May 31, 2005

Memorial Weekend Present

One of Paquito's legacies dug out of the hard drive on his laptop is this totally cool track he was putting together in the days leading to his death.

The vocal audio track can be found here. He had talked about this song in our last email of March 18, 2005 (two days before he was killed). A fragment of the email describes it as so:

Let's see what else....
Oh yeah, I'm back in the swing of music creation, and I am very happy w/ whats coming out.

Just the other day I put together a track where I grace w/ actual vocals that I recorded of my-self. It was quite the task, due to the massive lack of studio goodness out here in the barracks. lol. But I went outside w/ my mic, and did my best.

Man, I can NOT wait to get out and get my hands in all of this.

As far as my art goes, I haven't put my self to good use b/c it's hard to find motivation for it, but I have been embarrassing the ways of the sponge, and have been absorbing all possible ideas around me.

All I need now is to get out and apply all of my sparks of genius.

Finally, here is the finish product:
sweetRelease.mp3

Gina Cavallaro, our family friend and reporter for the Army Times recently participated on one of NPR's shows. An audio stream for the "On Point" program for Memorial Day can be found here.

Posted by martinf at 06:10 AM | Comments (2)

May 26, 2005

It is now over two months

With Memorial Day weekend approaching, I thought of updating the blog entry I did in the Utah hotel after being notified of Paquito's death.

http://www.mfconsulting.com/blog/archives/000076.html

I thought it would be a good place to put some of the links that tell you about him and to let my family's friends and loved ones read again the outpour of support that the world community gave us during those very difficult times.

Last night was the season finale of a couple of very amusing shows ("Lost" and "American Idol"). The majority of us are doing our best to keep busy with all the things that will take our mind off the ongoing war in Afganistan and Iraq.

Do you ever stop to think about what happens to all the kids we send to this war? You see, we have no ongoing "Draft" so that means that those who did volunteer so that you and I are not forced to go have to do more than what is fair.

If we can't bring them home now because is not appropriate, and will not let us finish what we started, then perhaps... Start the draft. Let us see how patriotic we really are. I did my time in the service (over 10 years)yet, I will go back in if it will help my fellow men and/or women.

I am far from a war monger! However, if recalling me back to active duty will give our volunteers a shorter troop rotation then send me in.

Posted by martinf at 07:47 AM | Comments (1)

May 18, 2005

Famous Conclusion

mariposa
Life is what you make it.   -- Francisco "Paquito" Martinez, Korea 2004
Posted by martinf at 07:29 AM | Comments (3)

May 16, 2005

Visiting Boston

Today is my first work day back from my trip to Boston. I went to our Healthvision Waltham office to give a presentation/training on the HV Remote Print Server. I am pleased with how well it went.

In the evenings, the scene was about hanging around with my dear family in the Novell Cambridge office. On Thursday, Miguel, Ben and I went to a Mexican restaurant called Casa Romero (located in Boston). We met with Stephen Walli and Robert Lefkowitz, two prominent figures of the Open Source movement and very interesting persons. The food was so succulent!

On Friday, Gonzalo, Miguel and I conversed a lot; preview some of Paquito’s videos and photos from Korea, Kuwait and Korea. Later we were joined by Maria Laura and Jayna, Duncan and Ben. We ate at Legal Seafood and yes, Paco ate salmon. No, I did not go into violent convulsions due to any sort of my now infamous allergic reactions.

You can see some more pictures here.

Tomorrow I leave for Fort Carson, Colorado. I think Tita my sister will come along to participate in a memorial service that the US Army 2nd Infantry Division will do to honor Paquito.

Posted by martinf at 07:25 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2005

US Military Bloggers

Reporter Mark Memmott, USA TODAY has written a article about Military Bloggers. Paquito is part of the piece.

The article should be available in the printed version of the Thursday May 12, 2005 edition of USA Today newspaper.

Gtk# 1.9.3.1 Windows Installers

There are new SDK and Runtime Installers for Gtk# versions 1.0.9/1.9.3.1. These are available for download at Novell Forge.

Mono 1.1.7 Windows Installer

The latest revision of the Mono 1.1.7 installer was built this morning and made the suggested inclution of intl.dll to the core Mono selection. I think we are ready to integrate mono-1.1.7-gtksharp-1.9.3-win32-0.4.exe in the mono-project.com/downloads section.

Posted by martinf at 04:14 AM | Comments (1)

May 11, 2005

After Some Suggestions

Wow! I asked and I received!

We had 88 downloads for the mono-1.1.7-gtksharp-1.9.3-win32-0.1.exe installer file. I have now removed that file and I have now uploaded the revised installer (mono-1.1.7-gtksharp-1.9.3-win32-0.2.exe).

Thank you very much for all of the testing! You all bring up great points. Some of the cosmetic issues (like the Mono bitmaps that the installer uses) will probably wait for a later release.

Corrected:

- The opening sentence on the ReleaseNotes.

- A new dllmap entry in /etc/mono/config corrected the problems with rsvg-2 missing dll

- I managed to build xsp2 ( a new test for gmcs in the configure.in was keeping it from building)

As far as the Gtk# not being installed in the MS GAC, it is the correct behavior. You may want to look into the Gtk# Win32 Installer for the .NET Framework SDK which does install project templates for Visual Studio .NET 2003 and does perform MS GAC installation of Gtk#.

I could not include the Mono SQL Query that I have been including for the past few installers. There appears to be a problem (I think is a UI related problem) that is keeping it from loading. Daniel Morgan, if you discover anything on this let me know so we can revise the installer.

Thank you once more for the great feedback and keep it coming! :)

Update

Urs did some more testing and caught some oversight of mine (not re-including the batch/shell script files for the xsp2 and mod-mono-server2.

Thanks to his observations, corrections were made and new XSP 2.0 Start Menu entries were created. This will allow for easy testing of all of the coolness that Gonzalo, Lluis and others have been working on to give us a look at some of Mono's take on ASP.NET 2.0. Some new capabilities include Mater Pages, TreeControls and more!

I hope you like it.

Posted by martinf at 07:30 AM | Comments (1)

May 10, 2005

Mono 1.1.7 installer for Windows

Please help us test the Mono 1.1.7 Windows installer to make sure it is good enough to put it up on the Mono Project Downloads page.

You can find the installer here

Posted by martinf at 08:10 AM | Comments (15)

May 09, 2005

Gtk# 1.9.3.1 .NET SDK Installer and a Gem

The good news is that the Gtk# 1.9.3.1 Win32 Installer for .NET SDK is now available as a preview. It is considered a preview because I want Mike Kestner, Ben Mauer and Todd Berman to kick the tires and see if there is something crazy or if we should publish it.

The matching runtime installer has not been put together awaiting the thumbs up. Don't worry, that one is a subset of the former one and it takes very little time and effort to put it together.

As far as the Mono 1.1.7 combined installer for Win32, we found some discrepancies in the runtime that were impeding xsp to work its best while in Windows. Gonzalo has been looking into a fix and as soon as we have that resolved we should have the installer the following day.

And now for a treat that a lot of you have been hoping for - myself above all!

Paquito's (a.k.a Frank, FM5, dbfeek, djfreek) things have arrived from Iraq as well as Korea and Mirela and I have gone over most of it. One of the gems that has already been unearth is a glimpse at what FM5 was supposed to look like!

This is what we knew: http://www.fm5ive.com

This is what we now know: http://www.mfconsulting.com/fm5

I know that MFConsulting is hosted out of a puny upstream connection, but I could not resist the temptation "To Share His Passion With The Rest Of The World" -- FM5 Origins Video.

More to come if my bandwidth survives my stupidity :-D

Posted by martinf at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2005

Excuses, Apologies and another Memorial

I ask for everybody’s indulgence. We are very close to having the Mono 1.1.7 installer for Win32 out the door. Ankit, Sebastien, and Raja are working with me to iron out some problems in the build system.

These all should be resolved and we should have a combined installer for Windows no later than Sunday.

I will be in Boston next week and later will travel to Fort Carson (Colorado) the following week. The trip to Fort Carson is to attend a memorial service that the 2nd Infantry Division will have for Paquito.

Posted by martinf at 07:28 AM | Comments (1)

May 02, 2005

Better Mono/Gtk# in Windows

I am working on the first version of a Mono win32 combined installer that for the first time in many months and much iteration will actually use a different GLib. We will based this one on glib-2.6.4. Zoltan Varga had done this recommendation quite a few weeks a go but since the Mono installers I do for Windows is coupled with GTK+ and Gtk# I had hold off on doing the change.

The Mono combined installer is the bases for my build system. As you may recall, I build all of the pieces (Mono, Gtk#, XSP, Gecko#, etc) using a combination of Cygwin and the Mono combined installer located in C:/mono/Mono-1.1.6 mapped to /usr/local. I do not use MS Framework 1.1 SDK unless I need to validate something, but what is shipped is finally built with Mono.

Another big release in terms of significance will be new Gtk# SDK and Runtime installers for .NET Framework runtime and SDK respectively. These will be very important since Mike Kestner, Ben Mauer, Todd Berman, Miguel de Icaza and many others have been working hard to fix errors and to improve the functionality of Mono and Gtk# in Win32! I will admit that there have been times when I felt that Mono on Win32 did not get enough love, but here it is to prove me wrong. -- /me likes being proved wrong :-D

As it turns out Gtk# Win32 Installer for Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 SDK is one of the most downloaded projects at Novell Forge. Last week it was #1 and with over 4,700 downloads. The Mono combined installer for Win32 is probably just as popular but once it becomes available in http://www.mono-project.com/downloads I loose the ability to keep an aggregate count of all of its downloads.

Posted by martinf at 11:45 AM | Comments (2)