Life is so good, it gets better every day

To The Orpheum

Went to see Narnia with Ethan and Clodagh today. A totally more satisfying experience compared to King Kong.

First OpenSolaris Company

Maybe I missed it in the news, but it seems like the first company centered around services for a custom OpenSolaris distribution has been formed – Nexenta Systems, Inc. Hell, it might even by the first company based on Ubuntu too!

Their website has the following –

Membership fees also pay the salaries of employees who often contribute, directly or indirectly, to “external” Free Software projects such as the OpenSolaris, KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice, and others.

so I’m looking forward to seeing lots of GNOME patches go upstream in the near future.

SunNetTalk

Hal Stern, Simon Phipps and Stephen Hahn talk about Open Communities – worth watching.

A Lunchtime with Jeff Waugh

Met up with Jeff, Pia and Ellie for lunch today – great to see them all again. A couple of beers and talking the shit looking out onto Darling harbour was a nice way to spend the afternoon. We then went back to his place where he showed me his pool, jacuzzi and sauna. He even let me borrow his pants for the occasion, which may be due to the fact that he seems set on wearing pretty little frocks instead these days. Not sure what’s happening there. but anyway, I digress….

We hatched a plan!

If you are attending GNOME.conf.au and Linux.conf.au we have some pretty interesting ideas we want to test out, since we’re now in the PARTICIPATION AGE!.

If You Evangelize It, They Will Come

During the recent Solaris Desktop Summit, I re-echoed one of my basic gripes about open source communities. So often it as much about the people and personalities as it is about the technology. Don’t get me wrong, technology is important, but what’s the point in technology if you don’t have the right channel to advertise it, the people evangelize it. So it’s wonderful to see that the Netbeans dudes are groking that need, and even more so to see Roumen in that role, and taking on a community manager.

The OpenSolaris dudes have grokked it as well, and I’d love to see the Java guys grok it, with deep respect to James for what he’s done.

The reason so many of these communities thrive are because of enigmatic leaders, excited about the technology they’re working on. Everyone wants a role model – and as Jeff would say, stand up, and be the signal.

Technology vs Pain

Here’s me thinking that no one has really tried to build GNOME 2.12 out on OpenSolaris land – the reality of the fact is that there is a small thriving community of people trying to build, and it’s wonderful to see. Too bad the mixture of technology isn’t getting that feedback into my mailbox. Sorry everyone, hopefully we’ll get this fixed real soon.

Stop It, You’re Scaring The Children!

Eric pointed out where to get KDE and GNOME for Solaris and OpenSolaris. One of his links made me cry. Now I’m all for promoting the GNOME brand in our software stack. I believe it’s hugely important for us to do so and we almost certainly don’t do it enough currently, but we probably need to fix that link to point to JDS somehow, and organize this one a little better.

Slashtime

I’ve been meaning to install Andrew’s slashtime utility on my Solaris laptop for a while, especially since I’ve been lame and not spent the time to port our timezone clock applet patch that we have for JDS to the newer versions of GNOME. Fortunately it was a relatively easy task. I first quickly grabbed the CPAN module and created a spec file for it, created the package using pkgbuild, installed it, and then tried to run the slashtime utility. The original script had some Linux’isms [or so I assume], and fetching the TZ variable from /etc/default/init seemed to do the trick and things were running nicely. The patch is here for anyone interested. Neat utility, thanks Andrew!

P.S. I know my Perl is pretty oooky.

Toastin’

Andrew, I was just thinking the same thing. Some serious hot air, and it’s not the result of the post-pudding Christmas day. Fortunately we’re armed with a couple of rash vests, some 30+ sun block and a backgrarden pool which makes things just about bearable.

Christmas Down Under

It’s been a pretty wonderful Christmas so far, with lots of great company, wine, beer and pool sessions. You get the usual things like the standard Christmas dinner but with a slightly Sydney slant. The day after Christmas we headed out with Shane, Katie and family who are friends of Sharon and Dic on their boat, primarily to catch the start of the Sydney/Hobart race. During the morning the boys and girls got dragged around, with a little time for water skiing at the end for me. The main attraction was the race, and we caught up with the crews with choppers flying overhead, all to see a few boats. In reality, it was an amazing event. Although we only caught enough to see the big maxis at the start, by virtue of running out of fuel right amongst it [ooops], it was just an amazing sight to see them cruise away with such ease and splendour while the other hundreds of vessels scrap for position in the harbour.