Life is so good, it gets better every day

Ailing Sun Desktop…Where?

I think I should clarify about our supposedly ailing desktop. It’s not ailing, it’s in fantastic shape and we’re going places. We’ve already been shipping JDS on Solaris, and the code is already available. We’re just moving our development processes onto OpenSolaris.org. We’re admittedly taking our foot off JDS the distribution while we go to focus on other things [doesn’t mean we won’t come back to it!], but JDS the desktop is alive and well – a subtle difference in brand naming that confuses a lot of people.

JDS and OpenSolaris – A New Beginning

After much heated discussion internally, I finally sent in the proposal for starting a new OpenSolaris JDS Community. These are pretty exciting times – it pretty much guarantees that we’ll be more open than ever before, and I can only think that GNOME will benefit greatly from that. It’s also the first time in a while where I’ve been 100% focused on what I’m doing – we’ve always had the distraction of other things that I’ve tried to throw myself into as much as possible, before getting yanked out to do something else.

I wrote up a short presentation on how things might look, what challenges we face and what goals we have for the community. Watch this space – or better still, join the new JDS OpenSolaris community!

Although somewhat related, this is a bit cheeky.

New Baby!

Congratulations to Mikael and Carina – awesome news about their new arrival, Emma.

On the Verge

It’s amazingly frustrating when you’re on the verge of something cool, that you want to be a part of, and then your mail goes down for the day. With that, and the GNOME servers being down to kill my blogging muse, the timing has been impeccable.

Not What I Expected

Oh man, my sister, the geek. I guess I shouldn’t be so shocked. For all those who haven’t seen it, the Open Language Tools project is definitely worth checking out, being currently led by another family member [grin].

101 Things to Know about GNOME

In case anyone missed it, we now have the full multimedia experience for my talk in Stuttgart, minus the hungover as hell Irishman. Thanks heaps to Kris for putting this together.

File:	gnome-101-video.ogg
Size:	20MB
Md5sum:	1886ad0ce8075957cd25e6ab418458f9

An Open Letter To Sun

Oh wait, Sun’s my company…nevermind. So by now everyone’s seen the new Ultra 20 workstations starting at $895 – something that we’re not really going to make much money out of at that price.

Now Open Source has always been important to Sun – we’ve proved that in the past, and will continue to prove it in the future. However, there’s always been one request from hundreds of employees working directly with various open source projects – being able to donate hardware and software to make those projects significantly better. I’d like to think we could have a few of these machines to share, especially for the projects that we’re interested in, start up an annual program, and make the world a better place. Call it ‘Summer of Hardware’, if you will.

I’ve asked. Who’ll listen?

Back in New Zealand

It’s been nice to get back to New Zealand, although it’s been freaking cold the last couple of days. It could have frozen the balls off a brass monkey. The southern alps are looking good, although still probably too early in the season for the snow lovers. Managed to pick up a crappy cold on the way back, which really killed my sleep cycle and getting over jet lag. Have been wide awake at 5am for the past 4 nights – fun!

Met up with Emma and her travelling mates on Wednesday night for a curry and a pint, only 5 hours after stepping off a plane. And 5 hours after knocking back 2 Bloody Marys on our approach into Christchurch airport – I blame the English man and Welsh man over for the Lions tour in the seats beside me. Emma was in good form, seemed to enjoy trip around NZ and we had some good catchups. Not too long before Domhnall and Linda are over here.

Bought a dehumidifier for the flat – there’s quite a lot of condensation on the windows in the morning, and there’s a bit of a musty smell. Hopefully this will do the trick, without sucking my body too much of water as a side effect. Tried again and again to tune in the N64 that I brought over from Ireland – can get pictures working fine, but no sound. Very frustrating. Wonder if there’s a difference between NZ and UK tvs, or is it just a broken part somewhere along the line.

Speargate

So having managed to miss out on most of the Lions tour while over in Ireland, I came back pretty enthusiastic for the first test on Saturday night. It was a pretty odd experience being the only person in the local pub with a green shirt. Jo wore red, and we were engulfed by the sea of black. The match was pretty disappointing too, with O’Driscoll being stretchered off after the first minute having dislocated his shoulder in what’s now being dubbed as ‘Speargate’.

But in fairness, the Lions were amazingly poor. The forwards were poor losing a huge percentage of scrums, line outs, rucks and mauls. Shane Byrne had a mare, and got nicknamed ‘Chuckie’ at our table after the first 20 minutes. Robinson was terrible and Wilkinson was non-existant. It was nice to see Ryan Jones shining through, but he was mostly on his own. All pretty depressing stuff.

Still, there’s always next week, but I suspect the score would have been worse had it not been for the torrential downpours in Christchurch. Not to take it away from the All Blacks though – they were impressive and completely deserved the win.

Incidently, does anyone think that Clive Woodward looks like Mr Burns?

Amazing Frankfurt

Why don’t more airports like Singapore have plugs for people to use their laptops with? Oh, I’m sure it’s a ‘security feature’, but it’s absurd in this day and age. Surely they don’t expect everyone using WLAN to have a battery that lasts more than about 30 minutes, do they? I’ve been searching around for about 10 minutes trying to find one. GAR! Frankfurt, WORST AIRPORT EVER! German efficiency, yeah right.

Some hours later, I get to Singapore. Ahh, Singapore, you put warm fuzzies in my heart. Lots of plugs, and a decent enough wireless connection. There’s even nice places to eat, and nice bars to drink at. There’s no smoke, and well fewer Germans!