that’s whacked

photos, photos, photos

Sunday, Jun 24. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Photos

i’m finally getting around to uploading the mass of photos i’ve had waiting on multiple memory cards.

first off, photos from our wedding…. i uploaded the metric buttload (i’m sure that’s an SI unit, no?) of all our wedding photos to our album here. there are two subalbums which contain the thousands of photos our photographer took, but i also highlighted the ~120 i thought were the best in the main album

i’ve also uploaded the several hundred photos i took during our honeymoon split up into the various cities we visited. i still need to upload photos from taiwan, and our reception in Hualien. i’ll get to that soon, i promise.

last weekend, i went to the OpenSolaris picnic that ben and tamarah put on in Sunnyvale and took a few photos there, too.

and finally, i just uploaded some photos of our kitchen now that we’re all done remodeling. you can see what it looked like before here and here. and here’s what it looks like now!. we knocked out the wall separating the kitchen/living room and it opened up the space a lot.

Bad news for Isis :(

Friday, Jun 15. 2007  –  Category: Pets

Those of you who know Wendy and I know that we are crazy about our beagles. We love those stubborn stupid lazy hound dogs even when they’ve cleaned out our fridge, drank my whiskey, and in general done something stupid whenever their noses have led them into trouble.

So we were really bummed today to hear from our vet that Isis’ recent bladder problems are due to a large (2.3cm in diameter) tumour growing just outside her bladder. It looks like she has some sort of bladder cancer.

I picked her up from the vet, took her home, took the rest of the afternoon off and took her out to play and give her treats (to make up for her not getting breakfast this morning)

I have to say I wasn’t prepared for this. I’m not naive, I knew Isis would pass one day, but I expected her to live for at least a few more years (she’s nine). The life expectancy (without surgery) for her is about 200 more days. Given she’s had these symptoms for about a month already, we’re expecting we only have about 5 or 6 more months with our favourite beagle… and whenever I think about that I get choked up a bit.

We’ll be looking into the surgical option, but the vet said the tumour is in a pretty high risk area to operate and it may not extend her life that much. If that’s the case, I think we’ll give her some medicine to ease the pain (the vet said it shouldn’t be bad), and let her live out her remaining days with lots of food and love. (and she will get LOTS of food) We’re officially stopping her training, and she’ll get to lick the ice cream bowl from now on.

I’m pretty bummed out…. I can’t believe how attached I am to that little prima donna. I’m gonna miss her an awful lot.

USB pole dancer?

Wednesday, Jun 13. 2007  –  Category: Linkage, Musings, OpenSolaris

for only $25

… wonder if it’s supported under Solaris?

… wonder if it presents itself as an HID (human interface device)?

hanako oku

Monday, Jun 11. 2007  –  Category: Music

on our honeymoon, wendy and i spent a couple of nights in tokyo. on one of the nights, as we passed through the Shinjuku station, we heard a really innocent female voice singing. and innocent is probably about the best word i can describe it with… especially as it floated across an insanely busy metro station.

in the middle of the metro plaza she’d setup an speaker/amp, hooked up to her electric keyboard and microphone and she was singing and playing away. we were absolutely mesmerised by her voice and ended up staying for about 25 minutes or so listening to her perform.

after she was done, she sold a few CDs (which we bought), and that was about the end of that. i ended up looking her up on the net and ended up downloading a few more tunes and buying another CD.

her name is Hanako Oku, you can see one of her music videos here on YouTube.

Indiana, and mixed messaging

Monday, Jun 4. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

Indiana

I’m a little late to the Indiana party, having just recently returned from vacation, and it’s taken me a few days to try and parse the nuclear explosion of a thread that is still spawning mail on opensolaris-discuss, but here are my thoughts so far (for the two people who have asked for my opinion - ahh the beauty of blogging)

I support Project Indiana’s goals, and I think the idea of having an alternate distribution to tackle those goals is fine. If Solaris marketing wants to develop this distribution, more power to them. If Ian Murdock is to be the ’sole arbiter’ of contentious decisions, then that’s fine too - that’s nothing more than someone filling the role of tech/project lead.

In previous postings, I have supported the idea of a reference distribution: a distribution that takes all of the various consolidations currently available on opensolaris.org and bundles them together into an installable image. I.e.: Solaris Express without the encumbered and non-redistributable components. Thinking about it more, this only worked because (for the most part) we had non-competing technologies; i.e.: no competitor to ON, no competitor to Xorg, no competitor to JDS. This isn’t true anymore (the most obvious examples being the KDE and XFCE projects happening on opensolaris.org). Putting my Sun employee hat on, I still think it’d be nice to have a non-encumbered and freely redistributable Solaris Express if only to more easily evangelise Sun’s distribution of OpenSolaris; but I think the idea of a reference distribution quickly falls apart as more diversity occurs at opensolaris.org.

I don’t support Indiana being called “OpenSolaris”, or being deemed the “reference distribution”, for a few reasons:

1. It’s unfair (anti-competitive?) to other non-Sun distributions given that Sun owns the trademark “OpenSolaris” &tm;. They aren’t allowed to use it in their distributions’ names (without Sun’s express written consent).
2. Sun calling their distribution “OpenSolaris” puts the non-Sun distributions at a disadvantage since they will forever be trying to come up with messaging explaining why their distribution is OpenSolaris, but not “OpenSolaris” &tm;.
3. It’s confusing messaging. For the past 2 years, we’ve emphasised that OpenSolaris is not a binary installable. It’s a collection of source code from which other people/organisations/companies derive distributions which people can install. This leads to part 2 of my blog post which I’ll post after I’m done with Indiana.

So, there it is. I think the goals of Project Indiana are noble and good. I think the project should be approved, and I would love to see progress happen on it. I don’t think it should be allowed to co-opt the OpenSolaris community though, and I don’t believe Indiana should be treated preferentially or differently from other OpenSolaris-derived distributions (including Solaris Nevada/Express).

Mixed Messaging

As I noted earlier, I think delivering a distribution called “OpenSolaris” is a mistake in part because it further confuses the message we’ve been trying to deliver: OpenSolaris is a technology source code base. But in truth, we’ve been delivering mixed messages for a while now. Both Sun executives and engineers have been overloading the term OpenSolaris to refer to so many things now, it’s no wonder users are confused. I don’t envy the job Sun marketing folks have in trying to distill the “What is OpenSolaris” message succintly.

So let’s all agree (for the moment) that the messaging is confusing to users. Do we make an about face and redefine what OpenSolaris is in order to clarify? Or do we crack down and try to enforce the correct definition and educate users? In order to educate users, we’d need to educate people internally - and well, that’s hard… so I can appreciate marketing wanting to just redefine what OpenSolaris is.

Hopefully Glynn won’t mind me citing him here, but he brought up a good counterpoint: Debian has the word “Debian” trademarked, but that hasn’t stopped Ubuntu from “building a better Debian”. It’s a good argument, and one that I haven’t finalised my thoughts on. I’d like to hear more opinions before I do, so if you have thoughts to offer, please do so here.