Sun Birthday Cluster

OpenSolaris 1 Year Anniversary

An inordinate number of people I know seem to have birthdays this week… not least my own (and two other members of the Sun desktop team) yesterday, which signalled the halfway mark to my threescore and ten. Or probably threescore minus ten, given the genetic predisposition of Lanarkshire folk to fatal heart attacks.

Today, one of the projects I work on has its first birthday too… OpenSolaris. I only work at the desktop end, which arguably isn’t where most of the coolest stuff is happening, so I’ll let the other bloggers talk about that sort of thing… but nonetheless, the result of all our hard work to integrate GNOME 2.14 into OpenSolaris just before Christmas is that for the first time in quite a while, I can generally use my Solaris desktop box all day every day to do my job, without resorting to Linux or OS X for anything other than testing. That has to be a Good Thing, and long may it continue!

Germany So Far…

Not too many dud games in the World Cup so far… Sweden v. the Scots’ adopted team of Trinidad & Tobago was probably the least action-packed, but livened up considerably by watching it on the big screen in a pub full of Trinidadians and Tobagans (and one bloke from Montserrat).

Of course there were all the usual jibes from the English media in the build-up to the opening Germany v. Costa Rica game, about how the Central Americans beat Scotland 1-0 in Italia ’90. It’s funny how everyone conveniently forgets that in same group, Costa Rica also beat Sweden (as did Scotland) and were unlucky to lose 1-0 to Brazil (as were Scotland), thus progressing to the next round (where they were, admittedly, whipped 4-1 by Czechoslovakia). They certainly weren’t the mugs that everyone makes them out to be; it’s just unfortunate that Scotland had to play them first before everyone else cottoned on!

Incidentally, any British fans who are bemoaning the lack of Baddiel and Skinner’s Fantasy Football on the telly this time around might be interested in their World Cup Podcast instead– I only came across it by accident, so you might not have noticed it either (unless you read The Times, presumably, as they’re sponsoring it…)

Le Moan

Can’t believe all the complaints from Wenger and Henry today about the referee costing Arsenal the Champions’ League Final last night. Er right, and what about the fact he should have allowed Barca’s first goal to stand when Lehmann was (quite rightly) sent off, and that you scored from a free kick that was the result of a blatant dive? Learn to lose with some graciousness, you whiney muppets.

Farewell Tel

After a couple of weeks of speculation, former England captain Terry Butcher is officially departing his post as Motherwell boss to take up the reins at Sydney FC in Oz.

He’s been at the helm since Motherwell went into administration in 2002, and despite the sort of budget that entailed, nonetheless took us to a couple of cup semis, one final, and consecutive top six finishes in the SPL. While sometimes guilty of displaying all the tactical subtlety you’d expect from a 6’4″ centre-back, Big Tel did a sterling job under the circumstances, was well-liked by the fans and the media alike, and goes with everyone’s best wishes.

Assistant manager Maurice Malpas takes over, with his former Dundee United and Scotland teammate Paul Hegarty rumoured to be joining him as number two.

apt-get install java

From now on, that’s pretty much all you’ll need to do to install the latest JRE/JDK on your Linux box1… Sun have just changed the way they license Java binaries to Linux (and OpenSolaris) distros. Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo are already taking advantage of this, along with NexentaOS, BeleniX, and SchilliX on the OpenSolaris front. Read the DLJ FAQ, or get more info at the jds-distros project website.

1 Ok, actually it’s apt-get install sun-java5-[jre|jdk]

That was close…

Kudos to the Thunderbird team for adding a neck-saving feature (maybe it’s been there forever, but I’ve only just encountered it tonight)… an alert that pops up when you try to send a mail using the keyboard shortcut rather than clicking Send. How I’ve laughed in the past whenever I’ve sent incomplete/embarrassing/borderline-litigious emails by mistake (usually when trying to use some other keyboard shortcut, followed by Enter) before I’d counted to ten and rewritten them 🙂

Now, you could well argue that it’s a poor shortcut (Cmd-Enter on Mac, presumably Ctrl-Enter on others) that’s easy to hit by mistake. But it’s kind of a standard one these days, so the warning is appreciated in the meantime until they pick a better one.

Road to Hell and Back

Went along to the last night of Chris Rea‘s farewell tour at the Olympia in Dublin last night… the tickets were one of last year’s Christmas presents, so I’d been looking forward to it for a while!

I hadn’t bought any of his albums for a few years, so I was a little surprised at just how rootsy/bluesy a lot of his recent stuff was… although with post-near-death projects like Blue Guitars under his belt, I don’t suppose I should have been. Not that I was at all bothered by that; I enjoy a good bit of blues guitar as much as the next man (although I can take or leave the lyrics, but that’s true of most of the stuff I like). Julie much preferred the songs from his more chart-bothering days though– “Road to Hell”, “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)”, “Let’s Dance” et al. Even on those, she thought there was a bit too much guitar noodling, and normally I would have agreed, but I didn’t mind it last night… mostly I because I can’t remember the last time I saw a slide guitarist play live, so I was too busy trying to watch and pick up some tips 🙂

Was a wee bit disappointed that he didn’t have anything to say for himself during or afterwards, given the “end of an era” nature of the evening, but maybe he’s just one of those guys who prefers to let his music do the talking. And nobody could begrudge him that.