Life is so good, it gets better every day

It Should Have Been 30

Slightly disappointed that jdub’s list of 28 things to improve in GNOME 2.8 doesn’t include any mention of printing. I guess it’s too large in scope for a cool hacks list. I probably would have put number 30 as making sure gnome-keyring is being used where possible, but fortunately that’s already getting a bunch of loving right now.

Update : Okay, I totally missed the point. Duh. Still some odd bits and pieces on that list.

Times Like These

And there has always been laughing, crying, birth, and dying
Boys and girls with hearts that take and give and break
And heal and grow and recreate and raise and nurture
But then hurt from time to time like these
And times like those
And what will be will be
And so it goes

It was one of those days, and all I wanted was a hug from someone special.

Maeve Just Ruined My Day

I was going all productive until Maeve mailed me a link to this film game. Darn.

Google Rating For a Friend

So poor Patrick Davey was cruelly knocked off the top of Google. Okay, so it was a pretty darn funny prank at the start, but that other Patrick Davey sounds far too similar for my liking. I’m creeped out.

Get Well Soon!

Returned home on Monday night to hear the shocking news of Claudia’s freak climbing accident. A block hit her from above and she tumbled down the cliffs. As far as I know some vertibrae were shattered. It’s hard being so far away, but my other friends back in Ireland have been great about keeping us up to date. Things seem to be going well after some scans and surgery. Claudia, get well soon! We’re all thinking of you over here.

DME on Linux

David’s musings on Linux is read worthy. It’s interesting that he concludes that Sun should pick Debian as its linux distribution of choice. I’m also of that very same opinion, although the commitment to such a project shouldn’t be taken lightly, much like contributing to the GNOME project. A while back I wrote up a bunch of slides on why Debian might be the right choice within Sun. I’ve been running Debian on my iBook for quite some time, but since I started to work getting JDS ready for our SuSE base I haven’t booted into Debian – it’s a shame, I really like it and for the most part, like GNOME, ‘Just Works’.

Proprietary Development Models Also Fall Flat

Okay, so I’ve switched the topic around, but computerworld’s latest article about how open source development models fall flat, is rather embarassingly wrong. In particular, Nancy [from Sun Microsystems] says that the geek creed ‘If you can’t install it, you don’t deserve to use it’ is still alive in many open source projects. However true that might be in some cases, we should look at a number of proprietary development models that have embarassingly failed in this respect – from our beloved Staroffice/OpenOffice.org to Netscape/Mozilla and many other examples. Those projects employ hordes of build engineers, with very technical, complicated build environments that the average geek has no chance of building. Perhaps it might be argued that she used ‘install’ from a user point of view, but if we expect people to contribute they need to be able to build first, then install. Fortunately there are OpenOffice.org folks who are improving this situation.

Nancy also goes on to say that the open source mantra that ‘everyone can contribute’ is actually misleading because adding to an open source project is basically limited to code, bugs and patches. I’m rather surprised with this, since Nancy has been involved in the GNOME project, where this is obviously not the case – with contributions of 70+ translations, heaps of online user and technical documentation and countless usability advice.

I think we, as corporates, could learn a lot more about open source development models. Despite their perceived lack of organization, they do seem to work very effectively, with many good practices that we could adopt.

So Who Reads These Things Anyway?

So I often wonder who reads my blog. I often wonder who reads planetgnome or who reads planetsun. So, when I read articles about Java and open source like this and this I wonder if the right people will notice and read them. James, I guess I’m looking at you right now.

Goodbye Lenin

We had a night at the cinema, and I was rather impressed with Goodbye Lenin. I didn’t know much about it before I went there, but I really liked the film. I’m not sure whether it was because the story was so intriguing or whether I could connect with the characters or what, but it just worked for me. Got back home and cooked a nice steak with some port gravy and drank a bottle of italian red wine. A real chill out day, that was so badly needed.

Do As The Kiwis Do

2 weeks ago we headed to a Crusaders game. They played The Bulls in the Super 12. Watching rugby over here is a completely different ballgame – they’ve livened it up a bunch, and really encouraged it as a family occasion. We’ve also organized some tickets to see England play the All Blacks down in Dunedin thanks to Carolyn for mid June.