Wednesday, 31 October 2007

Halloween and current developments

I'd hoped to do a release today, but a few things that we're working on just aren't ready and I'd like to wait until the next Sunbird/Lightning release. Meanwhile things are really moving forward with some great contributions from the community in the IMAP area. I've nearly finished with global addressbook integration (using OpenDS) including in the webmail side. The pieces remaining are:

  • Personal Addressbooks (working out how the security works)
  • Addressbook administration
  • Administration cleanup
  • Documentation

click for screenshot of address search in Meldware
searching for addresses in a global addressbook hosted by Meldware/OpenDS

This work is moving ahead now and we should be ready for its release shortly. Meanwhile, we've seen a lot of uptake in interest since you-know-who was acquired. I think people are really starting to see the difference between real open source and trial-ware/shareware.

click for a screenshot of displaying an address
showing an address

I never can help myself from looking ahead. I think there is a real need for better mobile integration in the calendar space. Particularly with scheduling. However, targeting multiple mobile devices is still a pain. With SuperWaba going closed source and already basically violating its GPL license (from what I can tell), I don't see any great solution.

I kind of think a scripting approach makes sense. That being said I'm not altogether sold on JavaME. One, who needs another proprietary platform (JavaME is not open source, or even apparently free as in beer or whatever). Secondly, it doesn't seem to have much in the way of ubiquity. My Treo doesn't even have it. I wonder if a scripting language geared for mobile devices and a set of widget peers might not work? Something like TCL/TK but not. The idea would be a tight subset for internet connected handheld devices, buttons, windows, grids and essentially sockets or http... I look at stuff like SynchML and it is a bit depressing to be honest. Why can't I have as robust of an experience on my phone as I have on my desktop (screen realestate aside) without selling my soul to any one vendor's "platform strategy"?

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Posted by acoliver at 12:00 PM in Buni.org
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Friday, 21 September 2007

Bye Bye MacBookPro

So after my macbook pro fried (which is also a large part of why I haven't been on), I sent it back to get it repaired. It came back and OS X boots fine but Ubuntu won't boot, even off of a CD (I suspect there is still a hardware problem but doubt they'll fix it 'because Linux won't boot anymore'). In the meantime I got a Toshiba which has all Intel graphics, etc and an atheros card (although I have to use the ndiswrapper until they finish up support for N cards). I'll probably give it to my stepson and use my new Toshiba instead. It has however marginally inferior resolution :-(.

Meanwhile I'm working on something cool for Meldware (that I kid you not no less than 12 people IM'd me)...stay tuned to find out what :-). As for Yahoo buying Zimbra. I'm so happy. I was afraid we'd have a real competitor eventually in Zimbra once they abandoned their "Open Source is the toy version, please buy the Man's version" model (inevitable). Now...they'll end up like most other "we acquired something outside our core business model". So it is how it is meant to be -- ultimately -- Us vs Exchange.

Posted by acoliver at 3:09 PM in Buni.org
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Thursday, 16 August 2007

Meldware and Flex on WebDevRadio

I'm in Finland this week and Switzerland next week, but I wanted to point everyone to an interview that James Ward and I gave to the WebDevRadio podcast. James gave me his cold shortly before and I was feeling ornery that day so I may have implied that say a certain browser developer needs to get off of its behind....possibly not the one you think...

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Posted by acoliver at 8:54 AM in Buni.org
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Monday, 2 July 2007

RANT: Nat Torkington can go jump off a cliff

I tried more subtle approaches, but O'Reilly's radar is about as astute as a lump on the head. Nat posts a query about where open source groupware is. I tried answering in comments. I tried emailing. I tried introductions via mutual friends, business acquaintances and more. So far...dead silence. Its not like there aren't more than one open source groupware project. Nat just didn't notice. To be fair, we're the only one doing the full monty really. Well we'll be presenting at one of IDG's conferences but none of O'Reilly's. I'd like a nice juicy one to launch at now that we're soooo close. (Mail is kicking ass, Calendar is just a matter of a few templates here and there, LDAP/Addressbook is appearing quickly and the Web client is decent...the admin piece...well ask about that later).. Maybe I'll cancel my safari subscription that I nearly never use lately in protest.. We need a rebel alliance open source conference like Screw-OSCON or something ;-)... The only question is what antics should we pull at NGDC? If I could get Holly Holm to come that would rock (big fan).

Holly Holm ROCKS! 

Maybe someone could kidnap Torkington and Holly could beat on him? Now that really represent our 'lil open source company well huh?

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Posted by acoliver at 5:10 AM in Buni.org
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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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Friday, 20 April 2007

Buni Meldware @ Linuxfest Northwest

Apparently I'm not the only one excited that this time next week I'll be on the LUG tour at Linuxfest Northwest. We'll be doing a meldware talk/demo on both days @ 10a. I hope to see you there.

http://linuxfestnorthwest.com

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Posted by acoliver at 9:36 AM in Buni.org
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Wednesday, 18 April 2007

Anonymous CVS restored

Okay we have some sort of weirdness going on with CVS. It took some dirty hacking but now anonymous CVS access to Meldware works again. I'm not sure why the normal way of doing things did not work. Oh well. Anyhow...fresh open source...come and get it.

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Posted by acoliver at 6:08 PM in Buni.org
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Sunday, 15 April 2007

Volunteers wanted

Hi all, we're working feverishly towards release and we could really use a hand in a number of areas. If you're a Java or Javascript developer and have been thinking about getting involved and haven't taken the plunge because you don't know where to start. Write me at acoliver -at- buni -dt- org. I'd love to hear from you.

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Posted by acoliver at 2:23 PM in Buni.org
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Saturday, 14 April 2007

Buni is all about home baked cookies and....thong panties

The TriLUG meeting went off without too much of a hitch. Though oddly, and this is the one last place that Linux truly blows, I got my projector to work after two days of twiddling with the help of the folks in the #trilug IRC room on freenode. However, I could NOT get it to work for the presentation. It did however work with Red Hat's projector (the meeting was at Red Hat HQ). My wife is testing out some cookie recipes for a business she may start. Unfortunately this batch wasn't quite as good as previous batches, however the comments were constructive and helpful nonetheless. The deal was a survey for a cookie. We also gave out a survey for to draw for the Buni logo thong panties. I'm sure both gentlemen who won them will look stunning in them. The slides are improving. I hope to have them trimmed down by my next presentation at Linuxfest Northwest. We have a few other surprises planned for LFNW. However no cookies, sorry.

The demo also went better than expected. I did spend so much time on the projector issue that I forgot to disable the debugger, but someone commented that things seemed pretty fast. Someone mentioned their favorite moment was when I went "oh wow, it actually worked!". Anyhow, you may get to hear a podcast of this show (and so you know...it is different EVERY TIME) although apparently it may be marked "explicit" because I called myself an "asshole" (actually I was quoting someone in an embellished story). Anyhow, what can I say, that is how we roll at Buni: home-baked cookies, cussing, code and thong panties. I think I set the tone in my first entry. Anyhow, hope to see everyone at LinuxFest. It will be fun. BTW...M8 will be out shortly, we're fixing a bug or two and Mike is doing something really cool ;-).

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Posted by acoliver at 11:19 PM in Buni.org
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Sunday, 18 March 2007

Meldware In Washington DC at DCLUG and Running MS Windows with Pride

Mark your Meldware-based calendar off for March 21, I'm flying up to D.C.(DCLUG) to give a similar talk to the one Calendar whiz Aron Sogor gave to much accord at CSUEB.

Aron Sogor
Aron Sogor

This is the announcement for my DC LUG talk:

The March 2007 meeting of Washington DC Linux user group will take place on Wednesday, March 21, 2007 at 7pm.

Andrew Oliver from buni.org will talk about their Linux groupware software "Meldware Communication Suite". He'll discuss front-end and back-end issues, and do a quick tour of installation and features, and discusses integrating their software with popular organizer tools such as webcal and Thunderbird. Under duress, Andrew will break and admit that they even integrate with Outlook.

The meeting location is our usual 2025 M street, NW in downtown DC. There will be signs in front of the building. The location is within 3 nearby Metro stops, both on the red (Dupont, Farragut North) and blue/orange (Farragut West, Foggy Bottom [a bit of a hike]) lines.

Parking in the area is available for approximately $5; there's even parking in the building itself. Street parking is free after 6:30pm, but scarce. There's a parking lot at 23rd St. between M and L that is not enforced after 7pm (people have successfully parked there for years---no one we know was ticketed or towed yet, but it could happen).

The meeting dates for the rest of the year 2007 are: Apr 18, May 16, Jun 20, Jul 18, Aug 15, Sep 19, Oct 17, Nov 21 and Dec 19.

For other details, see our home page

http://dclug.tux.org

...except I'm proud of our integration efforts. I will come right out and say with glowing pride. Not only does Meldware work with Outlook but the server runs fine on Windows too....maybe I'll tone my pride down on the "Works on Windows" talk for the LUGs huh? I can still flirt with Solaris, OS X and BSD though right? Okay no...stick to message. Meldware: Groupware for Linux baby!

click here for google map

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Posted by acoliver at 11:27 PM in Buni.org
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Thursday, 15 March 2007

How to pronounce Buni -- in pictures or "I hate cute furry animals"

So I heard Buni featured on this week's Flex Show. I appreciated the mention...but...they pronounced Buni like "Bungee"? So Buni comes from Swahili. It means "to put together" and is also a type of coffee bean. We have one customer who pronounces it "bunny"...the cute little furry things. Well Buni developers are fairly macho and we have one thing to say about that:

I don't know how "buni" is actually pronounced in Swahili, but here is a hint on how WE pronounce it:

Notice that our ghost isn't one of those cute little Casper types. He is BAD-ASSED. Boo-Knee. Get it?

Anyhow, thanks to the Flex Show guys - all in good fun. If you're not interested in our Groupware Server or Client (the Flex part) but are a mere Flex developer looking for a calendar control, you might want to check this out and if you also happen to be in the East San Francisco Bay area (Hayward), you can ask him more about it at his Linux Users Group talk about Meldware.

Posted by acoliver at 12:59 PM in Buni.org
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Sunday, 25 February 2007

Minor patch build available

For those of you who had issues synchronizing your Meldware Calendar via iCal to Evolution or some other client this forum post documents a quick fix. We've captured this packaging change in a minor patch build (labeled 20070225) off the 1.0M7 branch that you can download here. This does not contain any changes from the HEAD, in fact it contains no code changes whatsoever (only build fixes for packaging).

Posted by acoliver at 10:46 PM in Buni.org
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Wednesday, 21 February 2007

RE: Atlassian Represents

I saw this post from Mike Cannon-Brookes. I just had to one up that picture...

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Posted by acoliver at 7:17 AM in Buni.org
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