Life is so good, it gets better every day

What I’ve Been Doing

A few weeks ago, Carolyn and myself had a quiet weekend exploring Wellington, availing of the cheap Air New Zealand flights. Wellington was a pretty cool place, more so when the sun shone. It was nicely divided up into different cultural areas – everything from the arts, shopping, pubs and restaurants to hippie Cuba street. We took a look at the waterfront and Oriental Bay, up the cable car to see the Botanic gardens and the ‘Sun dial of human involvement’ [which sucked], Te Papa and did a bit of Christmas shopping. We met up with Mike who took us up along up into the Hutt valley and along the west coast, which was quite beautiful. But it really pissed down on Sunday, with high winds – enough to shut down the airport. Nice city, but I get why a lot of south islanders [ok, at least people from Canterbury] wouldn’t dare to live there. Some photos are online.

This week a cold has hit me for six, and spent much of the past couple of days sleeping. I blame the weather for being spectacularly crap.

Sun Java Studio

Todd announced that a new Java Studio Enterprise was available. Sounds good until I saw the system requirements. No Java Desktop System? Alarm Bells? Looks like I’ll have to wait until my desktop arrives so I can run Solaris x86 – although after nearly 5 months waiting, I’m not quite sure of my chances.

Standing on the Shoulders of Java

I’ve only written a handful of Java code in my life, and most of it was during various Java labs in university. I’ve recently embarked on a project based on Java. We’re leveraging code that came out of Sun Labs. It’s proving to be an interesting, if a little hairy, learning experience.

First of all I figured that I had to relearn Java. Ooof. Fortunately I found The Java Tutorial which proved to be pretty useful, and with some background in GObject it was a nice easy learning curve in an isolated environment. I could easily compile the sample applications and work through them, step by step. Great.

Then I discovered what I can only call ‘The Java Complexity’. Oh my god, Java is BIG, and reading through the code already written for said project above made that even more obvious. I had to start looking at things like ant and jcloak, not to mention half of the standard API. Are people expected to remember this stuff? As funny as this sounds, it seems infinitely more complicated than your standard autotool and C based GNOME APIs!

Still, the project has to get done and I must learn. I’m terrified at every corner though. I thought having a look at Netbeans or Sun Java Studio might help me, but it feels like they’re just another variable on the stack right now which I don’t need. So plough on, I go…

And I find out that ant is not installed on my machine. Some SuSE packages don’t seem to help me here, since I have jdk-1.5.0_01-ea installed. So time to rebuild an RPM. I find some SRPMS and look at the spec files thinking ‘Hell, this should be easy’. The Red Hat one terrifies me. The SuSE one is workable though. And then I discover the ‘setJava’ script and /etc/java profiles. Crack.

Sigh.

So my startling discovery has led me to come to an uninformed opinion that Java just doesn’t feel ready for Linux right now, and certainly not JDS. It’s hard to accept, as a developer who currently doesn’t care about anything more than building and developing his application, the reason why there are multiple versions of Java right now. It feels that we [Sun] have failed in that respect by creating the root cause by a non-free Java. I originally started out with the goal of having a developer environment up in minutes, with all the various components installed – ‘plug and play’ comes to mind. Today has shown that is not the case, and I’m no closer to writing the lines of code that matter to me. We have much work to do.

Update: So I discover Netbeans has an ant module which helps quite a lot, thanks!

Holidays Photos

I finally got around to putting my north island holiday photos online.

Best Practices

Jim Grisanzio pointed out this computerworld article, which details a reaction from Tiemann about Open Source Solaris. While I don’t really have any opinion on the Linux vs Solaris debate, one thing in particular stood out from the text –

Declining to speculate too much on what Sun might or might not do with Solaris, Tiemann said the company is doing a “great job” with its work on the open source Gnome project.
“We would like to see Sun [uphold] Gnome as a best practice and when it holds up Java it should recognize that compared with Gnome,” he said.

It’s a nice complement, and while I don’t think we’ve completely figured out how to contribute effectively to the GNOME project, there is a *huge* amount of learning that we can take away from our involvement. With software development, particularly in a corporate environment, it is quite hard to work out in the open – with increasing pressures from the marketplace which effectively determine schedules and deadlines, quite often, doing the right thing is damn hard. Working to synchronize that with a community 6 month schedule is even harder.

Being open and communicative about what you’re doing is the key…even if that means letting the cat out of the bag from time to time about what you’re doing.

I’ve been very worried about our activity within the GNOME project over the years that I’ve been involved, intensely aware that we need to sync up as much as possible with what the community is currently doing. We’ve been burned too many times in the past when we worked ‘in house’ and developed features away from the community. How many patches have we developed that have never seen the light of day upstream? How many engineer hours and lines of code have gone into those patches? How many days of frustration have we spent rewriting those patches so that they apply to a more recent community release? Having a competitive advantage is important – but balancing that out with getting key functionality upstream in the core is where its at.

We’re not there yet. There’s so many things we’re learning, and we [in the GNOME project] may never reach an ideal solution and often have to cut corners and make compromises that we really don’t like taking. I’d like to think, though, that all those experiences have not gone wasted, and that projects like Solaris and Java can benefit from them.

I Can’t Believe…

That most modern browsers don’t do this.

The Long Wait

I waited all morning for my donut to come in the mail, but alas, it didn’t. The pain of working remotely – still, nice to see Solaris 10 is out. Looking forward to running it if my Dell desktop ever makes its way off purchase order status [I think we’re nearing 4 months at this stage….brrr] to something a little more real.

VPN Updates

After calls to Sun HR, Erwann and Robert the best step was to call the European support center. Unfortunately without me knowing it I ended up speaking to India again, and when the assistant asked if it would be ok to open up another ticket with the exact same category I rather rudely replied ‘But I don’t want this going to India…I’m not sure if I have the confidence that they’ll know what my problem is’. ‘Sorry sir, you’re already speaking to India’. Oh dear. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of clever, clever people in India that are amazingly more competant than me, but it’s amazing what a day of frustration will get you. Jumping to conclusions – racist conclusions, you could say.

After another round in the support queue and a few phone calls later, it seems my problem is known [merely the fact my token card authentication was disabled – quite how I managed to get into sun.net is another marvel] and within 5 or 6 hours the servers will be synced and I’ll be online again.

GNOME Foundation Board Elections

It’s hard to describe my feelings about the GNOME Foundation Board Elections this year. I didn’t really have much time to think about putting myself forward for another year, and with a holiday and lack of access to mail I mostly forgot about the elections.

So I have mixed emotions. Mostly I completely sucked this year. I really, really sucked and had very little motivation to attend the early morning meetings. I’d like to think it was because I had less motivated people to bounce ideas off, and while most of the board would admit a similar lack of motivation, the buck needs to stop at someone to be that necessary kickstart. I’ll definitely miss the board emails – they were the source of many interesting discussions. I’ll miss the work for the most part too – since I don’t code that well, it’s a perfect opportunity to give something worthwhile back to the project. I’ll miss also the title it brought to me at Sun – quite often people would listen a bit closer to someone with such a title; sad but true.

But in the end, I just couldn’t justify going another year. While a new board would bring along new members that could potentially motivate me, I think I just need to stand aside and let some one else have a go and see how they do. It’ll be hard to stand back though.

So my slightly pessimistic election question is this –

How do you think you could motivate the rest of the board, if and when the other directors have other time pressures? What drives you to run for the board? What one problem could you hope to solve this year?

VPNot

Remember when I got transfered? Fortunately I took enforced holidays before getting too tangled up in the mess. Almost 2 weeks later, I’m still tangled. I think I probably only lost 2 days of mail in the transfer, so that’s not such a big deal. But when it comes to VPN, it is.

When I set up the network in the new house, things didn’t go according to plan. First of all, I couldn’t IRC and it was easy to figure out that it was due to the firewall. First problem; easy solution – disable the firewall until I have more time to look at it. Secondly, my VPN connection wouldn’t work. Initially I thought it was because I still didn’t have a user account, but when I checked in with sun.net things went okay, and I was able to log in with my handy encryption card.

I logged a service desk request, thinking that it was a relatively straightforward problem. I was using exactly the same router configuration locally and nothing had changed at my end since the previous weeks that I was happily using my VPN connection. I even tried another router, and got Laca to test it on his Solaris box down in Dunedin. No show. I’m 99.999% sure the problem isn’t my end, and figure it’s just a case of adding a simple user id to the VPN database, if such a thing exists.

Being in New Zealand doesn’t help, when your service desk has been offshored to India. It has been a frustrating 2 days – with a huge lack of understanding and communication that has eventually resulted in my service desk request being closed because Linux [and JDS] ironically hasn’t been supported. Hello? Alarm Bells?

To top that all off, I’m now faced with following it up myself – The HR department in Australia seems like likely first bet, after the service desk girl suggested I get in touch with both the JDS helpdesk and some JDS FAQ. Do you know who I am lady? I think I made her cry. What’s more, in the transfer my Irish corporate calling card has also been cancelled so now more long distance calls without having to worry about expensing them. Sigh.

I’m sure there’s a morale to the story here, but right now I’m a pretty unhappy camper. Sun is built full of technically gifted engineers who know what they’re talking about and I’m embarassed to think there are other people in the field who are facing this kind of frustration on a daily basis.

How much am I worth to Sun an hour? Let’s say $100 as a random figure. Having missed 2 days before I went on holiday, and now 2 days after coming back, that’s 32 hours @ $3,200. I’d like that in my next paycheck if you just waste it!!

[Apologies for the rant, it’s just been a frustrating day]