LinuxWorld Conference Philippines 2005 was quite a tiring event. It's not enough that I've done a couple of preparations for PLUG, but I've also supplied the "toys" (a Dual Xeon workstation and a last-mile Senao wireless AP) as well as given a talk on Zope and Python for business applications.

However, I really deplore the presence of the vendor tracks - sadly though LinuxWorld is becoming more of an avenue for big businesses to sell their stuff. I would've preferred the old-school style of LinuxWorld - more of the cutting-edge tech stuff but with the suits staying at their booths.

Next time I bring an SMP machine to an event I'd make sure it won't have an ATI Radeon card. SMP Linux + X11 + Radeon = death by crashing. Even disabling DRI wasn't enough as the rig's still very unstable. This is payment I guess for having the misguided conception that no proprietary drivers = very stable. That goes except for the sucky ATI Radeon cards...

I managed to flunk a couple of students last term. Bad. I hardly care anymore if they give me a low rating - I know I've done good by treating students professionally and absent of spoonfeeding them information. They're college students for the heck of it! At the very least I now have a fresh start by having freshman students rather than those sophomore students who've been spoonfed too much. I never intend to sink to the level of spoonfeeding lessons. Never had, never doing so, and never will.

There's still danger of software patents in the Philippines. Apparently our patent office allows the patenting of software when embedded in hardware. No way would we allow such practice go unscathed and unchallenged. We plan to make people notice this real soon. I'm not looking forward to a future wherein I wouldn't be able to make free software and a living out of it simply because of the institutionalization of software patents!

We plan to have another conference by next year, but this time in the spirit of Free and Open Source software - ala Linuxconf. There's still a year for me to draft the plans - but I plan to make it work. And maybe bring RMS to our country as we've already talked with him during the UNDP-APDIP conference in Cambodia earlier this month.

Linux IS NOT Windows! When will those hard-headed Internet "cafe" (which are gaming stations in disguise) owners realize that? Now that a nationwide crackdown is being done by the OMB (funded by BSA, of course), they're now looking up to us in finding them painless solutions for migrations. It's disappointing to tell them that Wine is not a solution - native ports of games would be - but I'm not counting on that to happen anytime soon.

The temerity of Microsoft not to tell the truth that they're still behind it all in these raids. They tell that they aren't involved - it's our NBI and police that are doing these raids. Oh yeah, and my first name is Elvis.