Solaris 10 Update 1 - Crunch Time!

So, we've moved into bug fixing mode over the last month, and now we are folding our feature gate and our bug fix gate into one. And the last minute features are crawling out of the woodwork! Lots of folks threatening to escalate up to Jonathan Schwartz (or telling me how important this feature is to Mr. Schwartz), or at the very least threatening to escalate to my VP, if I just can't understand why their feature is so important.

Here's the thing: Updates are *very* short releases. We just don't have that many builds, and as much as we all do testing, new features very often have bugs. Or defects, or issues - whatever you want to call them, I don't want more problems in my gate. It's important to Sun, and to me, to make each release a quality release, which is why at some point in time I just have to say "no" to new features. Fortunately, most folks are very understanding and will retarget their project to the next update. The releases really aren't that far apart.

Soon we'll be in "stopper" mode, which means I'll even have to say no to noncritical bug fixes.

All the same, I'm still really enjoying my work on the update. It's really cool getting insight into other groups, though it can also be frustrating getting insight into other groups ;-) The update core staff are all hardworking, intelligent people. I'm very lucky, indeed!

Now I just have to get back to my obnoxiously large RTI queue....

Squirels, cats and bats - oh my!

Ok, so for a long time now, I've been plagued by the squirels that live on my roof and love to run across the cable wires to the apartment across the alley. I'm not bothered by the squirels themselves, but rather by my cat who is fascinated with them - and with trying to attack them. This wouldn't be a problem if she could watch the squirels from another room, but she has to be in the same room as me at all times. Squirels get up much earlier in the morning than I like to, which means I have to listen to my cat meowing and pawing at the window and blinds first thing in the morning.

Katy (the cat) gets really wound up by these squirels and will often try to actually jump at them, as she does not understand the concept of gravity and windows. One early morning last summer, she took off running at full speed at a squirel on the wire and hit the screen. I had just recentlly gotten new windows and when she hit the screen, instead of stopping her like my old screens did, she FLEW out the second story window to a concrete alley below. I grabbed my glasses and ran full speed out the door and down the stairs in my pajamas, thankfully finding a perfectly terrified but healthy cat. She's an indoor only beast, and the big wide outside was just more than she could handle. I think these new screens are somehow fire safety, or something, because they pop out of the window *so* easily.

Now, you would think she would've learned a valuable lesson about gravity and the sysiphian nature of her attack on the squirels. Nope. She's just as much a squirel fanatic as before. Only now, I have to make sure I don't open the window wide enough for her to knock the screen out, and instead she rams herself against the window.

Then it gets worse.

Last night, I notice she's going apeshit over something she can see out of the window of my bedroom and everytime I drag her into another room, she goes running (full speed) back to the bedroom to the window. So, I go into my room and look out the window and see little dark flashes going by the window. Turning off the lights confirmed my suspicions: bats. Lots of them. Now my cat has something to "chase", in my bedroom, at all hours when I might possibly want to sleep. I hope bats are just seasonal. *ugh*