Pain, sorrow, struggles, and victory filled this past year, the former three occurring predominantly during the conclusion of the year. From Mozilla Firefox gaining about 10% share of the internet, to the RIAA continuing its jihad against Americans to the MPAA joining them, the year was eventful. 2005 was the beginning of a blog, a crib to be exact. The crib moved twice but has hopefully found a permanent home at Weblogs.us. We survived the death of a pope and a Supreme Court justice, and the wrath of two hurricanes as our friends over seas dealt with several mass transit terrorist attacks (Madrid, Spain and London, United Kingdom). A record number of hurricanes developed in the Atlantic this year. Most importantly the RIAA reported a ‘record’ low sale of music this year.

I never really enjoyed this year. Many things were accomplished, such as lettering in Track and Field, and becoming an Eagle Scout. More recently I had my wisdom teeth removed and have been in continual discomfort since that time. Upgrading could sum up most of my hardware and software purchases, gifts also, that I made this year. Mtekktux is another positive from this year, culminating my determination to get Gentoo to work on a computer.

The year’s disappointments are for the most part my own fault. I have yet to redesign my blog, which you are reading, which I said since April that I would do it. That media center computer that I want to build isn’t even fully planned out yet. On a more personal note one can infer that others have disappointed me. In particular I can think of one person who keeps bugging me. The only reason that I feel that she could be a problem is because of a peculiarity. That would be that in the past I had dreams involving someone whom at the time I wanted to go out with. Now I no longer have any dreams of that sort. What scares me is that the dreams were a habitual and impulsive move by my brain to warn myself of perceived problems. These problems I have yet to resolve what they allude to.

What to look for from 2006:

Songbird: I believe it will end up making a gigantic splash I the legal music download site business. Not only does it look nice, and support skinning, but the developers are fairly active and it is based off of the gecko http rendering engine. Personally I believe it has more potential then Flock.

Flock: Firefox + Extensions + Customizations = Web 2.0. The internet has been around for several decades now, as IE is now something like ten years old, many things have changed, yet there is not allot of user friendliness on the web. Not only do you need multiple applications to use the various features of the web but many times they don’t integrate well and that’s something nobody enjoys. Flock tries to incorporate specialized tools to make the web more useable, such as integrating with del.icio.us and Flickr, along with a blogging tool into the reliable Firefox browser. I am interested in how popular Flock becomes, since I personally don’t have a need for its added features but I like the idea.

Intel Conroe/ Merom: NetBurst was a blunder, even though I know several people who swear by the old GHz rating system. Intel hopefully will correct this mistake with it’s Conroe/Merom core processors due out during the second half of next year. They will be the first of the P8 generation of microprocessors, and are supposed to be just as good if not slightly better then what AMD will have to offer at the time. These speculations rise from the fact that a Yonah/Yohan (Intel Core Duo) competes clock-for-clock on par in most cases then the AMD Athlon X2. I was never impressed with the NetBurst architecture and I really only looked forward for a Tejas processor, which was terminated with NetBurst. I plan on getting a new laptop with a Merom dual core processor in it for College.

Mtekk’s Crib v2: I’ll be developing a skin for WordPress for my blog, I’m just looking into the design aspect of it now but it should be up by the end of January.

-John Havlik

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I think I’ve stumbled across this site before but today someone who visited my blog some how ‘found’ my blog through it. It’s still a proof of concept in the parts that work and it is missing many results that are findable from Google but I expect that to change over time with the addition of more peers and the implementation of a crawler. The interesting thing is that YaCy doesn’t use a crawler (yet), instead it implements a proxy caching of sites that YaCy users search and browse. This partially implements my idea for the TGG query response caching, which has been implemented in various Gnutella already, though not to the TGG GASSPS specs.

Here is the link: YaCy Homepage

-John Havlik

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Forget that outdated metallic feel of iTunes and say hello the modern, plastic black of Songbird. It looks like iTMS, it works with iTMS, but it’s more then that. It’s open source, based off of the Gecko rendering engine, uses XML/XUL based GUI, and is able to use the multiple Microsoft music services along with iTMS. The only bad thing is that there isn’t even a beta preview yet so until then it can’t be used by the masses.

I had my four wisdom teeth extracted today. I fought off the anesthetic again but didn’t try to get up like last time. I can’t eat anything too solid for about a week so until then it’ll be fun finding things to snack on.

Here is the link: Songbird Developer Blog

-John Havlik

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