Hello again
Well, it's not quite six months since I last wrote here.
I've moved from Canberra to Sydney. It's larger, warmer, closer to the rest of the world, more busy, more expensive, more compact and connected. There's lots of good food: restaurants, markets, organic greengrocers and butchers.
It's a good feeling to again be in a city where you can surprise yourself by walking or driving somewhere new.
I'm trying to hire a few good people at Canonical.
posted Wed 28 Jun 2006 in /personal | link
A beginning
I have started work at Canonical. Canonical is developing a free operating system based on the Linux kernel and Debian called Ubuntu. Of it, they say
Ubuntu will always be free of charge; Canonical will never charge licence fees for Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is shipped in stable and regular release cycles; a new release will be shipped every six months.
Canonical is entirely committed to the principles of Open Source software development; no part of Ubuntu will ever be proprietary, and we encourage people to use it, improve it and pass it on.
Ubuntu is suitable for both desktop and server use. The current Ubuntu release features the GNOME desktop version 2.8, includes the Linux kernel version 2.6 and supports Intel x86, AMD64 (Hammer) and PowerPC architectures. Ubuntu includes more than 1000 pieces of software, from word processing and spreadsheet applications to internet access applications, web server software, email software and games.
I am not working directly on Ubuntu, but rather on improving the tools used by open source developers inside and outside of Canonical. The charter is to build a distributed version-control system that open-source hackers will love to use.
I have been watching and reporting on distributed version control for a few years. Much brilliant work has been done, but I don't think there is anything that is totally satisfactory, something that everyone can love. Yes, the field is crowded, but I think we may yet add something useful. To a large extent this is about finding the best features of existing projects, and trying to make them cleanly coexist.
Thank you all for your kind words.
posted Tue 1 Feb 2005 in /personal | link
Phil Agre on professional leadership
How to Be a
Leader in Your Field — might also be subtitled How to
find interesting work
.
posted Thu 12 Aug 2004 in /personal | link
Interview in Builder Magazine
ZDNet is reprinting an interview I did with Brendon Chase for Builder magazine. I'm pretty happy with how it came out:
Microsoft are now shipping GPLed software! That’s a little amusing after all the nasty things they've said about the GNU GPL, but it's basically a good thing. Just about all technology companies are now working in open source to at least a small degree. This is a remarkable change from just five years ago, when most people were very skeptical that it would ever take off. Seeing Microsoft ship open source software is a bit like seeing the Berlin Wall fall. After so many years of denial and propaganda, they're finally saying (very quietly) “you know, a bit of freedom can be good”.
What advice would you give to other developers who want to get involved in open source software?
MP: A good way to start is to report or try to fix bugs that you find when you're using free software. You can learn a bit about how the software works and how the community works, and you might even get your bug fixed. Free software maintainers will often be very happy to hear problem reports, if you include useful information and do it politely.
That page come up with a Microsoft ad saying that Windows is 11%-22% cheaper than Linux. 11%, eh? Not "10%", or "about 10%", but exactly 11%. That's a pretty precise number. It's almost like they just made it up or something.
posted Tue 30 Mar 2004 in /personal | link
social climbing
Went indoor rock climbing. It was good. I got up some walls I wouldn't have thought I could. I feel much more sporty now than I did a couple of years ago. Now I do some kind of exercise every day or two: swimming, netball, walking, now climbing. This is still perhaps not very sporty by some standards. I don't know what changed in me.
posted Tue 16 Mar 2004 in /personal | link
Kablooey
Some kind of bug in LVM or parted blew away the root partition on one of our servers. My fault really: running unstable complex software on a machine without adequate backups. Life being what it is, I was in the process of installing more disk so that we could make full backups.
What I *should* have done was keep it simple: bring the machine down and boot from a bootable business card, rather than doing things with any partitions live. Not use LVM, but rather just put new partitions on each whole disk and use traditional unix symlinks to glue them into the right places.
How do you back up a fraction of a gigabyte of slow-changing data to CDs? I need some kind of knapsack-algorithm to split up the files...
posted Fri 19 Dec 2003 in /personal | link
life_state
Stephane is away for Thanksgiving; we'll spend Christmas with my family. hack mode.
I'm working out good routes to drive to Noosa and to Adelaide for LCA. I'm pretty keen to go along the Great Ocean Road and just generally for S and myself to see some more bits of Australia.
Went go-kart racing with the boys today. Good fun: no torque, no traction, poor brakes. Pretty tiring. My car felt silky smooth afterwards: remarkable that you can make a 1000kg car feel lighter and easier to control than a 50kg kart.
I've been listening a lot to soundlab. It's good. JJJ during the daytime can tend to get stuck on "alternative top 40", but soundlab's playing some pretty novel beats.
I went for a ride with Michael down into Namadgi National Park. It still looks a bit desolate after the fires at the start of 2003. We went up towards Yankee Hat, and visited the Orroral Valley tracking station that was used for the first satellites. There are no buildings or equipment there anymore, just concrete foundations and some plaques, and an overgrown garden. You can see blue 60s tiles where the bathrooms used to be, and a little courtyard where the rocket scientists probably had their morning tea. It would be a good place to go for a picnic.
I swapped onto Michael's YZF-6R for part of the way back. I think you've been on it once? It's very different: it feels so tiny! It feels like the weight you have to lift to get it off the sidestand is half as much as mine, probably because of the outright mass and also a different center of gravity. It's very sweet. It's like a tiny little glass of honey liquer. It revs up very freely, and the sitting position is very comfortable, though the seat is hard.
Speaking of revvy, BBC World plays a little motoring show here called Top Gear. I first ran into this flipping through the channels of the United in-flight show, and it was really the first time I realized there was more to BBC World than just the Economist-rewrites-CNN of their normal newsfeed. The content is pretty amusing: guys hooning around British backgrounds in modern and classic cars. I think I find the presentation even more interesting though: there are some pretty glossy camera and digital tricks happening. I think I need to ask my media studies expert. I'd say it's consumerist porn, but I've never heard of porn being quite so well and lovingly filmed.
posted Sun 7 Dec 2003 in /personal | link
0wn3d
Ben has been acquired by a cat, and so have I.
posted Mon 1 Dec 2003 in /personal | link
Worth waiting for
Credit: Chris Yeoh
posted Thu 19 Jun 2003 in /personal | link
more photos
posted Tue 27 May 2003 in /personal/roc2003 | link
I hate paperwork. I have been cleaning up my big box of old bank statements, receipts, etc. It makes me grumpy.
Aside from that, a pretty good weekend.
Almost all the leaves on the deciduous trees are gone now. It's getting almost too cold to wear summer motorcycle gloves.
posted Mon 19 May 2003 in /personal | link
jellyfish and duck
This weekend: ate jellyfish and duck salad, debated the existence of a universal aesthetic, decorated the Tiki Room, read Chick tracts and a history of them, and more. Very happy.
posted Sun 11 May 2003 in /personal | link
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