Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
Collabora
Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and
services for whom I work.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on
the LibreOffice Planet news
feed.
Older items:
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Checked mail quickly; into Cambridge with T&B, S&L for
a walking tour - chips at Gardies, back to relax, write a few cards
and more.
-
All Saints - canned music, and fun. Home for a pizza
lunch; slugged, watched a Mission Impossible movie.
-
Slugged much of the day; assembled Naomi's dresser,
played with new bass guitar. Out for a walk on the heath
with the babes in the evening.
-
Out to Anglesey Abbey - enjoyed the tree & main
house; back for lunch, out to play the Organ - David over
- played silly games until late.
-
Packed the house up, collapsed beds; managed to stuff
presents into cars variously. Picked up a hire car with Tom,
bid a fond au-revoir to R&A. Drove home, heated the house,
unpacked, welcomed M&D, T&B&S&L.
-
Up late; Nicolas, Laura & T arrived
went to the park with the whole tribe; ate, caught up,
played together.
-
Christmas day; stockings in the morning - thrilled
to discover J&I had a stocking of our own - filled with
chocolate & a pair of satsumas. Out with M&D to the
excellent nearby CofE church for a Christmas service complete
with interactive congregation word-cloud, and good music &
talk.
-
Back for presents, lunch; lots of lovely food, good
company - sadly congested chest. Played games variously -
Empires, Articulate etc.
-
Up late. David, Gillian & Peter arrived -
tried un-successfully to get their motor-home through an
unhelpfully narrow gate. Walked a good way to beef up
the congregation at a Carol Service in the evening.
-
Worked on a thank-you blog for our
customers partners & community for much of the day, with Amir:
-
Rather an unhelpful congested chest; breathing hard.
-
Played at All Saints; packed lunch in the car on
the way to Bob & Amelia's for Christmas - much excitement.
Met Lydia in-person for the first time, good to see T&B&S.
-
Got beds setup for babes & Peter.
-
Breakfast, walk around Fisherman's Path; back for lunch.
Out for a walk on Sizewell beach with Anne; relaxed, enjoyed
tea, tried to fix strange Windows Vista & Windows 10 issues for
B&A. Drove home.
-
Worked much of the day; lots of copy editing.
J. to B&A's. Men of Faith curry in the evening, train
to Ipswich, picked up by J. sleep.
-
Mail chew, marketing bits, booked rooms at the Hotel Bedford
for team mates, for the forthcoming FOSDEM hackfest.
-
Thrilled to see the iOS co-investment between Adfinis SyGroup
and Collabora finally see the light of day: check-out our
video
and/or Nicolas' detailed
blog
and of course come to the
FOSDEM
Hackfest
to get hands-on with the code.
-
Mail; good 1:1 meetings with my (excellent) team through the day.
Admin left & right, Sales & marketing call.
-
Out for a run; really pleased to see the hard work
by the team released as CODE 4.0 (or at least an RC1 of that) - many more
improvements to come. Thanks to all our partners & customers for their
feedback and funding. Of course - we'll continue shipping feature & fix
releases on top as we progress.
-
Mail chew, marketing work much of the day. Late partner call,
and sync. call with Tracie on year-end bits.
-
All Saints band in the morning, Fraser speaking. Kindly
entertained by David & Jocelyn for lunch - played charades.
Back for the Carol Concert, quartet of babes playing, packed
tired persons off to bed late.
-
House tidying action left & right, J's family over for
a fine lunch, present exchange and so on. Great to see them.
-
Dropped E' to a friend's sleepover.
Out to N's friend's baptism at a nearby Methodist church;
lovely service, nice to see lots of old friends.
-
On to Andrew & Annabell's Christmas house-party in the
evening, left H. for a sleepover, lots of very tired.
-
Chased marketing issues, call with Florian, Brian. Partner admin.
Submitted another FOSDEM talk.
-
Admin frenzy. ESC call, poked at online unit tests.
Late calls.
-
Up early, got build setup, sync with Kendy, legal call. Out to
see The Ark with M&D -
very interesting indeed, kindly shown around by John - good stuff.
-
Played in the Soham Ely Carol Concert orchestra in the evening.
H. N. & M. played beautifully; J. M&D, Mary & E. to watch,
put babes to bed rather late.
-
Mail chew, more text review; built ESC stats. M&D arrived
for lunch, good to see them. Tech call, up late with Eloy & Henry
poking at translating bug reports.
-
Mail chew, status, sync call with Amir, poked at text and
partners.
-
Church - played variously; communion service; Christmas lunch
afterwards; All Saints Talent show - featuring Meeks babe quartet. Back,
tidied up, tired slugging, dinner, stories for babes bed.
-
Up lateish; sorted out some Christmas presents, visited Screwfix,
inspected the All Saints organ innards for H. Lunch. Started working
through some marketing backlog until late. Robin over with potatoes for
roasting, had some tea with him.
-
Mail chew, interview, calls; TDF/BoD call; friend, partners - wrote
a few Xmas cards. Finished LOTR in the evening with the family.
-
Calls, ESC, budget & review planning. Collabora Christmas
party in the evening with J. good to see the Cambridge team relaxing.
-
Mail; admin, submitted two FOSDEM 2019 talks - getting close to
the deadlines; should be a great conference - with LibreOffice hack-fest
in advance.
-
Mail chew; build ESC stats, while on the phone to the bank
variously to fix credit limits, re-issue a server order etc. Tech.
team call, annual reviews.
-
Mail chew, sync. with Andras & Kendy; tons of admin; managed
to buy some server hardware. Calls until late. Maths work with Esther & M.
band practice too.
-
Played bass, pizza lunch, lots of slugging in the afternoon;
not so well, but good to rest and play with the babes. Bid 'bye to
Julie.
-
Out into town for community, market festival goodness. Got
J's nativity scene setup in a gazebo, then re-assembled it when it
blew down , carols, returned to the ruins of the
gazebo: English weather !
-
Caught up with John, home. Relaxed, Uche over, J. out to
Christine's leaving do. Spent some time working on a pet unit
test - behaving oddly. Dinner together, finished Patriot Season 2.
-
Mail chew, TDF call, admin, sync. with Eloy, planning.
Julie back from Brazil, for a sleep over with the girls - lovely
to see her.
-
Mail chew, patch review, contract review with Miklos.
Out to music lesson with the babes - M. dancing at school. Built
a unit test for an online nasty while there.
-
Built ESC bug stats, admin, lunch, call with tech mgmt.
Poked at profiling some high CPU & I/O load un-related to an
online instance, but on the same VM. Legal call.
-
Built ESC bug stats, admin, lunch, call with tech mgmt.
-
Mail chew; re-factored some image handling; sync with Kendy.
Misc. planning.
-
Bass at Church with H. on Piano. Mary's 90'th birthday celebration
lunch with Simon and Nicki too - lovely. Slugged in the afternoon.
-
Sanded ceiling, trying to get a smoothish surface to cover up the
rather awful plastering job from the roofer. Helped babes with Maths and
other homeworks; bit of hacking & admin. LOTR in the evening.
-
J. out on a trip to the tower of London with H,N,M.
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Mail; continued debugging and polishing to a deadline. Interested
by the GNU
Kind communication controversy. Interested and pleased that the strange
mix of libertarian, campaigning and (perhaps overly) permissive roots of the
GNU project are still being championed by Richard, despite other
views being represented. Still thinking through my take on the pronoun
topic which intersects respect, integrity, truthfulness and much more. I find
the Roman Catholic compromise
interesting. What do you do when faced with a dogmatic requirement to call
someone's interpretation of faith and hierarchy the one true/universal
view ? What if you profoundly, but respectfully disagree with chunks of their
doctrine and practice ? Do you go for Papist (rather divisive), some
re-define the term to mean the universal set of all true Christians ? (but that
doesn't help with the identity question). How about a fudge that acknowledges the
chosen name and also the real identity of the one making the claim, in some
suitable way (ie. Roman Catholic). Of course, there are plenty of weaker
truth claims out there Unification Church
vs. ~pejorative Moonies etc.
Interestingly google tells me that these days catholic means
"including a wide variety of things; all-embracing" with synonyms of:
"diverse, eclectic ...". Perhaps a good thing to aspire to for communities
seeking to accomodate and encourage dialog between those of widely varying ethical
pre-suppositions.
-
Prodded at the Chrome mobile device profiling bits - rather an excellent
tool-set.
-
Mail chew, dived into some hacking to help the team with their
deadline; too fun - criminaly so; broke & re-assembled bits of code
left & right. Worked excessively late - nice to have a continuous
set of changes going in all night handing over from late-night Europe,
to night Canada to early morning Russia, Europe. Tired.
-
Coming increasingly to the conclusion that the HiDPI model of
adding a scale-factor at the low-level rendering layer, while keeping
the rest of layout, etc. working in a different co-ordinate space is
the best of all worlds. Apple lead the way, gtk+ followed, and cairo
makes it easy - even if the treasured shibboleths such as consistent
height pixel aligned grid rendering need significant extra lifting.
Not entirely clear how to do it through an integer pixel API though.
-
Mail chew; partner call, sync with Daniel. Monthly all-hands.
Hacking, call with Amir.
-
Mail chew, built ESC stats built slideware
and stats. Lunch. Monthly commercial call. Worked at analysis, marketing
bits with Amir & Eloy. Up late looking at documentation.
-
Mail chew, partner calls, sync with Miklos & Kendy.
-
All Saints in the morning; Laura over for lunch, played
games, relaxed, watched They shall not grow old in the
evening; harrowing.
-
Slugged in bed; attacked poorly polished plaster in kitchen
skylight with E, sand-paper and vacuum cleaner; tried to make less
of a mess of the filling there. Relaxed variously with the babes.
-
Worked in the morning, lunch with Dad; walked to the
station - train 20 minutes late: "slippery leaves on the line",
pre-booked ticket re-work in York; train also delayed 20mins
in Cambridge - nice. Got lots of bitty admin done on the train.
-
Mail; Rhona's funeral at a packed Methodist church. Family
burial afterwards, and a lovely reception. Good to see the wider
family. Home, worked - admin, mail and more.
-
Mail; product comparison; lunch with J. train north for some
hours; dinner with the parents - talked until late.
-
Mail chew, bug review, built ESC prototype, fixed some scroll-wheel
nightmares that have been plaguing me.
-
Mail; admin; lunch, status report, sync. with Andras, Miklos, Kendy,
Eloy; worked late.
-
All Saints, played bass; pizza lunch, dropped H. and M. off to the
Rememberance parade & service with Scouts. Watched Man in the High
Castle, and a large nativity silhouette with J. Worked on mending J's
old Galaxy S3 for M. in the evening - struggled to find compatible PIT
files that would not be rejected; grim. Rather unclear why Android's
Download mode doesn't let you read the flash contents smoothly.
-
Off to Sue & Clive's - worked in the car. Saw their new porch,
enjoyed a fine lunch, out for a walk - saw some deer in the fields. Adrian.
Georgina & Isabelle arrived - enjoyed fireworks together. Drove home -
bed extremely late.
-
Mail chew; admin, board call during lunch; interview,
marketing call, interview. LOTR in the evening.
-
Mail chew, lots of it. Customer call, TDF marketing, sales &
marketing, ESC calls. Two partner calls. Back to some quick patch review.
Some hacking in the evening on urgent code bits.
-
Guilty hacking and bug-fixing through the day, poked at a perennial
annoyance of not complaining when people send SSL/TLS frames to a plain
HTTP port in online, timeouts on slow document conversions and more - fun.
Band practice in the evening. Worked excessively late tackling some bugs.
-
Mail chew, built ESC agenda/stats. Some patch review, admin,
filed bugs.
-
Mail chew; drove into Cambridge to swap hardware around &
see Dorée home for a late lunch. Mail chew. Physics lesson for
H. and Katie in the evening kindly provided by David.
-
Played at family service; M. reading, H. piano & organ, N. games
& violin. Lots of people for shared lunch - fun. Back with Mary for some
more slugging, organ practice, sheet cutting & sewing machine dis-assembly
with J. relaxed variously. Stories, bed.
-
Cooked breakfast, H. out singing, played Paper.io with the
babes. Put up fixings in M's room, nice. Caulked plasterwork - still
not dry, and considered the kitchen mess.
-
Fixed some gtk / webkit goodness Tor has produced to use our Online
view inside a gtk+ frame - for easy debugging, testing. Might be a good route
for a more attractive minimal viewer & editor on the Linux Desktop one day.
Watched LOTR-ness in the evening with the babes.
-
Mail, sync with Olivier, got my Android development environment
into some sort of state; lots of downloading. Bought an iPad to test
with an expensive hobby. Caught the last part of the ESC call. Dinner.
Back to install more Java/Android-ness.
-
Up early; briefly strengthened ceiling joist mostly suspended by
plasterboard. Dean arrived to fix leak & plaster things up.
-
Mail chew, more C'bra mgmt hangout goodness; interview. Out to
Band practice, then the pub with two Chris' and Max.
-
Up, interested in the water dripping through the roof: an
exciting new experience - thank goodness it wasn't plastered first,
placed a lunch-box underneath.
-
Listened to the IBM/RedHat webcast - hybridize your clouds,
RedHat is a great company, perhaps IBM's sales teams will do great
things for their existing products. I guess Microfocus' sale of SUSE
for only $2.5bn
looks like a bargin.
-
Mail, tech mgmt call, picked up E. from school; mgmt call.
Up late, fixing kitchen lights, packing the extension loft void with
fibreglass: a giant blanket of thick goodness; hopefully it helps
somewhat.
-
Dean arrived to fit a new Velux window on the kitchen - fun.
Spent a while squeezing myself into a very, very small cavity along
with lots of fibre-glass to try to make the extension somewhat warmer.
-
Couple of calls, lots of mail, C'bra mgmt meeting bits.
-
Band in the morning, Max, Angie & Noah over for lunch,
out to a fine concert at All Saints, part of Beethoven's 5th
piano concerto curiously instrumented for piano & organ. H.
played the organ too. Wine, cheese, fund-raising for naitbabies. Great talk from
Cedric on the research they're doing to address it.
-
Out for a walk from Thorpness back to the Warren with the babes.
Lunch, drove home, brief un-packing, out to see Johnny English with David
in Bury; harmless fun.
-
Mail chew; out for a swim nearby with the babes - unfortunately pool
closed, wandered the harbour wall & played in a brightly painted kids
playground. Back for lunch. Worked through the afternoon, partner calls late.
-
Mail, worked in the car trying to use the Chrome JS
profiler which appears less helpful than it could be - nice
timeline but not easy to connect to the code.
-
Enjoyed Bruce & Anne's hospitality; calls in the
afternoon - Sales, ESC, interview. Posted our (rather brief)
Javascript
Developer job advert.
-
Mail chew, admin, interviews & partner calls.
Back-ported mst's a11y regression fix. Partner call from
Church during H.'s organ lesson. Back for dinner, band
practice.
-
Mail chew; built ESC stats, tech mgmt call. Plugged
away at the admin deluge; out with J. in the evening - lovely
to have some time together.
-
Mail chew, admin backlog, sync. with Eloy & Kendy.
Interview, partner call.
-
Music at All Saints; pizza lunch, out for a walk in the
forest at Brandon as a family; lovely.
-
Tram, train, plane to Gatwick, train to Newmarket. Lovely to be
home, relaxed with the babes variously, read stories, bed.
-
Up early, is it possible that they built more housing
on the mid-town farm-land near Scönegg since I was last
here ?
-
To DINAcon, partner and customer meetings; finished
slides and spoke on Migrating to LibreOffice - nice to have
Nicolas, Michael & Mads there.
-
Enjoyed the awards - not least the extraordinary privilege
of being awarded:
OpenSource Classic fun. Fine nibbles afterwards for the OSI
20th Birthday celebrations, on to the Hackfest: pleased to have
four volunteers interested in hacking on LibreOffice - spent the
evening working on code pointers and reading technique with them.
-
J. dropped me at STN; flight to Bern, dinner with Nicolas,
Simon and several others - good to see Matthias again; a fine
evening.
-
Mail, admin, slide building and partner sales call.
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Mail chew; administration & form filling, built ESC stats.
-
The increasing volume of sextortion SPAM I get is quite extraordinary
and rather liberating given its comic lack of any basis. Interesting to
see the large increase in purchase-order, payment related scams too -
thank goodness our finance department are savvy (and run Linux Desktops).
-
Joined the LOT Network today; was
extraordinarily impressed and pleased to see Microsoft's unambiguously
good move of joining OIN - was wisely preceeded by joining LOT - to
avoid concerns about indirect trolling. Already had a great deal of respect
for Microsoft's engineers (having worked with some in the deepish past), now it
seems they have commercial people to match. If you read the MS Legal VP's
quote I linked - it is interesting that he traces their open-ness back to
open-sourcing ASP.Net in 2008. Miguel's Mono project combined with his positive
and constructive engagement with many good people inside Microsoft seems to
have yielded much sweet fruit in the end. Which is of course not to say that
the bad-cops did not play a role too, but - anyhow; most pleased at the positive
outcome for all.
-
Monthly commercial call, prep, projections, slides.
-
Interview; mail chew, sync with Kendy & Eloy. Lunch with J.
-
Tried to restore the missing Mattermost to IRC bridge that just got
shut down; horrors. The lack of good nick / tab-autocompletion - plus the
insistence on requiring '@' before completing (which ambiguates itself via
other unusual fields) makes it deeply cumbersome to use for conversation.
Surely it is possible to learn to communicate effectively in a much more
constrained fashion - say with a lump of coal in your mouth; but why ? I
wonder if RocketChat copes with typing the 1st char of a nick, and tab to
dis-ambiguate it.
-
All Saints, music group, chatted with people; back for lunch
with Lydia. Mended part of the creche door, back to All Saints to fit
it, odd issue with Organ bellows over-filling and triggering a relief
valve - interesting. Home to read stories, dinner late, iplayer, bed.
-
Up lateish, did some maths with E. and M. - read with H. and lazed
around with N. Out to David's for lunch - and enjoyed an Escape Room with
H,N,M & David.
-
Home for some hacking about in the garden, a fine dinner, cake for
David - and up late talking.
-
Interview(s) - still trying to find a good JS developer to work on
Online. Worked on catch-up calls with Eloy, Kendy, Miklos, lots of backed up
mails and tasks to do.
-
To the booth, another day of visitors; helped Jos pack things up,
back to the airport via a quick tour of the town. Picked up by J. bed
rather late.
-
Discovered a local Netto - and stocked up to avoid being
charged an unbelievable amount of money for food in the show.
Met with a stream of customers left & right. Out for dinner
as a team in the evening; fun.
-
J. kindly dropped me at STN, flight to Nurnberg. Met an
interesting sales engineer working on Nuclear power stations in
the plane.
-
Headed to the Nextcloud booth, spent some time talking
to customers, interested parties; lunch, wandered the show floor.
Out for a pleasant dinner at a nearby Italian place - staying
AirBnB just next to the venue; nice.
-
Got an anxious security mail from Microsoft to verify
that it was indeed me using my computer to access live.com; ended
up at this triumph of usability - do I click:
"This wa..." (grey) or "This wa..." (blue) ?
No tooltips. Mercifully Chrome's debug mode suggests that the
blue 'wa...' was the one to click if it was me.
-
Mail chew, admin, sync with Kendy, Eloy, Miklos, Andras
.
-
Picked up H. from her sleep-over (a garden shed full of small
girls), back to All Saints, H. played piano; fine shared lunch
afterwards. Enjoyed some organ playing with H. home, watched the
Princess Bride. Put tired babes to bed early. Started the new
Man in the High Castle series with J.
-
Relaxed with the babes, read stories, chatted with
small girls. H. out. Sophie over in the afternoon, M. and J.
out to the Higher childrens mission / event at Ely Cathedral.
Watched an Oceans movie.
-
Mail chew; admin. Poked distributors, until I found a
friendly one. Catch-up with JP in the evening. Out for Men of
Faith in the evening, nice Mexian meal.
-
Migration workshop; lots of interesting feedback. Lunch
together, got some good product feedback; flybe back to the UK,
trains home, late.
-
Up rather early; J. dropped at station; trains, admin
& projections in the airport. Arrived in Belfast, off to
Ulster Hospital. Great to meet up with the team there and to hear
the encouraging & amusing stories. Did battle with Tor, Mark &
Leslie's help with PatientCenter - a mix of VB5 and VB6 - and looking
for Java libaries too; fun. Up late writing slides.
-
Mail chew; built ESC minutes; mgmt team call.
-
Mail chew, AirBnB booking, lots of admin, customer call.
-
NCC, sung & played bass variously - over to Dorinda &
Frankie's to enjoy lunch & their company. Home, watched A Cinderalla
Story - not entirely sure that the plot-line of the anonymous, on-line
relationship happily turned out to be with a real-human / frustrated jock
is a great pattern to promote.
-
Taxi to the airport; flight home - wrote blog; added stats
to ESC minutes, worked on mail. Kindly picked up by J. lovely to
see her, H&M again; home, relaxed.
-
Up lateish, lots of hallway-track conversations in the sun.
Spoke to a set of local engineering students with Eike - about
Solving
arbitrary engineering problems - hopefully helpful for them: lots
of good questions.
-
Back for the closing session; out for a team meal together -
lots of good Italian food, and company. To a cocktail bar afterwards.
Bid 'bye to all - a great conference. Finally got time to review
& sign-off on CP's 2017 accounts.
-
ESC meeting first-thing, balanced diversity & inclusion
session. Lunch. Spoke on discussion paper around re-focusing TDF
marketing around the community, to drive ecosystem growth and
credit all participants.
-
Hack-fest in the evening, more partner meetings, pizza,
and interesting catch-up with people.
-
Breakfast, more slide polish; to the venue. Gave my
keynote:
-
Relaxed and talked in the courtyard in the sun, OSI
20'th anniversary cakes. Fine dinner in the evening, with a cake
from Collabora Productivity to celebrate five years, and thank
the team for their hard-work and confidence, and the community
for all their help.
-
Up late, working on slides.
-
Out to a nearby lake with the team & a set of
our partners for a stand-up-paddle exercise. Good to talk
with everyone, see the lake, mountains.
-
Back into town for a tour of the Museum - rather
interesting and sobering too wrt. the communist era. A
notable picture of the dictator at the start of his reign
and 10 of his friends: only he survived to the end.
-
Meal at a nice restaurant, managed to project
some slides with the assistance of the hosts - and got
everyone to introduce themselves - chewed over what we're
up to.
-
Party in the evening, good to sync with Daniel,
Chris, and catch up with many friends old & new.
-
Up unfeasibly late writing slides.
-
Breakfast, mail chew; checked out of Idea; board
meetings, adding the MC later - lots of discussions. Meal
in the evening; checked into new hotel & slept.
-
Up, breakfast - out to Church at IPA Tirana
interestingly opposite the Iranian embassy. Admired the town
center.
-
Back for lunch with Simon, Guilhelm, and Italo. Rested
and chatted much of the afternoon. Dinner in town with a
gathering number of friends & community members; bed.
-
Up for breakfast with J. - who left with H. for an
Organ competition. Played with the babes, bit of mail,
packed for Albania. Tried to tidy the house for J. Lunch,
left the lovelies for another week. Train, train, train,
met Simon on the plane - good to catch up.
-
Couple of hours of sleep, train, plane, coach.
Slept a little, mail chew. Pleased to hear Theresa May
sounding like a Prime-Minister. Lovely to see the babes
and J. again - families are a wonderful blessing.
-
Up early, visited Michal at the SUSE offices - a very
pleasant blast from the past. Back to the conference, more talks
with partners and customers. Encouraging product feedback on
Collabora Online from many. Wurst, and party in the evening.
Up late writing.
-
Up extremely early, J. kindly dropped to the airport;
off to Nurnberg to the ownCloud conference, arrived just in time
to present. Great to see customers, partners and catch up with
them. Dinner in the evening.
-
Booked more flights; built ESC stats; mail.
-
Mail chew, status report, IRC, built slides for the
ownCloud conference. Wrote lots of prose.
-
Church; back for fine roast lamb lunch with Sandra.
Read, slugged, played games with the babes happily in the
afternoon. Out for prayer meeting & a drink with Mike later.
-
Worked a little in the morning, sorted out some VBA OptionButtons
compatibility problem causing grief for a potential customer.
Out for a walk in the afternoon with the family. Yes Minister in the evening.
-
Pleased to my chat with Randal & Dan at FLOSS Weekly
published.
-
Booked travel to DINAcon 2018
will be available to do some LibreOffice hackfest'y stuff, and a talk
on "How best to migrate to LibreOffice".
-
Mail; distracted by a bit of hacking for a customer. Marketing
& Sales call, ESC call, early dinner, interview.
-
Pleased to see Jona publish our latest LibreOffice
Infographic giving an update on what we're doing.
-
Admin; consultancy customer feedback process bits, mail.
Band practice with H. in the evening.
-
J. out for new counselling course. Mail chew; sync with Andras,
mail & admin. Lunch. Picked E. up from school. Built ESC agenda.
-
Thrilled to get a call from the airline letting me know that my
kiwi.com flight had one leg cancelled for 'technical reasons' (its good to be
able to predict plane failure a week+ in advance). Offered lots of
unhelpful flights that arrive at the wrong time. Re-booked on BA
arriving in Tirana a day earlier; fun. Attempted a fix of a sax parser,
threading cleanup on exceptions fix during the various calls.
-
Out for a run with J. - locked us out; spent some time
re-leading & puttying in the glass pane broken while
attempting removal - bother. Mail chew.
-
Occasionally I have to use skype: the customer is always
right. When I do - I wonder why they recommend searching for
"Echo
/ Sound Test Service" - rather than providing a helpful
built-in link somewhere, and/or why they didn't restratin the
rather large number of unhelpful people calling random accounts
the same thing - to the point that it's impossible to test
your sound; amazing. All the lonely people - where do they call
come from ? Luckily skype provides a friendly 'location' breakdown
so it's easy to see.
-
All Saints, James, Marta & Amelia over for lunch - had a fun
afternoon together. H. & E. to organ practice with J. Watched
Yes Minister with M. and N. Prayer meeting at All Saints in
the evening.
-
Up early, removed mouldy silicone and re-siliconed N's bedroom windows.
Painting of everything else inside and outside - used lots of white paint up.
Long stories in the evening.
-
Mail; TDF BoD call in the afternoon. N. to a sleep-over. Badmington
in the evening as a family with Margarit. Jack Ryan watching.
-
Disrupted day, mail chew - Open Door arrived to remove
two surplus wardrobes. Nice chap arrived with a
new bed for M. and fitted it. Lunch. Sales & Marketing
call, ESC call, dinner - with a customer call in the middle.
-
Pondered: is it a bad thing how much I enjoy reading my
Brother's CMOS VLSI Design text-book in bed instead of
some trendy management tome (I could be hunting Zebras eg.).
-
Mail, admin. Amused by a faustian bargin cartoon in the Private Eye;
Devil: "I shall enrich you with all earthly pleasures in exchange for ...",
Person: "My soul ?", Devil: "Your Data!".
-
Drew more pictures around TDF's commercial ecosystem
-
Mail, fitted-wardrobe builders arrived. Sync with Jos.
Mail; out to Bury Hospital, back for lunch. Tech. mgmt call.
Built ESC agenda, out to visit the dentist; a day for personal
maintenance.
-
Mail chew; sync. with Kendy.
-
Thrilled to be notified by our HR system that it is now exactly
five
years of Collabora Productivity. Congrats to Andras Timar, Jan Holseovsky,
Miklos Vajna & Tor Lillqvist for surviving the transition and the last five
years, and Lubos for joining us later after his SUSE time. Of course - the number
of talented individuals who have helped keep us afloat and contributed significantly
to our success keeps growing & I'm grateful to so many for their hard work and
good-will. We're also growing our team more - hiring not only in marketing
but also always on the look-out for interns or full-timers with excellent Javascript,
and/or C++ skills; do contact me to join us.
-
Lunch, disassembled Miriam's bed. Poked at the product management
backlog, call with Miklos.
-
Early morning swim before breakfast with Greer. Communion
service, showed the results of the kids work. Lunch, packing, down
to swim with the babes again; said our 'byes - and drove home.
-
Off to an organ concert in Ely with H. - who was very
kindly let play on the (massive) Ely Organ by the assistant
organist; exciting. Seems the CH Chapel
Organ - (that I used to practice on) is the biggest south of
the Thames.
-
Breakfast, talk in the morning interrupted by a fire alarm.
Coffee. Max spoke well on Acts 11 and its context. Lunch - baptism
of a couple of ladies on the beach, swiming in the sea with the family.
-
BBQ in the evening, followed by an All Saints talent show
in the evening - all singing, all dancing.
-
Out star-gazing with H&N. on the beach - unfortunately
light-polluted by the nearby nuclear power plant, but still, lovely,
played cards bed.
-
Morning calls; viewed a rather disappointing house. BoD call.
Worked in the car on the way to B&A's - nice cup of tea with them,
and onto Sizewell Hall for the All Saints retreat.
-
Lovely grounds, dinner, music & talk; nice to see everyone,
up late talking; managed to get two kids into playing 'Go'.
-
Mail chew, sync. with Andras and Henry. Calls variously.
Took M. and her friends to go-carting; pleased that the lads there
coached the two nervous ones into the cars - who then enjoyed it.
Back for a party tea, and sleep-over in a tent. Back to work on
paperwork - dispatched that lot late.
-
M's birthday - presents and croissants at breakfast.
Mail, sync with Miklos, team meetings, admin - lots of it;
don'tcha love extremely lengthy forms to fill out full of
arcana. H. out to an escape-room in Cambridge with her friends,
party & Bourne DVD in the evening.
-
Up later, chats at breakfast, E-mail, sync with Miklos.
Walked to the TU Berlin; caught up with people left & right,
good to see Lukas & meet Jos' wife. Admin, projections, Lunch.
Talked more, tried to restore Olivier's laptop with him mostly
fruitlessly. Train, plane home late.
-
J, kindly dropped me before the crack of dawn at Stansted.
Arrived at the Nextcloud Enterprise Day thankfully just in time to
finish my slides & speak. Pleased with a more BDM focus at least
initially; spoke too fast as normal.
-
Enjoyed catching up with some existing customers and partners.
Some encouraging feedback, good to see our progress appreciated.
Caught up with lots of friendly Nextcloud-ites left & right in
the flesh.
-
Out to a communist, vegan bar in the evening - curious,
supposedly about to be sold to a new wealthy owner. Sync with Jona,
Philippe, Olivier, Frank and more.
-
All Saints, bass & violin - christening of a cute
Ghanian-English daughter of the church - meal afterwards. Home
for some exhausted slugging, Smash-Up, and more. Pizza dinner,
Julie leaving - sadly; bed early.
-
Finally got around to painting the exterior timberwork that
for the first time since it was installed a decade ago - along with
pressure-washing the workshop roof of a similar vintage; it looks
better painted.
-
Out to admire a curious house nearby - newly built but
seemingly poorly laid out. Back for a late tea.
-
Started to work at soldering some very fine (enamel
coated, armature wire) onto the extremely fiddly JTAG port on
the dead S3 - acutely and ultimately un-successful work, bother.
When the pads have a 0.5mm pitch, being some 0.25mm in width
even the solder-iron kindly ground-down by Bruce doesn't cut it.
-
Out in the evening to a hog-roast provided by Greer &
Barbara, a fine evening - lots of dancing for the kids, good food;
met Guy and Crystal.
-
Mail chew, helped Victor a bit, worked on slides for Tor.
-
Amused to see IRC turn 30 - and still using it; hexchat's
UI still significantly better than mattermost - completion of
names without cumberome @foo things. Then again the core idea
of IRC getting continuously re-invented as twitter, whatsapp,
telegram, snapchat etc. is a little tedious. How many apps does one
need on a single phone just to chat these days ?
-
Lots of girls' friends in and out in rotation through
the day. De-briefed Victor.
-
Up in the night. Rather encouraged to read Bradley Kuhn's take on
Gerv Markham's movement into the second phase of his mission to
Glorify God, and enjoy him forever cf. going
home. I'm particularly encouraged that someone in the feminist wing
can have learned something new of the meaning of tolerance and mutual
respect - it cheered my early morning. Pleased that at least in an
earlier era of the web when the ochlocracy was only starting to tool
up - that good people stood up and kept Gerv's head off the plate,
unlike another notable
historic critic of marriage ethics. Will really miss meeting up
with him at FOSDEMs variously, and his refreshing perspctive on many
topics and friendly advice.
-
Slideware hackery; sales and marketing call. Partner calls.
-
Elize & Emily over for a sleep-over. Watched
Marvel's Black Panther in the evening - bit
saddened by the animism - the redemption by technology instead of
healed relationship - and the somewhat inevitable Marvel violence;
but great to see some good black leads.
-
Mail chew, bits with Victor, partner call. Pleased to see Jos'
thoughtful analysis
of open-source engineering and the value of communicating directly with
the relevant engineers doing the development.
-
Plugged away at this & that, interview with an old friend.
ESC call - sadly the alternating Thursday / Wednesday slot seems
under-loved.
-
More bits with Victor; monthly mgmt call, lots of admin;
partner call late.
-
Mail chew, Victor arrived - worked on getting him setup. Failed to
make Ubuntu's iceccd work with SUSE's - annoying. Eventually moved machines
around to have something working. Consultancy and Product team calls.
-
Babes cooked a fine meal in the evening with Julie for us - lovely.
-
Out to Methodist Church with Amelia in the morning; drove on
to Bedford for Louise & Anthony's 60'th wedding anniversary - lots
of family there to talk to. Drove home, SHIELD in the evening, bed.
-
Worked at toilet plumbing pieces with Robert with some
success, out to walk in Kenilworth Park before lunch. Continued
the work, watched Ella Enchanted, BBQ in the evening; bed.
-
Breakfast together, out to the very lovely Warwick Castle
together for an impressive display of falconry, a great jousting
historical entertainment, tour of the castle, and Trebuchet
demonstration.
-
Home for a dinner, up late catching up with Rob.
-
Tried to replace a Galaxy S4 SIM/SDcard component - to
no avail. Mail & catch-up with Miklos. Got an adoption
reference finished, executed and posted for some dear friends.
Ate in the car & worked on mail and admin.
-
Arrived at & admired Rob & Amelia's new home -
lovely indeed, up late talking.
-
Up, checked mail, packed. Off on the lovely Lady Florence
restaurant boat at Orford for a sumptious birthday lunch for Bruce.
Lots of interesting pieces along Orford Ness - from abandoned nuclear
bomb explosive trigger testing sites, to the site of the
re-introduction of avercets in the UK after 150, caused by a stray
tank-round destroying some sluices during training, and so on.
-
Worked in the car on the way home. Packed to visit
Robert & Amelia tomorrow, packed the Vive - kindly on loan
from Robert.
-
Up very early - mashed ESC bug stats into a proto-agenda,
did some backed-up admin. Call with Eloy & Foad. To the beach
with the family, swam in the sea, into Aldeburgh & back for
lunch. Customer call and sync with Kendy in the evening.
-
Mail chew; sync with Kendy & catch up with Miklos.
Unwound a chunk of admin. Worked in the car - arrived at B&A's
Lunch. Sync with Eloy, some mail chew.
-
Bought new SIM card reader for Galaxy S4 - it appears to
have failed annoyingly; switched to H's phone. Sync with Nicholas.
Caught up with Mark & his wife, Sue, Clive, Adam & James
arrived - chatted together.
-
Up for early practice on Sunday with the worship team,
then service - good to be home. Back for a Pizza lunch.
-
Re-soldered and Araldited N's laptop connector after the
hot-glue approach failed, made a fly-swat from wood & spare
lino, repaired the swing in the garden with N.
-
Spent the evening tinning thin enamelled wire and trying
to attach it to JTAG ports on J's old Samsung Galaxy S3 to try
to recover some wedding photos from R&A's wedding.
-
Packed the house, down to the nearby river to paddle with
the parents, visited an amazing musical bridge: which has steel bars
of different lengths protruding above the hand-rail - which when
hit with a stick play the favourite hymn of the parent to whom it
is dedicated.
-
Read Brendon Chase to the babes while driving. Good to see
Julie again; unpacked watched SHIELD with babes.
-
Up early, long drive north to above Ulswater for a short
mini-pony-trek with the babes. Most enthused but E. disappointed
by dis-intersted pony syndrome. Back via Aire Force waterfall.
Stories & applied jigsaw-puzzling in the evening.
-
Crumpets for breakfast, down to the 'beach' by the local
river - tempted by jumping from the bridge into the freezing water
but didn't. Waded around, dammed a nearby stream somewhat
successfully. Picnic lunch.
-
Out to Honister
pass to climb inside the mine - lots of fun in the dark with
a brave set of babes. Wetherspoons in Keswick for tea, back to base.
-
Up late, breakfast, out to Coniston to climb the Old Man.
Bit rainy to start with - Goats Hawse looking lovely, great to see
the wind across the water. Lunch at the saddle, eventually got to
the top despite periods of strong winds, more lunch at the top.
Down again - in lovely sunshine, great views.
-
Drove home, butternut squash rissotto from G'ma; watched
Ice Princess - how many more movies I can watch where the
parents suck and the kids are right - and where the parents learn
all the lessons taught by their wise kids - is deeply unclear
to me: what a fantasy. Bed.
-
Up lateish, walked around Tarn Hows with a picnic lunch.
-
On to meet up with Johan - the rather wonderful sailing
coach from River
Deep Mountain High for an afternoon out in a Hawk on Coniston
Water with the babes. Excellent, calm, and helpful training -
friendly, babes had a lovely time steering, hot chocolate,
Swallows & Amazons island sail-past, and unexpectedly a
great Christian testimony: God saved my parent's marriage,
some awesome memories indeed.
-
Home; J. nobly washed and dried the clothing; pizza
tea, bed.
-
Up late; a short walk today to a Swinside Stone Circle
had a picnic in the rain admiring the circle. Interesting how
the esthetic has changed - a modern circle would be a miracle
of precision with cut and polished stones and so on I would
suspect - perhaps with an un-tastefully minimal chrome,
porcelain sacrifical alter. The apparent lack of any attempt
to dress the stones is interesting.
-
Drove on to a Pony Trecking center to see if there
are any slots: fully booked all week; on to Haverigg to see
the sandy beach to play on; although having read
Fallout's take on Sellafield's
historic output not entirely sure digging in the deposited sand
is a great plan.
-
On to Millom to shop, and back home.
-
Up lateish, sung, read, had a Rico Tice sermon & some
quiet time together. Out for whata was meant to be a short walk:
to Hardknott Pass and the fine Roman Fort ruins with M&D.
stopped off at a pub for a late dinner; put babes to bed.
-
Packed in the morning, set off to the Lake District. Stopped
off at Kirkby Longsdale for a picnic, admired the bridge, on to
Low Farm in the Ulpha Valley. Settled in, dinner in the garden, out
for a quick walk to admire the beautiful hills & mountains.
-
Up; stuck in my book & didn't realize H. and Mother
had gone to Organ practice - followed them. Back for lunch.
-
Out for a nice walk with J. in the afternoon, into
town & up the castle steps. Watched a music Cinderella
production from four young ladies, with ice-creams in the
interval.
-
Docusigned another W8-BEN-E, dinner, stories, slugging
in the evening.
-
Poked mail quickly; H J&M out to see Macbeth in York.
Made a packed-lunch and out to Brimham Rocks with N,M,E & D.
Much climbing, back in time for a partner call, C'bra mgmt call
and another chat.
-
Reading The Rise & Fall of the Third Reich
with some morbid fascination.
-
Worked with N. and Father mixing concrete and pouring
a small foundation for a raised-flowerbed for Mother.
-
Out in the afternoon for a walk to a local bird
sanctuary. Talked late in garden in the cool of the evening
with M&D.
-
Mail chew, built ESC agenda, tech. mgmt call. Sync call
with Kendy, Eloy. Removed seat from the car, packed babes and
baggage inside; ate on the way north.
-
J. drove, while I wrote an adoption reference for some
dear friends; what a privilege. Sketched talk outlines.
-
Mail chew, admin, syncc with Kendy, lunch. Distressed that
after months of flakiness a chat with Florian seems to suggest that
MTU
size is an issue for BT infinity - how can BT break huge chunks
of the internet by default without caring ? amazing.
-
Customer call, poked at CCS framework agreements.
-
Up early, played at church; babes involved in manic home-made
lemonade & ice-cream sale for Cornerstone. Sophie, David & Jocelyn
back for lunch - slugged and chatted much of the afternoon.
-
Watched Inside man with H. and N. bed.
-
Took H. into town for a treat breakfast & organ practice.
David over for lunch, out to Brandon for a forest walk, back for tea.
Played a game together, watching with babes, bed.
-
Poked JS with George - it starts to become less scary
having read more of it. Sync with Tamas. Lunch, catch-up with
Andras. More JS-ness with George.
-
Mail chew, strained away at JQuery with George - eventually
finding that we need a tabindex to make something focus-able;
interesting - progress at least.
-
Partner call, sales call, assembled a screen stand with
George - hopefully gives one better posture; lets see. Still far
too hot.
-
Mail, admin. Talked through researching data and writing logs
with George; poked at some JQuery-ness. Bruce & Anne, S,C,A&J
over - out to Prezzo for a lovely birthday lunch.
-
Back, more hacking, code review; ESC call, sync with Dennis,
dinner. Very hot ...
-
Freed up J's laptop, and got G. working with a Mac + remote-X.
I am still astounded that you can go for this amazing UX decision of
having a minimalist single button on the mouse - while simultaneously
infesting the keyboard with an additional 'Mac' modifier in addition
to Ctrl and Alt - making a foul confusion of keybindings cross-platform,
and having no obvious # key either.
-
Got G's first commits pushed.
-
Mail chew, bid a sad au-revoir to Gerd's team. George
arrived in the morning - moved some hardware around to make
a space for him, and got him going on some tasks. Encouraging
to see his C++ & JS progress in a day.
-
Product team meeting; some code reading; customer call.
-
Up early; H's birthday - croissants & presents at breakfast.
Out to All Saints for an early communion - then off into Cambridge
together. Enjoyed wandering the town, looking at the architecture.
-
Picnic on Jesus green, played in the play-ground. Punting
action together along the mayhem of the Cam - punted alongside a few
daughters happily.
-
Home for some Vive goodness, and a buffet tea; bed lateish.
-
Julia's birthday, presents in bed, sogging with N. and H.
variously. Breakfast, out to Anglesy Abbey for a fine picnic lunch
in the sun with everyone and a wander.
-
Back to see Gerd, Kerry, Sarah & Liam - visiting from
Australia, played games with them - up late talking to Gerd &
Kerry.
-
Up at 2:30am for some reason - mail chew - admin.
Breakfast, sync call with Eloy. Played a little with Android,
sync with Kendy, filed tickets.
-
National Treasure 2 in the evening - a re-make of the
first version it seems; hmm.
-
Mail; built metrics with Tor. Booked travel to the ownCloud
conference too.
-
Interested by Bradley arguing
for reduced restrictions on speech in codes of conduct: an encouraging
direction of travel. Personally, I think protecting speech, academic freedom,
and more is well worth the cost of hearing some unpleasant opinions. Having said
that - one of the things that dismays me about FLOSS conferences are the
tedious, low-level and lazy attacks on Trump voters and their mental capacity
(I have no vote in any US election). I really dislike political polarization as
a modern-day US export: the idea that by painting your opponent as completely
evil you galvanize your support base is not new, but getting worse. Carefully
re-reading some various recent
polarizing views from some emminent lawyers, it seems that it is possible
to be deeply concerned about the US's direction of travel and the role of the
judiciary without being unhinged. I can believe such concern might move some to
the point of drastic action - such as voting for the only plausible short-term
protection from some perceived long-term evil - without actually having a
pro-incoherence approach themselves. I can also imagine economic concerns, perhaps
unfairly conflated with immigration being a key issue - under-addressed by the
mainstream (as arguably in the Brexit vote). It would be good to hear some more
balanced criticism of the lamentable failures of the alternatives in both parties
too - as well as in the electorate (or the media) for following their long term
trend of being more interested in politics & news as entertainment, rather
than policy & information.
-
ESC meeting; posted minutes, dinner, TDF Advisory Board call.
-
Mail; admin, monthly all-hands call. A little hackery,
some estimation, worked late on proposals.
-
Sync with Miklos, Eloy, Foad, lunch, projections, partner bits.
Monthly mgmt call. Patch review, admin. Built ESC bug stats.
-
Mail, catch-up call with Eloy, admin, lunch. Sync with Lubos,
Miklos & Tor. Status report. Booked travel to the Nextcloud conference and some
hack-festery - Mon/Tues. Pair of partner calls in the evening.
-
Breakfast, off to All Saints with Tim, who spoke briefly of
their work, back for Pizza lunch, much slugging & digesting, a
walk on the heath; bid 'bye to Tim, Suzie & Simon, put babes
to bed and read to them.
-
Up late, odd jobs around the house; got into window-cleaning
unfortunately my squeegee (a birthday present) got left leaning on
a sharp wood edge so leaves a lovely line down the window; bother.
First clean in 12 years or so (now convinced this is a good cadence
for window-cleaning). Turns out there is a whole world of colour
outside - I should get out more.
-
Watched National Treasure with the family, SHIELD in the
evening, caught up with Tim & Suzie; bed.
-
Mail; sync with Miklos, support bits, admin, patch review,
Tim, Suzie & Simon over in the evening - talked Graphite, and
SIL much of the evening.
-
Mail chew; finally got a chunk of admin / documentation done.
Sales & Marketing call. Customer mail.
-
Interested to hear of a peer of E's being sick in a Sex &
Relationships Education (SRE) class covering prophylactics - 10 year
olds not loving that.
-
Babes to music; fixed a pivot table regression for fun.
-
Finally got around to building ESC proto-agenda. Bug review, admin,
started to fit fun tasks between the annoyance again to make at least some
progress. ESC call in the evening. Band practice, Julie back to stay for
a bit.
-
Bug triage, mail, admin, mgmt call, more admin, partner
and customer calls.
-
Mail chew, status report, sync with Kendy. Mail chew.
Took H. for her Grade 6 piano exam to Saffron Walden; worked
late.
-
Church, played bass; good talk on repentance from
visiting DDO. On to BBQ at Steve & Beckie's for Julie
& Amie-Jane - returned from the USA briefly. Fine food,
company, sun, home via the town-band playing at All Saints,
slugged & read The Economist variously. Reading
In Search of Stupidity to H.
-
Mail & work in the morning; out to Holkham Beach for a
fine day of digging sand, enjoying the sun, with almost no-one there:
a blessing conferred by the World Cup. Fish & Chips in the car
on the way back; packed somewhat sun-burned babes to bed - mental-note:
even teens cannot put sun-block on themselves properly.
-
Up in the night; poked mail, reviewed estimations, more E-mail.
Watched MIB with the babes - very silly; more work late.
-
Dropped into the Cambridge office with Foad, brain-dumped
for much of the day. Taxi back, All Saints band-practice, chat in
the garden; Mac setup late; bed.
-
Mail, admin, some patch review, admin, sync. with Olivier.
Worked late waiting for Foad, picked him up from Cambridge late.
-
Into Cambridge for an interview with Chris in
the morning - had lunch together.
-
Thrilled to see Dennis' multivariate
regression work for Calc pushed & published - go Dennis.
-
Mgmt team call. CP board meeting; drove home, customer call,
took H., M., Elize & Alish to Soham for the Young Musician of
the Year competition / concert - good music, home.
Built ESC minutes, bed.
-
Mail; admin, product team call, managed to finally get
J's and my gmail / Android calendars to sync. up after another
horrible scheduling conflict. Skype call with great news
from Rob & Amelia.
-
Played at All Saints in the morning; stayed for meal
with the church. Home to play Vive with Alfie; afternoon movie
Wonder - interesting, read stories to babes.
-
J. out much of the day with Louise; riveted E's netball
hoop and put it up on the trampoline; needs some adhesive to stop
it rotating. Some mail bits.
-
Mail chew; call with Kendy & Miklos, a frenzy of
estimating and processing the admin backlog.
-
Lost most of this day travelling east, asleep. Poked
mail on the Heathrow Express, Cambridge train standing room
only & horribly delayed .
Train to Newmarket. Simply lovely to see the family again.
-
Up early, extensive slide-ware massage - meeting
with Oscar interesting.
Off to see Javier & the team, lunch, sync with
Philippe. Back to the hotel for beers,
and a trip to the airport. Managed to see ~nothing of
Mexico somehow; sad.
-
Sync with Kendy; breakfast together; more slides;
presentation, estimation, fun. Back, meaty dinner with
Frank & Olivier - bed.
-
Breakfast together, meetings all day, a truck
load of work landed on my desk for more work overnight.
-
Breakfast with Olivier, spent much of the day and
late into the evening creating product description slides,
caught up with Frank later.
-
Helped to pack babes off to the Insane Terrain fund-raising
run for Youth for Christ, packed for Mexico City - long series of
trains, a very long plane ride.
-
Listened to a sermon from All Souls by Ross Hendry
on Equal Pay;
lots of interest but:
- Obligatory John Stott quote:
"Total egalitarianism is not the Christian goal for
God himself has not mandated us to be identical either
in our nature or spiritual endowments. What Christians
should seek to ensure is that all differentials are
due to merit not privilege."
-
A godly worker opposes discrimination; recognizing
the equal worth of all should yield equal pay (for equal
work).
-
We should also oppose pay that causes enmnity &
envy. since large pay disparities can quickly make us become
dissatisfied. We should oppose the love of money generally;
and more.
Interesting, of course, internationally PPP considerations can blur
the picture - but the scandal of unequal pay is clearly a worthy
thing to fight. On the politics of envy and suspicion around pay,
a Christian involved in a Union presumably also has a tough task
to avoid stirring up envy.
-
Arrived, sleep.
-
M. off on a coach-trip to France. Admin, mail-chew,
TDF board call, admin. Bid 'bye to H. on her DofE hike.
Watched Get smart with the babes.
-
Breakfast, dropped Miklos to the station; some mail chew.
Lunch, monthly all-hands call, catchup with Lubos and Andras.
Mail & planning. Tea, late customer call.
-
Train to Cambridge, met Miklos & chatted into London, visited
our lawyers briefly; on together for a day of meetings at the IET Savoy
Place with Chris & Bob, fun. Out for dinner together & train +
taxi home late; fun. Played with the Vive, bed late.
-
Mail chew; built ESC proto-agenda, monthly commercial
call. Sync with Miklos, interview.
-
Presents at breakfast - seems having spent a year telling
people I'm actually 41 (by mistake) I now am (I think); early onset
senelity apparently.
Mail chew; plugged away at OpenSSL's BIO / handshaking
pieces around outbound connections. Birthday tea - steak &
baked alaska.
-
Woken unfeasibly early by small girls' six-in-two-beds
experiment breaking down. To church to play bass & violin
rather tiredly. Home for lunch joined by Margarit & Marius.
-
Packed up tent, dried blankets etc. straightened
tent-pegs in the vice with E. Tea, bed.
-
Put up tent in the garden for E's birthday sleepover; out
into town to play at the Bill Tutt memorial - onto All Saints for
a free out-door barbeque for the community - chatted to lots of
people variously.
-
Home, dealt with six small, post-swimming girls at a party;
got a movie on for them; tried to wrestle them to bed and calm them
down in a tent; nearly got there - but eventually defeated by the
sheer excitement of it (and ultimately fear of the dark). Not much
sleep.
-
Mail, sync with Kendy, mail; finally a bit of hacking -
somewhat frustrated by needing python 3.6 - but not being able to
install it without breaking / removing half my distribution; hmm -
not optimal. Minimally implemented client websocket masking.
-
Mail chew; meetings, more mail, patch review, support
ticketing.
-
Thrilled to see Collabora
Office 6.0 - The Migrator's Choice released - containing tons of work
from so many - and particularly happy to see the new COLEAT goodness ship:
-
Booked flights variously for conferences & meetings.
Band practice in the evening.
-
Mail chew, copy-writing, calls, lunch. Sync with Kendy.
More paperwork, copy-review.
-
Consultancy call in Miklos' stead; mail chew, and a round of
marketing copy-writing, calls with Jona & Eloy. Plugged away at
that much of the day and late into the evening.
-
Bamford breakfast, out for a short walk along a cliff edge,
bid 'bye to all - and drove back with Greer; lovely to see the small
babes again, tea, read stories, bed.
-
Bed turned out to be rather broken, supported mostly by prayer
from Greer below - hmm. Into Bamford for cooked breakfast, and set out
on a fine walk around the Ladybower Reservoir - leaving the
short-walkers at the Inn, and climbed Win Hill for lunch.
Fine views into Edale and around. Great to chat to lots of
interesting Men of Faith.
-
Long gentle walk back down, shower, chat, to the pub
for dinner, back, talked until late, played the guitar, room 101,
and found a more solid bed for a solid rest.
-
Sync with Miklos, mail chew, packed for Men of Faith walking
in Derbyshire. Off with Greer via lunch at Clumber Park. Arrived at
Thorpe Farm Bunkhouse near Bamford - lovely place; BBQ with the lads,
up rather late - very creaky bed - slept badly.
-
Lots of mail, sync with Kendy, sales call, ESC call,
customer/partner call. Evening interview - too much talking
for one day.
-
Out to help the scouts learn walking on bearings on
the (large flat) Newmarket heath - drawing unusual shapes as
GPS tracks.
-
Mail chew, customer call, admin.
-
Annoyed by Skype - they seem to run a scam whereby you give
them credit, which doesn't show up for 15mins so you forget about
using it. Then after some months that credit is de-activated (now
it tells you that you have no credit), so next time you attempt to
use paid-phone service - you are encouraged to add funds (rather than
re-activate those you have). When you give them more cash they point
out you need to re-active it - at which point you discover you already
have a significant balance. Not ideal, but is it deliberate ?
-
Lovely lunch with Ben; back to mail, admin, merged alpha patch
reviews and more.
-
Mail chew, call with team; partner call. Plugged away at
calls, content, testing happily for much of the afternoon.
Helped H. with Astronomy and built a question-spotting spreadsheet
in the afternoon for tomorrow's GCSE.
-
Mail chew, call with some of the team, lawyer call. Pleased
to see Miklos update our Document
Conversion page with details on UnoConv -
also inferior to a properly managed Collabora Online.
-
Listened to the Microsoft Gitlab conference call - exciting
to see Nat doing cool stuff. Debugged some horror with Tor & Andras.
-
NCC in the morning, family service; Max spoke well. H.
played piano nicely. Out for a church BBQ afterwards at Jan's
lovely to get to know everyone better. Back, sat in the garden
with J, played badmington, relaxed, read stories to the babes,
tried to repair H's Galaxy S4 - interestingly now no longer
powering on after its charging port replacement.
-
Breakfast, mail chew & maths with N. much of the morning
with some Astronomy revision with H. Lunch, babes dressed up,
practiced their quartet - and performed at Dan & Nami's
wedding reception (next door) to general appreciation. Home,
slugging with babes.
-
An influx of small girls - up to seven of them at
a time - J. out all day; mail chew while writing maths
tests for Miriam. Helped H. with Astronomy, N' out
swimming, call with T&B, fed everyone; caught up with
Melv, sync. with Eloy, out for Organ practice, home for
quartet practice.
-
Quick mail chew & patch review. Off to
Whipsnade Wild Animal Park with the family, Sue,
A. &. J. lots of fun, picnic in the sun.
-
Partner call in the car home, Odyssey and
some hackery.
-
Deeply irritated by my shell; why is it that
the history that bash stores is a very poor
reflection of what has been typed into the (dozen)
shells I have; that I can't do global history search
and that routinely useful history is deleted ? poor.
Worked into the evening.
-
Early morning mail, off to Aldeburgh to see
Bruce & Anne. Lunch, out to the beach - popped in
to Sizewell visitor's center. Back for tea, remembered
music practice & made a bee-line for home; watched
SHIELD in the evening.
-
Built ESC bits & pieces. Commercial call. Partner call,
cleaned up partner tickets, status report.
-
Mail, calls with Miklos, Kendy, Eloy. Helped M. with
her maths homework - algebra: select a safe permutation
and apply it.
-
Emily and Kiki over for sleep-overs with H. and E.
-
Bass & Violin at All Saints; lunch. Applied slugging
interspersed by Banangrams & Vive-ness.
-
Picked up H. from an excellent young-women's conducting
training session at Fitz - you would think with free entry, a
lovely location, gratis grub, and expert tution girls would
come en-masse; apparently not - should encourage people next
year. Invite to come & play the Organ.
-
Interested to discover that WhatsApp have banned under 16's (in
Europe only) due to GDPR. Two very annoyed daughters, and one disappointed
one. Telegram it seems is the solution, upgraded them.
-
Lunch, out for a walk with David, disassembled an old and
under-used wooden castle in the garden with David for mooted re-use
as a Mansergh tree-house. BBQ, read stories to babes.
-
Mail, call with Florian, partner call, patch review.
-
Mail chew, lots of admin, lunch, commercial call, worked
on more double-proposal paperwork - finally got it done.
Helped H. merge down her 'senior student team' election video.
-
Encouraging partner call, call with Aron, filed bugs.
Lunch. Encouraging calc patch review.
-
Mail chew, code reading, mgmt call, built ESC stats.
Visited West Suffolk Urology for some fun camera action. Home.
Call with Jona & Eloy.
-
Tried to mend Galaxy S4 burning up its motherboard
on start - some internal short in a chip ? froze the electronics
and manage to get it to an unlock-screen before thermal cut-out.
Downer - even cooks itself in the recovery screen; hard to debug.
-
Pleased to get OpenShot
working nicely - despite my generic horrors at AppImages: no
security/signing and encouraging people to download & execute
random stuff (cf. horrors of Windows virii) - it worked well.
-
Mail chew; attemped again to use the ICO's failing
web registration process. Calc code & patch review. Status
report.
-
Code reading with Marco on a calc validation feature.
Prodded at parallel XML parsing fun.
-
Played at Church; Cornerstone project meeting afterwards - focused
on making our Victorian flint church more open & inviting; interesting.
Back for a roast lunch, badmington & volley-ball in the garden - out
for a walk with J. and H. Read the Economist.
-
Started to watch Startup; sickened by the increasingly explicit
and gratuitous hyper-sexualization / pornography; needs an '(21+)' rating or
something, quit part way through episode 1; shame. Why do they do that ?
-
Up earlyish, off to Cambridge, train to London.
Enjoyed the British Museum with the babes, Pizza Express
with R&A for lunch - on to see a Les Miserables
matine - an excellent performance.
-
Train home; Astronomy GSCE practice with H. took her
to Tashie's - back, put babes to bed, hacked on unit tests
finally defeating them; bed late.
-
Out for a run with J. Partner call. Sync with Miklos,
finally some hacking & debugging of odd online unit test
failures - interesting. Watched SHIELD in the evening with
the babes.
-
Mail, admin, Sales & marketing call; ESC call.
-
Mail; sync with Andras & Kendy, poked at bugs &
customer bits; lunch, team call. Built ESC agenda.
-
Received 10 mugs in the post - 2 chipped; amazingly the
chipped ones (and two others) made it through, the rest were
varying types of completely broken.
-
Music group in the evening.
-
Mail chew, sync with Miklos, built slides; monthly mgmt call.
Sync with Kendy, more mail. J. out to counselling meeting, put babes to
bed and prodded at setting up SSL for Apache on AWS on SLE12 - hmm.
-
Mail chew, admin, pushed some online changes; lunch.
Bit of testing, sync with Andras.
-
Breakfast, to the conference, Jules' talk on
Facebook's use of Infer - to find various classes of
problem, interesting. Bid 'bye & kindly dropped
to the airport by a friendly organizer.
-
Poked at socket code on the plane. Finally home
J. kindly collected me, lovely to see darling wife &
much loved babies again. Pizza tea.
-
Overslept, taxi to the conference; tried to learn
Spanish by listening to security talks - with mixed success.
Lunch - presented some slides on our security fun:
Almeria is a lovely place - GUADEC should be amazing here.
-
Walking tour of Almeria in the evening, passed a
marching band, and a statue being propelled by lots of
apparently dis-embodied legs; interesting. Party in the
evening.
-
Up unfeasibly early; coach to STN, fight to Almeria,
worked on slideware; admin; short sleep - I feel so Spanish -
more work, out for a lovely dinner with Ismael & a number
of other interesting folk. Tapas, bed late.
-
Mail, poked at slides, sales & marketing call.
ESC call, chat with Caolan - more sliding for Almeria.
-
Mail, chat with Markus. Interested to see Excel adding Javascript
functions. We have some horrific, ancient Rhino - JS implementation that
is built on Java; so in theory we're already there - but ... I suspect a
modern JS engine would perform better and run everywhere; then again - it
is always fun to see how many separate garbage collectors we can fit in
one process sharing the same signals etc. mix and match Java, C# &
JS ... who do you hand your SEGV handler to next ?
-
Sync with Kendy, Miklos, chat with Lubos; much massaging of text.
Up late chasing a very interesting file corruption issue.
-
Mail, filed bugs, built ESC agenda, lunch, mgmt call, sync
with Philippe.
-
A bank holiday - climbed onto the roof to re-point the
chimney, to re-seal with concrete the capped ones and to add a
cowl. BBQ lunch in the garden, Badmington competition - with
small Umpires and evolving rules: I'll be the judge of that.
Visited Chris & Allison in the evening.
-
All Saints family service; H. playing piano. Shared lunch
afterwards . Home - setup
badmington in the garden, and babes played that enthusiastically
while J. visited Lydia.
-
Off to Wicksteed park together, lovely day with the babes
sliding, riding, laser-questing etc. met Steve from GenR8 too.
Picnic in the sun. Fish & Chip supper in the car on the
way back.
-
Watched SHIELD with babes in the evening - why do media
types have to portray even casual relationships in the most
intense & explicit way - is it pure laziness ? or does it
reflect a personal 'Mr Creosote' style approach to the topic.
-
Sad to see the LLVM Code
of conduct intended to avoid people feeling uncomfortable or
threatened apparently having the opposite effect for some of its
contributors.
Getting the right CoC - (and theirs seems reasonably sensible to me - modulo
the apparently really unhelpful "censorship of discussing the CoC" and
the extra-territorial "behavior outside this space" clauses) -
and putting it in-place in a friendly way is a tough job. Giving
confidence that it will be enforced in a balanced (ie. not captured by
special interests), transparent and fair way can be too. Damaged people
with experience of bullying and harassment - often by those who are 'popular',
are not so convinced by the arguments often deployed here: "These guys
enforcing the over-broad policy are really nice, everyone [I] like[s] them
so nothing bad will happen [to people like me] so your concerns are invalid.".
-
Sync with Florian & Thorsten, mail & admin.
-
Mail; admin, customer call, lunch, built slides, sync
with Andras, Eloy.
-
Call with Kendy & Andras; mail, admin, patch
review, hackery, late partner call. Band practice with H.
on Piano.
-
Mail, built ESC proto-agenda. Hacked at async websocket
client pieces here and there.
-
Mail, admin, fixed an l10n bug in Online; put babes
to bed - Chemistry with H. call with T. got N. setup with a
wordpress instance. Relatively depressed by the mysql setup
and authentication aggravation vs. wordpress and other DB
integrated apps - it all seems un-necessarily unpleasant.
-
Played bass & violin at church; stayed for annual
church members meeting. Back for pizza lunch, played Sushi Go
with Sophie, H. to church to practice; tidied up variously.
-
Watched the next Oceans film together, read stories, bed.
-
Did another astronomy past-paper with H. David over
for lunch; J. out to see Lydia, out for a walk on the heath with
David.
-
J. back, out to All Saints with H. to practice the
Organ; helped Cedric tidy up his babe's party. Home for
sliders, chatted to David, put babes to bed. Watched Gataca
with H.
-
Calls with Miklos, Kendy, Lubos, Andras & partner. Admin,
documentation. Customer call, Allison over for a fine dinner.
-
Mail, profiling, calls, lunch, more calls, admin; hmm.
Network Installed Tumbleweed/Server into a rather old VirtualBox,
surprised it failed to boot even after an upgrade, got a nice
42.3 instead.
-
Sync with Kendy, ESC call. Admin, patch review; fixed a
couple of bugs idly for fun.
-
Partner and customer calls for much of the day. Worked late
-
Mail chew, full of enthusiasm tried to setup a 300Gb crypted
file - gave up waiting after an hour or so of an unusable laptop;
bother.
-
Lunch with J. admin, mgmt call, sync with customer. Had fun
with babes. Worked very late on admin & built ESC agenda.
-
Breakfast with babes, mail chew, got stuck into admin
before realizing I was meant to be in Cambridge for a mgmt
meeting. J. dropped me in a hurry - minus phone & PSU.
-
An encouraging set of meetings; good to catch up with
Guy, Philippe, Olivier & the local team too. Out for a pub
meal in the evening. Herman kindly took me to the station,
train home.
-
Up, played bass at NCC; home for lunch joined by David, Jocelyn
& Sophie. Talked happily in the garden much of the afternoon.
Took H. to practice the Organ for a bit, tea, put babes to bed.
-
Woke early, breakfast, poked at Quartet pieces for the babes
to play; ideally hard Viola, easy Violin 2; hmm. Some mail IRC. Lunch.
-
Out to Saffron Walden to enjoy two of their mazes, a lovely
day in the sunshine + ice-cream. Home. Moved some async client
web-socket puzzle to the next step.
-
Out to Barn Dance in aid of a Burwell Print - babes
up late dancing.
-
Mail chew, chat with Florian, customer call, sync with
Tor & Miklos. Lunch. Plugged away at tasks in the afternoon.
Worked late on client web-socket code.
-
Mail chew; hunted the house for a spare disk, and was encouraged
to use Clonezilla via a great image
from Taiwan. Call with sales & marketing team. Lunch.
-
BT Phoned up to say I'd run up a $100 phone bill calling India
yesterday and could they do something about that; surreal.
-
Thrilled to see the team get Collabora
Online 3.2 released:
A number of great new features for our customers & partners, including
data-validity - so you can limit the options in a drop-down for a cell - so that
they make sense (to Patriot watchers anyway), as well as basic things like
Insert -> chart something not present in Word Online (for example).
-
Pondered why Windows 10 fails to boot in curious ways when its disk
is copied to another disk without the disk label being made to match; any why
it then proceeds on a length series of hour plus long "Attempting repairs".
-
TDF Advisory Board call.
-
Sync call with Miklos, mail chew; poked at some socket code.
Still sad that there is no good C event-loop, and as such no async
structure that a nice DNS APIs could fit into; ho hum. Of course there
is getdns but it in
turn has several dependencies.
-
Customer call much of the afternoon. Pleased to see the free
Samsung SSD imaging tool do a great job of moving a Windows install
to a new disk.
-
Out to brand practice in the evening at church. Packed the
bathroom cold tap washer with a piece of plastic milk-bottle before bed.
-
Mail chew, patch review, planning.
-
Great to see some nice work by Tomi to get Collabora Online support
integrated into JODConverter
(increasing security), and to see Miklos's nice writeup around Document
Conversion there - several of our customers get support for document conversion
use-cases that help to improve LibreOffice.
All those poor souls still struggling with manual management of LibreOffice
processes for document conversion can relax & use something sensible
instead.
-
Weekend mail fun, poked partners, sync. with Miklos,
Andras, created a unit test for thread stranding problem with
fork-kit - whereby having threads lurking around at the time of
a fork - is a really bad idea.
-
All Saints in the morning; H. played piano for a song.
Back for pizza lunch plus Charlotte & Grace, took H. back
to practice the organ.
-
Home; tea; read stories; out for a drink with Chris in
the evening.
-
Drove to Aldeburgh to collect N. and H. - who had both
made pretty rings with Bruce. Silver-soldering up settings and
bands, and setting a stone in them - good stuff.
-
Out to wander Sizewell beach, back for tea, home.
-
Partner call, mail processing, admin, sync. with Eloy.
Lunch, TDF BoD call, sync with Kendy.
-
Mail chew, H. and N. off to learn some jewlery making with
Bruce. Commercial call, lunch with smaller babes. ESC call.
Pleased to see LibreOffice Writer used as the word-processing
workload in the Powerhammer
paper.
-
Hospital app't in the morning - West Suffolk: they at least
know a difficult case to be referred; good. Filed holiday, mail
chew, poked at receipts & expenses.
-
Still no voice, mail, admin; lots of friends over for
lunch before Tania's funeral at All-Saints - very sad; a packed
church. Back for a customer call.
-
Plugged away at tasks variously; dinner, put babes to
bed, worked in the evening.
-
Practically no voice; not ideal; swallowing a challenge.
E-mail doesn't require a voice-box however.
-
Breakfast together at Burger King supposedly
the only place open at this time - hmm; interesting
engineering going on nearby - parts of a TBM(?) nearby. To
the office - for a status update, and more sync with
friends.
-
Lengthy flights back, J. picked me up, lovely to
be home, but a horrible throat to go with it.
-
J. kindly dropped me to Stansted early, flight delayed
by an hour - plugged away at calc, vlookup-ness. Eventually
found my way to the Freiheit offices - a beautiful venue
kindly donated for the hack-fest.
-
Met up with and talked to lots of old friends. Up
late talking, caught up with Miklos & Tomi at our AirBnB,
some mail chew, sleep.
-
Waded back through the accumulated mail pile; lots of things
going nicely. Checked-in for the Hamburg
Hackfest tomorrow - should be interesting.
-
Worked in the morning, bid 'bye to the parents; J. drove
home while I poked at calc internals a little - ESC call and chewed
mail in the afternoon.
-
Into Harrogate for Spring Harvest; not entirely convinced -
but spoiled by big (free) conferences like FOSDEM that are so well run
and scheduled. Some interesting content of course.
-
Poked mail; drove to Stockton to meet up with Joy, Chris &
their young ladies. Holywood Bowl, Pizza Hut, Pets At Home &
back to the parents'
-
Rather a rainy day, slugging in the afternoon; reading The Rise
and Fall of the Third Reich - fascinating.
-
Lunch; out to Sandra's for swimming & cake. Home tiredly,
feeling rather under the weather - fuzzy head & cold-ness.
-
Easter day - off to Jennyfields in Harrogate for
a lovely Gospel-centered family service. Home for a fine
roast lamb feast, out for a walk to the town castle,
up the steps, back to see R&A, watched The Sound
of Music together, bed.
-
Up, girls dressed prettily, drove to the Reed's home
for a fine pre-Easter feast in Pickering. Walk down to the
North York Rejoiced over an accepted offer for a home
for them. Home in the evening, put babes to bed.
-
Got up, played lego, walked down by the river; sang
in St Roberts cave. Came back for lunch, Rob & Amelia
arrived late. Learned to play "Sushi Go!" together, admired
the house they just viewed. Lasagne dinner together.
-
Mail, admin, sync with Kendy, Andras, Aron, Jona, lunch.
More work, packed & set off to Knaesborough with the babes.
-
Mail chew, mended NSS use in minimized jails, fixed unit tests.
Reviewed security documentation at some length.
-
Mail chew, admin, interview, more mail, built ESC stats.
Mgmt call, sync with Philippe. Dinner, spent a chunk of time
reading NSS in the evening.
-
Mail chew, chat with Paolo, mail chew, admin left & right.
Back-ported a patch eventually, and poked at the crash reporter.
Helped M. and N. with their maths in the evening.
-
Up; played bass & violin (not concurrently) at All Saints.
Grier & Barbara over for lunch and fellowship. Quartet practice
with the girls; Odyssey after tea, put people to bed; watched Patriot -
amusing.
-
Took a car-load of babes to Ely for Shine and did
The
Ely Spy Mission Trail with E. - a nice meal together by the river,
visited the museum & picked up a set of babes to take home.
-
Julie over in the evening, out with J. to Wetherspoon for
a nice evening out together - met several people in the pub, relaxing.
-
Mail chew, chat with Andras, sync with Kendy.
-
Early morning customer call. Mail chew, another customer call,
and another, and a sales & marketing meeting, 5mins for lunch, then
the ESC call. More mail.
-
More mail; calls, aggravation. Music group practice
in the evening; relaxing.
-
Mail chew, team call, etc. commercial call, in the
afternoon. Lots of E-mail annoyance.
-
Up early, practice with H. and E. Mail chew, code review, hit a
deadlock while editing & fixed it.
-
Booked flight for SuperSec
2018 in Almeria which should be fun. Wrote status report.
-
More mail; grief.
-
All Saints in the morning, baptism, Fraser spoke well, back
for lunch; Violin practice with E. out to pick up babes; took H. and
E. to a concert - back for pizza dinner, put babes to bed.
-
Up late; into Cambridge with E. for Science Week. Lots of interesting
things in the Guild-hall - glow-worms (nematodes with glowing proteins and
double the life-span), LED torch creation with the IET, vascular models to
pay with, Artemesia seeds to plant, and more.
-
Lunch, on to psychology to see some tool-making bird videos, theory
of mind, optical illusions and more.
-
Over to see David later, built giant lego tower with E. to the
ceiling, back to ours with David for a chinese meal, bed early.
-
Mail chew, analysis, patch review - great to see Noel making
great strides in privatizing the dreaded separate alpha into
vcl/ where hopefully we can remove it, accelerating
everything that uses cairo / libpixman at least.
-
Bid 'bye to three babes to Burwell House for 'Alive' with YFC.
Watched the last Season 2 Man in the High Castle; interesting.
-
Mail, ESC call, competitive analysis - rather encouraging how far
Collabora Online has come since 2.x. ESC call, more analysis.
-
Mail, poked at patches, funded two small girl's phones;
what a chunk of cash to spend on connectivity; saved the difference
by getting a better personal plan.
-
Calls with Andras & Eloy, and others.
-
Mail chew, patch review. Pleased to see Tor's impact on
Mac
bugs, with Mac disappearing from the high-priority regression list
(for now).
-
Seems the security circus got a lot nastier recently; what
chance that a company releases a very slick website, with pre-made
videos, polished collateral, and marketing - in advance of any
technical information, or patches that "AMD is vulnerable" - just
for fun. I wonder who paid for all of those pixels.
-
Practice with E. scales decaying over the weekend; hmm.
Mail chew, sync with Miklos. Lunch with J. Sync with kendy,
call with Jeroen. TDF call. Stories in the evening - Asimov for
E. Max Lucado for H.
-
Up, cooked breakfast in bed for J. with M. - presents,
cards, a banner, etc. for the sweetheart. Out to All Saints,
played bass; enjoyed Max's sermon. Home for roast lunch.
-
Slugged; digested; played guitar much of the afternoon
while babes played lego (a break from minetest), and Smash-Up.
Julie over for tea.
-
Poked mail, took H. to practice the Organ & got
a bit of hacking done. Back for lunch. Watched Lost in
Space (with not much to recommend it) in the afternoon.
-
Out for a run; mail, customer calls, poked at
projections.
-
Poked at EC2 hosting of minetest again in the
evening with N.; SLE12 too stale, and/or games not
compiled for it; decided to try flatpak having played
with snap the other day. Far from ideal for a head-less
server use on a remote machine; the app store gives
.ini files rather than a simple command-line to install.
Installing files demands a server to install from rather
than noticing I have just one, and the app is in it.
The command-line demands very.long.qualified.names rather
than being helpful. I assume this works beautifully from
the GUI, and I'm a victim of a corner-case.
Running a new OS underneath chews enough RAM to
require a more expensive instance too - upgraded that,
it works; hmm.
-
Customer call at breakfast; fun. Sync with Miklos. Call
with Eloy. ESC call, posted minutes. Out with Richard Wood in the
evening for a pleasant drink / catch-up.
-
Mail; sync with Andras, admin, lunch; chat with Thorsten,
poked at projections.
-
Mail chew, more text review; built ESC proto-agenda. With a
number of friends dying of Cancer near and far, I was encouraged to watch
Death is not dying;
serve, with joy - what a great reminder; the serving is easy -
the joy is often hard for me.
-
Got some AWS / EC2 instance setup in the evening with N. to
backup family photos & minetest
onto; fun.
-
Mail chew; admin, call with Mike K, lunch. Great swathes
of admin; people like to send me 60 pages of legal boiler-plate at
a time it seems.
-
Interested to see in the news that
the Royal Mail can spot bogus clairvoyants these days - I
wonder if they use AI for that.
-
Pleased to discover that after some upgrades removing
nouveau.modeset=0 from my kernel parameters (while
adding nopti) gives me some accelerated X goodness again; nice.
-
To church early, played bass, E.H & self did
prayers for the family service. Back home for lovely family
Italian food extraveganza - with S&C, J&A, B&A.
-
Played Vive, with J.&A, Clive gave bass advice;
listened to Odyssey over tea together; put babes to bed with
stories. Reading N. Sustainable Energy
without the Hot Air.
-
Snow-ball fight in the morning in the road & built
a snow-man. Christina over for lunch & making cookies with H.
- out to sleep-over with Charlotte; watched Evan Almighty. Stories
with babes; bit of work; Man in the High Castle in
the evening.
-
E. home for another snow-day, while H.N.M. go to school
in Soham. Mail chew, sync with Andras & Kendy, updated some
docs. More mail.
-
Pleased to see the team produce a great Collabora
Online 3.1 release with lots of fixes & improvements.
-
Hannah, Nick & Joni over for dinner, and an art
lesson drawing still-life; terrible tonal shading from yours
truly.
-
Early call with Martin & Miklos, mail, snow sweeping,
call, lunch.
-
Somewhat irritated to get "Your exclusive invitation -
The new Porsche Cayenne" through the door - presumably sent to
company directors; I guess we need to have some reply options:
"[X] I invested my money into Free Software not silly cars"
or perhaps -
"[X] When your car is a plucky start-up leading the battery
vehicle and self-driving future, then I might look again (cf. Tesla)"
Then again - a junk-mail fuelled heating-system is an attractive
option with snow outside; perhaps I should install another
forty-two letter-boxes in my door to feed it.
-
ESC call, chat with Daniel, mail. Dinner, read stories.
Contract review, financial projections.
-
Mail triage; swept snow off the drive, played with E. and J.
a little. Community call, CP team call, sync with Dennis, two customer
calls, partner call; called out ... more admin & beating back the
falling snow.
-
Poked mail, slide work; into Cambridge - to the office to
talk with a potential partner; good meetings - out for lunch and
a quick tour of Cambridge (in the cold). Bus back, mail chew, picked
up by J. and E. (a quick office tour for E.), and home again;
more mail & admin to catch up on the day's business.
-
Mail, mattermost, patch review, contract execution, etc.
First TDF BoD meeting of the new BoD.
-
Reflecting on the non-profit/charity sector post- Oxfam &
Save The Children and many other instances where (it appears) that
in some cases aid was used for sexual exploitation. The assumption
that companies (particularly large ones) are and must always be
treated as uniformly evil always looked rather thin to me; but the
idea that non-profits are intrinsically whiter-than-white in
comparison also starts to look increasingly unlikely.
-
Up late preparing slides.
-
All Saints, played bass; visiting speaker on Lent; home for
pizza lunch, slugged playing Bananagrams, out to pick up M. -
eventually found Barbara & Grier's house - complete with icy
pond to play with, bees to admire and more. Chatted with Barabara
for a while, back for tea, read stories to babes.
-
Lie-in, slugged and read the economist, helped N.
with her maths; lunch & out for a walk leaving H. to do
her homework.
-
Back, watched Secondhand Lions - together
very good; dinner, Odyssey, littlies to bed, out to
practice the Organ with H. and do some hacking.
-
Run in the morning with J. Partner technical call,
partner calls, aborted sales call; admin, picked up Allison
from the station & had a lovely evening with her and the
family; bed late.
-
Mail chew, Marketing & Sales call; product research.
Up very late working on slides, planning, and other admin.
-
To work early, mail chew, sync with Tracie, Miklos. Lunch.
Partner call.
-
One of the nicest stories I heard about Billy Graham
was from ParkStreet and went very roughly a bit like this:
Billy was about to speak at a Boston(?) conference, and as he was introduced -
with this growing, glowing haggiography of his achivements, awards, travels
and so on got increasingly concerned. After the introduction he came on the stage
... and told approximately this story: The other day I took an elevator, and
inside it, on the floor, was a dirty, drunk man. Looking up at me there was this
flicker of recognition: he said "I know you! You're Billy Graham! ... you changed
my life!". That - is what happens when Billy Graham tries to change your life - we're
both wasting our time. What you really need is to fix your eyes on Jesus
to let him rescue & change you.
apocryphal; maybe - but if only all preachers realized its ultimately really
not about them.
-
Mail; old-friend / partner call, more partner poking.
Monthly mgmt call, admin.
-
Babes back to school; quick Old Story New Bible study
at breakfast. Mail chew, chat with Florian, sync with Kendy, status
report, mail. Plugged away at admin.
-
All Saints, Stephen back for roast-lamb lunch with the babes,
chatted afterwards. Watched the last Harry Potter in the afternoon.
Bed, watched The Man in the High Castle with J.
-
Poked at a little work; David over for lunch, out for a walk
at Lackford Lakes/river/forest. Home, tidied up - Julie over for a
birthday tea - chatted to her; bed.
-
Run in the morning, mail chew; poked at this & that;
bid 'bye to Leanne; Miriam, Ben, Mai & Jude over for lunch -
really lovely to see them & catch up after so long. Had a
fine afternoon together.
-
Back to work, two customer calls, mail, movie with kids;
out to Church men's prayer meeting & curry.
-
Up in the night, couldn't sleep; idle mail chew &
triage of my TODO, modelling, watched a movie, slept on a chair;
hmm.
-
Off to Aldeburgh to see B&A, lovely lunch, walk on
the beach with Anne.
-
Found an interesting chap driving a quad-bike
dragging some instrumentation up the beach - quizzed him. It seems
they place several thousand RFID instrumented drill+fill stones on
the beach - then watch where the sea, storms etc. move them over
time - must be a fascinating data-set of vectors. Helpful to check
that Sizewell doesn't fall into the sea I guess. Found a
paper
with pictures on the topic.
-
Back for chat, pancakes, and set off home. Odyssey in
the car. Plugged away at a proposal until late.
-
Discovered the flowers I'd got for J. smelled of petrol
rather: the trials of only being able to escape subtly when J.
is out with the car. Rescued by J's cold.
-
Amazing influx of girls; Kelsie, Elsie, Sophie, and
return of exhausted N. from back-to-back sleep-over-pair.
-
Beat back the mail mountain; admin, interview, sync.
with Andras.
-
Mail, patch review, customer call, slide-ware hackery,
lunch at the K/B, sales call. Value-prop analysis call.
-
Pleased to see Swapnil's patreon
posting of our chat yesterday; interesting to see Patreon growing with
Simon there too.
-
Valentines card production in the evening.
-
Mail; sync with Miklos, estimation, status report. Customer
call, TDF/BoD call; Leanne over to stay; worked late while listening
to the ladies talk.
-
Played guitar at All Saints with Laura & Mary; fun.
Took Mary R. home for lunch and off to Histon to pick up H. E.
& Kelsey. Home, lunch, slugged & played with Mary &
tired H. and E. tea, stories, put people to bed.
-
Breakfast, out for a walk in Anglesey Abbey with
J. M. and N. - enjoyed the winter garden, and lovely
grounds. Back for some applied slugging by the fire in
the afternoon - and attacked the pre-loading problem for
some of tangle of late-binding module inter-relations
in LibreOffice.
-
Not hyper-well, mail chew; admin, planing, sync.
with Kendy, late partner call. H. and E. off to GenR8
fun in Histon.
-
Interested to see the growing awareness (as brought to
prominence for me in The Tipping Point) that some quite
(surprising) issues can be almost contageous
if given social permission and/or with too much tragic detail.
-
Mail chew, ESC call, sync with partners, admin.
-
Relaxed a little; mail, calls, planning, lots of unwanted
hassle left & right.
-
Band practice in the evening, Beckie kindly lent me her
guitar; went reasonably well.
-
Breakfast with Kendy, off to the venue - somewhat
zombified from chronic sleep deprivation. Talked individually
with lots of great people, bid a sad 'bye, and train / Eurostar
to the UK - surprisingly good wifi on the train even in the
tunnel, worked on the way home.
-
Lovely to be back, and see my lovely wife &
wonderful baby girls.
-
Off again, to the lovely Beta
Co-working space - board meeting ~all day. Pizza bought in for
a late lunch. More meetings - until late, out for a drink together;
sad. Finally back to E-mail; then bed.
-
Awake until 6:15am writing my talk; slept until 9am,
up breakfast, off to the venue; spoke on re-structuring a
giant, ancient code-base:
-
Out for lunch with Julian Seward & a thunder-birder
- excellent to catch-up. Back to the booth to see many old
friends into town in the evening for a
burger with Guilhelm, Olivier, Miklos & Kendy - nice.
-
Back, to write a few more slides; bed.
-
Breakfast with Kendy; to the conference lugging swag;
handed out stickers to many people
lunch with some friends. On to the LibreOffice dev-room for
some interesting talks. Gave my talk:
-
Walked to the awesome Beta Co-working in the
evening for a fine Italian pasta, LibreOffice dinner from Italo
and Marina.
-
Back late to the hotel.
-
Train too early to Hamburg; met Herbert in the airport,
flight to Brussels; worked on slides on the flight; got to the
Atlas Hotel in the end - tried to get one talk finished before
heading out; then joined the AB call instead.
-
It is this time of year when you re-read your abstract,
scratch your head - and try to work out what possessed you to
put XYZ topic in there.
-
Out to the foundations dinner; great to see lots of old
friends, and make some new ones too . Back to
Gerv's hotel, and caught up with Loic. On to the
Delerium Cafe - surprisingly less packed than normal at midnight;
met up with Nicolas, Kendy, Markus, Raul, Richard and many more;
eventually back to bed.
-
Freezingly early blackness, bus, plane, tram, train, walk,
Univention Summit. Good to meet lots of partners & friends,
some great talks, an excellent evening party - encouraging.
-
Mail, calls with Jona; sync with Kendy, proposal pieces,
built ESC stats.
-
Mail, admin, proposals, much of the day, chat with Simon.
Into Cambridge to meet Philippe; had a fine dinner with a chunk
of the C'bra team afterwards, good to catch up with Guy again.
-
Mail, meetings, poked at the Poco process execution impl.
and created a cleaner one for online. Started writing slides for
FOSDEM in earnest. Sync with Kendy in the evening.
-
M&D left early, All Saints, played bass - unusual sermon;
over to Beckie & Stephen's for a lovely lunch
and afternoon together. Back for another Odyssey & tea, read stories
to babies; bed.
-
Out for a walk with H. and N. to see a nearby farm, woodland,
snowdrops & the like. E. fell and hurt her knees. Back for lunch.
H. M&D out for organ practise in the afternoon. Dinner, stories,
talked until late.
-
Up at 5am, poked at code and bugs variously. Breakfast.
Dropped E. to school, out for a run. Home - meeting with Kendy,
Aron, Jona. Plugged at admin. Lunch.
-
Parents arrived Sorted out expenses with Julie; poked
at mail. Listed to Odyssey in the evening, and chatted with the
parents.
-
Mail, spreadsheet-ness, customer call, admin. Lunch.
C'bra mgmt calls through the afternoon.
-
Poked mail, chat with Miklos, poked at partner mail and
tasks. Sync with Noel & Eloy, customer call, out to see the
dentist.
-
Pleased to discover from Pranav that although Linux' skype client
inexplicably (and globally) eats the ctrl-alt-shift-D key-combination
(without doing anything with it seemingly) - I can still select
an online window and do
map._docLayer.toggleTileDebugMode().
-
Out to All Saints to practice with the band.
-
Mail chew, admin, meeting prep, partner cal, lunch.
Installed LibreOffice build tools on HP / Ryzen 5 laptop; upgraded
Windows 10 endlessly. Build ESC stats, commercial call.
-
Went out with J. for the first time in some months;
just lovely to spend time alone with her out of the house.
-
Mail triage, sync with Miklos, status report & more mail.
Lunch. Admin left & right. Call with Andras.
-
Off to All Saints to play bass; great sermon from Fraser
on the Wedding at Caana - the pattern of hour not yet come
knowing the end from the beginning and more.
-
H. had an organ lesson, home for a Pizza lunch; slugged
variously, watched a Wallace & Gromit, tea, Odyssey, put babes
to bed.
-
Waffles in bed in the morning thanks to M. Got a bit of work done,
sat by the fire with J. Helped N. get various new minetest mods sorted out.
Read stories, spent time in the evening with H. on Chemistry - lots of
electrons, ions, and various kids of bonds.
-
Mail chew, sync with Tor & Miklos, more mail,
research and estimation. partner call. Admin. Managed to
forget E. at school - a patient love: didn't complain and
was lost outside the secretary's office - remembered &
collected post-haste.
-
Mail chew, call with HSBC - trying to persuade me to invest in
bonds at 0.7%, when the UK Government is offering 2.2% direct at retail;
weird. Marketing & Sales call. Lunch.
-
Mail, bits of code, bugs, ESC call, Advisory Board call, sales
call.
-
FOSDEM put up some of my incoherent
ramblings - looking forward to seeing people in Brussels!
-
Washing machine pump started to make noises as if a hair-band
has got into it (urgh), will attempt dis-assembly. Thrilled to discover
that the pump (and filter) are trivially accessible and easy to clean
in contrast to the last machine where the pump was carefully concealed
inside a razer-sharp metal box with rubber and pipe clips everywhere.
-
Mail chew; patch review, estimation work, catch-up with Miklos.
Booked flights to the Univention
Summit before FOSDEM - should be great.
-
Sync with Andras, Jona, mail chew, commercial call, partner
call, read reams of framework contract-ness. Dinner.
-
Debugged some JS
horror - where we end up with a 'this' referring to an entirely different
object in a class' method - type unsafety to the N'th.
-
Sync. with Miklos, Kendy, code review, lunch, mail, sync
with Andras, customer call.
-
Played bass & sang at All Saints, christening & Max spoke.
Back for roast lunch, slugging, playing of 'Job Simulator' by babes,
Adventures on Odyssey in the evening; put babes to bed.
-
Out to practice with H. in the morning, caught up with N's
ceramic painting party later. Home for lunch, and some slugging -
watched 'Superman' with the babes. Practised bass variously with
H. in the evening.
-
Mail chew. Poked at dialog code with Kendy, N's friends
over for a sleepover & party, up late cleaning async dialog
bits up. Collected replacement VIVE controller - excellent,
remembered to cover up the mirror in the front room too (a top
tip for structured laser users).
-
N's birthday - fun present opening at breakfast. Admin, calls,
some code-reading, ESC call, catchup with JanI. Julie over for dinner &
Smash-Up playing action.
-
Mail, admin, calls, more admin; a little patch review.
-
Mail chew; suspiciously little - odd, poked sysadmins.
Fixed a page border rendering issue in LOOL, ESC bits arrived,
built stats.
-
Mail chew, sync with Miklos; contract review.
-
Off to All Saints, enjoyed the family service; back for lunch,
Got N's minetest pieces going nicely with her, played Smash-Up, with the
family, Organ practice with H. Detectorists before bed.
-
Breakfast in bed for J. - babes did homework, re-silicone'd the
shower window, took H. into Cambridge; slugging away from the cold with
the family; Julie over in the evening.
-
Moderately irritated (as a remain voter) by the repeated, flaccid
argument (now on the BBC) that old voters (who are dying out) voted for Brexit,
and young people voted to stay: so things are somehow unfair. What a bag of
hammers! It is deeply unclear to me that we should dis-enfranchise the old (and
hopefully experienced & wise) in favour of the young (and arguably
politically naive); but at least there is an argument there for decisions
that only impact the young's future. However - the idea that as young people
age and they experience life (or their brains ossify) - that their political views
remain entirely static seems really unlikely
and is an intrinsic assumption here. The old of today would seem to me
to be a good proxy for the views of the old of tomorrow.
-
Worked on nailing some contract / admin backlog. Fixed a bug
at lunch. Intersted to see the X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE patch from AMD.
-
Mail chew; admin, sync with Jona, then Kendy, ESC call.
-
Irritated by dish-washer, why is it that a dish-washer cannot
have a colored LED on the front with a large diffuser that shows
green: if it has been through a wash-cycle, and the door has not
been opened yet (ie. 'clean'), that slowly decays into red over a
minute or so after opening the door. The current effort has an un-lit
display to denote both dirty and clean states, with a lit-up one for
washing; hey ho.
-
Up early; larger babes to school; back to work.
Mail, sync with Miklos. Plugged away at admin and accumulated
task backlog bits, call with Andras. Practiced bass guitar in
the evening.
-
Worked somewhat in the morning, lunch; soldered bits of
VIVE controller up after breaking headers; still no joy. Worked
with N. getting her laptop upgraded to the latest openSUSE,
teaching here about virtualization, and getting the latest
minetest plugin pieces setup.
-
Bit of mail triage; slugging, went for a walk in
and around a muddy wood in the rain as a family: bracing -
saw some waterlogged deer & a hare. Watched last LOTR.
My content in this blog and associated images / data under
images/ and data/ directories are (usually)
created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under
the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0
license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for
themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /
improvements / corrections by private mail.
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,
Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),
or anyone else.
It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
