Life is so good, it gets better every day

Constant Craving

Went out with Jo, Shane, Carolyn, Maeve and Andy [and 2 others whose name I forget] for a few pints to an English bar. They served some good Guinness. I wonder if it is because of this? They were good, but not that good – I think I might be losing my sense of taste on that front. I am so looking forward to going for a few pints when I get back to Dublin in July, even though it will be a complete reality check. I’m looking forward to seeing what that will be like.

Payne’s Ford Roof Factor

The easter weekend was a pretty excellent trip, heading some 7 hours up north to New Zealand’s premier sport climbing crag, Payne’s Ford. Friday and Monday were public holidays here, so it was a super time to go, and with amazingly clear weather for the entire weekend we got some good climbing done. My first impressions of the crag weren’t all that great. It seemed like a poor attempt at a good French limestone crag like Verdon or Calanque, and felt a little uncomfortable at first on the Payne’s Ford slopers. The routes were quite short, although we managed to find a pretty sustained hand jamming, chossy 18 which was completely undergraded. On the second day we found a much better sector with some excellent routes – Andy topping the day with a flash of Rawhide, a 22 with a bouldery roof start.

On Monday we headed just south of Abel Tasman NP and took kayaks out around the bay – pretty awesome paddling, although was knackered after 2 hours with the heavy boats. Andy has joined us in the house while Patrick has left to live out in Hoon Hay. Have been climbing 3 days this week at the wall after joining for another 3 months. Since Andy arrived it’s been great to have someone to push my climbing a little more, and we’ve met a bunch of people at the wall putting up some great problems. I’m climbing as well as a guy who’s leading 25 or 26 [about 7b/+] – I really need to convert that to outside.

Major life milestone: I’m eating bananas again.

Okay, So It’s Worth A Try

Havoc, want a job? [grin]

Sweet As, Bro

Erwann put back the first round of the new icon theme to the Blueprint package last week. JDS is starting to look amazingly sweet now and while most of us are focused on a GNOME 2.6 based JDS, an update release including the centralized configuration manager, APOC, is looking pretty darn good. Nat commented ‘We don’t expect much movement on the desktop in the next 12 months’. I just wonder if this is quite true, with gradual adoption already reaching new highs and there’s every indication of that continuing and increasing in activity.

It’s Time to Play The Music, It’s Time to Light The Lights

John, you see I’d just call that a workaround, but everyone seems to have different ideas of what is best. I like the idea of having custom feeds, but then I guess you need a way to publish the various topics that you might write blog entries about, and with 1,000,000’s of people blogging you get a staggering encylopedia of words. Yes, I too am seeing the amazing parallels with American TV. Scarey.

Jeff gives a pretty interesting commentary on the use cases and categorisation on what he calls ‘The Language Question’, and in his conclusion he asks the following questions – ‘Is Sun doing anything to get the community interested in Java? Not that I’ve seen. Mono may win over the community, not for legal or technical reasons, but simply through lack of attention from the Java camp. I wonder how close the Java and Desktop teams are within Sun’. This question has come up time and time again, and while so many people in Sun have focused heavily on the technical issues, they seem to have dropped the ball on the community. I don’t think this has ever been a ‘lack of attention’, more a reluctance to publically come out of a corner and defend their corner. My real feeling is that the Java camp isn’t a community to the same extents as GNOME, and could benefit from looking at our model. Sure, there is the JCP and a confusing mix of java.sun.com, java.net and java.com. It’s a good start, yet I’m saddened when I see no set of documentation writers writing good online user help, no translators adding translations for dozens of languages and no bug team triaging bugs on a daily basis and more of a traditional Sourceforge type setup. Okay, so the Java ‘community’ is so much larger than we could ever hope the GNOME community to be, and I’m probably being amazingly naive to expect otherwise. But to answer Jeff’s questions, yes, the Java and Desktop teams aren’t amazingly well aligned as they perhaps should be. The Java hackers aren’t desktop hackers, and the desktop hackers aren’t Java hackers, but the two groups are definitely starting to become more aware of each other and respecting each others concerns. Little steps, but all important ones.

Luis and Havoc have been discussing the delights of syncing with GNOME development and time based releases. It’s a discussion that I’m hugely interested in, having seen how many resources get sucked in to maintaining features locally, and making sure all the patches apply cleanly with an upgrade of the version tarball. For our GNOME 2.6 based release we seem to be doing a better job, with only 260 patches locally of which maybe 20 are feature based. Unfortunately, it’s hard to convince Sun about the merits of ‘FIXED UPSTREAM’, working primarily against trunk, using bugzilla as the main bug tracker and a bunch of other things that could potentially ease much pain. Still, worst of all is trying to convince people on the merits of ‘value add’ and with Novell, Red Hat and Sun being as competitive as ever, it’ll remain an exhaustive and demoralizing battle.

I’m still trying to define my role in Sun. I think I spend most of my time read and writing mail and blog entries. I think I need to move to California so that I’ll at least spend my time in meetings and feel like I’ve had a productive day, or something.

RSS – Mostly Harmless

Both Alec and Alan commented on the potentially harmful use of RSS with people publishing the full content in the RSS feed, both with seemingly different use cases and it’s pretty obvious that no good approach to blogging has yet emerged, yet it feels like aggregators like PlanetGNOME, PlanetDebian and PlanetFedora have accelerated the use of blogging and information sharing.

PlanetSun seems to be moving towards the same problems as PlanetGNOME – who gets added, how often are they blogging and whether their full entry is published in the RSS feed. I’m sure Jeff will be able to comment a little more or this. We have a ‘Sun Bloggers’ internal alias within Sun, and while I only subscribed sometime last week, a lot of the comments seem to get caught up over commenting mechanisms. I don’t have comments on my blog for a few reasons, as for me [and my current use case of occassionally reading PlanetSun, PlanetGNOME and a few other random places] they take potentially useful information away from the main flow of things, they are a spam target, they increase the number of click throughs that other people have to do [and vice versa], and increase the complexity of the blogging and aggregating software. Should I have used the commenting mechanism replying? Perhaps, but then fewer people would have seen these posts and potentially fewer people brainstorming on a solution.

The #1 Most Annoying Things About Blogs

Even though we now have wonderful sites like PlanetGNOME, PlanetDebian and PlanetSun [and an internal blogging site], we still have people being all rude and not publishing their entire blog entry in their RSS feed. It’s hugely infuriating having to click through to various blogs just to read them. Hopefully people are reading this and making suitable changes. Ahem.

GNOME API Documentation Openings

Keith Sharp posted an awesome summary of the state of GNOME API documentation. Looks like there’s still a bunch of work to be done getting it all up to speed for any keen people. Definitely one of the better places to get started, as it’s a good way of learning the APIs by documenting them.

Planet Sun

Holy fucking shit no way! Planet Sun. Rocking stuff! Totally awesome to see other Sun dudes blogging in public.

It Was The Start Of The Summer

Actually, quite the opposite. Well, while Ireland starts to bask in Summer heat, Christchurch begins its Winter – and man, it’s cold. Our house has no central heating, no log fire and 2 mini electric oil heaters. Apparently most houses in Christchurch lack the central heating thing. Kiwis are hard. Go hard, or go home. I’ll probably stop off at Katmandu and buy some fleecy slippers for a start.

Seriously thinking about heading to California next year – could be the right time for a move like that, career wise. The climbing and girls aren’t bad either. Lots to talk about and discuss before then.

I joined the climbing gym again, on another 3 month membership. Seems like a good time to start as the evenings start to close in again. Will hopefully get back into the swing of going there 3 nights a week, with a few afternoons on the ski slopes. We’re heading to Castle Hill tomorrow for an hour or two, with a trip to Paynes Ford for the Easter weekend. Rock. I put up some photos of my trip to Perth.