Life is so good, it gets better every day

Can You Repeat That?

The following contains hugely sensitive internal material. If you understand this, you can have my job.

Unfortunately, every so often you are simply unlucky. Today was one of those days. While going through my mail boxes at the weekend, I noticed a bug mail with an MR [Multiple Release], and an associating SubCR [Sub-Change Request]. Haha, easy you say? I went ‘bugger me, what’s that?’ and forwarded on the mail to my QA buddy, Shane. He replied back that it was multiple release bug that required a patch for a given release of Solaris, and pointed that I had to get approval through the IPR system [Internal Patch Request]. Right, of course. Fortunately one of our team has had to go through that process, and very usefully wrote out a series of steps. After raising and approving the IPR [and having needed contact names, phone numbers and emails for various bits of the form], I have to raise an PRF [Patch Request Form], which needs an associating CRT [Change Request Tracker]. Are you following yet? I’m currently on step 3 of a 9 step process, and each step feels completely disconnected from the previous and next steps.

I love Sun, don’t get me wrong, but I sometimes feels the various processes that we’ve set up really kill the average developer’s productivity, sanity and progress within Sun.

I’m going on holiday tommorrow. My timing is impeccable!

What Weekend?

Another weekend over, and again I’m finding myself asking ‘What happened to it?’. This time I think I probably know the solution – 3 nights of drinking since St.Patrick’s Day. I wake up this morning just a bit stupider than I did on Thursday. Sigh.

Mick arrives today for a week. It’ll be nice seeing him again, and hope to have a good time touring around the south island for the next week.

As some people have noticed, the GUADEC schedule is online. It’s been really hard designing a schedule this year that fits in with everyone’s thoughts and plans for the conference. Like previous years, I think we’ve ultimately taken on too much again – this year has an exciting brainstorming day, a multimedia track, and all the usual talks/BOF’s and User/Business day panels. We need to try and learn from our mistakes otherwise we’re just going to keep having the same heartache over and over again, especially trying to fit in as yet unschedule talks and BOFs due to pressure from our sponsors. We’ll get there – we always invariably do.

Our Day

It’s that time of the year again. Hooray. Happy St.Patrick’s day. The crowd is already gathering outside our Irish local. It’s the only day where the Guinness tastes almost as good as one back home – although I suspect it’ll get a bit messy later on, when the demand peaks. Met up with Patrick for a liquid lunch, but managed to make a quick exit after a couple.

Patrick tells me we get to drive around the south island in a BMW while Mick is over here. Sweet.

After months of ignoring all Gmail invites, I created a Gmail account today. It’s not like I need another mail account, but curiousity got the better of me.

On The Move

For the past couple of months I’ve been living with Patrick. It has been lots of fun [especially the networked Half Life frag sessions], but now with winter approaching it’s time to move on again. I came across a small one bedroom apartment on Montreal street, which is right in the middle of town. There is a slightly higher rent [$275 a week], but it looks much easier to heat, and seems to have a nice kitchen. I plan to move out just after Easter.

Tim and Barbara arrived into Christchurch on Monday afternoon. It was really great to see them again. We spent Tuesday afternoon down in the French village Akaroa, just south along the Banks penninsula which was fun. They spend the next two weeks travelling around the south island before finally coming back to Christchurch for a night.

Mick arrives for a week next Monday. I think the plan is to head down south, maybe hit the Keplar track, and spend some nights around Wanaka and Queenstown. Looking forward to seeing him again.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I just recently finished Aron Ralston’s book ‘Between a rock and a hard place’ – remember the guy who cut off his arm after it got trapped by a large boulder in Utah. Throughout the book it was hard not to constantly think ‘What a jerk’, with danger seemingly following him right throughout his life. I’d like to say that most climbers aren’t like that, but I’ve met my fair share of people who push themselves too much and get themselves into trouble. After finishing it, I didn’t feel much sympathy. An interesting read nonetheless.

Directory Hell

Interesting that Tim has come across ‘Directory Hell’ on his latest notes with moving from Linux to Solaris. What some might call amazingly confusing, seems to be a feature for most Solaris engineers, and ARC members. Lots of other interesting notes – I think python was only recently added to Solaris by the GNOME team [although could have been in /opt/sfw for a while].