Life is so good, it gets better every day

It’s Time to Play The Music, It’s Time to Light The Lights

John, you see I’d just call that a workaround, but everyone seems to have different ideas of what is best. I like the idea of having custom feeds, but then I guess you need a way to publish the various topics that you might write blog entries about, and with 1,000,000’s of people blogging you get a staggering encylopedia of words. Yes, I too am seeing the amazing parallels with American TV. Scarey.

Jeff gives a pretty interesting commentary on the use cases and categorisation on what he calls ‘The Language Question’, and in his conclusion he asks the following questions – ‘Is Sun doing anything to get the community interested in Java? Not that I’ve seen. Mono may win over the community, not for legal or technical reasons, but simply through lack of attention from the Java camp. I wonder how close the Java and Desktop teams are within Sun’. This question has come up time and time again, and while so many people in Sun have focused heavily on the technical issues, they seem to have dropped the ball on the community. I don’t think this has ever been a ‘lack of attention’, more a reluctance to publically come out of a corner and defend their corner. My real feeling is that the Java camp isn’t a community to the same extents as GNOME, and could benefit from looking at our model. Sure, there is the JCP and a confusing mix of java.sun.com, java.net and java.com. It’s a good start, yet I’m saddened when I see no set of documentation writers writing good online user help, no translators adding translations for dozens of languages and no bug team triaging bugs on a daily basis and more of a traditional Sourceforge type setup. Okay, so the Java ‘community’ is so much larger than we could ever hope the GNOME community to be, and I’m probably being amazingly naive to expect otherwise. But to answer Jeff’s questions, yes, the Java and Desktop teams aren’t amazingly well aligned as they perhaps should be. The Java hackers aren’t desktop hackers, and the desktop hackers aren’t Java hackers, but the two groups are definitely starting to become more aware of each other and respecting each others concerns. Little steps, but all important ones.

Luis and Havoc have been discussing the delights of syncing with GNOME development and time based releases. It’s a discussion that I’m hugely interested in, having seen how many resources get sucked in to maintaining features locally, and making sure all the patches apply cleanly with an upgrade of the version tarball. For our GNOME 2.6 based release we seem to be doing a better job, with only 260 patches locally of which maybe 20 are feature based. Unfortunately, it’s hard to convince Sun about the merits of ‘FIXED UPSTREAM’, working primarily against trunk, using bugzilla as the main bug tracker and a bunch of other things that could potentially ease much pain. Still, worst of all is trying to convince people on the merits of ‘value add’ and with Novell, Red Hat and Sun being as competitive as ever, it’ll remain an exhaustive and demoralizing battle.

I’m still trying to define my role in Sun. I think I spend most of my time read and writing mail and blog entries. I think I need to move to California so that I’ll at least spend my time in meetings and feel like I’ve had a productive day, or something.

RSS – Mostly Harmless

Both Alec and Alan commented on the potentially harmful use of RSS with people publishing the full content in the RSS feed, both with seemingly different use cases and it’s pretty obvious that no good approach to blogging has yet emerged, yet it feels like aggregators like PlanetGNOME, PlanetDebian and PlanetFedora have accelerated the use of blogging and information sharing.

PlanetSun seems to be moving towards the same problems as PlanetGNOME – who gets added, how often are they blogging and whether their full entry is published in the RSS feed. I’m sure Jeff will be able to comment a little more or this. We have a ‘Sun Bloggers’ internal alias within Sun, and while I only subscribed sometime last week, a lot of the comments seem to get caught up over commenting mechanisms. I don’t have comments on my blog for a few reasons, as for me [and my current use case of occassionally reading PlanetSun, PlanetGNOME and a few other random places] they take potentially useful information away from the main flow of things, they are a spam target, they increase the number of click throughs that other people have to do [and vice versa], and increase the complexity of the blogging and aggregating software. Should I have used the commenting mechanism replying? Perhaps, but then fewer people would have seen these posts and potentially fewer people brainstorming on a solution.

The #1 Most Annoying Things About Blogs

Even though we now have wonderful sites like PlanetGNOME, PlanetDebian and PlanetSun [and an internal blogging site], we still have people being all rude and not publishing their entire blog entry in their RSS feed. It’s hugely infuriating having to click through to various blogs just to read them. Hopefully people are reading this and making suitable changes. Ahem.

GNOME API Documentation Openings

Keith Sharp posted an awesome summary of the state of GNOME API documentation. Looks like there’s still a bunch of work to be done getting it all up to speed for any keen people. Definitely one of the better places to get started, as it’s a good way of learning the APIs by documenting them.

Planet Sun

Holy fucking shit no way! Planet Sun. Rocking stuff! Totally awesome to see other Sun dudes blogging in public.

It Was The Start Of The Summer

Actually, quite the opposite. Well, while Ireland starts to bask in Summer heat, Christchurch begins its Winter – and man, it’s cold. Our house has no central heating, no log fire and 2 mini electric oil heaters. Apparently most houses in Christchurch lack the central heating thing. Kiwis are hard. Go hard, or go home. I’ll probably stop off at Katmandu and buy some fleecy slippers for a start.

Seriously thinking about heading to California next year – could be the right time for a move like that, career wise. The climbing and girls aren’t bad either. Lots to talk about and discuss before then.

I joined the climbing gym again, on another 3 month membership. Seems like a good time to start as the evenings start to close in again. Will hopefully get back into the swing of going there 3 nights a week, with a few afternoons on the ski slopes. We’re heading to Castle Hill tomorrow for an hour or two, with a trip to Paynes Ford for the Easter weekend. Rock. I put up some photos of my trip to Perth.

Some Time Later

Had an awesome time in Perth with Domhnall. The Counting Crows concert really rocked – it was good to see them again, and we were fortunate enough to catch them before they cancelled the tour [Adam had a seriously bad run of luck]. We hired a car and headed south for a bunch of climbing – everything from granite sea cliffs, limestone sport crag, slab off-routing to beach bouldering.

Not nice to be back in work though. Very little seems to have changed apart from an announcement of collaboration and reduction in headcount. Slightly disappointed to see a lack of momentum on the JDS side, but hopefully I’ll have enough motivation to start kicking arse once again.

GUADEC is totally going to rock this year. The guys in Norway are continuing to do an awesome job. Michael has put together a tentative schedule and done a great review of the various GUADEC papers, with help from Malcolm. It’s really nice to see so many people involved, compared to last year.

Bin 333

We had a pretty good St.Patrick’s day, going out to The Bog where there was live music out back. After a few rather sorry looking attempts at Guinness and a bit of craic it was over for another year.

I went climbing with Steve, a US dude from Colorado. Currently he’s climbing at more or less the same grade which rocks. Did some nice routes in the 18-22 range – even redpointed a 22 cleanly, which I was pretty pleased about. Perhaps I’m not completely out of touch as I thought. We’re planning a pretty huge boulder session on Sunday, if I can manage to survive a pretty big party on Friday night, and some Saturday flat hunting.

Auckland And The Needle Of Death

Patrick and I headed up to Auckland at the weekend to see Billy Connolly and his ‘Too young to die old’ tour. It was a pretty relaxing weekend all in all, with a nice meal of mussels and frites in a Belgian pub and a couple of Leff Brun. There’s not a huge amount to do in Auckland except throw yourself off random buildings, but we decided to pass on the norm and opted to see Kelly Tarlton’s underworld adventure. It was pretty good, although not quite on the same scale as the Sydney aquarium. In between some crazy golf [Kiwis seem to have this thing about crazy golf] and some frames of pool, we headed up to the Skytower, for a bird’s eye view of the city, before another typical chill out afternoon in New Zealand. For an incredible $175, you can plummet down the side of the building at 75kmh in a gaudy costume of blue and yellow. I think I’d like them to pay me for doing that.

I’m slowly starting to catch up on things at work – things were totally swamped when I got back to India, and while I’ve been pretty busy, I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. JDS seems to be going pretty well, despite various dubious decisions being made along the way. I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to desperately get all the localized documentation back upstream before the 2.6.0 tarballs are released. That’s seems to be mostly successful so far. Another interesting turn of events is our increasing desire to work against community HEAD wherever possible and maintain as few patches as possible locally – hopefully it’ll just be a few branding and translation patches. This is a pretty huge direction to what we’ve currently done, having maintained 100’s of patches previously. I’m definitely getting the feel good factor about doing this work, despite how tedious it is becoming.

XORG Foundation

I’ve been following the arch and foundation mailing lists for the past few weeks, and it’s very reassuring to see progress being made on that front. It’s even more encouraging to see Jim plugging the GNOME Foundation and membership structure. A while back when there was a heated discussion on the foundation about the membership policy, I initally didn’t agree with Nat’s proposal to open things up. I definitely think it’s a good idea now, and has worked out well in the last couple of months, having monitored the membership committee mailing list as a board rep. Sure, we’ll still probably result in low turn outs in the various elections [we were getting them before the policy as well], but it seems to give people a good sense of being, and community spirit by being a GNOME Foundation Member. We are definitely one of the top free software projects in this field.