Life is so good, it gets better every day

I Want To Be A Luis

I always admired Luis, ever since Ximian signed a contract to Sun for supporting us with our GNOME 2.0 work. I don’t know how he managed it, but looking through 1000’s of bugs day after day was a herculean task. Of course behind anything like that is a good woman, and I suspect having Krissa over in Africa might have helped his concentration.

That being said, over the last 2 days I’ve been trying to triage the 1000’s of bugs in Sun’s bug tracker. Historically as a team, we’ve basically avoiding regular triaging of the database and focused on P1’s and P2’s – we even got temporary waivers to avoid looking at P3’s, as we couldn’t cope with anything more with our current resources. This kinda means that anything logged as lower than a P3 gets ignored, occupies space in the database, and rots away untouched. It’s a sad reflection of not really being able to coordinate our efforts better between a community bug tracker, and our own internal one. I think we’ve done a pretty ok job about getting a stable product at the end of any given cycle, but our process feels a little broken when you have people logging nearly every bug as a higher priority only because they know logging it as anything else won’t get it fixed, let alone looked at.

I’m going to spend the entire week going through the database. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to piss off a *lot* of Sun people with what I’m doing. I’m going to generate 1000’s of emails. And sometimes, I’m going to get things wrong. I’m using my best judgement in 5+ years of GNOME development, but everyone makes mistakes….

Sydney, Australia

And after booking flights to Thailand, I followed up with flights to Sydney for Christmas – arriving 20th December, leaving 5th January. Nothing like spending money travelling when you’re down.

Krabi, Thailand

After a real shitty month, I decided that I badly needed a holiday. Booked flights to Krabi for 12 days of sport climbing, massage and chilling out on the beach in November. Everyone has said it’s an incredibly awesome place to go climbing and hang out, so I’m looking forward to it immensely, and being able to catch up with Patrick, and climbing with a cool group of people.

One slight bugger, is that I need to move out of my current place by 30th November, so will now spend between now and then searching for places to live – an utterly miserable experience.

Film Time

Went and saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tonight – surprisingly enjoyable and well, Johnny Depp stole the show again with the various one liners. Had some curious departures from the book, but so did the old one which was abysmal. Really like the disco songs from the Oompa Loompa. Tim Burton got it about right I suspect, so hopefully Roahl Dahl has stopped rolling in the grave for a while.

New Geek Toy

Arrived safely back in New Zealand after a several hour flight. Nice to be back after such a crazy week, but felt a bit down due to the lack of a welcoming party at the airport. When I got unpacked at home, I figured I needed some treat to take my mind off things. I had scoped out the new PSP while hanging around Singapore airport. I had nearly bought one there, except for the fact that all they had were the white models. Dick Smith had a good range, and was soon walking out with a combo pack including ‘Underground Rivals’. It’s a really sweet handheld, and I especially like the wireless feature and web browser. As tberman said, the screen is fucking unreal.

Massage Parlour

Had an excellent night around town with Patrick being our host. Had some delicious food at a muslim restaurant, then a nice coffee, then a quick dash by his apartment before some more food. Then it was time for a foot massage. After being led to a rather seedy looking massage parlour which we decided to skip, we eventually ended up at a wonderful place just around the corner from the office. A good 70 minutes [of mixed pleasure and pain] for only 50 RMB. Fantastic – think I might have gotten the best one out of the four of us. A nice way to end off the week. One more day of this place place, and then I’m out of here again and back to NZ.

JDS and OpenSolaris

I gave a presentation to the university students right beside the Sun offices in Beijing. Hard to know at what level to pitch the talk, but mostly just went through the goals for the desktop community, why OpenSolaris was important, and what our plans were for JDS.

Hopefully I sold them on the ideas of creating Solaris packages from spec files using pkgbuild, and that I’m swamped with mails telling me how they’ve packaged their favourite desktop application using the build environment I explained. Here’s hoping anyway. The slides are here.

Patrick’s trying to convince me to come to English corner this Friday evening where I can sit and talk random stuff with people who are trying to learn English – just not totally sure I’ll have the voice for it after this weeks sessions. It’s been fun time during this trip, and I think pretty productive. These guys rock, they’ve just been sheltering under one for too long, and now it’s time to shine!

Ahhrrr

Avast!. Those be treacherous words.

TVIC – The Valley in Christchurch

Met up for lunch with Phil and a bunch of people from effusion, a small community of people that came together around OSS stuff. A really interesting bunch of people – I’ll avoid naming because I’ll invariably end up being embarassed by forgetting most of their names. Nice to get out for lunch, and some interesting conversations. Then later in the evening, some of met up again for a Chinese and some more tech talk – cool people, doing cool stuff.

Java China

Darn it, maybe I should have organized to go out a little early. It seems that Java China is being held this week, and a whole rake of superstars are out in Beijing at this very moment.

I just wonder who’s going to be out there next week. It seems Beijing is a popular place at the moment.