I have been running FreeBSD on my servers for years and have made many attempts during that time to use it on my Laptop - all attempts failed… But with the recent commit of xorg 7.2 to the Ports Tree I might just have to give it another go

The upgrade has been 6 months in the making and would not have been possible without the dedicated work of Florent Thoumie , Dejan Lesjak and many other top FreeBSD developers - cheers folks - I look forward to putting it to the test in the next few weeks.

I have spent the last few days trying to find a decent tool to help with software design. I wanted something that could do everything, UML diagrams, Use Case etc, but of all the tools I tried not one of them felt right. There are many tools out there but the majority seemed too slow to work with or too complicated to just whip up a quick diagram.

After all the searching I have yet to find a tool that works better than good old pencil and paper! One tool however does stand out from the crowd and although it focuses on a single task, it performs that task exceptionally well. The tool you ask? Freemind.

I have been using Freemind for a few months now and keep finding new ways to make use of the simple Parent / Child Node tree. Project planning, personal achievement records, website maps etc etc. The list is endless and after reading an article on Developer.com now includes Software Design.

See Wave2 Informeer for a simple example.

I hope to get the mmEvents Daemon running this week, time permitting of course. I seem to be having so many ideas at the moment and unfortunately so little time….

I started work on an Asterisk Widget last week as a way of taking a closer look at the AJAM interface recently introduced in Asterisk 1.4.0.

This also gave me the opportunity to upgrade from Asterisk 1.4.1 to 1.4.4 which (touch wood) seems much more reliable - well at least my Debian box has not hung since!

The widget will function as a dialer to begin with and also provide visual status indications for incoming calls and number to name mappings. Nothing that has not been done before I know, but by using the HTTP protocol and the Yahoo Widget engine I should be able to run it just about anywhere (even more so when they release a Linux client).

Writing another widget also provides an opportunity to check out the latest Konfabulator engine - 4.0. The new engine offers improved performance and reduced memory consumption - something I could have done with when I was working on the Del.icio.us Widget It also boasts built in SQLite functionality out of the box!.

It should be a busy week with JavaOne kicking off today and the fight for Rich internet Applications heating up (Apollo, Java FX and Silverlight) - my money is on Flex/Apollo, but until I actually witness Java FX i’ll hold back on that comment.

I’m still waiting on Bugzilla 3.0 before I finish the site but it’s evolving nicely so watch this space…..

One last thing! check out CollectGraph, a cool MoinMoin macro for rendering your CollectD graphs into your Wiki. It’s written by Sergiusz Pawlowicz and based on the mmRRDtool macro I started a while back - nice work!