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


2021-12-31 Friday

2021-12-30 Thursday

2021-12-29 Wednesday

2021-12-28 Tuesday

2021-12-27 Monday

2021-12-26 Sunday

2021-12-25 Saturday

2021-12-24 Friday

2021-12-23 Thursday

2021-12-22 Wednesday

2021-12-21 Tuesday

2021-12-20 Monday

2021-12-19 Sunday

2021-12-18 Saturday

2021-12-17 Friday

2021-12-16 Thursday

2021-12-15 Wednesday

2021-12-14 Tuesday

2021-12-13 Monday

2021-12-12 Sunday

2021-12-11 Saturday

2021-12-10 Friday

2021-12-09 Thursday

2021-12-08 Wednsday

2021-12-07 Tuesday

2021-12-06 Monday

2021-12-05 Sunday

2021-12-04 Saturday.

2021-12-03 Friday.

2021-12-02 Thursday.

  • Catch-up with Miklos, Andras, COOL community call. Caught up with Simon, partner call. Got on with annual review preparations.

2021-12-01 Wednesday.

  • Mail chew, sales call with Eloy, sync with Olivier P & Andras on server room racks; catch up with Tor & Kendy.
  • Lovely memorial service for Roy Starling featuring the town band (now with 'mask' on their instruments interestingly) - a wonderful, encouraging Christian Gentleman & musician - sadly lost to COVID early in the pandemic.
  • David S. kindly helped M. and N. with their Physics.

2021-11-30 Tuesday.

  • Mail & catch-up with Kendy. Lunch.
  • Pleased to see the work we have done together released announced as Nextcloud Office which will be the default Office in Nextcloud from now on; looking very slick. A few points:
    • Lots of that coding touches Collabora Online and is already included and published in CODE 21.11, and of course we build on LibreOffice Technology so that work is also already contributed and will go into the next LibreOffice releases.
    • From a customer and support perspective we continue to work together as before to deliver excellent support to all of our customers and users as today.
    • Naturally we are thrilled that Nextcloud joins a long list of other partners and OEMs that choose Collabora Online as their default option, very often white-labelled.
    • Nextcloud Office built on COOL and LibreOffice Technology
    • Interested by Richard Moore (head of MI6)'s take on data traps
      "The data-trap is this: that if you allow another country to gain access to really critical data about your society, over time that will erode your sovereignty - you no longer have control over that data."
    • Plugged away at an ASAN build to chase an horrific but rather hard to reproduce spreadsheet / comment crasher I've been idly chasing for some weeks and can now reproduce.
    • Finally got around to fixing older blog links from www to people en-masse.

2021-11-29 Monday.

  • Mail chew, planning call, TDF board candidate questions, recording for Jos; lunch, worked through E-mail, audit, partner bits. Out for a run with J.

2021-11-28 Sunday.

  • All Saints in the morning - lost singing voice from over-use yesterday; H. played piano & organ. Home - pizza lunch, and talked / snoozed in the warm lounge for a while. Rebekka home, cakes and VR with Raj & Cherish. Drove H. to the train back to Durham.

2021-11-27 Saturday

  • Up early, Julia-Anne & Isaac's wedding - spent some time setting up the reception venue, before heading to the wedding venue at Clare Country Park. Got quartet bits setup, Jitsi streaming (made worse by remote user-muting (and no ability to then un-mute) of the stream) of the event, and after an awkward hiatus realized I was supposed to be leaading parts of the service - so tried to get the various bits into the order with Cannon White leading the service. Stayed & locked up after photographs.
  • Lovely reception, food, speeches & some dancing - interesting company; drove back through snow / blizard, bed late.

2021-11-26 Friday

  • Day off; visited Bletchley Park with J. M. & E. - really good to see the place; lots of interest, not enough about local favourite Bill Tutte.
  • On to IKEA - which had dis-continued the chairs that J. wanted before they could be ordered; bother. Home, took babes to Badmington & set out to pick up H. from Ely - so lovely to see her again.

2021-11-25 Thursday

  • Mail chew, catch-up with Miklos, then Eloy, COOL community call.
  • Really thrilled to see our first CODE 21.11 release today packed with new features from the team and community.
  • Lunch with Rebekka: at home making wedding cakes for Julie & Isaac. Plugged away at debugging an issue for Lubos; feeling flat.

2021-11-24 Wednesday

  • Took E. to school; out for a walk with Isaac, catch-up call with Eloy. Analyzed some macros, out for a run.

2021-11-23 Tuesday

  • Took E. to school; mail chew, call with Mike, Thorsten & Paolo. Mail chew, catch-up with Cor. Up very late working on demo servers & documents.

2021-11-22 Monday

  • Mail, quick planning call, took M. for her 'cello exam to Haverhill on to Deja-vu for a comforting coffee; dropped her back to school; to work. Mail & meetings, catch-up call with an old partner.
  • Setup tables & chairs & video-call for PCC & Bishop & co. to come over for section 11 meeting for new vicar at our house, caught up with Ian afterwards.

2021-11-21 Sunday

  • All Saints, played bass & violin; back for a fine pizza lunch. call with H. collected babes from Cambridge late; sleep.

2021-11-20 Saturday

  • Up late, J. on a course, dropped M. into Cambridge. Bit of mail chew; played with E. David over - even more floor-space in the Garage freed: with G-clamp rack, and counterweight for hatch - fun.

2021-11-19 Friday

  • Catch up call with an old friend, staff call, TDF board call. Admin backlog, a smidgin of hacking.

2021-11-18 Thursday

  • Caught up with Miklos & Andras, COOL community call, found some fun bugs; marketing call, partner call.

2021-11-17 Wednesday

  • Weekly sales call, CP all-hands, marketing review, catch-up call with William & Andras.

2021-11-16 Tuesday

  • Catch up with Caolan, 1:1's with Kendy & Cor, call with an old acquaintance, call with an interesting older ex-customer to get useful product feedback (much of it already implemented thankfully). Monthly management meeting.

2021-11-15 Monday

  • Planning call, lunch with Isaac, call with an old acquaintance. Out for a run with J.

2021-11-14 Sunday

  • All Saints; remembrance Sunday - sung & played variously. Home for a roast lunch, slugged & watched end of LOTR with babes interspersed with catching up with an old friend on the phone. Dunged leaves & fallen apples out of the garden.
  • Isaac & Julie turned up, chatted to them, watched Money Heist and picked up N&M. from StAG; bed.

2021-11-13 Saturday

  • Up earlyish, flow-tests, off to Sue & Clive's for bonfire night celebration. Great to see their upgraded home for the 1st time since lockdown - with new garden cabin. Enjoyed some fine food & company, fireworks & drove home late.

2021-11-12 Friday

  • Admin, calls with William & Andras, interspersed by other calls and E-mail. LOTR in the evening with the babes.

2021-11-11 Thursday

  • Admin; 1:1's with Miklos, Andras; COOL community call. Lunch, partner sales call, catch-up with Lothar & Paolo.
  • Ran some Oxbridge mock interviews for some promising young people from Hills Road; interesting.

2021-11-10 Wednesday

2021-11-09 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, call with Mike, Kendy, Cor, TDF team. Up late working on slides.

2021-11-08 Monday

  • Planning call, partner call, catch up with Mike & Cor, poked at demos & slides.

2021-11-07 Sunday

  • Drove to Kennilworth, L's funeral - lovely to see R&A&E, and all of the family & extended friends. Talked to lots of interesting friends & neighbours. Drove back lateish, chips for tea and movie with J.

2021-11-06 Saturday

  • Up early, bid J' 'bye to her course; breakast. Chatted with E. and read her some of Josephus's The Wars of the Jews: secondary sources are passé
  • Worked away at pulling some delta code out of some older past for CO 2021, fixed the build. Lunch with Georgie with Sue & Phil popping in. Sorted out washing left & right.

2021-11-05 Friday

2021-11-04 Thursday

  • 1:1's with Miklos, Andras, COOL community call, lobbying call, ESC call, customer call - pleasing to have a near flawless upgrade from COOL 4.2.x to 6.4.x at a very large installation.
  • Bible study group on John 2 with Sue & Phil & Mary.

2021-11-03 Wednesday

  • Weekly sales call, more admin.

2021-11-02 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, 1:1 with Kendy & Cor, more admin, late partner sales call.

2021-11-01 Monday

  • Weekly planning call for much of the morning; E-mail catch-up, joint marketing call in the afternoon; E-mail.

2021-10-31 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning, out for a walk with J. in the afternoon; slept & relaxed variously.

2021-10-30 Saturday

  • David over, managed to clear a lot out of the Garage together somehow - good. Tried to turn a pulley on the lathe before realising that - clearly I need to learn how to use it properly, it's not entirely obvious - four cuts is winsome.
  • Spent some time writing up where I'm at.

2021-10-29 Friday

  • Mail chew, TDF OOB board call - hmm.

2021-10-28 Thursday

  • Up lateish, quick mail chew - worked in the car to see B&A, with Louis, Adrian, Georgina & Isabelle - lovely to see them all.
  • Fine lunch, out for a walk on Aldeburgh beach. Back for some tea, drove home.

2021-10-27 Wednesday

  • Sales call, catch up with Kendy, plugged away at code & meetings - late but enjoyable partner call in the evening.

2021-10-26 Tuesday

  • Consultancy call: Miklos is out, lovely to catch up with the team. Calls in the afternoon. Took M. to her DofE drop-off in Norwich; home - mail, babes off playing Rumikub at half-term; admin.

2021-10-25 Monday

  • Planning call, catch-up call with Gokay; lunch.

2021-10-24 Sunday

  • All Saints, pizza lunch, relaxed, out to Wandelbury to meet the Dickens with David, enjoyed a bit of a Mansergh birthday celebration in a wood with lovely company - fun. Home, chat with H. LOTR #1.

2021-10-23 Saturday

  • Mail chew, some garage tidying action, played Rumikub with E. and J.
  • Some hacking: fixed a silly bug around exceptions during deferred event processing at COOL startup. N. out as a Charlie's Angel with friends to a party; M. off to a sleep-over; watched RED with E. and J.

2021-10-22 Friday

  • Mail chew; board call(s), catch up with Paolo & Emiliano.

2021-10-21 Thursday

  • Mail chew, admin, monthly C'bra mgmt meeting; customer call.

2021-10-20 Wednesday

  • Weekly sales call, monthly all-hands; monthly mgmt meeting; TDF AB call. Band practice - two meter Peter now playing piano with us.

2021-10-19 Tuesday

  • Kendy & Cor 1:1's, Monthly mgmt meeting, TDF admin.

2021-10-18 Monday

  • Woke somewhat rested. Planning calls, interrupted by various other calls, TDF legal committee call. David S. over to kindly tutor N. in the evening, picked up M. from scouts, bed early.

2021-10-17 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning, no pianist. Home for lunch. Dropped N. & M. into StAG for evening teens work. Tried to sleep.

2021-10-16 Saturday

  • Slept badly; David over in the morning - poked at an overlocker for his friend. Claire & Fiona over later had a lovely lunch with them & talked for some hours.
  • J. out to an overnight re-union; helped E. and M. with their maths homework in rotation for some time; watched Up, bed.

2021-10-15 Friday

  • Mail chew; admin, patch review here & there - encouraging to see more fixes & performance improvements for Online as well as good progress to our next major release.
  • After Italo's keynote announcement of the new LibreOffice Technology marketing plan at the LibreOffice conference, we lost no time integrating this great way to fairly present the goodness of LibreOffice that we depend on to build Collabora Online & Collabora Office mobile into the product. With new links that can take you to our LibreOffice Technology page where we can celebrate the community & credit all the hard work done under the hood here, and of course the logo. Still a work-in-progress, and will start to appear in our products over the next weeks as/when we refresh them, but so far it looks like this for desktop & mobile:
    up-coming COOL About dialog up-coming COOL About dialog
    Thanks to Italo & Mike at TDF for developing the concept, and also to Pedro & Elisa, for their work on the code & logos - we'll be iterating it with them over the next days & weeks.

2021-10-14 Thursday

  • Mail chew; catch up with Miklos, Andras & a great COOL community call - lovely to see some of the hacktober participants showing up and contributing.

2021-10-13 Wednesday

  • Slept badly, took babes to school in such a hurry I left my wallet & phone at home: discovered this having filled up the car; eventually released to get them from home; ho hum.
  • A day of gut-wrenching TDF administrative angst; draining.

2021-10-12 Tuesday

  • Caught up with Kendy; more admin, calls. Out for a run with J.

2021-10-11 Monday

  • Mail chew, planning call, worked on projections, and an admin backlog - lots to be done.

2021-10-10 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning; Snashells over for lunch. Took N. and M. to StAG in the evening for a fine sermon & youth group afterwards. Out for a drink with J. while waiting for them; home.

2021-10-09 Saturday

  • J. out all day, plugged away at tidying the garage; worked on new loft hatch with E. - had fun together playing outside. Bit of work, helped N. with some homework. David over for Ham, Eggs & Chip dinner with J. watched the first of The Hobbit - got PCC minutes into some sort of shape.

2021-10-08 Friday

  • Mail chew, board calls, lots of mail & admin. Dinner. Relaxed by removing some obsolete Poco synchronous socket code and moving LOOLWebSocket into tools/ and out of the way.

2021-10-07 Thursday

  • Sync with Miklos, long legal call, lunch; ESC, catch up with a friend; admin.

2021-10-06 Wednesday

  • Mail chew, sales call, admin, partner call.

2021-10-05 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, met with Kendy, Andras; admin, catch-up with Lubos, patch review; improved trace generation slightly.

2021-10-04 Monday

  • Took babes to school, planning call, churned through admin; lunch, marketing call, partner call, sync with Philippe.

2021-10-03 Sunday

  • Played at All Saints, pulled-pork lunch, out for a walk with J. - lovely; home, played Articulate with the babes & watched a movie in the evening.

2021-10-02 Saturday

  • Tired; up late, J. mowed the verge; David over - watched The Goes-Wrong Show - amusing.

2021-10-01 Friday

  • Really encouraging first COOL days Business Day - with lots of case studies, a panel and discussion of Digital Sovereignty and lots of other good content. Really enouraged by those taking part.

2021-09-30 Thursday

  • Really encouraging first COOL days developer conference. Great to hear from so many talented contributors and partners doing great things with COOL, and to see many of the improvements of the last year.

2021-09-29 Wednesday

  • Last stand-up for COOL Days planning, lots of interesting content built on LibreOffice Technology for developers as of tomorrow:
    COOL Days all about development
  • Ploughed through admin. Pleased to see Miklos' list level styles work.
  • Made loolstress use SSL when specified. Up late working on slides.

2021-09-28 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, got some finances for H. sorted. Distressing TDF board call.
  • We are advertising for a Marketing Manager to lead the Collabora Online / Office marketing team, so if you know someone who loves FLOSS & marketing - please encourage them to get in touch.
  • Reviewed and executed accountancy papers in bed - fun.

2021-09-27 Monday

  • Planning call; positive TDF board, staff & MC meetings. Plugged away at slides & admin.

2021-09-26 Sunday

  • Up lateish, breakfast with the family. Helped assemble high-chair for L. with Dad & chatted to him while everyone else went for a walk. A fine lunch, packed - bid 'bye, drove home.
  • Arrived late; unpacked, no H.(!) a hole where she used to be. Watched most of the last Vigil episode.

2021-09-25 Saturday

  • Up just before 6am, quick breakfast, got H. to Durham staging area by 8am, and into Hatfield early. Unpacked good things variously into her new room & looked at it with the babes, dropped the car; bacon sandwiches & bid a fond 'bye.
  • Back to M&D's - caught up with the last talks at LibOCon, final Q&A session etc. Out for a walk to catch up with M. and J. at the top of Galeon stairs looking over the town. Wandered back with them.
  • Dinner, and watched The Ideal Husband in the evening with the babes; fun. R&A, E&L arrived late - put them to bed.

2021-09-24 Friday

  • Up late, worked on more slides, listened to Cor's talks. Gave a talk on COOL performance:
    Collabora Online Performance improvements
  • Lunch; mail chew. Somehow packed the car with all H's bits for university - as well as the rest of the family; some grim cold going round too: set off for M&D's; arrived late - bed.

2021-09-23 Thursday

  • Mail chew, listened to LibreOffice talks. Gave a keynote:
    Collabora's LibreOffice keynote as a hybrid PDF
  • Lunch, listened to more talks; helped assemble a toolkit for H. for university: with some useful bits and pieces. E's friends around in the evening.

2021-09-22 Wednesday

  • Call with Tor & Kendy; Productivity all-hands call. More slide & E-mail multiplexing.
  • Frankie, Dorinda & KA. around for a pizza dinner - lovely to see them; up late working on slides.

2021-09-21 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, partner queries, worked on slides, chat with Cor, Tor, monthly mgmt call; slides.

2021-09-20 Monday

  • Took kids to school, planning call, partner and other calls.

2021-09-19 Sunday

  • All Saints - H. played & was prayed for as she goes to University. Home for lunch; applied resting - watched the latest Vigil and slept poorly.

2021-09-18 Saturday

  • Off to see the Griffins. Worked in the car on slides and bits of code. Really lovely to catch up with them, and eat together properly. Stayed and talked to Bruce while Anne, J & the babes when jewlery shopping for H's 18th. Drove home; relaxed.

2021-09-17 Friday

  • Visited an accountant nearby; catch up with Paolo, picked up some hardware from the office. Worked on slides with some success. H. back, watched Yes Minister with the babes, bed.

2021-09-16 Thursday

  • Plugged at infographic pieces, COOL community call - great news from Pedro;, patch reviews, bug multiplexing, some great perf. work and fixes going in.
  • Started on performance slides for the LibreOffice conference; lots to say. Partner support.

2021-09-15 Wednesday

  • Mail chew, catch-up with Miklos, Kendy, Eloy; sales call.
  • COOL days call, poked at the COOL developer days schedule to get that straightened a little. Lots of conference related admin at this time of year.
  • Caught up with Marco, lovely to hear from Robert too. Finally got some insulated plaster-board setup around the noisy garage water-pump; hmm - still noisy. Band practice.

2021-09-14 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, catch up with Cor, lunch, sync with Tor, admin, catch up with Tracie, TDF milestone call, helped H. with some programming exercises.

2021-09-13 Monday

  • Took babes to school, planning call, sync. with Cor. Lunch with H. mail chew, patch review, catch up with Daniel. Worked late, somewhat ineffectively.

2021-09-12 Sunday

  • Played at All Saints, caught up with people afterwards Home for a fine pizza lunch. Took H. to Ely Cathedral to watch the Organist at choir practice & enjoy Evensong together; good talk from a Ridley College trainee.
  • Home, dinner, watched, talked with babes; relaxed.

2021-09-11 Saturday

  • Up early, breakfast, poked at E-mail and messges. David over, mowed the lawn together and binned a truck-load of windfall apples.
  • Took babes into town for the food & drink festival variously. Worked away at pump enclosure to reduce noise for a while. BBQ dinner. Elish & Ionie over for a sleep-over with E. and M. and H. out to Jude's birthday party.
  • Finally got trace-replay working in my new & improved loolstress - very nice indeed to see multiple users concurrently typing into the same document so smoothly; good stuff. Chased a bug until late.

2021-09-10 Friday

  • Mail chew, call with Dennis, employees & Board calls. Idly bisected a compile breakage in the background.

2021-09-09 Thursday

  • Mail chew, partner call, COOL days standup, COOL community call. Lunch with J. catch-up with Lubos, customer call, sales call.
  • House group in the evening; lovely to see Jan & Hamid back too.

2021-09-08 Wednesday

  • Mail chew, marketing stand-up, sales call, admin, catch-up with Miklos, poked partners variously. Some coding before finishing work.
  • Really pleased for J. to have her first paid private counselling patient from home - despite doings shed-loads of work for people.
  • Band practice at Cedric's home.

2021-09-07 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, partner call, marketing stand-up, catch up with Kendy and Philippe.

2021-09-06 Monday

  • Mail chew; planning call, catch-up with Tor; lunch. Poked at investigating H's apparent fraud case - nasty.
  • Status report; customer support.

2021-09-05 Sunday

  • Packed; some thoughts from Rick from James 2; out for a walk nearby, back - toured the Castle in the light; lunch at the pub & headed home. Lovely to have everyone in one place again.

2021-09-04 Saturday

  • Breakfast, walked from Wells to Holkham, to Holkham Hall for lunch, back to Wells, bought some necessaries, and wandered down the Quay and along the river for a good way.
  • Back, rest, out to the pub for a pleasant evening; back via a bit of - star-gazing from the ruined castle: beautiful.

2021-09-03 Friday

  • Mail chew, positive partner call, packed - N. kindly made a lemon cake. Peter picked me up, took us to Castle Acre for the All Saints men's Walking Weekend; fun.
  • Found the place, Rick prepared a fine BBQ, enjoyed catching up with lots of lads. Played Reminiscing together.

2021-09-02 Thursday

  • Mail chew; COOL community meeting; catch up with Eloy, customer call, caught up with Simon N.

2021-09-01 Wednesday

  • Up early, helped H. pack bits up. Chat with Marina, lunch. Call with Cor & team, then Nick & Mert. Admin. Worked back through even more mail.

2021-08-31 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, catch-up call with Kendy, Cor & Eloy, more mail, reading of text, analysis etc.
  • Pleased to notice the 30 years of Linux celebrations, and some great interview bits from SVJN one gem from Linus:
    "I think the companies getting involved has been hugely important - and that may sound so obvious as to be trite and stupid, but some corners of the open-source community have been fairly negative to any commercial involvement."
  • Watched Yes Minister with the babes in the evening.

2021-08-30 Monday

  • Back to work, planning call, lunch, caught up with people left and right. Phil & Susan came over for lunch. Sandy dropped in too.
  • Thrilled to see Lubos' work on Skia on Mac land, with some significant wins.

2021-08-29 Sunday

  • Up earlyish, M's Birthday - croissants for breakfast. Off to All Saints with H. to practice & played for the service; good to see lots of people returning to Church in-person.
  • Home for lunch, went for a walk as a family in Brandon forest; back - Ailish & Rebeka over for a fine roast lamb dinner - they stayed up late for a sleepover. Watched some of 'Humans' with J.

2021-08-28 Saturday

  • Mail chew; tidied up a little. David over for lunch; lovely to see him. Plugged away at insulating the loft tank/pump together for a while; dinner together, assembled a Tokyo lego model / present. Watched The Princess Bride.

2021-08-27 Friday

  • Breakfast, packed up, washed up, tidied the place, bid a fond farewell to everyone. J. drove home, rested - lots of tired people.

2021-08-26 Thursday

  • Out for a rather better walk with Rob & my families. Sun, lunch by a stream - dammed it with E. and E. - fun. Wandered back past a great view of Thor's cave. Home.
  • Prepped for Mum's party, managed to dispatch Anne, and move onto Robert; caught up with Richard & Matthew. A fine, catered Birthday dinner, speeches. Barn & Sarok dancing in the barn until late; fun.

2021-08-25 Wednesday

  • Up earlyish; everyone out to Haddon Hall together. Got side-tracked by the Kitchens and a tudor cooking video for a while. Sandwiches for lunch outside together. Back to enjoy the spectacular other innards of the hall - lovely long gallery & gardens.
  • Into Bakewell to get a genuine tart to eat, flowers for M, and some other essentials. Back. R & A cooked a fine BBQ for everyone, ate outside for a while . Relaxed while Anne & Olivier taught Bridge to H. N. and others.

2021-08-24 Tuesday

  • Breakfast together; selected a rather short walk which got lengthened significantly by roads being closed; parked at Ilam Hall, and walked to the top of a nearby hill with a fine view back across the valley with R & A & Bruce. Lunch at a tumble-down barn.
  • Back, played guitar songs for small nices & nephews to run around inside happily. N. cooked a pasta supper. with Eton Mess from B. Then H. setup a murder / assassin style game for the families - fun. Played CodeNames in the evening.

2021-08-23 Monday

  • Up early, chewed mail backlog quietly while packing, reviewed some patches. J. drove to near Ilam derbyshire to stay at Lower Damgate Farm with much of the wider family & some friends to celebrate Mother's birthday party.
  • Out shopping with R. chatted & slept.

2021-08-22 Sunday

  • All Saints music in the morning, H. on Piano, M. on Bass, N. singing, me on Beckie's Guitar; fun. Home for lunch; relaxed variously together.

2021-08-21 Saturday

  • Family out for Julie's hen-party looking georgeous. Off to All Saints for Church cleaning & dunging out - coffee with some of the lads afterwards, home - lunch.
  • Mail; poked at some benchmarking code; added valgrind support for tracing kit processes and poked at some rather interesting things that appeared; fun.

2021-08-20 Friday

  • Mail chew, patch review, call with Mert, caught up with sales backlog a little. Yes Minister and Ghosts with the babes in the evening.

2021-08-19 Thursday

  • Up early, bounced with L. on the trampoline, helped T. get his UK Bank account reset. Lunch. Bid 'bye to the American branch. Chewed some mail.

2021-08-18 Wednesday

  • Breakfast, T. explained his job to H. out to Lackford Lakes for a walk & playground visit. Home, tried to get the shade sail to be easy to detach (in case of rain) with some success with T's help. Played games in the evening.

2021-08-17 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, consultancy call, cleaned the house, put up flags, catch up with Tor. Helped babes prepare a full English Breakfast / brunch.
  • Tom, Beckie, Sam & Lydia arrived - so lovely to see them in person after so long; celebration lunch - lazed around, babes to bed to tackle the jet-lag. Enjoyed each other's company.

2021-08-16 Monday

  • Planning call with Andras returned from holiday, Aron & Cor, catch up with Dennis & Szymon, chat with Gopi, sync with Ash. Mail chew.

2021-08-15 Sunday

  • Up early, took H. for PCR test in Cambridge; home, played bass at All Saints, home for worship guitar & lunch.
  • Played Rumikub with the family; bit of Articulate, watched 'Ghosts' & 'Yes Minister' alternately with the babes.

2021-08-14 Saturday

  • Up early, noticed 17yr vaccinations open & took N. for hers in Cherry Hinton early. Drove to see B&A. as a family; worked in the car. Enjoyed the beach: N&E swum somehow, back for some tea & drove home.

2021-08-13 Friday

  • Mail chew, finance / admin / signed off accounts, partner call, intern setup call with Mert. Sync with Miklos, more mail, code reading.
  • Got music planned & sorted out for All Saints Read story E. did some C# coding training with N. for school.

2021-08-12 Thursday

  • In to Soham VC to collect Naomi & Miriam's GCSE exam results; some impressive application - and great relief. Home. COOL community call, caught up with Gabriel & Alexandru. Lunch. Caught up with Pranam, Julie, chunks of admin.
  • Finally got an HA proxy issue around Host: header port numbers, an easy one. Dinner, more admin. J. collected N. late from an exam celebration party.

2021-08-11 Wednesday

  • J. collected H. at 3am from Cambridge; Up earlish, headed for Holkham beach with the family - dug in the sand, enjoyed the sun & sea & sand.
  • Back via F&C & Kebab shops on the way home, band practice, bed.

2021-08-10 Tuesday

  • Waited with trepidation for H's A-level results to show up on the UCAS website; some quality error reporing around coping with ~400k hits in the same minute:
  • A few minutes later - got the good news of acceptance by Durham. On to a partner sales call with Eloy, catch up with Pranam & Cor.
  • TDF staff call, interview with intern candidate. Tagged a new core release with Cloph's help.

2021-08-09 Monday

  • Mail chew, plannign call catch ups with Miklos, Pedro, screen-share support call with a customer.
  • Lots of people over for dinner, getting their nails done & so on. H. out for a walk.

2021-08-08 Sunday

  • All Saints band in the morning, back for a quick lunch, on to Jess & Alex's wedding - played for them variously - a joyful time.
  • Went to collect H. in Cambridge with J. very tired, but had a wonderful time helping out on camp. Lovely to see her again. Dropped Jude home, back to bed.

2021-08-07 Saturday

  • Spent a good time with N. getting shade-sail fixings fixed into the walls, and mounting the shade sail: nice.
  • Managed finally to cut through the ~inaccessible PVC soil pipe up-stand, by glueing to the wall with expanding foam and dremel / drill. Got the new air-admittance valve fitted.
  • Discovered the shade-sail about to burst - full of water; British weather is something else, hmm.

2021-08-06 Friday

  • Mail chew; catch-up with Cor, interview with a project manager; Lunch, catch up with Gustavo. Out for a walk with the babes at Nowton Park. Back, more mail, admin.

2021-08-05 Thursday

  • Catch up with Muhammet, COOL community call, plugged away reviewing text, code, finally getting back through the mail queue from a week away. Positive customer call, Simon N. over in person for a pleasant meeting - nice to see people in-person.
  • Played Articulate with the babes, fitted new sink waste with a slot for overflow: will be nice to have the overflow working. Some cost-engineer shaved 1cm off the bottom (or I ordered the wrong one) - ordered a new adjustable trap to match; annoying.
  • Dug through accounts & projections for this & next year.

2021-08-04 Wednesday

  • Mail, patch review, sales call, catch up with William, CO 2021 planning call, team testing call.
  • Call with Philippe, admin. Watched District 9 with the older babes.

2021-08-03 Tuesday

  • Up early, poked at some code; call with Pranam, then Kendy, then Cor, lunch. Bit of hackery on a performance regression, more calls.
  • Liked Matthew's post on Copilot - sharing ideas even those codified in neural networks (repeatedly counting the number of lines in an in-lined, C, double linked list manipulation method to check it used to be some sort of fun); so I tend to agree, that is unless we train a neural network to type out whole programs of existing (C) FOSS code verbatim: also possible, but not proposed. Looking forward to having time to play with CoPilot myself.
  • Chat with Gokay.

2021-08-02 Monday

  • Slept poorly, up super-early; quiet time - started chewing the E-mail backlog. Caught up with Kendy, planning call, lunch with the babes, patch review, admin bits.
  • Call with Mert, who has made the online auto-typing benchmark hugely faster; got some nice profiling data from that; lush.
  • Tried to reproduce the family bathroom plumbing problem (having cut a hole in the wall on Saturday pipes) - not reproducible - bother, ordered more plumbing bits - lets see.

2021-08-01 Sunday

  • Up lateish, sermon & singing at home, pizza lunch. Slugged and managed to catch the blog up to date.

2021-07-31 Saturday

  • Up early, replaced defective motion sensitive floodlight with E. Veneered door with J. - using JC's fine clamps. Lunch with David. H. set off with David to be an Assistant Leader at a Lymington Rushmore holiday camp.
  • Made a hole in boxed-section in E's wardrobe to attack a dubious and inaccessible sub-stack; ordered a pair of new air admittance valves, collected from screwfix. Dinner.
  • Dis-connected the bathroom extractor from the sewer vent (some amazing pro-builder design) to kill the smell problem, and fitted an air admittance valve instead.
  • Watch iRobot with the babes in the evening.

2021-07-30 Friday

  • Up early; packed up and cleaned out the rooms. Drove to Stonehenge & walked from the visitors center, some impressive stones, with lego bumps to hold them together. Lots of bracing wind & rain to invigorate us.
  • Lunch, bid 'bye to the dear relatives; drove to Salisbury to see the " ">famous Salisbury cathedral, ... famous for its 123-metre spire, famous for its clock." as advertised by the heroic Chepiga and Mishkin travel advisors & poisoners.
  • Drove home, M25 grim traffic; lovely to be home.

2021-07-29 Thursday

  • Swum with the babes and J. in the morning. Back to Alfred's Tower, walked to St Peter's Pump, through a hill fort. Bought some fine meat at the farm-shop, then the co-op at Meer. Back, Clive BBQ'd a fine meal.

2021-07-28 Wednesday

  • Up early, off to Longleat safari drive through park nearby. Amazing boat trip with rhinos, sea lions and gorillas in the torrential rain.
  • Lunch, walked the extensive maze, drive through safari with lions, tigers but perhaps more engagingly monkeys to snap bits off the car: lots of fun. Home later, fish and chips and Chinese for tea. Olympic TV.

2021-07-27 Tuesday

  • Out to visit a local barrow tomb, somewhat tight and poorly ventilated, lunch on top of it. On to a putting green, ice cream, home - enjoyed Olympic TV variously, babes swum again. Played a little tennis with H.

2021-07-26 Monday

  • Up late, drove past the Pilton Pop venue, and climbed Glastonbury Tor together. Lunch in the shadow of the church tower and back into town.
  • Ice cream in town; home for swimming. Took the plunge myself. Walked to the pub and back (it was shut). BBQ in the evening. More Olympics, really pleased to see lots of women's participation being celebrated.

2021-07-25 Sunday

  • Up late, N. unwell stayed with J. sermon in the car. Visited Frome, wandered round the town, had doughnuts. On to Nunny castle for lunch - Harley Davidson club arrived later on: a sea of middle aged male hair. Home in time to swim, N. made tacos for tea.

2021-07-24 Saturday

  • Woken early by swimming pool alarm. Slugged tiredly around; lovely to see Sue and Clive, and the boys. Watched the Olympics. The babes swam and played games at the games room.
  • Lunch; out to Alfred's tower (an oddly triangular thing) and walked nearby. Back via a farm shop for a carbonara dinner from Clive, and cider by the lake. Relaxing; bed early.

2021-07-23 Friday

  • Took H. for her 1st dose of Pfizer in Cambridge. Various calls with the team before leaving. Packed, tried out shade sail that arrived: an overly-ambitious size, bother; packed it up again. In a wrenching change from normality - tried some light blue trousers that J. likes; hmm.
  • Took N. to her prom via Frayer's house with a nice car for her friends group - looking lovely in an amazing bargin 2nd hand dress kindly mended by G'ma.
  • Collected N. late and drove as a family to stay at a farm near Frome arriving very early. Exhausted sleep.

2021-07-22 Thursday

  • Catch up with Muhammet, CODE community call, two customer calls, patch review, chat with Tor, catch up with Kendy. H's birthday tea, catch up with Cor.

2021-07-21 Wednesday

  • Mail chew, patch review, monthly Productivity all-hands, security post-mortem call. Birthday BBQ with J.

2021-07-20 Tuesday

  • Mail chew; catch-up with Kendy & Tor. Monthly mgmt call, patch review, GNOME AB call - interested to see the economics behind PAYG laptops from them.
  • Out to get some last minute card/present action for J.'s birthday tomorrow with N. and M.

2021-07-19 Monday

2021-07-18 Sunday

  • Lie-in, All Saints with H. playing piano nicely; back for a sermon on The Riddle of Samson, from the strong came forth sweetness - another set of singing at home. Lunch with D.
  • Julie's friend visited afterwards, watched the latest The Chosen episode together. Out for a nice walk in the evening with J. H. back very late after looking after her unwell friend.

2021-07-17 Saturday

  • Poked at bogus key-up emissions from our JS, played BosWars with E. helped H. with some programming, investigated buying / building awnings for the back of the house. Built lots of sheer-stress / bending moment calculations for aluminium beams of dubious quality. Pleased to see the Indian building regulations have some good pieces about canopy design and dimensionless wind design pressure factors to re-use.

2021-07-16 Friday

  • E-mail, TDF meetings, call with Tor, mail & admin, fixed a rare corner-case crasher. Catch-up with Frank in the evening.

2021-07-15 Thursday

  • COOL community call, various other calls, Collabora quarterly management calls.

2021-07-14 Wednesday

  • Sore arm, chat with Tor, internal "dev show & tell" which was fun, caught up with Simon N. Fixed async save race hurting CI users.

2021-07-13 Tuesday

  • Into Stevenage for a 2nd Moderna vaccine, catch up with Kendy, Ash, mail chew. Helped H. with some programming practice in the evening - nice.

2021-07-12 Monday

  • Planning call, good to have Kendy back from vacation. Plugged away at some security pieces, mended CI.
  • Continued reading The Children of the Sky to the babes in the evening in installments, fun.

2021-07-11 Sunday

  • All Saints, back for lunch, relaxed & slept.

2021-07-10 Saturday

  • Lots of preparation, house-cleaning with the family, lots of food cooked & prepared. Had a lovely 18th and 49th (and more) Birthday party experience with the wider family in the garden, great to see so many. E. pinged for self-isolation at some stage; bother.

2021-07-09 Friday

  • Poked at some code, fixed a silly crasher. H. out to the Botanical gardens with M&D, lovely to see them, got the bandsaw adjusted properly so it cuts nicely again.

2021-07-08 Thursday

  • Calls with Andras, Tor. Day off - into Cambridge with H. and N. to go canoeing and paddle-boarding with David: good fun had by all. Back to David's for lunch - lovely.
  • Home to see some much-loved family passing through.

2021-07-07 Wednesday

  • Catch up call with Pranam; sales call, dug at some floating patches at some lenght.

2021-07-06 Tuesday

  • Catch-up calls with Tor, Cor, Pranam. Lunch. Amused to find a Gazebo turned over & banging on our back door - hmm.

2021-07-05 Monday

  • Planning call, helped H. with some hacking / learning to code pieces.

2021-07-04 Sunday

  • All Saints, home for a Gordon sermon & more music with the family. Slugged variously, read The Children of the Sky to the babes, and watched The Tomorrow War somewhat disappointed by it.

2021-07-03 Saturday

  • Got lots of loose ends pulled together; tried to mend some abysmal plumbing snafu or two un-successfully. Cooked pulled-pork for the family who even survived eating it. J. out all day training in children's counselling.

2021-07-02 Friday

  • Employees call, TDF Board call. Chased various bits with Andras; plugged away at some code. Caught up with Holger.

2021-07-01 Thursday

  • Chat with Mert, and work on a keyboard mashing benchmark, catch up with Cor. COOL community call, call with Muhammet & a customer.
  • Reviewed Marketing, call with Andras & a customer, call with Aron & a customer. Lots of calls.

2021-06-30 Wednesday

  • Polished slides, helpful Partner Council call; more slides.
  • Spoke to some Hills Road Computer Science students on the skills needed for a career in Software Engineering, something of an unusual talk for me:

2021-06-29 Tuesday

  • Call with Kendy, then Cor, lunch. Worked at draft slides for the partner council; handed them over to Elisa.

2021-06-28 Monday

  • Planning call, admin, call with Hossein LibreOffice's shiny new development mentor: nice.
  • Toiled away at slides. Poked at an invalidation problem.

2021-06-27 Sunday

  • All Saints goodness, lots of relaxing.

2021-06-26 Saturday

  • David over, good to see him - put up a Gazebo and cable-tied it to the wall; hmm. BBQ goodness.

2021-06-25 Friday

  • Tried to peel back the main backlog a little. Testing meeting. Profiled a document conversion to PDF for a lead. Contract work, catch up with Florian & Thorsten.
  • Christina over to see H, Wendy dropped in too, E's Birthday party in the evening - busy.

2021-06-24 Thursday

  • Customer call, COOL community call, marketing call, sync with Andras, lunch. Call wiht Tracie, Mike, more admin. Proof-read text.

2021-06-23 Wednesday

  • Sales call & catch up with Eloy. Partner call, customer sales call, lunch. H. dunged more muck out of the Garage.

2021-06-22 Tuesday

  • Mail, catch up with Pedro, consultancy team call, Piano Tuner over, catch up with Kendy, Cor, Philippe. Plugged away at building performance benchmark with six users auto-positioned via bookmarks in a sample document.
  • Fixed a regression of my own creation blowing the JS VM's stack for large images.

2021-06-21 Monday

  • Planning call, mail chew, call with Tor & team, admin call with Andras, Herman & Stelios. N. off camping with her friends; Yes Minister with E. catch up with Guy in the evening.

2021-06-20 Sunday

  • H. and I headed to AllSaints, the rest to see Bob & Dee. Back for a fine pizza lunch, read family book together, got to the last episode of The Chosen together. Out for a walk, and switched to Line of Duty, a very lazy day; M. concerned about exams tomorrow.

2021-06-19 Saturday

  • J. out for counselling training; got another couple of sets of door furniture mounted. Wrote up the recent DAC/PCC meeting minutes from notes. Call with Dad, H. helped cut & mount door trims.
  • Helped N. & M. with a quartet backup plan for tomorrow, with H. double-booked.

2021-06-18 Friday

  • Presents at breakfast - some good tools to continue finishing the house more quickly. Took N. and M. to the orthodontist at Addenbrookes; home admin, lunch. Simon over for a long Sales & Marketing chat, interesting. Fine Steak & Baked Alaska dinner - 44 years, and none the wiser. Put up new Yale / wireless house alarm, H. organized the garage boxes nicely.

2021-06-17 Thursday

  • Mail chew, customer call, catch up with Muhammet, COOL community meeting. Lunch, couple of customer calls, poked at some profiles. E. had Amelie over for a sleep-over.

2021-06-16 Wednesday

  • Sales call, early lunch, catch-up with Elisa & Pedro. All-hands call, out to minute DAC / PCC meeting at All Saints. Picked up babes, hand-over with Miklos.
  • H.&N. back, dinner, All Saints band practice with H.

2021-06-15 Tuesday

  • Catch-up with Kendy, mail chew, built slides, CP monthly mgmt call. Build, profiling, fixed silly detected by CI. Legal / contract review & signing in parallel, chat with Pranam, dinner, late customer presentation; bed.

2021-06-14 Monday

  • E's birthday - remote silent-monks happy-birthday action, presents at breakfast, dropped them into school.
  • Planning call; mail, lunch, performance team call; re-discovered Android-Studio's love of consuming all memory and burning us deeply into swap.

2021-06-13 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning, back for a pizza lunch, some music. A cream tea with Mary & Nicky - been so long since we saw them; lovely.
  • Subscribed to Musescore, some quartet action. J. took H. & N. off to stay with B&A for a bit. David over for the end of the cream tea, caught up & watched Johnny English with the babes - relaxing.

2021-06-12 Saturday

  • James, Kate & Penelopy over in the afternoon; played "Smash-up" and caught up with them happily.
  • Put up more garage tables with E. and got the garage into slightly better order: clear bits of floor appearing in places.
  • Up rather late working on performance issues.

2021-06-11 Friday

  • Poked at profiles, dug at some particularly slow and memory consuming tile base64 conversion code. Lunch with H. Partner call, helped H. put up some desk / shelves.

2021-06-10 Thursday

  • Took babes to schook. COOL call, catch up with Gabriel; lunch. Sysadmin outage postmortem, chap turned to collect the car to mend the cat, customer call.
  • Code review session with Ash, plugged away at cleaning up my threading problem; good. Started to turn spare fire-doors into shelves in the garage.

2021-06-09 Wednesday

  • Up early, admin, sales call, bug review, catch up with Kara, Lunch. Met with Simon & then the S&M leads in the afternoon. Profiling goodness.
  • Band practice at church, home to discover the water is out for much of Newmarket; interesting. H. returned.

2021-06-08 Tuesday

  • Calls with Kendy, Willaim, Eloy & Cor, Philippe. H. out to Norwich for a sleepover with friends. Played Violin with N. - playing nicely by ear.
  • Investigated wavy-line rendering: used for mis-spelled words, seems it's all very tiny anti-aliased b-splines; hmm.

2021-06-07 Monday

  • Sync with Andras, planning call, admin. Caught up with Eloy, call wiith Ash. Minuted PCC call in the evening.

2021-06-06 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning, rested & relaxed variously with the babes; reading Vinge's The Children of the Sky to them when they're all around.

2021-06-05 Saturday

  • J. off to Birmingham, worked on hanging doors with David; made good progress. Decided we need to rebate them to fit together nicely - somewhat hindered by the cutter falling out of the router and into the timber while cutting: bother - top tip: don't loose the nice thin, stamped spanner for the chuck. Got ~there eventually, tiring.

2021-06-04 Friday

  • Paid off electricians. Chat with Cor, TDF employees & board call. Finished slides & recorded OW2Con talk - should be fun.

2021-06-03 Thursday

  • Electricians arrived and finished the last bits of wiring, good. E's friends over - went swimming, nice to see them. Built slide deck for OW2Con.

2021-06-02 Wednesday

  • Mail chew; helped H. with some python programming. Catton Windows arrived to fit replacement doors (after our previous but one night-time visitors ~7 months ago); nice. Worked on more slides. Customer call.

2021-06-01 Tuesday

  • Caught up with Kendy, plugged away at mail & slides for a customer/partner update - which slipped.
  • H's friend Anna came over; up late.

2021-05-31 Monday

  • Bank Holiday, poked at some profiling; relaxed with the babes variously. Got some door surrounds fixed with E. - sorted out mess in the Garage, adjusted external PIR lights.
  • Music lesson for the babes, and fine fish pie for tea.

2021-05-30 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning, lots going on. Home for BBQ left-over pizza; yum, H. and N. to a party, watched ParentHood with N. picked up H. late.

2021-05-29 Saturday

  • Up earlyish, chat with Sean, J. out all day in Birmingham studying children's counselling; poked at profiling. Spent some time plugging away at the code, and more time demolishing a door sub-frames to fit 8-foot fire-doors.
  • D. arrived to help out, managed to get most doors rebated, much furniture fitted, nice BBQ in the evening together, and finally got two big beasts of doors hung.

2021-05-28 Friday

  • Call with Florian, sales call, pleasant catch-up with Philippe H. Dug at more profiles.

2021-05-27 Thursday

  • Helpful call from the Rye Street Haverhill garage, turns out Admiral's courtesy car is fundamentally not very useful: covering rather a small window of time from part delivery until fitting; bother.
  • Caught up with Kendy & Andras on schedule, sync. call with Kara, lots of admin.

2021-05-26 Wednesday

  • Sales call with Eloy, admin, customer call, poked at nasty performance issues around table editing - all those handles to handle.

2021-05-25 Tuesday

  • Planning call, chased tickets, worked on security process write-up / document - lots to say.

2021-05-24 Monday

  • Chat with Kendy, sync with Ash, admin.

2021-05-23 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning, Bob preached, then came back for lunch with Dee - lovely to get to know them. Relaxed variously.

2021-05-22 Saturday

  • H. set too on putting up doors, routing hinges out of doors, frames, getting a lock chiselled out & other fun stuff, good to work on it together.

2021-05-21 Friday

  • Irritating theft of catalytic converter ourside our house, owning a Prius is normally a pleasure, but the combination of quality cat & easy access /maintainability is a poisonous one. Security cameras - not doing well in the dark; infra-red picks out the expensive Nike trainers but not much more. Bother.

2021-05-20 Thursday

  • Up in the middle of the night; wrote a paper on COOL security, failed to put me to sleep: we do some great things there; tired.
  • Lunch with H. caught up with mail backlog, poked at an interesting ticket, customer/partner call; setup another interview.

2021-05-19 Wednesday

  • Admin, monthly all-hands call, interview, sync. with Cor. Fitted new gas-lift to chair - lots of hammering - but getting better at this.
  • H. finished her A-level substitute exams; much rejoicing. Continued trying to migrate data to new laptop variously.

2021-05-18 Tuesday

  • Discounted Mac / M1 arrived, loaned it by post to the Czech Republic; hmm.
  • Bought a new gas-lift for my chair - someone seems to have cost-engineered the last vital inches from the default one.
  • Monthly management call; planning.

2021-05-17 Monday

  • Planning call, status report, admin, slideware. Cut down and fitted a new office door, now with a lock: ISO 27001 would be proud, the lock-screen and the lock-door.

2021-05-16 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning with H. on piano. Home for music with the babes, fine pizza lunch. Babes enthusiastic about quartet practice after a lengthy break: getting setup themselves - fun times.
  • Watched The Chosen with the family.

2021-05-15 Saturday

  • B. & A. over for lunch - really lovely to see them in person again after many months. Got SIM card sorted out for B.'s phone, and un-wound A's unusual phone number problems.
  • Girls made a Grandfather clock cake; yum.

2021-05-14 Friday

  • Manual measuring of HTML canvas rendering - far from ideal, knocked out each piece individually to measure them. Accelerated calc grid drawing significantly by drawing in horizontal strips to reduce CPU / Skia cache hammering effects of long vertical hair-lines. Misc. other performance profiling & admin.

2021-05-13 Thursday

  • Mail chew; ticket chasing; COOL community call; patch review, ticket filing, short customer call & got to an ESC call for once; admin, catch-up with Eloy.

2021-05-12 Wednesday

  • Sales call; chased customer tickets, fixed a nasty with unhandled exceptions from on event affecting others.
  • Routed door surround with Julie. Catch-up with Philippe. Dinner, band-practice, cut out door frame bits, got one lock mounted.

2021-05-11 Tuesday

  • Sync with Kendy, poked at projections, chased support tickets; sync with Andras, Miklos, filed things that need doing.
  • Built an adjustable jig to route door surrounds on the band-saw from some spare ply; used a larger router and halved the time to get a door lock installed; good.

2021-05-10 Monday

  • Planning call, sync with Tor, then William. Reviewed Ash's async-save patch-set. A chunk of door-furniture arrived.
  • Set too with small router to fit locks into door frames; oak door surrounds seriously tough; spent ages fitting a lock.

2021-05-09 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning with Cedric - some organ numbers. The Chosen in the evening.

2021-05-08 Saturday

  • D. over to help with a frenzy of door fitting - found the perfect router, and rebated hinges left and right. Sawed a lot of doors to size; only four hung in a day - and missing the furniture too - still, practice makes perfect. Enjoyed a roast dinner together.

2021-05-07 Friday

  • Customer call and semi-interactive remote debugging session, made more interesting by eleven rather heavy doors being delivered in the middle; hmm.
  • TDF board call, sync with Aron & Marc, mail chew.

2021-05-06 Thursday

  • Partner call, COOL community call.
  • Got a re-conditioned Dell G5 SE 5505. Turned it on - impressed by the latest Windows talking to me, up to the point that it hung indefinitely. Installed openSUSE Tumbleweed flawlessly. De-bonged various bits of hardware, upgraded the BIOS and persuaded the kernel to idle=nomwait to stabilize the GPU - seems to work nicely; 8 cores/16 threads - and a real open-source AMD graphics driver without a parasitic, closed Nvidia device in tow; nice.
  • Another interview; customer call. Out into town to vote with J. lovely.

2021-05-05 Wednesday

  • Up early; catch up with Kendy, sales call with Eloy; Designer interview; fun.

2021-05-04 Tuesday

  • Marketing call, planning call, catchup with Pranam. Lunch.
  • Interested to see ConnMan in the news and:
    Tesla patched the vulnerabilities with an update pushed out in October 2020, and it has reportedly stopped using ConnMan. Intel was also informed since the company was the original developer of ConnMan, but the researchers said the chipmaker believed it was not its responsibility.

    Brought back some bad memories of MeeGo networking stack decisions.
  • Up extremely late working on a partner document, and tracking a crit-sit loolwsd crasher for another partner with Ash.

2021-05-03 Monday

  • Took the bank holiday; made a soil-sieve with E. and extracted many barrow-loads of soil with J. from several cubic metres of mixed rock & soil left by the landscapers; tiring.

2021-05-02 Sunday

  • Played bass at All-Saints, relaxed.

2021-05-01 Saturday

  • Drove down to London, to continue helping with house clearance; back late - tired.

2021-04-30 Friday

  • Pleased to feature in a Nextcloud podcast. Kept going at browser perf. profiling, call with Gokay too.

2021-04-29 Thursday

  • Catch-up with Cor, COOL community meeting, more profiling - got some real wins with some rather small Javascript changes - nice.

2021-04-28 Wednesday

  • Sync with Cor & Eloy. Wrestled awful autotools nasties to get CI working again. Someone used gnumake macros to avoid using autotools' conditional compilation logic; hmm. Too much 'gbuild' it seems.
  • Got a helpful confirmation / reminder text for my injection appointment yesterday in the afternoon; cute.

2021-04-27 Tuesday

  • Drove to Stevenage to get a Moderna jab: oddly no appointments at the racecourse next-door. Broke the conspiracy of silence in a room full of people waiting to have an anaphylactic shock (or not) - some interesting people there.
  • Caught up with Nick Richards, bought a chuk of grass-seed for Rick & Shane to rake in.

2021-04-26 Monday

  • Planning; more profiling work on Online - seems frame rendering is a blocker made the root canvas non-alpha transparent, and de-synchronized for a nice win in Chrome. Discovered we've been looking at the wrong (server) side of performance: with events queueing in the browser's websocket: wow.
  • Chat / interview with Ingo for Nextcloud.

2021-04-25 Sunday

  • Church; enjoyed the next installment of The Chosen

2021-04-24 Saturday

  • Took babes to a YFC party at the amazing new custom built green oak church The Ark. Home - managed to get the front door dis-mounted, and planed down so it opens & shuts nicely.
  • Thrilled to see Gleb Popov has got CODE running nicely under FreeBSD - good stuff.

2021-04-23 Friday

  • Employees & board meetings. Got into a bit of profiling in the browser.

2021-04-22 Thursday

  • COOL community call, amazed to see our Amazon images' DNS fail horribly, transiently. Plugged away at matrix / testing with the team. Customer call, catch-up with Aron & Andras.
  • Published a new Marketing Designer role to work alongside Pedro with our team.

2021-04-21 Wednesday

  • Mail chew, monthly all hands, patch review with Ash.

2021-04-20 Tuesday

  • Somewhat disappointed to have our builder notify us that he is abandoning his contractual responsibilities - annoying when we've tried to be the ideal customer at all times.
  • Monthly mgmt call.

2021-04-19 Monday

  • Planning call, chat with Muhammet; poked at test matrix. Got hatch surround sorted out on the band-saw to try to reduce humidity in the garage for the tools' sake.

2021-04-18 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning, put up Badmington Net, Laura & Tyler over for tea.
  • Watched The Chosen really excessively good & well produced; and the King of crowdfunded TV.

2021-04-17 Saturday

  • Concealed wiring with H. in her room for her raspberry-pi powered lighting strip. Put up roman-blinds with J. - fun. Lunch.
  • E. helped jack up the car, made some large replacement Al washers to repaire the rattling Prius exhaust heat shield which had bi-metallically corroded its fixings through after a decade of heating while wet.
  • Interested by Dawkins's take on increasing the sum of happiness in the world; vs. a contrapuntal rosy view; vs. a hatchet job - we live in an interesting world.

2021-04-16 Friday

  • Admin; J. repaid our loan for the house; nice. Plugged away at the intersection of grim conditional Makefile dependencies and horrifying ordering issues with js, and generated js from typescript - eventually got there; a first-cut of the next-gen CODE builds and runs (thanks to Andras' and team's great back-porting work).
  • Out for a run with J. worked late - fixed a couple of customer tickets & caught up with Ash.

2021-04-15 Thursday

  • COOL community meeting - moved again to where it was; should now move with European daylight saving to avoid confusion.
  • Partner & customer call. Poked at some customer tickets.

2021-04-14 Wednesday

  • Catch up with Tor, sales call with Eloy - prodded at a nasty mis-feature with web view mode in Online and code read through a nasty with Ash. M's ballet re-starting; fun.

2021-04-13 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, sync with Kendy; chased customer bugs, and contractuals; catch-up with Pedro.

2021-04-12 Monday

  • Mail chew, planning call, catch up with Eloy.

Excommunicating a heretic

Young & foolish?

In 1988 as a scrawny eleven-year old arrival alone at boarding school, perhaps the only Quaker in a thousand strong body; I wore a white poppy to the large Remembrance Day commemorations. I recall the interest and forceful objections of my peers and elders - some with armed service connections, and my impassioned pleas for a personal pacifism. No doubt there were some who were intellectual defenders of the doctrine of Just War: (love's response to a neighbour threatened), as I myself became later in life - but I suspect that the fun of picking on those who are noticeably different was the dominant motivation. I imagine a majority of those in the Free Software community have suffered similar or more traumatic experiences, associated with being noticeably and vocally different; of being outstanding in one area & yet weak in others: perhaps socially and/or athletically. Hopefully that lets us empathise with others who are oppressed. That's why in this debate I think the purest motives on both sides here are closest to this: What is love's response to a neighbour who is threatened? and then what is proportional?

Disclaimer: something must be done

Recently RMS returned to the FSF board with to my mind an indefensible lack of grace & engagement with his critics. This seems to unfortunately intersect with the absence of good, representative governance structures for eg. GPL users to affect license direction. People started on-line petitions in liu of voting to either remove the FSF board or to unconditionally support RMS. Spoiler alert - there is something to annoy everyone here. I don't believe either of these stated positions is helpful and one of them is actively dangerous. I expect RMS to demonstrate hard-core leadership by preparing for his inevitable political or physical death, and building good governance structures that can live on and continue his work. It is not a time to do nothing. KDE's, statement seemed constructive, Debian had a middle ground option, and even RedHat's position was not so extreme. I sincerely hope that the FSF can be improved and continue to reflect RMS' vision of Software Freedom.

Its not all awful

The open letter to remove the FSF board contains much that is deeply problematic, yet there are some sensible pieces, take this one:

While these ideas have been popularized in some form by Richard M. Stallman, he does not speak for us. We do not condone his actions and opinions. We do not acknowledge his leadership or the leadership of the Free Software Foundation as it stands today.

Notice the credit, and yet creating distance, notice the sensible tone, and the moderate approach. I would like to think that the several thousand people signing up to this, many of whom I like, some of whom I've really enjoyed working with are primarily saying only what this paragraph says. If so - good, I can understand that. Unfortunately alongside this reasonableness are some very profound problems that needlessly makes this one of the most divisive initiatives I've seen in free-software:

Attacking people's beliefs?

The rational here seems really damaging:

"He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety [impiety?]. These sorts of beliefs have no place in the free software, digital rights, and tech communities. ... There has been enough tolerance of RMS’s repugnant ideas ... we will not continue suffering his behaviour, ... or otherwise holding him and his hurtful and dangerous ideology as acceptable. ... We ask for contributors to free software projects to take a stand against bigotry and hate within their projects."

This focus on beliefs is unconscionable. Beliefs struggle to exist outside people's heads so I read this as: People who we can plausibly accuse of having misogynistic, ableist or transphobic beliefs have no place in the free software community. This might sound plural and welcoming, and I understand the desire to stick up for those who are marginalized, but it has a number of acute problems.

What is the new orthodoxy?

Which are the views that must be held (or not held) to have a place in free software? Unfortunately the new orthodoxy while having sixteen promoters is unbounded - we are not given a comprehensive creed. We do have some very precise examples on what is not acceptable though. Lets take trans-phobia. Apparently RMS while not on the autistic spectrum, does have a phobia. However - exactly what that phobia is is rather less than clear. Many (including I suspect RMS) are convinced that he is not transphobic. There seems to be a somewhat complex difference in the doctrine of how best to de-gender pronouns which causes the problem.

Interestingly the ableist issue when I skimmed the snippets seems to be rooted in a specific view on the ethics of abortion. As a young woman finds herself unexpectedly alone at a crossroads of life-changing consequence it is hard not to have deep compassion for her! Indeed, my wife has spent some years giving space and a listening ear, to help women think through their choices at this crisis point. Views vary widely here, but it seems that even among abortion activists the (perhaps comforting) view that there is zero moral dimension: that the act is no more significant than clipping your fingernails is a rather extreme one. Nevertheless if you hold it I expect it makes it much harder to critique selective abortion - whether for sex, disability or (as technology advances) more eugenic Gattaca-style scenarios. I read RMS' deeply disturbing advice on selecting for ability (which is sadly common) as flowing from this understanding. Should an affirmation of the wonderful, unique, created in the image of God value of all persons at some point in this process be mandatory for inclusion in our community? A tough one.

Apparently the signatories of this document also think that having mysogynistic beliefs is grounds for excommunication from the free software community. Who chose these three beliefs? where did they appear from? are there any more things we should not believe? Presumably traditional convictions around marriage are also grounds, cf. the Brendan Eich hysteria but; what else?

On excommunicating heretics

The paradox of intolerance is often aired to lazily avoid spending any thought justifying this sort of statement & action. One day I hope to have time to read The Open Society and its Enemies and its counterpoint. The vital need is to respect the dignity, protect the property, and cherish the lives of others - particularly those who have historically suffered. I can see how this is especially important to trans people, and I take no pleasure in seeing them offended. Having said that there are also many groups who have suffered historically in horrible ways. History is indeed littered with examples of well meaning intolerance going badly wrong. It is also clearly the case that some speech is unacceptable (but beliefs!?). The interesting question here is really where to draw the line. No doubt it feels good to stand up for a vulnerable marginalized community by excluding those with whom they disagree. I do wonder whether that is easier than trying to understand and accurately portray both sides - or "putting the work in to understand other human beings".

This is fun! lets find more heretics!

It seems to me there is a substantial convergence of views between RMS and this new orthodoxy - so it should be far easier to find those whose beliefs diverge significantly. Luckily very detailed descriptions exist of what very large groups of people believe around the world. Many have different ideas of how best to love those with whom they disagree. For example Male and Female he created them - towards a path of dialogue on the question of gender theory in education. (published 2019 under Pope Francis). That should be easy to caricature in order to exclude people from the Free Software community. I think it would also be easy to argue that a loyal Catholic faithfully upholding the Churches' teaching has beliefs that are more easy to caricature as mysogynist than RMS'. I really don't want to pick on Catholics (who just happen to be rather good at multi-lingual write-ups of their doctrines), so how about a random update from the Church of England. Of course - in each case adherents would reject such a caricature and these labels; no doubt they would also have powerful convictions on when life begins. But perhaps that's all a bit Euro-centric - so how about Wikipedia on Islam, or we can spend all day cycling through major belief systems each representing hundreds of millions of people, and collectively billions. Almost all of these will have some element that will conflict with or upset the opinions of someone else. Most of these belief systems are mutually contradictory and/or mutually offensive at some level to adherents of others. So there should be no shortage of beliefs for which we can excommunicate others.

I hear the common objection: "But I have a friend who is a <insert religion> and they don't believe anything (like that) - perhaps we can only exclude the ones that actually believe these things?". I'm sure you do have such a friend, and so do I. Clearly no world religion has a monolithic interpretation. The balance between revelation & personal experience, the hermeneutics and theology varies extraordinarily widely. That results in sets of people under the same apparent umbrella holding widely different beliefs; even if we can safely assume that you truly know what your friend believes; and this is before we get into more esoteric Spaghetti Monster style creeds.

All that aside - I see no way to argue for excluding RMS on the basis of his beliefs (ie. he is not progressive-orthodox enough) without also loosing a big chunk of the rest of the world as well. Please notice - nothing in the statement that so many signed says this is specific to leaders, or being a prominent person, each belief itself is grounds: "these sort of beliefs have no place in the free software community?". Why pick belief as a rationale?

Potential allies in surprising places

An acquaintance of a friend spent many decades smuggling 'pornographic literature' into the Eastern Block - (very good for marriage enrichment). He also founded a non-profit Open Doors, here's a quote from the pre-amble to their watch list:

In the most populated countries on earth, [people] live in a surveillance state ... China has also developed widespread facial recognition software and established laws requiring facial scans to purchase a phone. When taken together, these two technological advances mean the government can track individuals like never before ... China is also rolling out a country-wide Social Credit System (SCS) by which authorities plan to reward "good" citizenship and punish "bad."

Do people with those beliefs, who are actively working to educate, lobby, change hearts & minds to guard society and help others - have common cause with us in the "digital rights community"? - or do they need excommunicating too? It is interesting that Open Doors provide one of the more conservative estimates of the ~thousand(s) of Christians killed each year specifically for their faith. I worry about an ethnocentricity that extrapolates from the USA's poisonous cultural divisions to erase the oppression of minorities around the globe. It is not acceptable to consider the impact of community policies based only on the Silicon Valley population & culture.

Transient heretics in surprising places

Another interesting problem with orthodoxy is the surprising belligerence and infighting that it can breed - often on minor issues. This is familiar from the innumerable schisms in small churches. A joke is told in the aftermath of a church dividing; of an old friend checking in with one of the new leaders: "Ah, these are terrible faithless times - we've split again over doctrine, and now it's just me and my brother. And to be honest - I'm not so sure about him!". I was interested to see the story of eg. Valerie Aurora: an extremely smart & dynamic feminist who is a leading expert on the latest diversity topics. Yet she was somehow ejected from Double Union the hacker/maker space she co-founded because of inadvertently infringing the code of conduct that she ~wrote. I fear living in a world where even outwardly conforming to the latest progressive orthodoxy would tax the wisdom of Solomon.

Prophets of a new creed

It is interesting to read about the beliefs of some of the people involved here; sadly I don't know Molly - but I've had the privilege of working with Matthew Garrett in his early days on GNOME - and a smarter, more charismatic, outspoken, iconoclastic(?), amusing person it's hard to find - quite apart from his amazing depth of contribution to Free Software. I was interested to try to quickly skim Molly & Matthew's beliefs based on what they write and see how they measure up.

Before doing that - let me re-assert that I take the freedoms of speech, conscience and expression extremely seriously as self-evidently vital for the functioning of an open society, though not absolute. While I want everybody to live in a physically safe space, I want to discuss views robustly in an atmosphere of respectful enquiry, with complete freedom and openness. It is not my intention to enlarge the sphere of (self) censorship.

There is however a kind of humour whose value (if any) is drawn from trampling the personal & sacred to elicit a response; is it nervous schadenfreude for those thus offended? (in this case those who love Christ more than friends or family). I don't see many cursing with ~obsolete god's names eg. Marduk so what can we learn from:

I'd prefer five words such as: challenging, fascinating, absorbing, collaborative, rewarding myself - but I'd hate to live in a world devoid of humour. Another example - I was interested by Molly's re-tweet on another hot potato (as always well worth reading the primary source court judgement rather than the dubious spin below):

To me it is curious that someone can champion excluding people over their heterodox beliefs, while simultaneously shouting things like the below; perhaps some irony overload here:

Apparently it is easy to end up championing the gentle treatment of a sexual minority while thinking it is funny to be gratuitously offensive to other minorities. Surely it can be offensive enough to respectfully state ones position. Still - in a world where there is a broad freedom of belief, conscience and speech, possibly some humour can cut through the gloom. A possibly tragic, possibly humorous but probably co-incidental aside here is that some chunk of this is based on an excessive focus on a small divergence in linguistic orthodoxy; when this was a hallmark of the GNU-slash-Linux campaigns of the past.

Perhaps you think it is deeply unfair to examine people's public twitter feeds - which occur outside the context of a project - to determine whether their beliefs are aligned with the standards they demand from others. Actually - I tend to agree. For good reason any sensible code of conduct excludes speech and behaviour outside its immediate project context. Not so this statement - its scope is everyone, everywhere and all of the time - even historic beliefs.

But possibly you think that it is ok to attack the privileged to defend the weak; that it is proportional to agitate to end someone's career in order to avoid the risk of a friendly minority member inadvertently working alongside someone who has some subset of beliefs that differ from theirs.

Saint Obama: the world is complicated

I was encouraged recently to watch this, and I excerpt the first part:

This idea of purity, never compromised, always politically woke & all that stuff - you should get over that quickly. The world is messy, there are ambiguities, people who do really good stuff have flaws.

(his Catholic vice-president also seems to be doing well as of late too). I expect that any model of people that doesn't tolerate the complexity and malleability of human experience and belief will ultimately not represent the world well. That will lead to disappointment. You should get over that quickly. I'm certainly far from perfect, my views change over time, perhaps the same is true for you. As Lincoln pointed out that Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it, I'm often guilty of that myself.

Conclusion

Should we fear a world-view that locates most of the world's problems in other people? The flaws I'm most concerned about are my own (which are more than obvious though I'm certain I have more that you can locate). It is because of those flaws that I need to live in a place that is patient and loving.

Should we fear a world-view that builds a path to redemption via being maximally unpleasant to others who disagree? Or is it better to try hard to "Act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6).

Is being offended occasionally by others' (truly objectionable) beliefs the price of collaborating with people with diverse viewpoints, discussing anything and everything without boundaries and learning? Not always a small price to pay, but is it not necessary? Surely it is the case that each member of outlying groups benefits from mutual tolerance. Indeed we often celebrate the amazing contributions to society of those who (at the time) were viewed to have unacceptably fringe beliefs & practices. Becoming a less tolerant society is potentially polarizing and dangerous.

What is love's response to a neighbour in need in this instance? Probably it is to vigorously encourage RMS to setup a representative governance so actual users of the GPL family can determine its post-RMS future. Perhaps it is to loudly re-iterate the obvious: that RMS does not represent you or me - and that we don't share the details of his unusual politics; to make more obvious that personal views are disjoint from organizations' missions, and to ensure we are able to choose our representatives in a secret ballot. But love's response is certainly not to let Free Software get twisted into a new and narrow orthodoxy consumed by gender politics to its own harm and the exclusion of others. We should remain a broad, tolerant and inclusive church even when it hurts. We used to be focused on liberty & freedom - I miss that.

"We ask for contributors to free software projects to take a stand against bigotry and hate within their projects."

Bigotry - a stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own.

Postscript A - why religious tolerance?

It seems obvious to me that this new orthodoxy combined with political power is rather dangerous. Perhaps those who have not grown up with some of the common stories would do well to read them. How about the fiery furnace - takes two minutes of your life; but why is it so hard to show due respect to the pagan government's request? is that really breaking the 2nd commandment? Or - if you have a very strong stomach - try just eat the pork: why won't they obey orders from an authority (Epiphanes: 'god manifest') - perhaps interesting? What requirements or forced conformity might be too much? Is there a shortcut via coercion to truly change society to how I want it to look? or is winsome persuasion the best way? Of course there is a shameful record of burnings, division & bigotry - often over rather small divergences in orthodoxy throughout the Church's history, without even getting into where major creeds interacted at a larger world scale. Then again I'm sympathetic to the Pastafarian concern that arbitrarily unreasonable creeds can be created, and that other points of view have no systematic orthodoxy to protect them which seems unfair: surely it is so: so lets treat all people fairly when our worlds collide.

Postscript B - hiring people

"We want to hire diverse people - but only if they are exactly like us."

One of the things that has saddened me most among those I've worked with in the past is that it is now acceptable for people to say that they would not hire people with beliefs that I know many wonderful, excellent, Christian programmers have. There is a rising tide of intolerance of those that are perceived not to kowtow to the new progressive orthodoxy.

Generally an attitude of graciously accepting others' hostility has held, along with avoiding law-suits. I fear though that as attacks on believers' presence in Free Software get more explicit there will be a slowly growing realization of the problem here. Not to pick on Mozilla (though they did sign this problematic statement) but I'm curious how views that are 'traumatic and damaging' can be accommodated there. I think it is past time to start monitoring religious affiliation as well as ethnicity as part of diversity.

Can any company explain how These sorts of beliefs have no place in the free software, digital rights, and tech communities can intersect with companies that build products around such communities? Surely we can find lots of quotes saying how important community is to developing software. Surely we can find statements that employees are members of such communities. So is it really credible to a-priori exclude masses of people on the basis of their beliefs from your employee pool? Does that extend to refusing to hire people based on their beliefs? Or perhaps people with incompatible beliefs just get inferior jobs inside the company partitioned away from those communities? Certainly - I feel far from safe & welcome applying to one of the listed companies there without further re-assurance. It is deeply ironic that in the past one of the (baseless) explanations from some of the more reasonable people I talk with for excluding believers from management is that they might discriminate when hiring.

If this statement was focused on leaders, it could be characterized as installing a new glass-ceiling for any who are not progressive-orthodox. Even if it were re-written as a criteria for leaders - I'm still far from sure we will get better leaders by selecting for conformity rather than competence.

As the virtual becomes increasingly more important than the physical for some people's livelihoods hopefully we can all agree that encouraging equitable behaviour online is a good thing.

Postscript C - (goes without saying)

As should not need saying: these views are mine, my own. I don't speak for my employer, nor any projects I'm affiliated with, nor my Church, or my friends. Feel free to borrow any views you find persuasive or reject any you find objectionable.

Updates

2021-04-14: Impressed to receive a very gracious apology from Matthew G for his language; though of course - I'd prefer movement on the substance; good chap; (he approved this, and tweeted). Also an amusing comment from a friend on the parallels between Act justly, and to love mercy and the Robustness principle

2021-04-11 Sunday

  • Sermon in the car on the way to R&A's - lovely to meet L - in person: another, wonderful nephew - exciting times, and tired parents. Lots of crypto mining going on, thank goodness for an increasingly de-carbonized electricity grid. Home, slugging, bed.

2021-04-10 Saturday

  • Up, patch porting, gave a talk at LinuxTag - lovely to hear lots of spoken German again.
  • Improved garage lighting, helped J. re-paint window frame, J. opaqued the family bathroom window - nice.

2021-04-09 Friday

  • Plugged at slides, sync with Thorsten, parents through for lunch on the way back northwards. More slide-work and playing with Moodle. Eventually poked at comment serialization to OOXML - some code!

2021-04-08 Thursday

  • Caught up with Muhammet; early lunch, interview, catch up with Frank & Philippe, idle patch porting. Poked at slideware - Marc doing a nice job.

2021-04-07 Wednesday

  • Quick chat with Eloy, drove to Heartwood Forest with the family, enjoying the team recounting their progress during Productivity's hack-week last week. Lots of interest. Met up with S&C&A&J - admired bluebell wood, played games , lunch - home, caught up with mail.

2021-04-06 Tuesday

  • Planning call with the team; worked through E-mail. David kindly tutored N & H in physics. Took H. to Bury Cathedral to practice & play the Organ in a service.

2021-04-05 Monday

  • Day off, feeling under the weather; tidied the house, really thrilled that Oracle's unhelpful copyright case against Android is finally resolved sensibly. Pleased to have identified the real issue rather early; also that this carefully guarded API (C) approach (that made a mess of Java standardization in the past) turned out to be ineffective in the long run. Good for the industry, open standards & interoperability as a whole. Great.
  • Helped babes with their maths for some hours back to back - getting better.

2021-04-04 Sunday

  • Easter Sunday, sung & played at All Saints lovely. Visited by J&K&Penelopy for a fine lamb lunch. Really wonderful to see them again in person after many years away.

2021-04-03 Saturday

  • Unpacked bits with H.'s help, assembled bench with E's help - getting the garage into a sensible state.

2021-04-02 Friday

  • Up early, drove to London, helped to cleared house post funeral, tea in the garden with Russian translator neighbour, drove back; tiring.

2021-04-01 Thursday

  • Slept poorly. Drove to Aldeburgh to have fish & chips in the garden with B&A, unfortunately rather a cool and breezy experience - caught up with them a bit; drove home - chewed mail in the car.

2021-03-31 Wednesday

  • Worked on the mail & ticket backlog. Babes had a garden meet-up, and fire in the evening.

2021-03-30 Tuesday

  • Supported M&D at John Cornish' funeral, good to see lots of people there. Lunch & tea in the garden. Drove home late.

2021-03-29 Monday

  • Planning call, lunch; worked on our QA matrix with the team; off to a funeral in London.

2021-03-28 Sunday

  • All Saints communion service, minuted the APCM and PCC Chancel meeting; back for lunch; D. over.
  • Re-assembled trampoline with D's help - amusing to see him playing trampoline dancing games with E. Rested & relaxed.

2021-03-27 Saturday

  • Up; three hour constructive TDF board call. J. got some painting done, out for a walk.

2021-03-26 Friday

  • Mail chew, lots of de-motivated neergh. Out for a run. New gamer chair arrived - cheap & perhaps cheerful, lets see.

2021-03-25 Thursday

  • Catch up with Muhammet, COOL community call, poked at a bug; ESC call. Did some hackery to inline versions into stack-traces we log to dis-ambiguate things.

2021-03-24 Wednesday

  • Mail chew, reviewed the ongoing RMS fiasco fallout, what an epic, and completely avoidable waste of time and squandering of goodwill. Worse one that despite more moderate statements has been siezed upon to create more division and distract the argument from leadership competence and/or the FSF's lack of representative governance into extreme ideological distractions; upsetting.
  • Sales call, catch up with Andras.

2021-03-23 Tuesday

  • Catch-up with Kendy, chat with Tor. Finally got the PCC minutes put together. Called our builder to try to work out if they still exist. Customer call.
  • Up late with a rather nuanced discussion.

2021-03-22 Monday

  • Took kids to school; weekly planning call.
  • Read the news; oh dear. Previously I was willing to cut Richard a lot of slack on the grounds that I don't think attacking hippies for being that is terribly broad minded and inclusive. However. The way in which Richard totally failed to engage with any nuance of his critics' arguments, articulate any degree of personal growth, give any ways to address concerns about his behavior is & was in my view horribly disrespectful to those who (often at some risk) raised those concerns. In my book you don't have to agree, but you do have to listen. An indefensible lack of finesse & clear communication for a leader. Or did I miss something. Very disappointing indeed, and probably symptomatic of the problems RMS and the FSF have.
  • Catch up with Miklos, Cor, managed to miss my weekly mgmt meeting.

2021-03-21 Sunday

  • Up late, on-line service, out for a walk with the family; relaxed variously.

2021-03-20 Saturday

  • Mended H's chair by angle-grinding a slot into the broken grub-screw & un-screwing it. D. over for lunch. Got into some plumbing action, sealed gaps under the kitchen units with M's help. Fine dinner, played bananagrams.

2021-03-19 Friday

  • Chap round to look at our apple tree - all good. Interview, lengthy contract review.
  • Called and then texted the UK Census people to try to get a number to file; no number, unfortunate - hours of free-phone music to enjoy.
  • Watched Romeo & Juliet with the littlies.

2021-03-18 Thursday

  • COOL Community meeting, picked up kids, more bug and marketing review; customer/partner call.

2021-03-17 Wednesday

  • Sales call with Eloy, lots of bug triage, close and review with Aron. Monthly all-hands, interview.

2021-03-16 Tuesday

  • Delayed planning call, monthly mgmt. call, mail, admin.

2021-03-15 Monday

  • Took babes to school, Addenbrooks visit, mail chew, admin, tickets. A 3m tall tree delivery from a lovely friend arrived.
  • Nice chap from Catton Windows arrived, inspected door broken by burglars for replacement interesting.
  • Very pleased to listen to Hauser Live in Zagreb and remember the collective enjoyment & cross cultural appeal of beautiful classical music.
  • All Saints PCC call, rather late.

2021-03-14 Sunday

  • All Saints in the morning - good to be back in the building. Pizza lunch, relaxed & slugged variously; watched O Brother Where Art Thou in the evening with the babes.

2021-03-13 Saturday

  • Up early; FOSS Asia - an encouraging conference, slides on some of the new work we're doing:
  • Out to get some plumbing pieces - trying the evils of speed-fit; M. helped to solder up the plumbing - good practice; nice burn while distracted.
  • Catch-up with M&D.

2021-03-12 Friday

  • Admin, TDF employees & board meetings, testing tickets, planning. Out for a run, worked very late on FOSSASIA slides.

2021-03-11 Thursday

  • Mail chew; testing. Sad to have all of the babes except E. out to school at lunch time. COOL community call, catch up with Andras, customer & partner call; admin.

2021-03-10 Wednesday

  • Early customer call, Sales call, encouraging old friend & customer call. Catch-up with Cor . Up unfeasibly late getting the APCM minutes written up for last year.

2021-03-09 Tuesday

  • Catch up with Kendy, more testing, bug-filing, and a bit of hacking fixing some; nice. Watched another ycombinator startup video with H.

2021-03-08 Monday

  • Planning call, testing, admin, E-mail. Put up a wardrobe for N. in the evening.

2021-03-07 Sunday

  • All Saints online family service in the morning. Lunch, caught up with L&T happily. D. over for a walk and then dinner.

2021-03-06 Saturday

  • Caught up with M&D. - lovely to see them lunch. Put up coat-hangers with E. in the afternoon: somehow a more cluttered house seems friendlier to me - is minimalism too much?

2021-03-05 Friday

  • Mail chew, call with Lubos & Miklos, worked on some data crunching / modelling in COOL/Calc - filed bugs, and fixed a double-click to rename sheet annoyance quickly. Catch-up with Szymon.
  • Out for a run.

2021-03-04 Thursday

  • Chat with Muhammet, COOL community meeting. Lunch.
  • Picked up Mac/ARM prototype from the office to ship back - good to see the place and evelikov. Customer call.
  • Fixed a forgotten but rather trivial ticket, good to do a little coding.

2021-03-03 Wednesday

  • Slides, poked at various patches & feature pieces. Great to read Muhammet's latest COOL community roundup.
  • Collabora Productivity Partner Council call & feedback - encouraging to have such a switched on, and engaged set of people to work together with.

2021-03-02 Tuesday

  • Patch review, builders returned to varnish & caulk this & that snag; mercifully removed several cubic metres of un-needed surplus materials, leaving only several behind.
  • Read about the z-Architecture, interested to hear of their XML parsing (and db2 acceleraton) zIIP co-processor: we could use that.

2021-03-01 Monday

  • Planning call, worked away at admin, slides etc.
  • Received a battery of health test results, all fine except for the obvious somatic disease; good. Got 2nd workbench installed in the Garage - with N's help - nice.

2021-02-28 Sunday

  • D. over, roast lunch, out for a walk, watched Bliss in the evening, a tragedy with mixed acting.

2021-02-27 Saturday

  • Up lateish; three hour TDF board call, dug ivy out of the garden somehow with Julia; out for a run together.

2021-02-26 Friday

  • Short TDF board call; partner / sales call, admin. Out for a run with J.
  • Finally got around to posting my FOSDEM slides, first an update for the Collaboration dev-room on integrating (with video)
  • And also for the work we did to integrate COOL into an app-image for easy installation as part of Nextcloud Hub (with video)

2021-02-25 Thursday

  • TDF budget ranking, calls, day of admin. COOL community roundup. Some perf / profiling of COOL - nice N^3 algorithm in writer affecting huge docs found.
  • Idle Freeze Pane fix, product management pieces, late partner call.

2021-02-24 Wednesday

  • Sales calls with Eloy, Kara, Miklos. Planning call, catch-up with Philippe. Poked at a bug.

2021-02-23 Tuesday

  • Early morning blood-letting at the hospital. Catch up with Kendy, mail chew & admin. Interview.
  • Cut out a rather rough letterbox in the new door; cheap pendulum jigsaw produces rather a different on the other side; hmm.

2021-02-22 Monday

  • Planning call, status report, worked through E-mail. Enjoyed some nice data from Lubos tracing COW page duplications in Online.
  • Catch up with Thorsten, worked on bug analysis & started slowly getting through the E-mail mountain.

2021-02-21 Sunday

  • Singing & Sermon on Judges / Jael. Relaxed variously, out for a walk with J. Watched some Black Mirror with H. - thought provoking.

2021-02-20 Saturday

  • D. over, together got water-tank breathing sealed up and out to a sofit vent, rather than having a waterfall ambience in the workshop.
  • Leveled and screwed workbench bench to the wall. Tidied up and unpacked lots of tools, ground off rust, oiled metal left & right. Somehow with a functional workbench it feels more like home.

2021-02-19 Friday

  • Cut out a hole to put up the washing line temporarily. Removed more builders rubble / scrap concrete etc. from flower-beds.
  • Had a brain-wave / simpler design for tank breathing; cut whole; visited a PPE clad Doctor too for good measure.

2021-02-18 Thursday

  • Played with E. making a rope-ladder for her attic; she sawed up lots of rungs, drilled them out, I routed the sides, and (eventually) we got it setup. As expected far harder to climb than anticipated - practice required.
  • Managed to finally get to dis-assembling the floating electricity meter with awful mini-roof that was plaguing the front flower bed. Rescued some conduit with M. and helped J. a little digging the flower bed.

2021-02-17 Wednesday

  • Out for a run; chewed mail, product research, admin - customer call, CP all hands call, lunch.
  • Equipment arrived for stopping large water tank breathing into the garage & making everything damp (#1 suspected cause at least). Spent a while considering what to do there.

2021-02-16 Tuesday

  • Monthly management call.
  • Did some wiring & hatch adjustment with E. Removed lots of rocks from the garden with M. - while waiting for the groundwork to be completed. Visit from the Barham and Sons chap around them multi-month delays for doors - hmm.
  • Watched Passengers with the family, a huge vista painted with almost no actors: great.

2021-02-15 Monday

  • Holiday (on and off). Gave up waiting for the lead-work to be fixed, and attempted it with E's help. 100W soldering iron not up to the job; hmm. Unclear that the blow-lamp for lead guttering is a good idea. Siliconed everything up instead.
  • Re-visited last security camera mounting, and discovered we'd mis-wired the connector at one end; balanced on ladder at a great height & got everything connected up finally.

2021-02-14 Sunday

  • Valentines day, cards appreciated variously - out for a walk. Babes & Julie decided to put together a romantic dinner for the parents - just lovely. Hand-cut paper hearts, amazing food, georgeous waitresses, fine menus, and some time with just J. Teen girls rock.
  • Watched 'Parasite' with J. while waiting - an interesting film indeed.

2021-02-13 Saturday

  • Out for a run with J.; D. over for lunch; relaxed variously before getting hooks put up on lots of bedroom and bathroom doors together.

2021-02-12 Friday

  • Catchup with Florian, TDF board-call, customer call, lunch. Mail chew, nice catch-up with Sean in the evening.

2021-02-11 Thursday

  • Admin meeting, COOL community meeting, plugged away at more admin. Customer / Partner call. Back-ported a fix to COOL 4.2 for a customer.
  • The babes have started to play 'Guess Who' a lot, perhaps it is the large number of people & characters they're missing. Amusingly they memorized all the names/faces so they can play without the board.

2021-02-10 Wednesday

  • Pleased to see Muhammet's latest nice COOL Community Roundup - having delay writing it, the backlog only grows; hopefully thinner next week.
  • Sales call, catch-up with Andras. Chased a bug-fix / back-port.

2021-02-09 Tuesday

  • Catch up with William & Cor, lots of tedious admin.

2021-02-08 Monday

  • Planning call, mail chew, marketing call, admin, GNOME AB call late.

2021-02-07 Sunday

  • All-Saints via Zoom - good to see many friendly faces. Some good FOSDEM chat questions from the LibreOffice dev-room. Back to the family - pizza lunch, sung, sermon, watched & relaxed together.
  • [Update] - slides posted.

2021-02-06 Saturday

  • Up lateish; enjoyed some FOSDEM talks, answered questions around mine. [Update] - slides posted.
  • In some spare cycles - did the Linux Foundation's new Inclusive Open Source Community Orientation course which was for the most part remarkably positive and helpful.
  • D. over for lunch, sealed more gaps in the utility room to reduce the air-flow: expanding foam everywhere.

2021-02-05 Friday

  • Mail, patch review, some testing & ticket reading. Call with Herman, got registered for and setup for online FOSDEM at the weekend - exciting. FLOSS Foundations virtual dinner in the evening - lovely to hear so many old friends.

2021-02-04 Thursday

  • Partner call, COOL community meeting, mail catch-up, code reading. ISO27001 training call, catch up with Guilhem.

2021-02-03 Wednesday

  • Morning sales call, more debugging & coding, sync with Tor, Henry & Kendy.

2021-02-02 Tuesday

  • Admin, some three way collaboration testing with Aron & Ezinne. Hackery, chat with Jeremy.

2021-02-01 Monday

  • Planning call, sync with Dennis, lunch, catch-up with Andras, patch review, lots of E-mail churn. Hackery until late.

2021-01-31 Sunday

  • J. fever & feeling down from the jab. Service together. roast lunch, with D. much applied slugging.

2021-01-30 Saturday

  • Up earlyish; out for a run, board, +MC, +staff calls through the day; J. out to get a jab in Ipswich. Relaxed, dinner, personal tax work. Played Poker with the family, back to work.

2021-01-29 Friday

  • Catch up with Lothar, Florian, Thorsten, partner call, sync with Tor & Henry, exhausted somehow.

2021-01-28 Thursday

  • Partner call, COOL community meeting, some patch review, C'bra quarterly mgmt meeting with customer call in the middle, mail.
  • Really pleased to see the migration TypeScript (a huge improvement from Microsoft) ongoing from Gokay & Dennis in COOL; much cleaner more maintainable code.

2021-01-27 Wednesday

  • Sales call, partner call, admin.

2021-01-26 Tuesday

  • CS3 - another interesting conference, they use the (proprietary) Gather.Town:
    which allows you to get -something- like an in-person conference hallway / booth experience; as you move around close to people their audio and video appear and fades in; works surprisingly well. Would love to have something similar in a FLOSS solution - hopefully someone's suppressed internal Javascript gamer bursts out soon. [Update] - seems the CCC team did this already with rc3 world built on Phaser.
  • Presented my slides; 14 minutes - 15 seconds a slide or so, hmm - if we did less, there would be less to explain perhaps:

2021-01-25 Monday

  • Weekly planning call, mail chew, admin, partner call, up late writing slides for CS3.

2021-01-24 Sunday

  • Slept exhaustedly; worship with babes, sermon from Gordon. Pizza lunch, David over for a walk, lovely to see him.

2021-01-23 Saturday

  • Up lateish, back to slides, worked through the day. Put family to bed, catch up with Ash, reviewed & merged some patches. Listened to LCA talks, some interesting stuff.
  • Gave my talk at LCA, lovely to be able to present to & meet people there (without having to fly):
  • Very impressed with LCA's organization; a nice video on how to setup your presentation AV locally well in advance, very clear communication on the infrastructure, background chat and green rooms for speakers, tech-checks well in advance, and also minutes in advance, clear scheduling with helpful count-down and music between talks, smooth speaker introductions, hand-over and questions; polished. Using proprietary Discord and StreamYard hopefully a transient tactic to quickly deliver something good for FLOSS in 2021. Overall - an amazingly well done conference, great work!

2021-01-22 Friday

  • Admin, sync with Eloy, and Kendy, mail catch-up. Poked at some calc profiles & fixed a couple of rather silly drop-offs. Plugged away at the next invalidation multiplexing issue. Worked late on slides for LCA.

2021-01-21 Thursday

2021-01-20 Wednesday

  • Mail chew, sync with Andras, monthly all-hands, slides, testing, TDF Advisory Board call. Recorded a collaboration dev-room talk for FOSDEM - fun.

2021-01-19 Tuesday

  • Slides, monthly management call, HDMI faceplate arrived & finally got the lounge into some shape. Sync with Kendy, worked on FOSDEM slides.

2021-01-18 Monday

  • Planning call, catch up with Tor, Florian, Cor, poked ESC bits, admin.

2021-01-17 Sunday

  • Up late, service at home, out for a walk with the family. Applied slugging, call with an old friend.

2021-01-16 Saturday

  • Plugged away at profiling Online, got a couple of rather significant wins, pushed for review.
  • Re-inforced the pantry shelves left & right to stop the MDF bowing under the jam jars. Tried to put up a curtain - but lost the screw-eyes.
  • Watched some Mission Impossible thingit with the babes.

2021-01-15 Friday

  • Read Ogilvy, partner call, TDF employees then board call.

2021-01-14 Thursday

  • Mail chew; discovered a call I was late for, enjoyed that, COOL community / planning call (minutes).
  • Discovered lateish in the evening, after recording a FOSDEM talk, and finishing one set of slides that the deadline is extended a little; good - it did its job.

2021-01-13 Wednesday

  • Plugged away all day at admin, shuffled conference talk schedule and started on slides. Reviewed community patches, and easy-hacks, filed another Online Easy Hack.
  • Sync. call with Ash. Worked late on slides.

2021-01-12 Tuesday

  • Took N. to have her braces finally removed at Addenbrooks. Back to mail.

2021-01-11 Monday

  • Planning call, mail, admin. Minuted All-Saints on-line PCC meeting in the evening.

2021-01-10 Sunday

  • Played in the band at All Saints, rather reduced & subdued congregration, H. played the Organ. Pizza lunch, watched "A Knight's Tale" together.

2021-01-09 Saturday

  • Plugged away at fused-spur / isolators for various bathroom appliances that had been bundled together in error with the help of H., N. and E.
  • Up late for LCA speakers tech-check.

2021-01-08 Friday

  • Persuaded jsdom to size widgets to allow some degree of interactive rendering and tile requests for nodejs automated test slaves. Call with Herman.

2021-01-07 Thursday

  • Managed to get nodejs and jsdom to load and (not) render COOL's Javascript here & there.

2021-01-06 Wednesday

  • Sales call, partner call, catch-up with Thorsten, some hacking.

2021-01-05 Tuesday

  • Mail chew, catch-up with Philippe; poked at nodejs.

2021-01-04 Monday

  • Started on the mail-backlog, and queue of admin. Un-blocked our next 6.4 release somehow. Personal admin too: tax return, insurance claim, builder snagging list etc.

2021-01-03 Sunday

  • Up late, worship, sermon, rest, out for a walk, fine food - a relaxing end to a vacation.

2021-01-02 Saturday

  • Finished getting door-bell wired and working. Guerilla glued things to mirror back to help mount it. Out for a walk as a family.

2021-01-01 Friday

  • Worked at door-bell fitting with E. amazing how annoying it can be to get a bell-wire fitted long after the house is complete - eventually managed to get it to the right place together. Got fused spur, and transformer cut in in the evening.

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)

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