It's been quite some time since I did an update on this journal... might as well continue it.

Been a very, very busy year for me - as I've been travelling quite a lot, coding quite a lot (Zope,Plone and Archetypes for a legacy ERP project that I'm now rewriting, then Ruby on Rails for the new web apps, XUL and Pythonfor some funky stuff we're doing...) and working a lot more than usual. I guess my friend was right that this would be my busiest year.

Got myself an IBM Thinkpad T42p (2373-N37) after my old Dell Latitude C640 got its system board fried a few weeks ago. That laptop lasted for 2 years and has given me good profits. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS just got the thing running out of the box.

I'm now moving away from using Plone as my web development platform and shifting to Ruby on Rails. It's not due to the hype - rather - I find mixing RDBMS and Plone to be a daunting task (even with Archetype's SQLStorage layer).

LaTeX has been quite a lifesaver for me during document preparation... got nicely-formatted manuals in less time than it would take to have them done via word-processors. I've tried DocBook a long time ago but LaTeX is much easier for me.

Despite having a very busy lifestyle, my girlfriend Sarah has been quite very supportive of me.

The RHCE so far has given me the worst headache I've experienced since a couple of recent years past. As I only got an examination voucher for RHCE free of charge after a friend transferred it to me (he's writing a book so he doesn't have the time to take the exam at all) I gave it a shot.

I got to pass to get the RHCT designation - but since I don't do a lot of network services for a very long time already I didn't pass the RHCE component. No matter - for me it's already an achievement in itself, considering that I don't do system administration, nor have handled a RedHat system for nearly two years (ever since that RH 7.0 fiasco). Why RedHat systems make it so hard, ermm let me rephrase that, make it so unlike Debian, is a mystery to me :)

I was kinda struck with what Jonathan Schwartz of Sun mentioned in his December 2 blog, which I myself find to be true (after landing a couple of support contracts for the ERP I'm building):

Free software creates volumes that lead the demand for deployments - which generate license and support revenues just as they did before the products were free. Free software grows revenue opportunities.

Betting against FOSS is like betting against gravity. And free software doesn't mean no revenue, it means no barriers to revenue.

I've just finished migrating my old site in the UP Manila servers to eoncomputing.net. Since I'm shutting down my current company in favor of setting up a new corporation by next year, I figured I'd use the empty webspace of my company for the meantime as my own consulting site.

Why does this have to happen at the worst possible time - my laptop's hard disk just crashed! I don't mind working on my dual Xeon workstation... but I AM ABSOLUTELY NOT CARRYING a 4U machine as a portable! Now I need to find some cash to buy a new laptop hard disk...

I've made a lot of progress with the ERP I'm building. Just incorporated charting functionality via ZGDChart. It's still a bit slow (I haven't really optimized the database yet as there's still no data warehouse yet) but hopefully in time I'd be able to do an audit and fix all these problems (or at least a whole lot of them).

The initial interview with Google came out fine. Now I'm a bit worried as they haven't replied with an updated schedule for the second (technical) interview. I can't make it Monday morning on my time as I do have a class by 8AM. Big problem... Oh well...

Somehow I've made my dual proc workstation stable under kernel 2.6 by disabling ACPI and recompiling the kernel to remove the ATI radeon loadable kernel modules. Not cool, but until I get some cash to buy an Nvidia card or hopefully the OpenGraphics card (I'd buy it even if it cost $200) which would work real fine on Linux I'd stick with my flakey ATI Radeon 7000 running on VESA.

I got reelected to the board of the Philippine Linux Users Group a month ago (and I didn't write about it back then! Sheesh...) There's still a lot more to do for me in PLUG, and hopefully we would pull those projects off and tasks well done.

Today is I guess a lucky day for me.

I've got the most unexpected job offer in my mailbox today - it's from the amazing, uber-cool group of people residing in Mountainview, CA. I'm truly honored and shocked at the same time, as I haven't even dreamt of getting even one at all.