Life is so good, it gets better every day

Hutch

“Whoa! Your stock just went up in my book, my friend.” – sun.com has scary similarities.

Long Time No Blog, But Flyin’ Home

I’m still alive and lots to catch up on, but have just almost finished a relaxing month away in the Northern hemisphere. Anyone who is expecting a mail or anything out of me will have to wait for another little while, but feeling pretty good and refreshed and signs of the Glandular Fever seem to have disappeared.

We had a ball away, with trips around Paris and London, and my first Christmas at home for 3 years. It was all pretty sweet, but looking forward to getting back to NZ and tackle the busy January and February planned with Linux.conf.au, possible trips to the US, trip from Domhnall, and maybe the OpenSolaris conference. Should be fun.

Just over a year ago, I finally decided to stop pissing my airpoints down the stream and signed up with Singapore Airlines and Star Alliance. I don’t know what I was thinking earlier, but having lounge access has made the flying experience so much more relaxing and enjoyable. Heathrow continues to be absolute clusterfuck (seriously, someone needs to hire some clever people who have mastered in queue theory), but the lounges are those quiet oases I’ve always dreamed about (and free WiFi too!). See you on the other side!

Globe Hopping

I’m globe hopping at the moment, so I’m mostly ignoring email and my cell phone isn’t roaming over here. Jayne has a good blog of what we’ve been up to. Meanwhile, good to see GNOME 2.16 hitting the streets on Solaris. So far the reaction seems good, and hopefully the team will rock and nail the niggling bugs that we have. Meanwhile, the guys have been rocking on getting the GNOME 2.17 builds into shape. Yay!

Out To Get You

After 1,000’s of miles of flying across for your brother’s wedding, my body decides to get sick with some allergy to penicillin I was taking for a sore throat. Marvelous. Looking like shit a day before the wedding, and desperately hoping things calm down before a drive tomorrow. Doc says it might be Glandular fever, and this article seems spot on. The internet is an ugly place on these occasions though, and only helps to scare the willies out of you.

Planet OpenSolaris NEW!

Thanks to Steve (and the tonic team), we now have a new home, planet.opensolaris.org. Hooray!

GNOME 2.16 Hits Solaris!

Saw this in my mailbox today from Shirley –

Given a Preliminary Go from QA, Vermillion build 53 has been successfully delivered to Solaris WOS build 53(snv_53) nightly on Wednesday.

Which pretty much means GNOME 2.16. The entire team has totally rocked, and hopefully we’ll now start seeing the benefits of the HAL packages that Artem integrated a couple of builds ago. We’re already talking about branching our repositories so that we can start building the latest 2.17 packages.

Foundation Elections

After many anxious moments, Vincent provides the moment of glory. We now have 8 candidates. We now have a vote!

There’s still time for more!

Foundation Elections

Having been off the board for 2 years now, I decided to go up again in the annual GNOME Foundation elections. I figure this time will be much less frustrating, and I feel like I have more energy to really get stuck in and build on last years absolutely amazing effort by the board. We have a smaller board which I feel works significantly better in terms of being able to turn around decisions in a shorter time. The financial situation is hugely encouraging thanks to the great work that Jonathan has done. GNOME remains strategically important, with a bigger than ever advisory board, and lots of different programs like the Womens Summer of Code, and GNOME Embedded and Mobile initiatives. We’ve finally made some good decisions that had been hanging over us for years, and I think we’re finally at the point where the GNOME project can start fresh and be excited about its future.

I hope that my candidacy will start a flow of people keen to help the project rock this year. Above all, being on the board is actually fun and rewarding, and a really good experience for anyone thinking about getting involved.

Planet OpenSolaris

Planet OpenSolaris is now live and unleashed! You’ll notice a couple of things from the outset. The current blogroll only includes a small selection of people right now. We obviously hope to expand this list in the future, but any additions will be according to a pretty strong editorial policy. Where possible, we want to keep Planet OpenSolaris to be as relevant and readable as its counterpart, Planet GNOME and I’d personally like to thank Jeff for paving the way there, and his support in getting this running. Planet OpenSolaris will be predominantly English speaking, though I’d also like to encourage other communities to set up similar aggregations for their language or region, and I’d be happy to help people set those up.

So why not use the existing blogs infrastructure? The current setup is difficult to read, forcing you to click through to the posts that you want to read about. The current list of bloggers aren’t necessarily representative of the community that is developing around the source. By mapping a bunch of people who write about OpenSolaris to their (IRC) nicks and faces, everyone will be able to identify with various tasks and projects going, and create a real sense of community.

Many thanks are due to Steve for his kind support of grommit.com. For now it will be hosted there, until such a stage that planet.opensolaris.org becomes available. Also thanks are due to Planet Solaris, which still has a valid place if Dave is keen to continue maintenance on it. For those currently on the blogroll, send me your Hackergotchis, or alternatively point me at a suitable picture I can use for you.

Rock on OpenSolaris!

GNOME Vendor Patches

Corey suggested aggregating some of the information about vendor specific patches into the VendorPatches wiki page. I think it’s a good idea, and added some basic information about JDS. Feel free to add information for other people shipping GNOME.