Tuesday, 29 May 2007

Open Source Scheduling, mailbox service available (new build)

Today you'll find a new build of Meldware Communication Suite. This build unifies security/profile within Meldware and gives the Web Calendaring the ability to do scheduling. The build may very well be marked M8 proper.

This is the first time advanced scheduling (aka Freebusy) has been available to all free and open source software user enterprise and small whether they use webmail (above) or Thunderbird + Lightning/wcap plugin below.

Meldware is now on track with its advanced mailbox features (including an alpha of distributed IMAP IDLE support) and scheduling features to replace entrenched proprietary solutions.

We do love our friends at MySQL, but frankly their BLOB problem (search on ByteArrayStream, yes the problem persists and no it isn't just the driver) and somewhat unfortunate locking policy does makes the elephant roast the dolphin.

While we've gone out of our way to make this perform as well as MySQL is able, PostgreSQL is certainly the more powerful and performance choice. Therefore it is Meldware Communication Suite, Thunderbird+Lightning, Linux (or say OpenSolaris) and PostgreSQL that forms your open source power-stack that frees both your Inbox and calendar (even if it remains very busy).

Run, don't walk to your system and click to install it now.

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Posted by acoliver at 8:41 AM in Meldware
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Thursday, 24 May 2007

javaBlogs gone screwy again

Max asked why we repost to JavaBlogs... I answered that we don't. In fact JavaBlogs now is including things in feeds that aren't actually in the feeds. Case in point my feed vs what JavaBlogs includes. Of course it then for some reason makes all of our stuff new again, which made everyone ignore us...

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Posted by acoliver at 10:09 AM in Tech tips
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Sunday, 20 May 2007

DeadBox-360

Yesterday we got the XBox-360 E74 error. After disconnecting everything and reconnecting and trying w/o the hard drive connected (you can remove it by pressing the button on the side and pulling on the big block that says HDD), we called support. A very nice lady with an Indian accent (who despite claims in the aforementioned google search spoke perfect and understandable English) who claimed her name was Shaniqua helped us, figured out the warranty and is sending us a box to ship it back in. So after nearly a year of relatively light gameplay it has given up the ghost. Meanwhile the Playstation III is downloading another system update.

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Posted by acoliver at 8:48 PM in Tech tips
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Tuesday, 15 May 2007

Meldware on the Radio

Please check out the My Technology Lawyer Open Source Live Radio Show for today, May 15 [mp3] (WMA - irony). The Meldware segment is near the end (last 15m). Hopefully its good, I'm not accustomed to speaking to an audience I can't see. I generally measure my message against the facial expressions of those I'm in front of. I think it was obvious who was the marketing guy and who was the developer...I wanted to talk tech baby! You can also tell the difference in focus, us on the server, the other guys on their webmail. Wouldn't mind some feedback from you folks. Critical or not.

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Posted by acoliver at 7:02 PM in Buni.org
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Talk to BLU at MIT and PLUG-West at Unisys and Mike @ Man-LUG

I'll be giving a Buni Meldware talk at MIT (Building E-51) to the Boston Linux and Unix User Group AKA "BLU" tomorrow May 16th. Following this I'll be giving another Meldware talk at Unisys's Malvern office to the Philadelphia Linux Users Group - West on May 17th. This is all part of our LUG Tour. I'll give a full demo of ThunderBird + Lightning and Freebusy using WCAP. I'm also working hard to make Freebusy work in our WebCal. This pretty much gives you your free full-on Exchange replacement using a complete open source stack.

Andy's assistant, Francesca, at LinuxFest Northwest

Andy's assistant, Francesca, at LinuxFest Northwest

Following my talks there will be a one day gap and then Mike Barker will be giving another talk to the MAN-LUG on May 19th. I thought the name pointed to a different kind of group, but as it turns out the talk is merely in a little English town called Manchester where they have a team called Manchester United which plays cricket or one of those so-called sports I'm too American to get.

This follows our recent talks at SVLUG, TriLUG and LinuxFest Northwest. The assistant I hired that day received the most "more" comments:

There were a few more pics with her and Tux the penguin, but her photographer didn't get back to me in time, maybe I'll put them up later. You can find out more about her here or on her site, but she's in Spain right now so don't bother her. I also promised her that I would ask everyone to vote for her as a Maxim Hometown Hottie when voting opens in June. Francesca was a good sport about quite a few things including our door prizes, I'm sure all those guys will look just as fabulous as Satish in them. We did generate a little bit of controversy with a few people who are interested in political correctness more than fun. For the record I'm not opposed to hiring male assistants if there is enough demand for them. And there was the 9 year old who was selling cookies... But hey...open source should be fun and educational.

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Posted by acoliver at 1:49 AM in Buni.org
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Saturday, 12 May 2007

Hibernate bug in subqueries

Mikey logged this bug on Hibernate query generation. We've ended up writing a fair amount of native SQL for Meldware to deal with various limitations in Hibernate and/or MySQL or the sticky goo between them (generally Oracle is fine and frankly PostgreSQL is the most capable, easiest to work with database we test on). This latest bug affects when you have two subqueries and is a straight hibernate bug. If I say "delete from Foo as foo where foo.pid not in (select id from Bar) and foo.pid not in (select id from Goo)"... Hibernate generates something like "delete from FOO where pid not in (select id from BAR) and _foo0.pid not in (select id from GOO)" basically failing to declare its own alias _foo0 and thus erroring at least postgresql. This follows on a more serious Hibernate bug (really JavaAssist) which fortunately did not affect us. Hope the 2609 bug gets fixed soon as Mikey doesn't like it when he's writing native SQL instead of HQL.

Anyhow, M8 is coming soon... I realize it is very late, but it has a lot in it that we hadn't planned on but would have been silly not to do. Clustered IMAP IDLE notifications and nicely working WCAP + freebusy isn't bad for a month and some change huh? I'll have an announcement on Monday as well as some pictures of our official Bunisoft model for LinuxFest Northwest, Francesca...so stay tuned for that. I can't wait to blab on what I'm working on for M9...but I'll save that for even later ;-). I have to say as 1.0 approaches its hard not to start writing 2.0 in the middle of each milestone...but I resist.

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Posted by acoliver at 11:51 PM in Buni.org
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Ode to Intel graphics or my downgrade from my MacBookPro

I just bought a relatively inexpensive Gateway 4026 Celeron M laptop from Tom Billman of TriLUG. Tom has a Giant Shoulder and gave a good talk on video editing etc at the last TriLUG meeting using this very laptop and my operating system of choice (Feisty Fawn). He even had the projector working, which is more than I can say for my MacBook Pro. After dealing with the ATI double-suck drivers, I'm now a believer in Intel baby. They actually have open source drivers for their graphics stuff and they support the open source drivers. ATI/AMD think they have some sort of special trade secret to getting a depressing 400-700/fps on Linux. I'm fairly sure this Gateway will have a short life. Its pretty lightweight and without the magnetic power, I will definitely rip the power coupling out some day soon. However, I plan to extend its life by only using it for presentations. I'll continue to use the MBP for every day development. This Gateway is a Tom-special in that it has a atheros wifi in it as opposed to the Broadcom crap it came with (another "trade secret" driver company -- ironically their trade secret as to how to communicate over wifi in a crappy/slow/poor way isn't really that big of a secret). I think that the next laptop I purchase, even if I have to get it custom made (something that Tom increasingly convinces me is possible), will have MacBook style magnetic power, Intel graphics and atheros wifi.

I was simply awestruck when I plugged my "new" Gateway in to my projector and it "just worked". This will make the LUG Tour so much easier.

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Posted by acoliver at 12:59 PM in Open Source
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Friday, 11 May 2007

Dive Into Mark on Adobe Apollo

Following a blog-refer-thread off of Sam Ruby's 'Control You' entry:

Whether or not you agree with Mark Pilgrim on Flex/Flash, he writes a hell of a piece.

Adobe introduced Apollo, their latest attempt to recreate the web in their own image. Apollo is based on Adobe’s own markup language, Adobe’s own runtime, Adobe’s own graphics and animation framework, Adobe’s own video and audio codecs, and Adobe’s own developer tools. You can do many things with it, but “you may not sublicense or distribute the Software. … You may not modify, adapt, translate or create derivative works based upon the Software. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software. … You may not install or use the Software on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system.” It requires at least Windows XP SP 2 or Mac OS X 10.4.

The only part I disagree with is "the web". Actually Apollo is more about the desktop. Adobe needs to pursue openness more aggressively than it is. Announcing something 7 months before you do it with only a mailing list is...curious. Implying that you're doing that so that open source doesn't derail all stability and destroy your product is...an interesting message. Apollo isn't that relevant actually, I have several technical concerns with it and am dubious about its chance of success. In fact you probably don't need Apollo at all to achieve a good 90% of what Apollo wants to achieve and with only today's technologies. Java Webstart + izPack + Tomcat + a Flex API and you could do all the local storage you want and arguably most of the other stuff too. But as Mark points out, you'd be leaving vendor wonderland. That being said, I'm not opposed to Adobe having an even bigger role in defining the web provided they democratize and open up their platform a bit.

This guy raises a few good points but thinks that Mozilla will save us:

(We also don’t make you sign licensing agreements to get the format specifications, or prevent you from competing with us. We don’t tell you where you can and can’t install the software. We don’t tell you what you can and can’t tell people about your experiences, or that you can’t give it to other people with whom you might want to collaborate.)

...

Mozilla has always valued and supported web developers, and in turn those who support developers with tools and other assets, and we’ll invest more in this area over the coming year. But we’ll do it in a way that makes sense for the whole web, and brings to bear the human-manipulable power of web technology: a great set of primitives that people combine in very different ways, giving developers a great opportunity to choose tools and toolkits and patterns and technology that suit how they want to work and what they want to build.

The web can eat toolchain bait like this for breakfast. And, if Mozilla has anything to say about it, it will do just that. You won’t have to give up the web to work offline any more, or programmable 2D graphics, etc. Soon you’ll have the power of 3D and great desktop/application integration as well, via projects like canvas3d and registration of content handlers, and you’ll have it in a way that’s built on open specifications and a tool ecosystem that isn’t a monoculture. Why wouldn’t you choose the web, given its record and power and openness?

While I agree Mozilla is certainly more open and credible than Adobe as far as openness, standards support and lock-in avoidance... How does any of this stuff work in IE? Secondly, if everyone uses Mozilla then won't it fall into the same rut as IE did? Thirdly, Mozilla's credibility in the "Rich" of RIA...XUL is Mozilla's IE... They had a great thing...dropped the ball and let it whither. Meanwhile they haven't shown a great deal of motivation to work with or around Microsoft to make all of this stuff work anywhere BUT in Firefox. While buni.org traffic is > 50% Gecko based browsers (~48% Firefox) though nearly 75% Windows (I use Linux) -- I would bet that this is not a representative sample of the web at large.

Ultimately DHTML (aka AJAX) isn't enough. Sun's "silly season" scripting language over applets (aka JavaFX) is more of the same (and very disappointing). Microsoft's Silverlight smells of .NET and I'm sure will please their regulars, but will whither in adoption on the web as a whole. The richer web is coming and it is a race to openness as to who "wins". Guys...you can help define it, and make a lot of money selling the tools/services around it...but not own it. Any attempt to do so will create a "wedge issue" and limit your message and market opportunity to the party faithful...or your regulars if you prefer.

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Posted by acoliver at 11:49 AM in Tech tips
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Tuesday, 8 May 2007

Open Source TimePicker control for Flex

I needed a TimePicker in Flex 2 in order to help fix a few problems in the Meldware WebMail Client's calendar. I found one that was supposed to be on Adobe's site, but the page was broken. I found another for Flex 1.5 but it also didn't handle a 24 hour clock and had lots of minor issues even when I made it run on Flex 2. So I made my own:

click here to see it

I released it under LGPL/MPL 1.1 or whatever version of MPL the Flex SDK is released under proivded there are no amendments (ala Exhibit B). You can check the source out from here (instructions here). You can download a compiled version here by right clicking save as. You can also see it in action here. Click on the Event Editor Screen.

I've included usage instructions at the top of the main source file. I do not do asDoc as it does not run on Linux and is therefore not relevant to me at all. Basically this is the MXML: 

<mx:VBox xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
	xmlns:buni="http://www.buni.org/flex/controls/qsimport" 
	maxWidth="{this.width}" horizontalScrollPolicy="off">
...
		<buni:TimePicker id="mytime" twelveHour="true" 
                                    hour="12" minutes="0" meridian="AM" 
                                    onChange="changed()"/>

The build can look like something like this (the important part is the timepicker.swc): 

  <target name="flexExists" depends="flex-uptodate"
      if="flex.exists" unless="hello.uptodate">
    <java  jar="${flex.sdk.dir}/lib/mxmlc.jar" fork="true" 
           failonerror="true" maxmemory="128m">
      <jvmarg value="-Dapplication.home=${flex.sdk.dir}"/>
      <arg value="-file-specs" />
      <arg value="${flex.src.dir}/freebusy.mxml" />
      <arg value="-compiler.include-libraries" />
      <arg value="${lib.dir}/Cairngorm.swc" />
      <arg value="${lib.dir}/timepicker.swc" />
      <arg value="-debug=true"/>
      <arg value="-output" />
      <arg value="${flex.build.dir}/freebusy.swf" />
    </java>
  </target>

If you want to build the component you need a recent version of Apache Ant and Flex 2.1 of course. Set the FLEX_HOME environment parameter to your main Flex SDK directory. If you need a hand you can ask on the Meldware development mail list. I'll put out a build from time to time and continue to enhance it as we need.

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Posted by acoliver at 2:14 PM in Open Source
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Monday, 7 May 2007

James Ward's Google talk on Flex/Flash/Apollo

While looking down a list of Google Tech Talks, I discovered James Ward's Flex/Flash/Apollo talk. For some reason my sound is gone so other than the fact that James is still sporting the Buddy Holly evangelical preacher look that he adopted this year, I can only say that next time I reboot I'm sure it will be good. James is a "Technical Evangelist" for Adobe and contributor to Buni's Webmail/Webcal client which is written in Flex.

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Posted by acoliver at 3:38 PM in Tech tips
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