Software.Freedom.Day.2008.Davao.City

I'm still in General Santos City and I'm wrapping up my blog on Davao City's celebration of Software Freedom Day. I must say the whole experience was enjoyable, informative and very successful. Students from different colleges flocked together to learn more about free/open source software (FOSS).

Mark Maglana of Morphlabs started the program by talking about the Ruby language and the popular Ruby on Rails framework as well as showing everyone how easy it is to use for developing web applications. He also showcased two of Morphlabs latest services appSpace and appCloud, revolutionary web products that utilize opensource technology. Next was Nathaniel Jayme of DabaweGNU who talked about FFEHR (pronounced "effer") the free and open source Electronic Health Record project. FFEHR, according to Nathaniel, uses the Mozilla framework which includes XUL and XBL. It's interesting to note Nathaniel's passion for FOSS in fact I'm pretty sure he imprinted that passion to the students attending the celebration (I noticed a few students asking him a lot of questions after the event). Next on the list was 17-yr old Kevin Paquet of PinoyTeens.net who talked about Wordpress and why he thinks its the best blogging software ever :). Andrew Abogado wowed the crowd with his skills, showing everyone that GIMP and Inkscape is just as powerful as proprietary graphics software. Lastly we have Ragingmon aka Marlo Noval whose Blender talents never fails to amaze me, raises the bar by showing everyone how Blender with the help of Vodoo can do add 3D objects/effects into live-footages/movies (a process called camera tracking or match moving).

An animated short film made entirely with FOSS (Big Buck Bunny) was shown and signaled the end of the celebration as well. I hope next year's celebration will be bigger and better and will include more topics (w/c means that you guys wanting to contribute shouldn't shy away). See you on the next SFD!

SFD '08

Holden and I are currently conducting a private seminar on Linux administration in General Santos City. It's turning out to be quite a busy day and we're only in Day 2 :) but I do have enough time to post this link to Ragingmon's video of last saturday's Software Freedom Day '08 celebration


Software Freedom Day - Davao 2008

More on this on the next blog.

software.freedom.day.2008

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of free/open-source software (FOSS). SFD is a public education effort, not only to celebrate the virtues of free/open-source software, but also to encourage its use, to the benefit of the public.

From 2006 onwards, it has been decided that the Software Freedom Day is to be held on the third Saturday of each September.

Dabawegnu is spearheading its celebration here in Davao by conducting a free seminar on FOSS at the University of Mindanao, 1:00pm -5:00pm on Sept. 20, 2008.

Additional details can be found on here.

See you there!

Delphi.2009.is.officially.released!

I just got a nice email informing me that my favorite development tool has released its newest iteration. Delphi 2009 aka Tiburon is now officially released and a trial version is available for download. This version offers new language enhancements like generics and anonymous methods as well as unicode support plus more. I only want it to be the same kick-ass IDE i've always loved :)
Here is a list of 3rd party tools and components that are Delphi 2009 compatible. Devexpress users will have to wait a bit but I'm sure we won't have to wait that long.