Sam Lawrance

The last computer I bought for myself was a 1GHz Celeron, so I decided on the weekend that it was time for a new one. I went out shopping and returned home with a 1.83GHz dual core Intel Mac Mini. I had a G4 Mini through Uni at one stage, and this one mostly feels the same.

I ran FreeSBIE LVC on it last night (install Boot Camp, restart, hold down Option, choose ‘Windows̵ without any fuss. Ten minutes of intensive testing indicated that the important stuff works fine. It is equipped with an Atheros wireless card which will be useful if I run FreeBSD on it more often. I haven’t tried installing to the hard disk yet, too chicken

It has been a busy year for me. At the start of the year I decided that I needed a break from university. That meant finding decent work, and through some past contacts (it really is all about who you know) I landed a pretty nice job in the Hunter Valley. Starting from the beginning of this month I now have a permanent position with the same company, which is pretty cool.

One of the realities of the environment I work in is a move to standardise on the Windows platform. This effectively means that I can’t run a FreeBSD machine at work – which means that any time I spend using or contributing to FreeBSD happens entirely in my spare time. Over the past 6 months or so my contributions have been next to nothing. In fact I have been quite slack with some PRs, which I know is not fair on our submitters. It’s a balancing act that I need to work on. The first thing I need to do is dispatch my current PRs. After that I want to get back into regular ports work, with a couple of goals:

• always give submitters an idea of when they can expect action on a PR (feedback or a commit)
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• provide that action within a reasonable timeframe, or follow up with any notes and unlock the PR for someone else
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Today I pitched an idea for our next meeting of the BSD User Group Sydney (BUGS) – documentation work The idea is to find some documentation that we can improve, and work on it as a group – probably over lunch and a beer. I like this as an activity because it’s social, and everyone can contribute in some way. BUGS is only a small group, but I received some positive feedback on IRC so I’m hopeful we can pull it off. If it goes ahead, I would like to find a doc committer to sponsor us by providing fast feedback and commits.