Okay, a quick post to make up for the long gap. I just didn’t have time to update the blog, there’s too much going on!

Well, the project at NUS was largely successful, we now have a working and generic Struts application that reads RDF files and instantly makes them searchable. Needless to say, I learnt a lot, but I was also kind of frustrated with the Java Web Application structure. Especially since we now have more modern frameworks like Zope, Django and TurboGears. Personally, Java just doesn’t suit me! Check out this screencast from Sean Kelly at JPL, NASA, in which he compares J2EE, Ruby on Rails, TurboGears, Zope/Plone and Django. The file is 380MB and lasts about half-an-hour, but is totally worth watching!

Well, back at home, my awesome new Macbook Pro was awaiting me! I was raring to install Gentoo Linux on it, and yeah, it took me about a day to get that sorted out. My Sound still doesn’t work, and there’s an experimental iSight driver that I haven’t tried yet. Once I get a fully-functional Linux on the beast, I’ll post a nice integrated HOWTO. I’m simply amazed at how awesome the community is, we have a lot of people working on trying to get everything to run just fine. Well, I wish them all the best, because if we have everything in order, I’m going to remove Mac OS X! ;)

Speaking of which, my first experience with the new operating system was amazing. I felt quite at home with the BASH terminal, and the overall look-and-feel were great! I migrated from Thunderbird to Apple Mail just to test it out, and yeah Apple Mail was good. I tried out Adium for my instant messaging needs, another awesome application, which unfortunately doesn’t have IRC support. So I got X-Chat Aqua, which, as the name implies is the aquafied version of X-Chat. More on my Mac OS X adventures later though…

My birthday was a lot of fun, I finally got my Driving License; although the next day I was down with the Fever! On the bright side, the totally amazing Christian, decided to surpise me by gifting 1984, a book that I really wanted, to me on my birthday. Heh, my first package from a foriegn country, w00t! So, that’s one item off my wishlist.

I also made a trip to Chennai, where I finally saw the totally cool NRCFOSS (National Resource Centre for Free and Open Source Software) in-person. It’s a real-nice place, nested in MIT, Chrompet, just a 2 minutes walk from the Chrompet station. They had a workshop on translation, and we had a good time translating Django into Tamil using KBabel. I also volunteered to be a mentor for their Fellowship Program, and I am looking forward to it!

The SoC project has picked up pace and I made significant progress on the editor, I just hope I can wrap it up in time! I’m going to be spending the next two days in the train, yeah, my 5th semester starts on 24th. On other news, we finally have an Alpha release for PHP-GTK 2! Uh, it was actually called Zeta in the beginning (everyone was bored of alpha), but apparently the PEAR installer doesn’t recognize anything other than alpha or beta. Heh, so we had to switch back to convention. Now that Alpha is out, I have to start working on the PHP-Gnome bindings. Oh, and my article on PHP-GTK 2 is scheduled to appear in php|arch this month, so watch out!

Well, I guess that wraps up everything, surely I’ve missed some details, ah well. I hope that I am able to make some arrangements for internet access once I reach college, we’ll see.