Open Sauce

2006-04-28T14:31:00.000-07:00

Guys, you should really remove me as a member here, it messes up my Blogger dashboard! :-)

Logicalware Welcomes Sandra Harvey

2005-10-28T07:25:00.000-07:00

We're pleased to welcome our new Sales Manager Sandra Harvey. Sandra joins us from The Scotsman Publications, and has already hit the ground running this week talking to prospective MailManager customers.

To mark the occaision, RichardX shot some new team photos this morning, and we've put them up on the team page over on our main site. So, now you know what we all look like.

Logicalware at EuroOSCON 2005

2005-10-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

Peter and Kevin will be in Amsterdam next week at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and are looking forward to a wide range of presentations on both technical and business tracks.

They'll keep you updated from these pages, hopefully post a few photos as well.

Are you going to EuroOSCON as well? Fancy meeting us there? Let us know and let's see if we can make a plan.

Bangkok Post review of MailManager

2005-10-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

There's a pretty positive review of MailManager in the Bangkok Post. You can read it over at
Linux Insider.

Interestingly they have this to say about the Zope/Python root of MailManager:

"The downside of the Logicalware system is the dependency of the program. The system runs on top of Zope, a Python-based program that is not commonly part of the skill sets of most IT department staff. That said, the installation routine is actually quite simple as is the setup (assuming your server has Python already installed). If you are willing to do a little testing and try some new technologies, this system is well worth considering."

Butler Group report on MailManager

2005-09-16T04:42:00.000-07:00

The Butler Group report on MailManager is finally out. You can read it here.

It's the first analyst report on MailManager and it was quite nerve wracking. We put a lot of preparation in before Sue Clark from Butler Group came to visit and then we had quite a wait before we got to see the draft report.

Fortunately it went well and she had quite a lot of useful suggestions too. The overall report is pretty positive, there are a couple of issues that she's raised but nothing too serious and all things that were on the roadmap anyway.

We were the first open source company that Butler Group had reported on so I was pleased to see that in the report she says that it is a "valuable differentiator" and that our "active community" is helping us develop the product.

Zope SQL Bounty

2005-09-16T02:21:00.000-07:00

We are posting another modest bounty, something that will certainly help us along with MasilManager, and hopefully be of use to others as well.

- Add <dtml-comma> to <dtml-sqlgroup>

<dtml-sqlgroup> allows groups of SQL terms to be applied to SELECT statements but unfortunately it cannot be used with UPDATE. A patch was written to add this support in August 2000. Given the age of the patch it may need to be updated and unit tests will also be required.

Collector issue: http://www.zope.org/Collectors/Zope/1118
Developer list: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
Requirements: A bounty of $200 is offered for getting this patch checked into Zope.
Status: Taken - Tres Seaver.

Interested? get in quick! The last two bounties went within six hours. It would be interesting to see if we can beat that this time!

Update: Taken in under two hours by Tres Seaver. Thanks, Tres!

Check out the bounties page on our community site for details on how to claim it.

Software Freedom Day 05 - Edinburgh

2005-09-10T04:26:00.000-07:00

We paid a visit to the Software Freedom Day event at Drylaw Neighbourhood Centre in Edinburgh today, to see what was going on and to give a short talk on developing open source software at Sourceforge.

There were some interesting installs going on at the event, Ubuntu going onto old iMacs for example, along with various other hackery pokery things.

So, a big hand to Steve from www.hirisemultimedia.com for pulling the event together!

Shame there was only one of those smashing t-shirts, but Steve deserved it anyway. We made off with some Software Freedom Day ballons which are currently bouncing round the office.

Logicalware Bounties

2005-09-02T08:27:00.000-07:00

In the course of developing MailManager, we've come across a few things in the packages we use that could be improved, and that would probably be of use to others as well, so we thought we'd experiment with some modest bounties to see if there are any developers out there who have the same itches that need sctatching.

The first couple we have identified are:

- ZSQL Methods: Null to None patch
- Python Library format=flowed

If you'd like to find out more, or even better, sign up to write the code and claim the bounty yourself, then please visit http://www.logicalware.org/bounties.html.

If these go well, we''ll look at offering more Zope and Python related bounties in the near future.

Have fun!

Update: These bounties were snapped up within a few hours, but we'll be posting more more shortly.

Open Sauce Podcast #1

2005-08-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

In our first Open Sauce podcast we chat with Andrew Veitch, CEO of Logicalware about open source VC investment, MailManager and open source software development, and the Member of the Scottish Parliament for Glasgow Patrick Harvie tells us he's been banned from installing Firefox on Scottish Parliament computers and talks about an encounter with a Microsoft lobbyist. We round off with a brief visit to the Edinburgh Linux User Group.

It has been great fun putting the podcast together, and we would like to thank everyone who has helped, incuding Music Creation, DJ Brainstorm from Edinburgh's Pure , Chris Dooks, Patrick Harvie MSP and the folks at EdLug.

Download the Open Sauce podcast

MP3 (17.3 Mb)

Ogg Vorbis (11.4 Mb)

Enjoy!

MailManager Banner

2005-08-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

Richard X has recently provided us with some nice new banners to promote the 30 day free trial of MailManager to coincide with a forthcoming direct mail campaign.

So, feel free to give MailManager a try! We think it will help you breathe more easily ...

Andy's Open Source Stamp

2005-08-23T03:51:00.000-07:00

I just had to scan in Andy's new stamp to show you ...

We got it to stamp the back of some of the MailManager postcards we're intending to take to EuroOSCON in October.

We are also thinking of taking it to the ScotSOFT dinner because Julie says they've put our table right next to the Microsoft one, perhaps so we'll stamp all their menus for them, and maybe stamp the hand of everyone who professes to use open source software, we'll see, we'll certainly have some fun with it anyway I'm sure.

Multi terabyte Plone

2005-08-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

In between MailManager we still do some Plone work. We had a interesting job to really scale Plone up to handle very large numbers of very large files.

Plone itself is based on Zope and it was just some parts of the Zope infrastructure that began to fail as the size of the stored data grew. The first thing was that the ZODB began to get pretty bloated with the big binary objects in it. We used ATManagedFile from Enfold with some slight customizations. This stored all the content directly onto the filesystem or in our case on a Network Attached Storage.

We probably could have used DirectoryStorage instead but we think that ATManagedFile is a bit faster and there is also the security of all of the content being easily available in its original form.

The second scaling problem was TextIndexNG. Refreshing the catalog took several hours, probably much of this was the time taken by the various convertors to convert from proprietary formats to a text format that the indexer could use. As the repository still had a long way to go the indexing was going to get much slower. We got round this by using a Google Search Appliance.

We had two options on how to integrate the Plone search with the Google search. It would have been possible to have written a custom index for ZCatalog but in the end we went for the much simpler approach of customizing the appearance of the Google search page to look like Plone and then just linked to it directly.

Overall it seems to have worked pretty well and even with the cost of the Google Search Appliance still dramatically cheaper than using a closed source solution.

Rubber Stamp

2005-08-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

I've just purchased a big, red, rubber stamp saying "Certified Open Source". I can't wait to start stamping things with it.

ZODB v. RDBM

2005-08-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

One of the design decisions we've really agonised over has been whether to use the ZODB or a relational database backend for MailManager.

The 1.x series used the ZODB. This made the code much more concise (about half the lines required for SQL) and was wonderfully easy to install. Maintenance for the sys admin was also pretty straightforward, consisting of clicking on the 'Pack' tab from time to time.

Unfortunately the ZODB didn't scale as our the number of users and volumes of mail rose. The normal strategy for scaling ZODB applications is to use caching, but unfortunately in the MailManager application there is a huge amount of writing so caching doesn't help.

Making the switch to a relational backend involved a substantial rewrite but the performance improvements have been very worthwhile. The only negative is that MailManager is now slightly more difficult to install than it was but we're working on that.

Slightly embarrassingly I gave a talk at Euro Python 2004 on why storing email in the ZODB was a great idea, I think next year I might do a talk on why my 2004 presentation was completely wrong!

Email Response Management Thoughts

2005-08-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

One of my pet hates is when people talk about MailManager or other Email Response Management (ERM) systems as being a "tracker". I would prefer to talk about it as a merge between three different things - here's a venn diagram with email response management in the middle.

First, it's a webmail application. This is the IMAP, POP3, WYSIWYG editor, email filters, standard replies and coping with the truly bizarre rubbish that some email clients produce. Fortunately we had the new Python email libraries and the Epoz editor which made the job much easier. Barry Warsaw even added a feature to the standard library for us!

The next circle in our diagram is a Content Management System (CMS). Incoming email had metadata attached to it, is indexed, security is provided and it is put into a workflow. There is also some sort of archiving system in most email applications that allows you to retain different types of email for different periods of time.

Finally, we have aspects of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The idea of storing the history of communication with a customer, setting service levels for dealing with customer enquiries and reporting on agent performance is pure CRM.

So please, please, don't talk about trackers!

New MySQL Support in MailManager 2.01-alpha1

2005-08-12T05:19:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the release of MailManager 2.01-alpha1 today.

This release adds in experimental MySQL support (1208503), and a vastly improved regression test suite for the database code.

There are some known issues with this functionality, mainly relating to text searching. In order to implement text searching in MySQL, there are some auxiliary tables which are in MyISAM format. The consistency of these tables does not seem to be 100% correct, and as a result, the main ticket screen will likely show duplicates of tickets for the time being.

The following additional packages are required for MySQL functionality:

MySQL-Python: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python/
ZMySQLDA: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python/

Download MailManager 2.01-alpha1 from Sourceforge:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=85788

Download MailManager 2.01-alpha1 from Freshmeat:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/mailmanager/

Treffpunkt Article on Newsforge

2005-08-03T01:50:00.000-07:00

Martin over at Treffpunkt has announced on Newsforge that the web based project management tool is to remain a free service to open source projects.

We have been beta testing Treffpunkt for the last six weeks or so as we roll out MailManager 2.1 and the service has already proven itself invaluable, particularly in task prioritisation and tracking. It's unusual I guess to trial beta software in a live production environment, but we have been reaping the benefits with clarity of purpose and transparent communications all helped by having our project documented on our Treffpunkt system as it unfolds.

We will be adding a more in depth review of Treffpunkt as a comment to our original article later today.

MailManager 2.0-Final Released

2005-08-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce a final release for MailManager 2.0 today.

The focus of the MailManager 2.0 release has been on scalability. A PostgreSQL back end has been incorporated instead of using the ZODB, which has improved performance dramatically, particularly for larger installations.

There have been numerous other small changes, features, and bugfixes.

We would like to thank our user community for their ongoing contributions to MailManager, the bug reports, RFE's and patches are very much appreciated.

You can download MailManager to run on your own servers from Sourceforge, or get a 30 day free trial on our own hosted platform at http://www.logicalware.com/trial.

System Administrator Appreciation Day

2005-07-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

Hurrah! It's the annual 29th July System Administrator Appreciation Day again, that one special day in the year when you'll get any thanks, if you're lucky.

Still, if you haven't been rewarded with beer or pizza or an iPod for keeping everything from blowing up these last twelve months, you can cheer yourself up by listening to the System Administrator Day Song.

Open Source Beer

2005-07-28T03:49:00.000-07:00

Now here's a story to refresh the parts that other stories cannot reach. Some Danish students have created an open source beer! Their recipe has been released under a Creatve Commons license, 7% ABV and has added guarana in it to keep you awake so you can drink more of it!

The "Vores Øl Group", are a group of students at the IT-University in Copenhagen and have created Vores Øl (Our Beer) in collaboration as an experiment in applying modern open source ideas and methods on a traditional real-world product (beer).

Find out more on the Vores Øl web site.

What we like about this is it highlights the confusion that often exists regarding open source, in that it is somehow also "free", which of course isn't always the case. It also nicely illustrates the GPL but for a product, by opening up the recipe but insisting that derivative works or beers in this case must released under the same licence.

So know we reallly have a great case study for the phrase "free as in beer".

PS: Feel free to send us some, address on our main site ...

New Windows Installer

2005-07-27T03:14:00.000-07:00

The new windows installer for MailManager 2.0 is now going up on Sourceforge for 2.0.0-rc3.

There has been quite a significant rewrite of the installer for this release, particularly in the setup scripts to configure the initial MailManager instance under Zope. This restructuring should mean that we can put together a Mac and Linux installer at a later stage without a huge amount of hassle.

The new inno setup code has been published in CVS now under the installers/windows subdirectory. We now have an greatly improved build process on our windows development vmware instance now, which is almost at the stage of being fully automated. This should mean that we'll soon be releasing windows installers with every release.

DateTime arithmetic for postgres and mysql

2005-07-27T03:00:00.000-07:00

We think this should win a prize ;-)

SELECT (

<dtml-if expr="sql_database == 'postgres'">
round(date_part('epoch',
<dtml-elif expr="sql_database == 'mysql'">
unix_timestamp(
</dtml-if>

(SELECT ts FROM timestamp_test WHERE id = 2)

<dtml-if expr="sql_database == 'postgres'">
))
<dtml-elif expr="sql_database == 'mysql'">
)
</dtml-if>

-

<dtml-if expr="sql_database == 'postgres'">
round(date_part('epoch',
<dtml-elif expr="sql_database == 'mysql'">
unix_timestamp(
</dtml-if>

(SELECT ts FROM timestamp_test WHERE id = 1)

<dtml-if expr="sql_database == 'postgres'">
))
<dtml-elif expr="sql_database == 'mysql'">
)
</dtml-if>

) AS iv

Everybody Loves Eric Raymond

2005-07-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

Hiarious newish comic strip featuring Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds living in the same flat.

Surreal, bizarre, and uber geeky. We love it.

The Bash War on Terror

2005-07-25T05:02:00.000-07:00

Sun Ray has posted the ever so geeky, but strangely amusing take on the War on Terror^TM as viewed from the Bourne shell.

Here's a small excerpt:

$ cd /middle_east/Iraq/Democracy

$ ./install

Install Error: Install failed.  See install_log for details.

$ more install_log

Installed failed!

Prerequisite packages missing

Conflicting package Wahhabism found in /midde_east/Saudi_Arabia

Packages Church and State must be installed separately

File System /PeakOil nearing capacity

Please read the install guide to properly plan your installation.

$

Music for Hackers

2005-07-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

It's at times like this that one bemoans the loss of the most excellent www.musicforhackers.com [404].

Music for Hackers used to be the #1 tune site for late night SSH sessions round our way, with a good mix of Warp, Planet Dog, Plastik and the rest of the lofi usual suspects.

We miss you guys!

Currently putting up with Moby:Ambient, which I guess is allowed, given the hour.

Free Software for Busy People

2005-07-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

Found on BoingBoing today, reference to Mohammad Al-Ubaydli's book "Free Software for Busy People" which details 6 hypothetical user case studies of open source software uptake.

HTML Stripper

2005-07-18T05:59:00.000-07:00

i was needing to get a text only version of our current website to our SEO guy yesterday so he can make some essential text changes to help improve our Google rankings for email response management and a few other related keywords.

Searching around, the tools to help you do this nothing immediate came to light for OS X, you've got HTML Stripper for Windows which is OK, but that's about it.

I couldn't waste another ten minutes Googling for a solution, so I asked Kev and Graeme to help script something to do the job, going through nested directories in a web site, stripping the markup out of the pages, and outputting plain text with some basic formatting to preserve paragraphs etc.

The solution they both came up with is based on the UNIX command links.

So, assuming we are in the top level of the website:

$ tar -zcvf ~/website.tar.gz `find . | grep html$`

$ mkdir /home/user/temp -p

$ cd /home/user/temp

$ tar -zxvf ~/website.tar.gz

$ rm ~/website.tar.gz

$ for FILE in `find . | grep html$`; do links -dump $FILE > `echo $FILE | sed 's/html$/txt/'`; done

$ for FILE in `find . | grep html$`; do rm $FILE; done

Worked a treat! For example, the output text file for the index page at http://www.logicalware.com ended up like this:

* [1]Home
* [2]Products
* [3]Demo
* [4]Support
* [5]Community
* [6]Partners

[7]Log in

* [8]Home
* [9]News
* [10]About Us
* [11]Team
* [12]Careers
* [13]Contact Us

[14]pdfDownload a copy of the [15]mailmanager Datasheet.

Latest News

Explore mailmanager

Control your email and improve your organization's customer service.

[16]Find out how it works >>

Try mailmanager now

Discover the advantages of mailmanager for yourself, [17]register for a 30
day free trial - you can be up and running in minutes

Buy mailmanager

We currently offer a number of packages, from [18]Small Business to
[19]Enterprise and [20]Reseller options.

Introducing mailmanager

Have you got a team dealing with email? Perhaps dealing with mail at an
address such as sales@example.com, support@example.com or
info@example.com.

If so you need email response management software.

[21]mailmanager is the leading email response management solution and is
already used by thousands of people every day to deal with email in call
centres, businesses, education and government.

[22]mailmanager: Serious about email

Are you serious about email management?

"Companies that fail to get serious about their management of customer
service email now, will pay the price with higher customer service costs
and lost revenues down the line."
- David Daniels, Jupiter Research

Email Response Management

If an enquiry comes into your organization by email how quickly is it
dealt with? Will you notice if an email is unanswered for several days?
Are you sure which emails you are responsible for and which are being
dealt with by somebody else?

Reporting

You know your website statistics. Do you know your email statistics? See
trends in your incoming email, view average response times and identify
any problem areas. Your reports can be viewed on a web page or downloaded
to spreadsheets like Excel.

Share Information

All your valuable customer email is stored in one place and is searchable
- find every email from a customer and the replies that were sent out.

Reducing costs

If your email customer service is good it encourages people to use this
lower cost channel to communicate with your organization. mailmanager
helps you deal with email enquiries more effectively and improve your
response times.
[23]SourceForge.net Logo[24]OSI certified
(c) logicalware ltd 2002-2005 [25]contact | [26]sitemap | [27]legal Take
Email Seriously
[28]________________ [29][ Search ]
[30]Logicalware logo

References

Visible links
1. logicalware homepage
file:///home/peter/temp/index.shtml
2. mailmanager and other logicalware products
file:///home/peter/temp/products/
3. trial of mailmanager
file:///home/peter/temp/demo/
4. mailmanager support pages
file:///home/peter/temp/support/
5. mailmanager open source community
http://www.logicalware.org/
6. logicalware partners
file:///home/peter/temp/partners/
7. client login
https://my.logicalware.net/
8. file:///home/peter/temp/index.shtml
9. file:///cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi
10. file:///home/peter/temp/about.html
11. file:///home/peter/temp/team.html
12. file:///home/peter/temp/careers.html
13. file:///home/peter/temp/contact.html
15. http://www.logicalware.com/datasheet.pdf
16. file:///home/peter/temp/demo/
17. file:///home/peter/temp/demo/trial.html
18. file:///home/peter/temp/products/ondemand.html
19. file:///home/peter/temp/products/ondemand.html
20. file:///home/peter/temp/partners/
21. file:///home/peter/temp/products/
23. http://sourceforge.net/
24. http://www.opensource.org/
25. file:///contact.html
26. file:///sitemap.html
27. file:///legal.html
30. http://www.logicalware.com/

Use of NCC test lab for public sector OSS

2005-07-16T06:18:00.000-07:00

Gleaned from the Open Source Consortium mailing list.

http://www.ncc.co.uk/aboutncc/press_rel/testlab.cfm

Press Release, 17th June 2005
From The National Computing Centre, Manchester, UK for immediate release.

Test lab to prove open source viability in public sector launched

Today, 17th June 2005, the National Computing Centre (NCC) announced the opening of a test laboratory to prove the viability of Open Source software applications and configurations for public sector organisations.

The Open Source Laboratory forms part of the Open Source Academy a national project funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) as part of the "eInnovations" initiative. NCC is a member of the consortium chosen to run the Open Source Academy. Other consortium members include Birmingham City Council, Bristol City Council, Cheshire County Council, Open Forum Europe, the Open Source Consortium, Shepway District Council, Socitm, and the University of Kent.

Open Source (OS) software provides an alternative and potentially more cost efficient way of delivering e-government services over the lifetime of service provision. The public sector is traditionally dominated by proprietary solutions with take up of Open Source technologies relatively low. The creation of the Open Source Laboratory will help public sector organisations evaluate OS alternatives in an independent test environment without compromising current service delivery.

Public sector organisations can trial OS applications and configurations in complete confidence at the facility in NCC's headquarters in Manchester. The facility will also be available by remote access. The first user of the facility will be Cheshire County Council which is evaluating a joint Open Source and proprietary solution for desktop services that promises significant cost savings whilst maintaining service levels.

Ed Downs, Project Manager for the Open Source Laboratory said, "The facility provides a safe environment where public sector organisations can test and evaluate innovative technologies and configurations, prove concepts and get answers to specific technical queries. All without the risk of undertaking the work in their own organisations or compromising existing service delivery".

"Many organisations have heard about the benefits of Open Source but are wary about implementing OS solutions due to technical and compatibility considerations. The Open Source Laboratory allows potential users to test configurations, evaluate the benefits and build confidence in OS technologies, without risk."

The Open Source Laboratory is available for use by all public sector organisations and provides both technical support and a suite of test bed machines held in a safe area. Access to the service is currently free. The resources can be configured, possibly in conjunction with a client's own software, to required specifications for testing and evaluation purposes. NCC will assist clients in defining the tests that will establish the information they are seeking, conducting and reporting the trials.

Chris Marsden, Cheshire County Council said, "Cheshire's experience of the OS labs is first rate, Lab technicians were able to analyse Cheshire's requirements and propose an innovative solution. Using the lab test environment allowed work to proceed quickly, requiring only minimal resources from Cheshire to take the project forward."

Organisations wishing to take advantage of the service should contact the OS labs at NCC, email oslabs@ncc.co.uk

NerdTV

2005-07-14T15:47:00.000-07:00

Hot on the back of Zopecast #1 today comes NerdTV.

Soon we'll be able to download a video "uninterrupted hour with the smartest, funniest and sometimes nerdiest people in high tech", hosted by I, Cringely!

It's all kicking off with the mediacasting out there. Check the inevitable Slashdot thread.

We love the sauce ...

2005-07-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

We changed the strapline on the blog. We hope you like it.

Come back soon to get your next dollop of open sauce.

;-)

MSDN

2005-07-14T06:41:00.000-07:00

We had to buy an MSDN licence so that we can make proper Win32 installers and stuff. The price of it, I ask you.

Clare was just on the phone to Microsoft who had just gotten back to us four days after the order was first placed to say that there had been an issue with the credit card.

She sorted that with the Visa folk in five minutes, and when she got back to Microsoft they said they couldn't process the order because they had to reboot their local SQL server.

Oh how we laughed ...

On the way into work this morning ...

2005-07-14T02:27:00.000-07:00

I took a couple of snaps along the river. Here's one off the bridge I cross every day to get to Eskmills

I think it must be a really old bridge. You'll find it at
NT 340 725.

Zopecast #1 Unleashed

2005-07-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

Inaugural podcast about the Zope world featuring Chris, Tres, and an interview with Philipp von Weitershausen.
Tres Seaver and Chris talk about Zope 2.7.7, Zope 2.8.1, Zope 2.9, Zope 3, Five, the Zope Foundation, and Chris rants about CSS.

Also included is an interview Phillipp von Weitershausen, author of the book Web Component Development with Zope 3.

The audio file is about 55 minutes long or so.

MySQL porting

2005-07-13T09:01:00.000-07:00

The test suite for porting to MySQL, and regression testing against our existing database usage, is now commited to cvs. The number of quirks and problems that have appeared during the porting process have been far more than were bargined for. Some bug reports have been raised against MySQL during this process, although we now have workarounds for these in our code. The text search is still not published, but is partially complete. Hopefully this will be in place by tomorrow, although our listTickets.zsql method is now so full of logic I think it actually counts as a software product on it's own! Anyway, the SQL test suite is a very very helpful addition to our development process, and it introduces the ability to describe that resources are available for the test suite to use (in this case, sql servers). This will get built on again once I start putting in the API tests.

Unfortunately, it looks like there is no built version of MySQL-Python for win32 for our current versions of zope, and all of the makefiles are simply MSVC project files. I'm guessing that trying to get it rebuilt with mingw would turn out to be rather messy. We don't get our MSDN pack until the 21st, so the win32 version of MailManager 2.0.1 will probably have to wait until that date. If this is the case, I might want to shuffle some of the project plan about so that the API tests which are needed for 2.1 are also used to test the functionality of the MySQL port. At present we are only testing at the ZSQL level, but there are a fair number of changes which need to be made to the python code itself. Pushing the test suite in for this would probably be a good plan at this stage.

Live shuttle launch

2005-07-13T04:13:00.000-07:00

Dust off your RealPlayers, Nasa TV are broadcasting the shuttle launch this afternoon. T -5 hours and counting!

Nice intermittent background audio from mission control while you work.

Planet Logicalware

2005-07-13T04:03:00.000-07:00

We should add Planet Logicalware to the left hand second level nav at http://www.logicalware.com and set it loose.

I'll look into that tomorrow.

There are a couple of broken urls from /planet back up into http://ww.logicalware.com, along with right panel CVS feed broken links, and I'd like to sort the "Powered By" logos bottom right to acknowledge Blogger and Treffpunkt as well as Planet, but other than that, unless there are any big concerns about appropriateness of feed cntent, I'd be quite happy to set this live.

Any thoughts?

Changing before your very eyes ...

2005-07-13T03:59:00.000-07:00

Nice RSS aggregation work over at Planet Logicalware.

Treffpunkt Project Blog

2005-07-13T02:21:00.000-07:00

As you may have read, we are beta testing Treffpunkt open source project management tool during the Mailmanager 2.1 development cycle. There's another blog over there.

I was thinking it would be good to aggregate all the postings from the various blogs, including Kev's Wordpress, there's some good noises over there, it might make interesting reading, certainly provide a lot of rapidly changing content ...

BBC Open Source

2005-07-13T01:47:00.000-07:00

You may have seen today's Slashdot thread on the launch of the BBC Open Source site.

This is great news. Seeing that the BBC are whole heartedly adopting open source now as well (and it looks like they have been for some time) is another strong validation of the methodology. They have published a raft of internally developed software from CPAN and Apache modules, to specialist media editing tools, all available for free download and use. Hurrah for the BBC!

2005-07-13T01:31:00.000-07:00

It turns out out Apple Airport base station has enough coverage in the office that I can sit outside on the grass and work. Which is lovely in this hot weather, though if I'm going to do it for any length of time I should probably wear some sunscreen. And it's a bit difficult to make out the display in the bright sunlight.

Of course, I only discovered this because I forgot to bring my keys with me. They're ... still packed somewhere...

I should find out if, similarly, my Airport Express will provide me with bandwidth in the back garden of our new flat.

2005-07-12T02:28:00.000-07:00

Cyclists are like telephoto lenses. They both have a compressed perspective[1]. I know the area around our new office from cycling, when I was really keen on that sort of thing a couple of years ago. So I knew there was a bridge just a little bit further up the River Esk which would take me across and back up towards my new flat from the other direction.

The only problem is that the bridge in question was over a mile up the river. I'd been investigating the possibility of this being a short-cut home. No. Instead of a 10 minute journey, I was walking for nearly an hour. Still, it's a very pleasant walk and would work well with a nice cool pint in the Jooglie Brig (our new local pub) near the end.

[1] compressed perspective is where, when photographing two objects with a telephoto lens, one in front, one behind, that are a reasonable distance from each other, they appear close or flattened in the finished photograph. See this page (under the 'Focal Length and Perspective' heading) for a better description and some examples.

Shiny New Things

2005-07-11T02:27:00.000-07:00

Nice surprise on arriving at the office this morning, new G5 iMacs for Andy and I and a 12" iBook for Clare. Hurrah!

Getting the Message Out

2005-07-07T00:51:00.000-07:00

Over the past week or so we have been chewing over ideas for a direct mail campaign, using postcards with bold arresting images and message to encourage recipients to sign up for a 3 day free trial of MailManager.

MailManager is a great email response management solution for online shops for example, where more than one person is on the end of sales@example.com. So we're going to send people like that a wee postcard to invite them to sign up for a 30 day free trial of MailManager.

There are a few other ideas kicking around as well, and we'll hand them over to RichardX tomorrow for the creative work to begin.

Much consternation in the office over the London bombings today.

Treffpunkt - Open Source Project Management Tool

2005-07-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

Whilst checking the Newsforge article on our recent funding win recently, I came across another article on Treffpunkt, a new open source project management tool.

Now this immediately caught my attention, as I had been looking for quality open source project management software for some time. Having looked at most of the main contenders in the field I must admit to being generally disappointed. It might be just me, but when I pick up a piece of software for the first time, it has about five minutes to convince me that it's usable, and that's it's going to do what I want it to do, so hacking Perl to create a Gantt chart is not going to cut it with me as an easy to use tool, and I'm never going to use Java for anything if I can help it, but that's just taste. Achievo seemed to be the best of a bad bunch, with the OpenOffice.org Project Manager "in the initial phase where all the balls are in the air and nothing is decided yet" the field felt pretty bare really.

An initial MailManager 2.0 project plan had been drawn up in iTaskX on Mac OS X, which was easy enough to use, as you'd expect from Mac software, had all the right bells and whistles, although you try stitching in task dependencies on a Gantt UI with an iBook trackpad, it's hard, as is seeing anything useful on the Gantt on a 14" screen at 1024/768. The other problem with iTaskX was, only two of us in the team used it, working in a mixed platform environment, other people use Windows and Linux on the desktop, so we had the age old problem of cross platform file formats. A attempt to export the iTaskX data into something that MS Project 2000 would read was a failiure, so pretty much the most useful thing we could get out of it was a massive .jpeg on the intranet, pretty, but pretty useless unless you had a 21" cinema display. Needless to say, the project overran a bit, not just because of the software by any means, but still, it was an effort to work out where we were supposed to be at times.

Anyway, so along comes Treffpunkt, and not only is it open source, but it's designed with managing open source software projects in mind, which is ideal! Not only that, but it's web based which immediately solves the portability issue we experienced with iTaskX. Even better from my point of view, Treffpunkt convinces me of its usability within five minutes, and I'm sold. This is last Friday afternoon, and Clare is sitting next to me laughing at me as I'm like whooping for joy over a piece of project management software.

One of the may nice touches with Treffpunkt is the way that a project blog is built into the default project home page, really nice for distributed teams, along with a Wiki for collaboration. The UI for viewing and entering task information is clear and concise, and I like the way that collaborators can be added either as 'Lead', 'Player' or 'Watcher'. With a email engine built in, assignment notification is easy, and the time logger is a realy handy feature, enabling developers to record their activities as they go.

Treffpunkt Screenshot

On balance, I wonder whether the ticketing feature is a duplication of the Sourceforge bug tracker, but then again I guess not everyone uses that for issue resolution anyway, and the only other thing I thought was how do I get a Gantt chart out of this, because I think they can be quite useful to give a visual overview of the project, especialy at the outset.

So, in conclusion, Treffpunkt looks like a remarkably useful product, certainly very easy to get up and running with, and highly intuitive, as you might expect having been designed by someone who had been similarly frustrated in dealing with various other project management tools. I'm using it to facilitate development of MailManager 2.1 over the next month or so, and will have a better feel for it after that, but at the outset, the signs are highly encouraging.

MySQL Port

2005-07-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

The MySQL port is now about 40% complete. A lot of the grunt work has been done; rebuilding MySQL, checking and writing tests for DateTime properties, conversions from UTC, getting blobs working, getting various incompatabilities worked out using DTML, creation of test suite. There don't seem to be any show stoppers left, although we are going to have to be careful to make sure there are no dependancies on referential integrity (InnoDB is still lacking in some ways to relax constraints during a transaction). It's going to go on hold until next week, when the port should be completed. The SQL test suite should be finished at this point, and I'll try and extend that to some more test suite on the MailManager code itself, so that we can ensure that the code itself works, not just the SQL queries.

Put a graphical version of the schema online, and there's now a tool to build this. It's on the main logicalware site now.

EU Software Patents Rejected

2005-07-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

Everyone is delightedly reporting the landslide rejection of the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive by a majority of 648 to 14 at the European Parliament today.

With software already protected by copyright and EULA's, this misguided software patents bill was always seen as a threat to small software development outfits, and an advantage only to the larger organisations.

The past year has seen significant grassroots lobbying activity across the Linux and open source software communities, with web site home pages replaced with anti patent messages, and people being encouraged to contact their MSP's to instruct them how to vote, so it would be nice to think that some of this activity has paid off.

Here's the BBC take on the story, along with the inevitable Slashdot thread.

Do you want fries with that?

2005-07-06T07:28:00.000-07:00

As the Linux developer said to the Microsoft developer ...

Old as the hills, I know, but Kev just reminded us.

You want sauce with that?

2005-07-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

Well, welcome to Open Sauce, our irregular take on the open source software industry. We hope you enjoy your stay.