Pavel's diary

One year older again...

At the end of every year, I'm summarizing and planning for the next year. But it often is a fiasco ;-) Look at my plans/wishes for year 2006:

• AMD64 builds out of the box - this was my main wish. And it is now reality. Caolan and Kendy did an enormous work and I'm now watching every milestone carefully for new bugs so we can fix them immediately when they appear. This is very effective. From time to time, new 64bit specific bug appears as well - people like to pass pointers in 32bit integers around even if we have sal_IntPtr type etc.
• usable Mac OS X universal builds without X11 - this was a dream only. I do have universal patches in my build system with the exception of module bridges, and X11 universal build works OK on the platform it was produced on, but it crashes on the other platform. This was low priority for me, thus almost nothing done here. Current non-X11 build does something, but we have a lot of work to do. Playing invaders is now possible with the mouse, keyboard still doesn't work properly, because of some windowing issue.
• I'd like to cut down the list of MyIssues down under 40 at the end of the year (the current status is 83) - pure dream. The current list of MyIssues is 92 issues :-(
• my community build system migrated to newly designed build-farm, more automated - almost nothing done here as well. It works as it is right now very well so the motivation to change it is very low, the only thing needed is to plan for hardware upgrade of all machines - four years are four years and the fastest machine available then is now again effectively slower than my laptop.
• Czech team at OOoCon 2006 with more presentations and more active members - no progress. No new active people, and some active people who can't attend because of their personal or work activities.
• at least three big public companies/institutions in Czech migrating to OpenOffice.org and publicly announcing it - many companies migrating, but none announcing it publicly - the marketing part of our team has to do some investigation in this regard. Many of my customers are directly or indirectly using OpenOffice.org for their work, but they often do not communicate the infrastructure they are using because of the old habits and false dreams of better security.

So to sum up: not everything planned happened. I have to work even more to fulfil my plans ;-)

So what I want to do/work on in 2007? I'll try to be more realistic...

• native AQUA OpenOffice.org without X11 as an alpha version for end users
• migrate at least Windows and GNU/Linux x86 machines of my build system to newer hardware with the help from sponsors
• ... and maybe more ...

I hope the next year will be even more success for OpenOffice.org and we will completely accept and use the opportunity Microsoft is giving us for free with their Vista upgrade!

Short story first. Last summer, we were on Malorca and we enjoyed Marineland's show accompanied by beautiful song. Thus I wrote to "Santa" that I want CD with it and with other songs from the same author. We have a short snippet of the song recorded on our camera, thus my wife spent some time to find its performer. It is James Blunt, BTW.

Now I finally have the CD and I can do miracles with it ;-) I insterted it into my system and it started playing - good, normal, expected ;-) Then it automatically downloaded list of songs (using CDDB database), their names, their duration, author of the album, and I was even able to buy all the songs again (no, I do not have to - it allows me to "import" all songs from my original CD, so I can now play it even without the media in my machine - which I still have to consult with my lawyers, no that easy in our country, I think ;-). The only difference is that I have original booklet with the CD.

Maybe I'm a bit naive user in this area, but this is how I expected it to work - without my intervention, so I can actually listen to the music - my best one is still "You're Beautiful", the song that started this all ;-)

I'll maintain this blog entry as my own, personal list of Mac OS X annoyancees. I'm a bit special user of this system, but ... Some of these annoyancees are very easy to fix - just change the default, but this is annoyance for me - the default that does not suit my needs.

Installation/unix annoyancees

The default choice for filesystem is case insensitive fs, which is almost unusable for me because of my working habits (like ~/.emacs and ~/.Emacs etc.).

The tool seq is missing in the base system. I use it a lot.

sed's -i option has different semantic compared to GNU sed.

tail's -f doesn't accept more than one file.

UI

Where is focus follows mouse? ;-) Where are virtual desktops I'm used to use for about 10 years (... in Leopard is not acceptable answer ;-)?

How do I turn on date display in the menu bar? I'd like to know that today is December 21 without additional moving of the mouse and clicking on the "Thursday, 08:20"...

Applications

The default settings for Terminal are unusable - I had to change approx. 10 things to get used to it (meta, process end).

Why can't you run two instances of iMovie on one machine? I want to import clips from my camera as one user and create photo slideshow from iPhoto libraries in iMovie... How is user pavel able to know that user pavel2 is running iMovie!?

iDVD authors: great application - I can create DVD. How do I print cover for it? One step further... Hmm, this is not annoyance per se, but "Mac user like approach" ;-)

iDVD authors: what about fixing this bug? Isn't one year enough? Yes, /me too...

Can't disable format=flowed in Apple Mail.

Other applications

Adium X in the current version (0.89.1) is not able to cope with system Locations. Thus I have to turn proxy on/off manually when switching locations. Previous beta version (B17) worked OK, but current (B18) crashes immediatelly after switching Location.

Today, I identified yet another potential source of problems between Neo and OOo. It took me quite a long time after I wrote my first technical analysis.

The potential source of all problems are people who actually do not contribute to any of these projects. People, who only spend their time to make both development groups to hate each other. People who only write mails instead of doing something positive to their (or the other, it doesn't matter) group, the community.

We do not need such people. Really...

Sunday morning started with breakfast in my hotel.

Several new people joined - Oliver, Jogi and mmp. More debugging of Xcode and pending beakpoints. This is really weird.

Stephan described crash in menu activation code - MenuPopulate event for clicking on the toolbar icon. I investigated it a bit and found two separate crashes - one for VCL and another one for native menus, reported issues #i72249# and #i72250#.

The next part was dedicated to identifying work areas and assign names to them. We went over the document Stephan wrote some time ago.

Late Pizza again. I wonder why pizza Hawaii was named Waikiki there 8)

QA TestTool demo from Jogi. Interesting. I hope we will be able to have something QAable ;-)

The next topic was about packaging: javaldx and script, libsalsystools.dylib loading - why is it library at all!? Next part was dedicated to language packs installation and problems connected with it. Some nice ideas went out of it.

Tino gave kaib the introduction about Mac bridges issue so he can concentrate on Mac OS X specific bugs with UI/windows. Tino will create child workspace from his work to make it available for testing - map files stuff first, striping comes next.

Shaun testing the Segway Human Transporter ;-) Martin tried to show that you can you use it to go back - hopefully Google will be able to repair the building soon ;-)

Trip home was painless and fast - I was back at home at 9pm.

At the end, I can't forget to again thank Google for providing us their facilities and especially all the food there ;-)

I woke up at unbelievable time and went to the Prague airport - my wife was driving and my son was watching all the lights. So early...

Flight was OK. The recent tightening of airport security has almost no effect - only the toothpaste has to be packaged in seelable foil. Fog in Prague, but we were flying at 5500 m, jut above the fog - nice sunny view. Arrival to Hamburg acording to schedule, no problems. Nice sunrise over the city.

This time I decided to try Jasper bus because it just arrived. Straight way to the central station, taxi to Google office. Only Kai and Eric there so far.

Later other people joined: Tino, Shaun, Florian, Martin, Martin and Shaun, Juergen.

Eric had a presentation about the current status of the port, about X11 etc. Florian gave the presentation about status of the native filepicker - he is trying to achieve to make it working in X11 as well. Interesting. Small problems and one big issue, no way to make it working when X11 is running in fullscreen.

Afternoon hackathon. Stephan reported that when vcl is compiled with debug, it crashes at the beginning. I confirmed and identified that the problem is with the file salbmp.cxx in aqua directory. If compiled with debug, soffice.bin crashes, otherwise it works. We tried to look at it and finished in boost header files and exceptions handling 8) This will be interesting problem for our C++ experts... I have to file an issue about it and ask them. (Update: issue #i72248#, probably compiler bug!?)

After many experiments, we found and described the way to debug VCL in Xcode. We had to workaround several issues with Xcode - e.g. it looks like it can't debug binary named soffice.bin, but sofficebin works... Second Xcode bug in one day? ;-)

Stephan debugged the key repeat error and fixed it, later he applied the patch to aquavcl01 cws. jsc probably made his first build ;-)

Dinner in the city, bed early because I'm still not completely OK. Raining in the evening. Other guys went to some coctail bar and ...

Mac Port teams has its meeting on weekend in Hamburg, Germany (2nd MacPort meeting). I'll be there and I hope to bring some information about the meeting in my blog.

If you are in Germany or directly in Hamburg, please join us (if not for our workshops, then for evening workshop on Saturday ;-)

The meeting is sponsored by Google.