MI-80 De Oppresso Liber

So it's that time of the year again! The local temperature went from 70 to 30 overnight, half the people I know are sick, and the guys and gals over at Penny Arcade are ramping up Child's Play again.

To quickly recap Penny Arcade is a web comic devoted to video games. A few years back someone wrote the classic “video games make kids violent” article and the Penny Arcade guys said enough is enough and decided to appeal to their legions of gaming fans to give the mass media something positive to report about gamers. The result was Child's Play, an annual charity where children's hospitals build-up Amazon wish lists (there are alternative ways to give, but that's the biggest one) and all you do is login to Amazon, pick something out, and it goes straight to that children's hospital to be given to the kids on Christmas. Having only run the past few years in 2006 it collected over one million dollars in donations and now expands to dozens of hospitals all around the world!

NOT an official word! However someone I know at Apple hinted that 10.5 just might have gone gold and into production. Expected street date is October 26th, but obviously until Apple confirms it publicly who knows. After all that's something set by marketing, not engineering where my buddy works! However I did see it in action and even as a Linux guy I was very impressed. It's extremely polished so say the least, and worth upgrading to if you're a Mac user. Can't beat the price point (except with open source of course!).

I was speaking with a Novell developer and he mentioned that OpenSUSE 10.3 went gold internally last week. The slated release date is this Thursday, 2007-10-04. For anyone who hasn't played with it it's a very nice incremental improvement. It's basically adding polish on top all the features added in 10.1 and 10.2; I'll have more info after I play with it this weekend.

Well The Ohio LinuxFest was Saturday. I ended up going with four others, two of which (plus myself) went Friday night for the Fark party. The audience was huge but I won't guess at any numbers – I'm sure the LinuxFest guys will post some eventually. Despite apparently lower registration numbers I feel confident the actual number of visitors was greater than last year and the vendors had a fair variety to them. The talks themselves were the point I was a bit disappointed on. I'll have a full write-up later on tonight but despite some downsides I'm still glad I went.

So I've been in Cali for training this past week. When I get home tomorrow morning I'll write some more as it's been very interesting. I got to spend a lot of time with Barracuda equipment and well, walked a lot. A lot.

Anyways normal news should return tomorrow as well. I'm also going to speak with my instructor and see what if any documents I can publish. Unfortunately almost everything was marked confidential so I'm not sure how much I'll be able to - but suffice to say it's all some pretty cool stuff, and it utilizes open source heavily.