Was pointed at jdshelp.org yesterday, which is already starting to build up a nice little collection of rpms for JDS. What with that and the awesome blastwave project for Solaris, there’s quite a little community starting to build up around Sun desktop products at the moment, which is really cool.
News finally broke today of one of another major JDS deal… Allied Irish Bank will transition 7500 desktops in its branches in the UK and Ireland to JDS over the next year.
Of course this is a great win for Sun (the competition was extremely stiff), and since AIB are HQ’d in Dublin it’s a doubly-pleasing one for your friendly Sun GNOME team. But of course we couldn’t have done it without the GNOME community at large… YOU ROCK!
This quote made me chuckle:
“They should stay out of this,” said [named employee], a Sun Microsystems employee who attended the rally, who said he depends on money from stock options to pay his mortgage.
Ah, what it must have been to be part of the IT boom… the money from *my* Sun stock options wouldn’t buy a bag of penny caramels 
Want to know how/where/when/why? Andy Tucker‘s looks like the blog to watch…
Sun’s Java System Calendar Server connector (aka hydrogen) for Evolution 1.4 on Solaris and Linux was GPL’ed today and is now available in GNOME CVS.
Kudos to everyone who made this happen… hopefully the Evo 1.5 version will be along soon
Been playing a bit with the gcalctool-ng branch of gcalctool today, to help Rich and Sami decide whether it was time to merge the new features back into head. Hopefully I’ve convinced them that it is
So, it seems Eugenia didn’t like JDS2 much. But considering it’s never been touted as anything other than JDS1 plus system management tools, and it’s still aimed squarely at the likes of tightly-administered banks and call centres, I’d have been more concerned if the review hadn’t been padded out with some stuff about the games
not working properly.
Sure JDS has bugs, and I’d be the first to admit that some of them aren’t too hard to find if you’re not one of our target users (and Eugenia knows exactly who they are). But at the end of the day I’d rather that Sun continues to fix them based on customers’ rather than journalists’ priorities, even if the odd predictably-unflattering
review ensues.
Apparently our new Sun Ireland intranet site no longer allows us to see all our local colleagues’ mugshots, because doing so constitutes a “privacy issue”. I wonder if they’ll be taking down all our cubicle name plates too, in case we accidentally go round to somebody’s desk and see their face.
Have posted a few photographs (in no particular order, and unedited) from my recent trip to CHI2004 in Vienna, where Matthias, Jiri and I presented a short paper entitled Professional Usability in Open Source Projects: NetBeans, GNOME and OpenOffice.
It’s official– I am personally going to throttle the next person who commits a Foobar Preferences menu item to the JDS build tree with the tooltip:
[Configure|Set|Change] your foobar [options|preferences|settings]
:o)
