With the tick tock of clocks and the setting of suns, it is now near the end of 2008's first quarter. Wow! How time does seem to fly, does it not? It is almost just like yesterday that we were releasing our components for 1.5 and it seemed like just but a few moments ago that I was welcoming this year of the rat. Now here we are, fully 1.5 compatible and in the midst of new tales, fresh adventures and latest tidings.

First off, Azrul Studio bids a fond farewell to Eddie Yanto a while back, our bona fide hard core code- cruncher . While his time here has been a blast, he has set his sights on other things and we bid him good luck in his new journey. Needless to say we will on the lookout for talented programmers to flesh out our dev team. Anyone interested can email me at hazlan@azrul.com. We also offer a sizeable bounty (RM2000) to anyone who can refer to us suitable candidates. We are looking for keyboard cowboys and code jockeys. With intimate knowledge of PHP, MySQL and Javascript. As always AJAX, JSON and PHP framework knowledge will be an advantage.

We also had our company breakfast at Bangsar Shopping Centre's La Bodega this week to welcome the lovely Rekha, our new Business Development Gal. Well it seems that I will no longer be the odd business development duck in this software developer's paradise. Finally someone who I can speak the business lingo to. Anyway, she will be spearheading our new aggressive expansion strategy. As I said earlier, Azrul Studio is looking to go far this auspicious year! As always, there was a misunderstanding about the order whenever our crowd goes out to our company breakfast. I guess, we may have been cooped up way too long in the office and need to rediscover the pleasures of good food and communicating with helpless waiters. But it was sorted out in the end and we had a wonderful time exchanging tales and trading jibes, ideas and generally havign fun welcoming the new addition to our team.

As for our components, the buzz around the developer's lounge is that the final touches is currently being done on MyBlog's modules and content mambot integration for Joomla 1.5, by none other then Azrul himself. Though that is all I was able to get out of Mark after bribing him with some Mars bars the other day. When is it going to be released? I don't know, but it will be soon. Stay tuned ladies and gentlemen for further news adn developments!

Speaking of developments, Azrul's experiments with XEN and VPS has been quite successful and we have our very first server up and running. In fact our support and main sites are now hosted on our hosting service. Dubbed 3GoHost, this will soon be another branch of our service. Plans are being made to expand our server count soon and we will begin our entry into the still untapped territory of VPS hosting service in Malaysia. Meriza, Rekha and Myself will be busy soon, overseeing the business side of things while Mark and Azrul is hard at work between support tickets and improving our code, building and testing our servers.

In conjunction with Joomla-my.org Azrul Studio will be working hard to organize and energize Joomla! Day Malaysia 2008. We are in the planning stage right now. I have been in touch with Alex Kempkens of the Joomla Core team in their forums and Azrul will liaise with the committee from Joomla-my.org. We are looking forward to a grand and glorious Joomla! Day Malaysia 2008. We shall increase the number of participants this year and will reduce the required fee by a bit. Our aim to make Joomla! 2008 accesible to more people and reach out to more users.

By the way, we have updated our website with a new template and the latest versions of our components. Hope you guys like our new look. What do you think? Do tell us and leave your comments. There is a also a new FAQ section and a User manual out for MyBlog

Well, that's all for today, I am off to other more demanding work. Will share more tales with you guys later. Have a great week!