Month: March 2006

Guy’s latest article is “The Art of Sucking Down” and Robert Scoble claims that it’s the best article Guy has written.

Is there something wrong in this picture?

The article is about being nice to people. Guy has some interesting points about trying to make people smile during the day but it reads very much like a guide on how to intelligently schmooze your way through life. It really is a manual on “how to act like a compassionate human being and not an arrogant results-driven robot”.

Why do we need these gurus to tell us how to act? It’s because, I think, we’re taught to admire results-driven people. I know quite a few, you know, the sort who would skin you alive if they needed something to write on. The ones who would gleefully sell snow to an eskimo knowing full well he really doesn’t need it. I sat up one night with two salespeople and they both expressed disbelief that everyone was not like them. They firmly believed that it was a dog-eat-dog world out there.

I don’t admire that and indeed, infurious’ name is inspired by such a person. And it doesn’t have to be dog-eat-dog.

The Google presentation by the lovely Zaheda Bhorat was interesting even if the minutiae of her presentation was queried by RMS. (Just which license is used for that?). She spent a lot of time on code.google.com

The presentation by Les Timms about the Open Source Academy and the work they’ve done in promoting FOSS in Birmingham City Council was interesting even if he was interrupted again by RMS. (It’s not open source, it’s free).

Owen Hughes from Oracle provided the most humour. He spent a lot of time talking about the free stuff from Oracle and allowed himself to be sidetracked into why Oracle DBMS isn’t open source rather than focussing on how much Oracle contributes to open source projects. The guys from Google in front of me spent a goodly amount of time sniggering about him. A bit unfortunate but even I resent how the word “free” has been hijacked.

Lunch was fun – spent talking to InvestNI.

After lunch was RMS. He went on for a bit about his four freedoms.

• 0. freedom to run it as you wish
• 1. freedom to modify the source code
• 2. freedom to make copies and distribute
• 3. freedom to help the community

To be honest, the best bit was near then end when RMS made a crack about vi. Apparently:

vi vi vi is the editor of the beast

As I use vi and not emacs, I could appreciate this.

The biggest problem with the fanatical FOSS argument is that it doesn’t tell me how a couple of developers can create a company and hope to make a living at something they love. The FOSS world seems designed for IT professionals (because support is a major part of it) but not really for the writers of the code. And the hardware argument always trips them up. None of them are using FOSS hardware. All of them are using proprietary BIOS software.

Anyway, in conclusion?

Not too bad. Marred by the lack of power points, the complete lack of WiFi, the lack of tables, the lack of namebadges (to help networking), the lighting designed to induce migraines, the lack of something like a WikiWall or other mechanism for you to meaningfully interact with the other delegates. the companies that set up stalls around the periphery were mostly ignored but I’d rather have seen some presentations from them – companies providing Linux support, companies providing FOSS VoIP solutions.

12:00:
Bruce Parens was quite entertaining from his stories of subverting Pixar time to write patches for Debian to his lecture on the evils of software patents. Most applicable to a software company is certainly the patent issue – it takes, on average, $5 million to defend a software patent. Their use as obfuscated roadblocks to the development of future software is in complete opposition to the spirit of patents as a whole.

So yeah, you software developers. Write software for normal people already!

Now it’s time for a break. And these seats are REALLY uncomfortable.

10:00 am:
So, free software but no free wi-fi though the local Linux User Group has a WEP-protected access point up. But no big warchalk anywhere with the password.

Bummer.

So, I’m posting on a not-cheap GPRS connection because we don’t have economical all-you-cat-eat WiFi or 3G/GPRS plans available. I’m going to update this blog post during the day and we’ll see how it goes. Battery life would be my big issue I guess. I’ve got three hours left on this baby and another battery with maybe another hour on it. I had a conversation with a non-geek yesterday who was talking to another guy who was talking to another geek who wants to get wireless everywhere in Northern Ireland. I hope this isn’t just s circular chinese whispers…

The place is filling up with geeks….and I can’t see any of the guys whose names I recognise but whom I’ve never met nor seen a picture of….not surprisingly.

I can no longer send mail using Mail.app. No idea why. I’ve tried everything I (or MJ) can think of including removing all my SMTP servers, removing all my Mail accounts and creating from scratch. It doesn’t even send via the .Mac SMTP server (I have 3 different SMTP servers in different configurations and none of them work). This just happened yesterday.

So, I decided to file a bug with Apple. Got to the Apple Australia website, and clicked on Support -> Mac OS X -> Mail. Got the following error:

[an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Great.

So now I’m looking for alternatives to Mail.app.

Thunderbird: Probably the most likely candidate as a replacement – open source, well supported, full-featured. It’s biggest downside is that it feels like a Linux app. There’s no real integration with Mac OS X.

Mailsmith: Not even advertised on the company’s home page, Mailsmith won an award in 2003 and hasn’t been updated since. Hardly inspiring me to shell out cash for it.

Eudora: Mac OS X client is one rev behind the Windows version. Pretty basic also.

Entourage: Poor man’s port of Outlook to the Mac platform. Feels like a 10.1 app. No, scratch that, it doesn’t really feel like a Mac app (nor a Windows one). It’s an odd hybrid. At least MS Word for Mac feels like a prettier version of MS Word for Windows.

Everything else has some major flaws (e.g. poor port from another OS, bugs, lack of GUI, etc.). I don’t have anything against mutt or mh (two console based mail apps), but I use a Mac because I like the prettiness of it all.

Maybe when infurious is a little more established …

I may see some of you at the FOSS Means Business event tomorrow in Belfast. I’m not staying for the RMS workship in the afternoon, I don’t think. I’m interested in the other speakers though, but mostly I’m interested in the attendees.

It’s certainly a candidate for an unconference. Frankly I think a lot of the conferences I have attended, as both a delegate and a speaker, may have been better as unconferences.

Bleh, anyway, see you tomorrow maybe.

This isn’t a bad foray by Microsoft into the world of SyncServices. From an iCal perspective, Entourage creates a calendar in iCal called “Entourage” and syncs all the events with that calendar. This means that you can now sync your phone/PDA with Entourage as long as you only need a single calendar–no bad thing considering most devices only support a single calendar anyway.

What does it mean for us? Well, now people who use Entourage (or are forced to use Entourage) will be able to share their Entourage events via SyncBridge with their colleagues/friends, just as they would be able to share any other iCal calendar. Cool, we get another supported app for free 🙂

Heaps of info out there now. Looks like with today’s update for Microsoft Office 2004 (11.2.3), Entourage will also work as a SyncBridge client.

We need to test it of course but as soon as we have, we’ll add it to our information pages.

Nice to see. Way to go, Microsoft!

Looking at MJ’s post about Airwolf or Blue Thunder, I figure it’s worth talking a bit about our first product. It’s called SyncBridge, which I hope is an obvious representation of what it does: it provides a synchronisation bridge between users (in this case, iCal users).

We’ve been working on this product since late last year. Although it might not be 100% clear, I’m based in Australia, and MJ is based in Northern Ireland. We’ve not actually spoken to each other in several years – all our contact is via iChat. Also, MJ’s role is not as a developer, so he’s been kind of in the dark as to what’s been going on. He can see all the code I’ve written, and the amount of time and effort spent on producing stuff, but until very recently it’s all been vapourware.

So, it was nice to be able to suprise him with a quick video on “Here’s what using SyncBridge currently looks like.” As he mentioned in his more recent post it’s not quite pretty enough for public consumption – I’d hate to put people off by showing them something half-baked. I think we had a post earlier about how Joel Spolsky won’t go back to 30boxes because they weren’t sufficiently baked–I’ve a feeling the Mac community is even tougher than Joel in some respects (I know MJ is ;-)).

We’ve launched our new website. If you have any kind of opinion, (good, bad, indifferent) please let us know. Feedback of all types is important. As you can see, we’ve gone with a minimalist approach, aiming for enough content to explain what we’re about without boring the pants off people.