Life is so good, it gets better every day

Now Aren’t I A Good Boy?

I am now eating breakfast and eating fruit. All extremely shocking information for my mum.

We Have All The Time In The World

Okay, so maybe not all the time. Since moving to New Zealand I’ve definitely had more free time – I’m not quite sure what this is, but it’s good and I want more!

Been spending some more time getting the Foundation website in shape – with the help of Jeff and Vincent. It’s definitely ready to rock, so we should have it online soon. It’s nice to see all the web infrastructure in place – Developer, User, Foundation, GUADEC, CVS and Bugzilla. Haven’t made any more progress on the ‘Joining GNOME’ stuff yet, but there is time!

Unusually even managed to find time to go through some of the video from my time in the US, including that awesome drive through Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. And found time to read.

So the Foundation board are beginning to rock. Shame it’s almost time for elections. It’s been my first year on the board, and I’ve actually enjoyed it heaps, more so than being on the release team. It’s pretty cool when people just do stuff, and yet some amazingly frustrating when they don’t. I think we’ve had a pretty excellent team this year and definitely the right balance of people. We always keep saying ‘We have so much to do, and so little time’. Let’s just make the time, eh?

Can’t Stay For Long. Just Turn Around, And I’m Gone Again.

We kicked off the next round of GUADEC with a pretty awesome meeting last night. The team seem like an excellent and enthusiastic group of people and I’m pretty psyched about GUADEC heading there next year. It’s already shaping up as an excellent conference. The only trouble is that the meetings are likely to take place at 5am my time which probably means that I won’t be attending too many, but it really seems like they have a good solid idea of what needs to be done, and have already got most of the infrastructure in place already! If you have any specific complaints about GUADEC last year, or suggestions that you’d like to throw into the fray, now would be a pretty good time to email guadec-list@gnome.org. Stay tuned for an announcement soon!

So, after posting my ‘Joining GNOME’ plea for help I got a grand total of zero patches back [although I did get some grammar and spelling help from Erwann and Eric, and some comments from Graham]. I guess everyone is busy off doing something entirely more attractive. It’s kinda funny…months ago hundreds of people were complaining to Jeff that the current website was crap, and that he should get his arse into gear and put up *whatever* he had at the time. Now that he’s finally gotten something up, something that everyone can easily work to, I’ve seen a pretty small amount of people actually contributing back content. It’s all terribly sad and pathetic. Graphics and layout can’t make a good website on their own. We need content. WHERE IS THE LOVE?

I went for a 12km run down to Hagley Park and back. I think it almost killed me. Definitely need to improve on my general level of fitness over the coming weeks.

Why Can’t We Just Learn To Get Along?

I guess I’ve always been the impatient type, getting frustrated, yet expecting things to happen. Just like that. It seems all too easy to forget how GNOME works, and how that it relies on the JFDI principle. I was casually browsing developer.gnome.org and www.gnome.org with a view to finish off the contacts page on foundation.gnome.org. Even with our lovely new look, it’s easy to forget how much our content really sucks. It’s not badly written, it’s just old. Real old.

Suddenly I found myself taking a page at a time, gradually trying to improve the content. I just wonder how effective it would be if we all grouped together and spent a week concentrating on that effort. I guess it’s a thankless task, and a rather frustrating one trying to figure out the tangled mess of links, articles, tutorials, whitepapers and guides. With a few updates here and there, all a bit too random, I decided to concentrate on ‘Joining the GNOME Project’ – it certainly seems one of the more important documents that we have online.

So now I have this grand vision – that I will go to sleep, and people will read this blog, and see this link that I have started on, and send me patches. It’s not there yet, but it can be. You decide.

Shut That Door, There’s Draughts Coming Through

This weekend is Labour weekend in New Zealand, sharing a public holiday with many countries around the world. Awoke unusually early due to heavy rain hitting the corragated tin roof and decided that I couldn’t possibly waste the day. The International Antarctic Visitors Center is about a 10 minute walk away from the house, so it seemed like the perfect destination on a rainy day. It actually proved to be a pretty interesting visit, having an in depth look at how the bearded scientists survive during the 6 months of darkness winter. Despite the hardships they faced, and the huge swings of morale, I came away feeling only envy. Could I possibly survive such an environment? I couldn’t say, but I know there must be something to bring so many people back year after year. I am sure it is one of the few continents that I will probably not visit in my lifetime and yet seemingly, 1000’s of tourists visit the place every summer. They even have a Lonely Planet guidebook for the place, which amusingly asks all people travelling by ship, to make sure that they have reinforced ice breaks, an emergency helicopter and a few other random checklist items. It’s a different world, for sure.

It seems a good refelection of today that ‘hands on’ museums are more popular than the antiquated trip through dead animals and dusty books. It was pretty cool to be put in a freeze box, to watch how a typical Antarctic storm would feel. With the temperature lowing out at -20 degrees, you could imagine why this lonely place isn’t for everyone. Decided not to take a trip on the Haagelunds, although it was very tempting. Apparently they take you through an assault course, set to prove the worth of the machines in a barren environment like the Antarctic. It didn’t really seem like the real thing, so I left it at that.

After a quick lunch, I headed out towards the beach. Cycling east, I passed many of the suburbs left undiscovered after my week of house hunting. Christchuch gets a lot of winds, although perhaps not as much as Wellington, and today was a struggle of man versus machine [and nature]. When I found the sea, I was a little bit disappointed. I found a beach, empty and void of sunshine with pipes running out to sea at regular intervals. Decided that the sand was compact enough to cycle along the beach for a while. It was tough work, but totally enjoyable. Christchuch is an amazingly flat place, and today I was glad of that fact. After 3 hours on the bike, you legs fade, your will depleted and you casually lose interest.

Laca and family returned from their adventures in Dunedin, and now faces an interesting dilema of where to move. From his stories, Dunedin sounds like a pretty excellent place to visit.

JFDI Principle in 10 Easy Steps

Got frustrated at the general lack of momentum on the board list so sent a bunch of nag mails. Soon Jeff joined in and it was tag team time. And then I remembered the old JFDI principle that is so sadly lacking, and started hacking on foundation.gnome.org. Ported the foundation-web module to use the gnomeweb-wml build structure, and it seems to have worked well. Jeff has done a great job cleaning it up, so it was a pretty easy task. Hopefully we can get the new site online early next week.

Nice to see the gst-mixer being imported into the gnome-media module, and it will be interesting to see what it looks like, and where it will go. In fact one of the comments from an as yet to be published usability study was –

Had a nice few beers with Laca on Thursday night, who is down with his family scoping out the south island. It was good to see him again.

This Revolution Will Not Be Televised

So it seems I’m going to be working on fixing some of the usability problems with the current Java Desktop System, which for all intents and purpose is the GNOME desktop. We had a pretty successful beta program, with a large amount of interest in what we’ve produced. As a result, we’ve had a lot of feedback to chew and digest, and coupled wth a recent usability study based on the desktop, there’s a lot of small projects coming out of the woodwork.

It’s actually pretty humbling to see what issues have cropped up in the study, which hopefully the guys can soon release. From obvious problems of a poor help system, and a poor file selector to less obvious [or at least, harder to fix] problems with windows from launched applications hiding pretty important desktop objects.

Now it’s just a case of putting all these comments together, and trying to tackle them one by one.

When 11 Just Isn’t Good Enough

I too have found Tim Tams.

The Lifecycle of Junk Mail

Never before have I seen so much junk mail in my entire life. Okay, I’ve only ever lived in Ireland, and that probably isn’t a very good representation of a normal country. I think I’m getting, on average, one free newspaper and about 4 or 5 newspaper style ads. From ‘Christchurch Star’, to ‘Christchurch Mail’ and from ‘Christchurch Herald’ to ‘Community Times’. Do people actually read these things? They seem to consist of 80% advertisements, 10% random community stories, 5% gardening tips and 5% lonely heart messages. Still, at least they have some use – filling up 70% of the recycling bin. Seems like a monumental waste of resources for a perceived ‘green’ country like New Zealand.

On a semi related note, I seem to be getting less spam in my email these days. Very curious.

Welcome To A Whole New World

Dealing with Telecom has been less than inspiring. All I wanted from the start was a phone connection and ADSL dial up that worked. Is it too much to ask? All the utility companies in New Zealand seem to act like ISPs, in that you can chop and change as much as you like. What happened to monopolism? Confused by it all, I decided to go with the most convenient option and avoid the confusion of multiple bills coming in each month.

Spoke to a nice girl, after randomly being thrown around their phone queue system, who set me up with Xtra Jetstream Starter – a 128kb/s connection with a limit of 5Gb per month. I didn’t need broadband speed. I mean, who really does? After waiting for an engineer to come and connect me for a few days, I decided to ring them up again. Oh, I need 2 forms of identification before you can connect me? Didn’t you get our email sir? Um, no. That’s what I need an internet connection for.

So the big day arrives. I get connected. They hand me a USB modem. Wonderful. I guess I should have learned to second guess these guys by now. I distinctly remember them telling me that the modem had 1 ethernet port. Maybe it’s that language barrier thing happening again. They don’t understand me, I don’t understand them. Wanting so desperately to be like the Jetsons on that incredibly annoying ad they have on TV, I raced into town to buy a 4 port modem/router. Got all set up, to find that they didn’t submit a service order for my account. I had to wait another day.

Today I got a delivery of another starter pack, complete with USB modem. I’m still waiting on a courier to take by the first one. Stop this crazy thing!