Life is so good, it gets better every day

US Trip

I finally got my flights booked for a trip to the US in late November for John’s excellent idea of having an internal only [sorry folks] Solaris Desktop Usability and Performance Summit. The summit will be a 10 day hackfest with various different teams around Sun [JDS, XServer, Approachability, Sun Ray, Compiler, DTrace, and Kernel]. It’s going to be fricken awesome, and great things will come of this. I know a heap of us will be blogging live from the summit.

So, with a trip to Thailand planned in a weeks time, I’ll have a 1 day turn around [insane] when I get back before I head out to the states. I, and many other JDS team members, will be in Menlo Park from Mon 28th Nov until Sat 10th Dec. Hopefully I’ll get to meet a whole heap of OpenSolaris and GNOME fans over there – drop me a mail if you’re around and I’ll come and say hi! Bonus points if it involves beer.

Y.M.C.A

You know Jeff, if this Ubuntu gig does’t work out for you, there’s always a contract with the village people available.

Planet NZTech

Philip Lindsay set up Planet NZTech, an aggregation of people who are doing stuff in the tech industry which is cool to see. Hopefully it’ll be a natural progression for our ‘The Valley In Christchurch’ meets.

Sun’s Throw Away Desktop

This story was interesting, if a little on the bitter side. While I’ll always have a fond memory of our time developing a Linux based product, despite being fraught with difficulty, especially when your base distribution vendor gets bought by another company – do the math. Doing the ‘Ximian Desktop’ thing is hard, and without any decent control over the platform you’re stuck in a world of ‘will not fix’, hacks and workarounds. It’s not pleasant from an engineering point of view, and from a business point of view, I can appreciate the decisions being made too. Tom seemed to unfortunately get caught up in that frustration.

The good news is that the code is available for most of the core components of the desktop [GNOME 2.10 currently, GNOME 2.12 to follow real soon]. With our build environment as it is, there’s a collection of RPM spec files for you to build any packages that you need to. The rest of the components will all be available in due course as announced last week.

However, we’re following all the same engineering principles that we had on JDS Linux with our OpenSolaris work, to create an easy-to-use desktop, and I personally think we owe it to ourselves to see if this gig works for a while. I for one welcome our new evil overlords – at least there’s a better chance of being able to work with them and get the right projects started from a desktop point of view. I sure as hell haven’t seen the ‘holy war’ fanatics that are mentioned – everyone have been nothing but hugely helpful towards the desktop team. Don’t judge a project based on one or two people – dealing with Linux should have taught you that by now.

JDS Sources Released

So we finally did it – the Java Desktop Community has a new home on OpenSolaris.

Check out our new build environment, centered around that wonderful pkgbuild tool that Laca wrote. pkgbuild basically takes an RPM spec file and builds a Solaris SVr4 package.

[insert jaw dropping]

Now try building your own packages using pkgbuild!

It’s been a bit of a struggle to get there and I know the feedback will be “Uh, but it’s only GNOME 2.10 – that’s been out for months!”. In fact, we already have a GNOME 2.12 based version of JDS ready to go. Hopefully we’ll be able to get that out the door in the next couple of weeks, along with more details of a roadmap and the projects that we’ll be working on over the next couple of months.

Open Source and Rolling a Kayak

Went down to the Canterbury Innovation Incubator this evening where the NZCS were giving a talk about Open Source Development Tools and Trends. Pretty interesting but short set of talks on everything from Java and Netbeans, to Zope and Ajax. Then beer and pizza afterwards – bonus!

Just home in time to catch up with Dave and out to the QEII for some kayak rolling action. I’ve only been in a kayak a handful of times and was very hesitant about flipping it over – I was kinda nervous in the water because it’s been so long! But towards the end I was having a bit of fun, and learning heaps thanks to Dave. Didn’t quite get as far as rolling with the paddle because it was only a short 1 hour session – but enough to whet my appetite for more.

GNOME Foundation Referendum

I voted ‘YES’ in the recent vote for a couple of reasons –

• I’ve sat in too many board meetings where discussion got out of hand and some core decisions needed to be made – while this may be reflective of a lack of core process or delegation, I don’t think having 11 people there helps this, and often side tracks into irrelevant discussion.
• Having 11 people on the board makes it harder for people to get their voice in – especially when most meetings are over conference calls.
• I’d rather vote for 7 people who really wanted to be there rather than having to make up numbers with people who don’t.
• 7 people makes it infinitely easier to organize meetings, and drops the numbers needed for a quorum.
• As far as I can see, there’s about 2 or 3 people getting the job done and moving the Foundation in a positive direction. These numbers seem to reflect what I’ve experienced in the past and the primary reason that I stepped down [I had a conscience enough to let go when all I could contribute was hot air – I wish others had a similar conscience].
• With 7 members you don’t have to conceed control over to a smaller group of people – the GNOME Foundation is still very much a community, and the community dictates its direction. The Foundation is all about keeping in contact with new and existing organizations and being the point of contact. We don’t need 11 people for those jobs.

Life Update

Had a pretty good day out at Britten crag on Saturday with Dave – worked our way up along finally finishing up at Cattlestop Crag as the late afternoon sun beat down on the rock. I haven’t been climbing outside for a while, but it was real nice to get out again – just need to build up some last minute stamina before a trip to Thailand next month. Think I’ll be in pretty good shape for it – climbing is going well, and the indoor soccer is helping to build up my fitness. Really looking forward to getting away now, with some chance of having a 2 week trip in the US immediately after I get home again.

Was having a pretty low day, until a courier came. Someone sent me a teddy bear, called Mitsy, which was a nice suprise.

Solaris 10 University Challenge

So Sun launched it’s University Challenge today – with a chance to win $5000 per individual and a Sun Ultra 20 Workstation, along with $100,000 credit for the university.

The project suggestions should give you an idea, but don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to just those. There’s plenty of other things I can think of – everything from zeroconf networking, to virtual consoles, power management, to various admin tools.

Think about what sucks in Solaris from an approachability point of view and you probably can’t go far wrong! Of course, feel free to ask any questions in the various OpenSolaris forums.

Just for the Record

While AIB obviously have their head screwed on with technology, they’re still failing miserably on the usability front as a bank and not letting me transfer money remotely into a non-personal account. Are you serious? Yes sir, it’s all there in our terms and conditions, which I continued to tell them where they could stuff. Not much better is the people managing my shares, they can’t even take a simple VISA payment.

We have the technology to make this happen – why aren’t we using it? Even if I was charged for the payment to go through, at least I wouldn’t have to resort to getting a cheque made out [fee], buying an envelope [fee] and sending it through the post [fee]. I’m sure there’ll be some administration charge as well [fee]. Wankers.