Life is so good, it gets better every day

Shopping Comfort Food

Finally I mostly get a day off, and I headed out to Fremont to the REI store. A quick transaction (and some heartache for not buying more), I walked away with an MSR DragonFly Stove, DuraLite MSR pot set and North Face Apex soft shell. A couple minutes down the road, I turned into Fry’s. A couple of minutes later I was the proud owner of some Bose TriPort OE headphones and now listening to The Shins.

God, shopping feels good sometimes. Credit card bill later will be a little more painful. After a long slog on the road, I’m owed a treat.

OSCON Wrapup

Blink.

I missed it. Well, a lot of it. I attended a grand total of 2 sessions, on the last day. Even the lightning talk where I teamed up with Steve to keep a somewhat lack lustre OpenSolaris status update, I left soon after. I did however spend a suitable amount of time taking part in press interviews like these, and very much enjoyed the experience (thanks Brian!). I spent some time on the Sun booth, and noticed an increased amount of interest in OpenSolaris (and associate technologies) – nice to meet Jay and Wez, 2 contributors to the project. Also had a whole bunch of meetings with Ian, Sara, Patrick and Jesse – lots of Indiana discussions, so by the time the Sun BOF turned around, I was more than happy for the face of OpenJDK, Tom Marble, to take the podium.

Happy days at OSCON, though sad to have missed a whole bunch of people to catch up with. Apologies.

Sun Party @ OSCON

The Sun party is tonight – lots of free beer, and various party games. Drop along at 9pm to the DoubleTree, and join us in the…garage. We spent a lot of last night assembling some hotwheels for some Indianapolis racing and have hover soccer. The DTrace guys have touched up on their beer pong skills. Joyent is providing a DJ too.

Sun BOF @ OSCON

We’re hosting the Sun BOF on Thursday evening at 8:30pm. Come along and find out what we’re doing within the open source world, drink a beer and let us know your thoughts. This is the day after our party over at the DoubleTree – more details to come.

OpenSolaris talks at OSCON

If you’re attending OSCON, and don’t want to miss getting your warm fuzzies from the best operating system on the planet, then check out the following sessions –

Project Indiana: The Road to Solaris Next

Ian Murdock [Wed 25 July 11:35am, E141]

Why Observability Matters – How DTrace Helped Twitter

Adam Leventhal, Brendan Gregg [Thu 26 July 10:45am, 255]

Lightning talk: OpenSolaris Status Update

Stephen Lau, Glynn Foster [Thu 26 July 10:45am, 252]

ZFS: Bringing Terabytes Under Control

Jad Edwards [Fri 27 July 10:45am, D137-138]

Sun Party at OSCON

Sara’s been working on the party details for the Sun party at OSCON. It’s going to be a spectacular event on Wednesday 25th at 9pm in the Doubletree Hotel, Exhibition Hall. Hang out with a beer and join in the fun! You will be disappointed by all the other parties from OSCON, trust me!

GUADEC Times

Really good fun at GUADEC this year, though I know even less people here than the previous year – all good signs for the success of GNOME I guess. Still, as usual, awesome opportunity to catch up with a whole bunch of friends. It’s certainly been nice hanging out in my home community, and feeling relatively at ease before getting back to Indiana work, and the happenings at OSCON next week.

Had some good GNOME Foundation discussions – a relatively successful board meeting on Sunday, and membership meeting on Monday. I hope to post the slides to this soon.

Indiana Talks

Had 2 relatively successful talks about Indiana over the last couple of days. Caught up with the folks in Sydney, and then later the folks in Dublin – good to hear from the ground about what they think of the project. Some of the slide transitions won’t make too much sense without the narrative.

And for anyone conributing to opensolaris.org, take bits of this with a pinch of salt – everyone’s doing a rocking job already.

Update: Tim has some details of the meeting, including a podcast feed of the talk.

Simon on IT Conversations

Simon’s bang on, as usual, in his interview on IT Conversations. On talking about Jonathan’s recent invitation for dinner –

I actually think that approach is a really good approach. If I look back to the status of the Java platform with Debian 2 years ago there was a great deal of mistrust, and there was all sorts of antagonism taking place. Much of it was based on the fact that people weren’t talking to each other. The seeds of the OpenJDK being GPL were laid in the fact that we had conversations between the different players. So, one of the things that I did right at the start of that process was fly to Amsterdam and go have breakfast with one of the leaders with the free Java community, and ask him ‘Why he hated us?’, and try and sort through what the problem was. He explained what the problems were and I could say that there were some good faith failures that Sun had there.

Identifying one of the things that Sun is really getting right these days. There’s a lot of dialogue going on, and a lot of listening. It’s all very encouraging generally.

Speaking in Sydney

Alan announced this month’s SOSUG meeting, and it’s going to be another opportunity for me to talk about Indiana – so come along if you’re keen to hear about it, Monday 9th July 2007, 6:30pm in Sun Solution Centre, 33 Berry St North Sydney – after giving a quick overview (along with some OGB updates), I’ll probably be listening for the most part to get a real feel for the issues that other people have had.