that’s whacked

Dear Sun, learn to trust your own community.

Thursday, Jan 15. 2009  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Sun

Dear Sun,

I feel like we have trust issues.  Everytime I think we start to be good, and do good things… you go and do something to turn a good thing bad.  Let’s take this latest case of your “Free CD” button at the top of the OpenSolaris.org homepage.  I know you meant well… but see, you actually came out looking like… well, kind of an asshat jerk.

I’m really disappointed that you have, yet again, chosen to blatantly disregard the community process setup by the OpenSolaris Governing Board, in partnership with Sun representatives themselves.

To be clear, I think a free CD button is not a bad idea.  While I disagree with the current page (let’s throw a big blank looking page with a login that doesn’t use the same login as the previous page!), I think the concept isn’t bad.  I’m all for furthering adoption of OpenSolaris technologies.

What I think is a huge wad of community FAIL is how you’ve trampled all over the process that you yourself helped setup.  I’m of course, talking about the website review process.  The OGB chartered the Website Community Group to own the homepage.  Informally, the Website CG was given the responsibility (on behalf of the entire OpenSolaris.org membership) of updating the homepage with fresh content.

You’ve screwed up quite a few times before… the first time resulted in the establishment of a Website Editorial Board (which became a Review Committee) to review changes made to the homepage of OpenSolaris.org.  The second time resulted in Sun having a “Sponsored Links” section of the homepage where it could freely publish content without having it go through review.  Through both of these incidents, we communicated with you via the Sun/OGB liason, and worked out a policy and process agreeable to all parties.

We know the review process works because the Website CG (courtesy of content leader Michelle Olson) formulates, reviews, and publishes content every month in a timely and successful fashion.  The Website CG follows the process, and gets things done.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m finding it harder and harder to trust you these days with respect to anything that might require community input.  For every good thing you do with open source (GPL OpenOffice?  Great!), you shoots itself in the foot on others (sh*t on the community?  Boo!).

So here’s an open letter to the nameless executives pulling the puppet strings from behind the curtain: please… just follow the process that YOU agreed to.  It’s not hard.  It’s quite easy.  Your own employees are quite familiar with it.  Trust your employees, your engineers, and better yet… start to trust in your community.  You’d receive far less backlash and hate if you actually played by the rules that you yourself laid down.

Love,

Your biggest fan, Steve.

YABS on Songbird on OpenSolaris

Wednesday, Dec 17. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Photos, Songbird, Sun

YABS on Songbird on OpenSolaris

I just noticed that the YABS Feather looks awesome on Songbird on OpenSolaris.  The color and style of the skin just fit really well in terms of the blue highlights matching with the blue OpenSolaris default theme.

YABS is, quite possibly, my mostest favouritest Songbird Feather.

RIP Gene

Monday, Sep 29. 2008  –  Category: Sun

As Geoff posted, Gene Saunders just passed away recently. I never met him in person, but only knew him from our SecularLiberalGeeks list, where I always appreciated (and got a great laugh) out of his views, links, and commentary he passed on.

He’ll be missed.

Tired of it all.

Thursday, Feb 14. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Sun

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.

… stevel has left the building

Thursday, Sep 27. 2007  –  Category: Sun

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!)

we wants the x4150

Tuesday, Sep 25. 2007  –  Category: Sun

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

“We only part to meet again”

Monday, Sep 17. 2007  –  Category: Musings, OpenSolaris, Sun

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.

marsh-ed?

Tuesday, Apr 17. 2007  –  Category: Musings, Pets, Sun, Travel

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.

Deskbar SWAN handlers

Wednesday, Apr 4. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Sun

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.

i’ve been excluded from being included

Friday, Jan 26. 2007  –  Category: Sun

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.