that’s whacked

observations on the OGB election

Wednesday, Mar 28. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

just some random observations that come to mind from the recent OGB election: (in no particular order)

1. as glynn noted, no women elected. i was hoping to see michelle and karyn make it, i think both would have been well qualified.
2. 3 of the 7 elected members were NOT interviewed by simon. so clearly some people had their minds made up already.
3. the top 2 winning members (James & Casper), i would argue, did not campaign as publicly or strongly as others. i interpret this as the being the result of the majority of voting core contributors being ON developers who have had interaction with the two from past Solaris relationships.
4. the election of james, casper, and alan speaks to me that people wanted strong ARC influences, or at least strong engineering leadership.
5. everyone’s an engineer. i was hoping to see more non-technical members to make sure we don’t lose perspective on the non-technical aspects of the OpenSolaris community (i.e.: community users, user groups, and other communities like marketing, documentation, etc.)
6. i was surprised jim didn’t make it. if i’m reading the results right, it looks like it came right down to the wire for him.

i’m happy with how the board turned out. i think we have a strong set of board members, and i’ve got high hopes for making progress in the upcoming term.

we have consensus!

Tuesday, Mar 27. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

results

the elections are over, and i’m happy to say the constitution was ratified.

and yes, i was elected to the OGB. thank you to everyone who voted for me; i’ll do my best not to screw up.

congratulations to james, alanc, casper, glynn, rich, and keith

all this time… i’ve been running linux

Sunday, Mar 25. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

who knew?

Murdock is being brought on board specifically to help market Sun’s Linux-based operating system, Solaris

sweethearts at the bar

Friday, Mar 23. 2007  –  Category: Musings

Wendy and I made a first pass at trying to plan the seating arrangements for our wedding last night…. on the whole, I think it turned out okay.

One problem is that our tables seat 10… and trying to accommodate all the necessary family relatives (”that have to be there”) at the head table brings us up to 12 people at the head table.

My solution was to break Wendy and I off into a sweetheart table (one of those small side tables that only seats 2)

Wendy pointed out we might not have room for a sweetheart table.

My proposal was then for the two of us to just sit at the bar.

java ain’t open source?

Monday, Mar 19. 2007  –  Category: OpenSource

you , my friend, are an idiot.

“I guess this shows my first point up as being a little inaccurate.”

Uh. No. My car coming with a 31mpg highway estimated mileage is a little inaccurate. You are a little inaccurate in the same way the Titanic’s calculations were a little inaccurate.

Update: I retract and apologise for my undeserved insult of Nick. My issue with his post still stands, but my name-calling was uncalled for. Leaving the original text (struckout) for posterity so all may view my immaturity ;-)…. (please see the comments below for more elaboration)

worth every penny…

Tuesday, Mar 13. 2007  –  Category: Musings

i’m such a sucker for these things….. and i always get them from geoff or jesse

too bad i can’t cash in. i need to remodel our kitchen.

Why you should vote for me.

Monday, Mar 12. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

…. and if you don’t want to - at least scroll to the end to see who I think you should vote for.

Glynn recently asked “Why should I spend one of my 7 votes on you?”

Good question. You should vote for me because I give a shit. I think I have a proven track record of working to make all things OpenSolaris-related better. As I mentioned in my nomination thread, I’m on the OpenSolaris Engineering team, and have been involved in pretty much all aspects of the project. I’ve sponsored putbacks to ON. I’ve worked on the website. I’ve worked on the SCM bits. I’ve worked on the mailing lists. I’ve broken websites. I’ve fixed websites. I’ve even touched Jive (and washed my hands in acid afterwards). I’ve been paged at 3am when the site is down. I’ve broken the site at 3am, and then been paged.

Anyway, clearly I’m involved in the project - and I’d like to be involved more in the governance. I understand what needs to be done more transparently, what needs to be external, etc. but more importantly - given my work in the Tonic team, I understand how things can fit into our operational structure and how things would need to be implemented.

I’ve setup bugs.grommit.com (an external Bugzilla) and gave space for cr.grommit.com (external code review - though really, dp did all the hard work there).

You can read my response to the DTrace community’s OGB questions if you want some more specific answers to more specific questions.

What would be my priorities? Looking at the list of priorities from the recent poll, I would put my highest as:

• Deploy a public defect management system
• Deploy a public RTI system
• Reorganize the existing community/project organization

The first two are clearly needed before we can have a fully open development process. The first benefits both committers and viewers, whereas the second benefits only committers - hence why I list them in that order. The third is desperately needed… looking at our mess of communities and projects is clearly evidence of that. We need to cleanup grandfathered communities that should be projects, we need a clearer hierarchy of what should be a community and what should be a project, and I think we also need a stricter affiliation/endorsement (so that all projects are tied to a community).

It also looks like people are posting quick bios, so here’s mine: I did my BS & MS in Computer Science at UC San Diego, graduating in 2003. I joined the Solaris Kernel Test group, and worked there for a couple of years before joining the kernel development group as part of the OpenSolaris Engineering team. My biggest area of current expertise is probably in the SCM area, having been involved in the SCM infrastructure deployment and I’m currently leading the SCM Migration project in the effort to move ON from Teamware/SCCS to Mercurial.

…. and lastly. If you don’t want to vote for me, at least listen to who I think you should vote for.

• Keith Wesolowski - not only does he give a shit, he knows this shit. seriously, he helped write the draft for the constitution, and his thoughts on governance are hands down the most well thought out I’ve read.
• Michelle Olsen - it’s important to me that the OGB properly represents the non-technical aspects to the project. Docs are a key component, and Michelle has been heavily involved in the project.
• Glynn Foster - he brings the awesome. no seriously. plus he brings the experience of working with a large open source project’s foundation board
• Ben Rockwood - he’s one of the originals, he’s passionate about this stuff, and he’s always been heavily involved in all aspects of the project.

building & deploying OpenSolaris presentation

Thursday, Mar 8. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

here is a copy of my presentation on building and deploying OpenSolaris that i gave at Tech Days in Kuala Lumpur this week..

what a weekend

Thursday, Mar 1. 2007  –  Category: Outdoors, Travel

i still miss that utah snow

erik: you threw an awesome bachelor party. it was everything i thought it’d be…. 3 days of kick-ass powder. it was great to just be able to ride hard non-stop and then crash in the hot tub and chow down afterwards.

thanks again everyone for coming - i had a blast…. the riding was great, the snow was amazing, the food was heavenly (from the goat cheese ravioli…mmmm…droool…. even to the corn dogs), the drink was plentiful, and the company was brilliant.

even if i did “crap my pants”

cheers, steve da pimp

(thanks for taking the photos dan!)

OpenSolaris/Solaris Relationships, updated

Thursday, Mar 1. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

Many thanks to Tim for iterating with me on a revised diagram showing the relationship between OpenSolaris and Sun’s Solaris.

This updated version more properly reflects that Solaris 10 comes from a separate source tree - but that backports of OpenSolaris features are pulled into Solaris 10 for patches and updates. It also reflects that Solaris 10 was the initial “seed” for the OpenSolaris source (mostly true, the actual seed was Nevada - which is why Solaris 10 is kept as a parallel source tree).

You can see my original post here