Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I, for one, welcome our new database-selling overlords.

In all honesty, I'm glad this regulatory dance is over. We've all been having a little itch in our brains about this. Even if any of us have had real work to do, we've been at least a little distracted by by this whole acquisition uncertainty.

Well, we're finally part of Oracle now, and I think that's pretty cool. Larry E. wants to butt heads with IBM and HP directly, and quite honestly, we at Sun have been doing that on-and-off for at least my not-quite-14-years here. Now that this uncertainty has been removed, we can at least narrow the uncertainty to any internal-to-Oracle decisions, which given certain statements both in the past and yesterday seem pretty encouraging, at least from my engineering perspective.

Jonathan said we should light a candle for Sun. As a prank gift for my 40th birthday, I got a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English. I think instead I will pour that 40 for Sun.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Wanna help your Girl Scouts? Not unless you have Windows. :-P

My wife is the "cookie mom" for our twin girls who are in Daisy Scouts. She was very surprised when she logged in to the regional Girl Scouts cookie site (URL withheld in case any rabid fanboys do something stupid), and discovered that apparently, she needs to use Windows and Internet Explorer.

Their user documentation says: "We do not provide Mac support," and "Use any (non-Mac) computer at home or at work or at the local library." Does this mean they support OpenSolaris, Linux, or *BSD? Naaah, didn't think so.

We're a no-Windows household. We have three Macs, one work-issued OpenSolaris laptop, and a homebuilt OpenSolaris server. Especially in this age of people understanding vendor lock-in as a Bad Idea (TM), I'm shocked and appalled.

I'm going to forward this to a few Mac sites, and maybe slashdot. I'm sure nothing's going to change, but at least this should be discussed a bit, no?

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

IKEv2 project page updated

The IKEv2 project page on opensolaris.org now has links to both an early-revision design document, and a webrev pointer.