I just got back from Beijing, China, where I spent some good ol' quality time with my JDS folks there. It was nice to finally meet our new JDS manager, Zhaozhou Li, face-to-face. He's doing a fantastic job right out of the gate. Leo Binchy, another JDS manager, has extended her stay in Beijing for another 6 months, and Niall Power, a JDS engineer, is just finishing up his stay there. Mixing up the Irish and Chinese teams a bit is making a big impact. We'll have to see if we can do more of that.

One of my favorite things about visiting Beijing is getting demos of all the projects. I always know what projects are under development, but to actually see a prototype or working demo is really exciting. Of course better performance and more eye-candy is always rolling out, but some exciting new features that are coming out include:

• Vino: Remote desktop take-over

• Better multimedia support: newer Flash, newer Real Player, Fluendo, and Evince, which should resolve the problem of Adobe not wanting to port acroread to Solaris x64.

• SyncIt, a tool that allows sys admins to synchronize directories and files across machines. Useful if you want to replicate configurations. It's also useful to end users: think of it like the old Windows Briefcase, where you want to take files home with you on your laptop.

• OTR (Off-the-Record) plug-in for Gaim. A nice way to use Gaim at work without worrying about evesdroppers.

• Trusted JDS. Government-level security comes to the Gnome desktop. Freakin' sweet.

All of these are pretty far along in development, so you should be seeing them soon. Keep an eye out.... (Sorry, this is as close to talking like a pirate that I'm going to get today. I have some dignity.)

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