Category: Work

It’s not ‘kay’, m-kay?

Apparently, Scott McNealy pronounced my name ‘Kay-lum’ in his latest
monthly intranet broadcast (as Americans are wont to do for some
reason… especially those who live in Kay-lifornia).  I know this
because everyone keeps coming up to me today and saying “Hello
Kaylum”.  It’s really not that funny any more 🙂

New home for JDS community RPMs

Dave Southern will now be maintaining his unofficial JDS RPM repository over at Ricardo Wagemaker’s gcclinux.com
site. You’ll find a large number of useful apps for JDS R2
there, with JDS R3 RPMs ready to go as soon as we get around to
shipping it 🙂

Sam and Tom on JDS R3

Sam
and Tom seemingly aren’t too enamoured with the forthcoming
release of JDS release 3 on Linux.  While they’ve given us a lot
of support in the past, I’d have to take issue with some of their
comments about the beta versions they were given access to (not least
that I was under the impression that our beta participants were subject
to an NDA and shouldn’t be commenting on it publicly yet at all, but perhaps
I’m wrong there).

They don’t get any credit for their real contributions to very
important open source projects because they don’t have any people who
actually understand or talk to individuals in the open source
community,” Hiser said. “They’re not spending any time on the mailing
lists.”

Not
quite sure which projects they’re talking about here; Googling for
sun.com
addresses on the GNOME mailing lists alone turns up 65,000
hits, and that’s without counting contributions to OpenOffice.org,
Mozilla, Evolution, X.org… if they mean “we don’t have many Linux
kernel hackers” then no, we don’t, any more than Red Hat or Novell have
many Solaris kernel hackers, despite their offering products that are interoperable with (and in some cases run on) Solaris.

[But] the people they have now who rendered JDS release three have
done a terrible job. I think they’re going to find out that it’s not
going to do well at all.

What
they’re referring to here is the theme that shipped with JDS R3 on
Solaris
10, which was also the default theme in our Linux beta release. 
While I haven’t heard many Solaris users complaining about it, there’s
no doubt that it wasn’t to everyone’s taste in the Linux beta. 
Just for the record, since it’s not mentioned in the interview, beta
customers were
given an update that reverted it to the JDS R2 look and feel while we
refine the JDS R3 one to take account of their comments.

The Linux model is to give away the software and sell services,”
Adelstein added. “They’re going to give away the software, but they
don’t have any services to sell.

I was under the impression that Sun was selling support– a service that leads most enterprises to choose to buy their
*nix systems in the first place, rather than rolling their own.

Anyway…
time will tell who’s right and who’s wrong.  Look out for the Linux version of JDS R3 in
the next couple of months and make up your own mind 🙂

Step back in time

Gah… spent half the afternoon today trying to work out why all my
autogen.sh scripts were suddenly and silently not generating configure
scripts any more. Turned out that my Powerbook’s clock had reset to
January 1 1904 when the battery ran out this morning (pmud
doesn’t seem to work on my G4, so I can’t predict when it’s going to
happen). But come on guys, some sort of warning message would
have been nice…

In other news, the Centra on the business park has finally seen the light, and is now selling both Diet and sugar-stoked regular Irn Bru. Now if only its Daily Record deliveries were a bit more reliable…

gcalctool colours

Spent a little time towards the end of last week working with Rich on bug #157962, to get some colour back into gcalctool. We haven’t yet come up with a complete solution, which would involve an option that picked colours from the theme by default (I’m still thinking about that one), but in the meantime you can now copy the cvs-supplied .gcacltoolrc file to your homedir to change this boring old look into something slightly more sexy. (Or, of course, you can invent your own colour scheme to match your GNOME theme du jour.)

Just Another Day at Sun…

Apparently, a plane was spotted circling a couple of Sun campuses yesterday trailing a “Just Another Day at Red Hat” banner. As one Sun wag put it, the conclusion to be drawn is presumably that a typical day at Red Hat involves going round in circles with your head in the clouds worrying about the launch of Solaris 10 🙂

(Or, as another put it, “So Red Hat has moved from the ‘ignoring Sun’ to ‘laughing at Sun’
stage. On to stage three…”)