Life is so good, it gets better every day

Final Days before LCA2010

Over the last 9 months, Jayne and I have been involved in helping to organize linux.conf.au here in Wellington, New Zealand. For those who aren’t familiar with the conference, it is by far one of the best free and open source conferences in the southern hemisphere and attracts an absolutely awesome line up of speakers and since registrations began in October we’ve now reached close to 600 delegates. If you happen to be in New Zealand I’d strongly urge you to register and join us for what we be a great week!

After organizing GUADEC in Dublin back in 2003, I swore to myself I’d never be involved in another conference. GUADEC was a pretty stressful experience, though incredibly rewarding. As it turns out, LCA2010 is pretty similar. Fortunately this time, we have a brilliant team behind us led by the excellent Andrew and Susanne and things are coming together really well. We’re all looking forward to the conference next week, and we hope all the delegates will enjoy it as much as we’ve enjoyed planning it.

So, which sessions am I looking forward not to see?

• All the keynotes – it will be my first chance to listen to the excellent Glyn Moody and Biella Coleman, and always enjoyed Mako and Nat in the past.
• Jon Corbet’s Kernel Report
• Don Christie’s Changing NZ Desktop stack to FOSS
• Tridge and Bob’s Teaching FOSS at Universities
• Cat and Leslie’s Attracting and Retaining Talented People
• Tridge’s Patent defense for free software
• All the activities of LCA Open Day

From a work point of view, like most other conferences, it’s a great chance to see what the Linux community is up to, including challenges they face and features they’re developing. There’s even some OpenSolaris related content scattered across the conference – ZFS in Data Storage and Retrieval miniconf, pkgbuild and Source Juicer in the Distro miniconf, and an OpenSolaris booth at Open Day. It will be great to see how far we’ve come with the project, and get a feeling of general awareness that OpenSolaris really has changed significantly in the last couple of years.

Not to late to GO REGISTER!

Oracle’s committment to Sun Solaris and SPARC

Nice to see Oracle starting to come out of the woodwork on a few issues in the interim. Good strong statement for Sun’s existing customer and userbase, and headsup to IBM –

Go digg it!

OpenSolaris on FLOSS Weekly

I had the privilege to be a guest on FLOSS Weekly with Leo Laporte and Jono Bacon this week, thanks guys! Of course Aaron and David had done awesome groundwork with an interview on ZFS a few weeks earlier. It was a fun hour, and I enjoyed it though can think of many thing I’d answer differently now! Looking forward to catching up with Jono and others at the Community Leadership Summit next month in San Jose, the weekend before OSCON.

And yes, OpenSolaris is officially ‘not bollocks’. Check it out!

New Zealand OpenSolaris User Group

After many months of procrastination on my part, it’s time to launch the New Zealand OpenSolaris User Group. Organizing an active user group that meets on a regular basis is hard, regardless of technology interest, so I’ve decided firstly that NZOSUG will be just a virtual group for now with a mailing list to join – we’ll see how interest grows over time, and might have an occasional meet up with a presentation or several pints of beer.

Of course folks outside the country are most welcome to join. First up, we need to get cracking on a fun logo for the group – If you’re an artist and keen to draw something up, please do! I’ll make sure you get something from the OpenSolaris swag bag in MPK for your troubles.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 Released Today

OpenSolaris 2009.06 is now available for download!

I’m thrilled that we’ve gotten through another 6 months and produced another milestone, with some absolutely stunning new features like Crossbow’s network virtualization and IPS one click installs coupled with the automatic build and packaging service, Source Juicer . Check out what’s new with this release, along with Dan and Stephen talk through some of the new features.

We’re going to be celebrating the launch at CommunityOne with a whole bunch of OpenSolaris sessions. If you happen to be in the area, join us and help celebrate! Those outside the US should of course organize their own release parties!

New OpenSolaris Mirrors mailing list

I’ve set up a new mailing list for those mirroring the OpenSolaris ISO images. If you’re interested in hosting a mirror, or a current mirror maintainer, please join us! OpenSolaris 2009.06 coming soon!

Mexican Substances for Release Time

If you had been following OpenSolaris development during the lead up to 2008.05 and 2008.11, you might have heard the developers talking about Mexican Coke getting them through (the tip may be thanks to the guys at Joyent). Now rather than believe the engineers are a bunch of crack heads, their addiction is only to a sugary drink made from sugar cane and not sweetener used in the US.

So, on the lead up to OpenSolaris 2009.06 with fond memories of our first release coinciding with Cinco de Mayo, I give you Mexican chocolate perfect for those early morning conference calls.

OpenSolaris at CommunityOne

The first travel of the year for me with Sun, with a trip over to CommunityOne and JavaOne. Of course OpenSolaris will be there, with a great line up of activities, and lots of fun parties to help celebrate the release of OpenSolaris 2009.06. Come join us and hang out!

Planet OpenSolaris.[es,de,it,fr,jp,…]

With a lot of help from Eric, I’ve finally had some time to fix Planet OpenSolaris, and add some feeds. This aggregator has been predominantly English only, but now have started to set up language specific aggregations. If you’re actively involved in the OpenSolaris developer community out, and you write your blog in a different language, give me a ping.

First prize goes to Planet OpenSolaris.es, and Victor Fernandez!

7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me

Wow, it’s grown from 5 to 7, but since I’ve been tagged many moons ago by Sara and now by Patrick. Where should I start?

1. I am indeed Tim’s little brother. You wouldn’t believe how many years I got through Sun without people figuring that one out. When I joined, I had another brother in Sun, Duncan. That made 3 of us. The 3 amigos (though fortunately we never had a dance routine). I shared a bedroom for many years with Tim, and played my fair share of Top Trumps, Action Man, StarWars and Squares (and almost getting run over on my way back from the supermarket carpark across the road).
2. I studied at Trinity College Dublin and loved my college years. I found out relatively quickly that while maths in secondary school was quite enjoyable, taking it to the next level felt like a massive step. I got through my course with a first, but I don’t think I developed a strong aptitude for what I was studying (memory monkey = results). However, I did find a love of Unix somewhere along the way. Duncan let me use his maths account to dial up to the internet, and I soon learned a love of MH, taught as many freshman classes as I could with their computing labs and generally found the computing side of my maths course a whole lot easier and enjoyable.
3. At secondary school I learned to climb through Mr.Blackmore and Mr.Cryan. We used to head out to Dalkey on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. It was awesome fun, and I’ve kept that going right through college and was captain of the Climbing Club for a year, along with designing their website (though it’s a bit of a mess now). You can read a bunch of the old trip reports here for much hilarity.
4. My current passion is brewing. Tim had a strong part to play in this one having started it first in the family. I’m loving it. I have a monthly subscription to BYO, a growing collection of brewing books (including John Palmer’s “How to Brew“, and Charlie Papazian’s “Joy of Homebrewing“) and starting to put some all grain beer together. I’ve taken recently to ordering from the awesome guys at www.libertybrewing.co.nz, which conveniently means I can collect my grain just around the corner. I’m still learning the ropes, but this is definitely a career I’d change to.
5. I’m getting married in 2 months time to Jayne. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve lived in NZ since 2003, have residency and a screwed up accent (though apparently I now have a US twang on the phone).
6. I was rather fortunate to fall into free software, having picked up a job in the desktop group at Sun, Ireland (yay, nepotism!). Turns out they were looking at free desktop alternatives and chose GNOME. Always shared my code at college, so working on open source was a pretty easy step, and enjoyed spending my time on the IRC channels getting to know people, and them getting to know me (that’s Jeff’s influence, of which I am entirely indebted). I’m not so active in GNOME anymore, but I still lurk in the shadows observing and proud of where the project has come and my participation in it.
7. Sara tried to hire me over to be a product manager of a new (at that time heavily secret) distribution, OpenSolaris. It took a weekend of her convincing me that I should do it and her persistence is something I’m entirely grateful for as I’ve enjoyed every minute (and worked with some really great people), despite the occasional rough times.

That’s it. And here are the rules of engagement:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So, I hereby nominate: @comay, @epicbeer, @maupuia, @charliebird, @bogan, @basicbrewing and @marekkuziel as a rather eclectic bunch.