Life is so good, it gets better every day

GNOME and Solaris Land

For a long time, GNOME, or Solaris, has been a second class citizen with each other – I’m not entirely sure which way around it should be. As a desktop team it’s been somewhat frustrating having to rip all sorts of features out of our releases on Solaris, simply because we haven’t been able to come up with a substitute for them due to time constraints – whether because they just needed porting to the Solaris API, or because there was no substitute within the Solaris kernel.

Today I started writing that list, partly because of the guilt for not having written it before but also because I believe it would be really useful to have once OpenSolaris is released. I’m also guilty of not dog-fooding GNOME on Solaris a little more, and suffering in my jocks for a while. Hopefully Solaris will get some more desktop focus over the next year or two.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Linux and I believe in the development structure and culture that has been created around the project. I was hugely impresed by Andrew Morton’s keynote at linux.conf.au – many things he said were so very true of the management of just about every software project. I hope the OpenSolaris community can amount to the same.

Take a Ride, Buddy

tberman did warn me, but I figured the 7.9 out of 10 review on IMBD was past my threshold and would be enough. Sadly, it wasn’t. I’ve read the book, listened to the radio series, and seen the BBC tv series. It was a nice attempt but, for me, sadly fell flat on its face. None of the characters were instantly likeable, and it departed a long way from the original storyline.

GUADEC Plans

I think I’ve got more involved in the GUADEC planning than I originally planned to. It’s actually quite therapeutic in many ways – having a list of easy tasks to fulfill proves to be a nice change of direction compared to my daily duties within Sun.

However, this year, the GUADEC experience is going to be relatively short. I have no Foundation Board or Advisory Board committments, so that takes 2 days out of my schedule.

I could spend those days touring around Germany – going on the tour of Esslingen, or visiting some places around town. However, those 5 days are the few days each year that I get to see old faces and catch up.

So I’m not going to waste time touring around the place. I’m going to spend that time talking shit and hopefully brainstorming for GNOME’s future, most probably in a pub somewhere. Feel free to join me!

Glad to be Home

Jeff and Pia’s wedding was a blast. LCA rocked. Despite how much I enjoyed each, I’m pretty glad to be home. Still feel a bit weird that I’m calling New Zealand my home, but I feel amazingly comfortable here, and comfortable is good.

The wedding went really well, and I was completely honoured to be part of the wedding cheerleading party, along with Thom and Touie, Sue and Elly. Everyone, including myself, had a great time, and Denise and Touie’s hospitality and generousity was wonderful throughout the weekend I spent in Yass.

LCA was also great fun, although I admit that I was probably still burnt out and not as hyped for a Linux conference as I wanted to be. It was awesome to meet Robert and Davyd for the first time, along with many old friends.

My general perception was that most people had pretty much disregarded Sun’s involvement in the Linux space, which made me pretty sad. While I’m still enjoying the challenges of working in Sun I sure don’t feel as proud with the product that I’m personally involved with, as I did before. I guess I have lots of thinking to do to see how we can turn it around, and I believe we can. It’s just going to take a lot of groundwork, and riding the days of frustration along the way.

Linux.conf.au

Linux.conf.au just started yesterday, and I’m already tired. We’re holding the GNOME.conf.au mini-conf today. It’s going to be a long week – more later.

GNOME And The Future

While writing my ‘101 Things to Know about GNOME’ talk for GUADEC I’ve been ploughing through the archives of many mailing lists, gnome-announce-list in particular. It’s been a pretty fascinating read, and I’d encourage people to do the same if they have spare time.

One of the mails I came across was A non technical perspective on GNOME goals and future work, from DV. We’ve done pretty well considering, with many of those goals well on their way to being solved. A lot of them still need quite a substantial amount of work. I wonder if todays goals are a similar set, compared to those of 3 years ago.

As mentioned elsewhere, if you want to help me with my talk, please send me interesting bits and pieces. Thanks heaps for all those who have contributed thus far!

Lions Tour 2005

Clive’s squad, all in all, seems pretty fair, with 20 Englishmen, 11 Irish, 10 Welsh and 3 Scot’s – nice to see O’Driscoll leading the team. What’s not fair is the lack of a ticket to go see them, and the abuse that I’ll probably get while watching it in the pub.

Jack Johnson And Friends

Went to see the Jack Johnson gig last night in the Town Hall with Carolyn. It was a really excellent couple of hours, featuring Xavier Rudd and G.Love and Special Sauce. I hadn’t heard anything of G.Love and Special Sauce before I went to the concert, and at the start it was slightly strange having his hip hop style in the middle of Jack and Xavier – but in a way, it kinda worked, and when they all came out on stage at the end and had a jamming session it was really pretty cool. Definitely better than the John Butler Trio gig I went to a month or so ago, although his music would have blended in just fine last night too.

Longhorn Delayed?

Seems Longhorn might slip its release again – can only be good news for vendors like Novell, Red Hat, Apple and others…Hrm, looks like Sun is part of the ‘others’ again – suck. At least it’s good news for GNOME.

GUADEC For Everyone!

The next round of the popular GNOME conference, GUADEC, is just around the corner. I’m pretty excited by the conference this year – it be the first year in a while where I’m not so much involved in the planning, and have no committments with the GNOME Foundation board of directors. I’m going over there with a real sense of being able to enjoy myself for the first time in ages, without large weighted decisions looming over me. Not only that, but we’ll be surrounded by good beer, sausages and large bosomed girls in tight leather pants. Okay, I suspect I’m thinking more of this – isn’t it a pity we couldn’t co-ordinate the dates?

I already had booked my flights, before I saw that the GNOME Foundation sorted out a 10-20% discount with Lufthansa and with other cheap airlines in Europe, it should prove to be much easier getting the Stuttgart this year. I also booked my accommodation on the same day, staying at the Hotel Unger for the few nights I’ll be in Stuttgart [26th May – 1st June]. The GUADEC guys also organized a discount for a number of hotels around the area, and there’s still hope we might be able to organize some cheaper accommodation like we had in Kristiansand last year.

Unfortunately we seem to have ended up with the same number of talks from previous years. Everyone wants to talk at GUADEC, and we’re trying desperately hard to accommodate everyone with a rather action packed schedule with some excellent speakers – both old and new. This year, we’re trying out a few new things –

• A separate Multimedia track – There’s always lots to talk about in the multimedia space, and we’ve given them their own track this year. Fluendo are also streaming the conference again this year, for those that can’t make the conference.
• Lightning talks – This was a successful addition to the Boston GNOME Summit last year that we were very keen to add to the schedule this year. We plan to have lots of people talking for a few minutes about their project. If you are interested, you should register your lightning talk here!
• Freeform sessions – We’ve introduced a new slot on Monday afternoon. We’re hoping that this will be where some hard planning, brainstorming, and problem solving happens for GNOME. We have 3 more freeform sessions to fill up and we’re quite keen for people to come up with suggestions and lead these sessions. The great Luis Villa has already signed up for a Marketing GNOME session – he doesn’t know it yet, since he’s currently touring the back and beyond in Australia! You’ll also notice there is an hour-long group session where all the groups report back on what each session has brainstormed.

There will be a certain amount of schedule activity as we start to finalize the current schedule, so if you have any specific comments you need to get them in now to guadec-planning [at] gnome [dot] org. As always, we’ll be using our wiki page, on live.gnome.org, for many announcements along with guadec-list.

Tell us you’re coming! – you can’t afford to miss it! Registration will be announced soon!