Life is so good, it gets better every day

Can’t Keep Up

Don’t feel like I can keep up with blogging right now on top of all the other things that are happening in my life. Been a seriously busy couple of weeks here, both with work and play time. Lots of good times out climbing, kayaking, biking, fishing, and the occasional sun salutation. I’ve even started route setting at the local wall, The Roxx, and enjoying it immensely – it’s been a few years. Paynes was ace, the Tekapo release was wet, exciting and testing, and the Hokitika was breath taking. It’s wonderful to share all those great experiences with some amazing friends, both old and new.

Struggling with migrating my mail and addressbooks over to Thunderbird. It’s just not Evolution, even though I wouldn’t classify Evolution as a best of breed application either – lots of learning, frustration and slow mail reading ahead. I hate IMAP.

New CEO

Pretty excited to see that Jonathan has taken on the CEO role at Sun. I remember being disappointed when Jonathan moved up the chain away from Software a couple of years ago – it was at a time when software *really* needed some direction in Sun, and Jonathan was helping to provide that. I thought he would get into the executive ladder and we’d probably never hear from him again and we’d fall back into another rut. Fortunately that proved not the case. I really rate Jonathan. He cares about the things that I’m also interested in, believe best for Sun and the things that keep me working for this company – among which, open development of open standards in open communities. Not only that, he understands those principles and openly communicates both internally and externally – how often do you see a CEO take part in an open public discussion or have comments enabled on his blog? Jonathan sent a pretty excellent internal memo around of his thoughts about accepting the job – I sure hope he copies that mail to his blog, it’s a great motivating message.

Still, also nice to see Scott hanging around as well as chairman of the board, and Sun Fed – it’ll be important to have someone up there with years of contacts, level headed experience of running the company, and well, someone with a decent handycap.

Doing Well

Fantastic news! Congratulations Jonathan and Rosanna!

Project What?

Jonathan pointed out this article, where apparently Project Portland gave a technology preview at LinuxWorld in Boston. While I can appreciate the effort, I still don’t get why people are doing this until the current specs on freedesktop.org are anything other than ‘pretty good de facto’, ‘new and not widely used’ and ‘draft’. Some very senior engineers at Sun [4 digit ID’s, compared to my 6 digit one] recently remarked that most of the specs are full of ambiguities, that the recent icon theme cache discussions seem to highlight. I suspect someone needs to take their head out of their ass – although perhaps ‘shot in the arm’ is the correct phrase.

Jim’s Solaris 10 Experience

It’s interesting to know what sorts of experiences that pretty senior sys admins have seeing Solaris 10 for the first time, having used earlier versions previously. Jim Cheetham’s Solaris 10 experience is food for thought, even though I don’t quite agree with him on a few points. I did note that they were running Solaris 10 3/05 s10_74L2a SPARC though, which is a little bit behind times.

Surfin’ NZ Eh?

Last week was pretty busy one. Indoor soccer on Monday. Tuesday involved some climbing at the Roxx. Patrick was climbing strongly, while Dave and me were flailing badly. On Wednesday, Dave, Emma and myself took a quick spin around Bottle Lake on the bikes – lots of fun single, winding tracks along by the beach. With the clocks turned back, we got caught out by the time, and soon it got really dark. Managed to stumble around enough to find our way back, before a charge over to catch Fistful of Dynamite at the local film festival.

Thursday had Dave and me out at the QEII for another roll session. Was a little bit tired and failed miserably to get a bomb proof roll, although did get the T rescues more sorted out. Friday had us out at the YMCA for a quick session, and met up with a few spacey Californians – I’ve never been hugely impressed with the quality of routes there, so I don’t think I’ll make it a regular occurance.

Saturday had Patrick, Dave and me out in Sumner to surf some waves in the kayaks. I’ve been learning in Dave’s playboat and he’s keen to keep me in it for as long as possible. It’s a slightly intimidating experience going out for the first time, trying to make sure you’re watching the waves all the time, and lifting your rail but really got into it towards the end and had an absolutely super ride on a big wave towards the end. Afterwards we headed out on the bikes up Dyer’s Pass road, and along the tracks of Victoria park. I’m not much of a biker, and found some of the switch backs a little steep – the trials half way down were rather fun though. Raced back home and out to the Weedon’s cricket club for the cricket afters – a thoroughly drunken affair out in the middle of nowhere, with some strippers, court sessions and some naked initiation tests which become much easier the drunker you are.

Dave pulled me out of losing my entire Sunday with a hangover and took me out to Castle Hill for some bouldering with Hilary and Aila – was good fun but didn’t feel particularly strong, or balanced. Watched Lord of War with Phil, Mark and Patrick that evening, and had a lovely Thai veggie curry over at Patricks, and some yummy caramel slices.

This week has more indoor soccer, more kayaking up at the Brunner weekend, more climbing and more drinking. As Dave would say, ‘play play play!’

A Month in the Life of OpenSolaris

Over the last month, I’ve taken Martin ‘Joey’ Schulze’s excellent Debian Weekly News format and done the same for OpenSolaris. I think it’s proved pretty useful so far, and I’ve been motivated enough to continue them. The results are here, here, here and here. Thanks Martin for the inspiration – owe you a beer, or many beers!

Irish Diaries

Had a relatively quiet St.Patrick’s day this year, given that I had a cricket final on Saturday morning – The Bog was a little disappointing this year, employing a band who failed to grok that the crowd may actually want to listen to Irish music, rather than the attempted Oasis drivel they subjected us to. And of course, when they did switch over to a bit of U2, they absolutely killed it. Patrick’s blog has a bunch of pictures. Lost the cricket game, felt generally low about life, and at the last minute headed out with Patrick and Mark to watch The Aristocrats at the local film festival which was pretty amusing, if a little sick.

Watched Ireland winning the Triple Crown [Goode blamed ‘Luck of the Irish] early on Sunday morning over at Pete’s house, complete with full Irish Breakfast. After, headed out to the Port Hills and the Tors crag with Patrick, for a bit of a climb. Then over to the Arts Center for a quick Dux pizza and beer, and to watch The Collective, a film about mountain biking – pretty cool if you’re into that stuff, although I can never really see myself quite at that level.

Simply Stewart Video

A couple of days ago I finished putting together some of the footage that I took down in Stewart Island. The result is a little 2 minute video here. I still need to figure out some better utilities to convert the high format QuickTime version into a decent quality video – some day I’ll get to it. In the meantime, suffer in your jocks, and enjoy one of the nicest places in New Zealand! [Contains minor nudity].

Bootstrapping Costs

Marek sent around a great set of blog links – The Cost of Bootstrapping Your App [Part 1, Part 2], an interesting read. Eric Lowe [Solaris kernel developer] also has an interesting piece about the role of documentation in a development process – it’s a good read. Had a successful TVIC last night in the Sunny Garden – people even turned up this time around, and was a good night of food, beer and geek talk.