1. I am indeed Tim’s little brother. You wouldn’t believe how many years I got through Sun without people figuring that one out. When I joined, I had another brother in Sun, Duncan. That made 3 of us. The 3 amigos (though fortunately we never had a dance routine). I shared a bedroom for many years with Tim, and played my fair share of Top Trumps, Action Man, StarWars and Squares (and almost getting run over on my way back from the supermarket carpark across the road).
2. I studied at Trinity College Dublin and loved my college years. I found out relatively quickly that while maths in secondary school was quite enjoyable, taking it to the next level felt like a massive step. I got through my course with a first, but I don’t think I developed a strong aptitude for what I was studying (memory monkey = results). However, I did find a love of Unix somewhere along the way. Duncan let me use his maths account to dial up to the internet, and I soon learned a love of MH, taught as many freshman classes as I could with their computing labs and generally found the computing side of my maths course a whole lot easier and enjoyable.
3. At secondary school I learned to climb through Mr.Blackmore and Mr.Cryan. We used to head out to Dalkey on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. It was awesome fun, and I’ve kept that going right through college and was captain of the Climbing Club for a year, along with designing their website (though it’s a bit of a mess now). You can read a bunch of the old trip reports here for much hilarity.
4. My current passion is brewing. Tim had a strong part to play in this one having started it first in the family. I’m loving it. I have a monthly subscription to BYO, a growing collection of brewing books (including John Palmer’s “How to Brew“, and Charlie Papazian’s “Joy of Homebrewing“) and starting to put some all grain beer together. I’ve taken recently to ordering from the awesome guys at www.libertybrewing.co.nz, which conveniently means I can collect my grain just around the corner. I’m still learning the ropes, but this is definitely a career I’d change to.
5. I’m getting married in 2 months time to Jayne. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve lived in NZ since 2003, have residency and a screwed up accent (though apparently I now have a US twang on the phone).
6. I was rather fortunate to fall into free software, having picked up a job in the desktop group at Sun, Ireland (yay, nepotism!). Turns out they were looking at free desktop alternatives and chose GNOME. Always shared my code at college, so working on open source was a pretty easy step, and enjoyed spending my time on the IRC channels getting to know people, and them getting to know me (that’s Jeff’s influence, of which I am entirely indebted). I’m not so active in GNOME anymore, but I still lurk in the shadows observing and proud of where the project has come and my participation in it.
7. Sara tried to hire me over to be a product manager of a new (at that time heavily secret) distribution, OpenSolaris. It took a weekend of her convincing me that I should do it and her persistence is something I’m entirely grateful for as I’ve enjoyed every minute (and worked with some really great people), despite the occasional rough times.

That’s it. And here are the rules of engagement:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So, I hereby nominate: @comay, @epicbeer, @maupuia, @charliebird, @bogan, @basicbrewing and @marekkuziel as a rather eclectic bunch.

I’m in the final stages of putting together a ‘What’s new in 2008.11′ document, so I’ll not spoil that blog post. But go get it (continuing thanks to genunix.org for their support in hosting the developer ISOs), or image-update from an existing install and, most importantly, tell us what you think.

The engineering team have done another excellent and tireless job, as usual, but in particular I’d like to thank Comay for the fricken long hours he’s put in over the last week or two – home straight dude, home straight.

Download an updated install image of pkgbuild, and put it in /opt. Now set up your usual desktop CBE environment, but add /opt/pkgbuild-beta/bin to the front of your path.

With the latest changes, pkgtool will automatically create an SVr4 package and generate the necessary IPS scripts and manifests and automatically publish to http://localhost:80/ (or $PKG_SERVER).

gman@rampage:~/SFE/$ pkgtool --interactive --download --ips build SFEmonkey-bubble.spec

though does not yet install them by default. It will however install an SVr4 package if you provide --svr4 at the command-line instead of --ips

If for some reason you decide to delete the contents of your repository, then you can simply

gman@rampage:~/$ cd packages/PKGMAPS/scripts
gman@rampage:~/packages/PKGMAPS/scripts/$ ./SFEmonkey-bubble_ips.ksh

to import the package.

The enhancements also try and detect the appropriate grouping from the freedesktop.org menu spec if you’ve defined ‘Group’ in your spec file, and will also attempt to add a license if you’ve specified it in ‘SUNW_Copyright’.

Next step, cleaning up SFE packages to include the right meta-information and copyrights/licenses.

Dan also sent me a new set of OpenSolaris (.com) fan buttons – Go check them out!

Back then, the problem statement stood for a set of lofty goals for what we wanted to achieve, rather than a set of hard requirements we needed to keep. It was intentionally high level and vague to provide an artistic license when deep diving on the individual items.

So, with some caveats of

• This is a first draft
• Some of the language used is no doubt poor and vague
• The numbers mentioned are stakes in the ground for spark discussion
• This is not an exhaustive list – it doesn’t try to be
• Some items are intentionally vague, otherwise they become a bug list
• Some items may be optimistic or even ridiculous – this is a reflection on the level of feedback that I’ve got so far (little), and an opportunity to contribute

So go read, and let me know what you think!

Fortunately I managed to get some vacation to charge up the batteries with a 3 week vacation in Europe that started with a couple of days around San Francisco with Jayne (and buying an iPhone so we had a camera with us), then over to Barcelona to see my beautiful sister getting married (and the lively Spanish reception and welcome) and a tour around the wonderful sites of Barcelona. From there, across to an insanely wet Rome for a couple of days, and up to the beautiful Florence, where I took the opportunity of proposing to Jayne (she said yes) after the most incredible meal I’ve had in a long time. Around Tuscany (Sienna, San Gimignano, Luca, San Gimignano and Pisa) exploring some vineyards on the way, and out to the Cinque Terre for a night. Finally, up on the train to Venice where we spent our remaining couple of days. All in all a pretty perfect month, though the jet-lag with a quick return trip to the US the week I got home was a little less fun. Roll on 2008.11.