As promised, and in keeping with most of the blogging world, here is a look back at the year that was, and a few predictions for the coming year.
Looking Back
Its been an interesting year hardware-wise for me. I started the year have just got hold of a PIII 500 with 64MB RAM, which was a reasonable upgrade for me, and the first big upgrade since I had got married in 99. Now, only a year later, and my main desktop machine is an Athlon 1900XP with 1GB of RAM. Certainly a big difference.
I now also have a network at home, which is a new addition, aided massively by SmoothWall running on one of the old boxes. This has been matched with Broadband, which, as many will testify to, makes it impossible to go back to dialup once you have it. This has made for a great learning experience, which I have enjoyed.
The church office was an additional opportunity for me to lever a SmoothWall box and network in. Everything is running nice and smoothly, apart from a couple of issues with the adsl modem.
Lastly, I passed the first of the 2 level 1 exams for the LPI qualification.
My home machine is still running Debian happily (for both it, and me). If I was running 2 machines, a server and a workstation/desktop, I would almost definitely be looking at a Debian/Ubuntu combo (Ubuntu is currently residing on my work laptop), but with just the one machine, Debian is more than up to the task. Just how much I have become accustomed to it has been underlined by the few times in the last couple of months that I have been called upon to reinstall Windows on the machines of friends and family.
It’s been (IMHO) and big year for Debian. At the beginning of the year Knoppix was still making great waves, but we mustn’t forget the 2 main commerical Debian ventures – Xandros and Linspire – which are doing as well as any commerical Debian variants in the past (being that they are still going…..). And a big welcome during the year to 2 new big Debian distros, Mepis and the aforementioned Ubuntu. Finally we appear to be reaching the point where the power of Debian can be matched with a click-and-forget install and user experience.
Jobwise I’ve been getting into a lot more programming at work, which has been fun. I certainly feel very at home with Python now, which has been great. Add to that my new IBM contract, and things are very rosy.
Faithwise things have been tricky this year. Church is still great, but am still finding a proper equilibrium in my personal walk each day. However, there is always hope, and I am forever grateful for the people that God has placed around me.
One new project has been The Freely Project, which has taken off, and, in some ways, taken on a life of its own. It’s been great to talk with Christian Linux users the world over, and look towards using what we have learnt from Linux and Open Source to help churches and Christian organisations. This is something that I can only see growing in the next year. Of course, growth will bring its own problems, but we’ll tackle those when we get there.
I’ve spent a lot of time this year looking at Content Management Systems. WordPress is a great blogging tool that I’ve very much enjoyed using, and can be used as a simple CMS system. Perhaps the most interesting project is Typo3, which has to be the most powerful open source CMS available at this time, although I am keeping an eye on Exponent which looks like a great WYSIWYG CMS system. The guys over at OpenSourceCMS.com have been invaluable.
Perhaps the most interesting development of the year has been LUGRadio, which has matured (?) into a slick, funny, Linux-related radio show. It’s been a real pleasure to be involved in the community that has grown up around it, especially on IRC and the forums, and to meet new people, and make new friends. If anything, it has got me thinking about the nature of ‘online’ relationships, which are almost always portrayed in a negative manner in the media. I look forward to another year of LUGRadio (hopefully without the lengthy summer holiday 
)
JediMoose.org is going from strength to strength. I can’t say that we’re the most popular site on the web, but we’re doing reasonably well It’s been good to see some of the subdomains doing well, although things have been quiet on that front for a while. Hopefully it will pick up in the new year.
The move to WordPress has been reasonably painless – I can’t see us moving in the next year to another system, although an upgrade might be in order.
Lastly in the ‘looking back’ frame of things, is ScotLUG. I’ve now finished a full year of organising the talks, which has been interesting. We’re still getting reasonable numbers, including quite a few new folk. We’ve also managed to develop links with a couple of other projects, albeit informal and tentative. I am hoping to get a better variety of speakers through the next year.
Looking forward…..
So – predictions for the year. I’ll try and keep it short and sweet
- ‘Next’ year is always the year of the Linux desktop. However, I agree with the LUGRadio crew in that I think we will see 1 significant corporate rollout of a Linux desktop. I suspect that this may well be in a call centre environment.
- Firefox will continue to erode the IE market share – especially given the latest Microsoft announcement, I suspect that we will begin to see many more Firefox users.
- Another serious flaw will be found in XP
- JediMoose.org will move hosting company. (I suspect that this will be to Valcato hosting, who are offering stupidly large amounts of bandwidth, which will be useful for mirroring for LUGRadio)
- The SCO trial will be a huge anticlimax
- IBM will buy Apple
- Liverpool will win _something_
- Video shows via RSS will begin to appear (a la podcasting)
- There will be one major open source software release that nobody expected
- One of Xandros, Linspire or Lycoris will go under
mrBen
but I fully intend to reclaim the trophy in this years competition.