Life is so good, it gets better every day

If You Evangelize It, They Will Come

During the recent Solaris Desktop Summit, I re-echoed one of my basic gripes about open source communities. So often it as much about the people and personalities as it is about the technology. Don’t get me wrong, technology is important, but what’s the point in technology if you don’t have the right channel to advertise it, the people evangelize it. So it’s wonderful to see that the Netbeans dudes are groking that need, and even more so to see Roumen in that role, and taking on a community manager.

The OpenSolaris dudes have grokked it as well, and I’d love to see the Java guys grok it, with deep respect to James for what he’s done.

The reason so many of these communities thrive are because of enigmatic leaders, excited about the technology they’re working on. Everyone wants a role model – and as Jeff would say, stand up, and be the signal.

Technology vs Pain

Here’s me thinking that no one has really tried to build GNOME 2.12 out on OpenSolaris land – the reality of the fact is that there is a small thriving community of people trying to build, and it’s wonderful to see. Too bad the mixture of technology isn’t getting that feedback into my mailbox. Sorry everyone, hopefully we’ll get this fixed real soon.

Stop It, You’re Scaring The Children!

Eric pointed out where to get KDE and GNOME for Solaris and OpenSolaris. One of his links made me cry. Now I’m all for promoting the GNOME brand in our software stack. I believe it’s hugely important for us to do so and we almost certainly don’t do it enough currently, but we probably need to fix that link to point to JDS somehow, and organize this one a little better.

Slashtime

I’ve been meaning to install Andrew’s slashtime utility on my Solaris laptop for a while, especially since I’ve been lame and not spent the time to port our timezone clock applet patch that we have for JDS to the newer versions of GNOME. Fortunately it was a relatively easy task. I first quickly grabbed the CPAN module and created a spec file for it, created the package using pkgbuild, installed it, and then tried to run the slashtime utility. The original script had some Linux’isms [or so I assume], and fetching the TZ variable from /etc/default/init seemed to do the trick and things were running nicely. The patch is here for anyone interested. Neat utility, thanks Andrew!

P.S. I know my Perl is pretty oooky.

Toastin’

Andrew, I was just thinking the same thing. Some serious hot air, and it’s not the result of the post-pudding Christmas day. Fortunately we’re armed with a couple of rash vests, some 30+ sun block and a backgrarden pool which makes things just about bearable.

Christmas Down Under

It’s been a pretty wonderful Christmas so far, with lots of great company, wine, beer and pool sessions. You get the usual things like the standard Christmas dinner but with a slightly Sydney slant. The day after Christmas we headed out with Shane, Katie and family who are friends of Sharon and Dic on their boat, primarily to catch the start of the Sydney/Hobart race. During the morning the boys and girls got dragged around, with a little time for water skiing at the end for me. The main attraction was the race, and we caught up with the crews with choppers flying overhead, all to see a few boats. In reality, it was an amazing event. Although we only caught enough to see the big maxis at the start, by virtue of running out of fuel right amongst it [ooops], it was just an amazing sight to see them cruise away with such ease and splendour while the other hundreds of vessels scrap for position in the harbour.

GNOME 2.12 on OpenSolaris

Yay! Laca kicked so much arse and released GNOME 2.12 on OpenSolaris – that’s 2 releases of GNOME on OpenSolaris now within the space of 2 months. Rock!

King Kong

I took Ethan to see King Kong in the Cremorne Orpheum [a wonderful old style cinema] with mildly uncomfortable seats for a 3 hour film. It had some pretty great special effects, but that was about it – sadly, pretty disappointing.

Desktop Summit Gripe Session

At the end of the usability part of the recent internal Solaris desktop summit we handed around a survey for people to fill out what they enjoyed most about the summit, and whether it had reached their expectations. It was all mostly positive, which sets us up for doing it again in a couple of months. Of the responses that we got, we found that many people had enjoyed the ‘Gripes Session’ and wondered if we could organize a usability hackfest next time around.

During the gripes session everyone had a chance to speak up for what things really sucked in the desktop, and we wrote up a list of them on the whiteboard. I quickly did a writeup of that session. We only scheduled an hour for this, and John was super keen to get as many gripes listed down as possible – as a result some of the issues weren’t properly identified, and the write up certainly reflects that. At the end of the session everyone was given a set of 10 stickers for them to put beside the issues they felt most strongly against, and they were as follows –

• Media Support
• PDA Sync
• PDF Viewing
• Release Model
• Keybindings
• Fonts
• Community Engagement
• Building GNOME

You’ll notice that there isn’t any suggested solutions. While I did do a short write up on some of top issues and how we’ll likely tackle them within Sun, I don’t think it’s quite fit for publishing just yet. Hopefully next time we’ll organize more time, and start a few hacking sessions off to fix them – definitely more fun than performance work, although DTrace has made that rather fun recently.

OpenSolaris Community

Man, I’m having so much fun with this OpenSolaris thing. It’s just like how I felt getting involved in the GNOME project for the first time. Not only is there a whole heap of new technology, processes and ideas, it’s also another great opportunity to meet a whole heap of new people for the first time.

Today has me in the Sun offies in Gordon, Sydney. It’s been great to catch up with Alan Hargreaves and James McPherson for the first time, among all the other crew here. I can’t wait until we reach critical mass to start thinking about an OpenSolaris conference/summit. Rock on!