Oh man, my sister, the geek. I guess I shouldn’t be so shocked. For all those who haven’t seen it, the Open Language Tools project is definitely worth checking out, being currently led by another family member [grin].
In case anyone missed it, we now have the full multimedia experience for my talk in Stuttgart, minus the hungover as hell Irishman. Thanks heaps to Kris for putting this together.
File: gnome-101-video.ogg Size: 20MB Md5sum: 1886ad0ce8075957cd25e6ab418458f9
Oh wait, Sun’s my company…nevermind. So by now everyone’s seen the new Ultra 20 workstations starting at $895 – something that we’re not really going to make much money out of at that price.
Now Open Source has always been important to Sun – we’ve proved that in the past, and will continue to prove it in the future. However, there’s always been one request from hundreds of employees working directly with various open source projects – being able to donate hardware and software to make those projects significantly better. I’d like to think we could have a few of these machines to share, especially for the projects that we’re interested in, start up an annual program, and make the world a better place. Call it ‘Summer of Hardware’, if you will.
I’ve asked. Who’ll listen?
It’s been nice to get back to New Zealand, although it’s been freaking cold the last couple of days. It could have frozen the balls off a brass monkey. The southern alps are looking good, although still probably too early in the season for the snow lovers. Managed to pick up a crappy cold on the way back, which really killed my sleep cycle and getting over jet lag. Have been wide awake at 5am for the past 4 nights – fun!
Met up with Emma and her travelling mates on Wednesday night for a curry and a pint, only 5 hours after stepping off a plane. And 5 hours after knocking back 2 Bloody Marys on our approach into Christchurch airport – I blame the English man and Welsh man over for the Lions tour in the seats beside me. Emma was in good form, seemed to enjoy trip around NZ and we had some good catchups. Not too long before Domhnall and Linda are over here.
Bought a dehumidifier for the flat – there’s quite a lot of condensation on the windows in the morning, and there’s a bit of a musty smell. Hopefully this will do the trick, without sucking my body too much of water as a side effect. Tried again and again to tune in the N64 that I brought over from Ireland – can get pictures working fine, but no sound. Very frustrating. Wonder if there’s a difference between NZ and UK tvs, or is it just a broken part somewhere along the line.
So having managed to miss out on most of the Lions tour while over in Ireland, I came back pretty enthusiastic for the first test on Saturday night. It was a pretty odd experience being the only person in the local pub with a green shirt. Jo wore red, and we were engulfed by the sea of black. The match was pretty disappointing too, with O’Driscoll being stretchered off after the first minute having dislocated his shoulder in what’s now being dubbed as ‘Speargate’.
But in fairness, the Lions were amazingly poor. The forwards were poor losing a huge percentage of scrums, line outs, rucks and mauls. Shane Byrne had a mare, and got nicknamed ‘Chuckie’ at our table after the first 20 minutes. Robinson was terrible and Wilkinson was non-existant. It was nice to see Ryan Jones shining through, but he was mostly on his own. All pretty depressing stuff.
Still, there’s always next week, but I suspect the score would have been worse had it not been for the torrential downpours in Christchurch. Not to take it away from the All Blacks though – they were impressive and completely deserved the win.
Incidently, does anyone think that Clive Woodward looks like Mr Burns?
Why don’t more airports like Singapore have plugs for people to use their laptops with? Oh, I’m sure it’s a ‘security feature’, but it’s absurd in this day and age. Surely they don’t expect everyone using WLAN to have a battery that lasts more than about 30 minutes, do they? I’ve been searching around for about 10 minutes trying to find one. GAR! Frankfurt, WORST AIRPORT EVER! German efficiency, yeah right.
Some hours later, I get to Singapore. Ahh, Singapore, you put warm fuzzies in my heart. Lots of plugs, and a decent enough wireless connection. There’s even nice places to eat, and nice bars to drink at. There’s no smoke, and well fewer Germans!
Goodbye Ireland. Hello New Zealand! I’m back travelling tomorrow morning with a sucky 9 hours in Frankfurt. It’s been a pretty fun trip, but I’m more than ready to go home and get back to my old life. After a month apart, it’ll be quite nice seeing Carolyn again too!
It was really nice to see OpenSolaris being released this week – it’s easily another milestone that Sun can be immensely proud of. Initially I was pretty skeptical about the project’s success, since it was yet another huge dump of code that Sun was throwing over the wall. Yet another ‘sink or swim’ moment. Historically, there’s definitely a few cases where we’ve sunk.
Right now, from my perspective, OpenSolaris is as yet unproven. Despite how successful Solaris has been in the past, OpenSolaris is a completely different ball game. There’s a huge number of potential hurdles in place – from basic community contribution in terms of lines of code and participation in the various existing processes like Architectural Review Committee, right down to documentation, marketing and general advocacy of the product. It’s very clear, right from the start, the project needs to enlist community champions.
Fortunately though, OpenSolaris already has many of these – both within Sun, and outside. Anyone who’s capable of this is bound to have a following of OpenSolaris fanboys before too long.
What already turned my eye is the fact that for once Sun is listening, and I think we’ve been guilty of not doing so in the past. It’s listening to the engineers, the partners, and the customers. It’s ultimately doing the right thing – we can’t afford to do anything else.
So what does this mean for GNOME? At the recent GUADEC conference in Stuttgart, there was much conversation about the performance and profiling of GNOME. The key message from Robert Love’s Optimal GNOME Programming talk was the fact that we should use the tools that are already out there. Now we have that opportunity. Download Solaris, download Sun Studio 10 and benefit from those tools.
From my perspective, as part of the desktop team within Sun, it brings other challenges. It gives us an opportunity to change our work processes and I think we as a team probably need to do better job in keeping the desktop up to date, and relevant. That brings a number of hurdles –
There are lots of unanswered questions, but Wow! I’m excited. First step is starting a OpenSolaris community for the desktop/GNOME – and go from there.
For everyone involved in OpenSolaris, from the developer, manager and lawyer, Thank You! – words that aren’t said enough in open source and free software.
I’ve passed the buck over to Lucas Rocha. He’s been doing some great work going through bugzilla, hassling me over IRC and proving what a slack arse I’ve been over the last year. It’s pretty fantastic to have another new maintainer on board – rock and roll, welcome Lucas!
Joe: I don’t know about toothpaste, but I once heard that the average lipstick wearing woman swallows about a gallon of that in their lifetime. Nevermind wikipedia, I’d go for Ripleys Believe it or Not!
