Life is so good, it gets better every day

A Step Up and Harder Step Out

I finally got myself sorted to buy one of these buddies, thanks to Sun’s revenue continuing to do well – nice to know everyone on blogs.sun.com contributed to this purchase, huh? Looking forward to getting out for a spin, and getting used to SPDs for the first time. It was a pretty complicated decision. There are lots of factors into choosing a bike, not just your typical make, model and colour – and I must confess I was pretty out of my depth for a lot of it. Dave has been awesome explaining some of the componentry which helped heaps. It’ll be good to take it up to Wellington to ride the tracks up there, but hopefully I can get some time in the saddle before we head off.

X and Y Network Misery

When X meets Y, you sometimes get embarassing performance problems. Enough said.

GSoC Project Ideas

The OpenSolaris mentoring organization application has now been submitted to the Google folks for review, check it out here. While the application form itself was relatively painless to submit, coming up with a good list of projects was a lot harder. The results of this are here. Obviously this is just a taster for students to have a look at, though we’re looking forward to seeing some really rocking inspirational proposals, assuming we get accepted as a mentoring organization. Happy summer hacking!

Polls are Open!

As Stephen announced, the OGB election and constitution ratification polls are now open! I would heavily encourage all core contributors to vote in this election – it’s really important for the well being of the project as a whole to get a good turnout. As always a list of candidates and their positions/bios/others is available on the OGB status page. You may want to wait for a few days still, as many candidates still haven’t shown their hand. I really hope they do because I’d like to think I would spend my votes wisely.

Interview Central

Simon interviewed me this afternoon, as part of his special election series on the OGB candidates. We had to do the interview twice because the sound quality was poor on the first interview, and he cunningly changed the second set of questions. I didn’t sound too much like a wonk, though said ‘you know’ about 20 times during the 12 minute interview – I blame my up bringing, and possibly the Havoc effect.

James Purser interviewed James McPherson, Joshua Clulow and myself later this evening on his ‘Open Source on the Air’ podcast series. Unfortunately I couldn’t hear much of the conversation due to a bad phone connection, but check it out when he uploads it on Thursday.

Last month I travelled over to Menlo Park to take part in a series of SDN (Sun Developer Network) webcasts about open source. I see the series has started this month, with Simon spotlighting Sun’s open source involvement. Predictably, I talked about our GNOME involvement. It was a pretty interesting time behind the scenes as they were churning out the month’s episodes and a reasonably fun experience, even though I was pretty nervous.

The opinions, views, or comments do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, especially when nervous energy makes me talk complete crap.

OGB Questions from the DTrace Community

Bryan posted a couple of well thought out questions on behalf of the DTrace community, so given that we’re supposed to be in the campaigning period, I thought I’d post a link to my answers. A lot of the questions were about licensing issues and specific points about the constitution. What I’d love to see now is some meaty questions dealing with community interaction, infrastructure and how we can grow going forward. It will be interesting to see how the current test poll answers some of the priorities of the core contributors in the project.

FWIW, having looked at the test poll, the questions are somewhat confusing, in that prioritizing one item would automatically include another. In any case, here are my answers given that it’ll give people a better idea of where I stand wrt to my candidacy –

1. Create an infrastructure project to run opensolaris.org (‘Infrastructure’)
2. Reorganize the existing Community/Project organization (‘Reorganize_Community’)
3. Deploy a public defect management system (‘Defect_Mgmt’)
4. Replace opensolaris.org tools with an open source CMS or wiki (‘New_CMS’)
5. Deploy a public wiki on opensolaris.org (‘Wiki’)
6. Replace or remove Jive forum interface (‘No_Jive’)
7. Deploy a public code review facility on opensolaris.org (‘Code_Review’)
8. Deploy a public Request To Integrate (RTI) system (‘RTI’)
9. Remove inactive Communities or Projects (‘Remove_Inactive’)
10. Eliminate reliability issues with opensolaris.org web pages (‘Reliability’)
11. Provide an x86/AMD64-based kernel/project build facility (‘X64_Build’)
12. Provide a SPARC-based kernel/project build facility (‘SPARC_Build’)

Moving Island

As Jayne already blogged, we’re heading up to Wellington for a few months. I’m super psyched that it’ll be a bunch of new exciting experiences up there. It’ll be a nice opportunity of spending some time in another place (and Wellington did seem like a cool place on previous visits), and explore some new mountain biking, fishing, climbing and whatever else it throws at us. Sun have an office up on the terrace, so at least I’ll have a drop in office for a chance. It’ll be fun also to meet the Wellington IT crowd, and explore the various networks there – and obviously an awesome opportunity for Jayne to push forward with her web project.

We already have some accommodation arranged off Oriental Parade overlooking the entire harbour, and have a rough plan to be up there from about April. Should be fun!

Project Ideas for OpenSolaris

Last year, OpenSolaris had the opportunity of taking part in the Google Summer of Code, getting 2 student projects to work on. Nicolai and Ricardo both did a rocking job with their respective projects, and I believe it was a success all round.

This year presents another opportunity to build on the experiences of last year, and I still think it’s very much worth the effort of applying again as a mentoring organization and coming up with a list of rocking projects. Not only does it give us the opportunity of consolidating a tailored list of suggestions for any potential student of OpenSolaris community member to pick up and work on in our day to day development, it also gives us an opportunity to learn from the interaction of bringing new people into the project as a whole, something that we desperately need to advocate more of if we really want the project to grow and succeed.

Specifically, I desperately need people to stand up, take on the responsibility and step up to the plate – get involved either by suggesting relatively straight forward project ideas, by being a mentor, or simply contributing your ideas of how best to run this. We need our rockstars to be involved (you know who you are). We need them to take an interest in the project, lead by example and encourage others.

We currently have a mailing list (check out the archives) for the organization of this, working against a series of pretty hard deadlines. I, however, can’t do this alone and I need your help. A few people have already joined up – I hope others (*cough* ON *cough*) take their lead.

Photos from OSDevCon

Really enjoyed seeing Jim’s photos from Berlin, especially being able to identify faces with current set of contributors. Anyone notice that Roland is still smiling even after tackling the ksh93 integration project?

Similarly awesome to see the elections hotting up, including new candidates Shawn Walker, Karyn Ritter, and Alan DuBoff. Rocking!

OpenSolaris and the Google SOC

Jim asked me last night if I would like to lead the OpenSolaris involvement in the Google Summer of Code – more work, but hey, sounds like fun and I think it’s an opportunity for a lot of rocking projects to be tackled. I’m only starting to get my head around this, and posted a project proposal for getting some basic infrastructure ready that we can use year after year for our students. If you’d like to get involved, and help get things rolling, you are more than welcome! Mail me, glynn dot foster at sun dot com