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:
2023: (
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2022: (
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2021,
2019,
2018,
2017,
2016,
2015,
2014,
2013,
2012,
2011,
2010,
2009,
2009,
2008,
2007,
2006,
2005,
2004,
2003,
2002,
2001,
2000,
1999,
legacy html
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Up early, rushed to the nearest traffic-jam for
a two hour stay on the A14; eventually got to the Suffolk
Show. Saw lots of nice (heavy) horses with the pretty
wife - enjoyed some sandwiches.
-
Interrogated various vendors of insanely heavy
farm equipment and admired their wares; solar powered
robot planting and weeding machines - nice. Pre-fabricated
concrete slab salespeople, giant tractors & lifters.
Also a lot of animals & a flower show.
-
Home late with some cold babies; Music group
practice, dinner.
-
Mail chew, encouraged to see that Cor's initiative
to break the deadlock and finally get an actionable vote
passed to hire a couple of devs for TDF paid off with
Khaled hired; great.
-
We're also looking for a fluent German Project Manager to help out with some
of our German customers and partners.
-
Planning call for a couple of hours; lunch.
Eloy 1:1, catch up with E-mail backlog.
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Did some work with M. to get her chess-board
cut in the other dimension, and re-glued-up looking
good.
-
Up earlyish, signed a contract, then day off.
Out to see the Hawkins' in St Albans, enjoyed a day
in the sun, chatting, ice-creams, slept & relaxed.
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Home; Le-anne had arrived to stay, nice to
see her.
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All Saints in the morning, started to use
ising which
seems rather good. Chatted to B&C, noodle soup for
lunch. Bid 'bye to B&C - picked H. up from Cambridge.
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Up earlyish, out to All Saints to run Open
Church with B&C - no visitors. Home for lunch.
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Out for a walk from Reach to home along the
dyke; cup of tea, collected the car and chatted.
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Mail chew; misc. admin. Two hour process call, vendor
meeting. Back to mail, slides & admin.
-
Barbara & Colin arrived - lovely to see them
after so long, sat outside in the sunshine.
-
Up earlyish, tech. planning call; N. not well.
COOL community
call; continued to find interesting performance things to fix
there. Lunch, interview, marketing strategy call; admin.
Catch-up with Tracie.
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Bible study group, sleep.
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Sync. with Marco, weekly sales call, chat with
Sarper, lunch, sync with Caolan & Stephan, partner
sales call.
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Into Cambridge to the Beer Festival, met up with
the Collabora team, catch-up with Andrew Haley, some good
tips from Simon McV, lovely. Train back with H. late.
-
Mail, 1:1s with Andras & Pedro, partner call,
1:1 with Eloy, admin, sales call; got to profiling some
dialog bits and merged various improvements.
-
Strimmed the lawn with J, helped M. with her physics
revision in the evening.
-
Mail chew; planning call. Bruce & Anne & Louise over
for lunch - luckily lots of left-overs from the lady's day Saturday.
Long architecture call. Managed to get ESTAs filed eventually too.
-
Cooked breakfast, gave a short talk on Psalm
1: how's your walk ? Out for physical walking, and
bid 'bye to the lads - drove Simon home listening to Sons
of Korah.
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Lovely to see the babes again; slept exhaustedly
on the sofa; picked them up from Cambridge; bed late.
-
Out for a cooked breakfast nearby, then walked some
miles into Walberswick, lunch at the Bell Inn, walked back
by a different route together; good to have time to catch up.
Dinner at the Fox Inn together; bid 'bye to Alex.
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Bits of mail chewage; packed and drove Simon N to
Darsham, met up with lots of Men of Faith; chatted &
drank ale in the sun; BBQ, and a stew from Mihai until late.
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Slept in the Darsham station - a combination of
train vibration, and the more impressive lorry-on-
level-crossing vibration - making the bunk-house snoring
experience more amusing.
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Breakfast with the parents; bid 'bye to them.
Technical planning call, COOL community call, lunch,
1:1 with Miklos, E-mail & partner call. Booked
flight & hotel in Berlin.
-
Spent the evening on Psalm 1
for Sunday; really encouraging to pull it all together & to
delightful to get a better understanding of the passage.
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Partner call, weekly sales call, 23.05 release
planning call. Lunch, CP all-hands call. Parents over
in the afternoon - lovely to spend some time with them.
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Partner catch-up; various meetings, tried to clear my
desk somewhat, misc. calls.
-
Mail chew. Planning call, two hour partner call in parallel
with a catch-up with the wider marketing team. Another partner call,
COOL-days post-mortem and next-time planning.
-
Quick sync with Caolan; helped sort out AC maintenance in
the garden. Family dinner, off to minute PCC meeting; back late,
admin.
For anyone that doesn't know him - Caolán
has contributed amazing work
on the LibreOffice code-base for over two decades, latterly for RedHat. He has
pioneered work in many areas around LibreOffice:
- helping to found The Document Foundation, and contributing to its
growth and governance
- handling security for LibreOffice, managing CVEs and patch porting
- maintaining our static checking with Coverity and others
- getting fuzzing working, tending oss-fuzz, and incorporating a large
number of fixes to stop issues escaping in releases.
- tending our crash-testing of ~750k documents (~60Gb) of bug documents
which we continually run through (thanks to hardware sponsorship from
Adfinis) - maintaining the
great quality of our filters.
We expect Caolán will continue to spend time on these as part
of his role at Collabora; but of course this is only a subset of
the things he has contributed for RedHat some highlights being:
- re-working the entire LibreOffice UI to use auto-layout instead of
fixed-positions, it is hard to comprehend what a huge investment this
represents - with over a thousand glade dialog fragments, with over
half a million lines.
- adapting the UI toolkit to allow native gtk (& Javascript) widgets.
- maintaining our gtk backends to cope with the latest gtk churn^Wimprovements.
- various vital features such as printing comments in the margins in writer.
- getting almost every package in a RedHat distro to use the same Hunspell dictionaries.
- complex text rendering & layout, fixing innumerable bugs, improving the
user-experience and much more.
RedHat was instrumental in founding The Document Foundation, and has
invested far more than we had any right to expect through its team over
a long period; they deserve our thanks. I expect that LibreOffice will
still be available from flathub going
forward. However with RedHat now choosing to laser
focus its development investment into the open hybrid cloud,
it became clear that in order for us to continue to enjoy Caolán's
contribution - he would need a new home.
Happily - this circumstance is rather similar to the history of
Collabora
Productivity's founding with the direction changes at SUSE, and we could
act quickly. The paid and volunteer team around the code-base continues to grow.
However, it is is important that we retain skills, and continue to deepen the
talent pool around LibreOffice Technology and Collabora Online as circumstances
change.
The Collabora team is looking forward to working with Caolán to
continue his work in three areas: on the underlying LibreOffice
Technology, serving our customers as part of our
growing (we're
hiring) team, and of course to make Collabora Online even better
for our partners and customers. Welcome Caolán!
2023-05-14 Sunday
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Up earlyish, pre-service practice with
Cedric, played - home for Pizza lunch. Caught up
the blog; listened to another Psalm 1 talk.
2023-05-13 Saturday
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Slept in, out for a run with J; then shopping.
B&A over; took A. into town to sort out B's phone
malfuctioning: an under-used PAYG phone: phoning 150
and re-enabling the SIM: the solution, sadly the UI
has no hint for why its malfunctioning however.
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Lunch, toured new bits in the home; David
over; bid 'bye to the inlaws; set too at sorting out
J's garden lean-too; and getting more out of the
garage.
2023-05-12 Friday
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Up late; chat with Cor, Thorsten - packed, met up
with Thorsten and had a pleasant train ride together.
Epic queueing nightmare for security, another RyanAir
flight delayed by an hour; eventually got home to
Stansted and a train strike. J. picked me up and had a
very disrupted kid/taxi-service.
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Flushed E-mail, chased documents, dinner with
the family, worked late.
2023-05-11 Thursday
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Breakfast with Frank & Bjoern; off to
a rather encouraging partner meeting - lots of items
ironed out. Out for dinner in the evening, and up late
at a bar with Gotz, Niels & Mark.
2023-05-10 Wednesday
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Up lateish; enjoyed the warm weather, and
remarkable set of people we have, toured various
activities; caught up with individuals; lunch
with Kendy. Bid a premature 'bye to many.
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Taxi, flight to Hamburg - worked on
slides on the plane.
2023-05-09 Tuesday
-
Talk from Philippe & Guy, rap from Rachel,
mostly in-person mgmt meeting with the team; good to
see them and discuss where we're going in more depth.
-
Fine lunch; enjoyed booths run by other
Collaborans, caught up with some mail; more meetings in
the evening; dinner together. Individual chats until
late.
2023-05-08 Monday
-
Early taxi with Nick & Carolyn to Stansted;
met up with a growing group of Collaborans, worked on
the flight, prepping slides for the mgmt meeting.
-
Arrived in Faro, bus with an even bigger group
to the venue, enjoyed fine company, sea, food &
drink - after not seeing many people in person for so
long; really good to catch up again. Up late.
2023-05-07 Sunday
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All Saints in the morning; family service,
making crowns for some reason. Church BBQ outside
afterwards. Took all but H. into Cambridge, bed early.
2023-05-06 Saturday
-
Up late, got a bit of work in;
watched the conoration - pleased to
see things done properly in an orderly fashion; and
for the King to have impressed on them their role of
service to the real King, and the nation. Surprisingly
good, albeit lengthy.
-
Sorted out J's garden lean-to somewhat, and
strimmed the pernicious grass.
2023-05-05 Friday
-
Customer call, team deadline chasing call, catch up
with Andras, lunch; out to Josh Bendall's funeral to play
violin with Mick on keyboard - a good funeral.
-
A chunk of contract reviews; N. cooked a fine dinner,
back to work until late.
2023-05-04 Thursday
-
Technical planning call, COOL community call, customer
deadline chasing team call, weekly sales call. Customer support
call with Aron. Bits of hacking & admin.
-
Bible study group in the evening. Reading up on Psalm 1
for the Church mens walking weekend.
2023-05-03 Wednesday
-
Mail chew, early partner call, chat with Thorsten.
Encouraging COOL-days marketing post-mortem, interview;
All Saints band practice with Beckie & Mary.
2023-05-02 Tuesday
-
Mail chew, morning planning call, lunch, picked up bits
and pieces from Screwfix. Team call, catch up call with Patrick,
sync with Gokay on cypress. Varnished new stairs in the evening.
2023-05-01 Monday
-
Up, off to see J's parents - worked in the
car a little.
-
Lunch with B&A, fixed a number of things
around the house for them - blocked drains again
interestingly; tough to solve. Poked at various
things in the garage; replaced light-bulbs. Chatted,
and did a puzzle while babes playing scrabble.
-
Chips on the way home, worked through mail.
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)