that’s whacked

Posts filed under 'Sun'

Tired of it all.

I was going to write a long-winded response to the ongoing trademark, naming cluster-fuck that is ~~Indiana~~ OpenSolaris, but frankly I’m tired. Instead I’ll give a +1 to benr’s response (yes I know it’s a cop-out, sorry).

I’m tired of Sun’s continuing ignorance in how to treat its open source community with some modicum of respect, I’m tired of Sun’s arrogance in taking upon itself to determine what’s best for the community (a community which Sun’s current executives are completely out of touch with). I’m tired of Sun executives not listening to the people in the trenches who work for them, who quite frankly, know a helluva lot more about this whole “open source” thing than they do. I’m tired of Sun not acting within the framework of the governance and constitution that it helped setup. I’m tired of Sun telling me it knows what’s best for me.

But on the flip side…

I’m tired of all the armchair-lawyers on ogb-discuss asserting they know more about trademark law than Sun’s lawyers, I’m tired of all the trolls who agitate for immediate heavy-handed responses without thinking through the ramifications of their actions. I’m tired of so-called user experts telling me they know what’s best for me too. I’m tired of idiots on the mailing lists painting Sun employees with a broad brush and slagging the very people who backed them up and supported the same ideas as them.

Yes. Sun fucked up (and continues to). Who hasn’t? Is a response warranted? Yes, I think so. Should that response be petty and childish? Sure, if we (the OGB and the OpenSolaris community, by extension) want to be perceived as petty and childish too.

So my general plea to Sun executives is: Listen to the very people you have tasked with helping you to understand what open source is, and how to develop an open and transparent developer community. You have smart people working for you and with you.

My general plea to the rest of the OpenSolaris community is: Have some empathy and take 30 seconds before you hit Send or Reply All and try to understand the other side’s view. Personal insults and accusations are unwarranted.

Okay that was more long-winded than I wanted to type. I’m off to recuperate with a bowl of pho, and a pint.

1 comment February 14th, 2008

… 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

“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

marsh-ed?

i’ve always wondered where the origin of the word swamped came from (as in “i’m so swamped with work”). why not marshed? i notice swamped does share some commonality with bogged, as in “i’m bogged down”.

but anyway, i digress.

i’m swamped, bogged, marshed, whatever…

the SCM Migration Project is predictably going slower than we planned. on the plus side, i’m seeing lots of interest from other engineers - but we haven’t been getting the internal resources we’d hoped for, so for now it’s primarily me, richlowe, and kupfer plowing ahead. we’ve picked up a couple guys from ERI that should help.

of course, the other major thing on my plate at the moment is my very-very-upcoming wedding (18 days!!!), so my days are oft filled with wedding errands and such.

so of course, with all this stuff going on in our lives… wendy and i thought it would be best to …. remodel our kitchen. a combination of a decent tax refund, and the realisation that the one-month estimate to remodel our kitchen (during which our house would be a disaster) coincided nicely with the one month of time we would be taking for our honeymoon and vacation. so now we’re rushing about trying to secure contractors, and get permits in the two weeks before we leave.

i feel like our lives our pure chaos right now. on the one hand, it’s hectic, crazy, and i’m getting crappy anxiety-ridden nights of sleep. but on the other hand, i’m really starting to appreciate the small quiet moments… like the 8 minutes i took after the electrician left today during which i just laid out on the sofa/futon with one beagle slumped across my feet and the other splayed out next to me resting her head on my chest. within 45 seconds, both were snoring. those 7 minutes and 15 seconds of blissful peace (i won’t say quiet, since they were filled with the snores of two hound dogs) and doing nothing but vegging felt great.

2 comments April 17th, 2007

Deskbar SWAN handlers

I wrote a couple of Deskbar handlers that I find incredibly useful in my day to day use at work on the SWAN. The first, Monaco simply adds a handler to open a bugID on Monaco. The second, NameX, does a query against the namex database to quickly lookup a user in the employee database to get their extension.

3 comments April 4th, 2007

i’ve been excluded from being included

we have an internal mailing list system where you can subscribe or unsubscribe from various lists. some lists require approval, not unlike Internet mailing lists. anyway, today i got the following email:

You have been declined from subscribing to the the Alias: InclusionExpansionProject_3

hrm. odd. i was excluded from being included in an “inclusion expansion” (which in and of itself, is an oddly opposingly-worded name) list that i never attempted to subscribe to in the first place.

anyway, just thought it was funny and odd.

Add comment January 26th, 2007

infoworld article on Sun

i don’t normally post these sorts of articles - but i have to admit, the last sentence of this article really got me excited:

Sun’s growth is good news for the entire industry. It proves, as I keep pointing out, that trends are useless in predicting the future. Find players with vision, drive and patience, mixed with a desire to please customers as well as shareholders, and it’s easy to pick the winners. Sun’s a winner.

Add comment September 14th, 2006

a tough day at work today…

for anyone not following the news and blogs, today was a big RIF day at SUNW. thankfully, nobody immediately under my director was affected (OpenSolaris and JDS are still around!). i’ll still be your ON delivery monkey for now.

sadly, many other groups and many good people did not escape unscathed.

just wanted to wish everyone who got caught up in the RIF everyone good luck, and ‘bon chance’. i can’t imagine what it’s like to be RIF’d, and i’m truly sorry to see so many good people go. i realise and understand the business decisions behind it, but it’s still painful.

like alcohol on a wound, it’s good in the long run - but boy does it hurt in the “right here, right now”.

anyway, i’m rambling. to the people i had the good fortune to know, and to the many many more i never had the pleasure of working with: thanks for everything you’ve done for Sun.

cheers, steve

Add comment August 3rd, 2006

sometimes i really truly hate ITOps

so on friday i was running a script out of my homedir. when i came back a few hours later i noticed a bunch of files missing… upon further investigation, i noticed a ton of files missing…. including my directory with all my opensolaris delivery scripts/stuff i’d written in the past 9 months.

i got freaked out and killed my script and sat there in stunned silence for about 15 minutes (well, not complete silence since i was bitching about it on #opensolaris). i then filed a ticket with ITOps to try and recover from a nightly backup.

i got a call about 10 minutes later from someone with ITOps in India who kept insisting on emailing me ‘ls’ output of my directory. i don’t need her to do that. i’m perfectly capable of doing an ls myself. she also kept trying to find out how i was connected to the SWAN (Sun’s network). she didn’t know what punchin was (our next generation VPN) and asked me a few times if i was VPN’d in (to which i replied yes, via punchin). she then asked me a what version of Windows i was running and what program was i using to connect. sigh.

anyway…nothing major was lost… i lost a few changes to some small scripts i use to deliver the nightly and build-synchronised deliveries, but nothing i can’t recreate in an hour or two. but this whole weekend i kept berating myself for writing and then running a script which had managed to trash my home directory. i felt pretty damn stupid.

until i check my email this morning and see:

Dear Jurassic users,

There was a rogue script run by ITOPS which deleted some of the files and directories in user home directories. We have disabled the script and are trying to figure out how to recover from this.

)(#!@&&#%&@#(*%&#!!!!

what the f.

this whole time i thought my script had gone insane and psycho and started trashing my home directory. turns out i was wrong. Sun ITOps had gone insane and psycho and started trashing my home directory.

i know people joke from time to time about their IT departments being unhelpful… we certainly have our fair share of disagreements with ITOps. but this is the first time i’ve genuinely felt like they were out to get me.