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: ( J F M A M J ), 2022: ( J F M A M J J A S O N D ), 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)