Life is so good, it gets better every day

JDS and OpenSolaris

I gave a presentation to the university students right beside the Sun offices in Beijing. Hard to know at what level to pitch the talk, but mostly just went through the goals for the desktop community, why OpenSolaris was important, and what our plans were for JDS.

Hopefully I sold them on the ideas of creating Solaris packages from spec files using pkgbuild, and that I’m swamped with mails telling me how they’ve packaged their favourite desktop application using the build environment I explained. Here’s hoping anyway. The slides are here.

Patrick’s trying to convince me to come to English corner this Friday evening where I can sit and talk random stuff with people who are trying to learn English – just not totally sure I’ll have the voice for it after this weeks sessions. It’s been fun time during this trip, and I think pretty productive. These guys rock, they’ve just been sheltering under one for too long, and now it’s time to shine!

Ahhrrr

Avast!. Those be treacherous words.

TVIC – The Valley in Christchurch

Met up for lunch with Phil and a bunch of people from effusion, a small community of people that came together around OSS stuff. A really interesting bunch of people – I’ll avoid naming because I’ll invariably end up being embarassed by forgetting most of their names. Nice to get out for lunch, and some interesting conversations. Then later in the evening, some of met up again for a Chinese and some more tech talk – cool people, doing cool stuff.

Java China

Darn it, maybe I should have organized to go out a little early. It seems that Java China is being held this week, and a whole rake of superstars are out in Beijing at this very moment.

I just wonder who’s going to be out there next week. It seems Beijing is a popular place at the moment.

Have Wheels, Will Travel

I finally got around to buying a car – a 1995 Nissan Primera Camino sedan. It’s silver, clean looking and expect it to get me from A to B. As part of the process, I also applied for an NZ drivers license. Since I already have an Irish drivers license, it was pretty much just a case of answering 35 easy multiple choice questions. However, the eye check was a bit more challenging. Either I’m getting blind, or the machine they used to test it was really not configured right. Had real difficulty seeing 3 columns of letters, and my left eye is definitely weaker than it was previously – must really get that checked.

But at least I have wheels now, which gives me an entirely new level of freedom over here.

Off to Beijing

Still banging away at the various GNOME/JDS/OpenSolaris bits for a release soon enough – making progress, just slow as hell. Hopefully we won’t have to go through this process again.

Had a really interesting roadmap discussion within our team yesterday, to try and solve our current number one goal – how to increase the numbers of developers on Solaris/OpenSolaris. John and I brainstormed a whole heap of cool stuff on the phone late last night, and it’s clear we have a lot of work to do and a good deal of stream-lining to do. Think I might start a discussion on desktop-discuss@opensolaris.org, and see if we can collectively brainstorm there too.

In other news, I’m off to Beijing on the 17th September for a week to meet up with the JDS dudes in the Sun offices there. Should be a good week, and starting to look forward to it now.

A New Haka

We headed down to Dunedin for the weekend in time to watch the boys pull off a new haka. The game was pretty close, with South Africa making the best of some pretty loose play by the All Blacks. I suspect they’re going to dominate their northern hemisphere tour – the difference in level seems to be getting wider and wider.

Another Arrival

Hooray, Leo [my boss] has just given birth to a baby boy. Damien’s been running stakes on gender, weight and day – I was a day late, a couple of pounds too heavy and the wrong sex. Story of my life! Best wishes to Leo and Michael.

Off on his Travels

So Patrick left New Zealand on Saturday for 5 months of travelling – it’ll certainly be a bit strange not having him around the place, and I’ll miss him in very man-ly way. Happy travels dude!

The Otherside

I’ve been listening to a lot of Kiwi music recently, and one band in particular, Breaks Co-op. They’re playing this week with another of my favorites Goldenhorse, but the tickets are a little over priced for my liking. Their latest album, The Sound Inside, is well worth checking out.