OfficeBuzz

Last Saturday we had already our 4th LibreOffice hackEvent in Netherland/Flanders. Again we were able to do a nice variety of work: documentation, build environments, study functions in code, translation work .. Honestly, often not that complicated at all. Nevertheless, the term 'hacking' might sound scaring for the average reader, though many and real easy hacks can be found at LibreOffice. In any case, while talking, we decided that the next event will be dedicated to the testing of the new LibreOffice 3.5.0, that will be released in February. So the next time no hacking and just normal testing. Well, 'normal'... to do some good testing you really have to be awake! So also because of the nice coffee ;-) thanks to the people that were so kind to invite us to their place for this event, MadLab at Eindhoven.

Looking forward to the next week with great pleasure :-) First - apart from regular work - further furnishing the new Nou&Off office . Then I look forward to the 4th Dutch LibreOffice Hackers event, of which the preparations of course already have started. Don't miss this opportunity to work and exchange with other hackers Before that, an event of at least the same importance wild be held: the ODF-plugfest, Gouda, November 17 and 18. I'm asked to represent TDF and LibreOffice with both info on technical issues and the general progress of the project. Will be a great pleasure to join there! Just as a good final action for the past week, I just posted the presentation on easy hacking LibreOffice that I gave at T-Dose, the Saturday before.

The LibreOffice project will be well presented at T-Dose : Technical Dutch Open Source Event, Eindhoven, this weekend. There will be four members that make a contribution as speaker on various subjects, and a simple booth with stickers and people to meet. Since it's mostly Dutch, read my Dutch blog for more ;-)

Some readers asked me about the further information that I promised about the recent LibreOffice conference :-) Eh sorry! Have been bit busy with presentation on LibreOffice for the OpenSourceLab , new article for Linux Magazine, finding new office for the company (succeeded :-) ) and also a large project to get me some food in the kitchen. OK so already a fairly large number of the presentations given, is available on the LibreOffice wiki ! Among those, also my presentation about improving the QA Release cycle – with special focus on the coming LibreOffice 3.5.0. Interesting numbers about bugs and fixing of those in the developer versions (master). And good ideas, learned during the presentation and discussion, about working smarter. I'll come back on this later! Before me, I've some notes I made during the conference. Just some things I found positive, interesting.. * We talked about leadership in the project, and to help people finding their way, so that they can start wi...

Already the start of last day of the wonderful first ever LibreOffice conference . Before preparing the final bits for my presentation on QA (improving the Development / QA cycle - so that means a talk about understanding the interesting and complicated interaction between development and QA-community, and hopefully some smart contributions from the public to get seemingly random improvements) let me post some notices on the event. First there is a great number of presentations and discussions. We started with an impressing overview, by Italo, Michael and Florian, of the first years' achievements of TDF. Impressive numbers, some polished to an very shiny state. But hey, marketing is marketing after all, and also without the footnotes that would make some of them look more realistic: we may be very proud with the people that are involved and all product improvements and the tooling and community that are set up! Nice words about those were spoken by Simon, at the evening organised b...

So, this was a busy and inspiring day. About hacking, sadly that happened only a little. Someone had his laptop stolen this morning, others were getting the build environment in shape again after different use, experimental OS-installations, another still hacking the Windows build system.. In effect there was only *one* building system: mine ;-) Which Rob gratefully used to work on the Scanner window. So Joost, who delivered a patch earlier (renaming sheets in Calc while copying) and I looked the code, hunting for ideas / hacks at various places in the code. You know, the things that you hope/expect to be not tooooo complicated. Yes, those ;-) Was good and I learned some useful things. Sad still, that little work in the code was done this day. Nevertheless, all 7 that attended were pretty happy with the gathering. There was a lot to talk about things that happened since last year. What is so obvious for the people that are active in the international project week after week, can be com...

Last weekend there was a tremendous event for LibreOffice hackers in Münich. [1]. More than 30 people joining for some days and working on features, bugs, UX (and pasta ..) It's obvious that there is a great base of LibreOffice users and devs in Germany (and Italy ;-) ) What about The Netherlands and Flanders? We had some small events already last year. With between 5 to 10 people joining and learning about, cooperating on localisation, development, features.. The next Saturday we have a new event planned. In the science city of Eindhoven. We also invite the old friends from OOo to share about all that's going on and cooperation. More on the wiki [2]. 1] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011 2] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/NL/bijeenkomst_11-09-10