So many things to blog, so little time
Saturday, September 24th, 2005I’ve been a long time away from my blog, doing lots of stuff here in Daet and in Manila, and only now do I reserve myself the opportunity to sit down, write a post, and flood my syndications yet again 
Midterms and SFD
First, I left Daet last September 9 so that I can take my Natural Science midterms at the UP Open University the next day. On September 10, after my midterms, I went to PUP to attend the Software Freedom Day 2005 celebration to meet Clair Ching, JM Ibanez, and other geeks. In that event I got to chat with Jerome Gotangco of Ubuntu, who brought his Toshiba Tecra M2 along which I borrowed later for my presentation on FOSS games (we downloaded wesnoth and penguinracer during this, thanks to free Wi-Fi!) It seems that the most interesting issue posed in my presentation was the question of running popular and Windows-based MMORPGs on a GNU/Linux system, starting with Ragnarok Online. Little do I know that I will be posed with the same question in the upcoming days, especially during LinuxWorld.
LinuxWorld
Fast forward to September 14, where I moved myself from my Tita Baby’s flat in Malate to Ninang Chi’s condo at Greenbelt. Although I could have availed of hotel accomodations by the organizers, I opted to stay at someplace more familiar Anyhow, I went to Dusit Hotel Nikko to attend the first LinuxWorld Philippines conference and expo, and as I stated earlier, to talk about Emacs and LaTeX.
The first day went fine, and I listened to my fellow speaker’s talks; at the end of the day, I got to borrow a ThinkNote s223ii2c (provided by TQM) from the organizers. Originally, it had DSL as its OS, but back at the condo I replaced the OS with a fresh install of Ubuntu Hoary, and Hoary found everything out of the box, I even got Wi-Fi access from Meridian (aka Smart Wi-Fi; unfortunately ’tis locked).
While I was lucky with the laptop, I was unlucky with my pair of leather shoes, for one of them lost its sole due to the wicked weather (baha somewhere near Greenbelt, and I had to walk my way through those waters)…
Had to wait until the next day (September 15) to go back to the hotel and hang out at the PLUG booth where free (and usable) Wi-Fi was so I could get Emacs-CVS and TeTeX. During the day I met Jijo Sevilla of free.net.ph who would (at the next day) later show to both Clair and to me the benefits of the Dvorak keyboard layout. I also got to meet fellow blogger Rogelio Nocom, Jr. from Pinoy Tech Scene. Before lunch, I had to sneak out of the hotel to get myself some new leathers…
After lunch, Dominique Cimafranca who earlier talked about the Ubuntu workstation, referred some people from a company specializing in systems migration to me so we could talk about getting Ragnarok Online to work on GNU/Linux. As I wrote earlier, this was going to be an extension of a forgotten two-year-old experiment (the original HOWTO carefully preserved, thanks to Sacha Chua). I’ll save writing about this in a later post; suffice to say for now that I’m working at providing an accessible solution to this problem, and, hopefully, in the coming days, I can put up a wiki on this and other MMOs…
Finally, I got to do my Emacs talk, which was attended mostly by the people I know (and the people I know probably already knew a thing or two about Emacs, hehe ;). However, it was by far the most interactive presentation in LinuxWorld (as Dom had said), and it ended late (around 7 p.m.). In retrospect, I think my Lisp still needs improvement, lest I be misunderstood, and I should have set up a more realistic ~/.emacs setup (one that can allow me to read my mail, browse the net, and chat on IRC, and more
I’ve not much to say about the last day, except that I regret returning the ThinkNote 
Photos of the event are available at Ian’s, Dom’s, and Mikhail’s.
Big day
And, oh yeah, last September 22 was my birthday. I’ve been good enough this past year Is anyone willing to donate a laptop?
