Our story so far...

Just going back over the all-too-sparse blog entries previous, a little updating is in order.

Item: OSCon was, predictably, a blast, but I didn't have energy left over to do much blogging.

I do want to go back to Portland; it's the kind of city you could fall in love with, with a delightful marketplace, and a light rail system that was surprisingly useful. It didn't hold a candle to the London Underground, of course, but transportation within downtown was actually free, and the trip to the airport was marvelously cheap.

The resolution to the teaser from the first (and only) entry was that I spent the Sunday before the conference driving out to Mount Hood, which included exploring a long (and long-cooled) lava flow. The ground was covered with ancient lava, most of it ground to dust. The drive out was fun in itself; the Columbia River valley is gorgeous.

I love the Pacific Northwest; to a prairie kid like me, the rivers, mountains, and forests seem like the landscapes of a lush alien world. It's the only place I like enough to seriously consider moving, and retiring there is also a possibility. (Though the cost of living there tends to put a damper on such thoughts.)

Item: I'm not the primary developer on the Tcl/Tk maintenance project, and as a result I haven't really been forced to learn Tcl in earnest. I've been splitting my study time between that, brushing up my Java in preparation for getting Java certified, and various other stuff, with too little progress on any of these fronts. Story of my life.

Item: I've gotten a bit of programming work in SL, subcontracting for FireSabre Consulting. It hasn't resulted in any actual cash income, and may not ever; I expect I'll be using earnings to subsidize my tier, and pay my portion of the cellphone bill.

Item: Sun has open sourced the Java 6 SDK under the GPL. I suspect this will win them a lot of mindshare, and will make Java a standard component of Linux. I expect to see a lot of packaging alternatives emerge as well (e.g., windows native installer with tight desktop integration, Java-on-a-USB-key, Java as an ActiveX control, etc.). Now more than ever, I need to get certified in Java.

Item: Second Life has published their client software under the GPL, and plans to do the same with its server software (after a meticulous security audit, one presumes). Prospects of getting any useful studying done look dimmer than ever as a result.