| Stuff Michael Meeks is doing |  | 
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: (
    J
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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
 
	- 
		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.
 	
- 
		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.
 	
- 
		Home; Le-anne had arrived to stay, nice to
	see her.
 	
 
 
	- 
		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.
 	
 
 
	- 
		Up earlyish, out to All Saints to run Open
	Church with B&C - no visitors. Home for lunch.
 	
- 
		Out for a walk from Reach to home along the
	dyke; cup of tea, collected the car and chatted.
 	
 
 
	- 
		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.
 	
- 
		Bible study group, sleep.
 	
 
 
	- 
		Sync. with Marco, weekly sales call, chat with
	Sarper, lunch, sync with Caolan & Stephan, partner
	sales call.
	
- 
		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.
	
- 
		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.
	
 
 
	- 
		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.
	
- 
		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.
	
 
 
	- 
		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.
	
 
 
	- 
		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.
	
 
 
	- 
		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
 
	- 
		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
 
	- 
		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.
	
- 
		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
 
	- 
		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.
	
- 
		Flushed E-mail, chased documents, dinner with
	the family, worked late.
	
 
2023-05-11 Thursday
 
	- 
		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
 
	- 
		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.
	
- 
		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
 
	- 
		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)
