Mark mailed with his latest venture –
Rapid News is a comedy spoof news programme with jokes. Think of it as a radio show without the radio. Or a book that you listen to. Or a picture without the shapes. Or a pat on the bum without the wink.
Check it out here – 8 weeks in an RSS feed, though I should warn it’s pretty Irish centric.
The first OpenSolaris Developer Summit has been announced for the weekend of 13th and 14th October at the University of California in Santa Cruz. It’ll be a pretty hands on summit, with a lot of discussion (hopefully) around putting together the bits of Indiana. It’ll also be a good excuse to party and get to know some faces behind the OpenSolaris project which I’m looking forward to – I’ve found with previous GNOME experiences, it’s the best way to get excited about where we’re heading for the project and putting a face to a name really helps communication wise too.
We haven’t yet got a solid schedule around, but there’s a mailing list set up and ready for discussion. We also have a small amount of travel sponsorships for non-Sun employees to be able to attend, so if you think you’d like to attend and have been active in the project thus far, please do apply. So go register! (oh, and save the world by car pooling down to the event if you can).
Like Jim, I’m sure I won’t be the last to quote passages of Matt’s interview with Jonathan –
The question to ask is, “What portion of the world knows my brand?”
With the Java platform I’d guess we reach 20 to 30 percent of the Internet every day (powering the games kids play online, the intranet application at a bank, etc.). Each of these constituents may think about Java in different ways, but in each case Java “sells” my brand. If you believe that brand is central to the next wave of Internet monetization–and I believe it is absolutely central–then the more people that know my brand, the more benefit inures to me.
and more importantly
Understand the demographics of your market. You need adoption in order to get sales. You don’t need to monetize every user of your software.
Both quotes absolutely on the money.
I know I’m probably the last person alive to have a commenting system, but finally, thanks heaps to Jeff, I’ve now successfully transitioned from pyblosxom to WordPress. Very much liking the Twitter and Flickr widgets, and tweaked the style enough to feel good about having a fresh new look. I do lose URL points on not re-directing all my previous blog links, but I figure reasonably intelligent people can figure out the new URL. Hooray!
Hard to believe GNOME is 10 years down the road, and that I’ve been in the project for 7 of those since I joined Sun back in 2000. It’s incredible the amount of progress the project has made during those 10 years, with the launch of the GNOME Foundation and massive industry support. I’d like to have thought I’ve grown up too since those early days of hacking on gnome-session and not having a clue what I was doing.
Just before GUADEC I announced that I had intended to put together a documentary on GNOME, asking the various developers how they got involved, any amusing anecdotes and their thoughts for the next 10 years. Unfortunately, I didn’t really pull it off at the time.
But we have another chance!
As part of the birthday celebrations, record yourself or your local GNOME user group (like Jeff, Jono, Quim, Willie and Mikael), and upload the recording. We’ll be collecting a whole bunch of links to them on our scrapbook, and adding more footprints to our story!
Wildwinds had a 40% sale on snowboards this week, so I sucked it up and replaced the piece of crap I’ve been using for the last couple of seasons. I now have a new Flow Infinite and a pair of bindings. Sweet. Really looking forward to using them down in Wanaka when we head down there in 2 weeks time. Also looking forward to carving the slopes with my buddy!.
Today, I am following in the footsteps of my brother. After talking for several years about how cool it would be to brew my own beer, I finally bit the crown and purchased the small beginnings of a home brew kit. Included in it is the vat, hydrometer, dextrose sugar, carbonation drops, heater mat, and various cleaning substances. My fellow brewer, Mikey, and I opted for the traditional glass bottle approach, and consequently needed to buy 48 litre bottles of Speights to would work nicely with our capping device. So we’re on a mission. Not only do we have to drink 48 litres of beer as fast as we possibly can, but we also need to be ready to produce at least one brew before working on our Christmas celebration brew. Embarassingly enough, the entire time I was in the shop scoping out the gear I had hiccups which I couldn’t get rid of.
I’m getting crazily excited and celebrated with a pie on the way home.
John Plocher uploaded the recent discussion at the open meeting of PSARC with Jim Hughes – it mostly turned into a discussion about Indiana, but I think it was useful on most counts.
I’m still struggling with figuring out how we transition over to our current interface and release taxonomy to something more appropriate for OpenSolaris as it exists today – if we never have a Solaris 11, we never have official guarantees of binary compatibility which seems likely to exclude most distributions who want to base themselves on the OpenSolaris kernel and maintaining the binary compatibility story.
Finally I mostly get a day off, and I headed out to Fremont to the REI store. A quick transaction (and some heartache for not buying more), I walked away with an MSR DragonFly Stove, DuraLite MSR pot set and North Face Apex soft shell. A couple minutes down the road, I turned into Fry’s. A couple of minutes later I was the proud owner of some Bose TriPort OE headphones and now listening to The Shins.
God, shopping feels good sometimes. Credit card bill later will be a little more painful. After a long slog on the road, I’m owed a treat.
Blink.
I missed it. Well, a lot of it. I attended a grand total of 2 sessions, on the last day. Even the lightning talk where I teamed up with Steve to keep a somewhat lack lustre OpenSolaris status update, I left soon after. I did however spend a suitable amount of time taking part in press interviews like these, and very much enjoyed the experience (thanks Brian!). I spent some time on the Sun booth, and noticed an increased amount of interest in OpenSolaris (and associate technologies) – nice to meet Jay and Wez, 2 contributors to the project. Also had a whole bunch of meetings with Ian, Sara, Patrick and Jesse – lots of Indiana discussions, so by the time the Sun BOF turned around, I was more than happy for the face of OpenJDK, Tom Marble, to take the podium.
Happy days at OSCON, though sad to have missed a whole bunch of people to catch up with. Apologies.
