After hearing G.Love and Special Sauce at the Jack Johnson concert last month, I bought ‘The Hustle’ when I was over in Sydney. It’s a really excellent album. As described on Amazon ‘This CD is better than leomanade on a summer’s day in the sweet sasparilla purple forest’. It really is that good. I suspect it’s going to be fricken hard to get some of his other albums over here.
Finished off Richard Branson’s autobiography at the weekend. All in all, it was a thoroughly fascinating read and was far from the dullness of most other business type autobiographies I expect. I’ve been watching his TV reality show ‘The Rebel Billionaire’, where he attempts to get someone to take his place within the Virgin Group. It’s been a pretty entertaining look into how shrewd a person he is, and what characteristics he looks for from the contestants – far from your standard run of the mill reality show. That also came out in his book, but also the humility to admit where’s he has made mistakes in the past. Definitely plane material, and kinda wished I had left it until my flight to GUADEC.
Next on the reading list is to finish off Dan Brown’s ‘Angels and Daemons’, and to make a start on Michael Connolly’s series of crime novels.
Okay, so the title is Hollywood-izing the current situation, but with the latest discussion on various blogs, I decided to create a new freeform session at GUADEC, TrainWreck. As Jeff commented, it’s likely to be an extention to the Topaz session on the GUADEC schedule.
Feel free to add to it.
For a long time, GNOME, or Solaris, has been a second class citizen with each other – I’m not entirely sure which way around it should be. As a desktop team it’s been somewhat frustrating having to rip all sorts of features out of our releases on Solaris, simply because we haven’t been able to come up with a substitute for them due to time constraints – whether because they just needed porting to the Solaris API, or because there was no substitute within the Solaris kernel.
Today I started writing that list, partly because of the guilt for not having written it before but also because I believe it would be really useful to have once OpenSolaris is released. I’m also guilty of not dog-fooding GNOME on Solaris a little more, and suffering in my jocks for a while. Hopefully Solaris will get some more desktop focus over the next year or two.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love Linux and I believe in the development structure and culture that has been created around the project. I was hugely impresed by Andrew Morton’s keynote at linux.conf.au – many things he said were so very true of the management of just about every software project. I hope the OpenSolaris community can amount to the same.
tberman did warn me, but I figured the 7.9 out of 10 review on IMBD was past my threshold and would be enough. Sadly, it wasn’t. I’ve read the book, listened to the radio series, and seen the BBC tv series. It was a nice attempt but, for me, sadly fell flat on its face. None of the characters were instantly likeable, and it departed a long way from the original storyline.
I think I’ve got more involved in the GUADEC planning than I originally planned to. It’s actually quite therapeutic in many ways – having a list of easy tasks to fulfill proves to be a nice change of direction compared to my daily duties within Sun.
However, this year, the GUADEC experience is going to be relatively short. I have no Foundation Board or Advisory Board committments, so that takes 2 days out of my schedule.
I could spend those days touring around Germany – going on the tour of Esslingen, or visiting some places around town. However, those 5 days are the few days each year that I get to see old faces and catch up.
So I’m not going to waste time touring around the place. I’m going to spend that time talking shit and hopefully brainstorming for GNOME’s future, most probably in a pub somewhere. Feel free to join me!
Jeff and Pia’s wedding was a blast. LCA rocked. Despite how much I enjoyed each, I’m pretty glad to be home. Still feel a bit weird that I’m calling New Zealand my home, but I feel amazingly comfortable here, and comfortable is good.
The wedding went really well, and I was completely honoured to be part of the wedding cheerleading party, along with Thom and Touie, Sue and Elly. Everyone, including myself, had a great time, and Denise and Touie’s hospitality and generousity was wonderful throughout the weekend I spent in Yass.
LCA was also great fun, although I admit that I was probably still burnt out and not as hyped for a Linux conference as I wanted to be. It was awesome to meet Robert and Davyd for the first time, along with many old friends.
My general perception was that most people had pretty much disregarded Sun’s involvement in the Linux space, which made me pretty sad. While I’m still enjoying the challenges of working in Sun I sure don’t feel as proud with the product that I’m personally involved with, as I did before. I guess I have lots of thinking to do to see how we can turn it around, and I believe we can. It’s just going to take a lot of groundwork, and riding the days of frustration along the way.
Linux.conf.au just started yesterday, and I’m already tired. We’re holding the GNOME.conf.au mini-conf today. It’s going to be a long week – more later.
While writing my ‘101 Things to Know about GNOME’ talk for GUADEC I’ve been ploughing through the archives of many mailing lists, gnome-announce-list in particular. It’s been a pretty fascinating read, and I’d encourage people to do the same if they have spare time.
One of the mails I came across was A non technical perspective on GNOME goals and future work, from DV. We’ve done pretty well considering, with many of those goals well on their way to being solved. A lot of them still need quite a substantial amount of work. I wonder if todays goals are a similar set, compared to those of 3 years ago.
As mentioned elsewhere, if you want to help me with my talk, please send me interesting bits and pieces. Thanks heaps for all those who have contributed thus far!
Clive’s squad, all in all, seems pretty fair, with 20 Englishmen, 11 Irish, 10 Welsh and 3 Scot’s – nice to see O’Driscoll leading the team. What’s not fair is the lack of a ticket to go see them, and the abuse that I’ll probably get while watching it in the pub.
