… stevel has left the building

well, that’s it. at 7pm, after sobering up from many quickie-shots of goodbye scotch (a very fine smooth Glenfiddich 18 — thanks to johansen for that ;-)), i left MPK17.

it’s been a sad couple of days boxing up my office, taking down the flags, cleaning things up, and seeing my phone disconnected (seriously: fastest servicedesk ticket response time ever. too bad i won’t be around to rate their service per their usual survey thing)

saying g’bye to all the friends i’ve made over the years has been rough. fortunately, SF is merely a hop, skip, shuttle, and train ride away from MPK; so i hope to continue to see lots of people and keep in touch. i can’t thank everyone enough for how much they’ve rocked and made my life so much fun for the past 4 years. but here’s a very very short list.

to those of you who think sappiness is lame: piss off and skip the rest of the entry.

first off, thanks to Bonnie & Karyn; i was fortunate to have the two best managers ever. i know that not only because i believe it strongly, but because others have told me so. you guys are amazing. your honest advice, and unwavering support means a lot.

thanks to Russ for fighting so tenaciously with ITops to get me un-borgified into ’stevel’ in my first week.

thanks to the entire Tonic team for making the past 2 years so amazing. Mike, Derek, Alan, Teresa, Linda, Eric, Jim… you guys fight day and night to make sure OpenSolaris ain’t teh sux0r and will never get enough credit for the work you do. love you guys, and sorry i’m bailing.

to everyone on #onnv: you crack me up. i’ll miss the NC-17 madness.

to mjnelson, dduvall, dmarker, & JBeck: for any future Mercurial madness that may be my fault: I apologise…. and thanks for putting up with me.

to everyone I pestered for code review, RTI, or to open up their process/code: thanks for listening, being patient, occasionally ignoring me, and then giving in and helping me.

to dp: you do too have a sense of humour. cheers.

sch and geoff: better mentors and leaders i never had. thanks for all the advice you’ve given me, and thank you in advance for all the advice i will continue to seek from you in the future.

johansen: the scotch rocked. i never cease to crack up when i think of the ‘welcome to jamaica’ joke. thanks for showing me that there was someone in the kernel willing to come down to my level (or lower)

patrick & sara: you guys helped me decouple the words ‘marketing’ and ‘weenie’. sara: thanks for all the swag over the years. patrick: yer still a liverpool weenie… told you you couldn’t have heinze.

gman: ogb20074eva! thanks for the support, for the many IM conversations, and for willing to stick your neck out. opensolaris needs more people like you.

and lastly to jjc & esaxe: pretty much everything i needed to know about kernel hacking, i learned from you guys. thanks for recruiting me eric, convincing me to join Sun, and then reducing the suckiness in me.

so that was a long-winded post, and i’m sorry i didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to everyone in person or thank you all for everything you guys have done for me - but i’ll see you around in the community (hopefully at the summit, eh?).

cheers and rock on.

….. now where’d i put that bottle of cachaça… (thanks acruz!)

2 comments September 27th, 2007

we wants the x4150

Looks like Sun just unveiled the x4150

sigh. we wants it, yes we’s do.

too bad i won’t be around to exercise any sort of employee discount. i’ve been lusting after a 1U x64 machine with a decent amount of storage to reduce my rack usage - and this one fits the bill perfectly

1 comment September 25th, 2007

twitter schmitter

so i confess. i totally don’t get the whole “micro-blogging” thing on twitter. i guess it’s convenient for blogging random little snippets here and there from your phone - but seriously, i swear, half the people i know doing so are doing it from their iPhones (yeah you Sara), or their otherwise keyboard-enabled smart phone and could just as easily blog it on their main blog.

is it for status updates of what people are doing?

am i going to twitter “taking a piss. why do people miss?”?

or “cleaning up my dog’s puke cause they ate dog poop and grass”?

i totally don’t get it.

/me ain’t hip. (and not just cause i emote with IRC actions either)

so here’s my micro blog: “woke up today totally into the idea of green t-shirts. need to get more somehow”

7 comments September 20th, 2007

voices of the lifestream

ocremix has always interested me… what can i say, i’m a fan of video game music i guess.

what kid from the 80s/90s can’t remember their favourite video game songs? everytime i went paintballing in college, strains of Contra went through my brain. i remember wandering through a dark castle in Switzerland and the Castlevania soundtrack seriously popped into my head. and everytime i smashed my head into a brick wall, Super Mario wafted through my ears.

okay, maybe not the last one - but i did have the SMB themesong as my ringtone for quite a while.

anyway, 1997 was memorable for a few things for me. graduating high school was one i guess. but much more memorable was Final Fantasy 7. probably one of the best Final Fantasies ever, and it had a truly amazing soundtrack. Square has always had good soundtracks, but for me, FF7 was the best. so i was super-psyched to see ocremix announce its Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream remix album, a whopping 4 CDs of video game musical goodness.

what video game geek can’t love that?

anyway, after finally grabbing the 2.3 GB torrent, i’m just finally starting to check it out now. so far, it’s been great. Deliverance of the Heart is a great track.

Add comment September 20th, 2007

“We only part to meet again”

I’m leaving Sun.

It’s been a gut-wrenching decision, but I got an offer to join a startup in SF that was just too interesting and exciting to pass up.

What’s more important is what I’m not leaving. I’m certainly not leaving the OpenSolaris community (while my participation may dial down somewhat, I still fully intend on being active in the lists, and serving in the OGB.) I’m not leaving the many many friends I’ve made in the past 4+ years working at Sun.

I believe very strongly in OpenSolaris; I believe that it will succeed, and that it will be a disruptive influence in both the proprietary/closed software world, as well as the open source world. I’m sad that I won’t have the opportunity to work on it as my day job anymore, but I will still eagerly participate and watch the progress from the outside as a non-Sun participant and contributor now.

It’s sad, and a little scary to leave a place that I’ve not only become comfortable at - but one that I love. I’ve loved working at Sun, I’ve had a blast, learned an immense amount of stuff, worked with some of the smartest people I know, and gotten to work on one of the coolest open source projects around.

I guess I feel that sometimes you have to spread your wings, leave the nest for a bit, and find a new nest.

16 comments September 17th, 2007

tech days presentation from last week

a little late, but here’s my presentation that I gave last week at the Tech Days in Boston.

the other talks are available at the Boston Tech Days page on opensolaris.org

Add comment September 16th, 2007

opensolaris kills hotel key cards

… well. opensolaris flash drives with magnetic clasps kept in the same pocket as your hotel key card, anyway.

i went through 3 hotel key cards before realising this.

Add comment September 11th, 2007

a party in 783 frames (78.3 seconds)

we had a party to celebrate Yukon’s 40th birthday last night. i’d been playing around with my new webcam (Quickcam Orbit MP, which aside from pan/tilt functionality - seems to work great under Solaris). i forgot i’d left it on and it was taking a shot every 30 seconds.

this morning i grabbed a copy of swftools, which also built just fine under Solaris and whipped up this following basic flash movie with the 783 frames the webcam took last night.

(i used jpeg2swf and set a rate of 10fps, and yes - it’ll loop around…)

the party started at 4pm, so most people were out on the back porch while we were grilling and drinking. as the night came in and things cooled down we headed in doors.

4 comments September 9th, 2007

Bose™ is in the business of being a trademark nazi

So I listed a Bose™ SoundDock™ on eBay with a photo of the SoundDock that I took. I then listed the following description:

Brand new, still shrink-wrapped and in box Bose SoundDock, dock system/speaker for the Apple iPod. Fits any generation iPod with the included 3 dock inserts. This one is the white one.

And I was informed that my listing was cancelled because Bose requested it be pulled for a trademark violation.

??? I can’t see how I violated trademarks given that I gave it my own description and used my own photo - but well, that sucks. I’m following up with Bose to see if it was just flagged overzealously by some trademark nazi (human or robot) on their end, or if I really can’t sell Bose equipment on eBay.

17 comments September 4th, 2007

isohunt seeding Belenix ISOs

happened to be visiting my favourite BitTorrent site, isohunt, this weekend and saw the following on their frontpage:

Since the nice folks over at Genunix.org the makers of Belenix (an OpenSolaris distribution) have decided to use us to distribute their torrents, and their trackers were failing under the load, I’ve decided to upload their torrent to torrentbox.com with us listed as an additional tracker, hopefully this will help out the folks at tuxdistro.com.

Anyway, I’ve been nice enough to ‘donate’ one of our machines (a02.ext.isohunt.com) as a seed box and one of my personal machines as well, let’s hope that it helps get this distro out into the public eye.

The isoHunt hosted .torrent files are located at: link and link2 if you’d like to download them and give ‘em a try.

A personal note to folks who think that isoHunt and the bittorrent protocol don’t have significant non-infringing uses: pull your heads out, the above project is exactly the type of thing that we’re here for.

permalink here

How cool is that?

2 comments September 4th, 2007