I’ve been slacking on my blogging duties… with the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05, the OpenSolaris Developers Summit, and CommunityOne I should be blogging more than ever, but life has taken presidency for a short while. I do intend to catch up, but I’ll start with a general update.

Things progress very well at Joyent. Cloud Computing is the new big thing and we’re right there in the pioneering pack, which is exciting. Its a lot of work though, we’re pushing hard as always and its time consuming but it is rewarding work.

On the home front, spending time with the family is always a struggle, especially over the last 2 months with travel and conferences, so I’ve been trying to spend all the time I can with the kids and away from the keyboard.

In addition to that, we’ve been living in a rental house in Fremont for the last 5 years, about 2 weeks ago we got a 60 eviction notice. Apparently the owner, who moved to Beijing when we moved in, wants to come back to live in the Bay Area for the summer. We’re fairly certain that he’s really trying to get us out and fix up the place a bit to raise the rent, but its neither here nor there. We’ve wanted to buy a house, but frankly can’t afford one in the Bay Area where $500,000 buys you a fixer-upper in a bad neighborhood… so we’re taking the plunge and moving to Tracy where really excellent houses can be had for under $300,000. Its about 45 miles east of the Bay Area just inside the Central Valley, but thankfully I don’t have to commute daily, and the likelyhood that I’d have to take a job where I did so is more and more remote as companies increasingly have flexible schedules and such. There are downsides to be sure, but the upside far outweighs them and we’re happy to not have to leave the state, as Tamarah and I are both California natives.

The process of buying a home is new to us, so much time is being spent traveling out there to better learn the town, selection of homes, researching price and value, researching mortgages, finances, etc. We put in an offer on a home Sunday and hope to get acceptance shortly in order to move before our 60 days is up, so expect that I may become less visible over the next 2 months as we become consumed with home buying, moving out of our rental and into the new home. For any of my Christian brothers and sisters, the Lord seems to be behind this move but we appreciate prayers.

As far as OpenSolaris is concerned, there are things happening in the OGB, namely a re-org, that will have a wide impact. I am trying my best to stay out of these matters currently. I have very strong feelings about it, but there are 7 people on the board elected by the community… I was not one of them. I have to trust that our board will do what is best for the community and to that end I’m staying out of it entirely as long as I can. I’ve already started to send mail to the list on more than one occasion and stopped before I hit send.

Where I am going to focus my free software efforts is the OpenSolaris Docs Community. I won’t go into my feelings about Indiana, but the 6 month cycle will solve a wide variety of problems for docs development and I intend to take advantage of it. We’ll be having a “leadership meeting” via ConCall this week (see the docs-discuss list for details) where I hope we can pull together more tightly and coordinate efforts moving forward.

In terms of cuddletech… I want to blog about Indiana and the new Image Packaging System (IPS) which I believe are very poorly documented at present. I’m still researching things and hope to deliver better documentation on IPS via this blog very soon.

And as for this blog itself, the spammers are back with gusto, and I so no more reason to avoid dumping my current blogging software (Pivot) for WordPress, Mephisto, or something more comprehensive. I’d like search that worked, CAPTCHA protection, improved spam handling, better performance, and plugins for OpenID and such and I’m ready to make the jump. I’ve put it off for a long time because its just time consuming putting redirections and such in place to ensure my current RSS feed isn’t sacrificed. Home and work have just been more important.

In closing… if you haven’t downloaded Nine Inch Nails newest album “The Slip”, Trent is offering it for free, in its entirety. FLAC is available just as it was for Ghosts, so enjoy the goodness of lossless free audio. Beides just being free, its a really great album, far better than “With Teeth” imho.