Colin Charles Agenda

Its exciting to see Zimbra being purchased for USD$350 million, by Yahoo!. Exciting because its a great product, exciting because I use it daily, and I guess Satish & team (of over 100 employees) deserve a big pat on the back. The other exciting thing to note is that its got MySQL in its core, and if they’re pushing it out farther and wider now thanks to the Yahoo! purchase, all the better.

There are a few things that are unclear, though, even from their FAQ:

• They mention commitment to Zimbra 5, but I’m still waiting for 4.5.7 :P (My Series 60 phone still hates IMAP via Zimbra).
• Will we see, say the AdSense Zimlet (only available in network, at the moment), disappear?
• Will they hurt the community by attempting to over-commercialise Zimbra? Compiling Zimbra from source control isn’t the easiest process, because of the dependency list, so I do hope they don’t run away from their amazing “easy” install process

I guess its good to know that they’re in the Communications & Community team. Yahoo! has a tendency to buy things and kill it in the past as well. Anyone remember Geocities? They were a better MySpace, any day. Lets hope Brad Garlinghouse ensures Zimbra stays committed to delivering their product, and remain relevant (today, I don’t see any better software for ease-of-use and integration available out there in the open source world). Again, congratulations to Yahoo! on acquiring a great company, and here’s me tipping my hat for their betterment in the future.

– a loyal Zimbra fan.

Technorati Tags: zimbra yahoo! acquisition

Its probably my fault for using MSN (Microsoft Messenger), but it seems to be most prominent among a lot of users I know. Thank goodness gaimPidgin supports the protocol just fine.

My recent usage of Facebook has wanted me to drop people profile information, via MSN. I somehow get a stupid message: “Message could not be sent because a connection error occurred:“. If you’re in a chat, you get disconnected from the chat, so you need to be re-invited.

It seems that in Microsoft’s infinite wisdom, they’re doing server side filtering, and killing your messages as they fit if they match an expression. Blocking popular items like:

• .info - yes, this includes all domains that have .info in them, which is really, silly
• profile.php? - good bye to sending Facebook profiles via MSN
• download.php?
• gallery.php

A more comprehensive list is being kept at the Adium (pidgin for OS X) wiki, at MSNCensorship. They also blogged it. I’m discouraging all my friends I talk with regularly from using MSN and moving to more sensible services.

Technorati Tags: msn, censosrship, microsoft, .info, profile.php, facebook

I’ve been a big supporter of Zimbra, because I think they’re one of the few projects/companies that get email/calendering/a groupware solution, right. Sure, I don’t necessarily like the model where they cripple the open source version in terms of say, backups (but this I guess will be fixed when MySQL supports online backups natively). No AdSense zimlet? Its easy enough to write one (with spare time).

What’s annoyed me of late with Zimbra, is its lack of ability to work with my Nokia E61i. Its a known problem (since February this year?), as it also affected the E61 (and probably other Series 60 phones, when you’re trying to access the Zimbra server over IMAP). You get the certificate being displayed, you get the headers, and when you try to open any email bodies, it just stops working.

The target for this fix, seems to be Zimbra 5, and according to their roadmap, we should see it in Q3/2007. The betas are already out, though I’m not about to load it on a production system. Watch zimbra#14850 - Nokia E61 sync with imaps if this affects you. There’s also a reference forum post. And here’s hoping to a good release, this quarter (2 more months to go!).

Technorati Tags: zimbra, zimbra collaboration suite, zcs, bug, nokia e61i, sybmian, series 60, imaps, email

As Ubuntu becomes more mainstream, and there are more desktop users showing up thanks to its ease of use, and hardware partnerships like Dell (I hope their sales go well), Ubuntu is going to have to rock hard when it comes to software support as well as hardware support (for workstations and laptops).

Today, I was looking for video podcasting software on Linux. PenguinTV came out tops, and I’ve never really got Democracy TV to work the way I wanted. Stable version 3.0 is out, and there are quite a number of fixes since 2.80 (5 releases to 3.0). Feisty DEBs on the website are available, but they’re i386 only, and I opted to go via the apt-get, Ubuntu way (okay, Debian way). I got version 2.80 and I thought I’d bug report it: #119262. All in hopes of a newer version. Within the hour, my request got rejected:

Thanks you for your bug report. We can find this out via merges.ubuntu.com with a lot of extra information - there’s no point reporting an update bug unless you actually plan to do the merge, attach the debdiff, and subscribe ubuntu-universe-sponsors. However, if you would like to help fix this bug, please come help us.

Now, I’m your average, and typical Ubuntu user. I just expect things to work. I’d like software thats new, and at the latest release. I am your typical Dell purchaser. I have no interest in merging, attaching a debdiff, and getting on yet another mailing list.

I don’t blame the person closing the bug report, because thats what I would have possibly done when I was futzing with Fedora packages and actively doing volunteer distribution development. However, this doesn’t bode well to Bug #1 being fixed anytime soon - PCs for sale do include free software like Ubuntu, the marketing that it has amazing features and benefits are known to quite a lot of folk, but its not nearly as user friendly, yet. Let time pass?

Technorati Tags: ubuntu, penguintv, bug, new release, mainstream usage

Liferea 1.2.10 actually rocks. It does duplicate detection in posts, and makes my feed reading life, a lot easier.

Liferea Duplicate Feed Detection at work

It also supports bookmarking with del.icio.us, which is nifty. It feels a lot faster than the previous version. It had some internal database change and did the honorable thing and keep a backup of the old one, in case I was planning on rolling back.

All my technical related feeds have been imported into Liferea, and I’m a happy camper. In my idea of making NetNewsWire even more useless to me, I’ve moved all photographic related blog reading to Google Reader.

Now, thats a nice piece of software. With access to the Internet, I can read my feeds and have them always “synced” - i.e. I’m never going to have to read an entry twice, or anything of that sort. The only caveat is that I need to actually be online.

So while it’s handy to read Google Reader feeds while I’m sitting in a shop waiting for my take-out, its also pretty darn expensive. I’m paying something like $4.95 for less than 5MB of traffic per month I think (or maybe its 10MB), with Optus.

Does there exist software to read Google Reader offline (Linux preferred, Mac OS X is OK, Windows tolerated)? Do Series 60 Nokia phones have such ability? I ask because soon I’ll not only have the N73, but an E61i (which has WiFi). If only Liferea read/synced with Google Reader, then I can move all my feeds to a cool backend.

Technorati Tags: liferea, google reader, series 60, rss, feeds

I decided to actually get backups going. I know, laugh. But I bet that when you snicker, you may also not have a great backup system in place.

Picked up a 160GB 2.5″ disk and an external casing. After careful calculation, it seems like maybe I could have saved money buying a pre-packaged solution. Weird.

Anyways, the tool of choice - rdiff-backup. Its simply dead easy to use. Just do: rdiff-backup <current> <backup-path>. My initial backup of about 56GB of my home directory, it took just under 2 hours for the first ever backup image.

Restore is something a lot of folk seem to forget. They make great backups, but never test restores. I went cold turkey - moved from Fedora to Ubuntu after a backup. It worked.

Only real problem is that in Fedora, I had uid/gid 500, but in Ubuntu, I was uid/gid 1000. That’s easily fixable, I restored (rdiff-backup -r), and I have my environment exactly as per before the format (and distribution switch).

I probably should try to do these backups daily, and maybe have even more that one drive for backups, but this is me being very appreciative of rdiff-backup. Today I ran it again after over a week.

time rdiff-backup /home/byte/ /media/disk/byte/

real    288m40.943s

user    52m1.951s

sys     12m57.641s

rdiff-backup also works over the network. Those dreamhost accounts are now starting to look very interesting for off-site storage. Read the documentation and examples if you’re wanting to get up to speed really quickly. Its also OS X compatible. Now if only I found a sensible Windows backup system…

Technorati Tags: backup, rdiff-backup, restore, unix, linux, macosx

I spoke to Matt and Barry today, and it was great to see them at the DotOrg Pavilion at the MySQL Expo, since the last time we caught up was at WordCamp 2006. Since WordCamp, Wordpress.com is now spanning something like 900,000+ registered users! That number used to be over 300,000+, just a few months ago, so it looks like they’re really popular.

While Barry entertained a visitor, Matt and I got to talking about growing companies. He’s really happy with the size of Automattic, and is going to try for as long as possible to keep the company size, under fifty. He’s also found it interesting that some people are running WordPress 1.2 (ick! security holes galore), and while I worried that the database itself might not be migrate-able, he mentions that going from 1.2 to 2.1 should be no problem at all. Speaking of releases, a new WordPress is just around the corner.

I just love updating WordPress. He mentioned that there’s a plugin that downloads the new package, unpacks it, installs it, and does it all on the fly, but it scares him, due to the recent break-in. Well, it seems fair, and I too wouldn’t want such a plugin, but a more automated way of doing things, would rock, though. For what it’s worth, WordPress 2.2 will allow you to disable all plugins at one button click, so that should be useful (and yes, this means I can script it easier). And now, they run an md5 like every minute on WordPress to make sure the release doesn’t change!

I’ve also been advised to use SVN for deploying WordPress. I’ll definitely look into it soon, as I want to get everything into revision control eventually.

I also got to speak with Bryan Alsdorf, Eventum developer, and got a nice run down of the history of the software. More love needs to be given to this tool, as its great, is basically the infrastructure that runs MySQL Support, and others will definitely find this useful too (if in the support business). I learnt some new things, the fact that there is also a command line interface to it, makes me like this software even more. Again, part of the fun of working in a distributed environment - this is the first time I’ve spoken at length to, with Bryan.

Got so many more people and DotOrg folk to visit tomorrow. Well, enough writing now, its time to go visit the DotOrg reception to grab some drinks and food.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, eventum, mysqlconf, mysqlconf07, dotorg

Knowing Fedora (Core 6), I won’t see Thunderbird 2.0 anytime soon, so I decided to get it via upstream. Some initial comments.

No x86_64?
Thunderbird only says Linux i686. In fact, its a 32-bit binary, as opposed to what Fedora provides in 64-bit form.
file thunderbird-bin
thunderbird-bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.2.5, stripped
file /usr/lib64/thunderbird-1.5.0.10/thunderbird-bin
/usr/lib64/thunderbird-1.5.0.10/thunderbird-bin: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9, stripped

Running it
Just copy it to /usr/lib/thunderbird, and it currently runs via /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird. /usr/bin/thunderbird clearly needs to be edited to allow for using Thunderbird 2.0. A good way to get it going:
mv /usr/bin/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird-1.5
ln -s /usr/lib/thunderbird/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird

Extensions
Some of them that I use, don’t work. QuickQuote (to select part of a message, and hit reply, and only that gets quoted, ala Evolution), Remove Duplicate Messages, Sync On Arrival (important when using IMAP). I am confident that we’ll see them very soon.

New stuff
The new visual interface is very slick. It looks rather professional, and I am thrilled by it.

New mail notification that pops up, looks a little like AVG scanning your email on Windows, but it actually shows useful information, and will be a productivity boost. I notice that it also doesn’t only appear in the workspace Thunderbird is running in, but in the current active workspace. This may become a nuisance when in the zone for work, and you’re getting mail every 10 minutes.

Compacting folders? I can select an option to do it automatically from now on. Yet another dialog that won’t bug me on occassion.

When Thunderbird detects new messages in the folder, it normally dispalys such a folder differently. On mouse overs now work wonders, as it shows summaries of what the new messages are.

Google Support
Gmail support within the accounts field, means I’ll actually be reading my GMail accounts a lot more. Its interesting to have Google integration built right in, because getting the Google Calendar syncing to Thunderbird 2 is also not a problem.

Gmail support is such that your mail gets POP-ed down by default, but its also kept on the server. You sort of get the best of both worlds. What obviously doesn’t work, is label support - you tend to get a lot of messages in your Inbox. Then comes the problem of also archiving your messages offline. Its not streamlined, say like IMAP, which is something Google should really consider enabling.

In conclusion…
I’ll play with this a lot more, as I use Thunderbird on Linux and OS X for daily use. I prefer the regular theme now, over the CrossOver theme on the Mac. I dearly miss Sync on Arrival. And I just got annoyed by the new message notification pop-up, as it came up while I was typing this entry! (You can disable it in Preferences, if need be.)

Technorati Tags: thunderbird, thunderbird 2.0, extensions, new UI, usability, google, gmail