Hooray! Tim’s now a father, Bob’s a mother, and consequently I am now an uncle. Congratulations to them, and very happy that everyone is doing well over there. Difficult to be a hundred billion miles away, but looking forward to seeing the pictures and skype webcams over the next couple of weeks. Have booked flights to Dublin for Duncan’s wedding in December – good times.
Man, twice in a single day that I’ve been totally impressed with DTrace, and two posts from Brendan –
# dtrace -n 'tcp:::receive /args[2]->tcp_dport == 80/ {
@pkts[args[1]->ip_daddr] = count();
}'
dtrace: description 'tcp:::receive' matched 1 probe
^C
192.168.1.8 9
fe80::214:4fff:fe3b:76c8 12
192.168.1.51 32
10.1.70.16 83
192.168.7.3 121
192.168.101.101 192
All hail Brendan, new overlord of DTrace! Rad!
Dear Planet GNOME [stop]
Please pay special attention today to Jeff’s blog [stop]
We have jack all submissions from the GNOME project [stop]
It’s making me cry because I’m on the paper review committee and can’t understand any of the other presentations I have to review and I already have an inferiority complex [stop]
P.S. Same message applies to Planet OpenSolaris and PlanetSun
Update: Of course, any good submissions to the main programme may entitle you to some travel sponsorship..
So the winter season is drawing to a close, and there have been really fun times, with fun people [Patrick, Dave, Heidi, Nick, Graham, Myra, Michelle, and Jayne], and some of their blogs give a much better account of how the season went. In short, my boarding has improved a lot, having previously had a half a dozen visits 2 years previously. I’m digging it, pushing myself a little more, and feeling like I’m slowly getting enough ability to be able to start playing around on some jumps a little more. Last weekend we had a whiteout at Cragieburn, but some super slushy snow fun, and then a monster day at Porter Heights with some beautiful blue skies, and ball grabbing moments on Big Moma, a rather steep double black diamond run (WTF was I thinking?). Thanks guys, it’s been awesome!
The following image [thanks to Myra for all of them], says it all really –
We’re finally one step further to really being “open” – Dermot’s mail this morning gave me my morning stiffy.
Good to see the Adobe guys making some good choices in terms of API use, though would be great to see them move towards GStreamer.
Good to see new opportunities are being created around OpenSolaris and related technologies – people like Ben moving on to new jobs, Apple hiring for DTrace hackers, and many other bits and pieces happening in the wings. Open source projects have the ability of creating superstars, and nice to see that happening closer to home as well.
Ahh yes, it’s lovely to see a bit of life back in the corporate world, IBM bashing Sun over OpenSolaris and Sun mocking HP among the notable ones last week. Bring it on.
However, I guess I was slightly disappointed to see the response from various Sun people. I can absolutely appreciate that OpenSolaris is everyone’s baby, and those people involved can be really proud of the long hours they have put into it, but I think there’s a lot of value to be learned from Dan’s comments. While I don’t agree with some of the points he made, it’s one perception of what others may think about the project and something that we should take as constructive feedback, however aggressive those comments are.
The truth is, there may never be another open source project like Linux, that caught on as quickly as it did. There was an obvious gap in the market and the project was still very early in development. Sun, and OpenSolaris, may well have missed that specific gap. However, do I think that there’s no room for OpenSolaris? Hell no, and the various innovative features [DTrace, BrandZ, Zones, SMF, FMA] that have gone into Solaris 10 is a good reminder of that. Choice is good. Building a community over night to the same fit as the current Linux community was always going to be hard. You have to find your niche. Ubuntu found it by providing regular 6 monthly releases tracking the latest and best code the open source community could offer, and provided a mechanism for a much wider distribution. It’s a challenge that I’m sure the OpenSolaris community will take up.
Dan’s right, the code is still stored behind the firewall. Yes, that *is* a problem that we need to fix. However, in a rather weird twist, that’s one of the things that Sun got right. As frustrating as it currently is to push back code [and really you should be talking to one of the people who have done this from outside], it gave the opportunity to discuss what development model works best for *everyone*, not just those internal to Sun. Better still, we got the people writing the code for the various distributed SCM’s to get involved in the discussion about which one to use. It’s nice to see open collaborative progress.
Rich Green described OpenSolaris as a run-away success. While he may have been talking about numbers of contributions or adoptions, I’d like to think it was the fact that we’re trying for the first time to encourage our 1000’s of Sun engineers to interact with a wider community, working towards a common goal. That’s not an easy thing to do – you wouldn’t believe how many people don’t completely grok open source development. I’m absolutely sure you’ll see the very same in just about every company developing proprietary software, including IBM. But that’s the fun part, and certainly makes my life more interesting.
Thanks for the feedback Dan!
Despite what others have written, I’m *delighted* to see Sun dropping the project names for Java SE 6 and 7 – it shows a great intention to actually be a community from the start, rather than keeping the clique project names around. Also good to see the feedback forums that Tom blogged about, and I hope it will prove to be a good channel back to what we should be doing though I have my doubts of making it a very public forum of casual readers, rather than a public mailing list of ‘vested interests’. Good to see the outreach and the intention to do the right thing from the very start – fingers crossed for a bright future.
Rob pushed me into giving a short presentation at the Wellington LUG the other night. While the turnout was pretty small, all peering over a line of monitors in a gaming facility, I think my talk went okay. I gave a short presentation about OpenSolaris, along with my slides from my OSCON lightning talk.
What I really wanted to push home was that working within a wider community can be an amazing amount of fun. Too often I see LUGs just keep to themselves, help others in the mailing list or through meetings, but never actually contribute to the upstream community – having the chance to work with absolutely amazing people, on amazing technology and being able to figure out what skills you can personally contribute. Not sure if that message got through – who knows.
