that’s whacked

why I hope the OGB won’t accomplish much

Monday, Feb 26. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

now that i’ve caught your attention with my razzy headline, i’ll expand on why i’m running for the OGB and what i hope to achieve if elected.

there is some truth to my headline. i’d honestly like to see the OGB be pretty hands-off. i believe the OGB should be a group that resolves conflicts if necessary, but otherwise pretty much stays out of the way.

imagine a really lazy US Supreme Court. one that did nothing other than mediate conflicts that were appealed up to higher and higher authorities. i think that’d be a pretty neat OGB.

i think the OGB should stay out of technical matters where it has no business going to… engineering issues should be best left to engineers. i challenge you to name one technical engineering product which was done in full, or in majority by any organisation with the words governance board in it.

likewise, i think the OGB should stay out of legal matters. licenses and lawsuits were made by, created by, and fought by lawyers. not governing boards.

IANAL. YANAL. Together…. WANAL (or WANL if you want to get grammatically correct, but well…that loses all the fun of the ANAL acronym). The OGB is most definitely not composed of lawyers.

The OGB should be a group that supports the OpenSolaris community. It exists to serve the OpenSolaris community, not drive it… and dare I say it: it does not exist to lead the community. Don’t get me wrong, I will fight for many things… a bug tracking system that non-Sun developers can use, an RTI process that is external, and more external transparent communication are just a few of the things I’d like to see; but these must be community-driven. They should not be decided by me alone, nor by the OGB alone.

I believe in organic growth. I believe that the OpenSolaris community can organise itself, and get shit done. I believe that yes, there are conflicts in projects or communities. And in the rare cases where those can’t get sorted out, sure… escalate away to the OGB. But by and large, I believe that the OpenSolaris community is made up of some pretty competent people who will grab the community by its various tails (marketing, engineering, documentation, user groups, etc.) kicking and screaming towards progress - despite any valiant attempts (Sun or not) to make mistakes.

heaven

Monday, Feb 26. 2007  –  Category: Outdoors, Travel

i’m not religious… but i do believe in heaven.

not only do i believe in it…. i was just there.

heaven (or at least something akin to it) is flying down a double-black on your brand new snowboard crashing through fresh untracked fluffy light powder…. and then doing it again…. and again….. and again. repeat for 3 days straight… toss in a great dinner, great friends, and a ridiculous amount of eggs, corn dogs, beer, and a bottle of Laphroig - and you have the recipe for an awesome bachelor party.

epicness

Thursday, Feb 22. 2007  –  Category: Outdoors, Travel

between MLK day, all the jurassic (home directory server) outages on tuesday & wednesday, and me leaving soon for a weekend of epic awesomeness in the snow at Park City, this has got to be one of my shortest work-weeks ever.

… for which i do feel guilty …

but i can’t help but be psyched for this weekend. i haven’t seen some of these guys in a while, and i’m looking forward to 3 days of boarding in the powder. i’ve only been up to tahoe twice so far this year in our winter-of-crappiness we’ve been having, so i’m feeling totally ill-prepared for this weekend. but oh well… i’ve got my asthma inhaler and a crapload of ibuprofen - i should be set, right?

opensolaris asia tour, redux

Friday, Feb 16. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

i’m headed off to present the Building & Deploying OpenSolaris presentation for OpenSolaris Day at Tech Days in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on March 6th. if anyone reading this is going to be around and wants to meet up, shoot me an email

i’ll also be in Singapore the weekend before, and in Hong Kong the Saturday after (making various connection flights).

the face of Sun Microsystems

Wednesday, Feb 14. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

googling for “OGB” today brought me to the following blog entry.

so so true

count me in…

Wednesday, Feb 14. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

quoted from my post to the cab-discuss mailing list.

gratuituous play on an Austin powers quote: “Allow myself to nominate…. myself”

I doth[1] hereby declare myself a candidate for the OGB elections, following the precedent set by Glynn. Unlike Glynn, I don’t have the experience of being involved in the GNOME foundation. I do, however, share the willingness to take part in, and help lead the OpenSolaris community. I am, as has been shown on many an occasion, fully willing to also take blame for various Opensolaris.org breakage - which I think is an important part of being a leader. I’m part of the OpenSolaris engineering team, so I’m paid by Sun to make OpenSolaris not suck.

Unlike Glynn, I have built my own kernel.

It panic’d upon boot.

[1] Like the way I combined the first person “I” with the third person singular present tense?

OpenSolaris/Solaris Relationships

Tuesday, Feb 13. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

UPDATED POST HERE

there still seems to be some common misconceptions about what the relationship is between OpenSolaris & Solaris. it’s not as simple as “OpenSolaris is open source Solaris”. i’ve tried to answer this before, but as has been said: a picture is worth a thousand words.

so here’s my picture:

basically, OpenSolaris is a set of source code encompassing things like the kernel, libraries, commands, guis (JDS), X, etc. etc. distributions are free to pick and choose from those source code areas as they see fit, they don’t have to take all of the OpenSolaris source. this is why OpenSolaris has the concepts of consolidations, which have the duty of publishing coherent collections of binaries (thanks to sch for that wording, i like it). e.g. JDS is a consolidation publishing the whole desktop environment, ON is a consolidation publishing the kernel, libraries and commands that depend on each other. this helps alleviate issues like dependencies, etc.

the interesting area we hit is when we reach distributions like Nexenta which clearly take ON’s kernel (and libraries?), but uses GNU user commands. an even more interesting area are operating systems which only take certain technologies (e.g.: MacOS taking ZFS & DTrace), or FUSE/ZFS for Linux. if someone took a basic Linux distro and added JDS to it, i would certainly consider it to be a distribution based off of OpenSolaris-based technology.

the 5 distributions shown in the diagram (Nexenta, Belenix, Schillix, MarTux, SXCE/SXDE) are our current distros that are more clearcut since they all deliver builds of ON.

i show the relationship between SXCE (Solaris Express Community Edition) and SXDE (Solaris Express Developer Edition) since they are essentially the same thing, but SXDE delivers at a slower (more “stable”) pace than SXCE which revs frequently. i denote S10 (Solaris 10) in a different colour because, it’s not technically open source since S10 FCS was delivered before we open sourced the Solaris source base, but certainly features and technologies developed in OpenSolaris (ZFS, BrandZ, etc.) are finding their way into S10 updates & patches, so it seemed reasonable to show it in this diagram still.

lookit i’m famous

Wednesday, Feb 7. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

well, famous inasmuch as being in an SDN Channel video makes me famous

at the very least, it’s the first time (to my knowledge) that a video of me has made its way to the Internet (discounting random ones taken with the digital camera in my photo gallery…. oh yeah, and that one night with Paris Hilton)

note: i haven’t seen it yet. so someone tell me if i look extraordinarily stupid so i can delete this blog post.

Just say no….

Thursday, Feb 1. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

…. to license flamewars.

There’s been a good flamefest^Wdebate going on over at opensolaris-discuss about GPLv3. I’ve gone into “mark-all-msgs-as-read” mode, but here are my brief summarised thoughts and opinions on the matter:

1. I’ve yet to hear a legal or technical incentive for dual-licensing with GPLv3. Indeed, if I understand it right, someone can fork the ON codebase and license it solely under GPLv3 which would prohibit changes flowing back upstream or being incorporated into CDDL codebases.

2. Dual and triple licensing has just caused messes in other OSS projects I’ve seen. Didn’t we just retire the SISSL becaused nobody used it in OpenOffice?

3. What’s wrong with CDDL?

I guess you can see I’m somewhat opposed to dual-licensing the codebase with GPLv3. I just don’t see what it buys us. My initial instinct is to just say no… but I suppose to be fair, I’ll wait to see how it plays out with the license being finalised and all that.

I think at the very least…. I will just say no to getting further involved in that thread of doom.

My 5 Things.

Thursday, Feb 1. 2007  –  Category: Food

I was wondering when it would be my turn… looks like I’ve been tagged by Forrest. For those unable to see the connection, Forrest is one of the engineers in the Solaris Kernel test group in Beijing whom I worked with (on Hierarchical Locality Groups test support) when I did my six week rotation in Beijing.

So… 5 things you may not know about me: (I say may, because I’ve certainly done my fair share of exposing embarrassing secrets about myself when drunk - so who knows if you know or don’t know this already).

1. I don’t play video games. Seriously. People generally know me as a computer geek (true), and believe I spend most of my day on the computer (true, on weekdays) - and make the assumption that (like a lot of geeks), I must play video games. I can’t think how many conversations have been abruptly pre-empted by me interrupting with “actually I’ve never played World of Warcraft.” My self-imposed computer game ban dates back to sophomore year of college, when a huge addiction to Rainbow Six caused many a missed class, and a caused me to lose a lot of focus at school. That was the catalyst for finally wiping the last vestiges of Windows off my computer and declaring myself free of computer games. We kept a Dreamcast around for short non-continuous (read: no storyline) games for a while, but… well… every good thing comes to an end. Though I do have to admit, I do indulge in cell phone solitaire.

2. I dislocate my toe about once a week. Weird, I know. I’ve had this problem for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why… it just happens. And yes, it hurts like a mofo every time.

3. I was expelled from my first high school… and that was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me, seriously.

4. I sometimes wish I were Canadian. I don’t know why. I’m fiercely proud to be English… but yet I’m culturally very much American. Canada just seems to be a logical midpoint between the two. I go to Canada at least once a year to see family, and I love it there. I always have a great time. I think I could be a really good patriotic Canadian. Except for the football team… seriously, you Canucks need someone other than DeRosario to carry you. You lost out with Hargreaves (coincidentally, just named best English player of 2006!)

5. I’m allergic to alcohol. Tragic I know… Especially given how much I’m fond of the stuff. It’s not just the usual Asian blush either… my asthma kicks in and I get very short of breath. Does it stop me from drinking? Not really. But along with my lactose intolerance, it makes wine and cheese hour (and those of you who know me know I LOVE & CRAVE cheese) both thoroughly enjoyable and miserable.