Happy to announce the release of Liferay Portal 6 Preview. You can download the files from SourceForge here.

The RC will be released in a few weeks with the GA to follow. Plugins for 6 will be released along with the GA.

Note that this is a Preview release and should not be used in production.

Enjoy!

You've heard of the Digg effect, but the same is true of the "Google" effect.

We're celebrating Sesame Street's 40th anniversary today. Go to www.google.com and you'll see a nice reference to Big Bird.

Click on it, and you'll see a reference to www.sesamestreet.org -> happily running on Liferay.

Anonymous access to Liferay's SVN servers now require inputting a username of "guest" with no password. We had to make this change due to some weird bugs with SVN.

That means the command

svn co svn://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/portal/trunk

will not work, but the command

svn co svn://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/portal/trunk --username guest

will work.

Access via http://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/portal/trunk also requires inputting a username of "guest" with no password.

This is a worker at my hotel who helped me replace my laptop hard drive. It was 4 am and I had given up because I didn't have a small screwdriver. We tried everything. Finally, he creatively used pliers and a large screwdriver to replace my Sony laptop hard drive. Not an easy thing to do.

I had a 250 gb ocz solid state hard drive. It's fast for email usage, but turns out it's horrible for doing any type of development work. Suresh and I swapped hard drives. He gave me his 7200 rpm laptop drive, and I gave him my solid state. He was happy cause he got the better end of the deal. I was happy cause I could code again.

That's a rickshaw. It's the preferred vehicle of choice when traveling short distances.

Rajesh and Karthik from Sun convinced me to ride one with them. All three of us have big butts, so it was quite a squeeze.

It felt a lot like the Indiana Jones ride at Disney.

They took me out to a nice Indian restaurant. I spent a lot of time with the developers on the Sun portal team as part of our collaboration with Sun. They are a smart bunch of guys and gals.

Oh, and the food was really good.

We decided to walk back to the Sun campus because we ate too much. It was fun wandering the streets of Bangalore.

A bunch of us in an elevator. I'm surprised we fit.

I had dinner with the other JAX speakers. I got to hear Keith and Craig argue about JPA vs. JDO. Craig is the spec lead for JDO and Keith is a spec member for JPA. Ken talked about how he loves to fly his private plane. And the Ruby guys kept making obscene jokes.

On my way to the airport, I got to meet the guys from mPower. They've implemented a lot of Liferay solutions the last few years. One of them is www.inikah.com, a marriage website for Muslims. They also gave me flowers when I met them. I've never gotten flowers before. Caris, I don't think you need to worry.

They made us some yummy lamb and chicken. I didn't feel comfortable eating rice with my hands though, so I had to use a spoon.

And last but not least, I got to make new friends with folks from our new Indian office. It was a fun week.

Here are some pictures of our new India office. It's in the Raheja Arcade, smack in the center of the Koramangala, the IT district of Bangalore. I was deeply humbled to witness our expansion into India. In these tough economic times, not too many companies are expanding. We've been blessed to be a leader in the open source portal and collaboration space, where demand has actually gone up during this economic downturn because we've been able to deliver more bang for the buck than our commercial counterparts at IBM and Oracle.

They are really into ceremonies in India. I got to cut a ribbon.

This office is different from our other offices around the world in that it has two floors and many rooms. Our other offices follow the format of one big war room or several war rooms.

An office is nothing more than real estate and furniture. To make it work, you gotta add that secret ingredient... people. I'm amazed at the talent of our growing Indian team.

The opening ceremony was on Good Friday, and to my surprise, it was a public holiday in India. It's not even a public holiday in the US.