Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

Its the close of September. And just a week ago I turned 16: in hex, that is. Although I do distinctly remember how I wished coming back to being a 16-decimal-year-old then…

So, how does it feel being one? I’ve barely begun to feel it. There has been a lot of distractions to keep me from contemplating too much about $age:

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age++; // more on this later

Yesterday, I was at the UP Engineering Theatre at Diliman to join in the worldwide Software Freedom Day celebration. I was supposed to be there earlier, but due to new work (and some new stuff to learn too I woke up rather late that day. So, I found myself there in UP at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, rather tired and sweating (note to self: walking around the campus and looking for the venue at that time is not a good idea) but also looking forward to have some FOSS fun with fellow FOSS enthusiasts.

I found Dom, Jerome, Paolo, Dong, Charlton, Ian Dexter, and Doc Mana there at the theatre listening on the technical seminars that were held by PLUG as part of the celebration. This time, the TechSem was particularly interesting, due to the new `student project presentations’ by UP Engineering students, covering areas as diverse as Embedded Linux and SMS-to-Speech technology. I missed the special video from Richard Stallman though, as it was shown earlier, but I was able to grab a copy thanks to Dom :D. In between presentations, there were also mini-matchups of Frozen Bubble, which drove the (mostly geeky) crowd crazy with the rocking music and players’ itches.

Representative Teddy Casiño of Bayan Muna also dropped by later that day, to observe the goings-on as well as to bring his filing of the draft FOSS bill to the public fore. This bill has been much talked about in the PLUG list, where the especially cynical posters (me more or less included had been taking their time nitpicking many of the details on the draft (especially on the section where it essentially says `all your base are belong to us’ Turns out that RMS also saw some things that he thought needs improving (towards the end of his video, he took some time reflecting on the proposed bill,) and he wanted to see more emphasis on promoting FOSS to the education sector.

Ubuntu CDs were also given away, as well as custom SFD/UP stickers. I also finally got to meet the UnPLUG hackers who, with PLUG, jointly organized this year’s SFD.

…I’m in.

Well, at least for tonight, that is. :p

[Imagine a picture of a perlish-white MSI MegaBook S262 here…]

Today marks the end of mentor/student surveys for the Google Summer of Code.

However, its just another day for me to work on OSDL’s Sendpage. The Perl lessons that I’ve learned from it have been invaluable to me, and have allowed me to see beyond what I have previously understood of software engineering. I’ve also learned some things the hard way (like getting the testsuite done first (yes, get the testsuite done first!!!))

Thanks Kees for the great fish!