Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

• Breakfast, mail chew. Set off to visit John & Louise down south. Impressed with the new Dartford Crossing - quicker to setup the account on-line than to queue once in a giant stinking tail-back.
• Arrived, out for a walk with L. & J. - fine food, wine company, up late to see in the new year, sparklers, etc.

• Packed, set off to Bruce & Anne's. Hacked in the car at a rather old bug around handling OLE2 storages with corrupt block chains - we should try harder with these now. Arrived, fine lunch, opened some delayed presents. Out for a walk on the warren. Chewed a bit of mail.

• Got J's new kitchen sound-system partially installed & setup; sounds good. Put up a picture, fitted magnetic glazing to the front-door: the last single-glazed window in the house - the trick seems to be to fit the steel strip to a ruled line, then put the magnetic strip on top of it and only then press the acrylic to the top of that.
• Lunch, out for a run with J. - rather cold & short of breath. Watched The Princess Diaries II - rather a Princess theme in our hourse for some reason. Bed, watched The Wrong Mans - sadly ~everything resolved in series two.

• Off to Starbeck for Church at St Andrews - home for an early lunch, packed, drove home at some length. Unpacked, tea, put babes to bed - read stories, watched Harry Potter with H. & N.

• Up late tidied & prepared for the Tom & Becky, UK / post-wedding introduction ceremony (Northern flavour). Lots of family arrived, fine food, much chatting.
• James Herriot TV in the evening, slugging & chatting with all & sundry.

• Up late, into Knaesborough for the Boxing Day tug of war between two local pubs across a river. The contest made more interesting by the almost entire lack of space to back into as you pull the rope: instead people run from front to back or vv. to avoid falling into the river (no-one did): fun.
• Back home, fine food, watched The Prince and Me played Pictionary & other fun board games in the evening. Tom building a fine 3D model of Becky using Blender.

• Up early, visited those admiring the contents of their stockings. H. M. N. E. & Auntie Beckie. Dressed, out to a brief church service in town; back to set the table for Christmas Lunch, enjoy snacks & a present with the babes.
• A fine feast, retired to open presents together - a fine crop of books, tools, toys, bathing salts etc. much fun. M. got a quadracopter to try to trim.
• Read stories, played games, high tea, put babes to bed; sat around chatting; sleep.

• Into town, walked up the castle steps for some excercise. Shopped in the market to beef up the satsuma & snack supply. Home, picked up Tom & Becky from the station, lunch, Robert arrived - lovely to have the family all together.
• Enjoyed each other's company - played bits of this & that, profiled my SvtListener memory shrink: increases memory usage - hmm - interesting. Put babes to bed & distributed the story reading load around the family. Peeled sprouts for some time.
• Watched the first episode of the next series of 'Wrong Mans', bed.

• Up, mail chew, packed car; set off north to the parent's. Hacking in the car is good - absent the immediacy of the internet its possible to get through some of the E-mail & task backlog.

• Breakfast with Barbara & Colin, and chewed through some mail; caught up with various ongoing projects, team meeting, lunch with B & C, bid them 'bye. Started to poke at a rather nice patch from Noel Grandin that starts to unwind VCL's lack of ref-counting. Another Team meeting, caught up with Marco.

• Up, feeling not ideal; slugged & tidied variously. Lunch. Out to Newmarket Academy to practice for the Carol Service - followed by the service: Nativity with E. as an angel, M. as Joseph, N. as a narrator, H. singing in a youth group; Barbara & Colin over to stay too. Home for stories, a pizza dinner & stayed up catching up.

• Cleaned up the kitchen - opening & filing a huge mound of un-addressed paperwork that had not been processed. Lunch. Collated bank statements etc. - filed 2x tax returns for J. and myself; got that done for another year - HMRC seemingly owe me.

• More reviews, admin, cleanup for a Christmas break; contract review etc.

• Into school to play a simple quartet arrangement (further simplified in parts) of 'Silent Night' with N. M. and E. for their music assembly: fun.
• Back; mail chew, started employee annual reviews - fun; lots of great team members doing good stuff.

• Mail chew, calls, estimation, contract review, partner call. Out to play the Violin on the Studlands Green for carols.

• Mail chew, built ESC bug stats, tried to plan the day and execute on it. Calls with Kohei, Kendy, Philippe. Out for N's school play.

• Mail chew, interview, sync. with Matus, more mail; lunch. Product Team call, sync with Michal, call with GL guys, Consultancy Team call, sync. with CL guys. Fed babes; read stories. J. doing PCC training - wrote LXF column.

• Off to NCC, ran the older kids group looking at John 2; back for a fine lunch; applied slugging - slept on the sofa. Quartet practice, the Princess Bride "Get used to disappointment", tea, & sermon in bed.

• Lie-in, breakfast, dispatched M. to Sophie's all-day super-party, out to Brandon for a walk in the forest with everyone else. Back, read some chunks of The Economist; forced myself to get back to paperwork - reviewed a 60+ page chunk of legalese while babes watched a movie.
• Pizza dinner, read stories, more work; bed.

• Chewed mail, interviews. Out for a lovely lunch in town with Bruce, Anne, Auntie Louise & J. Back for a partner call.
• Finally got to read the nice ODF plug-fest summary / press release.
• Customer call, partner call, sync. with Kohei. Worked until midnight on urgent beaurocracy / paperwork.

• Into Cambridge early, built ESC agenda; interesting partner meetings for the morning & a pleasant lunch . Chewed through mail, ESC call, met Lucy, synched with Neil.
• Back earlyish; dealt with babes left & right. Bed.

• Early call; mail catchup - a big backlog from 2x days out. Customer call, TDF board call. Out with H. to see E's Nativity play, complete with glokenspeil playing E. in angel-outfit: fun.

• Cooked breakfast, and walked to the venue; talked with lots of interesting people. Got setup with Jos on ODF testing which looks rather fun.
• Test Google Doc's latest ODF support for spreadsheets - and was very pleasantly surprised; correct formatting, formats, character properties, even some charting - a huge improvement: awesome - quite apart from Chris promising ODF 1.2 support soon.
• Sync with Svante, Jos & Michiel, great round-up. Left with Tim for Cambridge.

• Early train to the excellent ODF plug-fest; laptop screen packed in on the train: downer. Fine venue, interesting people, lots of talks - gave mine without slides etc. Out in the evening first to buy some screwdrivers, then on to a Microsoft sponsored meal - tasty; good to catch up with all & sundry attending.
• Back to the hotel with Florian & Andras, up late.

• Off to NCC in the morning; more toilet mending, finally got everything assembled (now with an easily service-able flush) - and ... now the inlet valve is not the right height; finally got another one, fitted that & life is good.
• Tea; put babes to bed; Andras arrived - good to catch up with him; sleep.

• Up late, set too dis-assembling my toilet - a broken washer in the flush: unfortunately necessitating removing the cistern; unfortunately the bolts corroded on - having sawed through the plastic and finally removed the cistern, angle-ground off the bolt. Interesting pattern of molten steel bits stuck to the tiles; hmm. Replaced the flush; re-filled, emptied, siliconed everything vigorously, left to set.
• David over in the afternoon, out for a walk and roast dinner - up chatting happily until late. N. sick in the night.

• Mail chew, catch up with the Munich students on idle and some git reflog / git rebase -i pieces. Sync. with Markus. Lunch. Admin, out to open HSBC business account.
• Filed a FOSDEM 2015 dev-room talk.

• Dropped H. to school - after a mix-up with her friend over-sleeping and busses. Mail chew, built ESC bug stats, call with Kendy & Andras: annual reviews. Lunch.
• Plugged away at admin; sync. with Sam.

• Report writing consumed much of the day; customer calls variously.

• Up in the middle of the night; hacked on OpenGL context confusion. Finally understood why we render it correctly and then stamp black on the top: we were rendering into the wrong context, and then drawing the texture we didn't render into on top: fun. Eventually got it working pretty nicely on Windows.
• Handed over to Kendy, breakfast, slept; lunch, mail chew. Misc. hackery & admin.

• Mail chew, GL debugging, lunch; wrote a LXF column, couple of team meetings and more debugging.

• Lie in; NCC - Tony speaking. Back for lunch via Julie's. Great to talk with Nate - in his deployed state - living in a shipping container in Africa. Tidied the house.
• Mother's cell over - complete with a number of children; somehow 18:2 is an amusing Female:Male gender ratio; should put in a spot of ad-hoc hacker training I guess; lovely evening. Pillow- fights in the dark with my brood; read stories to babes, bed, slept.

• Off to see Sue, Clive, Adam & James in P. Risoborugh; had a fine time with them, good company, food, etc. Wandered down the old railway line some way, climbed some trees; home. Sandwiches & Wii & home to put babes to bed.
• Up to midnight working on Windows / OpenGL VirtualDevice sizing, and de-bonging lots of mess around this code: as with eg. binutils, as soon as you hit things that impact several platforms the quality of factoring drops off, as almost no-one can test & fix all backends.

• Contract hackery / review with Kendy much of the morning.
• Thrilled to see Caolan's latest 0.00 Coverity defect score; some fantastic work there - hopefully its now easier to keep the numbers low.

• Mail chew, debugging windows / OpenGL issues, patch review, security faff; contract review.

• Mail chew, admin catch-up; tragic lack of hacking; TDF board call. Poked at OpenGL bits with lfrb until late, his amazing work evaporates the vast majority of makeCurrent thrash giving a great rendering performance boost.

• A more relaxed day, nominally off. Mail scan, catch up on misc. lapsed home/life bits; built ESC agenda, partner call. Took H. from Soham VC to her music exam in Haverhill. Out for a celbratory ice-cream & hot-chocolate. Home, checked mail/IRC.

• Mail chew, couple of team meetings, calls with guys, shuffling of projects, new builds, worked late trying to tie up loose ends, the pending E-mail deluge etc.

• Off to NCC, Tony spoke; finger-food & AGM. Back eventually for some serious applied slugging; played Boswars with H. and N. - pillow fights in the dark with four little girls, stories, bed, sermon, sleep.

• Up earlyish; into Cambridge, poked at some hardware pieces. Met up with Bob & JP, tour of the office, wandered around Cambridge - lunch on King's parade; back for some presentations, progress review & out for some beers; fun. Home, bed.

• Frantic desk clearing action; into Cambridge to get the car mended & serviced. Hacked on OpenGL pieces, report writing, various calls, more report writing. Lunch. Picked up car, returned home, up late working.

• Into Cambridge, meeting with Lauren, Laura & Rob. Quarterly mgmt meetings, snatched lunch, board meeting; poked about in the server room; caught up with Daniel and discussed OpenGL funkiness.
• Train home, stories, dinner, unscrewed various bits, heated the car bumper with a hair dryer (with the air inlet covered to reduce airflow & increase temperature) to make the plastic malleable; pushed out the worst of the dents, glued up the reflectors: much better. Bed.

• Into Cambridge taking a machine to return to the server room. Quarterly Productivity Mgmt meetings, frantically prepared slides, crunched numbers etc. Meetings much of the day with a partner meeting in the middle.

• Chewed away at master, GL rendering, texture and context lifecycle, chased misc. rendering problems. Mail catchup. Worked late.

• Whiled away the very late night / early morning prototyping some Alpha recovery approach to try to drag legacy gtk2 theming into something we can use for GL rendering without loosing more hair; render the captive widget to first a white background, then a black one - and do some math to extract the alpha & original pixels; what could go wrong.
• Slept an hour on the coach, arrived home eventually at 8am, got a few hours of shut-eye, team meeting(s), paperwork. Dinner with the babes, read various stories.
• Back to the hacking; discovered that calling wglMakeCurrent on an already active GL Context is unfeasibly slow - whereas checking via wglGetCurrentContext first to avoid re-setting it gave a two to three orders of magnitude performance improvement: hmm.

• Off to the venue, more meetings, hacking on misc OpenGL-ness with Markus; plugged away at various irritating bugs, helped to explain the recent exciting revival in the LibreOffice UX team - worth giving it another try. Out for a swift beer, and on to the airport with Markus. Flights, missed bus; waited at Heathrow until 5am for a coach.

• Sleep; to the venue, some hackery, met with various interesting people in the French LibreOffice scene, great to see another Michael hacking away at easy-hacks, and lots of interest. Beer & nibbles event in the evening, out rather late at a sandwich on a block type place.

• Breakfast, piano / sight-reading practice with H. Early train to Gatwick - hacked away at OpenGL rendering. Fixed 4bit / palette bitmap load / rendering. Significantly expanded vcldemo Bitmap rendering tests. Arrived, met up with Markus & Bjoern at the hotel, then with Arnaud - to the venue & out for a later meal with lots of cheery conference types.

• Mail chew; fun code-reading with Lubos. Dug through the writer code to find the missing copyBits case killing document content, which appears to be rendered through a stack of obscure VirtualDevices for no really good reason in the modern world.
• Lunch. Partner poke, mail, ESC call. Booked ground travel for the Toulouse hack-fest, leaving tomorrow. Poked at GL rendering oddities.

• Back to paperwork, performance bits, report writing, partner call, more E-mail chew. Dinner, partner call, vcldemo hackery - implemented some LineCap / Join / AA rendering tests. Worked late.

• Built ESC stats, suitably appalled by GroupOn's behavior, and then relieved by them backing away. Lots of time reading profiles variously, and hacking on OpenGL pieces. Lydia over after dinner, reversed into her car somewhat: bother. Worked improving vcldemo until rather late.

• Up early, sync. with Markus, mail chew, chat with Matus, then Lubos. Plugged away at profiles.

Many areas of LibreOffice have been hugely improved in recent times, from the general cleanup of the code, to the huge VCL / UI layout re-work touching all of our dialogs, the significant re-work of Calc's internals - many areas of the code have had big improvements. One area that has however sadly fallen behind is the Visual Class Libraries (VCL) rendering model - that is used to draw nearly everything in the document, and chrome around it.

Open GL - as-is

OpenGL from the Khronos Group is, of course, the premier cross-platform rendering API for hardware acceleration in the modern world, with implementations from iOS and Android to Windows, Linux & Mac. We have started to use OpenGL in LibreOffice in several places, but unfortunately OpenGL has some pretty unfortunate all-or-nothing type decisions in its platform implementation. What does that mean ? Take for example our infamous Collada duck:

Notice the grey background that surrounds this duck, and unusual sizing handles. This is caused by this all-or-nothing curse: whereby we cannot have a duck 'element' inside a presentation, suitably happily animated - without either having a grey window nailed onto the screen (as is familiar from accelerated video windows), or without taking a major performance hit. The root problem here is that we cannot possibly mix Windows/GDI rendering with OpenGL rendering.

To fix this we need to move LibreOffice rendering into the modern world of hardware accelerated / OpenGL graphics. By rendering all the normal, 2D work into an OpenGL context, we can embed rich, 3D visualisations and data seamlessly into the suite with good performance.

Faster, higher quality rendering

The graphics compute units in modern hardware GPUs are great at rendering (as well as calculating complex spreadsheets). They work in parallel to the CPU, thus (effectively) asynchronously off-loading lots of work from the CPU which can get on with all the heavy lifting to layout your documents.

VCL in contrast, has had extremely variable performance. This is extremely noticeable on mobile devices like Android - where VCL has had to use pure basebmp / CPU rendering on some already under-powered CPU hardware. Meanwhile the powerful GPU cores in your phone/tablet have been idling. By using OpenGL we can ensure that each compute unit is doing the right thing and make optimum use of the available power.

Image scaling is another area where we currently suffer; with several open bugs - first one complains about performance, and then when you lower rendering quality to get performance, another bug complains about rendering quality. Doing high quality image interpolation of large images takes time, even when threaded. People love to whack large, high-DPI images into their documents and presentations. By moving all of the image interpolation work to the GPU we should be able to have our cake: pretty scaled images, and also eat it quickly: with fast rendering.

Another area that is currently slow is gradient rendering; with current VCL implementations, most gradients that you see are decomposed into innumerable smaller polygons by VCL and then many hundreds of these are rendered. This can bring a significant performance penalty. Thanks to Chris Sherlock we now have the ability to render arbitrary gradients in the platform / OpenGL backend. This makes a lot of sense since rendering gradients is something that can be done almost for free by a GPU - lovingly shading each pixel at incredible speed.

VCL / Structural issues

As the Linux world moves to Wayland, LibreOffice will need to adapt. In particular the option of client-side rendering in software (as used in our current gtk3 port) is not incredibly attractive - that suffers from a number of existing rendering problems, as well as being very substantially slower. By moving straight to an OpenGL solution, we should be able to have reasonably optimal Wayland rendering too.

One other problem plagues VCL rendering however; and that is 'immediate' rendering. LibreOffice renders in one of two ways - either immediately: so when you press an 'A' it tries to nail the pixels for 'A' immediately to the screen; or - a very deferred idle rendering which happens a hard-coded 35ms later. This situation is really non-ideal for modern rendering where we want to ensure the scene is perfect before showing it on-screen. However, this is not something that we can fix immediately. Faster deferred rendering will miss 4.4 - the problems are too wide-spread. Having said that, some great work has been done by Jennifer Liebel and Tobias Madl from the Limux team (Munich) - who are implementing a new way for 'idle' tasks - such as re-drawing invalidated rectangles to be run immediately with prioritisation instead of hoping that various combinations of timeouts: 35ms, 50ms etc. arrive in the right order. This should form a great foundation for us to remove immediate rendering in favour of idle rendering without a performance impact in subsequent releases. Thanks also to Kendy (Collabora) for finding and nailing a nasty Windows timer issue; using high-resolution Timer Queues to avoid Windows' (unbelievable) Timers which cannot sleep for less than 10ms.

What we're doing

The new OpenGL rendering code provides a VCL back-end implementation that can be used to render all VCL Windows' content via shared code on all platforms, poke in vcl/opengl for that. Of course, there is also a certain amount of per-platform setup and context management work that has to be done for each platform as well, but the great bulk of the code is fully shared. Markus has also re-factored to help split the Native Widget framework (used for platform theming) and the Text APIs (which are also different per-platform) from the stock GL rendering code.

The new OpenGL backend, thus allows all application rendering to happen to the same OpenGL context. This allows us to avoid a dichotomoy of rendering with GDI or X11 on windows, and then needing to box all 3D / OpenGL content into its own window. This should allow seamless integration of 3D content, as well as giving much better performance particularly on mobile platforms.

Testing VCL implementations

One area that VCL has not been ideal is the lack of a well written test / demo application. This is somewhat ironic since the LibreOffice code-base stated off decades ago as the demo app for the VCL toolkit. Over the last week, we've done a little expansion and started to implement something that aims at exercising all of the relevant backend / VCL API in an easy to extend fashion.

Naturally, the OpenGL code is not for everyone - neither now, or for the forseable future. Many OpenGL implementations have debilitating bugs, despite using only a small and simple sub-set of OpenGL features : we believe that will need to black-list these. Similarly, we will want to white-list newer and more stable drivers, but of course users will be able to choose between legacy and OpenGL rendering too.

What it looks like

So - when you put all of that together; it is advancing rapidly. Markus just checked some code into master which shows some of the VCL primitives that we can render already:

Ongoing work

You can play with the work on master; clearly LibreOffice is not rendering perfectly with this yet - that goes without saying; and help is much appreciated in the lead-up to LibreOffice 4.4; we love to work with other people.

Credits

Thanks to Markus Mohrhard (Collabora), Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne (Collabora), Ptyl Dragon (CloudOn), Chris Sherlock, along with more future / pending work in-progress from Michael Jaumann working on OpenGL canvas and Stefan Weiberg on OGL Transitions both mentored by Thorsten Behrens (SUSE).

• Relaxing day; Simon Matthews at NCC; home, read some Terry Pratchet; bussed M. to a Rememberance Day service, out for a slowish run with E. M. and N. in the dark; fun. Back, put babes to bed, read stories; sleep.

• Up early, hacked with Markus a little; went through the log of 'annual' trips I intend to have with my babes - discovered a serious lack; out into Cambridge on a trip with M. to the Botanical Gardens and into town for a nice meal. Worked at downgrading an openSUSE 13.2 machine to openSUSE 13.1 to make fglrx work - played table-football with M. Took the machine home for further medicine. Played with babes, up-late hacking VCL/GL and re-installing machine.

• Poked at OpenGL rendering pieces for much of the day, significantly expanded the vcldemo demo. Misc. paperwork, mail responses, release planning etc.

• Up in the night, bit of scripting, cleanup, test build pokeage, ran some builds. Lunch; spent some time reading expat to try to work out what it is spending its time doing and why. ESC call.

• Mail chew etc. call with Matus, sync with Michal. Lunch, report writing. Hacked in the evening reviewing and merging some of the Munich students' Idle handler work to master, and adding an UNO API to allow us to process pending work remotely. Hopefully that can help to eliminate those odd performance effects. Great to see Tobias & Jennifer's code.

• Mail chew, out to buy some matched disks; hmm. Built ESC bug stats, travel into Cambridge for lunch & fitting. Discovered I was missing some SATA cables - sadly PC cases don't have spares these days; walked to Maplin to buy some.
• Fitted new disks, worked out how the KVM switch works: pressing scroll-lock twice and space is your friend. Out to visit Steve Maddocks at Addenbrooks; back - more mail & hackery.

• Mail chew, admin bits, couple of team calls, Linux Format Column, partner poke.

• Off to NCC - ran the kids group downstairs: trying to get a moderate ground on Baptism in the Spirit. Back, lunch; quartet practice with some little girls - going rather well. Finished The Rats of NIMH with M. Unwound a nest of computer problems in the afternoon with babes; James Herriot movie, slugging sleep.

• Up rather late, out to Bury St Edmonds gardens to play, fireworks party being set-up, and (apparently) cardboard-tube mortars in-use (almost certainly made by my Brother-in-law). Back for late lunch, and applied slugging.

• Up early; mail, bit of code hackery - good, cleaned up some horrible snafus in my yet-another-thread-pool-impl. Lunch. Sync with Tor & Kohei, caught up with Kendy; customer/partner call. Chat with Thorsten, and massaged text.
• Sophie finally up-loaded all the great content from the conference to the LibreOffice Youtube Channel. My Keynote from the LibreOffice conference: Money fairies, Consultancy & Product - or - LibreOffice from Collabora.
• Interested to watch Igor Zaika's talk on the Microsoft Office cross-platform architecture which seems to make a lot more sense these days.

• Mail chew; misc. calls, reviewed code tried to get to some hacking, more mail; sync. call with Philippe; built ESC agenda (rather late), ESC call.
• Really pleased to see CloudOn's Awesome iOS App released incorporating LibreOffice, and a ton of work that has been done by the community, Collabora, Igalia, Synezip and others. Nice to see the Old vs. New screenshots too.

• Up; call with Tor, quick mail skim. Out to see Auntie Nicky, Joy & family at a nearby farm shop - had a lovely time with them. Home, E-mail, analytics, partner call, more E-mail. Set off to drive for home; worked in the car.

• Up lateish; walked up into the town, played in the Castle gardens. Home for lunch; bit of work; sprayed the beams in the loft with woodworm killer so Father can insulate his garage. Watched James Herriot movies with the babes.
• Out into town for a pint & a nice meal with J. lovely to spend some time together.

• Up early; moved lathe bits around on skate-board; out for a walk along a beautiful river, with several rope swings for babes out over the water. Back for lunch; mail chew.
• Worked at mail, built a consulting agenda; product team meeting, consulting team meeting; sync. with Markus & lfrb, sync. with Matus, and Nemeth. Lots of good work going on.

• Up earlyish; off to St Andrews, Starbeck for a fine service. Back for a large roast lunch, out swimming at Sandra's & moved a rather heavy lathe bed with Father; drilled some holes in a bee-hive for weighing it. Home for tea, put babes to bed.

• Out in the morning to collect some bee-keeping equipment with Father for Christmas presents; back for lunch. Out for a walk nearby, climbed out onto some trees that had washed down the river and grounded with the babes. Watched an old film about Scott of the Antarctic in the evening.

• Up late; mail chew; worked on a proposal; then on a report. Encouraged to see the XFastSerializer work Matus did on master taking XLSX export time ~30% faster, nice - should make it quicker to run the profiling tests too.

• Mail chew; call with Michal, then Tim; lunch. Poked at some code too briefly; back to SOW drafting.

• Intensive E-mail chew; built ESC stats & agenda; lunch. Partner call, sync. with Kendy. Out into Soham for a parents' evening with the family.

• Up early; partner call, mail chew - thrashed through the backlog of tasks, chat with Tor, contract review; mail.
• Out to help with Cub Scouts in the evening; Miriam is one, somewhat surreal inactivity & computer discussion - meeting the formal parent/child ratios I suppose.

• Slept; somewhere here missed most of a day and several team meetings; chewed through E-mail and a big back-log of off-line work. Partner call on the way home; finally back to put lovely daughers to bed.
• J. running a PCC training session; call with parents & David; sleep.

• Breakfast, listened to a great sermon on Haggai; Arthur kindly picked me up; visited his family & home, and out for a fine improvisational pasta lunch with Gabriella. On to a Dinosaur park & wax-work museum, then off to the falls together; a lovely day out.
• Flight to Sao Paolo diverted due to lack of fuel to stay in a holding pattern; thankfully re-fuelled and managed to make my onward flight (also rather delayed).

• Up earlyish; the older I get, the worse I handle jet-lag, even an ~insignificant 4hrs & having slept on the plane: hmm. Breakfast, mail chew. Out for a quick coach tour of the Itaipu Dam - a really incredible feat of construction. Its hard to get a feel for a ~200m tall Dam until you see it. Amazing that the concrete was mixed with flake ice not water; an extraordinary piece of engineering.
• Back to the Hotel, out for another pleasant meat experience. Mail chew, call with Markus; poked at VCL timers / idle handlers.

• Early to rise; quick call, mail, breakfast; continued on slideware - really thrilled to use droidAtScreen to demo the LibreOffice on Android viewer.
• Off to the venue in the coach; prepped slides some more, gave a talk - rather a hard act to follow at the end of the previous talk: a (male) strip-tease, mercifully aborted before it went too far. Presented my slides, informed by a few recent local discussions:
• Quick lunch, caught up with mail, customer call, poked Neil & Daniel, continued catching up with the mail & interaction backlog.
• Conference ended - overall an extremely friendly & positive experience, in a lovely location - most impressed by my first trip to Brazil; cudos to the organizers; and really great to spend some time with Eliane & Olivier on their home turf.
• Out for dinner & drinks in the evening; finally managed to internalize the canonical Brazilian rendition of LibreOffice: Lee-Br-Off-See.

• To the venue, crazy handing out of collateral, various talks with people; Advisory Board call, LibreOffice anniversary Cake cutting and eating (by massed hordes).
• It is extraordinary, and encouraging to see how many young ladies are at the conference, and (hopefully) getting engaged with Free Software: never seen so many at other conferences. As an unfortunate down-side: was amused to fobb off an un-solicited offer of marriage from a 15yr old: hmm.
• Chewed some mail, bus back in the evening; worked on slides until late, for talk tomorrow.

• Up early; mail chew, interesting breakfast with the Krita guy. Freshened up, met up with Eliane & Olivier, coach to the dam; got the booth setup; partner call. Lunch with Olivier; booth duty. Enjoyed the opening talks; back to the booth to re-charge. Out in the evening for dinner, kindly driven by Artur.

• Chewed some mail, great things going on while I'm asleep: seemingly I should sleep / wander off more often. Hacked a little on my backlog of things that need work.
• Flight to FOZ, Brazil appears to be a lovely place; hacked on the flight, taxi to the hotel, hacked in the hotel at length - fun. Mail chew too; call with partner . Poked at tiled rendering foo until late; sleep.

• Mail chew; call with Kendy, Laszlo, Tor; mail. Lunch with J. team call; more mail chewage, sync. with Matus & Andras. Hurried packing and dropped by J. for some train/plane/etc. to Brazil / LatinoWare.
• Arrived rather early at LHR; had an interesting chat to a young movie maker off to Jordan; enjoyed rather a good sleep on a lengthy TAM flight to San Paolo.

• Off to NCC, extremely tired; Tony spoke. Back for a roast lunch; applied slugging, put up some lights & a clock in H's room, fixed M's cupboard. Dinner, showed Babes some Ball Brothers, put babes to bed. Sermon; sleep early.

• Lie-in, large breakfast: porridge & boiled egg; off to Brandon for a wander through the forest, and play in the playground. Home for a fine pizza lunch. Dropped E. off at a sleep-over.
• Plugged away at E-mail, and worked late on a profiling problem.

• Mail; admin, booked hack-fest flights for Toulouse and Munich.
• Dead pleased with CloudOn's Teaser Video of their LibreOffice based product for iOS - coming exciting.

• Plugged at mail, partner call, more mail. Lunch, mgmt team call, wrote a LXF column on open source civility. ESC call, merged some patches & back-ported some others.

• Up early, sleeping poorly; read mail, caught up with J. read profiles & build a report. Shuffled the sales pipeline, there's always room for another entry if you need something awesome doing on LibreOffice.
• Partner / project call. Dinner with the babes, up late shuffling E-mail - no sight of any code, sadly; sales work variously. Somehow really encouraged to see the prototype LibreOffice 4.4 feature page a month before feature freeze. Worked dead late.

• Mail chew, wrote status report, out to buy a replacement MCB; admin; built ESC stats.
• I forgot to blog about my small tilebench helper that can be used to benchmark LibreOfficeKit tiled rendering. It builds by default on Linux, and should show up in instdir/program If you run: cd instdir/program ; ./tilebench `pwd` /path/to/test/doc.odt then it should produce some nice output a bit like this:
  

  profile run:
    initialization - 263.4392(ms)
    load document - 1097.3644(ms)
    getparts - 0.0222(ms)
    get size of parts - 0.0784(ms)
    render whole document - 74.4882(ms)
    render sub-region at 1:1 - 175.5018(ms)
    render sub-regions at scale - 388.7520(ms)
    destroy document - 178.5827(ms)
  Total: 2.1782(s)

  Which gives some timings for rendering a dozen tiles of pieces of your document at different sizes. This of course exercises the headless backend, which has quite some scope for performance work. At least it's rather easy to use cachegrind to profile the run-time there, and you find some interesting things.
• Lunch, replaced the MCB - even got back on-line afterwards; always encouraging.

• Broken, feverish sleep; up; feverish E-mail activity. Sync. with Kendy, team meeting, skipped lunch, chat with Kohei, another team meeting. Friendly chat, partner call, dinner, worked late.

• NCC, ran the older kids bible-study; re-capped John 1:1-18 and had fun; home for a big lunch. Played Othello with the babes, started to feel somewhat unwell, bed - v. groggy.

• Worked on a proposal, slugged at home for much of the day. Managed to blow most of the sockets in the kitchen - MCB seems to be broken; or was it plugging in my laptop PSU ? hmm.

• Mail chew, read commits on master (always encoruaging), misc. E-mail. Into Cambridge, another box arrived, got the cluster setup to a degree, made a mess of the server room with non-rack-mount hardware, got several windows' installed & an openSUSE 13.2 (accidentally).
• Encouraging catch-up with Matus; home early, put babes to bed, call in the evening with Thorsten.

• Chewed mail slowly. Looked for a replacement battery for this iBUYPOWER CZ-28, thank God for dmidecode - Chassis is really a MicroStar Int'l MS-176K, leading to BTY-M6D; turns out it's easier to un-plug the battery and read the serial number from it though.
• Churned through mail & project updates. Lunch. Catch-up with Philippe, ESC call, partner call. Arun around for bible study.

• Mail chew, call with Laszlo, train into Cambridge, got started on some hardware setup in the office; installing Windows is always a depressingly poor experience. TDF board call. Always deeply encouraged by the compound failure of Windows - installed the latest video drivers, and an un-bootable, hard-locked system; nice. Waited late into the night in the office, home by train.
• Worked even later on tiled rendering performance / tests; amazingly it seems we're rendering invisible progress bars on document load, and rulers that don't show up in tiles and; bed.

• Up early; mail chew, code review with Matus; built ESC agenda. Reviewed / merged a few patches, did a simple size shrink on our Android branch; plugged away at admin, this & that until late. Bloated / infected elbow starting to go down (some horror beastie bit me on it on Sunday).

• Mail chew, sync. call with Kendy. Poked with wireshark to try to debug my debilitating, intermittent DNS failures - always succeeding on the 2nd try, but failing on the first. Dropped an unusual looking search home site from my /etc/resolv.conf, re-started nscd etc. but still suffering that; urgh.
• Interested to see Bjoern's nice numbers on the mergedlibs impact on cold-start time: 3.4 seconds to 2 seconds, well worth having, all of it making the I/O scheduler's live -very- much simpler; volunteers to unwind whichever problem in 4.3 is causing it to break are much appreciated.
• Worked late; poked at Android builds etc.

• Breakfast, NCC (at Newmarket Academy this week), back for a fine roast lunch; out for a walk past the nearby wind-farm; sadly the farmer has put up lots of 'private' signs to discourage people from going close to them. Home for tea, baths, stories, bed. Enjoyed a Gordon sermon on 1 Samuel; sleep.

• Breakfast with the family, poked mail while homework happened; got some builds running. Got N's bedroom covered up for J. to paint; removed the medicine cabinet from the wall; H. having inadvertently unscrewed the security catch, drilled a hole in the back; heated a ground steel rod with H. drilled a hole into it to catch the catch; managed to open it; re-attach the knob etc.
• Lunch; poked at some running compilations, finally got a 64bit NDK so I can link debuginfo; babes out to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a play by Nomads. Plugged through some E-mail.

• Mail chew, Kendy finally defeated the timers; good. Fun call with Matus looking at profiles. Out for lunch with Bruce, Anne & Hannah.
• Returned; can't compile android with debugging symbols due to being out of address space; need to install a 64bit openSUSE instead; did that - tried a cross-architecture in-place distro update; perhaps a bit optimistic there. After some more disasterous tweaking and repair got back to something sane; set various source trees building.
• Unwound a spreadsheet threaded XLSX import nasty with an extra guard around some editeng funkiness.

• Mail chew, attempted to join a Microsoft Lync session with near zero joy; no Linux support: bad but, switch to Windows; doesn't work in Chrome ? fine - switch to IE ? doesn't work with an already installed Lync; fine - uninstall that; re-boot for good measure - (installing updates 1 of 29)...; finally re-install the web plugin to enter the session extremely slowly - and miss the end: bother. Must improve my Lync foo.
• Flawless Google+ interview call; admin foo; lunch. ESC call in the afternoon - now open to the public; great to have Noel show up, but partly glad that we've apparently included most interested people already anyway.
• Plugged away at writing VCL timer unit tests for increasingly twisted scenarios to try to reproduce the Windows issues we see. Finally pushed that.
• Out in the evening to see Ryan & Nancy back in the UK for a brief vacation; lovely to catch up with J. too.

• Mail chew, train into Cambridge; caught up with Tracie & Andrzej, built ESC agenda & mailed wrt. our first open call - lets see if it can work. Lunch with Agustin, David, Andrzej & some interesting Bromium guys.
• Back for a partner call, paperwork with Rob & Tracie. Got a number of long pending tasks knocked down together with Rob - nice. More partner / paperwork review, scoped the server room out for hosting some more hardware.
• Caught up with David in the evening; out for a nice pint together; train home late.

• Mail chew, interview, partner call; lunch. Partner call, dug at Kendy's nice timer patch; found a corner case or two causing grief still, and did some testing; dinner; back to work - pushed timer patch.
• Rather pleased with Emma Watson's UN speech; with an encoruaging leading rebuke; I'd call myself a Feminist if it wasn't for the dismissive, man-hating, alternative fringe that she calls out. Still good to hear the obvious re-stated eloquently and helpfully: that women should be equal and we should be upset when they are not. Then again, I get tired of the horribly complicated issue of suicide being used to make political / gender points.

• Mail chew, friendly partner call; worked through bugs at some considerable length with Andras; more mail chew; team call, lunch. Even more unbelievable admin, another team call. Dinner, put babes to bed, partner calls until late; reviewed Kendy's nice mainloop patch.

• Off to NCC, Roy speaking; fine roast lunch, slugging in the afternoon. Watched the latest Material Science open university program with the babes; then High School Musical (hey ho).
• Caught up with Dave; Gordon sermon on 1 Samuel; bed early.

• Checked mail; played with babes, took a blow-lamp to broken trampoline spring to the point that it could be re-worked into a new spring. Lunch; out shopping, repaired this & that around the house, more mail in the evening.

• Mail, meetings, bit of hacking today - encouragingly implemented some "kernel32" alike VBA shims for Linux / Mac to get high resolution timing data, filed a couple of follow-on easy hacks, and discovered that Currency (a 64bit integer type) does not make it through our native code invocation framework.

• Long day, slogging through mail; ESC call; partner calls.

• Mail, chat with Tor. Partner call, more mail. Dug recreationally through the VBA Lib implementation when not on Windows (something like DllImport in the CLR). We should stub a few of the more commonly used Windows APIs (pwrt. high-resolution time) there - of course LibreOffice's NOW() function helpfully jams some nanoseconds into the low bits of the double.

• Mail chew, chat with Kismat, then Philippe, wrote notes. Profile analysis, SOW construction & review, call with Kendy & Kohei, then Bob. Dinner & put babes to bed. Built ESC bug stats & sent proto-agenda.

• Packed babes off to school; mail chew, stats building. Lunch. Team meeting, more plugging away at admin, consulting team meeting.
• Thrilled to see Coverity's Updated Spotlight on LibreOffice - and I quote The team also reduced the project's defect density from .8 to .08, far lower than the defect density for like-sized projects using the Coverity Scan service ... Zack Samocha, senior director of products for Coverity [said] "We applaud the LibreOffice development team for their commitment to creating and delivering high-quality software." - great work by Caolan and others.
• J. had a PCC meeting; worked late.

• Off to Pulborough Baptist Church. Enjoyed the service, off to Grant & Anne's 50'th wedding anniversary party: a lovely, meal & interesting family & friends. Drove home, bed early - very tired.

• Drove down to Barbara & Colin's - had a lovely late lunch, and went for a walk to a playground, over a stream - balancing on a large cast-steel pipe, and more fun. Discovered a fluorescent pink loom-band in the bed of a nearby archaeologists of the future will get a nice accurate date with the loom-band strata I guess. Up late enjoying Barabara & Colin's company.

• Mail chew, and more of that. Customer call; Clara over for lunch - poked away at some irritating PDF signing crasher obscuring the real issues and nailed it - relaxing; back to the inbox, worked on a quote & proposal.

• Built ESC stats, though no meeting this week; turned around paperwork. Great to see Andrzej's calc tiled rendering work.
• Met up with Arun for bible study in the evening, finished 1 Samuel together.

• Attempted mail catchup; profile analysis, sync. with Kohei & Milkos, built proposal, 3x partner calls, chat with Italo.

• Into London with Tim for partner meetings; lunch by the Serpentine. Back, via Cambridge - stopped over to re-charge in the Collabora Office & met up with Nick & Daniel - out for another partner meeting in Cambridge - dead fun to catch up too.

• Mail chewage, tried to re-arrange tasks into some sort of sensible order with Andras, Kendy & Tim's help. Lunch. Reviewed and merged a rather nice string speedup which was a victim of a previous String to OUString conversion.
• Lots of partner / customer interaction backlogged from last week. Wrote an LXF column. Sam put up a nice LibreOffice from Collabora team picture from the conference.

• To NCC, good to catch up with all & sundry. Lunch. Out for a run with N. across the heath - fun; lazed in the garden in the sun suitably.
• Practised quartet a little, starting to sound quite good having moved lots of the blacker notes from E. to H. David over for a fine roast dinner.

• Up early - packed, set off for the rather nicer AirBnB venue; team all together - had a conference review / update with everyone - fun. Rather a late Pizza lunch, review of where we're at.
• Off to the airport with Kendy & Lubos, very packed train. Pleased to see Eliane's link to a new (English): LibreOffice Video.
• Lots of travel, eventually got home, bed exhausted.

• Caught up with Adam & team. In-person Board meeting in the afternoon. Caught the end of Moggi's talk on 3D charting.
• Gave a talk on faster XML Parsing with Matus:
  Still plenty to do to further accelerate our threaded parser.
• Final open session with the board, with some useful input from the attendees - voted thanks to Mathias & team for their great work.
• Out to the Indiana restaurant nearby again, and ate in the street with all & sundry until rather late; fun.

• Up early, to the university; gave a getting into the code for beginners talk - always nice to update that each year and dung out the cruft from the year before.
• Catch up with Alberto & Caolan, fun. Lots of good talks on various topics.
• Out to a rather fine meal with drinks at a nearby University venue - once again, excellent food & company. Encouraging (as a sponsor) to see funding applied to supporting collective meals & drinks through the day.

• Off to the conference bright & early; worked with Markus at simplifying my slides & translating to German. He presented them well auf Deutsch to the German business track. Then back to the main track.
  
• Enjoyed the CloudOn talk; lovely to see them re-using LibreOffice on iOS for their app. Shachar Binyamin's talk had some great highlights. They've been deploying LibreOffice as an option for their users for around a month and:
  • ~50% of users opt-in to using their LibreOffice based editing app (vs. a remoted MS Office from the cloud)
  • Of those that switch, 90% choose to continue to use their LibreOffice app vs. MS Office given a free choice
  • There is better retention for users that use their LibreOffice based App, than those using MS Office remotely: most encouraging.
• Presented a Keynote on what Collabora does for our customers:
  
• Lunch; met a number of interesting guys in the hallway track.
• Amused by the contagious attraction of the more 'interesting' definitions of Volunteer (ie. paid full-time to do the job) that seem to be catching on these days, with so many Russian Volunteer service-persons in Ukraine; I've seen that problem before somewhere.
• Rather humbled to listen to some of my guys' talk: what a team !
• Out for some hacking in the evening, ate, met up with partners, customers, talked through a number of interesting areas of development with some bright new students - up v. late talking with Mathias, Thorsten, and others.

• To the univeristy for breakfast, meeting with lots of likely hackerly sorts. Board meetings ~all day - lots of extremely dense content and rather encouraging updates on all the hard work Florian & team have been doing for TDF.
• ESC in-person meeting in the evening, good to hear from the UX guys. Customer/partner meeting followed by a team meal. Back to the appartment for some more slide hacking until late, sleep.

• Up rather early, train to Cambridge / KGX / London City airport. Sleep, mail chew, slide planning. Arrived, checked into a rather nice AirBnB appartment. Back into town, collected Kohei. Out for a fine dinner in the evening with much of the team.

• Up, off to NCC to play the violin - short family service. Frank, Frankie & April (x2) back for lunch - got to know them a bit.
• Helped Naomi with the drill-press - making an 'ultimate loom bands loom' from panel-pins, a drill-press and some chip-board.
• Mike, Jo & Robin over for a bit in the afternoon, good to exchange some electronics for some sheet-music there; great to catch up. Black Arrow with the babes, tea, put people to bed, read stories.
• Packed & set too trying to do a reasonable job of repair of the parents machine after the nasty remote scam from imax support. Failed to find much if anything beyond remote admin turned on; hmm.

• Slept in late. Breakfast, read the economist, slugged, hand-washed the result of a failed dishwasher, ordered replacement parts for broken bits around the house.
• Mail chew, travel planning etc.

• Day off ! breakfast with the family & my parents, Miriam's Birthday - lots of present opening etc. fun.
• Checked mail, pottered about amazed at the aggression everywhere in the news. Lunch. Bid 'bye to the parents, more work. Out swimming in the afternoon to Bury St Edmonds - fortuitously met up with Chris Reed & babes, there.
• Back, caught up with more work. Teresa, Jordan & Lucy dropped in - happily just de-frosted a large box of pasta sauce; really good to catch up with Teresa after so long.
• Late customer call, wrote minutes, read with H. bed.

• Early, intense partner call. Mail chew, tried to grab Sam. Slogged through admin most of the day. Parents arrived in the evening for dinner. Read stories, Arun around briefly, talked with parents while trying to install OpenSUSE 13.1 on Miriam's eighth birthday present laptop: the normal horrific UEFI / secure-boot problems, plus needing nomodeset to get around the old kernels in distributions. Catch up with Sam, eventually, by 1am, the Toshiba Satelite C55 was flying.

• Mail chew, off to get a Yellow Fever & Hepatitis A jab from the Nurse; somehow either injections have got less painful in recent years, or they assign trainee nurses to children, or perhaps not tensing the muscle helps.
• Lunch, 2x partner calls. Built some stats, worked on slideware for the conference.

• More working through mail & bugs.
• Saddened to get a call from an rather upset Mother apparently a victim of a unsolicited scam 'imax support' - which is sadly rather common. When I phoned them they apparently fraudulently claimed to be a UK registered company - but Companies House had no record of that name. Supposedly they are based in Kolkata, India Sector 5, Walzan Tower. Attempted to report it to the UK police, who appear interested only in statistical collection of I was scammed.
• Finally got through the backlog of expenses.
• Noticed Tamas' awesome blog on the great LibreOffice 3D work that we've been doing for 4.3 / master, great.

• Chewed mail, caught up with the weekend backlog of customer mail, partner pieces etc. Product and consulting meetings. J. kindly filing the backlog of expenses; unwound some accomodation issues for Bern.

• Up later; tired. Off to NCC, most encouraged on the way by Sons of Korah's rendition of a chunk of Psalm 37.
• Good family service lead by John, home for a pizza lunch and catch-up time with Lydia, nice to see her. Applied slugging much of the afternoon, bit of guitar practice and transcribed some parts to swap E's difficult bits into H's viola part for a quartet.
• Read stories & put babes to bed.

• Slept badly; up late; breakfast & in to Bury St Edmonds. Sorted out a sadly rather expensive Viola for H. enjoyed a walk, play and picnic in Bury's Abbey Gardens. Home for tea. Showed the babes the (rather excellent) Everyday Miracles - the genius of sofas stockings and scanners with the babes; good fun.
• BBQ dinner. Worked on bugs before bed - will I never learn; slept badly.

• Up early, somewhat incredible partner call; unwound this and that, another rather positive customer call; Family back in the evening, lovely to see them again.

• Up early, mail chew, chat with Caolan, more mail chew. Queried my Vodaphone bill, which appears broken. Lunch, ESC call, posted minutes. More mail, proposal generation.
• Dinner, Lydia popped in quickly; more work until late, ran some profiles, dug at some code finally.

• Train into Cambridge, mail chew, partner call.
• Great to see Collabora / Smoose LibreOffice on Android Update.
• Sync. with Markus, lunch. Meeting with Philippe & Rob for some of the afternoon; partner call, mail / admin catchup.
• Fine BBQ at Rob & Heidi's, interesting company & great to meet Oscar in person. Train home, bed late.

• Into Cambridge, had a fun day of quarterly management meetings, really good to catch up with Rob, Philippe, Tim, Tracie, Lauren; home late in the evening.

• Visited the Doctor, innoculations for Brazil; more mail chew. Pleased to see Caolan's blog on dialog conversion - 99% done, 4 to go. Looking forward to loosing some of the complexity of rsc/ and .res files if they're not going to contain dialog descriptions.
• Chewed mail, product & consulting team calls. Finally got to correcting the LibO conference program details.

• Played Violin at NCC, back for a roast lunch; slugged variously with babes. Sandy over in the afternoon. Read stories to little girls; bed - fitful sleep.

• Up rather late; unpacked a bit; lots of slugging, huge amount of back-issues of The Economist, IET etc. to get through. Played BosWars with the babes. Visited the neighbours and their extension. Bed early.

• Missed a chunk of this day, fitful sleep / work in the airport. Eventually got another plane to Gatwick, slept there. Kindly picked up by Grant & Anne, enjoyed their kind hospitality. Drove home, put babes to bed, slept.

• Up earlyish, quick mail chew, off to the airport with M. and E. Checked in, bit of work at lunch, some more on the plane.
• Tried to find a quiet place with reasonable wifi in the Icelandic airport - unfortunately, not that wonderfully setup for weathering the over-nighters inflicted on passing travellers. Found some reasonbly darker and comfy seating for the babes and did some hacking at last - merged an easy-hack fix and filed another.
• Pleased to see Andrzej's blog from earlier in my break on Tiled Rendering of spreadsheets / ppt.

• Continued to work slowly back through E-mail for much of the day, got some recent builds & profiles. Bought some management books JP recommended. Packed variously.

• More mail chew, chat with Jeremy - nice to be in a similar timezone. Great to see FutureMark's PC Mark release.
• Booked LibreOffice conference travel to Bern. Built ESC bug stats, worked late.

• Started on the mail mountain; 1200+ personal mails to work through; nurgh. Made slow progress. Out in the evening to Westford to catch up with Dave Neary & family - really good to catch up. On to Logan to collect Tom & Becky, bed late - catching up on their Honeymoon in Belize.

• Returned car, on to Park Street, sermon in part on the 'Oh!' in Romans 11. Enjoyed wandering through China Town, and on to the Cheese Cake Factory at the Letchmere mall for lunch. Eventually home by train, watched a movie & ate our cheesecake. Bed.

• Up early, sad goodbyes, set off for Niagra. De-tour via a Newmarket garage to discover the spare tire in the (immense) Dodge Caravan thing. On to the Niagra Falls, enjoyed a boat ride close up on the Hornblower - last time I was here with Florian & Mahren Reuter.
• Replaced the car (seems a lot for one tire) but Budget good about that; drove on, and on, and on some more back to Boston - an authentic US road-trip. Back late.

• Lovely cooked breakfast, out to a local farm to enjoy some animals & play equipment; back for lunch, and some swimming action in JP & Tara's pool with their girls. Visited an interesting post-Quaker chapel, back for dinner, up late talking.

• Drove on to a state fair in Hamburg - admired various horses walking in circles with cow-person types on their backs. Travelled on to Toronto - plenty of driving. Met up with JP, Tara & family - kindly hosting us; had a lovely evening together catching up, admired JP's stock-car - wow.

• Swam and played in the lake with the babes happily. Fish appeared to rather like nibbling at my ring. Went kayaking with the babes in turn. Admired some local snakes, BBQ'd burgers on a fire, slept.

• Off to Thatcher State Park with Amie Jane & Julie, enjoyed damming a stream, finding some fossils, and admiring the beautiful undercut rock / waterfall goodness.
• Drive on to Bowman Lake State Park via an unusual route thanks to a curious set of maps. Into 'Oxford' for shopping, emergency breakfast in the dark / rain, bed.

• Drove in with J. to pick up the rental car; drove to Lee for some shoe-shopping and on to Greenbush to stay with Julie's parents Dean & Dorris Calamaris who kindly fed and hosted us (all) for the night.

• Out to Park Street with the babes, eclectic meal afterwards, wandered Boston Common & played in the park, home in the afternoon. Watched A Wrinkle in Time dinner, and put babes to bed; cached maps for the next step.

• Packed up, checked out; off to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a couple of hours - lovely paintings & artifacts. Back to Port Authority and found a find knick-nack shop outside for the babes to buy hats and T-shirts. Pizza lunch, and a long bus-ride home.
• Horrible Boston transport experience - sold tickets for non-existent suburban rail at Porter, eventually got home after some hours of delay by no. 70 bus from Central; sleep.

• Off to see the Intrepid with the family who were pleasantly surprised by the scale of the Aircraft Carrier floating museum. Went on the submarine saw the Space Shuttle. Enjoyed the facilities, displays, ambience, etc.
• Met up with Guy for a late lunch nearby good to catch up a bit; tried to educate the babes palettes with mixed success. Back to Brooklyn in the evening; packed.

• Statten Island ferry, playground and memorial on the island, and ferry back to see the Statue of Liberty in passing - pleased at the reasonably un-crowded experience. Played in the fountains in Battery Park. Saw the Wall-Street Bull, had lunch, shopped for tat.
• On to see the World Trade Center memorials, and admire the nearly finished Freedom Tower exterior, walked back via the Brooklyn Bridge and subway home; ate, put tired babes to bed.

• Took Tom & Becky to the airport rather early; back, breakfast and set off by commuter rail & T to South Station for a bus to NYC. Arrived eventually, wandered NY - enjoyed Times Square and a free Marriot hotel lift ride. On to the Library, and then to Central Park - ice-cream of some kind there.
• Wandered through the 'Enchanted' park, and met up with Guy at an Adventure Playground after dressing E's foot. Rushed off to Brooklyn to checkin to our pleasant AirBnB appartment; bed.

• Wandered out to the Waltham library in the morning, along by the river home via some Carls chips and some shopping. Caught up on mail a bit. Watched The Parent Trap with the babes, and slugged variously with Tom & Becky.

Today we release LibreOffice 4.3.0, packed with a load of new features for people to enjoy - you can read and enjoy all the great news about the user visible features from so many hardy developers, but there are of course also some contributors whose work is primarily behind the scenes in places that are not so easy to see. These are of course still vitally important to the project. It can be hard to extract those from the over fourteen thousand commits since LibreOffice 4.2 was branched, so let me expand:

User Interface Dialog / Layout

The UI migration to Glade based layout of VCL widgets is finally approaching the home straight; more than two hundred dialogs were converted this release; leaving the final dialogs rather hard to find - help appreciated. Many thanks to Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) - for his incredible work here, and also Szymon Kłos, Michal Siedlaczek, Olivier Hallot (EDX), Andras Timar (Collabora), Jan Holesovsky (Collabora), Katarina Behrens, Thomas Arnhold, Maxim Monastirsky, Manal Alhassoun, Palenik Mihály, and many others ... Thanks also to our translators who helped in the migration of strings.

If you'd like to get involved in driving this to 100%, checkout Caolan's howto and his great blog: 99 to go update (now only 65) illustrated by this:

Build improvements

We've improved a lot this cycle in terms of buildability, and ease of comprehension - important for new contributors.

Visual Studio support

Not only did Jesus Corrius add initial support for Visual Studio 2013, but we had a major win from Honza Havlíček who (building on Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical)'s similar KDevelop work) implemented building a Visual Studio project file - allowing much improved build / debugging support video or just: make vs2012-ide-integration.

OpenGL as a run-time dependency

In the past when we needed an OpenGL code-path we would link a separate shared library to OpenGL and then dynamically load that component - as for the OpenGL slideshow. In 4.3 we unified all of our OpenGL code to use glew and now have a central VCL API for initializing and linking in OpenGL, making it much easier to use in future. Another benefit of using glew is the ability to check for certain extensions at run-time dynamically to better adapt to your platform's capabilities rather than having to work vs. a baseline.

Pre-compiled-headers / PCH updates

Thomas Arhnold discovered that our pch files (used for accelerating windows building) had bit-rotted, and did a fine cleanup sweep across them. That significantly reduced build time for a number of modules.

Mobile code-size reduction

A lot of work was put into LibreOffice 4.3 to allow us to shrink the code to fit a mobile footprint nicely. Thanks to Matus Kukan (Collabora) for splitting a large number of UNO components into individual factory functions - to allow the linker to garbage collect un-used components. Matus also created a python script solenv/bin/native-code.py to share the building of lists of components to statically link in for various combinations of functionality. Tor Lillqvist (Collabora) did some re-work on ICU to package the rather large data tables as a file instead of code. Vincent Saunders (Collabora) worked away to improve dwarfprofile to identify larger pieces of object file and where they came from. Jan Holesovsky de-coupled lots of accessibility code, and removed lots of static variables dragging in un-needed code. Miklos Vajna turned OOXML custom shape preset definitions (oox::drawingml::CustomShapeProperties::PresetsMap) from generated code to generated data: that allowed removal of 50k lines of code. Thanks to Tsahi Glik / CloudOn for funding this work.

Code quality work

There has been a lot of work on code quality and improving the maintainability and cleanliness of the code. Another 75 or so commits to fix cppcheck errors are thanks to Julien Nabet, along with the huge scad of daily commits to build without any compile warnings -Werror -Wall -Wextra on every platform with thanks primarily to Tor Lillqvist (Collabora), Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), and Thomas Arnhold.

Assert usage

Another tool that developers use to ensure they do not introduce new bugs is assertions; historically the OOo code base has had custom assertion facilities that can easily be ignored, and so most developers did just that; thanks to Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat), we have started to use the standard assert() macros in LibreOffice, which have the important advantage that they actually abort the program: if an assertion fails, developers see a crash that is rather harder to ignore than some text printed on the terminal. Thanks to all who asserted the truth.

Rocking Coverity

We have been chewing through the huge amount of analysis from the Coverity Scan, well - in particular Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) has done an awesome job here; his blog on that is typically modest.

We now have a defect density of 0.08 - meaning 8x bugs in every 100,000 lines of code found by static checking. This compares rather favourably with the average open source project of this size which has 65 per 100,000 lines. Perhaps the most useful thing here is Coverity's report on new issues - many of which are rather more serious than the last few, lowest priority un-triaged reports.

This was achieved by 2679 commits, 88% of them from Caolán, and then Norbert Thiebaud, Miklos Vajna (Collabora), Noel Grandin, Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Chris Sherlock, David Tardon (RedHat), Thomas Arnhold, Steve Yin (IBM), Kohei Yoshida (Collabora), Jan Holesovsky (Collabora), Eike Rathke (RedHat), Markus Mohrhard (Collabora) and Julien Nabet

Import and now export testing

Markus Mohrhard's great import/export crash testing has been expanded to 55,000+ problem/bug documents, now covering the PDF importer, and our crash and validation problem counts continue to drop. We import each of these documents, and then export them into each export format that we support; eg. an ODS would be re-exported as ODS, XLS, XLSX, etc. Markus also re-wrote and simplified the test script in python to make it simpler; however we routinely suffer from this test (running for 5 days and consuming a beefy machine) locking up Linux of several distributons, kernel versions, on both virtual and real hardware; which has a negative impact on usefulness.

Re-factoring big objects

In some cases LibreOffice has classes that seem to do 'everything' and include the kitchen sink too. Thanks to Valentin Kettner, Michael Stahl (RedHat) and Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical) for helping to re-factor these. As an example SwDoc (a writer document) now inherits from only nine classes instead of nineteen, and the header file shrunk by more than three hundred lines.

Valgrind fixes

Valgrind continued to be a wonderful tool for finding and isolating leaks, and poor behavior of various bits of code - although normal code-paths are by now rather valgrind clean. Dave Richards from Largo very kindly donated us some CPU time on his new 80x CPU Linux machine to burn it in. We used that to run Markus' import/export testing under valgrind, and found and fixed a number of issues. valgrind logs here. We would be most happy to help others with their boxes in need of load testing.

Address / Leak Sanitizer

There are some great new ways of doing (compile time) code sanitisation, and thanks to Stephan Bergmann (RedHat) we're using them enthusiastically -fsanitize is available for Clang and gcc 4.9. It lets us do memory checking (like valgrind) but with visibility into stack corruption, and to do that very significantly faster. Some details on -fsanitize for libreoffice are available. Lots of leaks and badness have been fixed using the tool, thanks too to Markus Mohrhard, and Caolan McNamara.

Unit testing

We also built and executed more unit tests with LibreOffice 4.3 to avoid regressions as we change the code. Grepping for CPPUNIT_TEST() and CPPUNIT_ASSERT as last time we continued the trend of growth here:

Our ideal is that every bug that is fixed gets a unit test to stop it ever recurring. With 1100 commits, and over eighty committers to the unit tests in 4.3 it is hard to list everyone involved here, apologies for that; what follows is a sorted list of those with over 20x commits to the qa/ directories: Miklos Vajna (Collabora), Kohei Yoshida (Collabora), Caolán McNamara (RedHat), Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Jacobo Aragunde Pérez (Igalia), Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora), Markus Mohrhard (Collabora), Zolnai Tamás (Collabora), Tor Lillqvist (Collabora), Michael Stahl (RedHat), Alexander Wilms

SAL_OVERRIDE and more

Traditionally C++ has allowed significant ambiguity in overriding methods, allowing the 'virtual' keyword to be ommitted in overrides, and also allowing accidentally polymorphic overrides. To prepare for the new C++ standard here we've annotated all of our virtual methods that are overridden in sub-classes with the SAL_OVERRIDE macro, to ensure that we are building our vtables correctly. Many thanks to Noel Grandin, and Stephan Bergmann (RedHat) for building a clang plugin to help to build annotation here with another to verify that the result stays consistent. That fixed several long-standing bugs. As a bonus when you read the code it is much easier to find the base virtual method declaration: it's the one that is not marked with SAL_OVERRIDE.

QA / bugzilla

This release the QA team has grown, and done some amazing work both triaging bugs, and also closing them, getting us back well under the totemic one thousand un-triaged bug barrier. Currently ~750 un-confirmed which is the lowest in over two years. Thanks to everyone for their great work there, sadly it is rather hard to extract credits for confirming bugs, but the respective hero list overlaps with the non-developer / top closers listed below.

We also had one of our best bug-hunting weekends ever around 4.3 see Joel Madero's write-up. The QA team are also doing excellent job with our bibisect git repositories to isolate regressions to small blocks of commits - which makes life significantly easier for developers.

One metric we watch in the ESC call is who is in the top ten in the freedesktop Weekly bug summary. Here is a list of the top twenty people who have appeared most frequently in the weekly list of top ten bug closers in order of frequency of appearance: Jorendc, Kohei Yoshida (Collabora), Maxim Monastirsky, tommy27, Joel Madero, Caolán McNamara (RedHat), Foss, Jay Philips, m.a.riosv, Julien Nabet, Sophie Gautier (TDF), Cor Nouws, Michael Stahl (RedHat), Jean-Baptiste Faure, Andras Timar (Collabora), Adolfo Jayme, ign_christian, Markus Mohrhard (Collabora), Eike Rathke (RedHat), Urmas. And thanks to the many others that helped to close so many bugs for this release.

Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical) also write up a nice taxonomy of our twenty five thousand reported bugs so far, and provided the data for this nice breakdown:

Code cleanup

Code that is dirty should be cleaned up - so we did a lot of that.

The final death of UniString

While we killed our last tools/ string class in 4.2 and switched to clean, uniform OUStrings everywhere - we were still using some 16bit quantities to describe text offsets elsewhere. Thanks to Caolán McNamara (Red Hat) for finally enabling writer to have >64k paragraphs - a long requested feature by a certain type of user, see the related blogpost.

VCL code / structure cleanup

The Visual Class Libraries - the LibreOffice native toolkit has not been given the love it deserves in recent years. Many thanks to Chris Sherlock for several hundred commits - starting to cleanup VCL. That involves lots of good things - giving the code a more logical structure so it is easy to find methods; systematically writing doxygen documentation for API methods, ensuring that API methods have sensible, descriptive names and starting to unwind some poor legacy design decisions; much appreciated.

Ongoing German Comment redux

We continued to make some progress on translating our last lingering German comments across the codebase to good, crisp technical English. Many thanks to Luc Castermans, Sven Wehner, Christian M. Heller, Philipp Weissenbacher, Stefan Ring, Philipp Riemer, Tobias Mueller, Chris Sherlock, Alexander Wilms and others. We also reduced the number of false positives and accelerated the bin/find-german-comments tool in this cycle.

Automated code re-factoring using Clang

One hero of code cleaning is Noel Grandin who is constantly improving the code in many ways; eg. writing out un-necessary duplicate code to use standard wrappers such as SimpleReferenceObject. Noel has been heavily involved in Clang plugins to re-write a lot of our error prone binary file format / stream overrides pStream >> nVar seems like a great idea until you realise that an unexpected change to the type of nVar far away tweaks the file format. These operators are now all re-written to explicit ReadFloat type methods enhancing the robustness of the code to changes. Noel also created plugins to inline simple member functions, detect inefficient passing of uno::Sequence, and OUString. Stephan Bergmann (RedHat) also wrote a number of advanced linting tools, checks for de-referencing NULL pointers, quickly catching inlining problems on Linux that cause most grief on Windows, and re-writing un-necessary uses of sal_Bool to bool. Stephan also wrote a plugin to find unused functions and unused functions in templates, as well as warning on illicit conversions of literal to bool e.g. if (n == KIND_FOO || KIND_BAR). All of this improves the readability, consistency, reliability and in some cases performance of the code.

Improving lifecycle

Takeshi Abe invested lots of time this cycle in improving our often unhelpful object lifecycle. Using smart pointers not only makes the code more readable and often shorter, but also exception safe which is very useful.

DocTok cleanup

This cleanup saved nearly 80k lines of code and make the codebase much simpler to understand thanks to Miklos Vajna (Collabora) you can see the before & after pictures in his blog.

Holding the line on performance

Performance is one of those hard things to keep solid. It has an alarming habit of bit-rotting when your back is turned. That's why Matus Kukan (Collabora) has built a test machine that routinely builds LibreOffice and runs a suite of document loads, conversions etc. under callgrind. Using callgrind's simulated CPU has the beautiful property of ensuring repeatable behaviour, and thus making any small reduction or improvement in performance noticeable and fixable. It is easy to see that in a graph - admire the crisp flatness of the graph between significant events. The X axis is time (annotating the axis with git hashes is not so photogenic).

Often we only check performance just before a release, its interesting to see here the big orange hump from a performance fragility found and fixed as a direct result of these tests. Raw callgrind data is made available for trivial examination of the latest traces along with a flat ODS of the previous runs.

Getting involved

I hope you get the idea that more developers continue to find a home at LibreOffice and work together to complete some rather significant work both under the hood, and also on the surface. If you want to get involved there are plenty of great people to meet and work alongside. As you can see individuals make a huge impact to the diversity of LibreOffice (the colour legends on the right should be read left to right, top to bottom, which maps to top down in the chart):

And also in terms of diversity of code commits, we love to see the unaffiliated volunteers contribution by volume, though clearly the volume and balance changes with the season, release cycle, and volunteers vacation / business plans:

Naturally we maintain a list of small, bite-sized tasks which you can use to get involved at our Easy Hacks page, with simple build / setup instructions. It is extremely easy to build LibreOffice, each easy-hack should have code pointers and be a nicely self contained task that is easy to solve. In addition some of them are really nice-to-have features or performance improvements. Please do consider getting stuck in with something.

Another thing that really helps is running pre-release builds and reporting bugs just grab and install a pre-release and you're ready to contribute alongside the rest of the development team.

Conclusion

LibreOffice 4.3 is the next in a series of releases that incrementally improve not only the features, but also the foundation of the Free Software office suite. Please be patient, it is just the first in a long series of monthly 4.3.x releases which will bring a stream of bug fixes and quality improvements over the next months as we start working in earnest on LibreOffice 4.4.

I hope you enjoy LibreOffice 4.3.0, thanks for reading, and thank you for supporting LibreOffice.

Raw data for many of the above graphs is available.

A French translation of much of this is available.

• Up early; mini team meeting, update, tried to deal with the most urgent E-mail; off to Carls for lunch with Robert. Back, continued to wade through the mail. Built ESC bug stats, sent some mail. Slugged with the family in the evening.

• Opened up, hacked away - finally unwound my problems with the EditEngine - fields are filled in by an amazing series of app-specific callbacks hidden under Links. Nailed my bug. Helped Algot out with triage - managed to get the number of un-triaged bugs really rather low.
• Dick and Jill arrived; Pizza for lunch. More work; Radek passed through, bid 'bye to Joel & Algot, kindly dropped home by Imanuel & Robinson, relaxed.
• Family returned home, full of bounce & exhaustion after water-park-ing at some length. Lovely to see everyone again.

• Into town early by car with the lads; met up with Algot, bagels for breakfast; very kind of Xamarin to provide such a fine venue. Did some gdb / callgrind training, Jeff showed up & implemented several easy hacks, Martin came too from the Inkscape guys. Interested to see LibreOffice: The Complete Guide as a magazine. Great to have some pre-setup EC2 VM's for LibreOffice hacking, thank to Cloph.
• Worked away at this and that until rather late. Burritos and discussion on Boston Common, back to the office for some more hacking; caught up with a passing Radek; more work, home rather late. Relaxed together; synched with Joel, bed late.

• Off to visit Bob, lovely home, took dogs for a walk, talked technology - into Waltham for a Boston steak & cheese sub, kindly dropped at Alewife. Into the Xamarin office - lovely place for a LibreOffice hack-fest tomorrow - lovely to catch up with Jo Shields, Miguel, Duncan, Jeff, Michael, Aaron and a lot of friendly new people. Very generous of them to host us. Waited for Joel and Robinson.
• Car home with Immanuel, Robinson & Joel, off to Wendy's and back to eat on the balcony.

• Woken rather early by babes squabbling - presumably that means they're over their jet-lag. Off to work with Thomas to the Symetrica office, had a rather interesting tour, good to meet his colleagues Matt & Greg again from the wedding.
• Worked through mail, out for a walk at lunch time around the lake and caught up with Matt, back to poke at a few silly bugs.
• Amused by the circular: "Assume that my world-view is unique and yours is not: now look how amazing my unique world view is !" argument. Since I've only heard this hubris from (some) atheists, let me transpose it to a Christian perspective for fun: "there are, historically, millions of world views that do not include God's glorious grace, mercy and free forgiveness you believe in only one of these - and think that all 999,999 others are wrong. I just go one step further - why don't you ?" lazy stuff indeed; quite apart from the various interesting discussions as to some flavours of atheism eg. some forms of Bhuddism.

• Mail chew, thrilled to see that the UK Cabinet Office have done the right thing and announced the choice of ODF for sharing and/or collaborating on Government Documents bringing choice of office productivity software, as well as improved market access for UK based SMEs. One great ODF solution from a UK based SME is of course LibreOffice from Collabora via one of our great Partners. Checkout the Sharing or Collaborating with Government Documents policy paper.

  The default format for saving government documents must be Open Document Format (ODF). Information should be shared in ODF version 1.2 (or later).

• Out to a local farm with the babes, enjoyed the sun, some minor water fights, and back for lunch; applied slugging in the afternoon. Wrote Linux Format Column on the Cabinet Office consultation.

• Off to the Boston Science Musem, much fun had by all the family in various exhibits, lunch outside, back for more goodness; took the babes for ice-cream in the Cambridge Galeria food-court. Home for dinner, and birthday cake for H.
• Built ESC bug stats, and posted it. Drank wine on the balcony with the brothers & sisters, and enjoyed the evening.

• Late American breakfast at a local diner; J's birthday. Wandered back to check E-mail etc. Out to walk up Prospect Hill with Robert & to catch up the family. Lunch. Dug through mail and tasks.

• Up, quick breakfast at the hotel with the new, extended Meeks family & Rottis; packed the cars and set off for Waltham first pausing at a local lake for a swim.
• Home for tea & wedding present opening with Tom & Becky - fun. Up late watching youtube videos of various kinds.

• Read to babes to keep them quiet in the morning; packed Julia and babes off to have their hair done; tidied up the flat a bit with the parents, chewed mail, bit of hackery.
• Set off with the parents for the wedding venue, arrived dressed up, with the other lads - babes dressed up as flower ladies and looking georgeous. Ushered briefly, and the service started. Encouragingly both Becky & Tom showed up - and were suitably married.
• Enjoyed the wedding feast, speeches, and dancing afterwards. Put some very tired babes to bed, and stayed up late catching up with Rob.

• Up early, read Citizen of the Galaxy to the babes to keep them from waking Robert & Thomas; pleasant, relaxing breakfast - off with Father to the suit shop to try & collect a Tuxedo.
• Back, quick snack, mailed the airline about a left bag. Chewed mail quickly, off to a wedding practise: met the Rotti family and friends - lovely venue & sunny date. Back to the Rotti estate for a fine barbeque and met the soon to be extended family, very pleasant. Back home late. Stayed up talking with Rob & Thomas.

• Up early; pleased to see Tomaz' initial progress update on his LibreOffice on Android viewer work for Smoose / Collabora get posted.
• Packed, lots of driving to Gatwick, dropped the car at Grant & Anne's (kindly looking after it for us) - and got back to the airport with Grant. Checked in, lunch with the babes, and an Iceland air experience - very good for the babes - the first flight they will remember. In a confirmation that "how to fasten your seatbelt instructions" are a pointless annoyance - E. (six) having worked it out herself in a few seconds, un-promoted expressed dismay at having to watch her first instructional video segment on the topic: "that's obvious".

• Mail chew; Collabora Productivity is still looking for LibreOffice hackers to hire: "it could be you" as the UK National Lottery says (and the odds are way better).
• Partner call, sync. with Kendy & Andras before leaving for vacation tomorrow. Reviewed a nice easy-hack patch.
• Great to see Miklos' write-up of the great TextBox re-work he's just completed for CloudOn for 4.4 - checkout the screenshots of much improved round-trip interoperability and functionality.
• Up late clearing the decks, packing etc.

• Chased queued up patches & fixes for libreoffice 4.3.0. Built ESC bug stats, tested and reviewed more patches left/right. Paperwork / review etc. Built some stats, and wrote what we've been up-to; worked late. H. out for an award dinner, M. at cubs.

• Mail catchup; re-started performance tinderbox; bug triage. Lunch; team call, mail bits. Naomi off on her outward bound trip.

• Off to Church in the Park - which was rained off; family service. Great to meet Andy's lovely girlfriend, and catch up with the church family. Back for a pizza lunch. Slugged in the afternoon - watched Frozen. Bathed the babes, played BosWars, read stories, put people to bed. Pleased to see Welby's take on legislation.

• Slugged and tidied in the morning; amazed at George Carey's apparent but unexplained discovery of something new in the ancient theology of the end of life. As puzzled as Peter Saunders - and frustratingly no deeper grist to digest on the topic; I'd love to understand his view more deeply. As a more positive contribution if you're free Bridge the Gap - a walk (initially setup by my good wife) is raising money in Cambridge on September 14th for the local hospice.
• Bruce & Anne over for lunch, had a lovely time with them into the afternoon. Played games with the babes, bed.

• Up early; mail chewage, reviewed and merged some patches for LibreOffice 4.3.0 - out soon. Lunch. So irritated with having to remember to run nautilus to thumbnail newly edited files before attaching them to Evolution mail messages that I updated to GNOME 3.12 where that is fixed; Hopefully that won't screw up XFCE too badly and will give a more usable evolution.
• Loved the "Edit as new message" feature in new Evo.

• Mail chew; dug through bugs for 4.3 left & right, analysed a profile for a regexp related performance issue. Lunch; call with Philippe; ESC call, dinner, posted minutes.

• Mail chew, plugged away at bugs, completed the windows build; partner call, board call, poked at a tracker bug, poked through a few regression / MAB bugs.

• Mail chew, IM bits; checked profiles - avoiding XSLT got rid of the horrible perf. regression - good. Built next ESC agenda and adapted bug stats for the 4.4 era. Finished a partner pitch.
• Worked on my Windows 64bit build; foolishly installed a 64bit cygwin - it seems in contrast to Linux, where the 32bit path is less well tested and more flakey than the 64bit one, Windows is still catching up. Enjoyed Michael Stahl's Native Make for a faster build that worked nicely.

• Poked at mail, and a calc bug; dug into a filter prioritisation regression of my own creation; fixed by David, so wrote a unit test instead. Product team call, hackery, consulting team call.

• Off to All Saints for H's leaving service; pleasant. Back for lunch. Played with the babes in the afternoon - put them to bed. Matthew & Suzanne came over for a pleasant dinner together.

• Poked at the kitchen wiring variously; MCB tripping problem went away but for no good reason - very irritating indeed - still seems to work. Out to see Hannah's paintings exhibited. Back to tidy bedrooms & finish homework. Watched Tintin with the family; put babes to bed.
• Backed up Photos from the last months; poked at a MAB briefly.

• Mail triage, filed some performance easy hacks lots of nice ways to get stuck into LibreOffice still open there.
• Lunch. Poked friends for Boston hackfest venues. Set about updating my Windows 7 to a 64bit flavour; now that installing a 32bit system on 64bit hardware passes the Ministry of False Economies - it seems few people test that use-case.
• Dinner, took babes to Friday Club, played BosWars with E. put babes to bed, hair cut, brain-dump / de-brief with Kendy.

• Off to visit the Dentist with the family; amused to hear of the 'Dental Age', as an adjunct to 'Mental Age' etc. (in the context of when to start the teenage brace torture). Wondered if there is a Dental Middle Age before The grinders cease because they are few.
• Partner call, sync. with Kendy; mail catchup, estimation. Took H. to Rock Solid in the evening, one to one with Arun.

• Mail; contract bits, sync with Nick, partner call; remarkably efficient TDF board call, J. out: worked late. Snicked in some more performance improvements before finding the algorithmic problem that makes all of that a waste of time.

• Unwound E-mail, poked at my credit card company - maxed out by AirBnB it seems. Dug around for some details for an easy hack or two.

• Mail chew, compiling things left/right, reviewed Norbert's nice fix for flash/bang during unit testing on Mac. Lunch; team meeting.
• Poked at icecream's ICECC[20770] 14:43:15: got exception 17 (192.168.1.113) message with Lubos - seems the host ran out of memory during the compile - C++ can do that to you it seems.
• Pleased to see the nice reporting of Bjoern Lundel's work on implementable file formats highlighted.

• Off to NCC, helped Clara with the older kids - fun. Back for a quick game; pizza lunch. Out to a baptism service in the afternoon; on to take the family to see David's (by now) rather nicely appointed home; tea & cake there. Home, put babes to bed.

• Shuffled rooms, and off to the venue; talked with each other for a while outside; met Laurent which was great; got in eventually - set too at the hacking.
• Plugged away at configmgr to try to stop it allocating interrogating and freeing UNO object wrappers left and right. After a day of work managed to rescue some 9% from the headless startup / exit - hopefully making the performance graphs go in the right direction.
• Good to see other misc. French contributors turn up as well, encouraging, and great to hear the mix of languages of people being helped with the code.
• Bid a sad 'bye to the guys, and set off for home; got to the Eurostar terminal, met a fashion journalist, and accosted by a family interested in my kcachegrind output - who turned out to be enthusiastic LibreOffice users: handed out stickers variously.

• Up earlyish, breakfast on the hoof, and off to the venue. Really great to be hosted in such a nice space. Met up with Charles, Sophie, an interesting chap from MIMO, Mohamed-Ali from Cap Gemini, gave some journalists a bit of a technical flavour of 4.3, poked at getting a guy setup.
• Pizza lunch, caught up with David O - who just un-screwed-up gerrit by discovering that the safe looking 'commit' and 'rollback' operations were no-ops for our use-case. Caught up with Italo.
• Hacked away at performance, trying to nail a half a percent here and there on startup; certainly some law of diminishing returns when staring at the profile there; occasionally enlightened by finding something truly silly.
• Out for dinner in the evening, with the team; back to the hotel eventually, sleep.

• Mail chew; prepped for travelling to Paris today for the LibreOffice Paris Hackfest.
• Interested to read a great article from Markus on Open Source & OOXML.
• Registered for the LibreOffice conference here.
• Into Cambridge, dropped some paperwork with Doree, onto the station to meet Andrzej and to the Eurostar while hacking on tiled rendering. Disabled persona image load in headless mode.
• Train to Paris, met up with Markus at the station, tube to the hotel, met up with Norbert & his nephew, out for some pleasant crepes together, and on to an Irish pub where Kendy joined us; bed late.

• Quartet practise in the morning, E. fingers getting stronger. Mail chew, call with Andrzej, good to catch up with his tiled rendering work. Lunch. Booked AirBnB-ness in Bern for the LibreOffice conference. Wrote a Linux Format column. Lovely dinner with the family.

It is great to see Microsoft's OOXML SDK project open sourced today; clearly while Collabora Productivity backs ODF as the preferred document format - we're pleased to see more FOSS appear out there in this space.

So what is it ? - Microsoft just open-source'd just under nine thousand lines of C#, with around a hundred thousand lines of code generated from the OOXML schemas. It is under an Apache 2.0 license, which seems reasonable (though I'd prefer a copy-left).

Where is it ? - The OOXML SDK is hosted at github - a great place to get distributed, non-hierarchical, peer based community involvement. Unfortunately the free-flowing goodness of github has an un-necessary roadblock that goes with it, hopefully one day people generally will learn.

Will LibreOffice use it ? (no) - Well mostly no; we have our own internal parsing mechanisms written in C++, this C# code targets the Common Language Runtime which has a different scope. We also have an efficient, and tuned internal document model that doesn't match even our ODF XML format - for example repeated formula are stored in groups to assist with OpenCL calculations so even if languages matched, switching to another representation would make little sense.

Will LibreOffice use it ? (yes) Having said that the OOXML SDK includes a rather nice validator. In recent years Markus, a Collabora engineer, has been developing an awesome torture test that loads fifty-thousand documents and re-exports them to umpteen formats consuming a big machine for around five days. One of those export formats is OOXML, after export we like to validate those to try to avoid interoperability regressions. New and improved validation can only help there, particularly the ability to go beyond a simple schema validation to check extra constraints. OOXML / Strict validation would also be lovely. Naturally we need Mono support (which I hear is coming) since all our headless automated tests run under Linux. We also currently allow configuration with --with-export-validation that validates the output from all of the unit tests that are run during compilation - it would be useful to have a command-line tool for this too.

What about ODF ? - ODF still rocks just as much of course. One feature I particularly like is Flat ODF which lets you express an entire document, images and all as a single XML file; in LibreOffice that has comparable performance to zipped ODF.

Is there an ODF equivalent ? - of course ! Generating and parsing ODF or Flat ODF is really pretty simple using any number of platforms and toolkits for ZIP / XML and in-memory DOM models. Then again there is benefit to re-using and adding to semantic sugar around that. In the C# / CLR world you can use AODL, or if Java floats your boat Apache's ODF Toolkit which recently had a new release.

What about validation ? - currently our automated testing tends to use Alex Brown & Cedric Bosdonnat (of SUSE's) nice Office-o-tron which handles both ODF and OOXML, a nice combination to be commended to the OOXML SDK.

Who should I start stoning ? - From my perspective ODF wins the standards beauty contest here hands down, but it's always good to have more developers working in the open and working together. If we have fixes for the SDK I suppose we'll try to contribute them back to github somewhere. Obviously our primary focus is always ODF, as an enabler for the primary goal of a better LibreOffice, and Free Software in every productivity environment. Having said that, we increasingly store and preserve OOXML attributes we have little use for in LibreOffice to re-export in order to ensure high fidelity round-trips. Better validation will be appreciated for that too.

• Mail chew, ESC bug-stat. churn, chased a crash inconclusively, poked Italo; reviewed some code. Lunch.
• Pleased to see talk of Microsoft releasing an Android Phone. Hopefully that will put to bed the threatening of other ecosystem participants to extort unreasonable, and un-earned royalties. Then again the ALv2 is really not a helpful license in this regard. Surely its about time Android had a more reciprocal (preferably weak-copy left) license than ALv2. Looking forward to seeing the hardware.
• Dinner, took M. to Cubs (geo-caching), back to play the older babes at BosWars, worked late; bed.

• Mail chew, weekend catchup, lunch. Team meeting, gap, another team meeting, chat with Markus. BosWars in the evening with the babes before bed.

• Up late, kids playing Bos Wars (the modern chess I suppose). Out to Pound Lane Free Church as NCC are all away at an event.
• Home, quick lunch in the garden; got going on E's sixth' birthday party. Much cleaning, preparation. Lots of party games, food, big water pistol fight in teams; much fun had by all. More gaming, put babes to bed.

• J. Mowed lawn, got Bos Wars setup for the babes; Barbeque lunch, lots of doing not very much in the sun, very relaxing.

• Mail chew, stats building, partner call. Lunch. Customer call, dug at a problem with a unit test briefly.
• Thrilled to see sanity apparently being promulgated down the stack from the US Supreme Court on the topic of Software Patents.

• Train into Cambridge - but it didn't arrive; shared a taxi with three other ladies; into the office to meet a friendly partner, talked happily for a while, Nandos for lunch, and a tour of Cambridge.
• Back for ESC call, All Hands meeting, Advisory Board call, then out for dinner with Neil, Guy, Philip, Rob & on for a drink. Avoided the appallingly late Stagecoach coach, and train home.

• Birthday presents / cards at breakfast - lovely. Plugged at another performance issue. Lunch. Back to some admin. Dinner - thrilled to have Baked Alaska - my favourite desert, J. has learned to make it.
• Amused to see Caolan's graphical illustration of the home stretch of the Dialog Conversion task going on on master.

• Built ESC bug stats, dealt with board mail; chat with Thorsten. Finally unwound the SfxItemPool problem, and got the 5x speedup I was looking for, albeit with some size wasteage due to the legacy binary file-format used in editeng for copy/paste.
• Lunch; work setting up a partner; scanning of printouts etc. Dinner, read stories, worked late, left some profiles running overnight.

• Mail catchup; new headphones arrived: disposed of the versions I've been eeking out: with no foam, crackly microphone etc; wow - comfort. Sync. call with Florian.
• Fascinated by the trends of Degrees for Women.
• Really pleased to William Gathoye's initiative of a LibreOffice Weekly News Lots to write about each week of course, looking forward to issue #99.

• NCC, Tony speaking on work/life balance and the importance of time management for deliberate living. Pizza lunch, slugged over the afternoon and ferried babes from parties; watched Frozen with the babes, nice - but not so clear to me why its such a hit ?

• Present opening with Elizabeth who is six (clever as clever). Off to Dinosaur Park with Sue, Clive & kids - great to catch up with them. Enjoyed a fine day together. Fish and chips in the car on the way home.
• Really pleased to see Andrzej's LibreOfficeKit Gtk widget - coming along nicely - though it needs some tiling goodness I suspect.

• Mail chewage, debugged a unit test hang fruitlessly, gdb / python running out of virtual address space (having loaded ~every bit of LibreOffice + debugging symbols in) with a segv; should really run gdb in gdb but ... call with Kendy, lunch. Got some text sorted & sent out finally.
• Finally filed openSUSE conference expenses in the right format.

• Mail dredging, encouraged to see Bloomberg doing cool things with the Oculus Rift.
• Plugged away at some LibreOfficeKit patches to improve and fix a few things. Dinner. Poked Ted to try to secure a venue for the awesome Boston LibreOffice Hack-fest (July 26-26th (probably)).

• Up; contract work, partner call, board call. Dinner, partner call. Pleased to see Joyent doing the right thing and dropping it's contributer agreement.

• Mail catch-up, partner call, team meeting, build ESC bug stats. Handed a chunk of fun hacking to Tor to get back to the admin. Wondered why the tool to do P2V conversions on Windows XP installs doesn't do this to educate the image about different controllers.

• Mail chew, catchup; much of the day consumed getting E. to and from hospital to have her last cast removed. Worked late.

• NCC, Calan & Julie's marrige / blessing thing - lovely to see them so smart & happy. Home for lunch. Slugged, read God's Smuggler to the babes. Catch-up with the parents, called Grant & Anne. Bed.

• Couldn't sleep in the morning, decided to hack instead, read up on SfxItemPool and discovered that non-poolable items were causing hideous performance grief on import. Chewed away at fixing that; got some 4x+ speed win for larger write docs.
• Out to help David move into his new home, lots of fun; Used the B&Q/Herz rental thingit - which was interesting; lots of lugging of good things; great to see David's nice new home. Pizza dinner in the garden, home; bed.

• Mail, contract review; fun; worked late.

• Mail chew, monthly management meeting; ESC call - great to see all open action items closed for once - clearly having a week off is a good thing. Crunched more stats.
• Great to read Markus' post on Property Mapping for charts in LibreOffice 4.3 - giving the user control predictable control over properties like colours used in the chart.

• Calls with Florian, Philippe, partner, bits of mail and hackery in between times; updated misc. stats left & right.

• Mail chew; built ESC stats. If I was going to create a new product I wouldn't name it after a serially mis-pronounced word like "Yosemite", but perhaps this is indeed the way to beef up the gnostic cult of Apple. Is Sedburgh or Llanelli next ?
• Lunch. Catch-up with Markus, then Jessica - nice to talk again after a long time apart. Sync. with Tor. Dinner, met with Arun.
• Checked on the largo valgrind thrash - wow, systems (& libreoffice) is much more valgrind clean these days - 26k traces with 0 errors, vs. ~60 with an error of some kind; chased a few issues idly. One silly caused 300k errors in a single document; fun.

• Mail chew; got a live build again, lunch, team meeting, took E. to have her plaster sawn off, and her pins removed - much screaming somewhat terrifying the registrar I suspect; afterwards when asked did it hurt: "no" - extraordinary; either that or gas & air works better than expected. An interesting thought - if an anaesthetic could remove any recollection of the pain, but not the pain itself - would people use it ? live for the moment - afterwards.
• Plugged away at work in the evening, wrote LXF column on GSOC. Dave Richards from Largo kindly donated some time on his new 80 thread monster machine: we can easily & usefully absorb that running our import/export tests through valgrind.

• Off to NCC, helped Claire with the kids downstairs; back for lunch; and out to a Laura's cake-bake / stall thing in Stechworth. Borrowed pressure washer from Nigel and set too on the remaining muck on the patio outside; got quite into gardening for perhaps the first time ever. Taught the girls how to make concrete & re-point the broken bits.

• Up early for some Go-Ape goodness with H. in Thetford Forest. Good fun, and nice to spend some time with just H. before her entry into the world of upper school. Lunch, played in the playground, home.

• Took a day off with the family; mail chew in the morning. Off to Anglesey Abbey for a wander in the gardens, babes played cricket, hide & seek - with Janine, George & Ben; Lee-Anne wandered around. Picnic.

• Mail chew, built the latest pieces of code, off into Cambridge; profiled this and that; caught up with Tracie & the office team.
• Great to meet up and talk with Ben & Graham from Linux Voice - got a paper copy of their magazine - and immediately got a solution for the Windows XP PtoV migration I so badly need to do to have access to my legacy testing environment on Linux; great stuff.

• More build, testing, marvelling at the awesome work done by Markus, Tamas & Kendy. Mail catch up, partner call, TDF Board meeting.
• Boggled at silver coated Ethernet cables: one born every minute: All audio cables are directional. The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. Arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality. For best results have the arrow pointing in the direction of the flow of music. For example, NAS to Router, Router to Network Player. I have no idea how the engineers live with themselves.

• Built ESC bug stats; turns out Thursday is a public holiday. Great to see Andrzej's LibreOfficeKit work for GSOC starting to bear fruit with a Gtk document viewer widget underway - hopefully for GNOME Documents integration in due course; exciting.
• Emily over & babes watched Tangled in the afternoon; partner call in the evening.

• Worked the bank holiday; mail triage, breakfast, call with Kendy, Tamas, Tor; rendering and import profiling. Worked late.

• Off to NCC, Tony presenting a rather sensible plan on how to explore accomodating our growing church, at some length. Barbeque lunch, slugged vigorously and watched a fly on the wall documentary about waste water treatment; interesting. Bed early, dreaming of sewerage.

• Mail chew, slogged away at overcoming misc. build problems on Windows, after a lot of aggravation turned out I had some bogus glew DLLs in my user directory; fixed up path generation issues and suddenly the cppunit tests sprung to life.
• Poked at some GL / event issue for Markus, merged an ODS import performance fix, and ran some more profiling overnight.

• Booked the Eurostar for the Paris Hackfest - 27th-28th of June; looking forward to it - it should be fun.
• SOW review, filed an annoyance as an easy hack. Worked late.

• Mail chew, contract work, lunch. ESC call, pleasant catch-up with Chris Halls after a long break. Dinner, stories. Saw that Mat M has made a great start on a tool to Find LibreOffice code from dialog strings which is really neat.
• Amazed at the World's smallest nano motor nonsense; have they never heard of the amazing, self-assembling nano-electro-mechanical machine that is ATP Synthase and so polished there is almost no variation from bacteria to man. I'll sound like an old bearded hacker: "it's all been done before & better at that."

• Mail chew; found another 10% silly in ODS load-time thats worth getting rid of quickly. Partner call. Up late hacking at a fun parsing test.

• More calc ODS load performance prodding, found another couple of sillies and plugged away at them. Partner call, catch up with Philippe, chat with Florian & Sam. Bible study with Arun in the evening.

• Battled mail left / right, worked through some tasks, progress review call with Kendy & Markus, 2x team calls.
• Plugged away until late on Windows. Simply extraordinary that Windows' dlopen() call LoadLibrary not only appears to have a 260 character path limit (which we don't hit), but also a mystical, undocumented size limit based on the contents of PATH. Staggering, and horrifyingly awful not to be able to read the busted mess in-question to try to figure out how to work around it.
• Prodded at some silly performance pieces in calc ODS loading.

• Church for Hope's dedication service, home for a barbeque lunch, snoozed in the sun in the garden with J. very relaxing. Mended a broken swing; attacked babes with cold water. Amused having removed my soaked T-shirt, to be told by M. that I was odd because I didn't have any tattoes: o tempora! o mores!

• Off to Wicksteed Park with a set of girls to meet up with Claire & Alan & their brood. Much fun swinging on pirate ships, picnicing in the sun etc. Somehow managed to field 2x small, lost children weeping with no mothers in sight, and packed them off to the staff / police - heart rending.

• Mail chew, and nearly endless contract review; lunch, more dense verbiage chewing.

• Dropped babes at school; mail chew, train to London. Ran some profiles of large file LibreOffice / ODS loading - we need to migrate to the fastparser really. Met up with some old friends at Intel - good to catch up; on to another meeting, home late.

• Up late, rather groggy from lack of sleep; there is some irony that yesterday was the BBC's drive on "you should sleep more". Mail chew - and catchup from a day out. Partner call, TDF board call.
• Re-fitted the washing machine control electronics; Fitted new motor and re-assembled the Dyson - finally approaching the top of the household device energy peak again.

• Up rather early, drove to Bristol; a series of interesting OpenCL talks from various people; in particular great to hear about SPIR work - doing the hard/slow crunching where it is needed.
• Gave my talk; slides (as Hybrid PDF) here:
• Out for drinks afterwards with a great set of guys from CPU, to GPU, to FPGA vendors. Drove home exceedingly late for several hours.

• Mail chew, checked and pushed the i18npool speedup that should make mixed Asian text input snappier in 4.3. Team meetings variously. Drove to Oxford to meet Robert, as a way-point to Bristol for IWOCL.

• NCC: Ben & Miriam speaking on their work abroad - interesting. Home for lunch with Arun, Henna, Nigel & Naomi, fun. DVD later, quick tea, out for a drink with Ben, Mike & Nate in the evening - sleep.

• Up lateish; eggs for breakfast, slugged with the babes. Lunch, out to see Hannah, Nick & Joni - had a fine wander around Reach, cakes, back to our house for home-made Pizza.

• Mail chew, admin backlog catchup; chased some bugs, dug at a performance issue.
• Interested to see the Ubuntu Podcast Bjoern and I were interviewd in posted; some LibreOffice fodder there.

• Walked babes to school, and enjoyed M's Ancient Greeks assembly. Mail chew, partner call, mail production. Started work on an 'infinite monkeys' regression test: find buttons in the UI and press them, type random text into boxes we find, spew events left and right etc. Made a start at least - turns out I should have learned to read asian languages if I wanted to understand random UCS2 words.
• ESC call; wrote up minutes; worked late.

• Washing machine continuing to wash without making enough noise (like the startling absence of noise in the Prius - I feel that a 1k RPM spin should make significant noise - perhaps we should shake the wall & floor electronically).
• Mail chew, built ESC bug stats & agenda - looks like we lost a few MABs as 4.1 reached end of life; good.
• Great to see the Hexus write-up of the great work done by the LibreOffice team from Collabora / MCW / AMD team on Calc / OpenCL integration and core re-factoring.
• Got through the admin backlog to the point of boredom; partner call, merged a few patches.

• Prius+ 12V battery flat - hmm, another instance of Toyota's preferred (semi-audible) warning noises on exit ? or something else? Set too charging it in situ.
• DirectLine generously paid both the recovery fees required to get us home after an initial quibble; the moral - don't assume that RAC recovery recovers you in case of an accident, and don't assume that your insurer will pay a recovery fee they did not arrange.
• Mail chew; worked on a proposal; lunch. More slideware etc. Partner call.
• Dinner, Arun over for bible study; re-plumbed in, and connected washing machine - amazingly quiet spin: almost no noise at all: extraordinary, no obvious leaks either.

• Mail chewage; catch-up with Julian. Plugged away at the washing machine - cleaned the sleeves up and got the new bearings tapped into place. Lunch, team meetings more mail. Machined some new metal-work to replace the bits that are rusted through. Worked until late re-assembling the beastie of a machine - turned out I'd pulled off the vital spade from the heater element while disassembling: urgh, eventually M4 tapped the protruding end of it and bolted the connector on.

• Off to NCC via picking up N's friend Cassidy. Simon spoke, back for a big lunch with B & A. Managed to drive one bearing out afterwards by cranking and grinding the driving rod; attacked the other - no joy - an hour+ of attacking it together with grinding wheels later - managed to crack it, and drive it out too - phew.
• Poked at the car with Bruce, played with the kids a bit, tea, put babes to bed, sleep.

• Horrible night, lots of poor young people suffering on the ward around the place, woken each hour to tend to E. but by the morning E. getting out of bed and trotting around much more confidently. Turned my back & found her on a tricycle (doh). Discharged remarkably rapidly - good; home.
• Rang round for a bearing puller, no joy until I got to Bruce - who has four, booked them for tomorrow. David Mansergh came round, enjoyed playing with the power-washer cleaning the 'scale' off the washing machine innards, and (inadvertently) cleaning the patio underneath - what a machine. Bed early, exhausted.

• Merged a nice patch from Jeroen Nijhof to speedup the German comment counting - hopefully we can get much more recent and accurate stats there if we're lucky. Mail chew. Call with Kendy. Tried whole set of friends and neighbours for a bearing puller - no joy; will have to make one & weld it in I suspect.
• Call from J. - E. broken her arm badly and off to hospital in an Ambulance, operating theatre etc. Collected babes from school, fed them & hot-footed it to catch up with a brave baby. Stayed on the ward with her - tending variously to the needs; hourly checks on fingers. Rather a nice ward.

• Train to Weybridge with Tim, and back into central London for a rather encouraging partner meeting; fun. Worked through paper and legalese on the train back. Read stories, dinner, partner call late.

• Mail chew, poked dwarfprofile, admin. Lunch - got the washing machine fully apart finally, now to drive the bearings out. 2x partner calls back to back, bit of research. Board call.

• Mail chew, built ESC bug stats with a new method to capture all components, ignore NEEDINFO / UNCONFIRMED - hopefully over time it will improve things.
• Lunch, attached a new hot water isolator to the washing machine outlet so we can have hot water again; good.
• Plugged away at dwarfprofile, fixing the duplicated accounting for inlines, and building an address space map / tree.
• When do you have to hit your washing machine with a sledge-hammer to make it work ? When your main bearing is corroded and seized-up with a vengence; finally got the spider's shaft through the main bearing - by breaking the bearing apart with screwdriver & pliers: one more bearing to go.

• Recovered my laptop from black-screen of picking the wrong GPU to drive the wrong display by prodding fglrx. Mail chew; pushed my openSUSE slides.
• Pleased to see Cor celebrating ten years of support and services (now) around LibreOffice in the Netherlands; great to have him as a Collabora partner.
• Lunch; product team meeting.
• Keith Curtis did a nice second part of his write up of the HiDPI work that landed in recent LibreOffice 4.2.x's - I love his take: "In fact, Caolán appears to be an email alias that 3 developers are attached to." - it often seems like that.
• Linux Format Column at some length. Dinner. Spent much of the evening disassembling our Hotpoint WMA40 washing machine to replace the bearings - unfortunately, that was (supposedly) the easy part. Seems like I'll need to do some metal bashing to replace some of the most corroded steel-work too; ho hum.

• Stumbled off to NCC, enjoyed Claire's howto read the Bible bits; back for a fine lamb lunch, slept in J's lap for a while while babes banged about happily; Emily over. Dinner, started to poke at disassembling the washing machine to get at the bearings - the joys of youtube videos on the topic make for an incredibly pleasant experience vs. the manuals of old. Gordon Sermon on < href="http://www.parkstreet.org/library/sermons/series/Samuel-Series">1 Samuel, Cabin Pressure, sleep.

• Up early for slide completion; breakfast; off to the conference - vigorous rain now. Gave talk on the history and status of LibreOffice, slides (as a large ~48Mb hybrid PDF) and Video of associated rambling:
• One thing I noticed about openSUSE was the rather nice We Believe poster (in fact there was some sort of cube made out of three points but it read a bit like this). Crisp and punchy.
• Fine lunch, met up with some Greeks & Brazilians nearby; caught up with Wookey & Jan W. Got a tour of the City (jammed full of young Catholics singing modern Hymns) - wandered the walls - an amazing place.
• Bus to the airport, poked at some German comments for Tobias on the way back; discovered there are some huge swathes of comment-free code these days; even VCL, added directory white-listing to find-german-comments to speed it up. Home rather late.

• Up before dawn, taxi, flight to Dubrovnik - bus into the beautiful town - what a location ! Checked in at the University & met the cheery organisers; caught up with lots of old friends. Out for dinner in the evening with Andrew & Rich, wandered the old city a little, back for a beer & up late working on slides.

• Mail chew; started pondering an openSUSE conference talk for Saturday, and booked ground travel for tomorrow; fun. Lunch. ESC meeting. More slideware hackery.

• Mail chew, contract review; red-lining etc. Poked at some test builds of LfC 4.2, lots of bug-fixing going on there (and in 4.2.x) from the team.
• Pleased to see the freedesktop summit write up, particularly the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP feature; if only we had had less pushback, and more pragmatism a decade ago on this. From a LibreOffice perspective, I'd still like a ':' separated set of features to integrate with, so eg. we get LibreOffice/gtk+ integration under LXDE without having to hard-code an endless series of desktop names with matching preferred toolkits into the code.
• Partner calls back to back; Emily over for dinner; read stories to babies.

• Back to work, mail catchup, sync. with Kendy. Great to see the line-up of LibreOffice GSOC projects (thanks to Fridrich / Cedric for their help there).
• Great to see Honza's work on LTO in Firefox, would love to compare code quality vs. WebKit by doing it for them too; but tantelised by the prospect of a similar write-up for LibreOffice.
• William Manley kindly pointed me at his Bloat Blame tool as a useful alternative to Dwarf Profile - tried it out on a biggish LibreOffice binary but seems it needs optimising first.
• Lydia & Janice over for dinner; worked late, finally ordered the replacement bearings for the washing machine: sounds like they're grinding themselves to bits finally (after 10+ years of use and 4x children's washable nappies) - got some new seals & brushes for good measure.

• Up early; insured the car; returned hire-car to Leeds Airport, drove home; cruise control makes long journeys so much easier. Arrived home, checked mail, ran some builds overnight.

• Easter Egg hunt in the garden in the morning - much fun. Walked into town for a service at the URC, caught up with some of the next generation of hackers. Home for a huge lunch; out for a walk in the afternoon up and across the river and back. Up late with the family.

• Up early, out to Brimham Rocks, climbed up and down, over and round lots of wonderful rocks. On to meet Chris, Joy, Auntie Nicki & family for lunch, out for a walk around a reservoir. Home to see Robert: not there, slugged variously. Up late talking to Bob.

• Into Leeds to look at a series of cars; got sucked into the 7 seat, Prius+, took a test drive, and got a reasonably cheaper second hand one; an interesting experience driving it - takes some getting used to from a manual-shift version.
• Home for quick lunch, out to Sandra's for some swimming, and spent a while fixing their internet connection. Back for fish & chips, put babes to bed.

• Poked at mail, code; cars. Setup a meeting with a chap in Leeds with a car: amazed at the amount of non-advertised nonsense involved - a very dodgy car from a very odd area; home in a hurry. Lunch. Tried to research on-line, caught up with sberg on comprehensive interface descriptions.
• Out with Julia for a pre-wedding-aniversary dinner in town, rather lovely to have some time together.

• Up, 8am partner call, off for a family walk near Mother's old home, fine picnic in the sun, wandered along a (supposedly) Roman road nearby. TDF board call on return, poked at mail, dwarfprofile bits and code generation.

• Relaxing day out, checked out the Kia Carens - rather impressed vs. the Toyota Verso: much less lameness removing cheap features from the bottom end of the range.
• Wwalking in a forest nearby - with some fine ruined follies, streams to jump across etc. lovely sunny day, very relaxing.
• Off to see what Toyota is doing with their latest Verso; disappointed with the design, quality & feature-set vs. the Kia: a shame. Home, mended bit-rot on Father's ancient XP PC, watched a TV series, talked, bed.

• 8am partner call - if only all holidays started this way; good to catch up though. Breakfast, brain-dump with Vince, poked at mail, team call, partner call, spent a little while sorting Dad's tools in the garage with J. another team call; dinner; bit more mail catchup.

• Off Knaresborough URC for the morning service, rather a good bash; talked to some of the young people: "oh, we use LibreOffice" - joining up the islands of cluefulness. Back for a fine roast lamb lunch. Moved Father's oak, teak, and other hard wood collection from a pile under plastic in the garden onto the racking in the new shed; phew. Watched Little Women in the evening with the babes.

• Up; mail chew, packed the car, and took the train to my parents, with J. driving the four kids.
• Spent quite a while in the train trying to answer the question: "Why is LibreOffice so big ?" by doing a bit more hackery on MJW and my (long paused) dwarfprofile to the point that it generates at least some degree of blame around code size caused by C++ inlining etc. Always a bit concerning to see include/ consuming twice the size of the source code directories, but prolly my code needs some debugging.
• Pleasant evening with the parents.

• Chewed over busted car, poked insurance, setup replacement, emptied it of contents; mail chew - partner call, contract review. Dinner - five seat rental car delivered, babes greatly enjoyed hiding in the boot etc. Worked until late.

• Up early; still interested at Mozilla's lack of positive engagement with either their newer tranche of critics, or their legitimacy problem. Interested by a cogent analysis of the issue; and also to see Brendan finally comment himself. I hope the spectre of legal issues doesn't get in the way of truth telling & reconciliation.
• Lunch; ESC call - interrupted at the end by a call from the wife, just involved in a car crash - thank God all four babes and better half still in one bit. Marked time until their return, posted minutes.
• Encouraged to see a nice new LibreLogo portal with some fine content.
• Babes returned, comforted & fed them, put them to bed.

• Mail chew; partner call; sync. with Andras, lunch, partner call, sync. with Matus; partner call. J. out counselling, worked late; bed.

• Up; mail chew; document review, call with Tim etc. Lunch. Sync. with Philippe, team call, more work; Dinner with babes, worked late.

• Up earlyish, breakfast, mail check and internet check - flakey; hmm - out to Saxmundham to discover the sweet-shop was shut-down; had tea in a tea-shop instead. Back to Bruce & Anne's, packed the car; drove home.
• Took some of my scrap metal to a huge recycling depot nearby; now I understand why people steal lead & cables: it pays; so also good to see the new process: car numberplates, no cash payments, identity checks etc.
• Out for a dinner with the family in the evening at Prezzo - to celebrate a term of hard work by four wonderful little girls; three music exams, good progress at school, and fine reports: a privilege to be involved in their lives; Thank God for Tesco vouchers.

• Up earlyish; breakfast; off to Aldeburgh CofE - rather a good service, but the vicar sadly retiring in a week. Nice to return to where we were married. Back to meet Chris, Carrie & babes - who moved in next-door & see their plans. Lunch. Watched the boat-race - some better solution to avoiding clashes is clearly needed - perhaps some longer out-riggers up front or something. Video in the evening.

Overview

Last night I was appalled and saddened to see that Mozilla's principled decision to do the right thing, and stand up to a savage and vindictive witch hunt, seemingly conducted and cheer-lead both by those employed by Mozilla Corp. and others outside the organisation, had finally worn people down enough to do something that looks horribly illiberal and which seems to betray the very basis of critical protections of freedom of political views. By which I mean accepting Brendan's (apparently principled) resignation. Of course, normally the real reasons behind the scenes are opaque and I've no view or insight into Brendan: his strengths and weaknesses for the role, a great technical CV, industry, leading insight etc. doesn't necessarily make for a great CEO. Quite possibly poor communication around an issue like this is a good enough reason to remove support such that resignation is the only option. However, the communication around the resignation and the new status quo was equally if not more horribly shambolic - lets see how that trend continues. All in all it makes it look like lots of people acted for all the wrong reasons to get a terrible outcome.

Personally I'm a supporter of traditional marrige; but also for reasons of basic justice a supporter of the UK's Civil Partnerships - perhaps a more nuanced view than is possible to express in the profoundly polarized US political system whose aggression seems to significantly infect social discourse; neither do I understand 2008's Prop 8. If your views differ, then my plan is to try to disagree respectfully & charitably.

Much as I admire Matthew Garret & his technical work, his take on the topic

The point is that the community didn't trust Brendan, and Brendan chose to leave rather than do further harm to the community.

leaves out the rather vexed problem of accurately divining what the community wants. I suspect that there was a concerted campaign outside - but more problematically inside Mozilla Corporation to bring the project into disrepute and thus to bring pressure to bear to achieve this objective. There is talk of a 70,000 signature petition - which sounds a lot until you consider a user-base of 450 million. Is it acceptable when sub 0.02% of users sign a petition to act this way ? I suspect it's an unrealistic view that the harm to Mozilla and by extension their great work on the open web is all finished and done with Brendan resigning; at least while an unaddressed injustice is seen, by some, to have been done.

Cowardice ?

Scandal aside a more interesting question to me has been raised:

As a volunteer moderating the Facebook page, it was evident that we had many users complaining and very little supporters. Now that Brendan has resigned, everybody has all of a sudden come out from a shadow. Unexpectedly to say at the least, is that we've got users telling us that we were no longer protecting Freedom of speech and that rights are taken away. Where have these people been hiding?

And it's a good one. Why didn't I speak up for Brendan before ? In my case there were three-fold reasons: first and primarily a lack of time, second a conviction that Mozilla was riding the storm, doing the right thing and that things would die down in time; but there was also a small cowardly fear of knock-on witch-hunting. Last time I discussed anything even tangentially related to this topic I was soundly and (to my view unreasonably) accused of all manner of horrible things. That has rather a chilling effect on the willingness to engage. Furthermore, that dialog is often highly emotive cf. the meritocracy kills hysteria.

Some quotes

Normally when such matters are discussed my perspective is heavily criticized and dismissed as being from a "privileged white male" and thus beyond utterly irrelevant. Perhaps more tellingly, I'm not a Mozillan, and handling the mob is not an easy thing: Mitchell has my profound sympathy. So let me excerpt the following text from two Mozillans self-identifying as homosexuals (neither of whom share Brendan's views), (Planet Mozilla is interesting too) today. In particular I excerpt Things Change, the Mozilla CEO (from K Lars Lohn, first struck out as 'moot' and now removed - checkout the planet for it's last vestiages [Update: now restored but missing the update wrt. threatening] ), those thoughtful quotes, as any, best read in their original context:

Since my involvement long ago I also became comfortable with being gay... I've also come to realize that change, isn't always progressive, and what looks like progress can hide other dangers. Progress is self-validating for the thing labeled progressive, and its too easy to dismiss those that seem to stand in its way but that is no more right than any other form of censorship, ... I've seen recently, too many comments that want to devalue people who stand in the way of progress as exactly the thing that they are trying to fight. LGBT issues were marginalized, and oppressed by society. Oppression is wrong, but don't be too quick to think that marginalized groups can't marginalize others, pushing views aside because they fail to meet socially acceptable criteria, whether that criteria is progress, equality or religion and heteronormativity. We might just all realize that for all someones faults, combining ideas, and not combating them, might just result in a new idea, a new change for all.

and

I am a gay employee of the Mozilla Corporation, and I support my company's decisions regarding the selection of CEO. This doesn't mean that I'm entirely comfortable with the selection, but not because I think Brendan Eich is a threat, but instead because of the public relations repercussions. ... I have friends that hold political opinions that are antithetical to me – I do not exclude them from my life, I embrace my friends. I neither support nor understand their beliefs, but doesn't mean that I throw them away. I cannot condone holding a grudge in perpetuity. To do so would be leaving a wake of enemies behind me whereas I could instead have them as allies beside me where we do agree. ... I say to the larger community calling for the ouster of Brendan Eich, “please don't succumb to the knee jerk reaction.” I did at first, but with some thought, I realize that we need to focus on the future not exact retribution for the past.

Particularly interesting in this latter post is the experience of the witch hunt even against a thoughtful, balanced, gay writer like this, K Lars writes (in bold) To the people that have threatened me about this posting, I can only look at you quizzically, laugh and then walk away.

The Secret Ballot Box as an alternative to mob rule

In the presence of such a difficult situation to unwind it is interesting to examine the Mozilla Foundation's governance - in particular the board that makes these tough calls. In general the idea that a freedom loving organisation should be run by a small (now even smaller), self-appointing board seems extraordinarily problematic from a legitimacy perspective.

It appears that there is a clear pattern of intimidation and harassment of people engaging on one side of this topic. Now, perhaps (as anger seems to build in the other direction cf. input.mozilla.org I hope we don't return to a sadder period of hostility in the other direction, [Update 2014-04-07: input now seems to be a horribly depressing place for all moderates, I'd avoid reading it]) some lose-lose-lose situation where we all end up more polarised would be desparately sad. Either way, the situation is not unexpected - coercive parties of all stripes hate secret ballots so...

My suggestion would be to adopt best-practise, re-use the existing, hopefully representative, meritocratic membership structures inside Mozilla and give those guys a fair (ie. STV) and secret ballot to allow Mozillans to choose those who govern them and to ensure that minority views of whatever kind are also respected and represented. Of course, quite possibly doing that will result in no change, but it will bring unarguable legitimacy to whatever solution eventually comes out of the political sausage machine; that seems to be sadly absent now.

I hope that a newly elected board would have the authority to make it transparently clear that Mozilla's important and valuable mission is rather orthogonal to promoting other unrelated agendas for everyone's sake.

Other links

Other interesting views from Mozillans at least for my future reference are: Tocqueville on the Freedom of Discussion in America, Sad day, Mozilla is not Chick-Fil-A, Recent Events, FAQtechism, Only what unites us, Freedom of speech in the Mozilla Community, Your Ire Is Mis-directed

Update 2014-04-07

Reading some of the more savage, vinctictive, angry and unpleasant anti-Mozilla / anti-Gay feedback more recently on the 'input' site I'm appalled to even appear to be on the same side of the argument. I'm more eager to respect those individuals who expressed civilised concerns about Brendan's appointment than that extreme. Then again, there are quite a few thoughtful more moderate posters who express their concerns well. Some do believe that promoting a position on this is a core part of Mozilla's mission now. Another thoughtful poster writes on speech and consequences.

Having said that, I'm still convinced this is fundamentally a slow-motion crisis of legitimacy, and nothing to do with anyone's rights, I believe it needs fixing in a way that addresses that.

• Cooked breakfast; played with babes, mail / web chew briefly; wrote a bit. Enjoyed more time with the babes; fine meal bed.

• Up early; train to Cambridge; Collabora Productivity Quarterly management meetings all day; really good to catch up with Philippe, Rob, Tracie, Mandy, Kendy & Andras - a great team; had a board meeting. Train home, and off to Aldeburgh.

• Up early; train to into London, spoke at the OpenSource Conference, met a lot of interesting / new people with Tim; home in the evening.

• Up early; mail chew, wrote Linux Format column on systemd. Lunch; partner call. Great to see Fridrich, Valek, David & co's Document Liberation project announced - also some pretty slides.
• TDF board call, partner call, another partner call; break; another partner call. Sleep eventually, woke in the night - read some appalling news on planet Mozilla, sleep again.

• Up early; into Cambridge; management meetings all day - good to catch up with the guys; out for a quick pub dinner in the evening, and back for a partner call. Admired Guy's photographic setup, caught up with Philippe; train home bed.

• Up early; mail chew, plugged away at weekend catchup. Call; took H. and N, out for their exams into Haverhill; stopped off for hot chocolate. Back for some work, quick dinner, bible study, back to work very late on slideware.

• Up too early, off to NCC; bid Dave & Emily goodbye; home for lunch. Pottered around in the afternoon, not doing much.

• Spent a day tidying things up; mounted the Dyson motor in the vice, spun it with the drill & ground down the commutator; replaced the brushes - jerry rigged a test harness: still rather impressive arcing; bother. Chat with Dad. Fitted lots of insulation into the attic with Naomi - just in time for the hot weather.

• Up early; last-minute practising with N. for her Violin Grade 2 today; mail chew, meeting setup. Worked through a funding bid. Amie Jane over for a sleep-over with E.

• Up early; mail chew, worked on an interview, contract etc. ESC call. Worked into the evening idly.

• Up early; mail chew, document review, sync. with Florian, Italo; partner bits; chopped down a document to file a bug. Call.
• Great to see the hard work done for Document Freedom Day, LibreOffice is a particularly helpful piece of migrating legacy data into the light with the stirling work Fridrich, Valek, David, and many have others with the compendium of legacy file-formats we can now rescue data from in LibreOffice.
• Great to see GNOME 3.12 and all the nice new features & polish there; fun to hear Karen's skills as a voice-over-(ist-(a?)) deployed to good effect too.

• Early morning partner call; dressed; mail chew, document shuffling, admin, paperwork; sync. with Philippe, calls with Muthu, and Matus. Lydia over for dinner, caught up with Janice, more work in the evening.

• Up early; a circuitous route into Cambridge with Markus, checked out the office, admired a number of Colleges together & lunch. Team meetings, sync. with Mandy, train home, more work. Farewell meal with family + Dave & Emily and fine evening together.

• Off to NCC; ran the older babes group with J. Home for lunch. Played with babes variously. Picked up Markus from the station in the evening; pizza dinner, and enjoyed each others' company until bed.

• Up earlyish; N. ill, so off into Cambridge to meet up with James, Helena & Rose with H. M. and E. - spent a great time at the Cambridge Science Festival - good fun. Into town for a pizza dinner later together; home, put babes to bed.

• Up early for partner call; sync. with Muthu & Andras.
• Ran the stats for LibreOffice contribution for Feburary - gitdm reports a busy month: 2926 commits, from 99 committers in 28 days. ~29 commits each, or 100 per day, ~4 per hour - beginning to approach the Linux Kernel's commit rate from 2010. Of course some things stand out such as Caolan's drive for coverity fixing and Noel Grandin (and other's) bool cleanups, unused removal and lint cleanups etc.
• Booked flights to the OpenSUSE conference.

• Up early; off into Cambridge, caught up with Patrick & others there. Met up with Oggi and off to Downing for some LibreOffice interviews for Keith's Movie of the book - should be interesting. Really lovely to see the Alma Mater again, Quaerere Verum: seek the truth - and you might find him:
• Back to the office for some b-roll, ESC call, met Dom & train home. Dinner, worked late; ran a profile for Ptyl, made a simple fix.
• Pleased by the Moonfleet Backgammon Board legend: Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima jactura arte corrigenda est or As in life, so in a game of hazard, skill will make something of the worst of throws..

• Up early, train into Cambridge, encouraging meeting for much of the morning; call during lunch, meeting with our lovely new HR team, partner call, TDF board call, unwound travel details, sorted out ESC bug stats / skeleton agenda.

• Up, to the mail, contract bits, call with Andras & Muthu. Sync. call with Philippe. Spent some time digging at flights between A, B, and C and worked out that being near an airport hub really is a wonderful thing.

• Up early; mail chew, estimation call; team meetings; beating back the mail mountain. Arun over for study in the evening.

• Off to NCC, helped out with the older kids downstairs. Had Jamie, Helen, Ben & Thomas around for lunch; babes played in the garden, enjoyed the company. Tea, put babes to bed, slept.

• Up lateish, into town to post expenses paperwork, played in the park with the babes. Back, for some slugging.

• Up early; practices, mail chew; dug at admin bits; signed up paperwork for Andras to join OASIS, good. Spent a little time digging into a sorting performance issue in calc, improved the behaviour of sorting long columns of identical formula a lot; wrote some regression tests too. Nice to go from minutes to seconds.
• Accepted at the IWOCL conference to present on LibreOffice / OpenCL spreadsheet acceleration; should be fun.

• Up; mail chew, sync. with Kendy; sync. with Andras; unwound some Sparkleshare oddness - I shouldn't try to use git in there... while the daemon is running I guess. Lunch, admin, ESC call. Dinner with the babes - lovely to see them again, bed.

• Up earlyish; packed, breakfast, drove to the venue. Paced the floor variously meeting people left & right. A final sausage lunch before leaving Germany; caught up with Andreas & Thomas, train / plane to the UK; started on E-mail. Finally got home, bed.

• Up, fine German-style breakfast; walked to the show with Tim, beating those in the car; booth duty, lots of hands to shake and introductions to make. Caught up with Thorsten - which was great. Enjoyed the free beer, if not the shameful automata at the party next-door; back to the appartment for some fine italian food, new card-games, E-mail and German Beer in the evening.

• Up unfeasibly early; coach to Stansted, flight to Hannover. Finally made it to the booth, caught up with Tim, Thomas and others. Caught up with Markus & Holger at OwnCloud. Lots more interesting potential customers and/or existing users of LibreOffice visited the booth, encouraging. Out for dinner with the team in the evening, back to the flat - tried to catch up with mail & work.

• Up; breakfast, off to NCC - Tim speaking enthusiastically. Back for lunch with Martin - enjoyed the sun, slugged around talking for much of the afternoon, fed and put babes to bed, packed for CeBIT.

• Up, breakfast with the family; out to Brandon forest for a bit of wandering around, picnic lunch & tree climbing with the babes. Back, bid Robert 'bye, watched a movie with the kids; pizza dinner, read stories, put babes to bed. Beat back the E-mail quickly.

• Up early; poked at mail, generated more of it myself; tested the latest Android builds; booked coach travel to/from CeBIT next week. Out for lunch with Bruce & Anne - lovely to spend some time with them.
• Back, caught up with Kohei - busily fixing things left and right; filed an easy hack, generated more mail. I wonder if these bad boys would make good icecream bricks to plug into the network to speed up LibreOffice builds.
• Poked at Keith / Eric's interesting X on OpenGL work. It makes me wonder if using software rendering / basebmp uniformly ~everywhere for rendering, with some limited OpenGL acceleration in LibreOffice and trimming our deep platform foo everywhere might be rather a good move.
• Robert over in the evening, good to talk with him until late.

• Up early; quick mail chew, into Cambridge - need a bigger laptop bag somehow I think. Sync. with Neil, lunch with Rob. Back, ESC call, posted minutes. Train home, dinner. Read babes stories, caught up with KeithP after a long gap - fun; bed.

• Up early; practise with babes, car scraping for J. etc. Mail chew. Discovered my non-functioning webcam, is a functioning webcam, except for some function-keypress to encourage the BIOS to let it show up to the party: good.
• Plugged away at detail; customer call, SOW-refactoring. Really pleased to be kindly invited to openSUSE Conference 2014 to talk about LibreOffice - hope to see you there in beautiful Dubrovnik.

• Up early, mail chew, more admin - wow, how boring my life is, printing, signing, scanning is a way of life it seems. Sync. with Rob, Tim, Kendy, spreadsheet-age; calls. Built ESC bug stats, worked late.

• Up early, mail chew. Call with Kendy, Timar, Miklos; lunch, team meeting #1 and #2, sync with Andras; wrote status, admin bits.

• Up late, feeling awful; off to NCC, back for a large lunch; slept and slugged for a chunk of the afternoon. Read stories to babies, and put them to bed.

• Up lateish; feeling somewhat awful, lungs filling with crud; Set to work on the dyson - replaced the brushes with H's help; hoover ran nicely until the brushes wore down to a circular profile, then roughness caused by the previous spring rubbing / arcing killed it again; drat. Call with the parents.
• Slugging, watched Enchanted with the babes. Got data and SSD transferred to new laptop in the evening; looking good at last though something of a luggable.
• Thrilled to see Broadcome do (what looks like) the right thing around their GL chipsets, open-source drivers make for successful hardware deployments; neat.

• Discovered that it's possible to avoid the boot-time hang worked around by adding nomodeset with vga=792, which in turn allowed fglrx to finally get itself sorted out and bingo a mostly working linux laptop.
• Lunch; several interviews back to back; chewed through some conference pieces. Discovered that the mail address on my TDF business card was going to /dev/null

• Catch-up with work backlog; estimation; decided - in the absence of any ACPI / brightness control on the CZ-28 to use VirtualBox under Windows to run Linux; setup 4 CPUs, and set about installing until hitting Buffer I/O error while rsync'ing, zypper si -d libreoffice etc. concurrently; bother - back to getting Linux to boot.

• Up early, mail chew, text fiddling. Lunch. Not terribly convincing to get a letter from your bank saying: "Thank you for standing by us during some of the most difficult times in our history" (the Co-op bank). Partner call. Finished writing and posted reponse to the UK / Cabinet Office consultation.

The UK Government has solicited feedback on its (excellent) proposals. I've published my response here too to make it somewhat more legible.

Preamble

I was profoundly encouraged by the depth of understanding underlying the Cabinet Offices' recommendation to use ODF for the default format for saving UK Government documents, which I support enthusiastically. It can be viewed as HTML here:

Disclosure

• I was a Novell Distinguished Engineer, and Novell's representative on ECMA's TC45 during the initial OOXML standardisation work; however I do not speak for Novell.
• I serve on the board of The Document Foundation who create LibreOffice, but don't speak for them here.
• For much of the last decade I lead first Novell, then SUSE's engineering team on OpenOffice then LibreOffice. These teams did significant work on both ODF and OOXML.
• I am now General Manager of Collabora Productivity a UK based SME focused on enterprise support of LibreOffice in addition to development consulting around the product.
• I'm a UK citizen.

Summary

• The requirement to share information in ODF is a great strategic choice for the UK government; I wholeheartedly support the recommendations here.
• The emphasis on other open, or trivial formats for exposing information to customers in forms that are susceptible to easy analysis, scripting, etc. is great. Formats such as CSV, TXT and HTML provide an ideal form for users to consume government data.
• I believe that browser based editing is and is likely to remain immature, and thus the recommendation of ODF for information sharing by traditional means is an ideal solution.
• By mandating ODF, no user will be required to purchase software to have a high-fidelity interaction with their Government. This is not only due to the presence of excellent zero-cost ODF implementations, such as LibreOffice, but also a smaller scope of document features which ensures that multiple high-fidelity implementations are possible from various vendors.

ECMA, TC45, and OpenXML standardisation

• As a member of TC45, the remit of the committee producing ECMA-376 was emphatically limited to: full compatibility with the existing Microsoft XML file format as submitted cf. http://www.ecma-international.org/memento/TC45.htm i.e. it was a pure documentation task.
• As such, frustratingly, no significant changes to the XML representation were possible, despite trivial changes being desirable in several instances. The scope made it possible only to improve the documentation of Microsoft's submission.
• Large numbers of features in an Office Suite require their data to be stored in the file format. As such, it is possible to read a file-format description as a set of Office Suite features and capabilities.
• ECMA-376 is one such, extremely detailed, and amazingly comprehensive specification of a single vendor's feature-set and implementation in Microsoft Office. It codifies innumerable behaviours of a single proprietary application.
• Such was the remit of the ECMA TC.
• As an aside, this is no bad thing. It is useful to have an extremely detailed specification of Microsoft Office. Microsoft is to be commended for releasing that, and indeed moving to a more open, XML based format. It was enjoyable and worthwhile engaging with Microsoft in good faith and working together on the best possible disclosure of information relating to those formats. Microsoft applied some excellent and dedicated engineers to that process.
• Having said that, the result, as continued into the derived ISO standard (even in 'strict' mode), and as circumscribed by the remit of TC45 is an emphatically partisan description of the feature set of a single vendor's implementation.
• As such, those who mandate high fidelity interoperability between document editors using such a standard are essentially, as of the present time, mandating the use of Microsoft Office.
• This is due, primarily, to the very significant engineering effort required to get a high fidelity implementation of the standard.
• While this is something that LibreOffice participants continue to invest heavily into, with a reasonable degree of success, building on a legacy of Microsoft investment in that work; it is still the case that significant areas of the OpenXML standard find no supporting implementation in an Office Suite anywhere outside of Microsoft Office.

Open Standards and avoiding vendor capture

• Having seen how it is possible for a vendor to use the ECMA/ISO fast-track to essentially standardize every detail of their own implementation it is then interesting to contrast that with ODF.
• Clearly ODF has a heritage rooted in the OpenOffice code-base, however the work of the ODF TC at OASIS is emphatically not one of describing a single vendor's existing implementation.
• Instead at OASIS the standards process is truly open: multiple Office Suite implementers (including Microsoft) provide their views on everything pertaining to document representation. Everything is on the table for discussion, change and improvement in ways that impact both the textual specification, but also the implementations of that standard.
• In addition the ODF standard is itself significantly simpler and as such is far more susceptible to implementation; in consequence fostering constructive competition.
• This is popularly reflected in discussions of the contrasting size (in pages) of the competing specifications. Each page can be seen as requiring significant corresponding development work to implement the feature with a high fidelity.

A language analogy

• The structure and content of both ODF and OOXML documents is described using what is ultimately an XML language.
• As such, it may be interesting to compare the OOXML standard to 'Classical Greek' - a highly inflected, extremely complex language which, to add insult to injury is frequently written in capitals with no inter-word spacing.
• Aside from those who have mastered the delightful intellectual challenge such a language presents, its full depth is sadly inaccessible to many.
• ODF in contrast could be seen as more of the 'English' of document content standards: taking inspiration and heritage from many different languages; it is significantly simpler to learn, and communicate with.
• The UK Government laudably works hard to present document content in 'Plain English'. Transposing this same concern for wide accessibility into the underlying document structure would be an appropriate way to extend access to all technical format consumers and producers.
• The argument that a large number of existing documents are structured in an unfortunate and vendor specific form should be an imperative to speed their transition to something more accessible; not an argument for retaining the status quo: where a veneer of document interoperability is achieved by using a single vendor's product.
• The translation analogy has a further application - which is that of needing an authoritative version. It is good to allow users to request documents translated into other formats in response to a specific request. As with any translation though, it is important to have a canonical original document format which should be ODF.

The importance of ODF as a single document standard

• An important role of standards is to enabling genuine competition in this important space, which in turn can drive down cost.
• By mandating only ODF, this benefit will be realised, via a widely based, open standardisation process with input from many implementers and consumers of productivity software.
• While a request for standards 'choice' by including OOXML seems superficially attractive, adding OOXML would be to remove the requirement for a truly open, vendor neutral standard.
• The existing proposal does not fall into the trap of re-inforcing the status quo by allowing a vendor specific standard with only a single high fidelity implementation.
• The existing proposal already wisely provides users with the choice to request a translation of their document to another format.
• Encouraging individual Government departments to make a choice for their users of a standard that would require users to have expensive software that can handle any of the significant, and often arbitrary complexity of OOXML documents would be unfortunate. Indeed that would nullify any competitive benefit of a truly open standard.
• This can, perhaps, be seen in the MOD's aversion to ODF, despite this being an accepted NATO standard for document interchange.
• As such, I believe that the impact of arguing for a 'choice' of standards in itself leads to a lack of choice. It is by far preferable to have a choice of implementations of ODF.

Macros expose implementation details

• While I agree that simple macros often form a useful part of document workflows, macros are typically profoundly problematic. As such it is great to see the requirement that: "Macros should be avoided wherever possible, particularly when sharing documents."
• While LibreOffice provides reasonable support for simple VBA macros, and naturally has built-in Python / Basic and other scripting support - these are not standardized in either ODF or OOXML.
• In the case of VBA inside OOXML macro enabled files, the macro text is stored in several binary streams with partially documented formats, making the round-trip interoperability of macros extremely problematic.
• Macros, as programs, tend to propagate very significant details of the specific implementation of a given document format and its structure in various ways.
• Limiting the requirement to use Macros in documents for interchange wherever possible is to be applauded.
• Textual macros are usually rather better from an interoperability perspective than operating system specific COM and ActiveX components that can be embedded into OOXML documents.

Device and platform choice

• ODF is usable across a large number of devices and platforms
• LibreOffice has an excellent ODF implementation supported on Windows, Mac and Linux, it also has promising prototypes for iOS and Android; although other ODF applications are available for mobile platforms.
• LibreOffice is also provided by Roll-App as a browser based on-line office solution for other operating systems and device form factors.

Conclusion

• In conclusion, the Cabinet Office's proposals have great merit, are balanced and well rounded.
• If implemented, they would allow Officials within government to work efficiently, while ensuring that Users do not have costs imposed upon them.
• It is my belief that these proposals, when implemented will also stimulate investment and innovation around the Office Productivity space, and exceed the expected benefits.

• Up early, music practices; packed babes off to school; drove into Cambridge with Italo; met with Tim, Doreé mail chew, built ESC bug stats, filed bug, reviewed text etc. Back & out for a curry dinner with the lads from Church.

• Up; off into Cambridge with Italo to visit the office; caught up with Tim briefly. Meetings, and calls with the team and/or partners for much of the day. Back for some fine Italian good (thanks to Italo) with the family, chatted through the evening.

• Off to NCC, Roy spoke; dropped babes at a party, and back for a light lunch with just J. Sandy & Daniel over for a bit, good to catch up. Italo over in the evening for dinner, talked with him in the evening.

• Up late; various slugging, off to Noughton Park for a picnic lunch in the sun with the family. Back to meet up with David, improved M's bedside light; disassembled the Sparks coming out of it Dyson, and ordered some new brushes; roast dinner, enjoyed catching up with David; bit of work before bed.

• Up lateish; mail, read Microsoft's response on the Cabinet Office proposals on the use of ODF; profoundly un-persuaded. Encouraged to see Simon's take. Lunch. Noticed the 4.3 MAB tracker, and added support for that to my bug stat generation tool.

• Up; quick mail check etc. Out to Thetford forest for a break with the kids; met up with Clara & babes, wandered the forest trying to keep tabs on six little people; fun. Picnic lunch in some drizzle - very English; more playing, E. covered in mud but cheery; home. Back to the mail pile.

• Up early; mail chew, poked at a profile in some detail. Lunch, partner call. Positive first board call at some length, getting the various pieces necessary into place. Bed early.

• Up early; mail chew; submitted a conf. abstract, more mail chew & more production, 1:1 with Philippe. Estimation call with Kohei, Markus, Kendy. Dinner. Back to mail, paperwork, created a cut-down test doc for an odd annotation issue.

• Up early; poked at mail; Product team call, Consulting team call, reviewed text. Bible study in the evening with Arun & Dave; fun.

• Up late; off to church, on to GenR8 to pick up H. and N. after a short service, fun. Home - babes tired, watched movie. Nigel & Sue over from next door - good to get to know them. Put babes to bed, set too dealing with a flooding dish-washer, followed by an amazing experience of the amount of crud you can rod out of a 4" pipe.

• Up lateish; mending around the house - rather pleased with the new LED light-bulbs with machined glass diffusers; finally some non-alien-dissection lighting at low power too. Bought another roll of fibre-glass insulation, this time made from recycled bottle - so rather an interesting set of colours.

• Up early; mail chew, poked at some bugs, great to see Stephane Guillou making such great progress migrating our old MAB tracker and re-testing remaining issues. Finally isolated my firefox crasher as a Mesa driver calling '_exit' fun.
• Collected babes at Friday Club, H. and N. off to GenR8 in Cambridge. Encouraged N. to stick it later in the evening.

• Up early; plugged away through E-mails, my life is a writhing mass of text, with not enough code in it, why is that ?

• Up early; new laptop arrived - started to set it up. Booting fails under openSUSE 13.1, so got a Windows build going instead; some fast AMD processors to burn through the code - nice. Got a build going there eventually - unfortunately our unit tests get broken by windows's virus checker.

• Up early; boggled at my E-mail variously; built ESC bug stats and prototype agenda - encouraged to see a drop in regressions immediately after release.

• Up early; mail chew, team meetings; partner calls, built collateral.

• Up lateish; off to NCC, did a more detailed study with the older kids downstairs; home for a quick lunch, babes out to a party; read Jeeves & Wooster to N. Mended fence on the brink of collapse; applied slugging left & right. Bed early.

• Up lateish, tidied the house, peeled carrots etc. Pleasant deluge of family members over for a birthday-present exchange and lunch. Good to catch up with all and sundry. Played with the Xbox One (a gift) in the evening, current selection of games in the store appears somewhat unsuitable for young ladies, OS is odd, hmm.

• Up early, practise with babes, back into the routine; mail chew, worked through a largeish backlog of pending tasks; finally getting some documents written, poked at Linux Format column. Call with Kendy & Andras.

• Woken early by a text; mail chew, back to the conference, meeting, more pacing of the halls etc. Eventually de-constructed the stand - lots of smallbits of electronics around the place; managed to get to Schipol eventually despite the crazy train ticket machines refusing VISA cards - apparently this is a feature. Plane (Darwin to Cambridge) delayed by an hour. Finally got home. Lovely to see the darling wife & kiss sleeping babes variously.

• Up too early, set off to Amsterdam, worked on the train with a rather intermittent internet connection. Finally got to Amsterdam RAI, and caught up with Scott, Guy, Jeff & Patrik at the booth. Wandered the show floor - lots of interesting things; misc. meetings.
• Back to Guy's fine appartment, and out for some pleasant dinner, back for hackery and bed.

• Up early; breakfast, off to the venue - mail chew. Interested to see the Eclipse 10'th Anniversary - interestingly, I was under the impression that GNOME 2.0 started its very time-based release train in 2002, one of our many accomplishments there (no doubt we were inspired by others); but it's good to see a growing consensus on the benefits to communities of that. As for their take on "... also making sure that the community is still represented in the governance" - I was hoping that someone would have time to explain at the wikipedia article the content of the governance documents in brief / plain English.
• Interesting presentation; lunch, talks with UI guys, pushed slides. Caught up with more hackers, bid 'bye to some fine folks; worked with Ahmad on a weird bug - an uninitialized memory access, and then with Miklos on tracking the very strange git behaviour seen in the log of that.

• Up; breakfast, off to the LibreOffice hack-fest, very kindly hosted by Beta Co-working at their beautiful office space. Got everyone setup, icecream building, and managed to squeeze a few more than then 20x person limit in.
• Worked on a few annoying UX bugs afflicting myself and others, Print buttons, a calc / sidebar tweak, and cleaned some code up; fixed sheet sizing in calc (a perennial annoyance for me). Back to the hotel late.

• Up later; breakfast, to the venue, booth lurking, chatted with a lot of interested people; handed out stickers variously. Caught up with the openSUSE guys, good to see scarabeus and hear of Richard's new role; chat with Cat. Helped clear & sweep up; back to the Astrid on the bus. Another fine meal in the evening.

• Up early, off to the conference, tried to work on more slideware at the booth, but interrupted by a steady flow of old friends, well-wishers, and good questions - sold some shirts etc.
• Gave my talk; good questions, should have tested my demo - ( it worked rather nicely in Milan ). Slides (as hybrid PDF) here:
• Wandered off to get some chips with Kevin and onto the dev-room, wrote a very quick liblibreoffice slide-deck while watching some talks; gave it - but how can one follow on after Caolan's epic Accessibility / UI layout talk. Slides (as hybrid PDF) here:
• Out in the evening to Kasbah for a 30x person booking, nice to see more people round the table each year; back to bed.

• Up early, train to Cambridge, met a number of ARM guys on their way to FOSDEM on the train to London; met Tim and Zaheda on the Eurostar, slogged away at typing slideware much of the journey.
• Arrived and got to the Astrid, checked in, partner call with JP & Curtis, rushed to GNOME AB meeting - lots of good things going on there, most encouraged by gtk+'s continued support of multiple platforms. On to two dinners back-to-back, met up with lots of lovely Free Software-ites; then the LibreOffice hackers.
• Up hyper-late hacking on slides, and catching up with the guys.

• Up early, mail chew, pre 4.2 rush; off to the dentist, back - tried to avoid chewing on self variously. Lunch. Waded through twitter E-mail on the 4.2 release, and encouraging ODF / LibreOffice goodness in the UK.
• ESC call, getting prepped for FOSDEM, UX hack-fests etc.

Today we release LibreOffice 4.2.0, packed with a load of new features for people to enjoy - you can read and enjoy all the great news about the user visible features from so many heroic contributors, but there are of course also some contributors whose work is primarily behind the scenes, in places that are not so easy to see - but is still vitally important to the project. It can be hard to extract those from the over twelve thousand commits since LibreOffice 4.1 was branched, so let me expand:

User Interface Dialog / Layout

The UI migration to Glade layout based XML files continues apace with contributions from many individuals, we managed to convert another 280 dialogs in this release, getting us around 70% of the way there. Many thanks to: Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), Manal Alhassoun (KACST), Olivier Hallot (EDX), Faisal M. Al-Otaibi (KACST), Laurent Balland-Poirier, Efe Gürkan Yalaman, Krisztian Pinter, Jan Holesovsky (Collabora), Andras Timar (Collabora), Cao Cuong Ngo, Gergo Mocsi, Katarina Behrens, Abdulmajeed Ahmed (KACST), and Alia Almusaireae (KACST). Thanks also to our translators who helped in the migration of strings.

If you'd like to get involved in driving this to 100%, checkout Caolan's howto and updates.

Build improvements

We've improved a lot this cycle in terms of buildability, and ease of comprehension - important for new contributors.

Much improved compile/run cycle

Six months ago we reported the great news of a pure gnumake build which is faster and sweeter. To compound the goodness for 4.2 we worked hard to ensure that you can compile and then just run LibreOffice without a slow install phase directly after compiling. We build a live, run-able image into instdir/, so:

./autogen.sh
make
cd instdir/program
./soffice -writer

Is enough to get a fully working suite on Windows, Mac or Linux. That avoids a ton of perl, cleans up a lot of scp2/ and includes removing a chunk of install-time setup. Thanks to Michael Stahl (Red Hat), David Tardon (Red Hat), Matus Kukan(Collabora) and Marcos Paulo de Souza. It's always fun to see partners exchanging runnable Windows installs as an instdir.zip.

As an added bonus we also removed some vile platform specific sub-directories from the build infrastructure things like unxlngi6.pro all over the place; if people want to build multiple platforms from the same source they can run configure from a separate directory. Thanks to Michael Stahl (Red Hat), and Tor Lillqvist (Collabora).

Individual localisation builds

Building the large number of localisations that go with LibreOffice - we support 100+ languages out of the box creates quite a compile-time load. Thanks to Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical) - we can now compile localisation separately from the main package. This helps Linux packagers in multiple ways. The split lowers the requirements for disk space on the build machine (which can be over 25 GB for a release build), which is helpful for porting to more constrained architectures. Builds and respins are faster. With the in-place runnable LibreOffice build into instdir we can also avoid using crufty scp2/ macros interpreted by perl to package these directly. The change also makes it easier to re-spin security fixes without re-building hundreds of unchanged localizations, we look forward to Linux distributions picking this up to ease their packaging and maintenance burden.

Autodoc is dead, long live Doxygen

For many years, horrible hacked version of ... now thanks to Michael Stahl (Red Hat)'s great work doxygen has been taught about LibreOffice's UNO IDL and we've rid ourselves of the cosv, udm and autodoc top level modules - good riddance to 57k lines of code. Thanks also to those who helped to improve, cleanup and 'doxygenize' code comments in 4.2 Julien Nabet, Miklos Vajna (Collabora), Christian Lohmaier (TDF), Thorsten Behrens (SUSE), Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat), Zolnai Tamas (Collabora). You can read our generated documentation for: public API and internal API here.

Code quality work

There has been a lot of work on code quality and improving the maintainability and cleanliness of the code. Another 80 or so commits to fix cppcheck errors thanks to Julien Nabet, the daily rumble of building without any compile warnings with -Werror -Wall -Wextra on each platform with thanks primarily to Tor Lillqvist (Collabora) and Caolán McNamara (Red Hat).

Coverity scan

We have been chewing through the huge amount of analysis from the Coverity Scan, checkout the recent Spotlight Report on LibreOffice. We've seen 210 fixes (and many more closed tickets) in this release alone with many thanks to Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), Eike Rathke (Red Hat), Julien Nabet, Norbert Thiebaud, Andrzej Hunt (Collabora), Markus Mohrhard (Collabora) and Gergo Mocsi

Import and now export testing

Thanks to Markus Mohrhard we have the successful import crasher tests, that now test 45,000+ problem / bug documents from bugzillas across every project we can get our hands on. We load them one by one in a build with paranoid debugging assertions turned on. In recent times, we've also started exporting these documents to multiple different file formats looking for export issues, then, subsequently running whatever validation tools we can on the output. That, over time has a great impact on quality. Output is logged by git hash.

Valgrind fixes

Valgrind continued to be a wonderful tool for finding and isolating leaks, and poor behavior of various bits of code. Thanks to Mark Wielaard for fixing a number of leaks and other problems here, along with many other of the usual suspects.

Unit testing

We also built and executed more unit tests with LibreOffice 4.2 to avoid regressions as we change the code. These are rather hard to measure, since people like to pile up new tests inside existing unit test modules. One simple measure is to grep for the CPPUNIT_TEST() registration macro we can see that we added 216 of these since 4.1 - but we also added more CPPUNIT_ASSERTs per test; over 2160 of these. Our ideal is that every bug that is fixed gets a unit test to stop it ever recurring. With over 80 committers to the unit tests in 4.2, it is a little difficult to list everyone involved here, but it's wonderful to have a firmly entrenched and growing culture of writing unit tests alongside fixes.

QA / bugzilla

This release the QA team has grown, and done some amazing work both triaging bugs, and also closing them. Thanks to Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical), Robinson Tryon and Joel Madero for doing some great work there - and particularly to our top bug fixers, there is a great list of people responding in bugs here.

One metric we watch in the ESC call is who is in the top ten in the freedesktop Weekly bug summary. Here is a list of the top twenty people who have appeared most frequently in the weekly list of top ten bug closers; thanks to them tommy27, Caolán McNamara (RedHat), Maxim, Jean-Baptiste Faure, Eike Rathke (RedHat), ign_christian, Foss, Urmas, Joel Madero, Cor Nouws, Julien Nabet, Michael Stahl (RedHat), Maxim Monastirsky, Jorendc, Andras Timar (Collabora), Lionel Elie Mamane, Kohei Yoshida (Collabora), mariosv, bfoman, Thomas Arnhold, Adolfo Jayme (fitoschido), Sophie (TDF), Samuel M., Markus Mohrhard (Collabora), Rob Snelders.

You can read more about bug statistics and background on Bjoern's (interesting) blog (with cats). The overall bug picture can be summarised with some thousands though.

• QA triages incoming bugs, testing and confirming that the bug is reproducible, providing good information and keeping the flow of un-triaged bugs down. It's easy to get involved and help out with this here.
• Each release QA finds and marks around one thousand duplicate bugs.
• Each release QA closes around one thousand issues as invalid (for various reasons - eg. no NEEDINFO response in months).
• Each (six monthly) release the developers fix around one thousand bugs.
• Each release the number of 'new' bugs grows a little, but that rate is slowing. Currently we have around 25k bugs of which 6.5k are 'NEW' and ~800 are 'UNCONFIRMED'. However, around 25% of our bugs are feature requests - to which, there is (presumably) no end.
• The trend in open most annoying bugs and those tagged 'regression' are flat, while fixed versions of both grow rapidly.

Code cleanup

Code that is dirty should be cleaned up - so we did a lot of that.

The final death of UniString

Perhaps the largest single change in 4.2 which has been underway from the very beginning of the LibreOffice project is removing our obsolete tools/ string class - thus leaving us with only 2x string classes, one for arbitrary encoding 8bit strings, and another for UTF-16 strings. The final commit slayed this monster for good. But of course huge numbers of people have worked hard at this job and associated cleanups for several years now - in this release around thirty people lent a hand; thanks particularly to Noel Grandin for spearheading the work, but also to many others Matteo Casalin, Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat), Ivan Timofeev, Michael Stahl (Red Hat), Thomas Arnhold, Kohei Yoshida (Collabora), Eike Rathke (Red Hat), Tor Lillqvist (Collabora), Palenik Mihály, Markus Mohrhard (Collabora), Luboš Luňák (SUSE), MÁTÉ Gergely, Andrzej J.R. Hunt (Collabora), Christina Rossmanith, Laurent Balland-Poirier, Julien Nabet, Sean Young, Neil Moore, Jelle van der Waa, Donizete Waterkemper and Arnaud Versini.

Finally in 4.3 we will have the first user visible benefit of this work, allowing more than 64k characters in a single paragraph, checkout our still nascent 4.3 features wiki page and a related blogpost. Beyond that, fixing a bug recently it was somewhat interesting to see the morass of string types in the Windows platform.

One fewer temporary file API

We have a number of APIs for handling temporary files with different pedigrees, the oldest and ropiest: tools/tempfile.hxx was kindly written out by Palenik Mihály. Ideally there would be just one (safe) place in sal/ where temp files are handled.

Ongoing German Comment redux

We continued to make some progress on translating our last lingering German comments across the codebase to good, crisp technical English. Many thanks to Philipp Weissenbacher, Philipp Riemer, Laurent Balland-Poirier, Rolf Hemmerling, Chris Hoppe, Rodolfo Ribeiro Gomes, Matthias Freund and Henning Diedler. I suspect the tailing off effect is in part due to a rather substantial number of false positives in our language-guessing bin/find-german-comments tool.

Removing dead code through compiler warnings

Lots of dead code was identified (and purged) with the help of recent improvements in Clang/GCC warnings (-Wunsued-function, -Wunused-variable, -Wunused-private-field, etc.) and by using SAL_WARN_UNUSED. (Caolán McNamara (Red Hat), Luboš Luňák (SUSE), Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat), Tor Lillqvist (Collabora))

Windows build & debug wins

The windows build time was reduced by 10 minutes (10% or so) thanks to Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical) and then promptly slowed down again by adding Link Time Optimisation into the mix for newer Microsoft compilers.

Another much requested feature that helps users to provide excellent stack traces for Windows crashes and hangs, and thus debug / fix those much more rapidly is Cloph's Windows Symbol Server for release builds. Checkout how to get a backtrace - which is a wonderful way for users to provide better bug reports on that platform. Thanks to Fridrich Štrba (SUSE), Luboš Luňák (SUSE), and Christian Lohmaier (TDF).

Calc core refactoring

There is so much to say here, and it will be presented in much more detail shortly at FOSDEM. Suffice it to say that Calc has had a massive internal re-work, improving memory usage, performance in many cases, allowing the use of OpenCL to calculate some formulae on the GPU and more. Many thanks to Kohei Yoshida (Collabora), Markus Mohrhard (Collabora), and to the team from MultiCoreWare: I-Jui (Ray) Sung, Hao Chen, Shiming Zhang, Yiming Ju, Yang Zhang, Hongu Zhong, Ming Li, Min Wang, De Chuang, Feng Zheng, mulei, Xin Jiang, Zhenyu Yuan and more.

Getting involved

I hope you get the idea that more developers continue to find a home at LibreOffice and work together to complete some rather significant work both under the hood, and also on the surface. If you want to get involved there are plenty of great people to meet and work alongside. As you can see individuals make a huge impact to the diversity of LibreOffice (the colour legends on the right should be read left to right, top to bottom, which maps to top down in the chart):

And also in terms of diversity of code commits, we love to see the unaffiliated volunteers contribution by volume, though clearly the volume and balance changes with the season, release cycle, and time available for mentoring:

Of course, we maintain a list of small, bite-sized tasks which you can use to get involved at our Easy Hacks page, with simple build / setup instructions. We now have a cleaner, and safer environment to work on improving the code. For example this video that shows how easy it is to get started in LibreOffice development these day. It is also encouraging to see how the Easy Hacks are progressing, lots of them are getting closed - could you close the 400'th ?

Another thing that really helps is running pre-release builds and reporting bugs just grab and install a pre-release and you're ready to contribute alongside the rest of the development team.

Conclusion

LibreOffice 4.2 is the next in a series of releases that incrementally improve not only the features, but fundamentally the foundations of the Free Software office suite. Of course, it's only the first in a long series of monthly 4.2.x releases which will bring a stream of bug fixes and quality improvements over the next months.

I hope you enjoy LibreOffice 4.2.0, thanks for reading, and thank you for supporting LibreOffice.

Postscript: this item kindly translated to French.

• Mail chew - dispatched some windows builds. The great thing about Windows 7 is the way there are so many ways to shut-down, in my case simply running 'make' in two libreoffice build trees concurrently is enough: though there is an intermittent delay. Linux on the same hardware is like a rock.
• Plugged away at text, lunch, partner call, early dinner, back to work at slideware. Booked flights to the US for Tom's wedding in the evening.

• Up; mail chew, researched some of the great work done for 4.2.0. Worked through the TODO, call with David, sync. with Bjoern, call with Philippe, then Kohei, dinner. Worked late - built my own xf86-video-intel to see if I could rid myself of the SNA related crashers.

• Up early, to work, starting to sicken with some cold or other. Mail chew, slogged at windows build and chasing / reviewing last patches for an RC4 of 4.2.0 with Markus, Cloph, Michael S, Caolan, Eike, Kohei, Norbert and some other heroic testers. Lunch. Made some progress at last, nailed a few potential crashers and nasties that should never have made it this far.
• Encouraged that my CORBA knowledge transferred to COM's BSTR quite nicely, and what an appalling mess of string classes Windows truly is. Chat with Thorsten.

• Up earlyish, off to NCC with Jackie & Pete, played in the band; back for a fine lunch; set too at insulating H's bedroom - though ended up doing E's and M's as well to some degree; worked away at that until the evening. Put babes to bed, watched TV in iPlayer; bed.

• Up late, lazy morning, did some homework with N. H. out with O. for her first trip into town without an adult. Set too building some shoe-racks to fit under the hall settle (to try to restrain the four girl shoe mountain). Lunch, finished glueing & fixing with N. Watched a Scooby-do movie with the little girls.
• Back to poke at my windows build; joy of joys Windows 7 had decided to re-boot itself overnight, no build logs, and seemingly MSVC not working - or is it out of virtual memory while linking: a cryptic error message.

• Mail chew, Pete finished the carpet; chased a windows build issue: have to switch SATA cables every time I want to boot Windows, a malign side-effect of having installed Linux first I guess and Virtualisation being horribly slow (for some prolly graphics related reason). Ideas on how to persuade Windows 7 to boot from a SATA device it was not installed on without windows 'rescue disk' usage appreciated. Poked at a curiously hard to reproduce bug.
• Partner call, another partner call, dinner, read stories, sync. with ahunt. Left a LibreOffice 4.2.0 release build running on Windows.

• Up early, mail chew, stats crunching / building. Pete laying more carpet, J. had a hard time , worked on slides, ESC call, Advisory Board call, dinner, put babes to bed. Partner call late, bed late.

• Up early; practise with the babes, M's 'cello going well. Mail chew, admin piled on admin, Pete over to carpet the stairs, good stuff. Lunch. Partner call, TDF board call. Took M. to beavers and back, read stories; bed.

• Up; mail chew, textual fiddling, ESC bug stats building. Chewed away at mail most of the day, missed a dentist's appointment: annoying, setup more meetings, wrote and sent a pitch. Dinner with the babes. Bible study with Arun, good to catch up.

• Up; mail chew, sync. with Andras & Kendy, Muthu, Tim, 2x team meetings, action items, busy work. Helped Chris get some code documentation done when you're reading Dr Dobbs from 1993 to find examples something is prolly wrong.
• Dinner, put babes to bed; up late working with Kohei.

• Up earlyish, off to NCC to practise with the band; funky 30'th anniversary service, helped with kids work downstairs. Party shared lunch afterwards, tons of food, home after a bit; played with babes. Put them to bed, 'Bridge'-ness, and sleep.

• Up, breakfast with the family, played with babes variously, tidied up, read stories; thrilled to see Milan fix the Evolution attachment crasher biting me so regularly - what a good guy; build a new package with that to test.
• Lunch, out for a family cycle ride with Sue & Sophie, met Bronnie & Robin on the heath, caught up with them, home, pizza tea. J. out for the PCC Quiz & puddings night, read E. a story; LoTR with the rest, chewed mail briefly; bed.

• Up early; music practise with the girls, off into Cambridge, management meetings all day with Tim, Kendy, Tracie, Philippe, Rob etc. Encouraging stuff. Finally got to an interesting set of interview questions, and a great analysis / proposal from Jo. J. out baby sitting.

• Up early; off into Cambridge, great to catch up with Nat, albeit too briefly over lunch. Dug through mail, collected a few signatures while I was nearby. Partner call, ESC call, worked on slideware.

• Up early, admin, mail chew, ESC agenda buildage, lunch. Call with Tim Eyles, poked Andras, partner call, board call, more mail sync. with Tim. What a boring life full of admin. Continued to get repeats of the annoying Intel sna_accel.c driver crash which you can see here, frustratingly intermittent.

• Up early; into Cambridge, mail on the train; mgmt meetings all day. Train home, read stories to babies, dinner with Lydia & Janice. Pleased to get mail from Marc - an old friend building this fun < href="http://www.levelstar.com/">Android Braille Tablet which looks neat. Built stats. worked late on paperwork.

• Up early, mail chew, built misc. stats. Call with Tim, team call. Plugged away at the backlog of work on my plate, wrote a Linux Format column.

• Up late; off to NCC, Tony spoke, home for a Duck roast dinner for N. enjoyed that, and slugged much of the afternoon reading stories etc. put babes to bed, more of The Bridge.

• Up lateish; Naomi's birthday - much excitement and final present opening at breakfast. Prepped for a party later; took E. to a sleep-over-party, and got N's underway. David kindly came to help out with the fireworks, enjoyed catching up with him, bed late after getting sucked into The Bridge.

• Up early; to work, mail chew, sync. with Kendy, poked at Salesforce. Lunch with J. Admin, collected cards & receipts. Sync. with Tim, then Italo, and Jo.

• Slept on the plane, arrived late in the day, some hackery on the train to Newmarket, got my horizontal document iterator changes improved, wrote more twisted unit tests: "if it's not broke, it doesn't have enough unit tests yet."
• Finally home, to a car-full of babies needing a kiss, and the lovely wife; dinner, unpacked a little, amused by the BBC News from Elsewhere blog; bed.

• Up earlyish, a fine breakfast with the family, Nancy kindly dropped me in to the convention. Milled around as before, visited a number of interesting companies - caught up with Guy.
• Eventually gave up on CES and went back to E-mail, discovered that Collabora is a member of CEA sponsoring some quite compelling Bash the trolls advertising at CES - encouraging; also got lounge access to chew mail in and catch up.
• Off to the Cosmopolitan & to the airport, got stuck into mail & a bit of hackery - encouraging. Plane.

• Up earlyish; packed, checked out, bus to the show, wandered the floors - an excess of 4k displays on display [sic], lots of interest. Mail chew - and a bit of hacking to stay sane.
• Taxi to Ryan & Nancy's, another surreal experience of having to map-read / locate the address for a GPS-free Taxi driver. Had a lovely time, so great to catch up & see the kids grown huge and see how they're getting on: Mackenzie, Emma and Isaac. Fine meal, up late catching up on so much.

• Up early again; worked through the show programme to try to work out whom to visit. Tried to chew mail, stymied by an oddness with Evolution's imap folder bits; tried to diagnose & file a bug. Off for a practice at the convention center, kicked about there re-working the horizontal cell iterator for better performance.
• Enjoyed Lisa Su's presentation, and gave a hearty plug for the work we've been doing to HSA optimise LibreOffice calc - it's great to use the silicon more effectively: LibreOffice the code your APU loves to run.
• Played with some of the cool demos in the AMD tent eg. Oculus Rift, back to the hotel for some shut-eye; sync. with Curtis later. Built ESC bug stats.

• Up at 3am or thereabouts; poked at mail, did a bit of hacking, nailed a real stupid in the ZIP handling code, giving a nice save-time performance improvement.
• Off to the venue, met up with Eric from Adobe, nice chap; breakfast, met more of the AMD team, enjoyed the analyst / press pre-briefings around Kaveri and got some great insights into what we can do better from Phil Rogers. Caught up with the demos at AMD's booth with Manju & Raghu, onto CES Unveiled and the AMD party. Bed too early, jet-lagged.

• Up, packed, drove with the family to P. Risborough working in the car: a bit antisocial. Chewed through mail. Flight to Las Vegas for CES pre-briefings, arrived, checked in, on to a reception.

• Up, sync. with Markus, watched Dark Matter of IT Sync call with Kendy. Lunch. Calls variously with Curtis, Manju etc. Catch up with Kohei & Kendy.

• Up, mail chew, sync with Markus, profiling fun, some hackery. Sync call with Kendy.

• Up early; fine cooked breakfast, to work; cleaned up my Trapezoid subdivision acceleration code, wrote a unit test and pushed it; why we're doing that in LibreOffice instead of using XRender for Polylines I have no idea; need to dig out a good Windows profiler.
• Fixed a calc crasher; wrote a status report. Lunch. Back to dig out another unpleasant crasher, played with profiling on Windows: what that platform is badly missing is a rich open-source ecosystem. Bruce mended my wedding ring - with a bit of platinum solder, patched for now anyhow. Drove home. Back to work.
• Picked Thomas up from the station, up late catching up; lovely.