Life is so good, it gets better every day

OpenSolaris Desktop Pages

Over the last week or two, a few of us in the desktop community have been working to revamp the desktop community webpages. I think they’re looking pretty sweet now, and I’d like to personally thank Mike, Doug, Alfred and Erwann for their contributions. Given that we have a bunch of associating OpenSolaris projects, I think the desktop community is a great way to advertise the incredible work that is happening in the upstream communities, and provide some basic information for anyone wanting to get involved in those communities.

Kayak Season

The kayaking season for me was pretty short but sweet, with a total of 4 rivers for the year – thanks again to Dave and Emma for guiding me down them in one piece. We went up to Murchison for the Buller Fest, where the kayaking community celebrated the sport with all sorts of competitions from slalom to big air. We had a nice enjoyable run on the Middle Matak (grade 2), and then slightly more intense run and swim on Earthquake on the Buller (my first grade 3, and a real step up in terms of water obstacles). Was great to see the kayaking community first hand after hearing stories from the others. A few weekends later we headed up to the upper Hurunui for another grade 2 and seal launch fun. Good times, and hopefully being around Wellington will be a chance to head out sea kayking from time to time.

Up in Castlepoint

I’ve recently bought a new surf caster, and been getting out and about the harbour for a few hours fishing. There’s lots of opportunities here, whether it’s off the various piers, walls and rocks. Jayne and I drove up 2 hours north of Wellington to Castlepoint at the weekend, to fish off the infamous ‘suicide rock’ shelf, about 10-15 meters up from the sea. We were blessed with good weather for the 4 or 5 hours that we were out there. I ended up picking up 3 Kahawai, 2 on a rig, 1 spinning, though all pretty small in size. Definitely a place I want to head back to and spend longer. The new rod is working out ok, but it’s pretty heavy so I can’t do long bouts of spinning.

Who is Sick?

Interesting read from Richard MacManus today – who is sick. I had that idea a long time ago and suggested it as a cool hack during a session at O’Reilly FooCamp. Chris at the time mentioned that Google had tried something like that previously and found it not to work. Still pleased to see that someone has sat down to put idea to actual result. I probably would have implemented it quite differently, as it’s not terribly obvious where the sickness trends are.

Embedded GNOME

Congratulations to Jeff for pulling off a successful day with the GMAE press release, he deserves much credit for being able to herd the various bodies involved right the way through to the big day. Congratulations for everyone else involved who put in the hard yards getting the platform figured out and up to scratch – really awesome to see. Between it and GOD, it’s going to be a pretty exciting year for GNOME. Glad to see Sun made it to the press release in the end 😉

Cellar-Vate Beer Club Tasting

Jayne hooked me up with her friend’s partner, Mark, to attend a monthly beer tasting night at the Backbencher pub last night organized by Cellar-Vate. It was a pretty fun thing, and I’ve never really been to an official beer tasting before, other than those times I’m propping up the bar. Last night was the heavies, sampling the following –

Roosters Haymaker

Strong Lager, Hastings, 6.5%

Morland Excalibur

Strong Lager, United Kingdom, 8.5%

Bennett’s Belgian Strong

Strong Lager, Nelson, 7.2%

Epic Mayhem

American Pale Ale, Auckland, 6.6%

Hofbrau MaiBock

Heller Bock, Germany, 7.2%

Brugge Tripel

Abbey Triple, Belgium, 8.2%

Hoegaarden Forbidden Fruit

Belgian Strong Ale, Belgium, 8.5%

Emerson’s Taieri George

Spiced Ale, Dunedin, 6.8%

We got a short introduction about each beer from Neil Miller while the bottles, cans and jugs were passed along the table. I rated the Bruggle Tripel highest, followed by a strong tie between the Epic Mayhem and Hoegaarden Forbidden Fruit (both of which ended up being first and second place in the vote). All washed down with 3 Guinness at the end to prove some sort of national pride. All in a good day’s work.

CommunityOne

Beginning to regret not trying to get over for JavaOne this year, especially for the free to attend CommunityOne event. The session line up looks awesome! If you happen to be around San Francisco on May 7th, check it out!

Planet OpenSolaris GSoC

As some sports fans may already have noticed, I’ve created a planet for our summer of code students to blog about their projects. You can read about their progress at http://planet.opensolaris.org/soc2007/. Drop into #opensolaris and say hi!

OGB’s First Meeting

After the relative farce of our first attempt, the 2nd call was a much more productive call, including an audio recording of what we all sound like.

I think it’s fair to say that most of the board are still trying to find their feet, trying to figure out where our responsibilities lie, and how best to spend our time. If you think there’s something we need to address, let us know, though if you’re not comfortable discussing it in a public environment (for sensitive issues mostly), remember we have a private forum if necessary.

Student Projects for OpenSolaris

It was a *really* tough call with just over 40 student applications – while we had planned for 8 slots, we ended up getting 4 in total, and have the following student projects this year –

i18n Emancipation Project

by John Sonnenschein, mentored by Garrett D’Amore

Racoon 2 and OpenSolaris

by Rahul Murmuria, mentored by Bill Sommerfeld

BPF for OpenSolaris

by Samy Al Bahra, mentored by Darren Reed

FFT and OpenSolaris

by Raymond T Harper, mentored by Rob Giltrap

Congratulations to the successful students (you’ll be hearing more from them soon), and sorry that so many awesome project ideas and students missed out. Hopefully next year we’ll be able to increase the number.