From the dev lists:

The target release date for WordPress 2.2 is less than a month away, April 23rd.

Phew. Patch and relax. Update and relax. Patch and relax.

When Matt and the others from Automattic said they’d be stepping up the frequency of updates - I didn’t expect this

It’s good though. Lots of new features promised for 2.2 and especially 2.3/2.4 and beyond.

Back from BrainShare and the usual round of patching the internal boxes.

The firewall/spam server got a good round of updates. IPcop had two major updates. Also the CLAM anti-virus for the mail sweeper got updated to 0.90.1

There are also a stack of SLES 10 and Windows 2003 updates to test and install. Sigh. Windows 2003 SP2 is now live; I need to check it doesn’t make anything barf. SLES 10 just has the normal slew of packages.

What does it mean?

For those at BrainShare - take your camera; mail your pictures to me at ezs@novell.com

I am in Hannover for a couple of days; announcing a new product at CeBIT - the worlds largest IT and technology show.

It is my first time here - and the scale is unimaginable. I was warned by colleagues about the traffic, the remote hotels and the expense - but until this morning I was unprepared.

The Novell stand is huge; with product demos; a cinema and a cafe to talk to partners and customers.

Two press meetings down; a press conference and a partner briefing to go.

Written at: Cebit. Hannover, Germany

All of the food so far in Beijing has been excellent.

Last night I headed out with Laurence and we ran into the Dong Hua Men Night Market - which is renowned in Beijing.

There is a wide range of regional delicacies on sale - including lamb kebabs, pork and beef skewers and fruit.

Then there are the real specialties. In the interests of fairness - think how interesting pork scratchings and haggis are..

Starfish on a stick:

And roasted and fried scorpions, silkworm grubs and crickets:

Silkworm grubs. Crunchy on the outside, silky and velvety on the inside. That’s what my online gourmet reviewer said.

Scorpions. Crunchy with a bite. I made that one up.

Finally crickets. Fried and ready to go.

The Beijing skyline is filled with cranes.

I’ve been taking pictures of my stay in Beijing - I’ve added the pictures from Laurence too.

In addition I am creating some panoramic shots stitching together many pictures to make a panorama.

The panorama is great for trying to give some feeling of the scale of the sights.

Here is Mao’s Mausoleum from a couple of pictures:

And here are a couple of pictures from the Forbidden City - still these pictures don’t give the vastness of the scale:

[For the record - I am using Hugin to create the pictures - it is free and opensource.]

I am here in Beijing with Laurence - a colleague from the UK.

Yesterday we did the unthinkable - and booked ourselves on an organised tour to the Great Wall.

First stop - the Ming Tombs - about 50km North West of Beijing itself.

As you can see it was drizzling and foggy.

Next stop - after lunch and shopping - was the Great Wall at Ba Da Ling itself.

We drove for just a few minutes and from nowhere Tolkeinesque mountains started to loom up through the mist. Very impressive.

We arrived and the snow started falling. I wanted to get a geocache - so we took the less travelled and much much steeper southern part of the wall.

As you can see - almost whiteout conditions.

The climb up was just slippery; going down was part farce, part winter sport. I’ll post a video of that later!

Here is a view during the summer to show the difference:

Finally - back into a very very wet Beijing for the evening.

We decided to avoid the local delicacies on sale in the hutong - pictures of those soon - but it was a festival - so fireworks, firecrackers - and kids with sparklers.

I’m in Beijing with Laurence - a friend from work in the UK.

I spent the morning in the local Novell office - great views; mainly of construction:

We were taken out to lunch by the project team from Novell - to a local tofu restuarant. Tofu served in ways I’d never seen it before. Even as a dessert.

This evening we took a taxi to Tiananmen Square - and walked around. It truly is immense. We were accosted by dozens of people selling kites, Mao watches, books of Mao Quotations - and people just wanting to talk and speak English.

We then went wandering, found a restuarant, and using a combination of pointing and my month old mandarin skills - we ordered Peking Duck, rice and beer. I even managed to ask for a receipt and get the taxi driver back to our hotel.

I’ve just arrived in Beijing after a day of travelling. I left home before dawn for a 6am flight to San Francisco, then flew to Beijing.

The flight was uneventful; immigration stressfree.

First impressions of Beijing? It’s raining, foggy and construction is everywhere.

Tomorrow I will be in the local Novell office, more updates then.