By my calculations, Saturday 7/7/7 was Catalyst's 10th birthday. Yay for us.

We are "celebrating" by organising and underwriting the New Zealand Open Source Awards. This is our way of acknowledging the importance of Free and Open Source Software in our successes to date.

Get your entries in quick, time is running out.

Chris Daish has put an incredible amount of work into getting open4business up and running.

http://www.open4business.co.nz/

A Catalyst led initiative, focused on open source software for business. Hoping it will generate the interest required to become self sustaining and "free" of Catalyst and Chris.

Another Catalyst Zoo Doo gone by. Another great time at Wellington Zoo. I hate to recommend the venue to other companies because it has been our little secret for so long. But the Zoo is a great venue for parties, particularly if you want to include everyone and their families. The keepers give talks throughout the evening, the Elephant House now has bats in and makes a great mid-Zoo staging post for when the Archibald centre gets a bit full.

Wellington Zoo has changed so much since I first went there fifteen years ago. Although budgets are obviously tight they continue with their programme of tearing down old cages and opening up bigger areas for animals to roam around and mix in. The new Chimp house is well overdue but I am really looking forward to the time when giraffes, zebra antelope, kangaroos and even the odd rabbit share an open space.

A client pointed out this service to me:

http://www.videoegg.com/

Video blogging is obviously huge in the USA and as broadband creaks out here will become more popular. Most successful sites (like YouTube) embed your video in a flash file and play it back in a flash player - finally, a good use for Flash! This process is not rocket science and Alastair has a prototype system up and running here. What is costly is the hosting and bandwidth costs associated with video content. Particularly if your humble little offering suddenly hits the world stage. However, the trend is to have YouTube type functionality in much more segmented sites, whether they be for social networks, content, blogs or other applications.

... was last night.

Matt did an interesting intro to LaTex (and i learned how to pronounce it correctly)

We also learnt that Lyx can be pronounce either way and still sounds misleading

Sam V did a test run of his OO-ified database access module comparison - but i think i missed the point.

and February's perl mongers will not be on valentines days, so our girlfriends/wives will be happy (i didn't know i was supposed to have one).

Catalyst are sponsoring Linux.conf.au

nifty!

Hey there Planet Catalyst!!

Post numero uno... Just about to head out for a few drinks, some pool & mebe even a lil' bit of a dance in ol Palmy North :) Right now, I'm just waiting for my GF to finish Pitfall on the Xbox :p she's "just about done" she tells me.

Have to say - kinda rocks being able to look forward to my weeks 'and' my weekends. See Y'all Monday ^-^