Most of my energy recently has been devoted to organising things for XTech 2006, now just over a month away.

Here are some XTech-related snippets:

• Mozilla Corporation has joined as a co-host. We'll have six Mozilla related presentations, plus a keynote about JavaScript 2 from Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich.
• The Ajax Developers' Day continues to take shape. We're looking to add a Ajax toolkit lightning demo session at the end of the day. Contact me if you or your company wants to take part in this.
  
• BarCamp Amsterdam II will be taking place directly after XTech. This will be a free-form participant-led conference, held over the weekend. Many XTech speakers and attendees are likely to hang around to take part.

MacBook 

My new computer has arrived, an Apple MacBook Pro. I know I wrote some time ago about how disappointing it was for free software advocates to be using a non-free OS, and I am rather sad about this in some ways. I'll be writing in the near future about my impressions of the platform, and reasons for buying this machine.

Writing

My latest piece on Debian has been published over at O'Reilly, Installing Software on Debian. We've been a little slow getting through the publication of these, so I'll try and hurry the next few along.

Rails

Rails continues to impress. I wish I had more time than I do to use it, as it feels so right to work with. With Matt Biddulph I'll be teaching a day on Rails at XTech 2006. In the meantime, I highly recommend Chad Fowler's Rails Recipes, it covers the most common requirements from real-world web applications.

Oh, and I'm scheduled to attend RailsConf this June. My paper was (not too surprisingly) declined for the conference, but Matt's was accepted.