Yesterday I merged a fix for Writer’s tdf#165094. Not that it was something exceptional; something that often happens when we change the huge code: a regression. Something that we try to do for them: a fix. Why mention it here? It happens to show something, that people underestimate. The complexity of what they call “proper… Continue reading How could QA catch this in advance?→| Mike Kaganski's blog
This year’s GSoC is coming; and this year, I suggest that we handle one big problem plaguing LibreOffice: deadlocks. Users know that sometimes, program hangs. Often that is because of deadlocks. It is well known that one of industry’s most widely used ways to handle this problem is Ostrich algorithm [1]. This proposal is to… Continue reading New LibreOffice GSOC project: resolve deadlocks using robust and efficient implementation of Ostrich algorithm→| Mike Kaganski's blog
Thanks to SUSE, our valued partner who supported this development, we at Collabora Productivity have implemented support for multi-column layout in LibreOffice’s text boxes. Up to now, it was only possible to use columns in Writer’s page styles, sections and frames. One could not make text boxes, including those used in Impress, with text distributed… Continue reading Multiple columns in LibreOffice text boxes→| Mike Kaganski's blog
As part of my recent work in upgrading our partner & customer ticketing system to make things sweeter for all our users I have been assigned a task involving importing data from a CSV that was generated using MySQL’s SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE. The problem was that the source table contained BLOB fields. The resulting… Continue reading Reading from MySQL data with BLOBs dumped to CSV→| Mike Kaganski's blog
After implementing glow effect recently, we at Collabora Productivity also implemented soft edge effect for objects in Draw and Impress. And again, that was done thanks to SUSE who made it possible. The relevant bug report‘s duplicate contains a sample that I use here for illustration. First, take a look at how it was before:… Continue reading Soft edge effect on objects in LibreOffice→| Mike Kaganski's blog
Thanks to SUSE who made this possible, now we have glow effect on objects in upcoming LibreOffice 7.0. Collabora Productivity engineers Tamás Bunth and myself together have implemented it for shapes and pictures. Below are some screenshots of a PPTX slide with glow samples collected from the relevant bug report: What puzzles me is why… Continue reading Glow effect on objects in LibreOffice→| Mike Kaganski's blog
Since forever, Basic in OpenOffice.org had a bug: it didn’t properly check closing parentheses in expressions like (example taken from this AskLibO question). Note the mismatch between opening and closing parentheses: four opening, and only three closing. The author missed one to close UCase function after Left( sString, 1 ), and any compiler would naturally… Continue reading When Legacy Justifies Errors→| Mike Kaganski's blog
Recently we at Collabora Productivity have made some substantial improvements to XLSX interoperability related to pivot tables, fixing many issues existed in Calc. Personally I have committed these patches: 4a524379548c916d304a71980f6911231768018 – fixes a case when pivot tables exported by LibreOffice were considered broken and discarded by Excel 577b95f4d0cc1cf8836ff35fc30189c64fefb508 – workarounds a standard non-compliance of Excel… Continue reading XLSX interoperability: pivot tabl...| Mike Kaganski's blog
Well – obviously. At least, their current actions tell that: they deprecated CRT MSMs (which is reiterated in VS 2019 RC2 release notes), a technology designed to allow MSI-based installers t…| Mike Kaganski's blog
You know what: Microsoft became miserably incompetent in IT.| Mike Kaganski's blog
You know what: Microsoft became miserably incompetent in IT. I develop open-source code. But that never made me one of the “I hate proprietary software or IT giant corporations” types. …| Mike Kaganski's blog
