I’m back from the ‘Doing business in China’ MBA classes at Shanghai Tongji University. The classes were very interesting and helped me get a better understanding of this huge country. Food was good and incredibly cheap, while the landscape in Shanghai is simply stunning with huge contradictions. The Chinese cell phone market seems very very promising (as any market there, I guess) with already 800 million users. I think we’ll have to translate relevant parts of the Funambol Forge to Mandarin soon
Of course I couldn’t resist taking the magnetic levitation train to the airport from Shanghai. Here is the video (the train goes only at 300km/h because it was too early. Later fares travel at 457Km/h).
It’s good to read on Palamida weekly reports that the GNU Afferto GPLv3 is being adopted at a fast pace, after I asked OSI to approve it. Considering that Google is passively opposing its adoption, I think that 95 projects is a good start. Now Funambol is in company of other high quality projects, like Clipperz and Wavemaker and with SourceForge supporting the Affero license, I think that there will be more. I’ve just updated the Trove category for the Funambol-related projects, where I could, but I advice other maintainers to do the same with their projects (and then move to the new Funambol Forge, which has cooler features than SF ).
I have the suspect that this is just the beginning and that AGPL will become as popular as the other two FSF licenses, the GPL and LGPL.
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.
I love geo-information. I still work on GIS, every now and then (I’ve just finished a project to map damages in Venetian buildings together with Politecnico di Milano and others) and it’s so much fun. It’s great when you can integrate data from different sources and make sense of different phenomenons. The Venice application maps damages in buildings and it allows to integrate also data from marine flows, traffic in the canals (and their waves), winds and so on, in search of cause-effect correlation. Integration is a powerful tool and you need interoperability for that.
which now pushes to the device my calendar events. That is, if I put an appointment on my Outlook and I add the location in it, it shows up in the car. I mean, I get in the car and I have all my appointments there. One click and I get routed to the place (with the fastest route, avoiding traffic jams).
This new gadget sounds so cool, I almost want to finally buy a car (I never had one, I prefer carsharing), get a Dash and move to California. For now I’ll stay in Milano, keep the scooter and participate to OpenStreetMap in Milano next Sunday.
A group of free software organizations and companies declared today the Document Freedom Day, a day dedicated to the promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general. Data lock-in is a very serious issue for knowledge based economy and knowledge workers. All we do is collect data to elaborate information and create knowledge. When we store this knowledge on our computers we better make sure that we will be able to retrieve them any time with ease.
Open standards are the only way to start securing the future of society. Unfortunately greed of companies promoting proprietary standards together with ill advised governments can put our future in joepardy.
Today I join FSFE, Funambol and the rest of the crowd celebrating document freedom with a wider perspective than the just the ‘office documents’ we’re used to. When I think of a document on my computer I think of every file I store in there, every database, every map, every picture, every email message, every bookmark, every calendar entry. That’s my life, my work, my being today and my future, my knowledge, the product of my life. And that’s on my computer as well as on my cell phone and in web-based applications. I want to celebrate open standards, not just ODF, because only with open standard I can still dream of a different computer system where files don’t exist and all the knowledge I need comes to me at the right time, instead of me hunting it. Happy DFD2008.
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.
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.
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://maffulli.net/wp-content/uploads/getbutton.png){kind=small}
