I've been looking around for a good book on XCode, the development environment included with MacOS X. It's neat, but also huge and there is a lot of documentation available, but mostly it's still based on an older version of XCode and not 3.0 included with Leopard.

That's until now, because a great free online resource has been made available; Become An Xcoder. Although it starts right from the basics, you can just skip those chapters and get an update on the other bits.

Support Bruce Perens! And add your signature to this petition for accepting him as a member of the executive board of OSI.

For people who don't know him, or what he stands for, you can read up on him on wikipedia or his own web site. I know him as a former HP employee where he started Debian. He's also the founder of the LSB, busybox and a great evangelist of open source in general, up there together with ESR and RMS.

You can find him (very) active on certain discussion topics on slashdot, but he's always very willing to help anybody out. When I had some open source related problems myself, I turned to him for help and he didn't leave out cold. I can't say who else is so much available, that approachable in the OSS scene other then Bruce. He deserves your signature if you care about anything OSS related.

Fosdem 08, two days of open source talks, speeches, meeting people and discovering new stuff that's out there.  You can download most talks on the Fosdem website, so I'm not going to go over them again like I did in my previous post the last few years. 

Instead I would like to present some pictures, that might give you an idea how the event is like (if you haven't been before).

Outside a 2CV station wagon (is this a hack? i never heard or saw this type of 2CV before) was parked, advertising the Document Freedom Day 08. 

I'm a loyal Fosdem donator, each year I make my donation to this free event. It has an added bonus that from a certain amount you can pick a O'Reilly book and you get included in a price draw at the end of the conference. 'The Bash Cookbook' was my pick for this year, it contains a lot of scripting tips, a good guide for any Unix system administrator. Oh, and speaking of the prizes, I actually won this amazing piece of hardware, more on this when the box arrives.

Even outside the conference rooms there is action going on. Most high profile projects and distros have their own stand, displaying demos, gadgets, advice and friendly chatter.

OK, a few emering trends I saw this year. First, the amount of Apple laptops that were used. Here a picture taken in between 2 talks. In this shot you see both a MacBook and a MacBook Pro. It almost looked like everybody had them, there were that many. Also, for all the talks I 'd been to, There were only 2 non-Mac speakers (the guys from fedora/centos).

Another trend, when you don't have an Apple, at least show up with an Eee PC. I don't think they are available in Europe yet, still that didn't stop them from popping up everywhere you looked.

Aaw, who could ever hurt such a little cute foxy.

Nobody is going to pin me down.

Yep, the usual suspects, last year the OLPC was shown during an opening talk, this year a truckload of them were displayed and usable for everybody.

That's how a fried sliced potato looks like from behind. Poor guy, dragging laptops, water and all kinds of stuff around the place.

Most talks were hot, certainly the Mozilla dev talks during the first day.

The room was packed, all the time! I believe the most successful talks were given by the Mozilla people this year. Can you blame them? There are so many interesting project building on and around the Mozilla project, not just Firefox and Thunderbird. But also Songbird and Miro, check them out!

This was something new, never before seen on Fosdem - Beer. There was a lot of beer drinking going on. I had never seen this the previous years, but luckily everybody was smart enough not to get drunk so the only hindrance you got was empty bottles lying all over the place. I'm a Belgian, and thus I don't have anything against beer (I like it more then wine in fact), but this conference is not the place for massive beer consumption.

Outside view of one of the buildings.

Don't forget to wash your hands.

Did you ever code with the daemon in the pale moonlight?

I loved this idea, it's brilliant! Users of Gnome (the best desktop environment for Unix systems) had this up on the wall at their stand. On the left you could leave a post-it on what you really loved about Gnome, on the right side you could leave a message on the worst bug or most needed currently missing feature.

This year Fosdem was extremely good. A lot of quality talks, a lot of people. And that could be the rising problem. Fosdem is growing, it's getting bigger, but the location stays the same. Some rooms were so packed that there was no possible way of getting in anymore. Perhaps they should start looking out for a new location or get more rooms from the VUB for next year event.

The Wii might just turn out to be the greatest console for all 30-somethings. It's nice for kids, it has great games and nostalgica galore, which now even reaches another peak with the introduction of C64 games in VC!

It's been a while since my last post, I'm still here ofcourse. Something changed, I have bought an Apple PC - the delightful Mac Mini (2Ghz version).

A real beautiful piece of hardware, and ultra-quiet. MacOSX Leopard is very nice as well (don't worry, Ubuntu is installed using BootCamp), but I'm still in the learning phase GUI wise. The approach is different for some aspects, like keyboard commands and the handling of application windows.

You'll notice a lot of Gnome in MacOSX, while on the other hand you'll notice how much Gnome differs.

Anyway, most of the the time they try to make it so easy for you it's scary. Even when playing around with the shell it's almost plug-and-play wise. Do you have an NFS server available? automount is configured in such a way that you only have to use the following command to mount a remote drive:

ls|cd|whatever-cmd /net/nfs-server/share path

In the past Ubuntu had the Nvu HTML-editor in its repositories. Now I suddenly had to adjust some HTML pages and since the were previously made with Nvu (call me lazy) I wanted to edit them in that tool again. To my surprise it was no longer in the gnome menu or the repositories.

After looking around, I discovered that KompoZer is in fact an independent continued developed version of Nvu. Although it starts with a 'K' it is no KDE app, it is really the same tool but more stable and less bugs.

It's 2008! And the things that I will remember from 2007 concerning Linux are the following:

• Dell is selling hardware with Linux on it (Ubuntu). This was not the first time, but this time they are not keeping it a secret.
• AMD/ATI is releasing specifications and open source drivers for their 3D cards, amazing.
• Lots of Linux based devices being released, and doing well in sales (EEE, gPC, etc.)
  

The best games of last year are:

• Wii: 'Resident Evil 4' I bought SMG and MP3 but haven't played them yet simply because RE4 was so good.
• DS: 'Final Fantasy 3' Sure it didn't get very high scores in most reviews, but as a FF fanatic and RPG lover it was one of the best things on the faithful handheld last year.

What was worth watching on TV this year, only one thing and it was:

• 'Heroes' I used to read (imported) Marvel comics, what more need I say?

Best distro of 2007 goes to:

• 'Ubuntu', although they have to continue the innovation pace and keep their eyes open of other distros that use Ubuntu as a base to build something better on (like Ubuntu does with Debian).