Life is so good, it gets better every day

The Indiana Branding Machine

As our first prototype releases draws nearer, it’s time to start thinking about the branding experience for Indiana, specifically from when they put the LiveCD into their CDROM drives and launch the desktop to installing it on their disk. From my perspective, it’s an incredible opportunity to promote the OpenSolaris community brand, and create a sense of pride of ownership of the product (and technology) that we’ve taken part in. I’ve started a discussion on the Indiana mailing list – if you have some ideas of where we should focus, and what content we might want to highlight get involved! It would be great to be able to identify a solid list to work from for an eventual first release in Spring next year.

I Was Wrong about Facebook

Scrabulous has stolen my life. I still stand by the rest of my comments that I don’t totally get Facebook, but it’s pretty good for Scrabble playing.

Back from Wanaka

Just back from an extended weekend down in the south island. We flew down to Christchurch, and hooked up with Jayne’s sister and family and drove down to Wanaka. The house was pretty excellent, and plenty spacious for the group of us. We opted to snowboard down in Cardrona, which seemed ideal for a family environment and relatively easy slopes. The snow conditions proved to be pretty good, and had 3 excellent days boarding. Patrick was down there too with his brother and sister in law, and we also caught up briefly with Carole. Fortunately Sunday morning greeted us with a fresh dump of snow, about 15cm, and spent the entire day with Brett absolutely munting ourselves (and my board) on a whole heap of drop-offs and jumps. Great fun, and mostly soft landings though ended up the day with a little concussion, dehydration, and sun burn. Great times and feel like my boarding is improving, but was slightly disappointed by the 40cm dump the day we had to leave though!

Protect our heritage

As much as I’m loving seeing Microsoft having to re-assess their business, documents like these are a little disappointing. This document was produced in quick time for a full page advert in the Dominion Post (a newspaper in Wellington, which conveniently happens to be the location for the NZ government) after a 2 day meeting with Standards NZ. NZOSS rallied around to get a couple of great people attending to keep things on an even keel and take notes. Good work guys! I am biased on this one, obviously.

Rapid News

Mark mailed with his latest venture –

Rapid News is a comedy spoof news programme with jokes. Think of it as a radio show without the radio. Or a book that you listen to. Or a picture without the shapes. Or a pat on the bum without the wink.

Check it out here – 8 weeks in an RSS feed, though I should warn it’s pretty Irish centric.

OpenSolaris Developer Summit

The first OpenSolaris Developer Summit has been announced for the weekend of 13th and 14th October at the University of California in Santa Cruz. It’ll be a pretty hands on summit, with a lot of discussion (hopefully) around putting together the bits of Indiana. It’ll also be a good excuse to party and get to know some faces behind the OpenSolaris project which I’m looking forward to – I’ve found with previous GNOME experiences, it’s the best way to get excited about where we’re heading for the project and putting a face to a name really helps communication wise too.

We haven’t yet got a solid schedule around, but there’s a mailing list set up and ready for discussion. We also have a small amount of travel sponsorships for non-Sun employees to be able to attend, so if you think you’d like to attend and have been active in the project thus far, please do apply. So go register! (oh, and save the world by car pooling down to the event if you can).

Fermentation proceeding nicely

In the fine tradition of YouTube, I’ve uploaded a status report.

Unsurprisingly enough, there’s a few better examples of people explaining the process of brewing beer on YouTube.

• How to brew beer – Lake House Brewing Co
• How to make beer (2, 3, 4) – Matt (waterball)

SUNW moves to JAVA

Red Hat’s reaction was to move to NYSE in response to the volatility of the NASDAQ. Sun changes brand. A while ago, Jonathan talked at an internal Solaris all hands where he talked about leadership, characterizing it under a single word, courage – courage to be honest and integral, courage to be innovative, courage to collaborate and courage to act with pace and react to market needs. Of course time will tell on whether this will be a successful move, but either way, I’m satisfied that Jonathan practices what he preaches and I’m massively supportive of that and his continuing leadership.

And Yet Again He Nails It

Like Jim, I’m sure I won’t be the last to quote passages of Matt’s interview with Jonathan –

The question to ask is, “What portion of the world knows my brand?”

With the Java platform I’d guess we reach 20 to 30 percent of the Internet every day (powering the games kids play online, the intranet application at a bank, etc.). Each of these constituents may think about Java in different ways, but in each case Java “sells” my brand. If you believe that brand is central to the next wave of Internet monetization–and I believe it is absolutely central–then the more people that know my brand, the more benefit inures to me.

and more importantly

Understand the demographics of your market. You need adoption in order to get sales. You don’t need to monetize every user of your software.

Both quotes absolutely on the money.

New Blog, New Comments!

I know I’m probably the last person alive to have a commenting system, but finally, thanks heaps to Jeff, I’ve now successfully transitioned from pyblosxom to WordPress. Very much liking the Twitter and Flickr widgets, and tweaked the style enough to feel good about having a fresh new look. I do lose URL points on not re-directing all my previous blog links, but I figure reasonably intelligent people can figure out the new URL. Hooray!