30 January 2004

David Bradley, the person responsible for selecting the Ctrl-Alt-Delete key sequence, is retiring from IBM.

About five years ago I interviewed with Dave when I was looking for a job at IBM. Actually, looking for a job there was only half of it, though even in 1999 they were already heavy into Linux, and their research teams are generally world-class.

The other half was that I needed someone to fly me to North Carolina so I could go to Linux Expo. This was a frequent technique for getting to conferences when we were in the pre-salary stages of Ximian:

Step 1. Find a company with offices in the general region of the conference.

Step 2. Apply for a job there.

Step 3. Schedule the interview just before or after the conference.

File under Advice to a Young Entrepreneur.

Miggy.

We open sourced our build system, which has many man-years of effort in it. Build buddy is primarily a tool for building packages on multiple Linux distributions; it has built-in knowledge of the major differences between the various Linux platforms, and can build RPMs, debs, and HP-UX packages from a single XML build configuration file.

We’ll probably be putting out and open sourcing all the conf files for building Ximian Desktop as soon as we figure out how to go about doing that.

There are some interesting mockups here.

I’ve been snowboarding the last two weekends, and am going again this Saturday. It’s been an awesome way of dealing with the short days and cold darkness here. Hopefully by the end of the winter I won’t be hearing my head hit the ice like a melon every run.