h0bbel.p0ggel.org

So, things aren't looking their normal half-finished self. Rest assured though, I'll have it back to it's normal half-baked shambles quite soon. The reason for this is that I never seem to finish any of the new custom themes I've tried making for Habari, and now my local installations codebase is so out of sync with the current development that simply updating it wouldn't be all that easy.

I've turned off most of my plugins, updated the ones that I truly need and reverted to the nice "stock" Simpler theme that Mr. Randy Walker has produced for Habari. All of the old (mostly rubbish) content is still around somewhere, laying around waiting to be rediscovered.

Habari 0.6 has been released into the wild. It's been a long time coming, but we're very happy to send a new release out the door. As the official release statement says

Executive Summary: New release. Get.

Noteworthy additions in the new version includes the new ACL permissions system, new API features and general improvements to the administration system

Grab your copy now and give it a test! We're confident you'll like it!

Another year is nearly over and done with, and 2009 is only a few hours away here in Norway. Instead of doing a wrap up of 2008, I’ll take a look at the upcoming new year and explain why it has potential to be a great year.

There are three things on my list that should make 2009 most excellent.

• VMware vSphere

  
  The newly renamed VMware Infrastructure 4 shows a lot of promise, and I can't wait for the final release to be made available. That and all of the fun projects I have planned at work should make 2009 an even better year to be a VMware administrator.

• Gallery3

  
  The "re-invention" of Gallery also shows a lot of promise, and knowing the people behind it and how they think I'm very confident that 2009 will be the year that Gallery again blows all other competitors out of the water. No, I'm not talking about overtaking Flickr, but there is definitely a market for people who really want to host their own data and not leave that to a third party service. Also, it's theming and embedding systems will make it easy to integrate Gallery 3 into your existing systems.

• Habari

  
  Habari is still evolving and I'm betting that 2009 will be the year that people really start noticing it's potential. The code foundation is strong and we are still exploring all it's possibilities. I'm confident that we will see an upsurge in usage and creative uses for the platform, and that 2009 will be the best year for Habari yet.

So there it is. My own personal list of exciting things to look forward to in 2009. Of course, there are many other things that should make 2009 great, but these are the ones in the forefront of my mind right now.

On a personal level, I hope that a few of the changes planned around here and on opticalpork.com will make a difference. I have a lot planned, time will show if I'm actually able to pull it off. I can promise one thing though. My posts here will be more focused and regular than before.

Welcome 2009. You look promising, now don't disappoint me.

Over the last few days, most of the Gallery developers has been doing a 'Gx Coding Sprint' in Google's Mountain View location. The purpose of the sprint was to reach an agreement on the road ahead, and to get started on the new version of Gallery.

Sadly I was not able to attend, but they seem to have managed fine without me (No surprises there)! So far, Bharat has outlined the road ahead in a Gallery-Devel thread. Read the whole thing for the details, but the gist of it is this:

• Name: Gallery 3 (surprise!)
• Framework: Kohana
• Supported Environment: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL 5, PHP 5)

Basically this comes down to acknowledging that Gallery 2 has become to large and to all-embracing to be effective at what it does. Gallery 3 will try to rectify this.

While I have no experience with Kohana at all, I'm really looking forward to working on this. It promises to be a lot of fun and I hope to be able to really contribute to making Gallery 3 a huge success. Now, lets get a fully functional external API ready and I'll try to make sure that there is a Habari Silo available for it as well.
After all, the Silo's look great and does a fantastic job when publishing content.

Last night the Performancing Podcast was entirely devoted to Habari

Both Owen and Scott appear live via call-in, and some of us hung around the chat room answering questions and being generally rowdy. It was fun and I hope I can participate more actively if we get invited back to do a followup some time.

Listen to episode 9 of Perfcast