Life is so good, it gets better every day

LCA Hackfest and Schedule

This years hackfest at LCA should be pretty interesting. It looks like it will be a series of questions to prove your hacking [and typing] skills. What’s really good, is the fact that the hacks will likely to be contributing towards existing open source projects, rather than writing silly game algorithms in previous years.

It’s also really nice to see the schedule being separated into seminars, tutorials and keynotes. I wonder if all the speakers this year have been asked to focus in on their topic some more, rather than the usual ‘Here’s what I’ve done since the last time I gave this presentation’ format that I really hate.

Good job LCA! Only 7 days to go!

Kinetic Chain

I happened to turn onto Top Gear yesterday afternoon on NZ TV, and they were showing a short piece on the making of Cog, a wonderful Honda ad based on a kinetic chain of car parts ending with a “Isn’t it nice when things just work?” voice over. When I googled the car ad, I came across the wikipedia site, which directed me to a competition hosted by Sportscafe which a NZer Nick Yates won for a similar feat involving sports equipment. A weird set of connections to take me back to NZ again.

Brendan’s DTrace Troubleshooting

Brendan Greg just pointed out his trouble shooting findings using DTrace on SMC. Useful for anyone looking at starting to write some DTrace scripts.

New Year’s Resolution

I’ve been meaning to get back to swimming for a long time. When I was real young I had a couple of lessons, but then my parents shifted house and I stopped them. I had only just barely made it into the deep end too, and was a complete wuss at being able to pick up objects from the bottom of the pool. It’s a real sob story. It’s not that I can’t swim, it’s just that I swim pretty badly.

Well, all that’s about to change. I’ve bought goggles. I look darn sexy in them, and I’m going to get this breathing thing right even if it drowns me.

It’s Only Rock’n Roll

Fancy working for Sun in the JDS group? There’s an open opportunity. Not only do you get to liase with local engineering groups and engineering groups in China, Germany, India and the US, but you also get to listen to me constantly moan at our weekly team meetings. Bonus! Send me your resumes/CVs if you’re interested.

Nokia 770

It’s like a gmail account, and I’m probably one of the last few to get one. A nice little machine, although the clock doesn’t seem to recognize New Zealand as being a place you can live – oops! Looking forward to playing with it over the next while, although I guess I’m going to have to install Linux on one of these boxes first.

Dogfooding GNOME

For the first time since 2.0 days, I’m finally dogfooding GNOME 2.13.x on Solaris. There’s lots of small issues, but for the most part it looks real sweet. The next part is just getting our build environment out onto a public source code management repository, but hopefully we’re not too far away from that. Rock on!

Evolution Getting DTrace Love

Really excellent to see the Novell dudes using DTrace to fix up Evolution’s memory leaks. Great things will come of this I’m sure, and looking forward to seeing what things they find. I wonder if a DTrace script repository for GNOME may be a good idea.

Where’s Alo?

Seemingly on his way to Brisbane – Alo, why didn’t you say you were going to be in town for a while? Or maybe it’s your evil twin brother?

Travel Plans for 2006 and Looking Back

Not a bad year travelwise – visiting Ireland, Germany, Singapore, Australia, China, Thailand, and the US. Best conference was still Linux.conf in Adelaide, although GUADEC was a really fun family affair in Stuttgart. Best business trip was the Solaris Desktop Summit over in San Francisco a couple months ago. Best food had to be the various places that Patrick took us to in Beijing. Best chilled out atmosphere was the beaches in Tonsai Bay, Thailand.

Hopefully will get some more traveling under my belt in 2006, although no big trips planned just yet! It would be neat to attend the Boston GNOME Summit again, and maybe some new conferences too, like OSCON and LinuxWorld. Hopefully I’ll have another few visits to Beijing and the US too if I’m lucky!

Happy frequent flyers everybody!