It’s hard for me to believe that is it 2011. Not only have we passed two of Arthur C. Clarke’s books without a trip to Saturn or Jupiter, it still seems like yesterday that we were worried about Y2K bugs. I hope to live until 2061 but doubt I’ll make it to 3001 (but you never know). I plan to be around for the Unix time bug in 2038, but of course, by then no one will be using software with that problem so there is little to worry about.

One theory I’ve heard about why time seems to go faster as you get older is that each year is proportionally a smaller part of your life. For example, a year to a 5 year old child represents 20% of its existence, but it is only 2% to a 50 year old person. If I lived to 3001, a year would represent less than 0.1% of my life, or the equivalent of 2 days for the 5 year old.

Trippy.

I was not unhappy to see 2010 in the taillights. While it wasn’t a bad year, it wasn’t great and we experienced some growing pains. On the other hand, I have a great feeling about 2011.

I expect that we’ll release OpenNMS 1.10 in the first half of the year, with the focus being mainly on IPv6 support. Seth has done a great job in refactoring the code to support both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and what’s left is a lot of testing as well as adding some IPv6 specific discovery mechanisms. We are also working to improve our Windows support, since believe it or not we seem to generate a lot of interest in the Windows version of OpenNMS.

We are also trying to extend our training to more parts of the world. On the last day of the month we’ll be holding, for the first time, our week long training course in Europe, which will immediately be followed by our first partner certification training. Look for more news about our new partner program next week.

We will also hold training in the US at the Pittsboro, NC, headquarters starting the last day in February. Both courses will have the a module on the new database reporting system based on JasperReports.

I will be speaking at a number of events this year. Next week I’ll be in Atlanta speaking at ATLNSMTUG (pronounced “awkward-acronym-ug”) on the OpenNMS Project. Since the Atlanta NSM Technical User Group is made up of some hardcore NSM nerds, the focus of this talk will be on how we set out to build a better NSM platform and how it compares to products like Netcool, eHealth and Netcool. It will be pretty technical, and I’m buying the pizza, so if you are into that sort of thing please register and I hope to see you there.

I will also be the opening keynote speaker at the inaugural Indiana LinuxFest to be held in Indianapolis on March 25-27th. I was very flattered to be asked to talk, and I plan to present some thoughts on how the open source community actually benefits from all its various groups and factions. I’ve titled the talk “Why We Can’t All Get Along (And Why This Is a Good Thing)” and I hope it lives up to the expectations of the organizers and attendees.

Here’s my sincere wish to my three readers that they had a wonderful holiday, and may all you wish for in 2011 be the least you receive.