Life is so good, it gets better every day

Reality

I thought 2 days of perfect stillness in Wellington was too good to be true. It’s now windy and time to suck it up.

Get the Flock Out of Here

Went to see Black Sheep last night with Jayne, Mike, Inge and Ula at the Embassy cinema. Fantastic place to watch a film, and an awesome Friday wind down.

Views From the House

Some views from the house.

A New Home

After a long week of packing, cramming, and stressing, I’m finally up in Wellington, sitting in the bedroom overlooking Oriental Bay. It’s a pretty sweet sight, and I’ve christened it by number four Guinness. I’ve not enjoyed shifting flat [again], though the journey up to Picton, and ferry across the straits was pretty wonderful. Some photos to follow at some stage.

OpenSolaris – Where Next?

Stephen announced the election results, and I’m delighted to see that, first and foremost, the constitution has been ratified, and secondly, that I’ll be a member of the Open Solaris governing board for the year. It was a pretty close run election, and I only just squeezed through the post.

The elected board seems like a decent mix of people and I’m hoping it’s going to be a productive year with real progress being made on all fronts. I’m obviously disappointed for a whole bunch of really rocking candidates that didn’t make it, as I believe they would have done a fantastic job. Also disapppointed not to see a female on the board – I think that would have been a good thing for the project to encourage inclusiveness right across the community, and I hope that we continue to strive for those beliefs. Still, there’s enough fresh blood there to start the ball rolling.

Last week Ian Murdock joined Sun taking on a new role to head up the operating system platform strategy there. I’m delighted there is another person at Sun who really understands open source and communities, and really looking forward to working with him as part of my new OGB duties.

Canterbury Software Cluster

In order to revive the monthly bbq’s once held around Christchurch, I was volunteered to give a talk at the Canterbury Software Cluster last night. I’m in the process of moving up to Wellington at the moment, so it was all a little rushed, but I did manage enough time to come up with this presentation which is a variation of a talk I’ve done previously. Not really knowing my audience, or the likely numbers who would attend, I figured I’d present why I’m still motivated to get up each day and work for Sun, while trying to give some background into the types of changes that are happening there.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been learning quite a bit about presenting various bits and pieces – lessons to take home are don’t wear stupid stripey shirts and sway while on TV, start making eye contact with your audience a little more, and less, well, you know.

OSWN – One Year Old

Just over a year ago, Ben mailed desperately seeking an OpenSolaris celeb to compile a weekly news. I had some time and a desire to help those who didn’t have the same amount of time to be reading 1,000’s of mails, and so put an attempt at the first issue of the weekly news, summarizing about 15 mailing lists. During that time, Eric stepped forward with his bi-weekly rollup experiment, also targetting similar lists. The program team also stepped forward to produce the OpenSolaris Newsletter. The documentation content being produced from the project was excellent.

A year down the line, and we’re at issue #53 before I knew it, expanding to 30+ mailing lists. I feel it’s been a pretty good success, and hope it’s proved useful to people. It’s been an awesome way personally for me to track what’s been going on within the various community and project groups, who’s been involved, and given me a broad understanding of the dynamic of the community. What I’ve really sucked at, is providing infrastructure and guidance for others to take on the role of compiling the weekly news summaries. I need to really sit down and think about this over the next couple of months, most of all because I believe it’s unhealthy having a single failure point in anything we do as a community.

Please Vote

Reasonable communication doesn’t seem to be working. Time for to start the blackmail campaign…

Considering there’s only 61 people who have voted so far, that’s a lot of kittens. Please think of the kittens.

CHA-CHING DING-A-LING!

Tired of wasting away your summer flipping burgers at the local restaurant, because you had the morals to refuse a programming project working on a proprietary product? If yes, then the Google Summer of Code is for you! Along with a large list of participating organizations, OpenSolaris offers you the chance to come join our community, work on a list of great projects, and earn $4,500 US while doing so.

We have a spectacular line up of project suggestions, including the following little gems close to my own heart –

• OpenSolaris Emancipation! – a chance to really make a huge impact in the community by releasing it of its proprietary shackles. There’s still a few proprietary modules that need replacing. If you step up to this one, you will be a hero among men..and women!
• DTrace and Firefox – Firefox has become our favourite browser, yet there are times when performance is less than ideal. With the introduction of DTrace to the mix, you have the tools to turn this around. Profile the browser, figure out what’s going on, and kiss the slow bits goodbye by writing some awesome patches!
• Virtualization and X – Virtualization is the new buzz word in today’s operating system environment, which presents some user interface thoughts. How do we visualize the virtualized? Come up with mockups, implement them in your desktop and window environment! Show us the bling!

But that’s not all – you too can suggest your own proposals and we’d love to hear them! Proposals are due by no later than 24th March, through the application page. We’re hoping to host 5 student projects this year – now’s your chance to be one of them!

Acceptance!

“Congratulations!
Your organization “OpenSolaris” has been accepted in to the Google Summer of Code(tm) 2007. You have been assigned as primary point of contact and as an administrator for your organization.”

Woo. OpenSolaris is officially a part of Google’s Summer of Code 2007. While the students start applying, don’t miss out on being a mentor this year – it’ll be incredibly rewarding (last year’s Google tshirt was pretty ace), and an awesome opportunity to really get a feel for the barriers to entry of our project and be in an excellent situation to give feedback on what areas we need to rock at more.

Thanks Google!