Life is so good, it gets better every day

The Dunk Tank

Somehow I managed to end up in the dunk tank water that Linus, Keith, Jeff, Bdale, Rasmus, Rusty and many more free software heros also plunged into. I may never wash again.

Conference Dinner

“I am feeling less than olympic today, less than olympic”.

We Will, We Will, Rock You

Just sat in on Jeff’s enthusiastic ‘Armed to the Teeth’ talk. He covered everything from general GNOME processes, history and current and future technology. It rocked, and really began to get that fuzzy GNOME community feeling. I remember way back when I attended GUADEC in Denmark, where I only knew names, but not faces. It was weird seeing the likes of Havoc, Miguel and all those other crazy famous hackers and being way too shy to go up to them and say hello. Now, 3 years later, I’m drinking beer with some of them, on the GNOME Foundation board, my name in the about box and some code in the desktop. GNOME is not just a desktop, but a community and Jeff’s memorial slide for Chema, Ettore and Mark really drove that home.

GNOME will rock you, pick you up and carry you through many amazing experiences and meet many incredible people. Are you ready to let it in?

GNOME.conf.au

The GNOME mini conf rocked. jdub did a pretty excellent job pulling it all off, and we seemed to get pretty good attendance. My first GNOME Building talk kinda sucked, since there wasn’t a huge amount to talk about but I was pretty happy about the JDS one and it was awesome to get the Live Eval JDS CDs in time [thanks Michael!]. Lots of interesting pipeline work from Keith, James and Havoc. Rock on.

Conference Time

It’s conference time again, and I’m happy to be on the other side of things once again. It’ll be so nice to be able to sit back and enjoy the talks, meet the people and have a beer. It was an insanely start for the airport, eventually having to squeeze out of my bedroom window because I couldn’t find the keys to let myself out. Then a 1 hour wait at the check in before racing onto the plane just in time. Turns out the plane was delayed, so that meant another race to get the connecting one to Adelaide. Another new place – I wonderif it’s as slow as Brisbane.

We headed to a place called Hanging Rock yesterday, just two hours south of Christchuch. From the guidebook it looked like an excellent place, with a good variety of climbs. Unfortunately it was our first encounter with carriage bolts so it wasn’t a very successful trip. Carriage bolts require having a wire loopedover them, as there is no hanger to clip into with your quickdraw. The rock was a mixture of pockety and slopey limestone with lots of potential, including room for new development if you have a bolt gun handy. Eventually we ended up top roping 2 routes – an 18 and a 21. It’s really not the same though, and I missed out on being at the sharp end of the rope.

News that doesn’t travel fast

Very sad to hear the news about Mark, especially since he was Irish and doing fantastic work on the GNOME usability front. Another empty space in the GNOME yearbook.

iPod Frustration

Why, oh why did I buy an iPod when I travelled half way around the world without my CD collection. Have started to remedy that buying ‘Welcome to the Monkey House – The Dandy Warhols’, ‘Elephant – The White Stripes’, ‘Get Born – Jet’ and ‘Riverhead – Goldenhorse’. At least I have some music for a plane ride now.

GUADEC – Call For Papers

Dave sent out the call for paper announcement for GUADEC. It’s great to see movement, and with Miguel posting some thoughts there’s lots to do and think about. Should be a rocking conference.

Got the last of my injections for India next month, so I’m charged, motivated and ready to go! I’m hoping it will be a good opportunity to see behind the doors of Wipro and witness first hand the various obstacles that Sun has thrown into the partnership. It should be a really excellent experience, and I feel there is a lot of problem solving to be done, sorting through the various processes that we have. I’m beginning to think through some sort of loose agenda with Arvind, but hoping that things are going to be pretty casual with lots of time for discussion –

• Sun – Behind Close Doors, the organization and people
• JDS – What is it, and where are we going with it
• Sun Processes – Enough red tape to tie you in knots
• Wipro Gripes – I want to hear them!
• Wipro & Sun – How to get 2 teams working as 1

Probably missing heaps of other possible things, but hopefully it’s a good starting point and lead on to a lot of changes within Sun.

GUADEC – Ramping Up For June

Had the misfortune of having to give guadec-planning@gnome.org a bit of a kick in the arse this week. It wasn’t a pleasant experience but I felt that things were slipping slightly and we all needed a reality check. If there’s one thing I learned from last year, is that you never have enough lead time. Fortunately the Norwegian guys have done awesome work up to this, so hopefully things will start to rock once again. If you are Norwegian, maybe you might consider helping the team out – email them at guadec-planning@gnome.org.

From Behind The Lines

It’s been a busy week, and as per usual everything seems to happen at the last minute. Spent much of the last few weeks porting JDS to GNOME 2.5.x, in the hope that we might be able to push a few patches upstream in time for the feature freeze. This week is patch pushing week and it’s been quite productive. A lot of the pretty big patches are still in the process of being ported, so I’m not entirely confident that they will all make it. GNOME 2.5.x is looking pretty good, and feel bad that I didn’t have any time to work on new stuff for either gnome-utils or zenity. Got pointed to an interesting article here, which seems fairly much on the ball. I’m rather curious to see if Sun can maintain its momentum, given various recent set backs – it’s been a disappointing and frustrating time of late and I feel there is little I can do to change that.

Heading off to Adelaide for LCA on Sunday. Very much looking forward to the conference, although beginning to feel that my JDS talk is a little too corporate for the target audience. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with some interesting insights from behind the lines, otherwise it’ll be a case of ‘here’s what you already know’. Haven’t begun to think about the other talk I offered to co-present – reckon that might be a last minute talk thrown together.

Had a good conversation with Arvind over my trip to India in February. Getting more excited about it and I think there could be a lot of benefit from it, especially if I can get the folks there to open up so that we can work through all the various hurdles that Sun has thrown into the partnership. The topic of planet GNOME came up on an internal mailing list this week, and I think it could be interesting trying to get the GNOME teams from Sun and Wipro to blog – it seems like an excellent way of keeping each other in touch with what is happening.

Climbing is going well. Climbed an overhanging 22 the other day [French 6c, 6c+?] which was heaps of fun. Bought a new rope, and a bouldering mat. It’s proving to be the perfect escape route for me right now, although sad that I’m constantly hopping in and out of the country to have a regular training schedule.