Life is so good, it gets better every day

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.

Planet Sun

Sun has an official planet – who’d have known.

Solaris Install Demo

The guys in the Caiman project are really rocking, with a demo of the the dwarfed down install now available. Very cool, though I’m struggling to find the source code right now.

Another View

A view from the office, for Stephen.

Makara Peak

Took off on Sunday morning for Makara Peak, touted as having some good tracks. Most of the tracks are pretty well maintained as you weave in and out of the forest, slowly working your way up towards Makara Peak. I did the recommended into heading up Koru, Sally Alley, Missing Link, Aratihi, wussed out at doing the top part of Ridgeline because of the wind, headed down the 4WD track, connected up with Ridgeline extension, and finally SWIGG/Starfish. It was a pretty fun ride, though a massive difference from the technical rock hopping of the Port Hills. Still, a fun couple of hours riding and getting used to the new bike/SPD’s.