Life is so good, it gets better every day

JDS Sources Released

So we finally did it – the Java Desktop Community has a new home on OpenSolaris.

Check out our new build environment, centered around that wonderful pkgbuild tool that Laca wrote. pkgbuild basically takes an RPM spec file and builds a Solaris SVr4 package.

[insert jaw dropping]

Now try building your own packages using pkgbuild!

It’s been a bit of a struggle to get there and I know the feedback will be “Uh, but it’s only GNOME 2.10 – that’s been out for months!”. In fact, we already have a GNOME 2.12 based version of JDS ready to go. Hopefully we’ll be able to get that out the door in the next couple of weeks, along with more details of a roadmap and the projects that we’ll be working on over the next couple of months.

Open Source and Rolling a Kayak

Went down to the Canterbury Innovation Incubator this evening where the NZCS were giving a talk about Open Source Development Tools and Trends. Pretty interesting but short set of talks on everything from Java and Netbeans, to Zope and Ajax. Then beer and pizza afterwards – bonus!

Just home in time to catch up with Dave and out to the QEII for some kayak rolling action. I’ve only been in a kayak a handful of times and was very hesitant about flipping it over – I was kinda nervous in the water because it’s been so long! But towards the end I was having a bit of fun, and learning heaps thanks to Dave. Didn’t quite get as far as rolling with the paddle because it was only a short 1 hour session – but enough to whet my appetite for more.

GNOME Foundation Referendum

I voted ‘YES’ in the recent vote for a couple of reasons –

• I’ve sat in too many board meetings where discussion got out of hand and some core decisions needed to be made – while this may be reflective of a lack of core process or delegation, I don’t think having 11 people there helps this, and often side tracks into irrelevant discussion.
• Having 11 people on the board makes it harder for people to get their voice in – especially when most meetings are over conference calls.
• I’d rather vote for 7 people who really wanted to be there rather than having to make up numbers with people who don’t.
• 7 people makes it infinitely easier to organize meetings, and drops the numbers needed for a quorum.
• As far as I can see, there’s about 2 or 3 people getting the job done and moving the Foundation in a positive direction. These numbers seem to reflect what I’ve experienced in the past and the primary reason that I stepped down [I had a conscience enough to let go when all I could contribute was hot air – I wish others had a similar conscience].
• With 7 members you don’t have to conceed control over to a smaller group of people – the GNOME Foundation is still very much a community, and the community dictates its direction. The Foundation is all about keeping in contact with new and existing organizations and being the point of contact. We don’t need 11 people for those jobs.

Life Update

Had a pretty good day out at Britten crag on Saturday with Dave – worked our way up along finally finishing up at Cattlestop Crag as the late afternoon sun beat down on the rock. I haven’t been climbing outside for a while, but it was real nice to get out again – just need to build up some last minute stamina before a trip to Thailand next month. Think I’ll be in pretty good shape for it – climbing is going well, and the indoor soccer is helping to build up my fitness. Really looking forward to getting away now, with some chance of having a 2 week trip in the US immediately after I get home again.

Was having a pretty low day, until a courier came. Someone sent me a teddy bear, called Mitsy, which was a nice suprise.

Solaris 10 University Challenge

So Sun launched it’s University Challenge today – with a chance to win $5000 per individual and a Sun Ultra 20 Workstation, along with $100,000 credit for the university.

The project suggestions should give you an idea, but don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to just those. There’s plenty of other things I can think of – everything from zeroconf networking, to virtual consoles, power management, to various admin tools.

Think about what sucks in Solaris from an approachability point of view and you probably can’t go far wrong! Of course, feel free to ask any questions in the various OpenSolaris forums.

Just for the Record

While AIB obviously have their head screwed on with technology, they’re still failing miserably on the usability front as a bank and not letting me transfer money remotely into a non-personal account. Are you serious? Yes sir, it’s all there in our terms and conditions, which I continued to tell them where they could stuff. Not much better is the people managing my shares, they can’t even take a simple VISA payment.

We have the technology to make this happen – why aren’t we using it? Even if I was charged for the payment to go through, at least I wouldn’t have to resort to getting a cheque made out [fee], buying an envelope [fee] and sending it through the post [fee]. I’m sure there’ll be some administration charge as well [fee]. Wankers.

JavaScript

Havoc, sure you weren’t smoking any when writing this entry?

Podcasted

So as Jeff mentions, I recently featured in James Purser’s Linux Australia Update. It’s my first podcast, and I probably didn’t prepare my voice with enough beer beforehand. Didn’t get to talk much about our JDS work on OpenSolaris as I hoped, and I probably need to figure out the ‘What is OpenSolaris’ pitch a little better – hindsight is a wonderful thing. Out of mild fear, do I really sound that English in real life?

Phone a Friend

Most of my best thoughts happen around alcohol. I’m not embarassed by that or anything – I figure it’s in the blood being an Irishman. For a while I’ve been thinking about how people get involved in Open Source development. A lot of the time they lurk behind user groups, installing the latest ISOs or upgrading to the the latest release of their favorite software. That’s great – I’m glad they’re trying our software.

But what takes them to go to the next level? What persistence does it take to log a bug, attach a patch? How do you get to be the next Jeff Waugh [tm]?

For me, everything happened overnight when I attended my first GNOME conference in Copenhagen. I remember feeling amazingly motivated after that conference. I saw so many new faces, and talked to so many new and exciting people who were interested in the project that I was. Those faces soon turned into so many wonderful friends and I owe the GNOME project so much for that.

So, it’s time to reach out. I want to make that connection once again. We have all these fantastic new technologies to make that connection so much easier – everything from skype to the standard telephone. Instead of replying to a bugzilla reports, we should talk in real time.

Send me your phone number, or skype username. Let’s talk.

OpenSolaris ISO

Luis, I’d *love* to see us have a completely open easily installable OpenSolaris ISO but we’re not there yet. While there are the derived SchilliX and now BeleniX, I’d love to see an OpenSolaris distribution along the lines of OpenSuSE and Fedora. In a way, we do have those ISOs already though – it’s called ‘Solaris Express Community Release’ [see downloads].

From what I gather, the choice of what to use was based on the license and what restrictions we already had with regard to 3rd party code – not whether it was GPL or non-GPL compatible. If we were going GPL, then I imagine our lawyers would probably still be sitting in a room talking. IANAL, so I’ll let others field questions for this one though – as mentioned, it gives the opportunity for the developer to be in full control of how much they want to share, how much they want to keep, and price to pay for their products. While I’m pretty sure Sun will be one of those ‘sharing’ companies, I’m not sure how comfortable I am with making that decision for others.

But sending questions or complaints to ombudsman [at] sun [dot] com would probably be a better way of getting the feedback to the right group of people within Sun.