
• Played 'go' with H, re-strung her Velix blind too & re-fitted it; watched HP#2, removed the old table made from a door from her attic room; read story to N. - finishing Voyage to Venus; bed.

• Mail chew, pulled code to the laptop; reviewed patch, built profiling sheet in the car on the way to B&A's. Good to see them. Lunch, talked with Bruce in the afternoon, tea.
• Bit of memory profile reading and hackery in the car on the way home, sickening somehow.

• Took E. to school so J. could lie-in, ran home. Mail, partner call, mail. Submitted an Open Document Editors paper for FOSDEM18 (FOSDEM rocks - be there, or get a hard stare).
• Poked at a nasty UNO/SolarMutex deadlock for a customer; fun. Watched a movie with the babies, Lynn over in the evening for a bit.

The story so far

Two and a half years ago Collabora started to maintain LibreOffice in the Mac app store - checkout LibreOffice Vanilla: Fresh from the community to your Mac. This made it extremely easy and convenient to install LibreOffice on the Mac, and it is gratifying to see that around 365k users have indeed installed it.

As a company our raison d'etre is to drive the success of FLOSS, however in order to do that we need to raise funds to drive development. As such a major motivation here was to try to bring enough money into the Mac ecosystem that we could start to fix bugs, and address longer standing problems with the Mac - something everyone wants to see.

To try to achieve that we included a risque 'nag' dialog, that would encourage people to donate to The Document Foundation (TDF) - and also encourage them to buy Collabora Office on the Mac to help fund engineering work. This would show up on first-start, though we moved that to monthly, and remind Mac users that while so many contribute so much of far greater value than money to code, docs, l10n, QA, UX, and in many other ways, nevertheless the quickest & easiest way to make a small contribution if you're missing the skills is with a small donation to TDF, or failing that by buying a paid Collabora Office through the app-store.

Today's numbers

Each month we have on average 54 people purchasing Collabora Office for Mac for $10 (we get 70%), and around 10 donation page visits per month that we could track, TDF's average donation is around $10. So estimating this is around $380 per month of income for Collabora, and say $100 for TDF.

That doesn't sound too terrible, until you look at this two ways:

1. The cost to Collabora - of the up-front investment needed to get the Mac build sandboxed as well as ongoing costs to work around changes to the sandbox, as well as fixing nits that reviewers find each time we submit a new version. So far that cost between two and three times the income (at cost ) - so quite some loss. This explains why we have not been investing as we'd like to in keeping LibreOffice Vanilla up-to-date.
2. The cost to TDF - what cost you say ? they got $100 per month for nothing. Well yes, and no. TDF serves install sets at around 50k per day - that is around ~20 million per year. TDF's awesome donors gave around Eur 800k last year to drive its mission - so around Eur 4 cents each download (though user counts could be significantly greater). So from 12k downloads per month, we'd expect $485 in donations from this many Mac downloads, assuming an average generosity of Mac users.

So - this current situation seems to be a lose-lose for Collabora and TDF, with only Apple winning its 30% cut. That is far from ideal - we didn't go into business to lose money and to reduce TDF's income (even by 0.6%); so how can we fix this ? (ideally without going back to phase one: "collection of underpants" ?)

A more elegant plan for now

Moving ahead, as applications are distributed in app-stores, there will be a super-easy payment mechanism placed right next to the download button. What is the convenience of an app-store worth ? How much will people pay for getting & maintaining a signed LibreOffice Vanilla through an app-store ? Put another way - in the future it will be critical to understand what the market demand curve, and elasticity of demand is for just that convenience.

We've discussed this with The Document Foundations' Board of Directors (BoD) and they asked for a proposal on how best to deal with this problem. We proposed an experimental solution which they agreed, so we are today starting an experiment which will make the following changes:

• No more nag dialog - we ship an almost completely generic LibreOffice Vanilla, and subsequent Fresh releases - perhaps with a few earlier fixes.
• Charge money for the convenience of an app-store install. This interesting question is: what is convenience worth ? We'll have to find out - starting low, say Eur 2/user, and increasing from there ? will everyone click the link to download it for free from TDF (and donate there ?) or is auto-updating, something they like ?
• Make it super-abundantly clear that LibreOffice Vanilla is a pure convenience purchase - prominently link to and direct people who don't want to pay to use the free manual downloads, from TDF.
• We're also updating to the latest 5.4.3 version, plus we've fixed the most annoying bug around page orientation when printing.
• What happens to the money raised ? Clearly, we don't want TDF to lose out; so we will donate 10% of the price to them. So for Eur 2, that would be Eur 0.20 - five times the average donation. Apple get 30%, not ideal - but perhaps it goes to subsidize the cost of the hardware (or not). The rest will go to defraying existing Mac related costs, as well as Mac specific bug-fixing, and (ideally if it works out) feature development. Is that convenience worth Eur 2 ? or Eur 3 ? or more ? we'll be exploring the market demand curve for convenience in an upward direction over time.

The hope is that this approach provides a win-win, where we can finally invest more in fixing and improving LibreOffice on Macs, while also creating a template and valuable data we will share with TDF on how to deal with app-stores - it is entirely possible that app-stores will become the dominant mode of software delivery in future, so TDF needs to be prepared.

FAQ / comments ?

Why doesn't Collabora just do this for free forever ? - We do invest a lot in LibreOffice, but if we're going to do something loss making long term, it should probably be to drive the success of free platforms, not subsidising convenience for wealthy Mac owners.

Why doesn't TDF do this for free ? - I don't speak for TDF here, but the fundamental economics don't change by someone else doing the same work - it looks like a loss-making business subsidizing Mac owners' convenience at this scale for TDF too.

How does this work with the trademark ? - TDF have existing Trademark Policy for the LibreOffice trademark that this fits neatly into. Of course - we need to make it clear that we're not TDF, and fit the other criteria. Discussing this with the BoD it seems that TDF may want to do this themselves in future in a different way, and if they're distributing LibreOffice in a given app-store, the duplication is likely to cause confusion - which would not be ok. Fair enough for the future. For now, there is nothing special about Collabora's use of the trademark.

Why doesn't TDF charge instead ? - perhaps this makes sense in future, that's up to TDF. Practically, this would be a for-profit activity that would need to be done and accounted for separately in the Stiftung, it would be necessary to do the same work and publish & award tenders for the relevant development pieces. That's a lot of work and overhead for TDF, with an unclear benefit vs. this approach. It would also mean TDF going into business itself, which could be seen as impacting its vendor neutrality. Clearly I expect TDF to continue to provide Mac downloads for free from libreoffice.org, as normal, indefinitely.

How can I help translate the app-store page ? - clearly we'd love to have help and community input here. Mail me to get more details, and/or with your translation.

Why is your app-id com.collabora.libreoffice-free if is no longer free ? good question - glad you asked that - but it's hard to change and not really user-visible.

What makes improving Macs special ? - interestingly the Mac platform accounts for a large chunk of our high priority regressions, currently three vs. a total of eight. The majority of developers are comfortable with and work on Linux or Windows, and the vast majority of paying customers in the ecosystem are also on Windows or Linux. TDF has tried to improve things by - making Mac hardware more widely available, but thus far without a huge impact. We really don't want to get into a situation where it is hard to improve things through LibreOffice's platform abstraction due to an under-resourced platform.

Conclusion

We're going to see if charging for the convenience of the app-store can help to improve the LibreOffice on Mac situation by funding its development. It is an experiment - who knows - perhaps selling convenience could evolve into a way for FLOSS projects generally to fund development. Possibly TDF will do this themselves in the future , or could even put out the use of their brand in app-stores to tender for the highest bid / contribution mixture.

Perhaps you're a volunteer - and talk of optimizing donations, or income streams sticks in your throat - I get that too. Many of TDF's most valuable contributions are in the form of time - and not money, from our thousands of volunteer contributors; still - converting cash into code is something we love to do.

• Mail chew, chat with Marina, reviewed a pathaological conditional formatting case with Tor, lunch. Sync with Jona, Miklos, contract review.
• ESC call & posted minutes. Finally got around to unwinding the gitdm-config situation to my satistfaction, good.

• Mail chew; poked at online SSL ciphers configurability for a partner, several sales & partner calls.

• Mail, built ESC stats, sync with Dennis, pleased to see the calc threading work merged to master for 6.0, some more cleanup patches to come.
• Helped Shinnok unwind some alias confusion in our gitdm-config, monthly commercial call, catch-up with Philippe & Tracie.
• Profiled using perf using sudo perf record -e machine_clears.memory_ordering --call-graph dwarf -a and found a number of things to fix, fixed them - but still no significant concurrency improvements: somewhat irritating really.

• Mail chew, chat with Dennis, Consultancy call, partner sync. Lunch. Mended some blog entry time messups from the recent past. Mail, text hackery, sync with Jona, partner call.

• Band practice at NCC, service. Home for a roast lunch with Lydia, re-arranged H's room for carpet fitting. Out to collect N. from Curve-motion roller skating. Gordon sermon in the evening.

• Up earlyish, into London with H. on a trip to the Royal Observatory - stood on the meridian, admired various telescopes and other machinery for star-gazing. Enjoyed a Planetarium show on the Carrington event with lots of super-computer rendered plasma-ness. Out for a nice lunch at Cafe Rouge, fast Catermaran to the Tower and tube, train home - late.
• H. up late doing her History homework.

• Early morning partner call; J. under the weather. Caught up with Martin, customer call. Lunch, J. unwell, call. Collected E. from school.

• Mail chew, catchup with Jona, partner call, lunch with J. Chat with Tom, built code left & right. oreport crashes when it fails to read kernel symbols as a user.
• Read some memory profiles with Ash; interesting. Poked at ways of profiling for scalability bottlenecks, some nice blog and slides on perf - but still, working out what processor events to trace in order to find contended mutex's, or contended atomic references still puzzles me.
• Late night partner call.

• Mail chew, built ESC stats, estimation bits. Lunch with J. Chat with Jona, sync with Eike & team on calc threading merge.

• Mail chew, commercial team call, estimation, partner call, caught up with Robert.

• Mail chew, status report, consultancy call, partner calls, misc. admin, partner call in the evening.

• To All Saints for Rememberance Day; pizza lunch, took M. to a parade later, and H. to practice the organ. Back home, dunged out the perennial hair problem from a sink. Slugged, played 'go', attacked H's Velux roller-blind; the cords cut through their plastic fittings after a time - annoyingly.

• Lie in, poked at mail, picked up H. & took her into Cambridge for an Apprenticed themed Naomi B. party.

• Out for a run with J. Mail chew, sync with Andras. Mail chew, poked at a bit of headless theming code. Hannah & Nick over in the evening for an art class on tone with charcol.

• Lots of partner, customer, quote, pieces through the day. ESC call, posted minutes; Taxi'd babes a little in the evening.

• Mail chew, chat with Eric, poked at Calc, chat with Muhammed.
• Discovered the interesting Are you Sure? Chrome plugin:
  "Are you sure? is a simple extension to help you stay productive on the internet. Distracting sites can be fun, but it's too easy to just visit them without thinking. You can be in the middle of some important work and, before you know it, your fingers have betrayed you and you're looking at cat pictures again."
  Indeed. I love the 'my fingers betrayed me' characterization. If the secret to productivity is planning, and scheduling some tedious tasks before some fun ones, then finger-betrayal is the spanner that busts the scheme apart - unless it is included into the mix (perhaps): work before news etc.

• Mail; admin, built ESC stats, got lots of smaller tasks done; good, partner calls, one late into the evening.

• Mail chew, admin, status report, cleaned up the consultancy sales pipeline a little. Lunch. Lots of Hangouts these days - I hope it's just me, but with these small mobile-phone ear-buds, I find myself from time to time trying to insert the 3mm jack into my ear, that is when I'm not plugging it into a USB port by mistake without looking; hey ho.
• Played Call of the Starseed: Emberstone - in the evening, the graphics are fun, but gameplay is frustratingly constrained really - something like a 3D, slightly interactive movie really.

• Up; All Saints in the morning - baptism service, great talk(s). Back for lunch - out to practice the Organ with H. Julie over in the afternoon, played games, fish & chip dinner, read stories; watched P&R.

• Up lateish, cooked breakfast; worked in the car on the way to Sue & Clive's - good to see them, setup fireworks with Clive, caught up with Adrian & Georgina & the nephews / niece. Good bonfire, fine fireworks, excellent food. Home late.

• Walked E. to school, ran home; plugged away at remote debugging. Partner form filling, profile reading, call with Dennis.

• Mail chew, poked at some code with Dennis; customer call, Lunch. Poked at code variously; ESC call. Plugged away at more admin - some hacking, chat with Kendy.

• Mail chew, call with a friend; lunch. Catch up with Pranav & Kendy, sync. with Philippe, Jona. Time to do some typing.

• Early morning interviews, mail chew & admin left & right. Out to help run the kids games at a Light Party - why people appear to choose to celebrate the vile things in life, and not the victory over death and evil on All-Saints eve is unclear to me.
• Rather good hands-free doughnut-on-wool eating game, Pinata (shepherding a queue of kids away from the most dangerous spot: right behind the hitter), Pizza, movie, and more.

• Mail chew, status report, admin, lunch. Consultancy call, and catchup with Miklos. Customer cold-call, sync with Eloy & Jona.
• Julie over for dinner.

• To NCC, helped with the older kids work; home for a Pizza lunch. Played go with H. and M. variously - getting into it rather. Slugged in front of a movie in the afternoon, put babes to bed: Vernor Vinge short-stories for M. and playing Raspberry-Pi & colored light strips with H. nice.

• Off to see Bruce & Anne, fine lunch; out to walk along the beach the other side of Sizewell, good to chat with Bruce. Back for tea, some sandwiches & set off home again. Read stories in the evening.
• Watched Inside Llweyn Davis - rather underwhelmed for a Cohen Brothers film.

• Up early; out for a run with J. Chewed mail, dug through an strace, sync. with Kendy. Lunch. Sync with Dennis & Miklos, poked at profiles, admin, and more.

• Out to Fountains Abbey in the morning with M&D, attended a free stone-carving workshop - and spent some hours chipping away at blocks of limestone (apparently a low silicosis risk stone). Had a great time, and carved some nice lettering.
• Admired the extremely creative Joseph Hayton exhibition of our tutor's work - Monks growing out of the Abbey, and more.
• Home, a fine pasta lunch, packed and hacked in the car on the way back; with a stop for some chips; relaxed - read until late.

• Mail chew, out into York to see the National Train Museum, lots of fine trains, wandered through the shambols, bus back, sadly missing the nice electric busses both ways; home - caught up with work variously.

• Up lateish; got stuck into The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich by mistake - bother. Out for a walk into town with J. and M. Back for lunch, consulting call, mgmt call. Built ESC stats.

• Mail chew, admin, partner call; wrote status report. Sync with Eloy & Jona. TDF board call. Set off north to Knaesborough with the family.

• Up lateish, picked up H. and on to West Road, good to see Barry; but forgot violin to return to him. Clear teaching explaining the passage.
• Home for lunch, room painting action, N. and M. returned exhausted; tea, put them to bed early; painting action & reading Adrian Plass to H. and J.

• Up in the night with horrible neck pain; hmm, poked at an online bug in a curmudgeonly way - found a cut/paste coding horror & tried to fix it. Back to bed.
• Up at midday; breakfast - David arrived; J. and H. back from organ practice; set too painting H's room, cleared moss off the roof with E. Dinner, H. out to a murder-mystery sleep-over. Listened to A monk's tale with David by the fire; while E. and J. played smash-up.

• Mail chew; marketing / analytics training much of the day. Managed to get some admin done too.

• Off to Cambridge in the morning; caught up with Hannah, Traice, Julie, met Olivier, Jakob and more - lunch with the team. Chased admin bits. Mgmt meetings all afternoon, out for dinner in the evening.

• Up early; mail chew, admin bits, chat with Andras. Lunch. Sync with Kendy.

• Mail chew; bug poking; Commercial team call; built ESC agenda, showed a local young gamer: Bailey the VIVE, interesting to see his improved situational awareness - it never ceases to amaze me how normal people put a Vive on and look at a very limited field of the scene: perhaps 45 degrees (if that) - without prompting to 'look around'.

• Two lots of maths revision in the morning with H. and M. Mail catchup, started working through the backlog. Lunch, consultancy call. Read to babes in the evening.

• J. off to do the NCC kids work. Played with H. and N. variously, lunch, Chris over - and out to church in Histon, stayed for a meal afterwards. Back, read stories put babes to bed.

• Up rather early with Kendy; set off to St Peter's Basilica to have a look - arrived in good time 7:30 or so to find it closed for a service; bother. Got a Museum trip instead, the expensive 'tour' option horribly over-priced but interesting. Sad to see so much wealth, and focus on the art, and artists rather than what they're trying to say about their inestimably more interesting subjects. Sola Dei Gloria (as they say).
• Wandered around myself, curious at the various celebrations of syncretism on display. Lunch, back through the Sistine Chapel - hard to express how beautifuly rich and the colors are, on into St Peters - guilded, but not as gaudy as some.
• Train, bus, to the airport - RyanAir; poked at mail and the task backlog.

• Up earlyish, presented the great work we've been doing with South Eastern Health Trust:
• Various encouraging customer & partner meetings Out for ice-cream with some awesome French guys. Caught Ash's non-blocking socket talk and Armin's EMF+ bits.
• Great closing session - was an amazing conference, congrats to all who were involved! Out for dinner together at a Pizzaria near the Colosseum (named after the gigantic golden statue of Nero that used to be there apparently).
• Back to the flat, farewells, bed.

• Conference, lots of hallway-track goodness; positive CoC panel / discussion with Marina & Simon - good.
• Lunch with friends great to see Pranav's Dialog Tunneling talk; gave a talk on Online Unit Testing:
• Off to the hack-fest in the evening, fine food, good company, lovely.

• Enjoyed the introduction, and the staggering depth of history, and richness of the venue - very grateful to the City of Rome for hosting us.
• Massed board & MC & employees panel thing. gave my Collabora Opening keynote with some examples of the exciting thigns we've been up to for the last year:
• Lunch; and minuted a rather lengthy ESC meeting afterwards - with some ideas of where to go next in graphics & code cleanliness.
• Out for a pleasant social event in the evening in town with the conference.

• Up early, breakfast from the Termini Station & waited around - sending scouts to find the missing bus, collecting partners and Collaborans variously. Eventually found the bus, got to the Airsoft venue, and played a surprisingly fun team-game - lots to learn:
• Coach to a nice Italian restaurant for lunch, and on for a presentation (minus working projector sadly), still - good stuff.
• Back to Termini; and had an all-afternoon team meeting & brain-storming / planing session until late. Out for dinner together; talked until rather late, bed.

• Up, quick breakfast - Kendy & I tried to get Uber working to get us to the Hotel. Board meeting all day, board dinner until late.
• Back with Kendy to try to locate somewhere to sleep; thankfuly found Miklos & woke Andras to let us in; quested for (and found) the necessary extra bed in the end; phew.
• Worked until 3am polishing slides; tiring.

• NCC in the morning, helped with the older kids work with Uche. Home for a quick Pizza lunch with Julie. Finished packing, J. drove me to Stansted, Ryan-Air-ness to Rome; got gotcha'd by an overly-expensive bus into town - should cost Eur 1.50 for a std. bus ticket.
• Found Kendy, out for Pizza together; back to enjoy the free bottle of sparkling red & catch up until late.

• Slugging in the morning; into town later to get some organ practise with H. only to discover a day of quiet prayer in AllSaints going on: fair cop.
• Waited in Spec-Savers for an hour for a trivial repair-job on N's glasses - before discovering that we'd just been forgotten; hey ho.
• Home, some travel preparation; bit of hacking.

• J. out to counselling course; took E. to school & ran back. Sync. with Dennis, mail chew, slide-ware & stats, customer meeting; picked up E. from school; babes returned.
• Babes out for a Compassion bake-off competition evening, another customer call, chat with Philippe; mail chew.

• Mail chew; admin, more admin, sync with Tor, Dennis. Partner call, lunch. Interview with Lenny, gap, another interview.

• Blizard of E-mail & admin. Lunch. Call with Nico, admin and calls until late.

• Mail chew; built ESC stats, lunch; sync with Kohei. mgmt team call, reviewed Marketing CVs for our opening & setup interviews.
• Dinner; read stories, admin, setup interviews.

• Up rather early; prodded mail, wrote status report. Breakfast. BT engineer arrived to diagnose our line problems - not in the home; seemingly the wire to the exchange actually died: wow - tree roots, water ingress (the cables are underground) ? who can say.
• Lunch; more mail poking, consultancy call, sync with Tor. roadmap planning, chat with Bruce, bed exhaustedly.

• Up; packed random books, face-paint, sweets etc. NCC for kids work; home for a roast lunch, Martin & Marie-Jane, Talitha & Tirza over to share it. Chatted much of the afternoon. Tea, read stories to babes & put them to bed.

• Up, onto the roof to measure chimney pots for new covers, greased the angle weather-vane too. Lunch, out for a walk along the Dyke with the babes; back just in time to catch Nick Webb - enjoyed some tea & time together.
• Watched a somewhat reduced version of The Matrix in the evening with H. before noticing I'm on kids work tomorrow. Stayed up rather late planning games & events.

• Up early; out for a run; mail, partner sales call; Bruce & Anne over for lunch, sync with Eloy, lunch. Team call. Admin & accounting review.
• Lots of kids over for a Baptism Class evening meal, review. Watched High School Musical together, H. and N. had their friends over for a sleepover.

• Mail chew at length; smaller team call; sync. with Bruce.
• Continue to be amazed that Barnier insists that the ECJ continues to have jurisdiction in the UK. Theresa May's Florence speech said: It wouldn’t be right for one party’s court to have jurisdiction over the other. - which does seem transparently sensible; to argue the converse - that the British High Court should have jurisdiction over the ECJ in discussions of British National's rights in Europe would sound equally absurd.

• Endless admin, calls etc. Got a bit of hacking done in the afternoon on time based delta compression.

• Sync with Miklos, admin, mail, lunch. Consulting catch-up, sync with Tor, customer call.

• Practice with babes & packed them off to school. Mail chew, lots of admin; analyzed some GL logs, caught up with some of the conference E-mail backlog. Consultancy call, out for dinner with J. in the evening: lovely.

• NCC in the morning; to All Saints to collect Mary Rogers; big lamb lunch. Quartet practice in the afternoon; out to a Organ concert at All Saints with H. in the evening; fine.

• Flight arrived late; picked up by J. at midnight; slept eventually. Up early, drove to Insane Terrain YFC fund-raising run - pleased to see all small girls wading happily through the thick mud, running, clambering over obstacles, and nearly swimming in deep ponds: great. Picnic lunch.
• Home, some degree of relaxing; watched 2nd Hobbit movie; babes to bed early.

• To the venue, talked much of the day with various people; tried to get some mail & admin done too. Out to the party in the evening; before heading onwards to a late-evening RyanAir flight.

• Walked to the conference, abortive customer call; gave my talk:
• Caught up with Markus over lunch, talked with various customers and users, poked at a bug with Thomas.

• Up unfeasibly early, coach to Stansted for an early flight to Nuremburg for the ownCloud conference. Poked at slides. Arrived, good to catch up with lots of people, out for dinner with Holger, Thomas, Michael & some CERN guys in the evening.

• Mail chew; chat with Eloy; lunch; partner call; built slides for monthly mgmt meeting. Admin, chased invoices; built ESC agenda.
• Dinner; out to H's organ practice; did a bit of hackery while it happened on unit testing, walked home and put babes to bed variously.

• Practice with babes; mail chew, installed ownCloud X for demos. Lunch with J. poked at online unit testing some more. Consultancy call.
• Into Cambridge with a 4K screen to seek out some memory issue; caught up with Tracie.

• Picked up H. NCC in the morning; dropped her and Elize to Katie's to setup a surprise party for a friend Home for Pizza; Julie over in the afternoon, slept a little; out to NCC AGM in the evening. Bed.

• Took H. to All-Saints for some Organ Practice & dropped her at Emily's; home, slugging variously. Took H. and Elize to hers in the afternoon for a sleep-over. Back to play with the babes.
• Got some hacking in while re-watching a Prince and Me DVD.

• Out for a run in the morning with J. mail chew, partner call, Lunch. More mail.

• Mail; finally noticed Java EE going to Eclipse on the grounds that a copy-left license is good for communities; good for Oracle. Looking forward to seeing how they can make that blossom & grow, exciting times.
• Admin, ESC call, sync. with Shinnok, call with Kendy & Heiko, plugged away at admin until late.

• Mail chew; patch review; sync with Tor & Miklos. Poked at partner mail; plugged away at spell checking in the evening.

• Mail chew; poked at tile diff compression; built ESC agenda bits. Travelled into Cambridge to setup some hardware, quick partner call. Lunch. More machine poking, consultancy call, home. Worked away until late; Lydia & Janice over.

• Mail chew, booked another AirBnb in Rome for the LibreOffice conference. Lunch with J. Consultancy call, signed things; more mail chew.

• Out to Giles' baptism in Mildenhall at Kings Church - really encouraging to hear his testimony of the rescue of his family and himself: from aggression, obesity, living to play xbox and being abusive to his family - to freedom, peace, a normal weight, running for charity, and with hope for the future.
• Back for lunch with Julie-Anne, caught up a bit; and slept on the sofa between playing Windlands on the Vive.

• Up late; played Vive with M.; poked at callgrind profiles and threading goodness. Prodded at team-building opportunities around Rome. Slugged in the afternoon variously.

• Up early; practices, packed babes of to school. Mail chew, out to get the car services & MOT'd - price of Prius Plug-in seems to be GBP 35k, presumably around the Tesla / Model3 price - of course, you get a hybrid / engine too.
• Worked (on the laptop) in a nearby gym until it was done; sync. with Kendy, feature ranking etc.

• Mail chew; partner call, admin, lunch. TDF admin, contract pokeage. Distressed by the hyper-load pops / clicks coming from pulseaudio + chrome + hangouts, starting up a hangout is far from ideal with headphones on - scary.
• Out for an Organ lesson with H. and Roger at All Saints - good to hear the pedals in action. Home, read to H.

• Packed oldest three babes off to school; did some practice with E. and tried to avoid getting stuck into M's bigger 'cello for its novelty value.
• Mail chew; planned the day; call with Eloy. Interview with Kevin. Amused to re-read the Economist Style-Guide on Political Correctness.
• Collabora is hiring always looking for smart people - but Collabora Productivity is particularly looking for a sharp Marketing Specialist - could it be you ? let us know; do you have just part of the skills we seek: also interesting - drop us a line.
• Customer call , another interview , admin. Dinner; assembled a hex core Ryzen PC with the babes - showing them how relatively trivial it is.

• Up in the night; worked, built ESC bug stats while doing CCPAS on-line training. Booked flight to the LibreOffice conference.
• M.'s first day at secondary school; made tea in bed for J. and walked her together to the bus; lovely to see them grow up - such a privilege.
• Did a live update direct from openSUSE 42.1 to 42.3 (as not recommended in the docs) - apart from having to delete a number of snapshots (was unaware that they were being created) - it worked flawlessly; continuing to work while it went in (wow).

• Up, mail & IRC poke-age; sigh. Chewed mail in the car on the way to Aldeburgh. Lunch, chat with Buovjaga, out for a walk to Thorpness with B & A. Back, more mail; poked at backlog of admin in the car on the way home.

• Off to Soham Baptist Church - encouraged to hear the Gospel preached & the word patiently explained & applied. Back for a pizza lunch; played smash-up, BosWars with E. and slugged generally in the afternoon. Watched the last Tick in the evening with H. - un-necessarily terrible language.

• To a kids-leaders' prayer & planning meeting at Klara's. Back for lunch with David, out to wander around Ickworth - back for a roast dinner, read stories put babes to bed.

• Out to Dianne Curtis-Prior's funeral in Histon in the morning, a really lovely service, lunch afterwards; back for lunch. Switched from IRC to Mattermost's IRC bridge. Plugged away at mail.

• Mail chew; call with Tomi then Thorsten, Miklos; lunch, Tor call; mail chew; an organ teacher arrived to meet H. ESC call; sync. with Philippe Watched The Tick on Amazon Prime in the evening with H. and J.

• Out for a run with J. lots of mail chew, reviewed Azorpid's great Google Summer of Code work on the fast-parser - really great to see some nasty threading issues fixed, and performance & memory use much better.
• Poked at tax paperwork with a partner at some unbelievable length; booked AirBnB appartment-ness in Rome for the up-coming and hyper-awesome LibreOffice conference, 15 of us can make it - fun.
• Built the ESC proto-agenda for the first time in a while; fun.
• Dinner; put babes to bed - hacked Heimdall to just write the PIT file; but - no go. Bought a USB/resistor jig to try to force download-mode; but really need a JTAG solution I guess. Dear lazyweb; does anyone near Cambridge/UK have a JTAG/RIFF box at a loose end ? ideally with a 12pin header to match the S3. Bought J. an S4 as a stop-gap.

• M's birthday - celebrations and presents variously.
• More admin, mail, sync. calls with team; management call; partner call in the evening interspersed with DVD setup, and pizza.
• Booked travel to the ownCloud conference in Nuremburg (a beautiful city !) later in September.
• Tried to flash J's phone - seems it has totally corrupted its flash, up in the night poking at Heimdall which looks awesome - an open-source, Linux compatible Odin-alike; seems it won't push a Partition Information Table without partition contents though; hmm - and the phone is no-where near 'download' mode, corrupted screen etc; fun.

• Started to climb the mail mountain; while having team calls with Miklos & others; lots of admin to get done.

• Late up, off to Teversham / Hope church - and picnic afterwards with James & Kate, picked them up with H. & had a fine afternoon of playing Smash-Up, Sabatour Gold, fine food & talk into the evening.

• To the conference, lightning talks, sadly missed mine due to lunch, and having to get a flight home, typical travel / experience.
• Picked up by J. and babes at Heathrow, home, bed, sleep.

• Up early; off to the conference for Frank's intro talk. watched a number of talks, met and caught up with people in the breaks, lunch upstairs; back to present my slides:
• More catching up with people, up late having dinner with friends; bed.

• Up early; breakfast, hair-cut with J. to de-wool. Poked mail, into Cambridge for coach to Luton; built ESC agenda, updated projections. Flight to Berlin, out for a fine dinner in the evening on a boat with the Nextcloud team, back - up late writing slides.

• Up earlyish, packed beds away, snatched breakfast, drove home. Started on some mail chewing, calls with Lenny, Eloy, Miklos, partner call in the afternoon, sync. with Tor. Put babes to bed (H. out at Katie's).

• Up early, into Haarlem to see the Corrie ten Boom museum - great to see St. Bavos, and show the kids the reality of the place we've been reading to them about. Enjoyed the tour - saw the physical Hiding Place, visited St. Bavos - kids lost in the kinetic-sand flood-defence play-area.
• Drove to Delft; out to lunch with Bob & Brian, meetings later in the afternoon , picked up by J. and to the ferry. Overnight boat - thankfully with a cabin, tried to sleep.

• Up early; re-booked ferry with beds for tomorrow evening; into Amsterdam to visit the Van Gogh museum with some eager sketchers, queued, tickets - rather crowded in the gallery. Lots of interesting art.
• Back home via a shop; caught up with Bob in the evening relaxed on the roof of our boat with J. while babes watched.
• Enjoyed a small hand-drawn rope ferry in the port with the babes; bed.

• Drove North; stopped at Tiger and Turtle magic mountain in Duisberg - a beautful installation rather marred by N. falling and badly injuring her knee. Off to the nearby Sana Kliniken for four stitches - poor dear.
• Picked up lunch & drove on to Arnhem to meet Cor and Gerlinde, and enjoyed a fine public park together, lovely to catch up.
• Drove on to Almere Marina to stay on a boat / house.

• Out fo Pforzheim Tiergarten in the morning - an excellent petting zoo, lots of feeding of animals, and all for the price of parking: Eur 5; wow. I guess it is achieved by relying on people being sensible - and not eg. releasing the goats 'for fun' - glad it works.
• Drove north to near Pulheim, and unpacked in the pouring rain. Out to a local BrauHaus for a really German dinner experience. Put babes to bed, stayed up chatting with Angela & Anthon in some German-lish mix.

• Up early; tidied & hoovered & packed the flat. Drove to Lausanne, and on past Stuttgart; stopped to see Frank & Olivier. On to Pforzheim and a fine AirBnB place; had a Turkish dinner with the babes - to save time & expand their taste.

• Up early, drove out to Grimentz - some great engineering on the road; a beautiful old, alpine village with several hydro-powered displays.
• Walked up the mountain heading for Roc d'Orzival; went up to Bendolla on the lift; made good progress until Lunch by a tarn; set off up a rather precipitous off-path slope; not ideal. Turned back without making the crest when it got dangerous; ran back to the telepherique, and down for a well deserved cake in the sun.
• Drove home, put babes to bed.

• Worked in the morning on admin, pricing, E-mail backlog. Lunch - left-over cheese fondu sandwich & saussage. Out to Lac Moubra for a 5k walk & the kids played in the lake. Home for vet movie & crisps.

• Out to Lens to see the statue of Christ de Roi lunch enjoying the view, not enough walking: so set off as well to the rather impressive Lac de Tseuzier dam. Watched the birds fly under-us in the impressively precise curves. Walked around the lake happily - flattish at least.

• Up early, inflicted my French on a number of tire replacement places; finally found one to do the work today. Pneus Mannia. Slugged and worked a bit in the morning. Lunch. Taught H. to jack the car & replace tire - down the hill to the pros - two new tires; back; slugged etc.

• Up lateish, walk together along the Bisse du Tissoret - to the unusually named Cave du Sex before walking back to the bus & cake-shop. Watched silly videos with the babes, pork chop dinner; read stories to the babes. Car tire seems to have grown an un-wanted screw & lack of air - bother.

• Walked along the Bisse du Ro - some impressive legacy engineering capturing water from the mountains and bring it around precipitous cliffs over great distances. Better these days with dynamite to make better channels - the original works must have been even more impressive. Lunch at a waterfall. Walked back home. Cakes with tea. Worked on a short talk for the C'bra Montreal party.

• Early rise, set off for home via Bergamo, enjoyed walking around the walls, admired some churches packged with art work. Pizza lunch, skipped the rain - and drove on. Shopped & returned to Crans Montana late - quick tea; put everyone to bed.

• Up late; played in the pool; bought lunch, down to the lake to enjoy it; back home before the torrential rain; watched movies inside the rain.
• Out to try to find a restaurant, before returning home to cook pasta, slept.

• Up early, packed, off to Italy to see Studio Storti, lots of driving - met up with Paolo & Marina, positive meetings, admired the team & office.
• Drove back to the flat in the rain - English-style weather (but warmer, and with pretty mountains). Lovely meal with Marina, Alex & Brando near Lake Garda. Bed late.

• Up rather early, quick breakfast - off to Leukabad Therme. Enjoyed the thermal baths, sauna, water-slides, picnic, , N. & M. enjoyed diving to the bottom of the 2.5m pool, playing with toroidal and cylindrical inflatable rings. Home late.
• Reading In my Father's house to the babes, very moved by one section speaking of Mr ten Boom putting his babes to bed, and resting his hand on their head before leaving them - and how they would stay still to keep the memory of that touch; more so - by a couple of babes piping up to say: we do that with you! (and another chipping in - sometimes I get stiff and have to turn over before sleeping). Convicted that I should be even more gentle with my sensitive darling daughters.

• Up early, bus to the lifst, and up to Cry D'er. Walked up to BellaLui, and on beyond Col de Pochet, along the cliff, and down a ladder there, before walking down to Violettes, and ultimately to Arnouva. Rather tired. Bought cakes & walked home.
• Slugged; vet DVD; roast chicken, brief E-mail poke; bed.

• Up late; bus to Plumachit, and walked back across to Montana a beautiful place; cakes from a patisserie. Slept part of the afternoon, while babes played.
• Watched Sherlock Holmes & a Vet, Natchos for dinner, put babes to bed late.

• Up late, walked into Montana, enjoyed the parks, persuaded the bank to allow us to use our cards; had lunch - went up to Arnouva for free, and walked back home.
• Watched Ocean's 13th with the babes. Pizza dinner, bed.

• Up early; visited the nearby cemetry with 7000 dead, 2/3rds Known unto God - and packed so close, surely were pre-dug graves originally in places. Interested to note the nearby French cemetry full of crosses.
• Drove and drove south; to see Norbert on a friends' dairy farm - a lovely setup, calves and small pony to pet, good to see how it all works & lovely to catch up with Norbert in-person, fine food & set off again to Switzerland.
• Managed to find a supermarket just before closing; Drove on to Crans-Montana, arriving late - got the flat setup, babes to bed, and slept eventually.

• Up rather early, drove to Dover - ferry to Calais, French food in the car while driving to the Thiepval Memorial - to the 70,000+ with no known grave who died around the Somme, built over a trench. Sobering & good for the babes to see.
• Off to stay at a nearby B&B near Mailly-Maillet, several smaller cemetries visible from the window; bought some food, put babes to bed late.

• Up late, N. went swimming with Naomi B, J. out counselling, H. Organ lessoning; mail chew etc. Lunch. J. packing, dropped PCs into the office .
• Home to get the car sorted out; tried to inflate tires. Unfortunately - some cheap 'tire pressure guages' combined with Kwik-fit's tender attentions conspired to sieze them onto the valves. Penetrating oil, gentle action, pliars - eventually got the mole-grips on both sides and broke the brass valves; horrible - flat tire. Hunted 24hour tire repair people, and up until extremely late, rather expensive - moral never fit anything to your tire stems except rubber caps.

• Cooked breakfast, reading Ungentlemanly Warfware or sim. about saboutage in France; mail chew, out shopping with Anne for a Jack Wills birthday present for H. Out to Thorpness for an ice-cream floaty drink, brief walk on the beach.
• Back for a pork & cheese-cake lunch, slugged, out for a walk on Sizewell Beach, checked mail; drove home, put babes to bed, watched Parks & Recreation.

• Up, quick mail chew; sync with Andras, Kendy & Miklos. Drove to Lowestoft - worked on mail in the car, had a fine meal at Iconic, left early for a board call with B. while the ladies shopped.
• Board call, customer call, mail chew; buffet tea, bed late.

• Up lateish, played with T,B&S for the last times before they left; Lasagne lunch, photos in the garden, bid a sad 'bye.
• Tidied the house up a bit; had a service at home, listened to a STAG talk together; watched a movie, put babes to bed.

• Up earlyish, finished slides, poked at a local online demo. Gave my talk.
• Alberto pointed out that I missed out the great work on Fleet Commander DConf based lock-down done by Stephan B; mea culpa!
• Caught up with some more guys around the place, and set off home by train, wrote a number of connection mails to join some missing dots.
• Caught up with the family, put people to bed;

• Run in the morning with J. back, quick mail chew, paperwork, train to GUADEC - its been too long. Arrived, talked and caught up with lots of old friends, out to a coffee shop for some more action, then a pub, then the evening buffet event; caught up with the SUSE team. Up late talking & writing slides.

• Poked at Raspberry-Pi driving a WS2812B LED strip with H. got the electrical pieces sorted out, plugged it all in, got some smoke: ATX power supply shorting itself via some helpful trailing leads - phew. Very early RPI not doing the PWM magic at all - mis-detection of the H/W it seems.
• Out to Bury Gardens, babes recording a wizard movie with T., to augment with Blender at home.
• Back home, got the LEDs setup & working with some cannibalized Pi 2 - did some programming in the evening with H.

• Rather a rainy day; up late, J. out for a run, H. off to play the organ at All Saints. Bit of mail chew, home, Julie-Anne over in the evening, fine Indian meal with everyone, caught-up with J.A., T&B out dancing.

• Up late, mail poke, call with Kendy; Out to Lackford Lakes for a walk, play & ice-cream with S. & babes. N. out swimming with Naomi B.
• Becky cooked a lovely dinner, H. took pictures of a sun-dial. Played Cover Your Assets & Smash-Up in the evening; bed late.

• Up late, raining enthusiastically - S. not sleeping nicely; call with Miklos; did a bit of work - Support & consultancy calls. Played Windlands racing with T.
• Watched TomorrowLand with the babes in the evening(?) - some scary robots - but some great female leads & heroism - nice.

• Up early; Violin at Church with Mel & co. Home for a fine roast lunch with the whole wider family. Slugged variously, R & A left for home. Played Windlands together.

• Up lateish, presents with H. lovely pancakes made Becky for breakfast, presents. Put up the tent for H's birthday party; poked at the LED light strip & Raspberry-Pi present while H. and Becky and Elize went shopping.
• Friends arrived, watched Beauty & The Beast together, put babes to bed, played Sabbtour Gold with H's friends. Put them to bed in the tent, despite strange fox calls in the night.

• J's birthday - presents at breakfast, out for a run together. Reviewed a number of fixes prior to -5-4-0, looking good.
• Rob & Amelia & Thomas arrived in the evening - out for a lovely Birthday dinner at Kings, all home later.

• Mail chew, catch-up, patch review, ESC call, Advisory Board call.

• Partner call, built ESC agenda, plugged away at excessive memory usage by meta-file rendering to canvas / drawing-layer.

• Mail chew, paperwork, lunch, build slides & projections, commerical call, did some memory profiling; always nice to spot a stray 1Gb of RAM allocated in error.
• Really pleased to notice that ARM release their v8a machine-readable architecture spec/ - have always been irritated in the past to see gcc/as, valgrind, llvm, mono, etc. write their own hand-coded machine-code parsers / generators - would love those to be auto-generated from some decent descriptions for all of the modern, relevant CPU architectures.

• Mail chew; product & consultancy calls, paperwork, board call, partner call. Played a little with Samuel at lunch & dinner.

• Got babes up, fine cooked breakfast with the wider family & friends, packed the car, bid 'byes, set off home via Sue's with T&B&S. Good to see the other nephews briefly, home - got unpacked, and T&B&S. to sleep.

• Up, enjoyed watching the extraordinary preparations of hair, faces, dresses for a slew of young beauties. Set off for the wedding venue, went rather slowly so as to be on time, arrived. A lovely, moving service. Off to Wyck Hill House for a fine reception - babes played quartet for light music; fine food, speeches, toasts - much dancing & chatting with interesting people until rather late.

• Everyone up early, quartet practice, out for a run with J. Mail chew. Set off early to collect babes from All Saints & Soham, drove at length to Swindon to stay at David & Gillian's house before Robert & Amelia's wedding. Fine food, home & company, lots of preparation - bouquet making, and so on. Up late drinking port & enjoying cheese with David.

• Mail chew, sync. with Eloy, partner call, got a few minutes of hacking in somehow. ESC call, left for music lessons, quartet practice, dropped M. straight back to her play with H. babes at home, back for a fine Aladdin play. Put babes to bed, wired up new lounge light, bed.

• Mail, some patch review; poked at product features, pricing, bugs, sync. with Philippe.

• Mail, admin, more mail, commercial call.

• Up early, quartet practice with H. and N. ran home from school with J. Mail chew, gerrit review, more mail. Product call, consultancy call, mail chew.

• Up lateish; off to All Saints for Miriam's leaving service; and picnic lunch & school graduation ceremony; ringing the bell as they leave - only E. left now.
• Home; set too at E's room making it suitable for Tom, Becky & Samuel next week. Played with babes variously, tried to separate H's rather broken S4 display from the frame assembly for N's phone-of-pieces - nearly (but not quite) succeeding (accidentally severed the connector in the process - bother).
• Dinner, put babes to bed; admired Chris & Allison's extension.

• Up lateish, cleaned the home with J., mended the hoover, worked on un-completed task list. H. swiming with Alex & Madeline, Vive playing on their return. Dis-assembled part of E's bunk-bed. BBQ, practiced Quartet late, put babes to bed. Stayed up mending J's phone with N., and H. installing a new screen.

• Practice, mail, work, more mail, calls, etc. M. out on a sleepover; J. out for dinner with Louise, E. back home from adventure holiday - exhausted, put her to bed; watched Indiana Jones - and the Last Crusade with H. and N. then worked until late.

• Quartet practice with H,N and later M. Mail chew, built ESC bits. More mail & admin pieces. ESC call.

• Quartet in the morning with the biggest three. Mail chew, partner call - sync with Pranav. Lunch. Customer call - always nice when a customer says 'Wow' when we show them the work we did for them.
• Tried to get skypeforlinux audio working; seems the wrong fallback input in pulseaudio (or something) - but having many dozen Test users registered obscuring the real 'echo123' user makes testing skype audio awful; hmm.
• Curious that Corbyn's 'Glastonbury' speech (really at the 'Pilton Pop' festival) ("Build bridges not walls !": fair enough) occurred behind a huge fence with watch-towers (to keep out those who didn't pay the ~GBP250 entrance fee), and he is now attacking their litter picking contracts; odd.

• Mail chew, patch review, profile trace reading, admin. Sync. with Andras, commercial call, mail, some hardware maintenance - taught M. to install a graphics card. Partner call, dinner.

• Up, practice with E. until she left for her Grade 2 Violin exam. Mail chew, prodded at this & that. Lunch. Product team call, followed by consultancy call, customer call, dinner. Picked up Josh & Julie at the station.

• Up lateish; breakfast with Josh, out to Bury St Edmonds to chuch, good to see Alan & Sue. Back for a pizza lunch. Applied slugging in the afternoon; cleaned out E's room to make room for T&B&S arriving in the UK soon.

• Up earlyish; off to Wicksteed theme park with the family. Lots of fun had by small people, a real pleasure to see them enjoying the slides, smallish roller-coasters, and so on. E. finally big enough to go on most things. Lunch in the field. More rides, laser-quest etc. Home in the afternoon, dropped H. at Katie's party.
• Home, Josh & Julie-Anne over for dinner, good to talk with them until late.

• Up, but not early enough - missed prayer meeting, out for a run with J. mail chew, into Cambridge to meet up with an old friend - Dhanajay, Bindu, Mihir and Mrinalini. Punting, botanial gardens, and more, fun.
• Home, put babes to bed; mail & work until late.

• Into Cambridge for a meeting; worked in the station for a bit; lunch on Kings Parade.
• Interested to read an Ubuntu Phone post mortem. I was predicting demise from the start of the project having seen the Nokia/Maemo/Meego outcome - for economic reasons, lots of people made really nice, different FLOSS operating systems, and some pretty but proprietary ones eg. (Windows, Blackberry). I'm glad Simon points as #1 to the lack of a "profitable niche" as the ultimate problem. When Android has a zero (or probably negative) cost - how can free fund building a compelling alternative ?

• Mail chew, chat with Thorsten, mail; admin backlog, pre-vacation sync. with Kendy. Julie over for dinner in the evening.

• Mail chew; extraordinary. Reviewed a nice FastParser improvement, commercial call, chased a late-payment. Dinner. Mail, built ESC agenda late.

• Mail chew; consultancy call; more mail. Lunch. Contract pieces.
• Out to see The Shack rather late with Lynn & Paul, well produced, some positive portrayals of God, the trinity etc. a bit concerned wrt. leaving room for God's wrath being missing; I will repay is a vital part of us letting go - I think; cf. coals.

• Up early; to the Stable for band practice & service. Did the kids work with Uche. Back to play Boswars with E. - collaborative play worked best. Out to HT for the evening service & to see Janine & Ben.
• Back, put babes to bed; played Windlands - alternating with J.

• Woke early, mail chew, played Windlands much of the morning with H. and others. Lunch, out shopping alone with J. fun.
• David over in the later afternoon for dinner; H. and M. out for a sleep-over; enjoyed catching up with David until later. Up late preparing for Kids work on Prayer tomorrow.

• Mail chew, plugged away at code for much of the day. Interview. Bought Windlands for the Vive, played it in the evening - rather mistake, an extraordinarily addictive game.

• Mail, admin, contract bits. Lunch. Sync. with Miklos, Ash, Kendy, Eloy, Armani and ran out of day.

• Mail chew; massaged priorities. Thrilled to see the great work from the team ship in Collabora Online 2.1.2 with avatars, and various other UI features; well worth an upgrade.
• Lunch. Martin over in the afternoon - really good to catch up, despite dentist' inspection; what fun.

• Consultancy call, mail chew, built ESC agenda. Lunch. Commercial call; super hot - and 3x active building sites two next-door, and one across the road: wow.
• Worked lateish and got my hash to wire-id conversion working nicely in online; more efficient and more readable.

• Mail chew, aborted team meeting; patch review, prodded leads. Lunch. Dug through older E-mail looking for gems. Partner call. Finally got around to de-bonging the online / slideshow unit test. Poked at a particularly fun unit test deadlock for good measure. Tried to unwind what is the same DNS lookup issue as this with unpleasant BT Home Hub. TDF board call.

• Birthday - 40th' today; a fine clutch of presents over a continental breakfast to enjoy with the family - they're such a blessing.
• Out to Louth Evangelical Church, good talk on Jesus' teaching's power to amaze & convict people from Mark 1:21-27 from Mark Plumb visiting from Huntingdon. Home for pizza lunch & more Spa'ing.
• Drove home; un-packed, stories for babes; movie, sleep.

• Up earlyish, out for a walk through the countryside around Louth; with the family - lovely; picnic lunch in a field. Back for a long swim together at the lodge Spa; lovely. Fine steak dinner, bed.

2017-06-16 Friday.

• Out for a run with J. mail chew, mail chew; calls with Miklos & Kendy; lunch. Set off to the Lincolnshire Wolds in the early afternoon with the babes; picked up H. and N. on the way, worked in the car. Arrived, meal, watched some Black-Mirror, bed.

• Mail chew; disappointed to see Tim Farron stand down from the Lib-Dems: "... we are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal society." Shame on those lazy interviewers who attack the man not the policies.
• Back to poking at calc formula iteration; Tor fixed the problem; nice.

• E's birthday - present opening at breakfast, so lovely. Mail chew, re-built master, admin - lots of it. Plugged away at Calc, and at online in the evening.

• Patch review, built ESC agenda. Plugged away at some calc pieces with Tor, commercial call, partner call & two customer calls. Visited a friend in the evening for some advice.

• Mail chew, a trio of team calls; partner call in the evening.

• NCC in the morning; some disappointing suggestions. Home for lunch in the garden; tried to get Unreal Editor working nicely with the Vive for H. crimped some ethernet cables, tried to get the editor UI to work at all; eventually managed to find the documentation on how to use it.

• Up early, contract review in the early morning; setup the Vive for E's friend to play with; J. out to funeral parlour to do bereavement counselling. Lunch, out to studlands park green for a family fun-day with M. & E. - lazed in the sun.
• Home for tea with Kiaran & Amy & Julie-Anne, lovely to catch up with them.

• Packed H. off for DofE expedition, mail, got used to the idea of weak and unstable Government for a while - and moved on.
• Chewed through admin quickly, worked on making tile hashes more comprehensible and smaller on the wire. Partner calls. E's birthday party, caught up with Marina, E's friend over for the night.

• Mail chew, carpet fitter arrived; reviewed nice patch fixing our zip handling's thread-safety from Azorpid. Lunch. Plugged away at re-implementing the gsf-vba-dump tool built into LibreOffice - using our much improved VBA import; added a --script-cat command-line parameter. ESC call.
• Up in the night to check on the election - oh dear. I used to be indecisive, but now I'm not so sure..

• Mail chew. Sync. with Timar & Nemeth. Catch-up with Cor, Lunch. Call with Eloy. Wrestled contract bits in the afternoon. Moved furniture around in the evening with H. and J.

• Mail, partner call, consultancy team call, code review, built ESC prot-agenda.
• Really encouraged to see the great recent work going on with German comment translation from Johnny M & Jens Carl. Down to a single top-level module (writer) to translate, and only 18 individual files (at least as far as the auto-detection goes) with around 500 strings - the end is in sight. Also great to see Johnny M cleaning remaining un-detected bits. If this floats your boat - before the tasks runs out poke at: the list, clone the git repo and make your mark in technical translation !
• Lunch, commercial call. Added some more ethernet cabling to the front room while the under-floor is accessible in the evening.

• Mail chew. Customer call, contract review; admin. Poked at some GSOC patches with Mohammed. Customer call.

• Collected H, off to church; Luciano & Simone back for lunch with their girls. Played in the garden & on the VIVE-ness a bit. Put tired H. to bed, then brace of babes. Watched Tower Heist with J. - amusing.

• Worked in the night, back to bed; up lateish; played with the babes, H. out to a party / sleep-over. Out to see Hannah, Nick & Joni for a walk, good to catch-up with them. Back for a BFG movie and home-made pizza.

• Out for a run with J. poked mail, call with Kendy, reviewed a lengthy report.

• Up in the night; worked away at a printing issue on Linux; a weirdness in printer / page settings detection that's reproducible; bed.
• Interviews, mail, lunch. Customer call. Poked at a patch. ESC call. Sync. with Tor, Miklos.

• Up early; mail chew, started on the backlog; lots to do. Lunch. Partner call. Built ESC agenda, GSOC patch review - some nice unzip / threading code coming along from Mohammed. Truck loads of admin.

• Some mail triage in the morning. Lunch, J. packed the car. Off to Uncle John's funeral at a crematorium in Leeds, a sad time, but good to encourage the wider family; Mother gave a eulogy. Out for a fine tea afterwards.
• Drove home with the babes, unpacked, poked mail quickly.

• Up super early; breakfast in the car, arrived in Clapham early, walked up into the hills to Gaping Gill - for the Bradford Caving Club's winch-meet. Booked in, got dog-tags, waited in a tent in the rain.
• Descended down the very friendly, and competent winching experience - through the spray of England's tallest single drop waterfall - 98m down into the depths of the ground - a giant flood-lit cave. Enjoyed exploring some nearby tunnels, galleries, great. Chair-lift up.
• Walked back with David & bid 'bye to him. Drove home to meet up with Bob, Amelia, M&D, scrubbed mud out of coats, slugged exhaustedly in the evening.

• Out to Jennyfields Evangelical Church - great sermon: enthusiastically explaining and applying the passage - refreshing. Out for a picnic at Cold Stone Cut; on to Brimham Rocks in the sun to finish off the climbing action. Back for tea & to watch Johnny English.

• Lie-in, played with the babes. Slugged variously until David arrived. Set out together for Brimham Rocks, had a nice picnic on a suitable rock. Set too climbing this & that. Driven to shelter in a small cave by thunder, lightning, lashing rain & hail concurrently - exciting, cave overwhelmed by torrents of water; fun. Helped to push someone's car out of a rather deep puddle.
• Drove back; wrung out clothes, J. managed to get the clothes sorted while I stuffed the boots with newspaper variously. Watched James Herriot in the evening, pizza tea.

• Out for a run with J, mail chew, calls, patch review. B & A over for lunch , more work, packed & J. drove us North - while working on a text. Up very late working on a pair of contracts.

• Packed up computers, dropped off babes, into Cambridge with J. Un-loaded the PCs, customer call, meeting with our accountant. Mail chew, patch review etc. Into town to the Beer festival; good time with the team, back by train to Newmarket; showed Lolu the Vive, dinner, put babes to bed, more work.

• Mail chew, sync with Kendy, admin, Lunch. Sync with Tor, also with Andras & Aron. Ron & Iris over for dinner - lovely to see them; put babes to bed. Back to work, sync. with Kohei, worked on a report & contract: the care-free hours up to midnight.

• Poked at printing for H. mail chew, paperwork, a bit of mentoring, sync. with Tor. Lunch with J. Built ESC agenda. Commercial call, interview.

• Mail chew, admin, consultancy call, sync. with Miklos. Calls variosuly; Vive action in the evening with the babes; stories.

• Up lateish; NCC at The Stable, back for roast chicken lunch; out for a walk at the race-course. Back to get Robert's Vive setup - babes played with it happily. Quartet practice, tea, bed.

• Poked at mail in the morning; bought some eggs for breakfast; out to see Kenilworth castle together; lunch, back - met the cleaner & passing estate agent. Out to get measured for a suit, bid 'bye and drove home. Put babes to bed.

• Out for a run with J. chat with Chris, mail chew, Lunch, client cold-call, mail, reviewed some patches. M. back from PGL. Drove to Warwick to see Robert, out for a fine Indian meal together; back, watched TV.

• Mail, interview, more mail, contract pieces, call with Miklos. Another interview after dinner.

• Up early; quick mail chew, drove to Cambridge Station to meet Heiner, wandered through Cambridge, to the office, back to back customer meetings, got tooled up for the new office with fobs etc. thanks to Doree. Drove home - horrible traffic. Dinner, admin backlog, put babes to bed.

• More mail, contract pieces, commercial call, call with Andreas & Eloy, built ESC agenda.

• Mail chew, consultancy call, sync. with Tomaz & Kendy; more mail triage.

• Up earlyish, breakfast. Idly read Vitz's Psychology as Religion, tragicomic. NCC. Back for a pizza lunch, applied many deferred Windows updates while fixing minetest server.

• Up lateish; out with N. to Ely Cathedral to do the octagon tour; lovely, pub lunch & a further wander around before returning home. Great to spend some time together. Poked at a VclPtr issue or two with Markus.

• Awake in the night; got a bit of hacking in on this & that. Up later, mail chew, reviewed some patches, some crypto research. Lunch. Customer call, sync. with Miklos, call with Philippe.

• Mail, more admin, testing, chat with Thorsten.
• Annoyed to see that Ahok goes to jail in Indonesia for two years for blasphemy, despite no prosecution case or real offence; pleased to see that Stephen Fry walks free, although he is beyond utterly wrong about God who as Psalm 89 tells us has Righteousness and justice as the foundation of his throne. Not a fan of blasphemy laws, discussing all things is important.
• Poked at improving online unit tests.

• Took E. to Addenbrooks in the morning; back, mail, built ESC stats, call, plugged through the task backlog. Read Firefox & Chrome's seccomp-bpf usage - which are not particularly obvious.

• Admin, commercial call; Board calls; call later, revised Biology with H.

• Up early, M.'s SATs start today - music practise, Bible study etc. Mail chew, consultancy call, sync. with Tamas. Lunch, more calls & admin.

• Up earlyish, practice & played at NCC; Julie over for fine roast chicken lunch; tidied up; played some games. Snoozed, finished cupboard side kick-board. Out to play running games nearby the statue of the Queen, racing, so walked through the graveyard rather than the heath; such a lot of hopeless tombstones. Tea, read stories to babes.

• A large degree of lazy slugging, up late, fine breakfast & lunch. Tried to buy cheapish >700mm extension ball-bearing cupboard runners for H's attic; without much luck. Up late revising Physics with H.

• Slept poorly; out for a run with J. mail chew; and a series of customer mails, calls, and so on. Lunch. Managed some fun hacks between fixes. Re-worked online inter-thread socket transfer to clean it up a bit.

• Mail chew; sync. with Paolo; Lunch; chat with Lenny.
• Thrilled to have Collabora Online 2.1 released: months of work by Kendy's team since 2.0. Naturally everything is already included into what will become LibreOffice 5.4, which enters feature freeze in a couple of weeks - for a first release in June. You can checkout the latest CODE docker container and get it setup. There is a huge amount of work under-the-hood in Collabora Online 2.1; here are some examples.
  • Re-worked threading model - our 2.0 version worked well, but suffered from significant complexity — re-using the Poco socket code was easy to start with, but that used a blocking model. Thus to get both non-blocking read & write, with sensible queue management required two threads per user socket. This combined with another two threads per document, to give four threads in the Web Services Daemon - along with a multitide of locks, conditions, and corner-cases. Collabora Online 2.1 replaces all of this. We've migrated to a mostly non-blocking approach for almost all our SSL code. This yields an extraordinarily simpler model - one thread per document, with almost no locking, no lock contention, and significantly simplifies both the code and reasoning around the interleavings as we change it - thanks primarily to Ashod Nakashian & Kendy for their work here.
  • Improved socket code - the new non-blocking socket code is rather simpler, more readable, maintainable and of course built-in; easy to find who is responsible for it.
  • Improved Bandwidth - in 2.0 we hashed tiles to avoid re-compressing identical tiles (since PNG compression is surprisingly costly), for 2.1 (thanks to Tor Lillqvist) - we propagate these hashes to the client - to allow us to avoid re-sending un-changed tiles. This reduces our bandwidth use by ~50%+ in normal writer editing.
  • State dumping - the non-blocking code uses state machinery to a greater degree than before; to help debug what state your server is in you can pkill -USR1 loolwsd to see any queued/un-processed data, queued messages, state of document loading etc. in the logs.
  • Calc row-limit - increasing this is thanks to Marco Cecchetti who has been nobly wrestling with the many and various ways Calc's non-affine, non-linear co-ordinate system intersects with browsers for months.
  • Commenting & Change tracking - lots of hard work here to improve the core code to expose changes & comments via various UNO commands from Pranav Kant, along with helping out Henry Castro with his work on the JS side, animations, prettiness and so on
  • l10n & packaging - with many fixes from Andras Timar improving lots of aspects, and with grateful thanks to the LibreOffice translation community for their hard work.
  • Code quality improvements - running the same plugins as in the LibreOffice core.git by Noel Grandin and Miklos Vajna.
  • SVG icons instead of PNG for better experience on HiDPI displays by Tomaž Vajngerl.
  • Lots more - git log collabora-online-2-0-branch-point..origin/distro/collabora/collabora-online-2-1 shows we had ~1300 commits, with 11 from non-Collaborans - hopefully that will grow over the GSOC period. There are lots of fun things that can be improved in Online, please do checkout the code and get involved.
• ESC call, and minutes.

• Early to rise - out for a customer pitch together; a quick lunch, M-J kindly dropped me at the airport for a near endless round of plane / bus journeys. Worked on various bits of admin in the time. Lovely to be back home with the babes.

• Up rather early; long bus journey to Luton; worked on E-mail etc. Eventually got my flight with some interesting Phico guys.
• Arrived in Lyon, rescued a lost Moldovan Police Lady travelling to Interpol, met up with Marie-Jo & Philippe, enjoyed Marie-Jo's kind hospitality, helped Sarah's English and learned lots of French.

• Quick mail skim; out to Brandon Park for a walk & play with the babes. Back for lunch, poked at home tidying. Watched Interstellar with M. and the other babes - hmm. Watched Line of Duty - great; sleep.

• NCC at The Stable; home for a roast lamb lunch with Sandra; played a card game, and running game in the garden; H. injured her wrist. Tea, put babes to bed.

• Slept in, finished The Amazing Maurice with E. Breakfast, Bacon butties & H. made heart-shaped fried egg toast slices.
• Edged the lawn a bit, found the ice-maker water supply was leaking in the fridge; bailed the drip-tray; re-fitted the push-fit connection; interestingly there is a water-mill style flow-monitor just after the solenoid actuator: presumably to fill your ice-cube tray just-right independent of pressure; nice.
• Up-ended the piano on its side, onto a skate-board (such wonderful things), and moved it into the kitchen; swapped other bits of furniture around to make more of our front-room. There is always hope that after enough musical 'chairs' that something drops out of the house at the end.
• Watched Bill with the babes, put them to bed.
• Poked at mail & bugs; really encouraged to see Jens Carl and Michael Stahl nailing even more German comments; calc down to ~1100 detected lines - 500 translated in the last two weeks: wow. On that trajectory this is a final call for getting your name into the roster of noble German comment translators in LibreOffice; if Lennart can help out - why not you ?

• Took babes to school & ran home; bid 'bye to the parents. Mail chew & other hackery.
• Lunch. Chat with Swapnil. Worked away at seccomp-bpf pieces to better isolate the LibreOffice Forkit processes; fun - eventually got a signal handler working nicely; unclear how to trade paranoia for performance when it comes to black-listing syscalls that look scary.
• Dinner; Lynn over - read M. a story; helped H. with guitar chords; sync. with Andras.

• Parents off to Hazel's funeral; mail, code review, testing online, call . Lunch with J. Merged improved compressed file serving from Aditya with some cleanup, fixed a certificate issue with Poco.

• Mail chew, chat with Tor, sync with Miklos, then Eloy. Lunch. Poked at new ESC stats generation pieces from JanI and built ESC agenda. Sync. with Lenny. Mail and task chew, read stories to babes, parents arrived, bed.

• Mail chew; code review; call with JanI; QA / smoke-testing etc. Lunch. Long overdue commercial call. Discovered the washing-machine inlet leaking & replaced that - PTFE tape is your friend.
• Plugged away at admin and calls much of the afternoon. Up late making thread safe socket transfer easier to maintain in online.

• Mail chew, consultancy call with Miklos. Submitted a brief paper for GUADEC deadline today. Plugged away at backlog of admin tasks, code review etc. Poked at plain-text import performance here & there for a customer.
• Nicolas over in the afternoon, great to see him - caught up, dinner, made some nail-blocks to avoid cat sitting on M's bird-box. Soldered new relay into the fridge & re-assembled: working again. Talked until late happily.

• Fine breakfast, checked-out, swam & sauna-ified; off to pick up the babes - who had had a fine time with B&A. Lovely lunch, drove home. Picked up H. from Lynn's, back for some songs & bible study together - tea, put H. and others to bed. Watched Line of Duty - gripping.

• Up rather early; room a bit light (despite otherwise being lovely) cooked breakfast; took a turn around the fine lawns, out together to Sutton Hoo for a walk around the bluebell woods & fine views. Back for a snacky lunch.
• Enjoyed the pool, sauna, spa, massage, relaxing. Idly poked at fixing and merging my DelaySocket development implementation for Online some more in the evening - it works.
• Fine dinner in the evening together, Parks & Recreation later; bed.

• Out for a run in the morning.
• Saddened to see Russia's Supreme Court's approach to Jehovah's Witnesses (JW). Personally I have serious theological problems with JWs on so many levels - their frequent Conjectural Emmendation (ie. willful alteration of the text, by un-named 'translators') in their New Testament eg. around κύριος (Lord) speaks volumes for their confidence in their understanding of God. The Trinity undergirds God's very nature as love: Father, Son & Holy Spirit - and is (in my view) a foundational understanding of Christian theology from which so much beauty and truth flows. As a footnote Christ-ians (a label they are fond of presenting) has a sense of partisans of Christ (His people who are crazy about Him) which is far from my experience of JWs. The anti-intellectualism expressed in their general avoidance of higher education concerns me - although I know of notable exceptions; their use of church discipline - particularly with a mistaken lack of precedence for honoring your parents, and the primacy of loving your family is also troubling. Anyhow - I routinely invite in, and enjoy respectful conversations with those JWs who come to my door - despite our differences. When a society is not willing to tolerate and listen to passionately held, different views, and goes so far as to confiscate property and stop them from meeting and praying - it is in deep trouble. It seems to me that the defence of liberty is most important at the extremes.
• Mail chew. Poked at a performance problem with text import - lots of dynamic_casting cost from a dynamic_cast with no check for a NULL return; hmm.
• H, picked up by Emily for DofE expedition. Set off to Aldeburgh to drop the babes with B&A - kindly baby-sitting. On to Seckford Hall for a lovely meal and evening together.

• Fifteenth wedding anniversary - it seems like yesterday - time flies when you're enjoying yourself; of course having an amazing, patient, graceful, intelligent, beautiful, wife is an amazing privilege as well. God is extraordinarily good to us, despite our general depravity, so much to give thanks for.
• Mail chew; more reading about COM interception - a lovely paper on the very thing is out there; in today's world I'd hope the same paper would have lots of nice URLs, including a github link. Chat with Florian. ESC call, sync. with Tor.
• Long delayed fridge relay turned up: good. Dropped M. to Scouts for the first time, put babes to bed, worked away until late.

• Up late; still with some post-holiday excitement. Call with Jos. Lunch with J. Built ESC bug stats; sales & contract call. Setup new 4k monitor - to try to avoid looking down at a laptop all the time. Required a new kernel to get the skylake support into good enough shape to drive it; all well.

• Up early; woke babes, mail chew; consultancy call; 1:1's, lunch with M & E, setup a movie for them; commercial team call. Plugged at E-mail left & right. Dinner, read stories to babes, worked extremely late.

• Up early, out for a run with J. tidied the house, cleared up, put up N's new swing seat, and bathroom shelf. Misc. shopping on-line; played games with babes, early beds, stories; watched Line of Duty, sleep.

• Out to Mowbray Community Church; sermon interesting but disappointingly disconnected from the text. Back for a fine lunch, quick chat with Tom & Becky; drove home, dinner, stories, bed.

• Up; helped H. structure her work a little; read some E-mail; thrilled to see Jens Carl burning down the German comments: include/ and sc/ (calc) now clean; 1600 detected lines left across ~100 files in writer & svx.
• David & Gillian around for lunch, and a wander through Knaesborough; good to see them. Puzzling & games variously with the family.

• Out to Sandra's to swim as a family; fun but tiring. Back for lunch. Did some carving with the babes in the afternoon. Rob & Amelia arrived, did some jigsaw puzzling with them. Up late chatting.

• Off to Brimham Rocks with the babes and Dad; lots of excited rock climbing - taking the initiative, leaping of chasms, wiggling through cracks, bunking people up & so on. Great to see the girls as a team, all helping each other kindly, and not needing the Father nearly as much. Lunch in the sun.
• Into Pately Bridge to see Auntie Nickie, admired a nice glass blowing place; out for tea together. Babes home - and went out for a lovely evening with J. alone - wonderful to spend some quiet time together.

• To Leeds/Bradford airport early - terrible set-down experience; flew to Ulster. Positive customer meeting all day, with some debugging mixed in. Flight back late.

• Up, bit of mail chew; out for a walk with the family down the river, and back to Knaesborough - found some Oak ( and other) leaves to carve; enjoyed seeing a heron fishing.
• Back for lunch; cut some lime pieces, Dad got his carving chisels out & started the babes off in pairs on wood carving - lime: such a great wood for that.

• Early up, packed car, synched mail & code - set off to Leeds - reviewed code & mail in the car.
• Positive meeting for some hours in the afternoon. TDF board call in the car while en-route to M&D's. Arrived - settled babes in.

• NCC at The Stable; back for a light lunch, made a replacement swing seat with N. - good to practice routing the seat's rounded edges. Some quartet practice in the afternoon. Stories for babes.
• Suffered the horrors of FluxPlayer for Adventures in Oddesy - no Linux version; doesn't run under wine; some lame DRM-thing - far from ideal for USB MP3 input in car.

• Late Breakfast with babes, relaxed; worked on Windows tracing a little; made a shelf for the downstairs bathroom, J. painted it. Pottered about, watched James Herriot in the evening together.

• Out for a run with J. early partner call; reviewed changes, triaged mail. Lunch including a partner call; sync. with Tor & Miklos.
• Spent some time digging around injecting DLLs into windows processes for debugging; loads of duplication in this space - something as trivial as LD_PRELOAD is (apparently) too much to ask for; it is necessary to write reams of rather dodgy code instead; apparently Deviare had the radical approach of not only creating the source, but making it easy to build (MS' Detours fails to build eg.). Of course - having examined the project files they spectacularly fail to build due to things like this work of genius from Microsoft - breaking innumerable project files; installed VS 2015 on top of VS2017 (not recommended), hey ho. For someone used to smooth configure/make/make-install that works across all manner of different UNIX's and cygwin too - all this hard-coding of random sub-paths into Visual Studios seems unbelievably awful.

• Early morning mail skim; out with the family for the day to Oxburgh Hall - a brick-built castle-alike; amusing to see the ornamental battlements go around only a couple of sides of the estate; nice mirror-like moat though. Built a den in the forest together, played a large-piece chess game with the babes at lunch, enjoyed the house; home for a call.
• Watched iRobot with the larger babes, and up late nailing a memory corruption with Ash.

• Mail chew; another grateful mail from a near-victim of Zelda Coatings Scam. Now complete with a google map-view of an address that (when you look in street-view) clearly doesn't have their brand there.
• Sync. with Tor & Miklos.

• Mail chew; family (except N.) out to see Sue & babes. Interview; code review; built ESC bug stats. Commercial call.

• Up lateish; consultancy team call, catch-up with Miklos. Mail chew. Lunch.
• Thrilled to see so much excellent German Comment translation coming from Jens Carl particularly, but also Michael Stahl (RedHat), Johnny M, Bubli (CIB) and some others. The good news is we're down to 2200 detected lines and only 160 files. If you've always wanted to have a commit in LibreOffice, and German is your thing, act quickly by checking out the list, clone the git repo and make your mark !
• Got the MoneyGram account details from the 5th victim of Zelda Coatings to poke me, but inadequate fraud reporting page demands a US-style phone number and wants a physical address; huh ?
• Chat with Kendy, customer call.
• Watched Mirror Mirror with babes, M's friend Nicole over for a sleep-over. N. sadly ill.

• NCC at The Stable; home for lunch; slugged with babes. Out to Laura & Creighton's 'bye party - sorry to see them go, met some interesting people there. Back, watched Line of Duty before bed - a recepie for poor sleep.

• J. out at counselling training at Addenbrooks, played with the babes generally, bit of spring cleaning; finished the shelves. Naomi & Grace over to play. Played some pirates maths game. J. returned in the afternoon. Read stories, put babes to bed - up late sketching the moon with H. for her Astronomy GCSE. Julie over for dinner.

• Mail chew, called absent customers, mail, sync. with Kendy. Lunch. Sales calls. Cleaned some more online pieces up.

• Mail chew, customer call, lunch. Calls with Miklos, Lenny, ESC call. Got some hacking done on online unit tests in the evening and watched the SpaceX launch; LibreOffice isn't rocket science - but am always somewhat encouraged by the relative size of the trend.

The offer

This morning I was saddened to get a mail from a friend in Brazil forwarded from a Zelda Coatings and Construction (not linked). The content of their offer (they were selected for approach from a jobs site rather quickly) was for a project management job - with some unusual hooks:

• Basic Salary: Between £120,000.00 GBP - £180,000.00 GBP per annum (this is will be disclosed after interview).
• Allowances: Hazard/Inconveniences allowance is 10% of Basic salary. Entertainment allowance is 5% of Basic salary. All allowances are paid weekly and locally in Pounds equivalent at the existing exchange rates.
• Paid Home Leave: All expatriates are entitled to a one (1) month paid home leave, which can be taken once at a time. All expatriates shall be entitled to a leave allowance (in Pound) of an additional 100% of their basic salary. All expatriates are entitled to free flight tickets to cover the span of their home leave.

Now I don't work in the construction industry, but I see it as a low margin, high risk sort of place - offering a salary of three times the Market Price seems an extraordinary offer!

The catch

This offer is (I guess) designed to appeal to people from outside the UK; and therein comes the rub; you need to attend an interview here - but (not to worry) - they will refund the fare later. For a large & reputable company - I would expect a detailed telephone interview first before they ask you to travel anywhere.

"With respect to the expected timeline of work take-off, Zelda Coatings & Construction Company has mandated a reliable travel agency based on your choice of travel documentation to ensure the processing of all travelling Document/immigration particulars.
If the conditions stated above are acceptable to you, you are hereby directed to contact the designated travel consultant (with your contact information) so that they can start the processing of your relevant documents/immigration particulars to facilitate your travel."

This travel agency turns out to be "Latona Travel" - which has another web-site long on (presuambly stolen) stock images. I wonder if you insist on paying your own way - whether they will continue to humour you and let you knowingly burn that money, or not.

For the benefit of anyone that wants to fund a criminal underworld, their details are as follows

RECEIVER’S NAME: Elizabeth Olivia MONREAL
RECEIVER’S ADDRESS: 1 New Change Road, London EC4M 9AF, UNITED KINGDOM.
ID NUMBER: 9170433600513

Nice web-site content

Apart from being a 'coatings' company (ie. usually paint) - they appear to have lots of nice case studies (without deep links or supporting press releases), and have stolen lots of content. The (apparently authentic) Jones Bros appeared to get ripped off eg.

The domain name registrant (who may be another victim) is one Kelly Dodder of 85 Dogwood LnApt/Suite, Fairfield, Connecticut, 06824 United States - which looks odd in itself.

Update 2017-04-05: now the company appear to have a google-maps annotation; but if you use street view to find any sign of their logo - you rapidly discover it is just a junk-yard (there is something apt about that).

Actions

Up to you - but I would recommend immediately cancelling any credit cards you may have given them details for. I'd also recommend a holiday in the UK - it's a lovely place - although I suspect the scammers of not being based here.

Update: - apparently the scammers ask for a money transfer; presumably to avoid delay to making off with your money.

Comment

I assume that every permutation of scams will eventually be tried; it is interesting that the initial ones preyed on people's avarice and dishonesty: "I will transfer millions to your bank account, then you share with me" - with subsequent scams appealing to another demographic: "I want to donate a large sum to your religious charity" - to perhaps capture a more virtuous but still credulous lot. Where will it end ?

It seems particularly sad to prey on vulnerable people who are between jobs, and extract potentially limited free capital from those who may not have much of a float to keep them going. Sadly our anti-fraud systems are insufficiently quick to deal with this stuff, but my hope is that eg. Google's Anti-Phishing team are faster.

• Mail chew; partner call, chat with Kendy, partner call, mail chew; discovered my E-mail address was broken in the CRM for some years and fixed it - wow.
• Took H. and N. to their piano exams; out to a cafe afterwards with Nickie too.
• Worked late, poking at COM tracing - something that should be so simple - made so awful; and why ?

• Practice with the babes, mail. Built ESC stats, speculative crashreporter fix while doing it - a crash fix per week keeps the doctor at bay (or something). Sync with Andars, poked at Azorpid's proposal; nice. Lunch.
• Mail chew; toilet flush broke: stainless pin had managed to wear itself through the cheap aluminium handle casting, drilled another hole a little further back, re-assembled & hoped. Poked at another mysterious post-dispose crasher related to context menus for Aron.
• If someone endorses you on LinkedIn for the skill of 'subversion' - is that a good thing ?
• In case it needs saying: I'm convinced about in the equality of men & women - both made in the image of God, alike in dignity and also (sadly) in depravity. The BDSM community trouble me deeply; I think many need professional help (this can incidentally be added to my list of other 'phobes') - but - given the lack of information about the alledged mis-deeds of Garfield - it seems pretty clear to me that injustice has been seen to be done here. Significant sanctions on ones career (linked to an open-source community) would appear (to me) to require a transparently open & just process; which (apparently) this is not. The argument archetype of "lots of people voted this way, just trust us" is made much more convincing when the information put the to jury is public and constrained by a sensible process.

• Mail chew; consultancy call, bit of patch review. Lunch. Plodded through more admin in the afternoon, ESC call, contract bits.

• Unexpected call to play at NCC; did that, and back for lunch with Lionel, Uche & Julie, dropped L. back into Cambridge. Back to see J., the babes, put some shelves for shoes up with E.'s help. Tea, put extra tired babes to bed.

• Up & out to the Cambridge Science Festival - picking up a Nieve and Nicole on the way - enjoyed the Whittle turbo-machinery display & tour, the Cavendish' Chaos pieces, with a good kids lecture on gasses.
• Into Cambridge to pick up Lionel with David; home for dinner, up late.

• Up early, helped M. with her maths homework; famiyl bible study, breakfast, ran home from school; interview. Reviewed & merged some patches.
• Lunch; call with Bubli, Cor & Marina. H. and N. out to Burwell for a YFC weekend.

• Mail chew, sync. with Eloy. Mail chew, built ESC bug stats, pushed a work-around for a popular printing related crash report. Worked on a delaying socket implementation for debugging online's sensitivity to latency.

• Interview; partner call; sync with JanI; Miklos; lunch. Mail chew, customer call; late partner call & chat with Cor.

• Up early, noticed the ice-crusher motor relay is the same as the compressor one (and presumably far far less used), de-soldered both relays, swapped them and bingo: a working compressor. Bench testing suggests the duff relay is only good at making nice clicking noises, rather than power switching; good.
• Poked mail; pushed fixes. Calls variously, code reviews, built slideware for monthly mgmt meeting. Call with Aron; tea, took M. to cubs, read N. a story, then H.

• H. ill, fridge compressor appears to have packed-in; spent a while dis-assembling it variously; annoying. Consultancy call. Lunch, sync. with Andras & Tor, code review.
• Poked at the Daewoo FRN-U20DA in the evening ; no error codes, nothing doing, compressor not running, but starter seems ok, and continuity good. Brian over to help; jumped the compressor all working well there in the plumbing section - good. Set to work on the electronics; found the RT (Room Temperature) sensor, seems to be fine; hmm. Ordered a new compressor relay: OMIH-SS-112LM.

• Off to NCC at The Stable; did the kids work with Klara downstairs - fun. Back for a pizza lunch, snoozed with J. for a while. Pottered around with babes. Out for a walk with Sue & Russell & back for tea. Put babes to bed.

• J. out to take H. and M. to "Shine"; got on with some plumbing bits with M. machined a new tap chain connector out of aluminium sheet together. J. back, out to buy some marine plywood with M. Lunch.
• Knocked together some shelves for walking boots in the porch together in the afternoon. Out to Sandy's birthday party in the evening; nice to see Daniel, Adeline & family there too. H. to Charlotte's for birthday 'sleep'-over.

• Up; out to NCC for Men's Prayer Breakfast; mail chew. Partner call. Lunch.
• Slightly scary with J. training in bereavement counselling to see a calendar appointment labelled: Sudden and Traumatic Death.
• Hackery left & right, chat with Eloy.

• Mail chew, customer call; built ESC bug stats, lunch. Spent a while mending the admin console auth token problems with http - fun. ESC call. More admin cleanup & re-factoring.

• Off to Cloud Expo Europe in the morning; hacked on mail and the Admin console on the train. Switched it over to non-blocking I/O on the train.
• Out in the evening with J. great that H. can baby-sit, lovely to have a quiet drink & catch-up together.

• Mail, calls with Miklos, JanI, Andras, Tor, Mike; prepped agenda for next call. Commercial call, sync. with Lenny, partner call with Eloy in the evening.

• Mail chew, customer call. Consultancy team call. Chat with Kendy; lunch, product call, AMD Ryzen arrived - awesome maingear.com model - started the ultimate benchmark: compiling LibreOffice from scratch.
• Worked late; helped a partner issue; poked at credentials on Admin Console.

• J. to All-saints for Nichole's baptism, NCC at the Stable; back for a roast lunch with Nicole; babes played happily, relaxed with J. did a stamp jigsaw puzzle together. Practiced quartet, girls singing You lift me up nicely together.

• Up lateish; out to Kelvendon Hatch with M. to tour the bunker; had a nice pub lunch afterwards - lovely to spend some time with her.
• Home; watched The Slipper & The Rose an old-time DVD favourite with the babes, while hacking on online. Worked late again.

• Mail chew; a number of calls through the day; managed to get back to Online / non-blocking hackery - good to see this merged to online / master. Up until midnight chasing a silly reverse lookup issue hurting lock-file creation.

• Up earlyish, mail chew, couple of encouraging partner calls. Lunch - ESC call, caught up with Philippe, worked late.

• Mail chew, built ESC stats; finally dunged an expensive but useless chair out of my office. Call with Miklos.
• Pleased to see AMD's Naples announced with video. 32 core /64 thread Ryzens, with 128 threads over 2 sockets; it is really time to start (safely) using more of those in LibreOffice.

• Mail chew, partner call, hacked on Online a little, truck-load of admin, commercial call; dinner. Customer call in the evening.

• Mail chew, consultancy call, quick lunch, product call.

• Up late, NCC - home for lunch; finished The Green Ring Conspiracy in the car/house. Slugged in the afternoon with babes, started to read Prophet to older babes; quartet practice: improving steadily. Read stories, put babes to bed - pillow-talked late to J.

• Up early; out to Wimpole Hall with the babes - wandered the gardens happily - bit boggy; dropped babes home. Went with H. to do some DofE group activity around filming some movielet, spent much of the afternoon with her friends.
• Home; watched a movie with them while working on online. Up until midnight hacking away at non-blocking-ness.

• Took babes to school, and out for a run with J. Back to chew mail. Builders working on extension next door - hopefully finishing the noisy phase soon.

• Up early; mail chew, gerrit review, chat with team lunch. Mail, ESC call. Out to take J. to N's parents evening, pick up other babes, take them to music; home. Dinner. Bit more work, took H. out to sketch the moon: again too misty to discern features.

• Mail chew; analysis; partner call, sync with Eloy, lunch, partner call prep. Estimations, chat with partner, built ESC bug stats.
• Met up with Luciano & Simone in the evening.

• More mail & opportunity chasing; extraordinary to see WordBasic (obsoleted in Word 97) still being actively used in macros today - fun.
• Commercial call, plugged away at testing LibreOffice and some E-mail; sync. with Philippe.
• Pancake day - enjoyed some fine pancakes.

• E-mail chew, meeting, status reports, analysis; TDF board call.

• NCC in the Stable; rather sad to chat to a long standing church member abour what I do, and find she's using OpenOffice: five years behind the feature curve - annoying.
• Ran the younger lot of the older kids work ( or something ), Ephesians 4 - the decietfulness of sin, putting off the old self & on the new one and so on.
• Back for a fine roast lunch with Dwayne & family; chatted happily through the afternoon. Played Port Royale with the babes afterwards. Tea, put people to bed.

• Tidied the house a fair bit; Julie over for lunch, cake & games - her Birthday; Dwayne, Heather, Phillipa & Jessica over for the afternoon - lovely to meet the whole family & catch up. Up lateish preparing kids work for tomorrow.

• Up early; took babes to school, went for a run with J. Back, catch-up with Marina, sync with Miklos, lunch somewhere. Caught up with Lenny, and some document work. Alex & Madeline over after school. Did some baptism prep. with them: Christianity is a fight, count the cost - etc. Back for a Bourne movie with H. and N.

• Customer call; partner call; analysis. Discovered that my presentations were being mangled by some text/fit issue since I'd set export format to avoid some vital extensions: phew; reset my export settings.
• Up late preparing material for Baptism class on Friday.

• Excited to be demoing a new Ubuntu / Snap based solution alongside Ubuntu and Nextcloud at MWC Barcelona.
• Also pleased to see AMD release Ryzen Making 16 threads accessible to everyone - helping your LibreOffice compiles (and load times of course too); good stuff.

• Mail, financials with Tracie, call with Eloy; then Ash & Kendy. Built ESC stats. Out to cubs in the evening with M. - ran a code-breaking table with several fun encoding schemes.

• Poked mail; sync. with Kendy, consultancy call. Out for a walk, lunch. Back to financials / 2017 projections and calls.

• NCC in The Stable in the morning; Tony & Anne back for lunch, played a game; quartet practice, tea & read babies.

• Up rather late; breakfast; slugged variously. Driven home with babes and more Green Ring-ness. Relaxed variously & watched Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.

• Up; worked through the morning on the mail and task backlog. Out for a walk to see some ponies with the babes at Thorpness.
• Back for lunch, and then to tackle the plumbing problems. Attacked an amazing amount of congealed fat in the sink plumbing - simply extraordinary; eventually had to cut the pipe-work out in sections and replace it with H's help.
• Relaxed in the evening with some fine food. Couldn't sleep, hacked on socket code instead.

• Poked at socket code a lot in the morning; drove to Aldeburgh with the family - listened to the Green Ring Conspiracy in the car. Chat with Philippe, ESC call. More hackery.

• Awoke again to the dulcet tones of the neighbours extension being drilled / compacted / etc. Hey ho - they get to enjoy our early morning piano practice I suppose.
• Built ESC stats. Most encouraged to see that the German comment count has dropped by ~10% in the first two weeks of February - ~320 lines fewer (of 3600) thanks to: Johnny M, Michael Stahl (RedHat), Katarina Behrens (CIB), and Lukas Röllin - wonderful.
• Sync. with Ash; interview in the evening.

• Nice set of Valentines Day cards for the whole family; dug away at drear contract review much of the day.
• Watched and fast-forwarded some James Bond for H. and N. in the evening. Hacked until late on improved non-blocking socket code.

• Up lateish; babes on half term holiday - team meetings; E-mail, code review with Ash. E-mail deluge, board call, chase Cyber Essentials certification; dinner, more paperwork.

• Overslept vigorously, to the stable for NCC; Claire explained Ephesians 1 well - helpful; back foor lunch. Off to pick up littlies but too late for the service. Lots of stories. Played with them in the afternoon; stories, bed.

• Up very late indeed, slugged in bed chatting to J. & bigger babes. Late breakfast, H. out swimming with Alex, Elise & H?. Spent my time mending the toilet - new float valve is much larger than the previous one - requiring odd angles, silicone bodgery and worse.
• Out for a walk with J. on the heath - nice. Swimmers home, for a Bourne movie with N. followed by tea & card games. Dropped Alex home. Put babes to bed.

• Mail thrash much of the day; caught up with Kendy before he left for vacation; sync. with Ash. Dropped E. M. and Kelsey at GenR8.

• Mail chew, admin, contract review, built ESC stats rather late; ESC call. Out to H.'s GCSE choices day - interesting stuff.

• Up lateish; mail chew; to work ! H. feverish and at home; worked away at mail by the fire with her a bit.

• Beta Co-working; actually got some hacking done: whoot, though very trivial. Worked away on the train, got a few patches CI'd and included between network black-spots. Lovely to be home again and see four babes, and one georgeous lady.

• Off to the Beta Co-working; had our own room this year - to avoid distracting others; good to have so many hackers in one place. Pursued by admin. Out to the same restaurant as last night fun.

• Another great day of FOSDEM; stood around saying what-ho to all and sundry, good to catch up with so many.

• FOSDEM - a riotous explosion of FLOSS goodness, as always tons of old friends and new people to meet & discuss with. Lovely to meet up with so many. Out for a TDF / LibreOffice dinner in the evening with ~50 or so others. Gave a talk on threading for LibreOffice next: 5.4, about some of the work ongoing on threading the suite (hybrid PDF):

• Up early; Bedford is rather good; walked to the FSFE offices, a whole day of (occasionally exciting) TDF board meetings. Out in the evening for dinner - but went instead to a kebab place & on to the Delerium Cafe - which was much less dangerously crowded than previously, good.

• Up, interesting customer call; is it easier and cheaper for Collabora to reverse engineer a 3rd party's usage of COM for automating MS Office, than getting a large SI to react ? - probably. Loraine B. over to see J, nice to catch up with her.
• Trains variously to the Eurostar for FOSDEM, TDF meetings on Friday, and HackFest afterwards.

Today we release LibreOffice 5.3.0, the next step in our journey: rich in features indeed - but (understandably) the media like to focus on the things you can see. What about the things you cannot ? the increasingly awesome underpinnings on which we're building the next round of improvements. Again - to see the pretty things people made and (more importantly) who did the heavy lifting checkout the user visible features from many great hackers, translators, UX designers etc. Here I am going to focus on the under-sung heros of making everything else better. There is an official 5.3 wiki page, but I expand on this and dive in more deeply here.

First apologies if I missed your good work; (and this is a very incomplete view based on a few hours of analysis) - please do add yourself to the wiki page and potentially mail me a unified diff to this; thanks ! It is only really possible to skim 9750 commits and nearly one hundred thousand lines of git log message across core and online - with:
26,080 files changed, 1,698,565 insertions(+), 361,298 deletions(-)

The last stubborn German comments

One thing that perplexes me about LibreOffice 5.3 is how we can have managed to translate 50,000 lines of German comments to English, but the last 3700 lines continue to defy us. Is it that people don't like finishing things ? Is it that the interest in comment translation is proportional to the number of remaining comments ? Seems unlikely - many of the remaning comments are in writer and calc. Either way - there is some lingering low-hanging glory for the person who can rid us of the last comments here ! Many thanks to Johannes Berg, Maarten Bosmans, Tor Lillqvist (Collabora), Julian Mehne and Albert Thuswaldner for taking on a few comments and to Phillip Szelat for updating the bin/find-german-comments tool.

A short list of strings to whet your appetite; please do help finally dispatch this gasping dragon if you're a native German speaker (or competent context reading programmer).

Crash Reporting

Markus Mohrhard's great work integrating a Breakpad based crash reporter has been extraordinarily useful. You can browse the crash reports here by version, and we've had over thirty crashreporter related fixes in 5.3 targetting particular issues. It is great to see commits like this that can quantify the win (20% of daily crashes in 5.2.0.4). We managed to nail lots of the most frequently reported issues soon after deploying the reporter.

Unfortunately, as Tomaz fixed another very long standing issue that was deadlocking the Windows clipboard code we managed to create a big spike in crashes (when exiting with a live clipboard) - this immediately jumped out of the stats:

Which allowed us to somewhat accelerate the next release containing a fix (hence 5.2.5.1 vs. 5.2.5.2). Markus also nailed a whole clutch of evil badness around processing of events during very late shutdown of LibreOffice that we hope will improve things still further.

Another curious issue is that Windows, even Windows 64bit has a fairly hard (for an ISV) limit of 10,000 gdi objects (should be enough for anybody) handles per process. This was leading to lots of extremely diverse symptoms - with inexplicable failure cases above the window abstraction. Thanks to Markus Morhard for adding the ability to report the number of open GDI handles to crash reports, and Kohei Yoshida (Collabora) for fixing a gratuitous consumer of these handles for 5.3.1.

Ongoing Code quality work

As always lots of work from many people

• Coverity scan - our Coverity numbers continue to be outstanding, thanks to the hard work of Caolan McNamara with a nice round 256 commits in this release. Happily (or not) we upgraded coverity version, and found a new check - throwing up another 400 warnings just before the release.
• cppcheck - some great cleanup work chewing through the latest cppcheck report with over 40 fixes thanks to Jochen Nitschke, Caolán McNamara (RedHat), Zolnai Tamás (Collabora), Julien Nabet and Muhammet Kara (Pardus)
• Enum scoping - Noel Grandin (Peralex) has had 180 commits cleaning up and making consistent our very many old, inconsistent & poorly scoped enumerations.
• unique_ptr - lots of our code uses a pImpl pattern, thanks to Xisco Fauli, David Tardon, Arnold Dumas and others for cleaning this to use the safer unique_ptr template.
• At many places, we were using own integer types instead of standard ones due to legacy. Many of them were cleaned up previously, but there are still various outstanding uses here and there. For 5.3, many of TCHARs / _tstring, sal_uIntPtr, or sal_Size uses were changed - thanks to Stuart Swales, Marian Scerbak, Michael Stahl and others.
• Google Fuzz - the lovely ossfuzz project is providing some great value to us thanks to Google, and also Caolan McNamara (RedHat) for getting LibreOffice integrated into their tooling.
• Clang Plugins - with 200 commits to the compilerplugins directory this series - we gained a number of Clang plugins checking corner cases, and enabling lots of cleanups. Overall this gave nearly 800 commits to the core fixing some auto-detected badness - from a who's who of Clang users - thanks to: Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Noel Grandin (Collabora), Miklos Vajna (Collabora), Tor Lillqvist (Collabora), Caolán McNamara (RedHat), Michael Stahl (RedHat), Markus Mohrhard, Mike Kaganski (Collabora), Kohei Yoshida (Collabora), Jochen Nitschke and others The top plugins generating commits were: passstuffbyref, expandablemethods, singlevalfields, stringconstant, countusersofdefaultparams, staticmethods, redundantcast, cppunitassertequals, constantparam, unusedmethods.
• a script to sanity check library dependencies: check-elf-dynamic-objects was implemented - to ensure that we don't get unexpected and unhelpful new library dependencies in# release and bibisect builds on GNU/Linux thanks to Michael Stahl (RedHat)
• Address & Undefined Behavior Sanitizers - its great to see more than sixty patches referencing ASan and UBSan - finding nasty memory issues faster.
• Crash testing - continues across a growing suite of around 100k documents; thanks to the RedHat team for keeping the numbers consistently at or near zero.

Unit testing

As always we continue to grow our unit test count, and number of assertions (and assert calls). The tests are run by the Jenkins CI infrastructure on commits before they are merged. Thanks to so many for adding tests and stopping things from regressing particuarly those who had more than 20 commits to the unit tests: Zdeněk Crhonek, Miklos Vajna (Collabora), Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Caolán McNamara (RedHat), Justin Luth (SIL), Eike Rathke (RedHat), Noel Grandin (Collabora), Armin Le Grand (CIB), Michael Stahl (RedHat)

And also to those with more than 10 commits to the unit tests: Tamás Zolnai (Collabora), Laurent Balland-Poirier, Tor Lillqvist (Collabora), Katarina Behrens (CIB), Markus Mohrhard, Mike Kaganski (Collabora), Takeshi Abe, Mark Hung, Giuseppe Castagno. It always takes more time to write a test, there is always a temptation not to - thank goodness they helped.

Thanks too to Michael Stahl (RedHat) for tackling a number of horrible threading races and mis-designs causing intermittent failure in our unit tests.

One notable improvement in 5.3 has been the work from Zdeněk Crhonek adding 280 or so nicely organized unit test sheets for each Calc function and some of its corner-cases to the tree, and even more encouraging to see these extended when bugs are fixed.

Another area that got a number of nice unit tests was the old-style Parser and new XFastParser implementations thanks to Mohammed Abdul Azeem laying the ground for our incremental adoption of the XFastParser for LibreOffice 5.4 for ODF formats. Great to write tests before the code.

UI Testing

Thanks to Markus Mohrhard and our generous donors we have a shiny new UI testing framework in LibreOffice 5.3. We even have tutorials ( part 1 and part 2) to help people add new tests. Checkout the code in uitest/.

It is always good to see a whole new class of testing enabled, and provides a nice place for people comfortable with python to make a really important contribution.

Online

There were really a lot of changes in the LibreOfficeKit APIs and in the online code to interface with them; these two modules are tightly coupled. For details and credits I wrote most of this up for the CODE 2.0 release, around the time of the feature freeze.

Hardware Acceleration

A number of important fixes and performance improvements made their way into 5.3 (many of which are back-ported to 5.2 as well). We have used guards - which are created and destroyed in pairs around any OpenGL block - to catch buggy & crashing drivers inside those execution blocks, in order to disable OpenGL. In 5.3 these were adapted to OpenCL as well thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora). In addition Michael Meeks (Collabora) added a test spreadsheet that is re-calculated using OpenCL whenever the driver changes - in order to catch badness in driver implementation - somewhat sad that these are necessary; it would be hoped that just asking a (software!) OpenCL driver for its version (to see if we can black-list it) would not hard-crash, but apparently that is too much to ask. Anyhow - now we cope well with lots of sub-optimal situations, and as such removed the legacy 'Test' button for manual CL driver selection.

The VCL / OpenGL backend got a large number of performance improvements from Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) including batch rendering of pixels, lines, rectangles and polylines and deferred texture rendering - these help to push more work to the GPU in one go improving performance.

Miscellaneous

• Automatic screen-shotter - one of the problems of maintaining documentation in LibreOffice is that of taking UI screenshots and keeping them up-to-date for all languages. Thanks to Katarina "bubli" Behrens (CIB), Armin Le Grand (CIB), Thorsten Beherens (CIB) and our donors - we now have an automated tool for building screenshots. Checkout the documentation.
• Threading wins - we deprecated the grim old windows-like osl::Condition API in 5.3 in favour of the much more sensible (Unix like) std::condition_variable - which makes it easier to write safe code. Thanks to Stephan Bergmann (RedHat) for fixing a related Thread Pool thread-safety issue. Also to Kohei Yoshida (Collabora) for unwinding an underlying threading issue in our ZIP file handling hurting threaded XLSX import.
• gtk+3/Wayland - thanks to Caolan McNamara (RedHat) we have much improved gtk+3/wayland support in 5.3, one gem is OpenGL slide transitions.
• Improved MathML support thanks to Takeshi Abe who continues to do excellent maintenance and bug fixing work on our math component.
• MS Office URI schemes - were added to much improve LibreOffice's integration with Windows web browsers and particularly Sharepoint for launching and editing documents thanks to Mike Kaganski (Collabora).
• Firebird - it has been good to watch Wastack fixing lots of blocker bugs for us to be able to use the upgraded Firebird 3.0 as our default database engine in 5.4 with lots of great commits.
• Calc dynamic columns currently we have a fixed array of columns for each sheet; thanks to Dennis Francis we are creating a nice new encapsulations to eventually change this to a more powerful, and efficient sparse data structure.
• Thanks to Maarten Bosmans for moving rapidly from translating German comments to improving Calc style and formatting performance as well as fixing bugs.
• Much improved Calc functions with many bug fixes and new functions thanks to Eike Rathke (RedHat), Winfried Donkers, and others.
• Significant interoperability wins thanks to Justin Luth who has tackled over eighty nasty bugs across DOC, DOCX and other formats.
• Android cleanups - its great to see lots and lots of code cleanups this cycle and many ongoing improvements with some great work from Aleksandar Stefanovic, Mert Tumer, Christian Lohmaier (TDF), Mirek Mazel and Otto Kekäläinen slowly making the app more polished.

QA / bugzilla

The QA team do a noble job struggling against great odds; you can see those doing the hugely valuable triage and fixing work in the QA stats for 5.3.0 wiki page. During this release cycle in August we had the pleasure of having Xisco Fauli join TDF - funded by our generous donors - to support and contribute to the QA team; their hard work together has got our UNCONFIRMED bug count way down - accelerating a vital feedback loop between users and developers.

Pootle upgrades

Pootle was upgraded this cycle bringing a wealth of improvements for our translators. From little things like allowing special characters in usernames, to major performance improvements allowing us to extract translations into our builds much more quickly. Other great features such as improved notifications with feedback on changes, off-line translation memory are much appreciated. Thanks to Dwayne Bailey (TranslateHouse) and our sysadmin team.

Updated bundled libraries

LibreOffice depends on many 3rd party libraries. To stay up-to-date, they have to be updated from time to time, their patches re-evaluated (ideally up-stream merged them) and they need re-testing. For 5.3, the following were updated:

• boost: Removed headers that are not used any more, and many more cleanups(Michael Stahl, Stephan Bergmann)
• libxslt: Updated, and removed some LibreOffice-specific patches (Michael Stahl)
• libzmf: Integrated, to support import of Zoner Callisto/Draw documents (Aleksas Pantechovskis)
• libxmlsec: Upstreamed more LibreOffice patches and updated to new version (Miklos Vajna)
• Added or updated fonts (Akshay Deep, Andras Timar)
• libstaroffice: Integrated library to support the old StarOffice file formats.
• firebird: Updated to Firebird 3.0 (Wastack, Lionel Elie Mamane, Caolán McNamara)
• harfbuzz: Updated to new version, and enabled to be built with Graphite support (Khaled Hosny)
• libmwaw, mdds, nss, curl, poppler, cairo, pixman, openldap, redland, orcus, liblangtag, libwps, icu, libmwaw: Updated to the latest versions (David Tardon, Kohei Yoshida, Caolán McNamara, Jochen Nitschke, Michael Stahl, Jaskaran Singh, Eike Rathke)

Getting involved

Lots of fun stuff going on at LibreOffice - quite apart from the visible feature development. Its a great place to find a home and contribute. If you want to get involved there are plenty of great people to meet and work alongside - come and see us at FOSDEM for example this weekend. As you can see individuals ('Assigned') make a huge impact to the diversity of LibreOffice.

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 volunteers vacation / business plans:

Naturally 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. It is extremely easy to build LibreOffice, each easy-hack should have code pointers and be a nicely self contained task that is easy to solve. In addition some of them are really nice-to-have features or performance improvements. Please do consider getting stuck in with something.

Another thing that really helps is running pre-release builds and reporting bugs just grab and install a pre-release and you're ready to contribute alongside the rest of the development team.

Conclusion

LibreOffice 5.3 is great; it is made by a set of developers having fun, working together, and building an increasingly attractive and beautiful Free Software Office suite, I hope you enjoy using it. Thanks for reading, don't forget to checkout the user visible feature page and thank you for supporting LibreOffice.

Raw data and commit stats built using our gitdm-config - are available for many of the above graphs.

• Mail chew, sync. with Bubli, text tweakage with Lenny. Worked late building an under-the-hood update with Kendy's help.

• Mail chew, interview, built ESC stats. Worked on trying to build the 5.3 under-the-hood stats: involves reading a vast number of commits. Chat with JanI. Commercial call, more mail.

• Mail chew; poked at admin, checked some gitdm-config bits variously. Consultancy call, various 1:1's.

• Up, finished up kids work prep; NCC, talked with the bigger ones. Back for a roast lamb lunch, slugged happily. Watched one of the most terrible movies I've ever seen; naff, corny, groan-out-loud awful: Hop - apparently we got to the bottom of the barrel of Amazon Prime free Kid-friendly movie content in under a month.
• Watched some Laugh your way to a better Marriage; why not ? with J.

• Up late; exhausted. Babes out to see friends; out for a walk with just E. lunch. Prepared kids work for tomorrow. To Lynn's birthday barn-dance in the evening; fun to catch up with people - good food, rather tired.

• Breakfast and bed; up for lunch. More mail chew, partner, customer calls; good stuff, albeit exhausting. Babes out to Friday Club. Watched Esio Trot on the free Amazon Prime subscription (suckered into accepting it by mistake) with the babes; fun.

• Mail chew, admin, sync with Miklos, admin. Lunch. Poked at more code. Somehow managed to work all night - when the customer calls ...

• Customer call, paperwork. Reviewed Azorpid's XFastParser implementation for our ODF filters, and pushed it - to see if the crash-testing likes it. Started chasing Cyber Essentials certification.

• Briefed Miklos, breakfast, interview; commercial team call, back to Calc bits until early in the morning.

• Brief mail chew; poked at intricacies of the Calc core for much of the day chasing an issue, dinner, worked very late - enough to catch up with Kohei; nice.

• Andy & Jo's one-year anniversary & marriage blessing at the Memorial Hall; played violin in the band, talked to a number of people afterwards

• Up lateish; played with babes, started to learn to play a new German Pirate card-game with the babes; fun. Got the circular saw onto J's kitchen lintel, lunch, mended a tap. J. out to the PCC annual quiz, worked away at some profiling pieces until very late.

• Mail chew; read up on F5's iRules wherever I could. Craig arrived to fix the boiler: inflated the expansion tank bladder again: I could have done that!. Plugged through admin and E-mail backlog; finally got to looking at a Mac bug in the evening, inconclusively.

• Bus into Cambridge - C'bra quarterly mgmt meetings lots of good things going on there, and great to see Guy, Amelie & Philippe in the flesh. Out for dinner in the evening.

• Mail chew; timesheet analysis, friendly chat & catch-up with a partner. Lunch.

• Mail chew; estimation with Kendy & Miklos; lunch. Customer call, contract work, chat with Bob, Monthly mgmt call. Customer call, partner catch-up in the evening.

• Visited the Doctor, customer call, mail chew & closing FY2016 finance call with Tracie.

• Up lateish, visited David at Christ Church - lovely to see lots of people there, met a BlackRock Analyst there; interesting; David back for lunch, chatted by the fire afterwards. Dis-assembled E's laptop to remove the Broadcom Wifi card which requires proprietary (and thus predictably not working) drivers. Installed a new Ralink card cheap on ebay - which worked flawlessly out of the box; nice. Watched The House of Magic with the babes, put them to bed.

• Up earlyish; train to London with the family. Tube to the Tate Modern for N. to find some things to sketch, over the Millennium bridge, past St Pauls, to Mansion House tube. On to South Kensington and the Royal Albert Hall - to see AmaLuna which was really rather excellent. Out to Pizza Express afterwards, trains home - rather late with the babes.

• Mail chew; sync. with Andras; action items everywhere, poked at the Mac, more E-mail. Sync with Philippe.

• Mail chew; customer call. Amused to see a paper on The Appendix suggesting it is not a vestigal organ; less amusing my Mother had her spleen removed some years back as another useless / vestigal organ before that too was found to be rather useful.
• TDF Mac Mini arrived, and I started to set it up to build LibreOffice, hopefully will have some spare time to fix a Mac issue or two.

• Mail chew, contract work, encouraging partner call. Took H. out to try to draw the moon at night (Astronomy GCSC) - immediate cloud cover: hmm.

• Mail chew; contract re-working; Lunch. Weekly commercial team call, filed bugs.

• One to ones, projections, lunch, chat with Eric. Customer call. Board call. Dinner. Bought a lameish 2nd hand Mac Mini to fix egregious bugs with; thanks to TDF.

• Up lateish; off to NCC, Pizza for lunch; rested thoroughly.

• Up; mended things around the house variously - maintenance everywhere. Lunch, snoozed by the fire. Out to play at Sam & Paul's marriage blessing; on to see Julie's nice new flat. Back together for a meal. Stories, bed.

• Mail chew; poked at contracts, priorities, encouraged people to buy good LibreOffice'y things - caught up with Robert.

• Worked through mail. Really thrilled to see the legacy StarOffice file formats being worked on by Laurent Alonso in libstaroffice. Great to see the rather embarrasing gap left by StarOffice's old and unpleasant binary file formats start to get filled.
• Plugged away at some rather tedious ESC / budget ranking bits to try to build consensus on what strategic things to push to the board. ESC call - good to see the guys, lots of good things going on.

• Mail chewage; customer contract bits. Booked travel for FOSDEM which will be awesome as ever.
• Measured my Wife's rather tired (original) Galaxy S3 battery as I replaced it; somewhat concerningly it has swelled from 5.7mm to 7.8mm some third wider than it used to be: exciting.
• Up late filing tax for Julia.

• Back to work; team calls and structural shuffling. Chewed through masses of E-mail, synched with Miklos. A long series of bitty calls with a new customer.

• Worked in the morning long enough to discover that most of the team wanted another day off, but didn't file it. Abandoned ship to wander around Wicken Fen - with family jumping on the fen-land. Supposedly the top metre is 3/4's water - but then so am I.
• Home to work through a task list of small things to do.

• Off to Isleham Baptist in the morning, N. to play at Emmas, home for a use-ups lunch; Bobbie, Tyson & Emma over for fixing 3D Goggles, silly games & tea.