From the Canyon Edge -- :-Dustin

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Its Go Time -- Kirkland 13.11 LTS Released!


AUSTIN, Texas -- Kirkland Family Life Enterprises are proud to announce the eagerly anticipated release of the second product of its generation -- Kirkland 13.11 Ultra LTS (code name: Corinne).

Chief Architect and Lead Developer Kimberly Kirkland (code name: Mommy) delivered another perfect new child process at 10:40pm on November 18th, 2013 -- four days slightly behind schedule this time.  As with previous projects, the development team labored through a very long workday, having begun the release procedures with an all-day Sprint that kicked off around 7am that morning.

Senior Product Manager and Community Coordinator Dustin Kirkland (code name: Daddy) multi-tasked a stream of procurement and support requests, and helped ensure an agile delivery.  He tagged each milestone with snapshots, offering encouragement throughout each task.  Kim and Dustin were assisted by an expert team of support engineers, Stephanie Carter (code name: Nanny) and Gerri Gros (code name: Mimi), who joined them on-site for the final QA and the initial release party.  Dustin wore an Golang Gopher t-shirt for the duration of the sprint, with Kim noting that the cute gopher face made her smile any time the going got tough.


Corinne 13.11 is an "Ultra" Long Term Support release, with first class expert support for at least 18 years.  She is already showing tremendous input/output capabilities and impressive throughput I/O performance.  A contract technician confirmed that her dual-channel stereo input is in good working order, and that her analog output volume, while still a bit inarticulate and compressed, is quite audible.  "We're so delighted to meet her!," says Kimberly, exhausted but joyful.  Kim sheds a tear, "We just couldn't be happier!"


Complete release notes do state that Corinne is currently prone to frequent, spontaneous reboots and random periods of inactivity.  Fortunately, her init and shutdown sequences are quite efficient.  Kim and Dustin shared the design responsibilities for Corinne's look and feel.  They seem to have done quite an elegant job, having achieved fine unity around her outer shell.  And she has a simply gorgeous greeter!  While they some experience at this point, Dustin and Kim were a bit out of practice and are still getting used to the young interface.  They do have quite a bit more debugging experience with various sleep states, and suspend/resume features.  Continuous integration is essential to a smooth running product!

"I'm just loving every second of uptime!" says Dustin, while dealing with an unexpected core dump on the system console.  "We've been looking forward to this package import for quite some time."

Corinne is currently in a limited-release mode, with access only granted to a few statically linked associates.   But in another 6 weeks or so, she's expected to make her first GA appearances, with a formal release party still to be held.

Corinne did meet her elder sister release, Camille, and these two will certainly be constant companions!

While Kirkland Family Life Enterprises are evolving quickly, their trajectory looks impressive, as we confirmed with Board of Directors chairmen Allen Kirkland (code name: Paw Paw) and Robert Gros (code name: Bob).  "We're just delighted with our venture investments and they continue to have our complete backing!" claims the chairmen.  Technical Advisers Donna Kirkland (code name: Gran) and Gerri Gros (code name: Mimi) said, "What an excellent team, and a fine family of products!"

Asked if there's a 3.0 update in the works, Dustin, wearing his VP Product hat, shrugged and noted that they still have plenty of development to do on their current two products.  "Let's work on maturing our 1.0 and 2.0 with stable release updates before we start talking about a whole new product line!  We're not on a time-based release schedule, so just ask me again in a year or two."



:-Dustin

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Thanks,
:-Dustin

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