Life is so good, it gets better every day

Portland

So finally decided to join the Portland mailing list today, with gentle prodding by Joe. For a long time I’ve agreed in principle with what Portland project is trying to achieve, though wildly disappointed with the implementation (I still am). Which is why I was delighted to read Waldo’s mail announcing the DTL Technical Workgroup conference call. From my point of view, the specs are definitely where we should be spending all our availalbe time right now – they’re often hard to read, ambigious, and have a weird mix of specification and implementation. They also suffer from the fact that it’s not entirely clear what commitment there is for the various interfaces they export.

What is worrying is the intense desire to have something out yesterday (akin to what’s happening in the LSB too), with the current approach of using a bunch of scripts seeming like a train crash waiting to happen – if you don’t believe me, ask one of the guys who’ve sat for years on a Sun ARC committee on how easy it is to maintain compatibility with them. In my previous experience in Sun, the desktop team have taken 5+ years to slowly mature the various set of GNOME interfaces – even now, there’s only a relatively small set that we’re actually committed to. Does that hurt our ISVs? Perhaps, though I think constantly changing them will hurt them more.

I Don’t Have To Like It

It’s been a rough day at Sun for many, many people. While many say it’s a good opportunity to do other things, for me, well, Sun always feels like a family [most of the time], so it really fucking sucks losing people – although I obviously understand the business needs of the company to have to resort to this.

For all the absolutely amazing people who got laid off today – it was a horrifying shock to the system, you rocked my world, and it was a pleasure to have worked with you. All the best for whatever you get up to in the future and I hope to continue to hear from you.

It’s times like this where I feel lucky, exceptionally lucky to be continuing to do the job I do, and have the opportunities that come with that job. It’s a suitably motivating factor for getting Sun (and SUNW) where it should be, and trust me, that will happen soon.

Proposal for Code of Conduct for GNOME

Be excellent to each other!

Siggraph

Best of luck to those exhibiting at Siggraph this week – hope it goes well!

Sun HQ

Flew down to San Francisco on Saturday afternoon, after pulling an Indiana Jones at the boarding gate! Got hooked up with a hire car, with Phil and myself heading down south to visit a Fry’s store down in Freemont. Dropped Phil off at the train station for him to head back up into San Francisco, and I headed for Palo Alto.

Palo Alto has always been quite a nice place to stroll around – it has that village feel, though you often feel like you’re on the set of Sideways at times. This week I’m visiting the Sun HQ in Menlo Park – it’s been great to catch up with people like Steve, Bonnie, Bev and Artem, and looking forward to meeting some of the other people in the maze that I’m constantly getting lost in.

Have started working on the latest ARC case for bringing GNOME 2.16 into Solaris Nevada – not exciting stuff in itself, but being able to integrate a new desktop a short time after its released ala Ubuntu is motivating to me at least.

Free Geek

On the last day of OSCON, I took a trip with Phil and others down to Free Geek, a non-profit organization providing free computers and education to those in need through the reuse and recycling of old computers. And seriously, what a warehouse of old computers it was. It was a fascinating tour, where they basically either reuse or recycle almost everything out of your typical desktop computer – then sell any extra bits and bobs in thrift store. There was crap everywhere, just amazing what useful and profitable crap it can be with a bit of work!

GNOME at OSCON

We had a small turnout of core GNOME folks at OSCON – Jeff, Jono’s boss, and myself, though there may have been others that I didn’t know about. There was a good collection of folks running GNOME in the few short glances of peoples screens I was able to make, but OSX and Windows still dominated which wasn’t overly surprising for a conference like OSCON.

At the last minute, I was asked to give a lightning 5 minute project update. Of course I couldn’t really think of anything to say, so instead showed a few holiday snaps – though most of them weren’t even mine. I’ve added some commentary to the slides which originally only had a picture and small caption.

A Non-Geek Conversation

On the back of Joel’s think like a geek blog post, I’m dating a new breed of something. Kind of alarming…

(18:00:14) glynn: sweet, you're a geek
(18:00:15) wallisjayne: speak for yourself
(18:00:20) wallisjayne: i am not
(18:00:40) wallisjayne: first, i don't understand half of what you write on your blog
(18:00:59) wallisjayne: second, i don't wear glasses or have funny teeth
(18:01:26) wallisjayne: third, i love you and you're not a core geek
(18:01:32) wallisjayne: so i can't be a geek
(18:01:53) wallisjayne: i'm a new breed of something

A Week of OSCON

My first OSCON is nearly over. It’s been a fun week, full of many interesting discussions, and some good sessions and keynotes. The OSCON schedule is absolute clusterfuck in terms of being able to see and experience everything that is going on – most of the time you don’t bother, and the important stuff happens outside the sessions. It’s a polished conference, and it’s very clear that there’s years of experience tied up in the conference organizers, yet still keen to try new bits and pieces out with things each year.

It’s been really sweet to catch up with a whole bunch of Sun guys for the first time, drink beer and talk shit. It makes *such* a huge difference being able to get to know a face behind a name on a mailing list. Was good to see Simon’s new Open Source team all out in force, and looking forward to them rocking over the next couple of months.

A couple of random observations and takeaways from the conference, from a Sun point of view –

• Exhibit Booth: I’m in mixed opinions of whether having a booth is a good use of time and effort. When the hall opened on Wednesday, there was such an incredible rush of people coming in grabbing tshirts and whatever else they could get their greedy hands on trying to avoid any interaction with the people on the booth. Once the free stuff was gone, there was nothing there to entice them in. Despite the best efforts of Brian, Channing, Alan and co, we definitely didn’t have enough OpenSolaris DVDs – we should have sacrificed the widescreen for burning a couple of hundred DVDs. It also would have been good to set up a few racks of our various new machines and advertising our ‘Try and Buy’ scheme. I definitely think it’s good to be part of the sponsorship list for OSCON – it’s still a high quality conference with a lot of pretty influential people involved from right across the free and open source stack.
• OpenSolaris: It’s pretty clear that OpenSolaris isn’t a popular distribution right now [most people seem to be running Linux, OSX or Windows]. We have a lot of work to do. I think there’s definitely interest in it, but the BOF’s were pretty underattended. Seeing Eric demo Google Earth under BrandZ was pretty rad. What we do know is that people are still amazingly confused over where to get OpenSolaris or Solaris, and how to maintain that distribution – hopefully the OpenSolaris Starter Kit that Steve, Teresa and others are working on will help this. Jeff did a good talk about community building within the Ubuntu project, and there’s some no-brainer lessons to be learned from those guys. I’d go further and suggest that Ubuntu’s success is primarily due to the fact that it’s a 6 monthly time based release giving developers the easy opportunity to easily keep in touch with the latest things that are happening in the free software world.
• Sun and Open Source: Last night we had a pretty excellent BOF on Sun’s Open Source strategy. I hijacked the start of it when the discussion opened asking if the non-Sun people could tell us what we’re doing wrong, and that theme carried on right through the hour we had with some really good feedback. Everyone agreed that Sun is doing heaps better than it was 2 or 3 years ago, but we’re still lacking a coherant message of how Sun’s software stack fits together. Was nice to hear [and drink with, thanks Stephen] some of the analysts be supportive of what Sun was doing.
• Java: Had some great discussions with Rich, Laura, Gary and Tom about the state of Java and things like java.net. All very encouraging and definitely curious to be a fly on the wall right now at some of the discussions that are taking place in Sun.

Definitely keen to get to next years OSCON – next stop, Menlo Park. I’ll have a short couple of days hanging out in top floor of MPK17, so if you’re around drop by and say ‘hi’.

OSCON 2006

Arrived in Portland after a mostly uneventful flight. Become a black belt at Suduko, or at least learned a few tricks for solving the damn things. Getting excited by the conference, although I haven’t quite figured out where I get my pass from.

I have a feeling that OSCON won’t quite be like anything I’ve ever attended before. First task, to figure out which of the 10+ parallel talks I’ll attend. Eeek.