Life is so good, it gets better every day

Glad to be Home

Jeff and Pia’s wedding was a blast. LCA rocked. Despite how much I enjoyed each, I’m pretty glad to be home. Still feel a bit weird that I’m calling New Zealand my home, but I feel amazingly comfortable here, and comfortable is good.

The wedding went really well, and I was completely honoured to be part of the wedding cheerleading party, along with Thom and Touie, Sue and Elly. Everyone, including myself, had a great time, and Denise and Touie’s hospitality and generousity was wonderful throughout the weekend I spent in Yass.

LCA was also great fun, although I admit that I was probably still burnt out and not as hyped for a Linux conference as I wanted to be. It was awesome to meet Robert and Davyd for the first time, along with many old friends.

My general perception was that most people had pretty much disregarded Sun’s involvement in the Linux space, which made me pretty sad. While I’m still enjoying the challenges of working in Sun I sure don’t feel as proud with the product that I’m personally involved with, as I did before. I guess I have lots of thinking to do to see how we can turn it around, and I believe we can. It’s just going to take a lot of groundwork, and riding the days of frustration along the way.

Linux.conf.au

Linux.conf.au just started yesterday, and I’m already tired. We’re holding the GNOME.conf.au mini-conf today. It’s going to be a long week – more later.

GNOME And The Future

While writing my ‘101 Things to Know about GNOME’ talk for GUADEC I’ve been ploughing through the archives of many mailing lists, gnome-announce-list in particular. It’s been a pretty fascinating read, and I’d encourage people to do the same if they have spare time.

One of the mails I came across was A non technical perspective on GNOME goals and future work, from DV. We’ve done pretty well considering, with many of those goals well on their way to being solved. A lot of them still need quite a substantial amount of work. I wonder if todays goals are a similar set, compared to those of 3 years ago.

As mentioned elsewhere, if you want to help me with my talk, please send me interesting bits and pieces. Thanks heaps for all those who have contributed thus far!

Lions Tour 2005

Clive’s squad, all in all, seems pretty fair, with 20 Englishmen, 11 Irish, 10 Welsh and 3 Scot’s – nice to see O’Driscoll leading the team. What’s not fair is the lack of a ticket to go see them, and the abuse that I’ll probably get while watching it in the pub.

Jack Johnson And Friends

Went to see the Jack Johnson gig last night in the Town Hall with Carolyn. It was a really excellent couple of hours, featuring Xavier Rudd and G.Love and Special Sauce. I hadn’t heard anything of G.Love and Special Sauce before I went to the concert, and at the start it was slightly strange having his hip hop style in the middle of Jack and Xavier – but in a way, it kinda worked, and when they all came out on stage at the end and had a jamming session it was really pretty cool. Definitely better than the John Butler Trio gig I went to a month or so ago, although his music would have blended in just fine last night too.

Longhorn Delayed?

Seems Longhorn might slip its release again – can only be good news for vendors like Novell, Red Hat, Apple and others…Hrm, looks like Sun is part of the ‘others’ again – suck. At least it’s good news for GNOME.

GUADEC For Everyone!

The next round of the popular GNOME conference, GUADEC, is just around the corner. I’m pretty excited by the conference this year – it be the first year in a while where I’m not so much involved in the planning, and have no committments with the GNOME Foundation board of directors. I’m going over there with a real sense of being able to enjoy myself for the first time in ages, without large weighted decisions looming over me. Not only that, but we’ll be surrounded by good beer, sausages and large bosomed girls in tight leather pants. Okay, I suspect I’m thinking more of this – isn’t it a pity we couldn’t co-ordinate the dates?

I already had booked my flights, before I saw that the GNOME Foundation sorted out a 10-20% discount with Lufthansa and with other cheap airlines in Europe, it should prove to be much easier getting the Stuttgart this year. I also booked my accommodation on the same day, staying at the Hotel Unger for the few nights I’ll be in Stuttgart [26th May – 1st June]. The GUADEC guys also organized a discount for a number of hotels around the area, and there’s still hope we might be able to organize some cheaper accommodation like we had in Kristiansand last year.

Unfortunately we seem to have ended up with the same number of talks from previous years. Everyone wants to talk at GUADEC, and we’re trying desperately hard to accommodate everyone with a rather action packed schedule with some excellent speakers – both old and new. This year, we’re trying out a few new things –

• A separate Multimedia track – There’s always lots to talk about in the multimedia space, and we’ve given them their own track this year. Fluendo are also streaming the conference again this year, for those that can’t make the conference.
• Lightning talks – This was a successful addition to the Boston GNOME Summit last year that we were very keen to add to the schedule this year. We plan to have lots of people talking for a few minutes about their project. If you are interested, you should register your lightning talk here!
• Freeform sessions – We’ve introduced a new slot on Monday afternoon. We’re hoping that this will be where some hard planning, brainstorming, and problem solving happens for GNOME. We have 3 more freeform sessions to fill up and we’re quite keen for people to come up with suggestions and lead these sessions. The great Luis Villa has already signed up for a Marketing GNOME session – he doesn’t know it yet, since he’s currently touring the back and beyond in Australia! You’ll also notice there is an hour-long group session where all the groups report back on what each session has brainstormed.

There will be a certain amount of schedule activity as we start to finalize the current schedule, so if you have any specific comments you need to get them in now to guadec-planning [at] gnome [dot] org. As always, we’ll be using our wiki page, on live.gnome.org, for many announcements along with guadec-list.

Tell us you’re coming! – you can’t afford to miss it! Registration will be announced soon!

Highlights From Down South

Although Patrick already blogged about our trip down south with Mick, I thought I’d put up a selection of photos. The trip was my first real taste of multiple day tramping in New Zealand – we elected to go and do the Keplar track, which is about 76km for 3 days walking.

We headed down in Patrick’s boss’ BMW to Queenstown early on Tuesday morning, after Mick had arrived the previous morning. I’ve never really been a big fan of Queenstown. Sure, the scenery is pretty awesome, but there’s not much to it after that. About every 2nd shop in the town is a tourist booking office. Now Wanaka is a different place.

The next morning we started the Keplar track. The first day was pretty dull, walking a few kms around the lake, then a 2 hour slog up to Luxmore hut, for our first nights sleep. The hut slept about 65 people, shared between 2 bunkhouses. It was pretty cool to be on the mountainside, but when you have a few people snoring, like we did, during the night, you soon get tired of it.

The hardlads started off early the next morning, on what was to be the highlight of the 3 days – a walk along a ridgeline with amazing scenery. We were totally blessed with the weather, with reasonably good views during those few hours. Unfortunately at the end of the day there was a 2 hour steep decent that had us crying towards the end. Another somewhat uneventful night in the next hut, fighting the cursed sandflies, had us starting the next morning to a 40km walk out to Te Anau. Most people bail out at the swing bridge after about 20km and get the shuttle into town. We opted to walk it out, which probably did unforeseen physical damage to our bodies. Oh well, what doesn’t kill you, can only make you stronger.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt in as much pain as I did the last day. After walking the previous 2 days, and limbs aching from the 2 hour descent, we were all in agony during those 40km. Fortunately we were blessed with the weather again, with a steady downpour for most of the way. It was pretty miserable. I can do 40km easily in a day, but after reasonably solid days the previous 2 days, it was really tough going.

The day after, we limped around Milford for the day, seeing the awesome dolphins riding in the wave of our cruise ship, and the underwater observatory.

Before long, the week was over, and Mick headed off to Australia on the next leg of his short holiday. I quickly caught up with my brother and his wife over dinner before he headed home too.

Back to a somewhat normal life again – only except that I’ve been catching up a bit with Larry who’s over in NZ waiting for his Australian visa to come through, and looking forward to Domhnall visiting in July. Busy times.

Oh man

Oh man, this is so cool – nice work team! It’s amazing to think how far Sun has come within the last year in terms of blogging becoming part of the social culture within Sun. Creating the blogging guidelines and getting some of the executives to blog were major milestones [although I’d still very much like to see Scott blogging as well].

Can You Repeat That?

The following contains hugely sensitive internal material. If you understand this, you can have my job.

Unfortunately, every so often you are simply unlucky. Today was one of those days. While going through my mail boxes at the weekend, I noticed a bug mail with an MR [Multiple Release], and an associating SubCR [Sub-Change Request]. Haha, easy you say? I went ‘bugger me, what’s that?’ and forwarded on the mail to my QA buddy, Shane. He replied back that it was multiple release bug that required a patch for a given release of Solaris, and pointed that I had to get approval through the IPR system [Internal Patch Request]. Right, of course. Fortunately one of our team has had to go through that process, and very usefully wrote out a series of steps. After raising and approving the IPR [and having needed contact names, phone numbers and emails for various bits of the form], I have to raise an PRF [Patch Request Form], which needs an associating CRT [Change Request Tracker]. Are you following yet? I’m currently on step 3 of a 9 step process, and each step feels completely disconnected from the previous and next steps.

I love Sun, don’t get me wrong, but I sometimes feels the various processes that we’ve set up really kill the average developer’s productivity, sanity and progress within Sun.

I’m going on holiday tommorrow. My timing is impeccable!