Life is so good, it gets better every day

OpenSolaris and the Google SOC

Jim asked me last night if I would like to lead the OpenSolaris involvement in the Google Summer of Code – more work, but hey, sounds like fun and I think it’s an opportunity for a lot of rocking projects to be tackled. I’m only starting to get my head around this, and posted a project proposal for getting some basic infrastructure ready that we can use year after year for our students. If you’d like to get involved, and help get things rolling, you are more than welcome! Mail me, glynn dot foster at sun dot com

Open Java Community Thoughts

Really awesome to read Mark Reinhold’s experiences at FOSDEM, including his slide deck. OpenJDK seems in reassuringly good hands with the thought going into it – very cool to see different perspectives being shared around the various communities. If OpenJDK grows up to have similar community spirit like I’ve experienced in GNOME, it will be a very happy place indeed. Rocking!

The Hackergotchi Factory

I’ve been in full hackergotchi mode today, doing heads for James, Alan, Ben, and Moinak. The family is coming along quite nicely.

Sad Reality

I am getting more exercise from my wii than any other means. Too bad that NZ is also in the state that the US has found itself in – bugger all chance of being able to get accessories for a couple of weeks. Having a lot of fun playing Rayman at the moment. Catch me on 4054-9503-1001-0825 😉

Cool Runnings

Cool blog of the week, Jayne’s friend Phil has just started her time down in Antarctica helping to restore Shackleton’s hut – Six months in a fleecy coat.

OpenSolaris Wins!

Yay! OpenSolaris hit Slashdot around the in.telnetd vulnerability. Alan has an excellent blog post of the timeline inside Sun and how a patch was provided. From my point of view, it’s a great win for the OpenSolaris project. It means the code is getting reviewed by a bigger volume of people and the vulnerabilities are getting found. The obvious benefits of open source really in my mind overshadow the obvious temporary embarrassment. The community is growing.

OGB Elections – I’m in!

As a diversionary tactic to the current set of discussions on the OGB list, I’ve decided to run for the OGB elections this year and hopefully this will encourage other sane motivated people to put themselves forward or discuss the upcoming elections. OpenSolaris needs you more than ever .

Why me? I believe I’m up to the job, willing to get my hands dirty, and hopefully take part in some positive direction that the OpenSolaris project needs to take over the coming year. I have many years experience being involved in the GNOME project, and while they are completely different projects, I think there’s some benefit to be gained from that experience. I’m principally involved in the Desktop Community (being a community leader), currently GNOME Foundation board member and secretary, and paid by Sun for the last 6 years mostly involved in community building and relations rather than at a high technical level.

I have never built my own kernel.

BaaCamp, Madness up in Warkworth

So BaaCamp, the equivalent of an O’Reilly organized Kiwi Foo Camp, was great fun, and juding by the blogs on Planet NZTech everyone who attended had similar experiences – thanks heaps Nat! Although I have to admit enjoying the conference overall, I was a bit knocked out by the travel to Sydney for LCA, and suspect I’m still carrying a bit of Glandular Fever around. From my perspective it probably wasn’t as productive as some of the other conferences I’ve been too. Don’t get me wrong, having the chance to meet a whole bunch of New Zealander’s doing cool stuff was a wonderful opportunity that I’ll treasure, but the focus of the conference was very Web 2.0 based (unstandable given the current climate for the IT space in NZ right now). It was cool to see Seth demoing his Firefox extension, awesome to meet Damien Bateman for the first time (the man behind Bens), great to catch up more with Jeff and Pia some more, play some Werewolf with a host of people while Chris and Artur narrated the plot, cool to see Phil hardware hacking controlling the car with his Nokia 770 widget hack, and wonderful to see and meet a whole bunch of new people and ideas coming out of the webspace like PlanHQ, Xero, throng, and a host of other wonderful ideas. Including Jayne. I was so impressed and proud of her participation during the conference, and delighted she felt comfortable talking to people about her awesome web idea – hopefully she’s been motivated by being there, and got some good advice about where to take it. Ideas like that don’t come around so often, so I’m rooting to see it live one day.