Life is so good, it gets better every day

Jack Johnson And Friends

Went to see the Jack Johnson gig last night in the Town Hall with Carolyn. It was a really excellent couple of hours, featuring Xavier Rudd and G.Love and Special Sauce. I hadn’t heard anything of G.Love and Special Sauce before I went to the concert, and at the start it was slightly strange having his hip hop style in the middle of Jack and Xavier – but in a way, it kinda worked, and when they all came out on stage at the end and had a jamming session it was really pretty cool. Definitely better than the John Butler Trio gig I went to a month or so ago, although his music would have blended in just fine last night too.

Longhorn Delayed?

Seems Longhorn might slip its release again – can only be good news for vendors like Novell, Red Hat, Apple and others…Hrm, looks like Sun is part of the ‘others’ again – suck. At least it’s good news for GNOME.

GUADEC For Everyone!

The next round of the popular GNOME conference, GUADEC, is just around the corner. I’m pretty excited by the conference this year – it be the first year in a while where I’m not so much involved in the planning, and have no committments with the GNOME Foundation board of directors. I’m going over there with a real sense of being able to enjoy myself for the first time in ages, without large weighted decisions looming over me. Not only that, but we’ll be surrounded by good beer, sausages and large bosomed girls in tight leather pants. Okay, I suspect I’m thinking more of this – isn’t it a pity we couldn’t co-ordinate the dates?

I already had booked my flights, before I saw that the GNOME Foundation sorted out a 10-20% discount with Lufthansa and with other cheap airlines in Europe, it should prove to be much easier getting the Stuttgart this year. I also booked my accommodation on the same day, staying at the Hotel Unger for the few nights I’ll be in Stuttgart [26th May – 1st June]. The GUADEC guys also organized a discount for a number of hotels around the area, and there’s still hope we might be able to organize some cheaper accommodation like we had in Kristiansand last year.

Unfortunately we seem to have ended up with the same number of talks from previous years. Everyone wants to talk at GUADEC, and we’re trying desperately hard to accommodate everyone with a rather action packed schedule with some excellent speakers – both old and new. This year, we’re trying out a few new things –

• A separate Multimedia track – There’s always lots to talk about in the multimedia space, and we’ve given them their own track this year. Fluendo are also streaming the conference again this year, for those that can’t make the conference.
• Lightning talks – This was a successful addition to the Boston GNOME Summit last year that we were very keen to add to the schedule this year. We plan to have lots of people talking for a few minutes about their project. If you are interested, you should register your lightning talk here!
• Freeform sessions – We’ve introduced a new slot on Monday afternoon. We’re hoping that this will be where some hard planning, brainstorming, and problem solving happens for GNOME. We have 3 more freeform sessions to fill up and we’re quite keen for people to come up with suggestions and lead these sessions. The great Luis Villa has already signed up for a Marketing GNOME session – he doesn’t know it yet, since he’s currently touring the back and beyond in Australia! You’ll also notice there is an hour-long group session where all the groups report back on what each session has brainstormed.

There will be a certain amount of schedule activity as we start to finalize the current schedule, so if you have any specific comments you need to get them in now to guadec-planning [at] gnome [dot] org. As always, we’ll be using our wiki page, on live.gnome.org, for many announcements along with guadec-list.

Tell us you’re coming! – you can’t afford to miss it! Registration will be announced soon!

Highlights From Down South

Although Patrick already blogged about our trip down south with Mick, I thought I’d put up a selection of photos. The trip was my first real taste of multiple day tramping in New Zealand – we elected to go and do the Keplar track, which is about 76km for 3 days walking.

We headed down in Patrick’s boss’ BMW to Queenstown early on Tuesday morning, after Mick had arrived the previous morning. I’ve never really been a big fan of Queenstown. Sure, the scenery is pretty awesome, but there’s not much to it after that. About every 2nd shop in the town is a tourist booking office. Now Wanaka is a different place.

The next morning we started the Keplar track. The first day was pretty dull, walking a few kms around the lake, then a 2 hour slog up to Luxmore hut, for our first nights sleep. The hut slept about 65 people, shared between 2 bunkhouses. It was pretty cool to be on the mountainside, but when you have a few people snoring, like we did, during the night, you soon get tired of it.

The hardlads started off early the next morning, on what was to be the highlight of the 3 days – a walk along a ridgeline with amazing scenery. We were totally blessed with the weather, with reasonably good views during those few hours. Unfortunately at the end of the day there was a 2 hour steep decent that had us crying towards the end. Another somewhat uneventful night in the next hut, fighting the cursed sandflies, had us starting the next morning to a 40km walk out to Te Anau. Most people bail out at the swing bridge after about 20km and get the shuttle into town. We opted to walk it out, which probably did unforeseen physical damage to our bodies. Oh well, what doesn’t kill you, can only make you stronger.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt in as much pain as I did the last day. After walking the previous 2 days, and limbs aching from the 2 hour descent, we were all in agony during those 40km. Fortunately we were blessed with the weather again, with a steady downpour for most of the way. It was pretty miserable. I can do 40km easily in a day, but after reasonably solid days the previous 2 days, it was really tough going.

The day after, we limped around Milford for the day, seeing the awesome dolphins riding in the wave of our cruise ship, and the underwater observatory.

Before long, the week was over, and Mick headed off to Australia on the next leg of his short holiday. I quickly caught up with my brother and his wife over dinner before he headed home too.

Back to a somewhat normal life again – only except that I’ve been catching up a bit with Larry who’s over in NZ waiting for his Australian visa to come through, and looking forward to Domhnall visiting in July. Busy times.

Oh man

Oh man, this is so cool – nice work team! It’s amazing to think how far Sun has come within the last year in terms of blogging becoming part of the social culture within Sun. Creating the blogging guidelines and getting some of the executives to blog were major milestones [although I’d still very much like to see Scott blogging as well].

Can You Repeat That?

The following contains hugely sensitive internal material. If you understand this, you can have my job.

Unfortunately, every so often you are simply unlucky. Today was one of those days. While going through my mail boxes at the weekend, I noticed a bug mail with an MR [Multiple Release], and an associating SubCR [Sub-Change Request]. Haha, easy you say? I went ‘bugger me, what’s that?’ and forwarded on the mail to my QA buddy, Shane. He replied back that it was multiple release bug that required a patch for a given release of Solaris, and pointed that I had to get approval through the IPR system [Internal Patch Request]. Right, of course. Fortunately one of our team has had to go through that process, and very usefully wrote out a series of steps. After raising and approving the IPR [and having needed contact names, phone numbers and emails for various bits of the form], I have to raise an PRF [Patch Request Form], which needs an associating CRT [Change Request Tracker]. Are you following yet? I’m currently on step 3 of a 9 step process, and each step feels completely disconnected from the previous and next steps.

I love Sun, don’t get me wrong, but I sometimes feels the various processes that we’ve set up really kill the average developer’s productivity, sanity and progress within Sun.

I’m going on holiday tommorrow. My timing is impeccable!

What Weekend?

Another weekend over, and again I’m finding myself asking ‘What happened to it?’. This time I think I probably know the solution – 3 nights of drinking since St.Patrick’s Day. I wake up this morning just a bit stupider than I did on Thursday. Sigh.

Mick arrives today for a week. It’ll be nice seeing him again, and hope to have a good time touring around the south island for the next week.

As some people have noticed, the GUADEC schedule is online. It’s been really hard designing a schedule this year that fits in with everyone’s thoughts and plans for the conference. Like previous years, I think we’ve ultimately taken on too much again – this year has an exciting brainstorming day, a multimedia track, and all the usual talks/BOF’s and User/Business day panels. We need to try and learn from our mistakes otherwise we’re just going to keep having the same heartache over and over again, especially trying to fit in as yet unschedule talks and BOFs due to pressure from our sponsors. We’ll get there – we always invariably do.

Our Day

It’s that time of the year again. Hooray. Happy St.Patrick’s day. The crowd is already gathering outside our Irish local. It’s the only day where the Guinness tastes almost as good as one back home – although I suspect it’ll get a bit messy later on, when the demand peaks. Met up with Patrick for a liquid lunch, but managed to make a quick exit after a couple.

Patrick tells me we get to drive around the south island in a BMW while Mick is over here. Sweet.

After months of ignoring all Gmail invites, I created a Gmail account today. It’s not like I need another mail account, but curiousity got the better of me.

On The Move

For the past couple of months I’ve been living with Patrick. It has been lots of fun [especially the networked Half Life frag sessions], but now with winter approaching it’s time to move on again. I came across a small one bedroom apartment on Montreal street, which is right in the middle of town. There is a slightly higher rent [$275 a week], but it looks much easier to heat, and seems to have a nice kitchen. I plan to move out just after Easter.

Tim and Barbara arrived into Christchurch on Monday afternoon. It was really great to see them again. We spent Tuesday afternoon down in the French village Akaroa, just south along the Banks penninsula which was fun. They spend the next two weeks travelling around the south island before finally coming back to Christchurch for a night.

Mick arrives for a week next Monday. I think the plan is to head down south, maybe hit the Keplar track, and spend some nights around Wanaka and Queenstown. Looking forward to seeing him again.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I just recently finished Aron Ralston’s book ‘Between a rock and a hard place’ – remember the guy who cut off his arm after it got trapped by a large boulder in Utah. Throughout the book it was hard not to constantly think ‘What a jerk’, with danger seemingly following him right throughout his life. I’d like to say that most climbers aren’t like that, but I’ve met my fair share of people who push themselves too much and get themselves into trouble. After finishing it, I didn’t feel much sympathy. An interesting read nonetheless.