Took me 3 1/2 hours to drive from Jersey to Boston… Arrived around 1:30pm at the nearby Ramada Inn. Dropped off my luggage at my roon (which has a terrible smell of moth balls!!!) and immediately took a cab down to South Boston. My cab driver got lost so it took us 45 minutes to get there! Grabbed my badge and walked around. Inside, pure chaos as a lot of the organizers tried to get their stuff ready for tomorrow.

Tomorrow I’ll be travelling once again to Boston, this time to represent Ubuntu Linux at this year’s Linux World Expo. The event, held in Boston this week, will mark the first time Ubuntu Linux showcases their product and also my “premier” as an active member of an Open Source organization. I’ll be hanging out among the hackers I read about every day online and to be quite frank, it is very intimidating… Hopefully I’ll be able to represent what Ubuntu Linux is all about and still manage to have fun!

It has been approximately 2 weeks now that I started hosting my pet project BillReminder on SourceForge. I’m very excited for living up one of my goals for the year: starting my own open source project. The goal is to force myself to port my programming skills over to Linux, now that Mono is definitely an emerging force in the Linux community! I have managed to get some people interested in contributing, both with code and art/web design.

Been away from this blog for quite some time now. Obviously, a great deal of events have taken place, and I intend to talk about most of them, eventually… The one thing that I’m most proud of however, is my most recent achievement: my Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification! This was one of my most coveted plans for the year and I’m extremelly excited and relieved for achieving this milestone!

This year’s Linux World Expo & Conference held in Boston, MA will take place this April 3 - 6, 2006. I have volunteered to organize the Ubuntu booth and am looking for Linux and/or Open Source enthusiasts from the area (NJ/NY/MA) to help me “man” the booth. If you’re genuinely interested and can afford to pay for your own expenses, please contact me by commenting here…

Been spending some time converting my pet application BillReminder (written in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET) so that it can run on Linux… but this time, without the Gtk# libraries for all the graphical rendering! Since I’m currently running Mono version 1.1.3 that comes bundled with Ubuntu Dapper, I can tap on to the new features including the port of the System.Windows.Forms namespace!!! I must confess, the conversion process has been very minimal, and the only thing I have to pick on is the native look of the widgets… I’m not sure if I’m missing some other package, but the quality, or lack of, of all widgets needs some serious work… But is ok… Just the fact that I can write code that has the potential of being executed in several other plataforms is exactly what I’ve been looking for all along!

I’ve been following with extreme interest (and caution) the discussion that has been developing about the many metamorphosis the Gnome desktop has undergone for sake of “simplicity.” Now, I have always been outspoken about the subject of application usability. I have had a few discussions about some of the changes done to the newer version of Galeon, where certain features were removed for the sake of “moms and dads” users… One day you’re happily using a program that you feel confortable with and attends your every need… and then, after an “upgrade” you find out (the hard way) that some features are completely “missing” from action.