Life is so good, it gets better every day

Up Close and Personal with Stephen and Tim

Stephen and Tim talk about what’s coming in the OpenSolaris May 5th release – check it out!.

Lead up to May Release

The year is flying. Really flying. Not only has NZ changed clocks screwing up my Google calendar settings once again, but I’m just over a week out to flying over to the OpenSolaris Developer Summit, starting a full month of travel. Jesse is continuing to rock in organizing the summit, and by the line up of rock stars attending, the event should be a real treat. If you haven’t made your arrangements and are in the area, do please attend – we’d love you to be there! I’m really looking forward to hanging out with all the people I met last year, and the few new faces that will be there too.

We’re also co-ordinating the summit with the first meeting of the OpenSolaris Governing Board. It’s been an absolute pleasure working with jbeck, alanc, jimgris, webmink and plocher, and Michelle is keep us all in line as the OGB Secretary this year. We’ve had some incredibly productive calls so far, and will be nice to catch up over dinner on Friday night right before the summit. We’ll also be hosting an OGB Townhall at 15:45-17:00 on Saturday – if you have anything you’d like to bring up, email ogb-discuss@opensolaris.org, or log a bug against the OGB category.

No sooner is the developer summit over, then Jesse is going to wrap us all in a bus and take us up to San Francisco to attend CommunityOne – it’s free to attend, and has a pretty cool line up of talks. I’ll be taking part in a “Operating System Community Panel” with Bacon, Brockmeier and Wade from Ubuntu, OpenSuSE and Fedora moderated by the charming Barton George. The event is free to attend, so you too can come along and throw tomatoes at us. I’ve heard rumours there’ll be an OpenSolaris party that evening too – bonus!

One day later, it’ll be into the JavaOne week and I’ve signed up to be a booth baby at the OpenSolaris stand, dropping into SecondLife, and hopefully getting to attend some of the keynote sessions. College students can attend free this year. Come by the stand and say hi.

Then it’s most definitely vacation with Jayne around SF, Spain and Italy. Woo!

End of free Telecom Wi-Fi

Well it seems that Telecom have finally ended the period of their own customers being able to access the Telecom Hotspots for free. I think it’s an extraordinarily bad move on their part, and removes the last benefit for wanting to go with Telecom for my broadband plan. I think it will also prove to be a dampener on all the cafes, bars and restaurants around town (apart from the other grumpy geeks around) – I’m certainly going to be less inclined to head down for a coffee, or go for a laptop lunch, and I suspect many others will too. When we move out of our place in Hay Street (this month?), I think it’s time to look at other service providers for better offerings.

opensolaris.com mockup

As opensolaris.com starts to focus more on the ‘download, install and run’ experience, catering towards the consumer rather than the producer, a few people in Sun have been working on a design separate to that of the current opensolaris.org, here – though much of the content is still being worked out.

opensolaris.org will continue to be the live hub for most of the day-to-day activity we currently see across the projects and community groups – nothing changes there, though hopefully the benefit is that it will relieve some of the burden from opensolaris.org on trying to cater for 2 pretty distinct audiences than it was originally intended for.

Of course I can’t take any credit in this, but personally I think the design is pretty fabulous! Have a play with the mockup, tell me what you think!

Distro week at SDNChannel

After the fake Jono Bacon and Ubuntu appearing on the show last time, time for the very unfake Ian Murdock and OpenSolaris, where he talks about the upcoming OpenSolaris OS release.

(Someone told me it was distro wars week and Jono makes a good target)