I was thinking of keeping my friends and family updated through this blog of my happenings and the occasional mussing during my period of mobilization (pre-deployment, deployment and post-deployment).

Two days ago, we returned from a week long vacation in Orlando Florida. The idea was to give Monica a full set of memories that will hopefully help her cope with Papi's 6 month separation. Her fears show up in nightmares, drawings, and conversations with her playmates that we sometimes overhear.

On the eve of her last day of school (first grade), she received some merit certificates and a medal for her academic achievements. Just as Maria and I were about to reach the teacher to thank and wish her a good summer break, a group of parents of Monica's classmates presented me with a basket of goodies (sodoku books, deck of cards, toiletries, candy, pens, pencils and stationary) to help out with my deployment. As if that was not moving enough, the teacher asked us to follow her to her classroom were she then gave me 22 letters that the kids had handwritten themselves to thank me for my service and to wish me well. The letters had all of these great drawings done on crayons and many personal thoughts.

I have known that I was deploying this summer since the beginning of January 2008. I never kept it a secret from prospective employers or the customers of my consultancy. I will share with you that it had an adverse effect on my earing potential. To the point that it once or twice made Maria and I question if we could make it through to the beginning of mobilization. Thanks to some creative accounting and some belt tightening, Maria found a way for our family to make this happen.

I bring this up because my story can not be that much different than that of all other junior enlisted reservist or national guardsmen households that struggle to provide service to our country. In the end we learn that the support our troops slogan is indeed alive within our community but rarely palpable through corporate and commercial entities.

If you are tunning in to my humble accounts expecting a blow by blow description of the daily grind at the airbase you will be sorely disappointed. To avoid getting myself or my brothering into trouble or worst yet, compromise safety and security, I intend to be somewhat vague and to intentionally exclude operational details from my blog entries. However, I think that I will still be able to provide a pretty unique perspective since there are not many 44 year old Air Force Staff Sergeants in the Security Forces career field with an extensive IT background focused on Free and Open Source culture who are admittedly democrats and are native Newyoricans that have been successfully transplanted to North Texas for 10 years.

I figure it would be a nice memorial to share a letter I received earlier this month.

Stacy Walters

As a civilian citizen of the United States of America, I can't wait for all of our troops to come home. Later in November, I will vote to try to make that wish happen.

As a military member, I promise to do EVERYTHING in my power to make sure that I protect the lives of our sons, daughters, husbands, wifes and neighbors so that all will come home to their loved ones.

Lets us have all Americans present during the rebuilding efforts or our own nation.

God Bless you Mr. Walters and your son.

Thank you Mari, Monica, Mami, Tita, Christian, Ryan, Titi, Kevin, Jay, Monche, Garth, Gina, Chris, Matt (Gut), Dan G., Gonzalo, Paolo, Jackson, Miguel, Sebastien, Niel, Joseph, C.J., SMSgt Carreon, Mirella, Adam Farmer, Harry B., PFC Johnson, Pedro, Angel and so many others that over the years support me and keep me strong and motivated.

A mildot reticle is a tool intended for range estimation. The idea is that you would have a visual of an object for which you know its size (a Texas STOP traffic sign measures 24 inches) and size it against the mildot reticle equipped optic (binoculars, spotting scope, rifle scope, etc.). Then you would use a formula that divides the know object size by the mildot measurement and that would give you the rage or distance to the object. This can be very useful when hiking and/or during land navigation exercises, but indispensable when doing bullet drop compensation adjustments on your rifle scope.

There some software programs out there that perform the computations for you. Yet, I can tell you that it is not so practical to lug around a laptop in the wilderness or an urban battlefield. This is why I always knew that the perfect use for the Nokia 770 is to become a field computer. With its long battery life and aluminum protective cover, the 770 is the ideal companion in a BDU cargo pocket. The Nokia N800 is very capable and very nice in a Starbuck's coffee shop but unfortunately lacks the battery life and the ruggedness of the 770.

Enter Maemo and Mono to the rescue. MilDotCalculator is a Gtk# application that helps you with the unit of measure conversions and the divisions done to achieve the range estimation provided by the mildot reticle. I wrote the software a few weeks before the Mono developers meeting of 2006 but finally have polish it enough to have it run on the 770.

I found a very promising shooting simulation software on the Internet that has a demo of its Mil Dot Ranging Classroom on-line. When use with MilDotCalculator you get a better sense of what I been trying to explain.

MilDotCalculator is open source and free of charge to any outdoors enthusiast (hikers, hunters and counter-snipers). You can always find utilities that help in similar tasks for Palm OS an/or Windows Mobile, but this one is powered by Mono.

You can find the MilDotCalculator debian package for Maemo here. A tarball containing the source code for the debian package as well as for the application can be found here.

What is recorded in history though, is that Sgt. Fischer along with another 4 airmen held his post at Bunker O51 located on the west side of the Tan Son Nhut Air Base even when over 600 attackers attempted to overrun the air base. Although mortally wounded, Sgt. Fischer continued to fight after all of his team members were apparently either dead or dying. He knew the importance of giving time to the blocking force to halt the advance of the North Vietnamese forces.

After running out of ammunition, Sgt. Fischer still communicated to the end, indicating enemy positions and losses, which eventually allowed the blocking forces to push the enemy off the base.

NVA soldiers reached the walls of the bunker, sprayed the inside with AK-47 automatic fire. One by one the Security Policemen's guns fell silent... and with a final radio transmission... they were gone. The Security Policemen in O51 Bunker fought to their death --to the last man-- after taking 20 direct rocket hits from the main attack thrust.

Do you know how hard it is to be posted at an emplacement knowing that the enemy knows your position but you don't know his? To me, the only viable motivation to put aside your own instinct of preservation and not abandon your post is knowing that you and your men are the last hope that the other men and women on that air base as well as their loved ones waiting for them back home have of keeping them safe.

While standing on an Iraqi neighborhood, my son Paquito ended at the cross hairs of an opposing force gunman. His death brought horrible searing pain to myself and the rest of his loved ones back home. Yet had he not enlisted, had he refused to deploy, some other soldier would have been at those cross hairs. It would irrefutably been some other family mourning the lost of their son or daughter this Memorial Day.

I am not making a case for all able United States citizen to try out and do a 3 year contract with the armed service branch of your choice. Rather, I would like for all of us residents of this nation to take a momentary pause and remember all of the fallen that regardless of how they felt about politics, their own personal interest or their ongoing pursuit of happiness, selflessly gave their lives so that others may live and comeback home to their loved ones.

Happy birthday Maria! I love you so much and will forever thank you for all of your support.

PS
I will be a guest of the CNN Newsroom on the afternoon show this Memorial Day. Right after my participation, the family and I will be meeting a the Dallas National Cemetery to put flowers at Paquito's grave.

In 3 out of 4 written tests, my scores have been 95, 100 and 100. This coming Tuesday, will be our fourth and final written test. I qualified Expert on the M4 carbine and the M9 pistol. There are numerous other "Performance Check" evaluations that I have taken and pass. These range from responding to domestic disturbances, utilizing weapon retention techniques, handcuffing (both standing and prone), performing a function check after assembly of the M4 carbine, and many others. These evaluations are required components of the course, but are graded pass or fail.

The instructors are very knowledgeable and extremely dedicated. I have made great friends with the other 14 TDYs in my team (temporary duty students - usually NCOs and other prior service personnel) that like myself, are attending class by direction of our parent unit. The majority of the class is composed of younger students (non-prior service a.k.a. pipeline) that go through Basic Training and straight into Tech School without having been assign to a unit yet.

At the beginning of April, I bought a Nokia N800 Internet tablet. Inspired by the awesome OS 2007 loaded on the N800, I went ahead and upgraded my old Nokia 770 with OS 2006. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time on my hands right now to code for this great platform. Needless to say, I have loaded mono and Gtk# on both tablet units and installed and configured my two little apps that I use to help me while on field military operations. My express thanks go to Paolo Molaro and Everaldo Canuto for their work on the mono ports for the Nokia Internet Tablet.

CNN has invited me for an interview that may air on May 28, 2007 (Maria's birthday). My appearance will be part of a Memorial Day program they are preparing. I thank C.J. Adams-Collier, Rino Amenta, Jackson Harper, Jay and Kristina, Dan Garvin, Matt Gutierrez, Gabriel Landivar, Joe Manich and many others for their words of support and encouragement this past March 20.

By now, I know that he is gone and not coming back to this earth. However, it has been nothing short of fantastic, to be given the opportunity to hang around many men and women that like him, hold a lot of promise, devotion and a sense of service before self.

I thank all of our supporters in the name of Mari, Mimi, Monica, Tita, Carmen, and Jean Ray.

As usual, feel free to leave your comments.

I have to put all my development work on hold until I get back from United States Air Force Tech School. The work will resume on the second week of June. I will be checking email, monologue and OSNews as often as possible during the evenings.

There has never been a better time to talk to your family members, co-workers and business associates about Linux, Mono and Open Source.

The first thing attempted was to create a fresh Windows 2000 Pro installation as to launch the Vista upgrade from within. It quickly told me that upgrading from this operating system was not supported and that one must boot from the Vista DVD to do a clean installation.

My second stab at it was more successful and was surprised by how relatively quickly it got installed considering the large amount of disk space it consumed.

Once running the Vista OS, I learned that my system had a 2.8 score (this is the lowest score of all the different metrics it uses do measure the total performance of the host computer). Even though the machine in question was equipped with an AGP nVidia 6800 sporting 512 MB it scored 2.8 on desktop graphics and that seems to be insufficient to run Aero.

The computer has an AMD Athlon 64 2800+ so I first chose to install the 64 bit version of Vista. The first application I tried to install was .NET Framework 1.1 redistributable, since it comes preloaded with the .NET Framework 2.0 redistributable. It gave me quite a bit of warnings and pointed me to some downloadable patches. I then installed my Cygwin vintage Mar 2004, which went through the setup routine without a hitch but ultimately did not work (bash.exe errors left and right).

I installed OpenOffice 2.1, FireFox 2.x, Thunderbird 1.5, and Gvim 7.x. All these applications worked well enough except that the Context menus (shell extensions) that permit me to send to edit in Vim any one selected file I right mouse click while on Windows Explorer were nowhere to be found.

I then thought about dumping the 64 bit version and also do a full installation of Windows XP SP2 follow by an upgrade to Vista 32 bit. I did that, but not before installing .NET Framework 1.1 and Cygwin while still in Win XP.

A few hours later, I had a Windows Vista running again but Cygwin was still broken.

I want to close this entry by expressing a very personal opinion:

• For your Windows development machines stick to Windows XP or even Windows 200 Professional for as long as you can.


• For your day to day workstation, get SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop or OpenSUSE 10.2

So, I have decided to share both the text of the email and my reply to it.

FROM: M. Bertozzi
TO: paco at mfcon dot com

Hi, I've seen here Mono and Gtk# 2.8 Release for Windows...
http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?monowin32

Thanks.

FROM: Paco Martinez
TO: M. Bertozzi

I guess your email could have begun thanking me for all the hard
unpaid work I have done on *all* of the Gtk# Installers for Win32 that I have provided since my first one -- over 3 years ago!

Paco

I realized that in Open Source we give without expecting to receive. I hate to sound mercenary here -- specially when my blog is syndicated in various places -- but it may help to remember that if you feed the musicians the band will play longer ;)

Daniel Morgan has been doing some very interesting things with Sql# GTK. His changes can be found on SVN (trunk/sqlsharpgtk). He should be the one giving you more details but I have been pretty exited about some additions to the application:

• autotools build system -- this should facilitate realigning sqlsharpgtk under mono-tools (Paco's suggestion, hint, hint)


• multiple result set handling -- Say you are connected to Sybase or MS SQL Server data source and you do something like exec sp_help tblCRM_FeedBack

1. Mono Combined Experimental Installer
2. Gtk# Installer for .NET Framework SDK
3. Gtk# Installer for .NET Framework Runtime

• Gendarme integration
• MoMA reporting
• InstallerMaker integration
• Launching project targets on Mono while hosted on openSUSE 10.2 VMware virtual machine

Unfortunately, all of those changes have really put a dent on my self imposed release schedule and that translates to about another 2 weeks before I release the new Gtk# Installers for .NET Framework. The good news is that once I am ready to release the SDK variant of the Gtk# Installers, it will for the first time, integrate the Mono Add-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003 and potentially the first pass at a Mono Add-in for Visual Studio 2005.

A byproduct of the upgrades is that I now have Sybase ASE Express 12.5 for linux running on SLES 10. I did not know if it would even be possible to do that, but thank God it is.

I will be going to military service for a fairly extended period -- Jan to May 07. While in service, I may have very infrequent access to the Internet and will likely be retracted from the Mono community. This is only temporary, and hopefully, will not impact anyone too severely.

I continue to rely more and more on Evolution as my personal information manager (PIM). Now that it can run on Win32, I wonder if it is time to begin playing with Evolution#. Can't wait to start but, will continue to work on the Gtk# Installers and the Mono Add-in until their release. In the mean time, I use monodocer to generate some evolution documentation. If you are interested in this, you can unpack the three files contained in this zipfile and place them in the sources directory of you MonoDoc installation. Restart MonoDoc, and you should find the new reference material under the Gnome node.

Its other major design goal is to serve as a base for all new migration/port work of technologies that exists on *NIX but have not yet debuted on Win32. It does this by including all of .a, .la, .lib, and .def files along with a rich set of .pc files that will go a long way to satisfy the dependencies and prerequisites of projects being ported.

Last but not least, the Experimental Installer is in turn used to build the Gtk# and Gnome# libraries that are later packaged in the two Gtk# Installers for .NET Framework. As you can tell by the previous release dates, it has almost been a year since I last released the Gtk# Installers for .NET.

The Windows Mono Development community owes a great deal of gratitude to both Lluis Sanchez Gual and to Levi Bard (tak). Lluis has been doing incredible work on MonoDevelop and has further its progress in ways that make this Windows programmer anxious to have it working on Windows. That is where Levi Bard comes in. Sometime around the September time frame, Levi submitted a patch to facilitate the running of MonoDevelop on Windows. The patch has been folded into MonoDevelop 0.12. At one point, Levi showed some screen shots of MD running on Windows! Levi had mentioned that he use the previous Mono Experimental Installer to help him achieve this milestone.

However, I have not been able to fully get MonoDevelop running on Windows just yet. There is no doubt that it is closer than ever and that the only thing needed is a few more pushes to making it happen. This is the reason why I have included a non-functional MonoDevelop copy as one of the installable components on this release of the Experimental Installer. Perhaps some one can tweak what is already there and/or continue with a new tarball of MD hacking it into submission.

In order to present a little bit of a more comprehensive picture of what all is on the Experimental Installer and how it differs from the installers available in the mono-project.com/downloads, I will try to detail below:

• Mono 1.2.1
• GTK+ 2.8.20 and GNOME 2.14.3
• GtkSourceView and GtkSourceview#
• Gtk# 1.0.10 and Gtk# 2.8.3
• MonoDoc Web Interface.
• MonoDoc browser.exe that can now truly work with either GtkHtmlRender.dll or GeckoHtmlRender.dll
• NAnt 0.85 has been included and I have created some shell wrapper scripts for it as well as a matching batch file (nant and nant.bat respectively).
• A lot of the Gtk# 2.x samples already compiled and ready to run, including a Mono-Cairo one that will answer the questions I get so often about Cairo running on Win32.
• MonoLaunch has now been included in the Experimental Installer to really make it easy to test samples in the samples directory by dragging the exe files onto the desktop drop targets.

New and Old Friends

It was great to see and hang out with my great friends Gonzalo, Jackson, Lluis, Paolo, Sebastien, Mike Kestner, Massimiliano, Atsushi, Miguel, Wade, Brady Anderson, Frank Rego, Niel Bornstein, Urs Muff, and of course, Joseph Hill. It was also good to meet again and share some dinners with Dick Porter, Martin Baulig, Ben Maurer, Duncan Mak and a lot of other new friends like Ismael and Andreia.

Some of the folks that I wish would have been able to make it to the meeting include, Kevin Shockey, Todd Berman, Geoff Norton, Peter Johanson, Daniel Morgan, C.J. Adams-Collier, Joe Audette, Matt Gutierrez, Zac Bowling, Calvin Gaisford, Peter Bartok, Jordi Mas and Erik Dasque.

The actual business end of the meeting was a smashing success! Oh my God!, what level of professionalism and technical precision in all of the presentations. It is obvious that we have so much to thank Miguel de Icaza, but it is important to also include Katey McMahon for all her hard work helping with coordinations and execution.

Google sent Christophe Bisciglia, an extraordinary person and a fellow that has now become a personal friend. As if the Summer of Code projects and other contributions to Mono were not enough, Google also wined and dinned about 54 of the conference attendees in a memorable evening at one of the restaurants of the Charles Hotel in Harvard.

The Sessions

The presentation that JB Evain from db4objects gave on db4objects, convince me to use it over my original choice of SqlLite as the embedded database on my upcoming external ballistics software project. Joseph Hill did a superb job at whipping out an impromptu Boo demo the night before the official meeting started. In fact, Joseph's demo might have help Aaron touch up the work on a totally cool Boo scripting console that the next version of Banshee will sport!

Sebastien, demonstrated Gendarme and MonoXide, which I immediately put to use when I got back home on various Gtk# apps I have been working on. Paolo went over the new Garbage Collector that he has been working on and his talk brought back memories of Jeffrey Richter discussion of MS .NET garbage collection on an Advance .NET Framework Training I took from Wintellect – although Paolo's talk was more interesting and clearer.

Atsushi Enomoto's talk on Olive surprised me quite a bit because I did not know that he had been working on Indigo and Infocard. The MonoDevelop presentation was the one just before mine. That made it a specially tough act to follow. Lluis had great stuff to show and even when I use MonoDevelop regularly I learned a lot about Stetic. Mike Kestner had a short presentation but did a good job of bringing us up to date and confirmed what I was hoping to hear. Mike is scheduled to return to all things Gtk# soon as his participation on the WindowsForm team draws to a close.

Speaking of WinForms, the new team members were introduced and their presentation was cool and full of surprises. They demoed Paint.NET running on Linux and exercised some of the theming capabilities that they have built for WinForms.

Finally, my Visual Studio for Mono Development session went well. You can see a video of it here.

Conclusion and Aftermath

Charlie Poole pointed out that the Visual Studio Add-in featured that I have been calling “Test in Mono” could be misinterpreted as a unit testing or other task associated with Test driven development. Therefore, I will likely rename that feature to “Run in Mono”.

While on that subject, we all agreed that there is a great deal of interest in creating a “Run in Mono on Linux” feature that will take advantage of a virtual copy of Linux running on the same computer as the one hosting Visual Studio and Mono for Windows. This will expand the quality of the testing done on the platforms being targeted by providing instant feedback while adding realism.

The InstallerMaker demonstration was well received. This means that I will indeed continue to try to integrate it into the features of the Visual Studio Add-in.

In the months to come, Novell will take over the release and packaging of the Gtk# Installers for .NET Framework. Wade and I spent most of the day Wednesday going over the functional parts of the Gtk# Installers and reviewing the challenges he may encounter.

There will always be a special place in my heart and thoughts for the Mono Meeting held on March 2004. Having said that, I will tell you that the Mono Meeting of 2006 was a tremendous success and will now be the standard for which other Mono events will be measured.