Life is so good, it gets better every day

Could it get any worse?

The best bit about having a house right on the shores of Lake Dunstan is the ability to decide at 7pm to take the kayak out, grab a rod, and try fishing for an hour before the crew catering begins. The worst bit about being right besides the shores is the poor expectations you set yourself thinking it’s time to catch one of the buggers. After trying a variety of methods (spinning, trolling, fly) I’ve yet to see a rise. The kayak has worked out surprisingly well, though proves to have quite a fast drift – which is nice for covering a lot of ground, but an absolute pain having to paddle into the driving wind to start a new one. We’re here for another week and a bit – fingers crossed for better times ahead.

Re-thinking the Media Kit

Over the last couple of days or so, I’ve started to think about the media kits a little more, particularly with respect to get.opensolaris.org for the OpenSolaris release, but also in terms of being able to create derivations targeting specific sets of our potential user base. As I see it, I think it should be possible to create a generic framework that would allow us to swap in and out components, depending on that focus – with the addition of more CD’s depending on the focus.

As such you could think about a number of standalone ‘modules’ –

• OpenSolaris LiveCD ISO image
  This is the standard image that has been part of the OpenSolaris Developer Preview series, providing the user a LiveCD image, with an opportunity to demo it before they install it to their system. This will track the standard ISO images produced as part of Project Indiana, complete with IPS should they wish to download and install additional software from the network package repositories
• OpenSolaris Source Code
  With the very real limitations of network bandwidth across the world, most notably in emerging communities such as India, China and many parts of Africa, it is absolutely vital for people to have easy access to the source code. This module will provide source code to the various consolidations working out on opensolaris.org as a checked out repository (either Mercurial or Subversion), allowing the user to pull updates from the network or browse off-line. Additionally with a simple set of scripts provided, it will provide an opportunity for those running the OpenSolaris distribution to run an OpenGrok instance and allow full searching on the local source code. This could also be useful in a classroom environment, where network access is limited.
• User Documentation
  This module will provide all the user documentation for running the OpenSolaris distribution, complete with a number of tutorials or other guides.
• Developer
  
  In the developer section, it will provide a set of simple tools and applications to develop on OpenSolaris, both for the OpenSolaris community itself and also in the wider developer community.
  • OpenSolaris Community
    • Mercurial, SVN, OpenGrok, ..
    • ON build tools
    • Sun Studio Compiler
  • General Developer Community
    • Netbeans
    • Sun Studio Compiler
• Module Derivatives
  A number of variations of the Media Kit should be possible, including a tailored set of derivations of the OpenSolaris distribution. Some possibilities may include –
  • WordPress/Roller Blog Appliance
    Run an instance of the popular WordPress blogging application, with everything automatically configured out of the box, including a web server.
  • Ruby on Rails Web Developer
    Provide a running web server with DTrace enabled Ruby, Firefox and Apache server.
  • HPC Research
    Provide a set of developer tools to monitor performance and throughput for highly parallel tasks.
  • Others Appliances
    Are there other specific appliances we could be doing?
  • Xen Client
    Automatic Xen client configured out of the box.
  • Community Participant
    Provide an out of the box OS that could be installed to automatically mirror sources/binaries or whatever to another part of the world, helping the global distribution of OpenSolaris.

Let me know what you think!

OGB Reflux

It’s been a very difficult year for most of the OGB members. We came to the table having ratified the current constitution, trying to figure out where we fit in. While I think the OGB made some good positive progress in some areas, it also feels like we lost the ability to talk with our community and pro-actively work on a plan for growth and prosperity for our community. It would be so, so easy to walk away after a year…

But I’m not. Consistency and context of past discussions is hugely important for subsequent boards, and so far in the nomination process, Alan and I are it. I’ve always said that I’ve wanted to stay on at Sun because I think I can still add value. When that day comes when I can’t add that value, and there are other better experienced people around, I’ll leave. The OGB is no exception to that (though the current constitution states there’s a maximum of a 3 year period).

So I’m in. I’d probably give myself a C+/B- on last years performance, and I’m interested to improve that this year – on retrospect, being Secretary sucked a great amount of time and I’d like to move away from that role so I can focus on the discussion rather than trying to take notes.

There’s a couple of things I’d like to see happen next year –

• At least one face-to-face OGB meeting
• At least one face-to-face Sun/OGB meeting (and an option for other meetings with other corporate members – ideally we need to get towards an Advisory board )
• Defined focus areas for each of the OGB members, outside their normal duties
• Working group to start re-assessing the current constitution and figuring out what our community has grown into, and what changes to the constitution are needed to reflect that

Bio: Glynn Foster. Almost 30. Joined Sun in 2000, working on the GNOME project. Past GNOME Foundation Board Director, and current OGB member. Joined the Project Indiana team in 2007 and looking forward to focusing energies to product a first release OpenSolaris OS later this year.

Post Indiana Developer Preview 2

Time is flying. They always say the older you get, the quicker it goes, and that seems true for the latest release of the OpenSolaris Developer Preview, codenamed Project Indiana. The announce mail pretty much covers most of the changes since the last release, and another incremental step towards really changing the delivery model of software for Sun has been made.

Shrinking down to a single CD image has proved massively useful for me as a remote worker, and it’s given me the flexibility of testing several ISOs on the run up to the release, without hurting my broadband plan too much – I can’t help but think that it will give 1000’s of people in developing countries with poor network infrastructure an opportunity to try it out. While the application availability on pkg.opensolaris.org is still poor, the introduction of OpenOffice fills the gap for pretty much all my needs in my day job. I can now install the packages I care about, and my disk feels lighter. Thank you to everyone who’s worked on this over the last couple of months – your patience and dedication are appreciated. Thank you to everyone who have downloaded and installed it, and more importantly, given us feedback.

But controversy continues to be the compromise for that progress.

Stephen’s two blog posts, here and here nail the issues for anyone who hasn’t caught up. It’s been a roller coaster ride over the last few months, both personally, for the project and the wider community. John Plocher has been rocking on putting together a set of draft guidelines for trademark usage and branding, after the official response from Sun on the continued plan to call it OpenSolaris.

At a personal level, being on this project is massively challenging. Not only in the desire to create the best possible user experience while encouraging continued open development, but also in terms of community dynamics and finding the right line to walk between my Sun commitments and my community ones, namely the OGB. There’s no question that there has been a shift in the community, both indicated by Sun’s rightful desire to name the artifact OpenSolaris (of which I agree with), and the interesting discussion in defect.opensolaris.org around the independence of OGB members. Dalibor’s “Finishing governance before finishing bootstrapping is a bad idea” quote highlights one of the main concerns I’ve had from the start – you can’t just switch to a self governing community overnight, you grow into it. Nor can you expect to apply a model that works in one community to another. We are all different. OpenSolaris, comically, is no exception.

So where next for the project? I’m hopeful that it will turn out just fine, perhaps naively so, but I can see people trying out the developer preview and realizing that it’s not too bad. Most of all, we need to execute in a regular and predictable fashion, as a community in as transparent an environment as possible. United. Not just Sun, but everyone.

Food and data wrangling at the OK Corral

Jayne and I are down in central New Zealand, taking a little time out of our busy Wellington lives to help her brother Mike, and partner Inge, shoot a western, of the Pavlova variety. When we first got asked to help, I imagined both of us, sitting on the porch of some gold mining town, rocking in the chairs watching some stranger walk into town. Unfortunately our first movie roles would have to take a back seat for another while and we were propositioned to be part of the catering staff for the movie.

Jayne’s done a pretty phenomenal job pulling together the plans 3 weeks worth of food for our time here, with us putting out breakfast, lunch and dinner for a core crew of 18 people, and the occasional posse. It’s been pretty tough trying to find the variety to keep the hardest working crew with satisfied bellies, but we’re getting there, on our second week in. We’ve both lost our appetites, but the crew are liking what we’ve done so far.

I’ve also been data wrangling for them, copying the data off the camera cards onto multiple USB drives. It’s mostly been without a hitch, though did lose one filesystem (HFS+) due to some sort of weird super block error, and didn’t manage to fix it – I bet Apple are looking forward to using ZFS soon.

The shooting has gone really well, and I’ve had the fortune of being able to review most of the shots each evening. Matt put together a quick first cut for a few scenes during the weekend, and the result looked sensational.

We’re now down in Cromwell, housed beside Lake Dunstan, and have full wireless access – it’s been a good chance to catch up on work from the previous week, as Tekapo turned out to be a bit of a melon in terms of network access (though thanks to the lovely Jenny for sharing her house for a few days). It’s nearly 1am here, so time to hit the sack. MI Films coming to a cinema near you – Jayney’s already working on the marketing campaign!