Mandrake was getting unstable. Serves me right for using Cooker I suppose. Also never got booting to work smoothly. Grub never worked properly and I had to type parameters in manually. I tried RH 7.2 this time then did Ximian's desktop. I must say, its all quite nice. Some things that need to be resolved:

• Integrating Ximian's menus with the Redhat ones. Lots of programs are lost from view at the moment. A better menu system that would allow re-arranging or at least adding to the base menu would be good.
• Settings don't stay in Galeon. Upon restart, Galeon loses all preferences I have set. Also, both Galeon and Mozilla are outdated. Hope they go with Galeon 1.0 soon, as well as the latest Mozilla (0.96).
• Some text garbage. I had noticed this with Mandrake's Gnome before doing some updates on Cooker. With programs like Gaim, some text gets some extra characters displayed at the end of messages (some control characters I think).

Things I like include:

• Evolution. This is a surprisingly smoothly running program. I am amazed at the quality of the email portion, its editor (with tables), its filters, as well as the calendar and address list. Very nice.
• The update tool. Very nice. I have a friend who had his system trashed with an update a few months ago (RPM stopped working). Hope this doesn't happen. The interface is one I could reccomend to my Dad (my Mum is much more tech savvy). I wish Ximian well with this tool. If they get good apps (or ones I need/like) on there and the purchase process is well done I will probably go for it.
• Adding the Gaim panel applet. I love the Gnome ICQ applet and now I can get the same ease of use with Gaim!

Redhat has done a great job as far as I can tell putting together a solid distribution. I have not hit it hard, so this is just a preliminary feeling. The install was very nice, as is the boot process. I am glad to be able to use ext3 for its journalling capabilities. Also, I will need ext soon for some projects that work best with it.

Just started my advogato account. Made what seems to be an embarrassing move of certifying myself. Oops. Didn't think it would work.

I am not at the moment a c or c++ coder, but seem to prefer database, scripting and html-backend interface issues.

I like scripting languages, especially ones that allow easy string handling. I also like encapsulating things in classes. This has led me to Perl in one way and away from it in another. I will be improving my Perl skills in the next while on a project I will be on. I have found Ruby to be a really fun language to use and have spent my spare time on that for the past several months. I am starting to become something other than a danger to myself with it.

I have registered and begun work on a project called Ruby Object Database. I've registered it at Savannah and am really enjoying that setup. This project is my attempt to provide an alternative to relational databases, as I find them a pain when dealing with the relational-object divide. I like XML, but don't really want to store XML. I want to store serialized classes. What I'd like to do is use Ruby to deal with the underlying hash database (Berkeley DB) and turn the data theirin into actual objects. Once that works one will be able to use the database easily using Ruby. What I'd like to do, however, is provide a layer above Ruby such as XML-RPC to allow language agnostic access to the database, with Ruby being just a lower layer. I will need some to do lots of things such as devise or implement some sort of query mechanism, provide a language-neutral way of representing object structures and rules, and many other things. I really do want to make this work and get to that point relatively quickly (in less than a year).

I realize that if I want to allow access to the database that is language-neutral I should not have chosen to use "Ruby" in the name. Oh well. I was not feeling very inspired that day name-wise.