Life is so good, it gets better every day

ABI and GNOME

Don’t worry Murray, we’re coming back with fresh motivation to look at the issue again. I’ve already got some ABI checking scripts to make a start from and we now have some machines slotted in our racks for the job. We’ll also have Joe Kowalski back at GUADEC this year to give us his experiences dealing with ABI in Solaris over the last millenium. With no distractions [apart from beer..], I think we’ll be able to slot in some nice time for making some real progress.

Ole from Barcelona

I’ve been spending a few relatively quiet days in Barcelona right before the GUADEC storm. It’s been really great to catch up with Lyd and Edu [whom I’ve never met previously] in her luxurious Spanish house, a few miles outside the main city. Lots of really great food, some good beers, great company and an occasional dip in the pool. As a special bonus, Tim and Bob have been over here too, so we’ve had a good few trips around town getting to see the amazing sights and sounds.

Met up with Luis and Chris today for lunch [which didn’t go as well as I hoped with some wanker stealing Chris’ laptop bag], and then a trip down to the World Trade Center to catch up with the Fluendo guys. Really ramping up for GUADEC now, and looking forward to the trip down to Vilanova with Christian tomorrow. Then party, party, party! It’s your last chance to get in on the act, and this GNOME conference looks like it will be the best ever!

Tonight we have some St.Joan festival – lots of good food, beer and fireworks. My sis has really nailed this Spanish thing.

LIVE across Australia!

Now this is more like it – reasonably priced internet plans for in-flight boredom. Hooray for Singapore Airlines, I salut you! The connection isn’t too bad either – I wonder if Sun have a corporate account on this thing??

The First Birthday

OpenSolaris is officially one year old today. Jim did an excellent review of the year, and some stunning results. During that year, I’ve had some personal highlights – JDS being the first non-ON consolidation to release their code, and the many new people I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the community.

Despite all those wonderful metrics, we’re still a growing community. We still have a lot of source code behind closed doors. The community contributions are still being bootstrapped by a relatively small set of people. We still don’t have our code in a source code management system. We’re still a little way off from a governance model. There’s still a lot of people in Sun that don’t quite grok working in an open source community.

But hell, there’s a lot of one year olds that can barely walk or articulate, and for an evolving open source community, OpenSolaris is doing just peachy. Happy birthday dude.

OpenSolaris at OSCON

I’m going to be there, who else? Looks like we’ll have a BoF there, I’ve volunteered myself for a stint in the Sun booth, and there’s bound to be a round or two of beers there. Give me a shout if you’re intending to come so I know who to look out for!

Work Update

It’s been mostly uneventful at work over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been helping to make sure that GNOME 2.14 goes through ARC ok, along along with great help from Brian and Irene. It went pretty smoothly, and apart from having to ARC a few bits separately, we’re still on track.

So on track, that in fact the next Solaris Express release you’ll install [if that’s your thing], you’ll see a new 2.14 based desktop. Packages have been built, and they’re somewhere on a server in Sun just itching to get into the Solaris Nevada WOS [wads of stuff]. It’ll almost certainly give you the willies though – the quality is pretty good, though we didn’t do as much QA as I would have hoped for a first integration build, but there’s a lot of change – it’s 2 years of community development, and we’ve got a pretty attractive non purple theme. We haven’t moved much from vanilla GNOME, by design, and hopefully people will be pleased with the result [if you can suffer the occasional bug].

Course, if you have a spare T2000, you could try running Ubuntu on it.

Otherwise, really looking forward to my trip to GUADEC this year – apart from having to present, it’ll be a good opportunity to catch up with my GNOME friends, and spend a couple of days with my sister who’s living in Barcelona. Then a short stop home to Ireland for a week, back to NZ for a couple weeks boarding, over to OSCON, and then down to HQ for a couple of days. Nothing that I could ever consider ‘work’.

Choice Bro

Last month I received an OPG People’s Choice Award in recognition of community building excellence [OPG being Operating Platform Group]. Today the award, a piece of welded metal in the shape of a snowboarder getting some air in a half pipe, arrived. Strangely enough it didn’t contain a Sun logo or anything indicating it was an award, but I’m pretty chuffed in any case.

The award nicely leads into the start of a new season – winter, and there will be lots of snowboarding, skiing, alpine ascents and ice climbing. I’m really looking forward to it all, and have bought a 10 day Chill Pass. I’ll probably miss bits and pieces with trips to GUADEC and OSCON, but I’ve been quietly optimistic that it’ll be a cracker of a season.

Had a pretty good weekend all in all. The Banff film festival was in town for Friday and Saturday nights. While Friday was dedicated to Alpine and Rock, Saturday was the classic night of extreme sports. The selection was mildly disappointing this year. While we had some really excellent films like Parallelojams, a film about jamming in Indian Creek, Utah, Sur le fil des 4000, Patrick Berhault and Philippe Magnin epic attempt to climb the 82 4000+ meter summits in the Alps, and Balancing Point, a short film about balancing rocks, there was a lot of ‘seen it all before, not interested’ films that the selection committee chose.

Went out on Saturday afternoon out to Birdlings Flat with Jayne for some fishing, but came back disappointed. Sunday had a couple of hours of rolling a kayak, mostly drowning, up in the QEII, before a quick green curry and a trip down to Hoyts to see Da Vinci Code which was also disappointing.

Charleston Climbing

More weekends, and no blogging. A few weekends ago, Dave, Matt and myself headed over to the west coast to Charleston, a magnificent set of sea cliffs in a wonderful setting. Unfortunately, Dave and myself had a rather large night on the juice the previous night, so were in no shape when Matt dropped by at 6am the next morning to head over there. After several queezy moments, bananas and a couple of pies, we made it and were greeted with 5m swells. It was an incredible situation, and made for some seriously exposed climbs although many of the routes were unclimbable with the spray reaching most of the height of the cliffs. Florian, Neil and Mark were over with the Uni teaching a few punters the ropes, so it was a really great crowd to hang out with. I was in no fit state to climb, but managed to pick off a nice route during the weekend in between getting stomped by some rogue waves. Didn’t manage to get near the rocks to take the rod out, and got a nice reminder of a lost bet from Jayne that evening.

THE Mark Cantan

One of my friends from back home recently just launched his new website, markcantan.com. Mark’s been writing for pretty much all the time I’ve known him, and had a few almosts with RTE, BBC and Channel 4. This is my blogging attempt at getting him the international fame he deserves.

JDS Survey

Any JDS dudes out there, please fill in a survey – there’s no cash prizes, but at least it’ll give us a better idea of what we should be working on. Thanks!