][ stefano maffulli

The new Funambol Forge opened registration to new members. It’s based on Collabnet, as other big free software projects like OpenOffice.org, NetBeans.org, java.net and eBay Dev. I feel comfortable and in good company

Funambol has a very big community with lots of people that contributed to the project over its many years of life. Its legacy is vast, made of 3 mailing lists spread in 2 SourceForge projects and one Yahoo! Group, one main project on OW2, many other contributed projects in the most disparate places (SF, GCode, self hosted), web pages of the free/libre version on the .com site and much more. All this deserves to be in one place. In a binary world things should be easy: move from point A to point B, delete duplicates and you’re done. But real life is harder because of one commandment of community management:

thou shalt not upset your community members

Changing a website can be very upsetting. You must give your users a good reason to change because it’s not just a matter of updating bookmarks. Your community members will have to register into a new system, change their habits, learn a new user interface, adapt their email filters.

I believe that the new discussion services on Collabnet are a fairly good reason, as will be the use of subversion (expected in July). Be delicate, be gentle and involve your community in the process.

Three projects have already decided to move in the new Forge: the SoGO Connector, the Google Connector and the Jajah Connector have a new house. I hope that more will join us in the next weeks.

I realized that it’s true what they say about email clients: they all suck. Some suck less, some (the majority) suck more than a Dyson vacuum cleaner.  Mailing list archives are important for communities because they represent their collective knowledge. Having all archives all in one place is definitely better than having to redirect people to google search to find answers or tips.

I had to redirect a few thousands email messages from a mailbox archive to the new Funambol Forge discussion system.  Evolution allows redirect as does also Mail.app, so I thought it would have been banal: CTRL-a to select all messages, menu / redirect and that’s it. Wrong: both applications cannot apply the command to more than one message at the time.  Scripting the action seemed too much work, so I reverted to using mutt, the email client that sucks less (as its motto says). Load the mailbox (mutt -f mail.box) select/tag all messages (hit the key T), apply the command to all tagged messages (hit the keys ;b), write the destination address and wait for smtp to do its job. After a couple of hours the postfix server was done. The past archives of Funambol mailing lists are in the archive of the new Forge. Great: the new discussions are ready to roll, on Monday.

As Funambol community manager, one of my duties is to know such community. It sounds simple, but since lots of software is involved to gather this knowledge things get less simple. I need to dive into apache logs and I decided to use my good old friend Postgresql. If I could, I would put everything in a database The problem is that I also need to rapidly prototype reports to transform data into information for the board. To start navigating the data, I first followed this nice tutorial to load apache logs in PostgreSQL. Connecting the database to NeoOffice was more difficult, mainly because there is no native PostgreSQL driver in NeoOffice and PSQL JDBC page is confusing. Anyway, after trial and error, I found out that on Leopard OS X 10.5 you need JDBC3 for your PSQL version 8.3 (I used the dmg packages). To install the driver I followed the instructions provided here. Now I can start diving in the logs and prepare some reports. The board will be happy soon and I’m glad I’m on my way to better knowledge of this community too.

Only real hackers consider improving what everybody else thinks is already optimal. At Funambol we like to do just that and we decided to improve the iPhone user interface:

Funambol, the company that is known for putting the “fun” back in the mobile business, today released a high contrast user interface for the widely used iPhone, making it more fun to use and more accessible to select customers.

Read the rest of the press release with the working screenshots on Funambol for iPhone.

Dal 9 al 11 Maggio si terrà a Firenze la seconda edizione di PyCon, conferenza dedicata al linguaggio di programmazione Python.  È stato pubblicato il call for papers. Da aggiungere in agenda, anche per il keynote di apertura da parte di Richard Stallman.

To confirm that Jobs got everything (not!) right, Sybase jumps on the iPhone bandwagon for enterprise users.

Sybase on Tuesday said it’s adding Apple iPhone support to its suite of mobile middleware, making it possible to access IBM Lotus Domino or Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers through a secure environment.

May I just add that Funambol can already be used to connect Domino and Exchange servers to iPhone?  There is also an open Code sniper bounty  to develop a plugin to connect only to Lotus Notes client.

* Of course I pity Jobs for not respecting user’s freedoms.

Domani, 18 Marzo alla Facoltà di Scienze della Comunicazione della Sapienza di Roma ci sarà un incontro sul tema della creatività nell’era di Internet che affronterà le tematiche del software libero e delle licenze libere per i contenuti creativi.

Durante l’incontro verrà presentato il film* “La Repubblica del Software”, Free, Open Source Software nella Pubblica Amministrazione italiana con interviste a Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Renzo Davoli, Salvatore Tucci, Wikimedia, Pietro Folena, Vincenzo Vita, Flavia Marzano, Hacklab Cosenza, Erica Litrenta, Vittorio Pagani.

Verranno inoltre presentate le iniziative:

- Co.Pi.Da., l’osservatorio della Facoltà di Sc. della Comunicazione sul diritto d’autore e le nuove tecnologie

- Liberius, lo sportello legale gratuito della Facoltà di Sc. della Comunicazione di assistenza alla creatività digitale < http://liberius.org>

Maggiori informazioni sul blog di Arturo Di Corinto.

I really liked watching this presentation, I think that Charlene has good points. My social graph is not flat and it’s more extended than any Google or Facebook knows. Which leads to my concerns: how much do I want to disclose to strangers? how do I make sure that I am the owner of my own social graph? how do I balance being part of a big social network and such disclosure?

I guess I’ll have to keep thinking about this. Meanwhile, enjoy Charlene’s slides.

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I made an experiment last Friday at the Italian Girl Geek Dinner: I grabbed the latest JAM email client that supports sending photos and I used it to report from there using the new service Twitxr.  Twitxr is like Twitter allowing short text messages but adding one image and a simple form of geotagging.  I setup my Twitxr so that I could send all my comments and pics to a special email address from which they would also be forwarded also to twitter (whose stream is included also on this blog’s sidebar) and my Facebook (Flickr is also supported, but I left it out for now).

I found out that the keyboard of the Nokia N60 I used is good enough to write short twits and that the quality of the pics is acceptable to describe what is happening.  The battery of the phone ran out faster than I expected. Giulia suspects that the JAM version I was using had a bug (I’ll check this with Edoardo later this week).

I had fun at the dinner, I liked Sarah’s speech: the girl has a clear vision, I found her very inspiring, definitely a person to folllow. We’ll have to find more occasions to do things together, since she is a mobile geek

The question everybody asks: How many guys were there?  I’m waiting for  the video in intruders.tv.

Sono molto contento di essere tra i 20 fortunati invitati alla cena delle Girl Geek italiane venerdì prossimo.

La lista dei Guy Geek (invitati ognuno da una sola Girl Geek) è stata annunciata con tanto anticipo e si è riempita in due giorni (e pensavamo di meno!)!

Spero di riuscire a fare 4 chiacchiere con Sarah visto che anche lei è interessata al mobile. Ci sarà anche una mia collega di Funambol

Liste d’attesa per il 29 febbraio « Girl Geek Dinners Italia