Tuesday June 21, 2005

Better Late Than Never

Well, I missed the OpenSolaris launch by a week or so. I could go into all sorts of humorous lies about my plans to make this an ironic but bold statement about "vapourblogs" and oh, wouldn't that be funny? But no, I'm afraid I'm not clever enough for that. My excuse is, I picked a really bad week to take a week off, and yet another bad week to become sick (the week before my holiday). Us lowly support engineers don't get access to SWAN unless we drag ourselves into the office, so unfortunately I missed various e-mails and notifications and blah blah blah until I returned yesterday.

When I studied at the University of Essex the Computer Science department had a very strict rule about deadlines. If you were late, by even 15 minutes, you got a big fat zero for your work. Now, I'm the kind of person who disagrees wholeheartedly with this kind of system. The amount of times that one more day could have made a significant improvement in my overall work, just because I made an amazing breakthrough hours before the deadline, were numerous. In the real world I am sure I would have been given an extension or a bit of a chance. Surely I would not be given the sack for being slightly late. That's why I like Douglas Adams so much. He knew the score about this sort of thing. I don't know if OpenSolaris was late or not - I am sure there are mixed opinions. In my world nothing's really late, so long as what eventually comes is good.

Well that's enough of that. I was originally going to blog about something really profound, and amaze you all with a spectacularly intelligent insight into the world of open source software. It's too late for all that now though, so I've drawn you a pretty picture instead.

"Hoorah, The Solaris Code has been freed! All in a days work for Super Support Girl!!"*

*SSG more than likely had absolutely nothing to do with any actual 'freeing' of the Solaris code and accepts no liability for anything ever.