Life is so good, it gets better every day

Happy Birthday GNOME

GNOME turns 10.

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!

Flowin’ in the Wind

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!.

Brewing

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.

Indiana and PSARC

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.

Shopping Comfort Food

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.

OSCON Wrapup

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.

Sun Party @ OSCON

The Sun party is tonight – lots of free beer, and various party games. Drop along at 9pm to the DoubleTree, and join us in the…garage. We spent a lot of last night assembling some hotwheels for some Indianapolis racing and have hover soccer. The DTrace guys have touched up on their beer pong skills. Joyent is providing a DJ too.

Sun BOF @ OSCON

We’re hosting the Sun BOF on Thursday evening at 8:30pm. Come along and find out what we’re doing within the open source world, drink a beer and let us know your thoughts. This is the day after our party over at the DoubleTree – more details to come.

OpenSolaris talks at OSCON

If you’re attending OSCON, and don’t want to miss getting your warm fuzzies from the best operating system on the planet, then check out the following sessions –

Project Indiana: The Road to Solaris Next

Ian Murdock [Wed 25 July 11:35am, E141]

Why Observability Matters – How DTrace Helped Twitter

Adam Leventhal, Brendan Gregg [Thu 26 July 10:45am, 255]

Lightning talk: OpenSolaris Status Update

Stephen Lau, Glynn Foster [Thu 26 July 10:45am, 252]

ZFS: Bringing Terabytes Under Control

Jad Edwards [Fri 27 July 10:45am, D137-138]

Sun Party at OSCON

Sara’s been working on the party details for the Sun party at OSCON. It’s going to be a spectacular event on Wednesday 25th at 9pm in the Doubletree Hotel, Exhibition Hall. Hang out with a beer and join in the fun! You will be disappointed by all the other parties from OSCON, trust me!