Life is so good, it gets better every day

Project Indiana

JavaOne was a pretty stressful week all in all – not only was it my first experience first hand with the enormous conference that it is, it was also an opportunity to interview for a program manager position for Project Indiana. I’ll spare you the interview details; but most of them involved both sides getting really excited by the thought of what could be achieved when the concept turns into reality, and how we might go about it. Ian presented some of his thoughts during his CommunityOne talk on Monday, though didn’t specifically mention ‘Project Indiana’ – it all sounded sane; it all sounded very real.

Queue some unexpected press. Midway through the week, the pace quickened up thanks to Stephen Shankland’s Sun hopes for Linux-like Solaris article, and the opensolaris-discuss rumour mill kicked into full gear (rightly so; the communication was not ideal and I don’t think anyone involved would dispute that). Marc chipped in with some great detail, and slowly the pieces started to take shape (along with some very reasoned follow-up reactions thanks to John and Bryan, which was awesome to see).

I’m excited about the project and I think it has an important future, so much so that I’m planning on moving to marketing and leaving my desktop engineering roots to take on the product management role for the distribution. Yes, I can still feel my heart beat, so hell hasn’t frozen over yet! Ian posted his thoughts on the concept, and that’s about as much as we’ve covered during the discussion at JavaOne. We all have different ideas of how this might work etc.. but nothing is set in stone other than the very real desire to get this done. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how it all pans out.

OpenSolaris Job

After Stephen’s post last week about whether it was appropriate to post jobs on OpenSolaris, this one is probably suitable for the new alias – Sara has an interesting and cool new position for an intern working in the US (not actually just Austin) on marketing initiatives for OpenSolaris. Rock!

JavaOne

Anyone who thinks Java is dead, is seriously misguided. Holy shit, JavaOne is HUGE – and a lot of fun too. Having a whale of a time here.

Surreal Night

Jayne and I went to a wine tasting last night – the folks from Martinborough were in town, and for just $35 we had access to over 50 boutique wines of varying quality. Now, I don’t know much about wine, but like most consumer I know what I liked, and happened to stumble across some lovely wines from Schubert, but in particular a gewurztraminer from Haythornthwaite that wasn’t on the official wine tasting list. Ended up buying 6 bottles of the gewurztraminer, along with 6 bottles spread around the various vineyards. Totaling $400 – have I ever spent that much on wine? As luck happened, I also won an $800 weekend for two away up in Martinborough! Afterwards we hit Cafe Eis for some gelato, paid $65 on 4 Mojito’s, and it all went down from there. Singing Sound of Music songs towards the end of the night was a bit of a blur….

Porta-People

Greg Papadopoulos does a series of videocasts called ‘Innovation Matters’ inside Sun, giving some perspective on where technology is going, and I heavily respect his opinion and feel for the industry. Recently he talked about some exciting technology for making conferences easier for remote workers, which is detailed here. It’s a little hard to see the benefits from the article and how it works – maybe they can publish the videocast they did on it?!

Java and CommunityOne

Yay, I get to go to JavaOne this year, attending the event for the first time. I’m pretty psyched about it, but more than that, I’m absolutely thrilled to attend CommunityOne (Monday 7th May), an open and free event the day before JavaOne ramps up for business. There’s still time to register for the event, and I thoroughly recommend it. There’s going to be some pretty big names at the event, and some really excellent sessions. It’s going to be informal and fun – people sharing stories, working together, and showing what a really kick ass time you can have being involved in an open source community. Go register!

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.