We’ve had a kinda-hectic few weeks over the last month, with rellies visiting, events to attend, bbqs to host…. So it was really nice to be able to wander off to our local warehouse of all things home improvement (ok, Bunnings) and pick up a plant, a few 20kg bags of white stones, some sugar cane mulch, tomato seedlings, a 9L (2 Imperial gallons, of course) watering can, a cat flap and an angle grinder.Angle grinder? Yup, to excise a suitable piece of grille from the security screen on the back door so we could teach codercat about her new cat flap.The plant (something with purple flowers) went into the side garden bed and the bags of stones went along the ground there – made an immediate improvement to that side of the house.The sugar cane mulch went onto my little proto-vegie patch after I’d -installed the tomato seedlings, and it was really nice to be able to use the water from our tank to get everything watered in properly.Today, joy of joys, the water in the pool was finally warm enough that J and I were able to spend about an hour swimming around, enjoying a resort-like lifestyle. With the days getting longer and the heat + humdity increasing, I can see many hours being spent in the pool. When we were figuring out what features we wanted in a house, having a pool wasn’t #1 on the list, but I’m very very very very glad that our buyer’s agent found this place for us. It’s been a great choice.

I mentioned a few days ago at work that one project I have on my plate is to integrate DLG‘s mfi(7d) driver into OpenSolaris.I’m getting the ARC materials together now and if you are using mfi(7d) on Solaris or OpenSolaris I would love to hear from you – just add a comment to this entry, or email me at j m c p@s u n . c o m with the subject “mfi(7d) usage”.If you can spare the cycles (and it’s ok to provide it) I would also love to get prtconf -v output from your system which uses mfi(7d) so that I can make sure I’ve got all the necessary PCI vendor and device IDs ready to add to the packaging info.Thankyou very much for your help.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[mfi], topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris], topic:{Technorati}[ARC], topic:{Technorati}[dlg], topic:{Technorati}[MegaRAID], topic:{Technorati}[LDI Logic], topic:{Technorati}[MegaRAID SAS], topic:{Technorati}[HP], topic:{Technorati}[Dell]

I was alerted to the existence of Charles Firth’s new venture, Manic Times a few months ago, and saw an op-ed in today’s SMH which hinted that Manic Times was now up and running.Indeed it is, though in keeping with the Google philosophy of “everything we do is always in beta”, there’s a “BETA” watermark splashed across the masthead.No matter, there are plenty of articles there already, including one which I found very interesting – Top QC says Kevin fails his own character test.I’m seriously thinking about subscribing to the print edition.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[Charles Firth], topic:{Technrati}[Manic Times], topic:{Technrati}[The Chaser], topic:{Technrati}[The Chaser's War On Everything]

….because I’m not contracting any more – I’m a Sun employee again. It’ll take a little while to propagate through the various systems, but once that’s done I won’t have that darned “C” in front of my id. Joy! .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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I might even post an entry from b.s.c from time to time as well.I’m very happy to be back as an employee, and I’m really glad that I’m staying with the group I’ve been working with for the last 10 months – they’re a fantastic bunch of engineers and it’s a real pleasure to work with them.BTW: Note for anybody looking at my profile on LinkedIn: LinkedIn won’t acknowledge that timezones exist, so it won’t let me update my profile to be correct. I think I’ll have to wait until 00:01 on the 1st of September US/Pacific

I was reading the comments for this story on OSNews about some alleged Linux Driver Copyright Violation. It made me quite annoyed on two levels – firstly, that a “news” site which aspires to have some degree of journalistic integrity jumped off the deep end by posting the link to the claim, and secondly that people who I’m fairly sure are knowledgeable software developers preferred to rant in public about second-hand information rather than go to the source and find out for sure.Misinformation, FUD and raised blood pressure…. sounds like just another day in the Free vs Open software battleground. I’m sick of all this licensing argument, it gets in the way of engineering software and solutions which people can use.

While talking on #opensolaris this morning, I had a need to go and find the list of patches which are applicable for the Studio 11 compiler suite. After much searching (I wasn’t particularly focused on it, probably due to a lack of caffeine), I found the page I was looking for here.Remember that if you want to build OpenSolaris you’ll need to have the compilers patched to match the info in the README – scroll down to “Installing from source” and look at section 2.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris], topic:{Technorati}[Sun Studio Compilers], topic:{Technorati}[Studio 11], topic:{Technorati}[SUNWspro], topic:{Technorati}[sunsolve].

The Update CTeam Review didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d hoped, and we’ve got a bunch of AIs to follow up on. I don’t think we will have to have another meeting in order to get everything ticked off. I’m also not sure which build we’ll get into. I really wish we’d been able to get into Update 4.

In a matter of a few hours our team will be meeting with the Solaris 10 Update CTeam for a review of our backport.I’ve been driving this (generating IDRs, filling in the paperwork etc), and two minutes ago I just hit “send” on the email to send the final review materials off to the CTeam’s alias.I’m nervous, more nervous than I ever was when I took part in the NWSC CTeam! I know we’re well prepared, but there’s still that nervousness which I can’t quite get rid of.

Yesterday we finally got our act together to connect our 4KL water tank to the Onga TF30 pump that was delivered last week. Courtesy of come connectors and 20m of 3/4″ polypipe from TradeLink, as well as another 3m of polypipe from Bunnings we managed to bring the level up by about half of what we needed in around an hour. Not a spectacular fill rate, but not too bad either.And of course it started raining about half an hour after we turned off the pump at 1pm…. the rain is still going, tank is now more than half full again, and Archerfield AWS has had 32++mm since 0900 yesterday morning.It’s certainly not the drought-breaking rain we need, but it’s been long and steady and gentle so with any luck if the predicted heavy falls happen on Wednesday then that rain at least should go into the dams.W000t!**Update, 10am**: the pool is now more full than when we took possession of the property at the start of July – the rainfall since 1pm is now more than 3.5cm. We might even have to let some out at this rate!

A long-running project under the leadership of Roland Mainz in the OpenSolaris community has been the integration of ksh93 into the ON consolidation. I’m ecstatic to note that (courtesy of April) this project was putback into snv_72 on the weekend. (The logfile should be here in a few days). April sent a flag day message about it. With the integration, this marks the closure of phase #1 for ksh93 integration as covered by`Korn Shell 93 Integration – PSARC/2006/550`_/etc/ksh.kshrc for ksh93 – PSARC/2006/587 and`ksh93 Amendments – PSARC/2007/035`_Roll on phase 2!`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[ksh93], topic:{Technorati}[Roland Mainz], topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris], topic:{Technorati}[PSARC]