Sunday, 14 October 2007

Mobile at last, dang

First of all, I'd like to thank whoever stole my Blackberry that I left on the Helsinki to Kuopio train (my camera that my stepson left on the way back was returned). That dang thing never actually worked. That made me get off my butt and buy a new phone. My crackberry never worked. It crashed on the way home on the day I bought it, but I figured that was an update or something (which crashed my previous phone on its first startup without fail), but that dang thing crashed randomly all the time and often times without switching to the JVM error screen so that I didn't know it had crashed.

I thought about buying an iPhone, but I just don't want to be associated with those suckers, besides I was mad at Apple for disabling my MacBookPro from running Linux (this I fixed). Frankly Apple's advertising annoys me. I'm beyond caring about being cool. I leave being cool to emaciated 20 year olds that shop at the GAP. If I want to be that cool I'll buy my own 20 year old to do it for me, sheesh....two if I want to be doublekool. I also resent locked phones. Like I want to pay some ridiculous amount to use my phone abroad. No way dude, I'm buying a pay as I go GSM card so bite me! There is also my theory that the reason my MBP runs so hot is that Steve Jobs wants to solidify his position as Alpha male...

I didn't really think about another Blackberry. As much as I wanted to get Meldware working with it, I had enough time getting the freaking Internet to work with it. No cool telnet or ssh or whatever! All the dreams I had about checking server logs from the train never came true. So that was out. (if you don't have a dud then it should work with IMAP)

Instead I walked into the Palm store while I was in the Atlanta airport with time to kill and saw a bunch of phones that weren't locked for relatively little. With a 30 day no-risk return policy, I was doing that. The only problem was that Versa Mail was a piece of crap. It insisted on loading THE ENTIRE MAILBOX INTO RAM and thus threw an OOME since my mailbox is a few gigs over the 8mb. Today while waiting for Billy (12) to get a turn at the soccer ball, I downloaded another app and it worked with Meldware right off. I was pleased. It even let me decide not to download my whole mailbox but stick to newer mails (essential cause it couldn't hold it). The only problem is that a certain open source diva sends email in embedded apple-encoded mime format which it doesn't seem to like much.

Now I just have to find a better calendar app for it.

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Posted by acoliver at 12:02 AM in Meldware
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Tuesday, 31 July 2007

Evolution + Meldware = Email + Calendaring + Freebusy

Evolution + Freebusy is working in the HEAD. You just need to grab the JESCS plugin. There are various differences in functionality between Evolution's WCAP support and Thunderbird's. The biggest difference is that Evolution stores things offline and gets the deltas where TBird+Lightning re-gets the data every time you start it. Unfortunately, it comes at a stability cost for some reason and Evolution+JESCS is kinda buggy. For instance it only asks for "BUSY" data but if no busy data is returned (you're completely free) then it displays the same bar of "no data" as if you had no calendar or there was an error of some sort (this . We should have an early M9 build shortly but the webmail is temporarily non-functional while we make some changes (Flex build in controls suck for auto-complete and the one on the Adobe exchange blows as well) so I'd rather hold off till its working. In the meantime if you don't care about webmail you can build from the HEAD. You can probably also use the webmail.swf from M8 with a build off of HEAD and it will probably work. Happy huntings!

click to enlarge this view of the evolution desktop
Screenshot of evolution running against a Meldware backend (build of the HEAD of CVS -- soon to be in first build for M9)

I'll definitely be demoing this in Philadelphia, PA tomorrow, so head to your nearest airport and drop by!

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Posted by acoliver at 7:21 PM in Meldware
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Monday, 30 July 2007

Buni Meldware Communication Suite 1.0 Milestone 8 released

We're pleased to announce the release of Meldware Communication Suite 1.0-M8. Meldware is a multi-platform enterprise groupware package including: email (IMAP/POP/TLS/SSL), Calendaring (web/ical/wcap), graphical installation and administration. You can download it here including a webstart installation (click from your browser). This release includes numerous bug and feature changes among the highlights:

  • a new look and feel for webmail
  • Freebusy support in the calendar
  • IMAP search support
  • WCAP support for Lightning+WCAP 0.3.1 for Thunderbird allowing for both calendaring and scheduling

This release is really late and long festering mainly because we've been working hard on the M9 release and hadn't gotten off our duffs to make the M8 release happen :-). That was certainly a mistake on our part. With this release IMAP has really matured. Calendaring and Webmail (based on Adobe's Flex technology) are gaining fast. Progress on the graphical administration piece has been slow but deliberate.

There is a new End User Guide which administrators can point users to. The Installation Guide and an Administration Guide will be available soon. Please feel free to join us in the forums and/or on the Mail List. There is also an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net called #buni. Don't forget to come see us at the Next Generation Datacenter conference colocated with Linuxworld. I understand from various folks that "open source groupware" was completely missing from O'Reilly's OSCON last week. This is your chance to get to see stuff that is too hot for O'Reilly, especially Nat Torkington! A complete stack of multi-platform open source email and calendaring is a reality, MS Exchange is ball and chain, free yourself and your company. Let's work together to make things better and open source look good!

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Posted by acoliver at 10:35 AM in Meldware
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Thursday, 26 July 2007

Mozilla struck by Lightning

We're gearing up for an encore presentation at the Philadelphia area Linux Users' Group next week and the Meldware session at the Next Generation Data Center conference in San Francisco, CA which is co-located with Linuxworld. Meanwhile a lot is happening. The first big event takes place outside of Buni.org entirely: Mozilla has released Lightning 0.5. You'll recall that Lightning provides calendar services to Mozilla's Thunderbird email client. You can grab the latest WCAP version of the Lightning 0.5 plugin here. You'll hopefully recall that WCAP is the protocol that we use to expose calendar functionality to email clients. So guys, I'm really excited about this release. Not only is it WAY prettier but it fixes some nasty little six-legged features from 0.3 (don't ask what happened to 0.4...there is no 4...why do you ask such questions?). I was so excited I had to immediately patch MCS to work with the latest version (the incompatibilities they introduced where very minor).

For a little demo we create a user via Meldware Communciation Suite's graphical administration tool:

admin screen, click here to make it bigger

Then we can pop into TBird and create a new event:

And we can invite some other folks (I secretly created another user buniluni1@localhost while you weren't looking):

Lightning Freebusy, click here to make it bugger

Who says open source GUIs can't be sexy!!! Okay the info is kind of boring because we're both free all day. Here is what it would look like if we tried to schedule another meeting (after we save this one):

Lightning Freebusy, click here to make it bugger

One of the things I really like is that you cn move the shaded part graphically and it changes the time. Another thing I like is that it dropped the red/green scheme. I dunno who does usability for these guys but umm... Red Green color blindess affects 7-10% of men (virtually no women). Not only that, but I'd tend to bet that the proportions are higher in those that work a lot with computers. Anyhow I thought the lightning 0.3 screen was ugly and, as a result of the color-blindness really, kind of mean (yes I can see it fine). see:

The Weekly view is also more attractive/usable:

Lightning weekly view, click to make it bigger

The montly view is nicer, you can really see the 3d effect of the blue :-)

Lightning day view, click to be struck by it

And the day view:

deuglfied Lightning daily view, click to make it bigger

Okay so I try and be ecumenical to Linux vendors (but love of Ubuntu comes out) and clients...but TBird+Lightning are my favorite and the new TBird 2.0 is much faster with the IMAP. However, Evolution tends to bug me. While its WCAP implementation is more sophisticated and does smarter things with offline views...Evolution is HORRID to develop for because if you get something wrong it crashes. Worse....it hangs. Not only that but sometimes when you kill it....it kills GNOME or at least your task bar. (No KDE-wankers bother me, I've never been sold on KDE from the QT-license fun to now...push your evildoer UI on some other unsuspecting open source villan). Not only that but they just caught the buffer underflow error in their IMAP that we found while developing Meldware...but they only got 1 and haven't found the corresponding overflow! Great example of why we chose the technologies we did for Meldware :-) -- we CAN'T code underflow/overflows :-). Yes, I'm sure Outlook is even worse and Apple's Mail.app has the worst IMAP ever. That rant aside, I've code in HEAD that integrates with Evolution:


weekly


monthly


monthly

While the calendar screens are nice, the setup is akward and the create event is kind of ugly (and the screens are not child windows of the application which is REALLY annoying):

I should have the freebusy support for Evolution fixed in the head shortly, but it is less attractive as well:

Note all the extra events are because Evolution caches them offline (a good thing) and just checks for recently modified/deleted (also good) but offers no easy way to resynch if you like drop the DB during development (pain for me, likely irrelevant to you).

Anyhow, my personal preferences aside, the complete open source groupware stack is a reality today with TBird/Lightning and Meldware (albiet you need to build HEAD if you want to use 0.5 ;-) ) and wait till you see what we're cooking up next!

BTW thanks to Sun for writing the plugins to connect Meldware Calendar to Evolution and Thunderbird. We might have done it without you but boy it would have taken a lot longer!

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Posted by acoliver at 1:10 AM in Meldware
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Tuesday, 19 June 2007

Contacts

You may have noticed that contacts have been removed in the M8 build series. I didn't really care for how the state of the present "Contacts" code worked. For one, it was only available via the web client and for two it was kind of klunky anyhow. Moreover, in Calendar it was intermixed with the concept of "account". So I've been learning LDAP (a feat unto itself) and integrating OpenDS. Initially, I was planning in integrating Apache Directory (mainly because I know Alex Karasulu, the founder), but a number of things about OpenDS recommended it. First off, their setup was a lot more refined than Apache Directory server. Second off, out of the box at least it is noticeably faster. Lastly, the documentation is clearer and the code really easy to work with. Not that ApacheDS didn't have its better points. OpenDS has a very quiet list of mostly sun employees, so its open source in license only really. They need to make more of an effort to make design decisions in the open. The IRC channel is completely dead. ApacheDS has a very active and helpful community, but the configuration and setup is relatively primitive. I love the ApacheDS tools for Eclipse, which I'm continuing to use with OpenDS.

The thing I love most about OpenDS is how they handle configuration. They have a bootstrap which is an LDIF file. The file is editable by humans. This is loaded at startup and becomes a set of LDAP entries, that can be modified (and are written by the server back out to the same file). I intend for this to be a future direction for Meldware. 1.0's administration DumDOM tool is a bit of a kludge and will be difficult for us to maintain in future releases and is entirely dependent on JBossAS. For a post 1.0 release, I'm thinking we can use OpenDS and store the configuration tree in LDAP, possibly using Mike's beloved Guice. Presumably we can also abstract this to allow other LDAP servers to be used as well. I've left us a lot of room so that at any point we can switch default LDAP servers or include both or whatever. Mainly I guess it will depend on how OpenDS and ApacheDS continue.

Ahh the future, always a favorite...but for the present, check out the fixes Hoshi has been making for the Web client. Also check out how it now supports both calendaring with the new Timepicker and Scheduling (aka freebusy). IMAP is faster than ever and with spam protection. The addressbook will be back in M9 only it will be replicated to both the web client and Thunderbird. I'm also working on making sure that WCAP works as well in Evolution and Outlook as it already does in TBird. Freedom is good and it starts here. Let's get it started!

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Posted by acoliver at 11:17 AM in Meldware
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Friday, 8 June 2007

New Build

We have a new build of Meldware today. This build may become M8 if there are no new serious issues. This build includes:

Posted by acoliver at 9:31 AM in Meldware
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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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Wednesday, 4 April 2007

Come to the Triangle Linux User Group on April 12th, win thong panties

After Aron's talk at the SVLUG tonight, the next stop in our Linux User Group Tour is the Triangle User Group at Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh, NC. This is my hometown LUG. I thought gosh T-Shirts are boring. Golf shirts are worse. It would be great if I could economically produce Buni Meldware slacks (to go with all the T-Shirts that other vendors produce). However, I wanted to capture the spirit of our little company.

That's right...we'll be drawing for Meldware thong panties. Imagine how great you'll look in these -- you'll feel like a real winner!

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Posted by acoliver at 9:52 AM in Meldware
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Tuesday, 13 March 2007

Server-side mail filters

Do you use mail filters in your client to route mail between folders? This way you can differentiate between mails sent to a mail list and mails that require your immediate attention or things you are only "sorta" interested in and things you are very interested in. In Thunderbird you do this by going to Tools->Mail Filters.

As useful as those are, they kind of suck with IMAP as it has to get at least the headers and then move the mail between folders. Wouldn't it be nice if this told the server where to put the mail rather than having to match the conditions on the mails and move them one by one?

Well I just committed such a thing to Meldware. You do have to configure it (click Filters at the top of the screen) via the Webmail interface, but it will affect mails as they are delivered on the incoming queue. At the moment there is no way to apply them after the fact, I'm sure we'll handle that eventually, but you can at least filter mail based on headers into various folders and delete mail as appropriate. Thanks to Buni Developer, James Ward for all of his help in getting the UI to work.

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Posted by acoliver at 11:22 PM in Meldware
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Wednesday, 28 February 2007

Meldware joins Java.net

So we're VERY excited about Buni Meldware Communication Suite joining Java.net in particular the Communications Community. You can find our Java.net home here. We're not abandoning our home, just growing so fast that we need more infrastructure and want the benefit from the larger Java.net ecosystem in particular the synergies we have with other communication projects. Meldware couldn't exist without open standards, compatibility and open source, Java.net is dedicated to all three.

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Posted by acoliver at 6:09 AM in Meldware
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Tuesday, 20 February 2007

Making Webmail/Webcalendar that doesn't suck: State of the Meldware pt1

Whoohoo so Meldware Communication Suite 1.0M7 is finally out. I'd like to give you a little tour of what the webmail and webcalendar look like in this release. James is whining at me to get a demo up. I also owe a few people buni.org email addresses (we give these out like candy to contributors or people who are interested in propagating the Meldware inside their organization). While I'm getting to that I thought I'd give a little tour... Like those guys in that beer commercial, I like to show people things. This is the Mail/Calendar as it is/was just slightly before the M7 release (there might have been a few tweakies here or there since I took the screenshots). These were downsampled to 800x600 so I hope they look okay! I shrunk them HTML-wise further just so they'd fit on the page, but if you click you'll see the full sized version.

This is the login screen. If you need a really extensive explanation...well maybe computers are just not for you okay?

This is the main screen where you can see all of your mails. Tom doesn't have any email, isn't that sad? I've resized smaller than the minimum bounds. Ooops? See why I'm trying to hire someone in sales? ;-)

You can have multiple aliases. This preference screen lets you pick the default alias to post as. You can also give yourself a cooler display name than your email address. Some people just pick their given name. I set mine to BadazzMutha to intimidate my rivals (even the ones in my head are scared). The timezone selector is just for pretty. We don't really need/use that ATM (it comes from your system timezone).

This is the compose screen. The style bar is just for pretty, it doesn't do anything yet. However you can send email with it, that's pretty cool right?

This is the main screen again only this time Tom has mail and views it.

If you click on the 'lil tab then you'll see a calendar for the month.

If you click on a day then you get the daily calendar. Click on an hour and you create an event! You can move he event through time to where you would like it. Remember to click Save (not shown). I have a few issues still with this screen. If you don't know to click the hours then it isn't all that intuitive... If you move an event after you save it you have to edit the description (meaninglessly) in order to enable the save button to save the time change... Presumably these things will be fixed by 1.0M8.

After you save the event you'll see the title displayed next to the time. Nice huh?

If you got to weekly view (above the right side mini calendar), you'll see the event you created.

If you go to monthly view you should see the event you created again.

This is the contacts screen. It needs some refactoring. I hate this screen. If you put "*" in the box and click "search" it will find everyone on the server. Then if you select them and click "add selected" they'll appear in your contacts. It is about as intuitive as doing calculus in cuneiform. Hopefully this screen will be fixed up a bit by 1.0M8 (and the query too!).

If you click on one of your contacts this screen pops up. Then you can click edit if you like and the labels become fields instead. The CSS isn't properly applied here but its okay :-)

Anyhow, I know I'm only supposed to say good things and carry pom poms, not point out the rough edges too. However, I'm a simple software developer not a marketing genius huh? You can see the tremendous progress that this part of Meldware (the most visible) has made in this release. You can only imagine what is up with the actual server (the bulk of our R&D effort)...nah don't imagine...install it baby! Just maybe wait till tomorrow, the server has been a little bit slow today with everyone pegging it for downloads!

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Posted by acoliver at 10:14 PM in Meldware
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Monday, 29 January 2007

Debugging Flex Applications

Today I received this email:

Now that Flex 2.0.1 is out the door, the Flex product team is deep in planning for future releases. To make sure we’re focusing on the right things, we need to hear more from the community, so if you’re using Flex please take a few minutes to fill out a short survey.

The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=801873200349

As always, we appreciate your valuable feedback.

Thanks, The Flex team

Okay so I filled this out. I have no doubt I'll be getting a call asking me to buy some 10k-15k/cpu FDS license (nearly all surveys by all big companies are by the sales/marketing department with ONE PURPOSE: lead generation), but.. I had to fill it out and put things like this in the comments:

LINUX SUPPORT!!!!! Especially, Flex Builder for Linux -- mostly I want the dang debugger...my beard isn't long enough to use a line debugger. I'm going nuts trying to get this stupid combo box working.

If you're like me or if you even like me...or hold me in polite ambivalence...I wouldn't mind if you added your voice too. I mean sheesh, Linux may not be the worlds most popular desktop client, but I would bet that a disproportionate number of uber-geek software developers use Linux! Shake these suckers up and maybe whine about Apollo too (we can whine about WebKit vs Gecko later ;-) ).

Posted by acoliver at 11:08 PM in Meldware
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Friday, 26 January 2007

Apollo version of our Webmail client

Check out Adobe's Apollo. Want to see a version of our Meldware Webmail running on it? It could help with offline functionality. Guess what? TOO BAD! James may add it to the build, but it won't be part of the mainstream distribution and the core developers in general won't be testing it or building it or whatever. Instead we'll probably be building a Java-based offline backend (basically a trimmed "dummy" version of Meldware CS) installed with Java Web Start. Why you ask? Well most of us can't actually run it or build it or test with it for the simple reason that we use Linux. Adobe's Linux commitment continues to leave something to be desired. It is too bad too. Apollo looks like it might be a good idea.

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Posted by acoliver at 7:08 PM in Meldware
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Monday, 18 December 2006

Aggressive 1.0-M7 release schedule

We are hard working guys here at Buni. Some of us are working into the holiday. Take a look at the next release issues. We aim to have at least a build with these in by Jan 21, if not the formal 1.0-M7 release. We aim to have 1.0 out by the end of 2007Q1.

I'm most excited about the Administration system. I find working on that provides me with the most excitement because I know how important it is for our users. A few years back when I envisioned the project, there were no other players on the market. Now we see wannabe after wannabe. They make a pretty webmail in javascript, slap a bunch of junk on top of postfix, take a bunch of VC money and brag in Businessweek on how well "they" scale. I've heard quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that they don't scale so well, in fact if you use any of their "cool" stuff...it doesn't scale at all. This is why blowing all your R&D on your COOL AJAX Web 2.0, might get you a lot of VC cash but doesn't serve the customer very well. Sure postfix scales. However, now you're short the rest of the bare minimum to be called groupware! Anyhow I tried installing/configuring their product and whoa it made me feel stupid. That is why Meldware had an installer from nearly the beginning and we will have a bang up easy to use GUI administration system before we DARE call it 1.0-final. Yes...email does suck! Let's make it better. However slapping webmail on top of postfix and a bungled heap of web services crap isn't enough to do that...get real!

Posted by acoliver at 4:54 AM in Meldware
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