As frequent readers of Open Source Penguin probably know I have been deeply involved with the Mambo CMS project for the better part of the last 3 years as the Project Leader and Core Development Team leader.  I recently retired from the project to spend some time with my family and pursue some of my own projects.  I wish the Mambo team all the best.  They are destined for a bright future.  It is a great project with an amazing team and vibrant community.

The first project I wanted to focus on was the completion of an Ajax chat system.  Yes I know there are quit a few out there already, but most are either basic chat rooms, mini Ajax tutorial type applications, or just simply not very good.  It started 6 months ago as a project to help me work around some firewalls that prevented me from chatting with old friends and as a way for me to expand my JavaScript and Ajax skills past the normal day-to-day web development usage.  The name of this project is "Mia-Chat".  Mia-Chat is quickly becoming a best of breed Ajax chat application with some very unique features.  It is now at version 0.8.1 and we have a few more goodies to add before we can do an official 1.0 release, but the application is now stable enough for every day use.

Key intentions and achievements of Mia are:

• Simple setup
• Ease of use
• Secure
• Platform independent
• Database platform agnostic

Grab it and take a look.  We hope you enjoy it :)

Well that's debatable and many hard core Linux users would beg to differ.  The major Linux distributions have matured to the point that they are quite usable as everyday desktop operating systems now and in many cases are actually better than their proprietary counterparts.  However, some people do enjoy Windows and/or need it for their day job so perhaps there is middle ground for these folks.  After all people probably want to experiment and/or test a bit anyway before making the big switch permanently.