u l t r a m o o k i e

I was exclaiming to my friends, after the Bailout Bill failed, that “We’re all going to die!”  And no one except JR caught me on it:  Yes, we’re all going to die eventually.  As Palpatine knew and used in Star Wars, fear is an excellent and potent weapon.  And it seems that in our society, [...]

I was exclaiming to my friends, after the Bailout Bill failed, that “We’re all going to die!”  And no one except JR caught me on it:  Yes, we’re all going to die eventually.  As Palpatine knew and used in Star Wars, fear is an excellent and potent weapon.  And it seems that in our society, there are a lot of people who fall for it.

Witness the people who feared (and continue to fear) “terrorists”.  That was the driving force behind W Bush’s plan to invade Iraq — “If you don’t invade Iraq, they will use their WMDs to blow us up to bits!”  Now, W Bush tried to use fear to get the Congress to pass the bailout bill quickly without much thought — “If you don’t pass this bill our country will crumble into oblivion!”  The bill has failed, good.  But, I think that we still need something to help out the economy, so I hope Congress gets their asses to work and figures something out soon.

On the subject of Palpatine, I was thinking about the different Force powers given to me in Force Unleashed:  Force Push (push stuff around), Force Grip (grab and throw people without actually touching them), Force Repulse (like making a huge explosion of air around you), and Force Lightning (lightning bolts shooting out of your finger tips).

Which would I want in real life?  Force Lightning, no question about it.  Oh, the times when I wanted to reach out and shock someone.  No killing, just a good can of electrical whoop ass.  I’d vary the shock depending on the situation.  With the fear of someone coming around and shocking you until you poop in your pants, people would think twice about doing silly crap.

Which Force power would you like to have in real life?

A long, long time ago in an interwebs far, far away there was a product named Stalker Internet Mail Server (SIMS) that ran on Macintosh System 7.  In that same interwebs, some guy named Mookie was building a server using an old PowerMac 7100 — one that was given to him out of pity and [...]

A long, long time ago in an interwebs far, far away there was a product named Stalker Internet Mail Server (SIMS) that ran on Macintosh System 7.  In that same interwebs, some guy named Mookie was building a server using an old PowerMac 7100 — one that was given to him out of pity and charity.  He was a young apprentice at the time and could not afford to buy hardware nor software.  So, he scoured around and found SIMS.  SIMS worked brilliantly, especially the free version that gave him a few mailboxes and did exactly what he needed.  After a while, Mookie started building servers using Linux and soon forgot about SIMS.  That is until recently.

My ongoing search for software or a service that will let me synchronize my iPhone without cables has come to an end.  This is all because I found a product by those Stalker guys, now known as Communigate Systems (personally, I think Stalker is a cooler name) .  SIMS has grown up and is now named Communigate Pro.

During this growin’ up period, SIMS also developed new skills, mainly groupware skills — tasks, contacts and calendaring.  And, those Stalker guys have a community version of Communigate Pro that is free for those of us who do not need to host 25+ people.  The community version of Communigate Pro is exactly the same as the commercial version and lets me host five users — if I go over the five user limit, the software swithces into trial mode for the commerical version.  Booyah, free software.

The other night, I reimaged my old VAIO notebook (a paltry Pentium 3 900MHz, 512MB RAM, and 80GB HDD) which has a busted space key (Jacob ripped if off).  I reimaged it with CentOS 5.2 because after trying to get my Debian/Ubuntu mojo on, I couldn’t — so, I returned to my roots, RHEL where I know how to get shtuff done.  Using the small, slow notebook for a server is great because after turning on the ultrapower save mode in the BIOS, the thing runs at 500MHz all day long.  There is no noise because the fan doesn’t run.  It sits and runs quietly all day long.  I setup a dynamic hostname over at DynDNS and got Communigate Pro working.

So here are my notes about my Communigate Pro experience so far:

• Installation was damn easy:  Install one RPM file.
• Configuration, on the other hand, was a pain.  There are a LOT of configuration options for Communigate Pro (CGP), which is not a bad thing per se.  And there is a whole bunch of documentation (witness the 1068 page manual).  But, the documentation, though plentiful is not well-written, nor is it well-organized.  I had a frustrating time getting things going at the start.
• There are three types of web interfaces available: HTML (no AJAX), Flash, and Adobe AIR.  I couldn’t try the AIR interface because it does not deal with self-signed SSL certs very well (think 1,000,000 “are you sure?” dialogue boxes).  The HTML interface is functional — and the only place to export data — but very, very sparse.  The Flash interface is very useful.
• Data support is excellent.  I imported all my contacts via the web interface using standard vCard files.  It also imports contacts in bulk.  I also imported my calendar events via the web interface using standard iCalendar files.  There are also options to export to vCard and iCalendar formats from the web interface.  Tres cool.
• ActiveSync (or as Communigate Systems calls it “AirSync”) works brilliantly.  The ActiveSync implementation of calendaring events even supports multiple calendars.  And because of this, the iPhone can show color-coded calendar events.
• Remote Wipe.  It works.  I tested it.  It completely formatted my iPhone and put it into an unactivated state.
• The web calendaring system and the backend system do not support alerts for calendaring events (a big “WTF?” in my book).  I don’t make too big of a deal here when compared with MobileMe because CGP is free.  I hope that Communigate Systems updates the software to at least store and sync calendar event alerts in future revisions.
• Contact pictures are synchronized between iPhone and CGP!  Win!  This never happened with the hosted Exchange setup or Zimbra setup.  Nice.
• All data on the backend is stored as flat text files.  I think this is very cool since I can just tar up those files and throw them onto external storage for backups — which, I do.
• Cost.  Did I mention CGP is free for those of you who don’t need more than five users?
• From running the server for a day and a half now, it looks like it does not take much to run — it runs fine on my small notebook and ps shows that it only uses around 15MB of RAM.

The difference between CGP and Zarafa are termendous.  Zarafa had me setting up daemons manually; configuring Apache by hand; and downloading, installing and configuring their ActiveSync component by hand (which also had a whole handful of manual steps to go through at the command-line).  There were also no administration tools, other than a command-line tool for user management.  CGP has an easy installation process (rpm -i <pkg_name>) and also a pretty detailed web-based administration tool.

There are other components to CGP, like mail, RSS reader, file storage, and stuff.  But, I doubt I will be using that stuff much — especially mail, which I do not need.  CGP works great as a backend server for doling out my calendars to my home and work machines — and my iPhone.  It also works great for storing my contacts.  After I tested remote wipe, I was able to restore my iPhone within minutes because everything was always in sync and not on the iPhone.

I am going to keep using CGP for my PIM activities and hope that they add calendaring alerts.

And yes, Alice, this ActiveSync stuff was (<- notice tense) the new “Linux distro” obsession for me.  I think it is over now though.

So, the other night I was stoked that I found Zarafa, an Open Source server that emulated a Microsoft Exchange and had ActiveSync push.  I wanted to give it a shot because this would mean that I could host my own calendar and contacts server, with push capability to my iPhone.  Wouldn’t that be cool?
The [...]

So, the other night I was stoked that I found Zarafa, an Open Source server that emulated a Microsoft Exchange and had ActiveSync push.  I wanted to give it a shot because this would mean that I could host my own calendar and contacts server, with push capability to my iPhone.  Wouldn’t that be cool?

The feature set on paper looks fantastic:

• Microsoft Exchange “drop-in” replacement (their words).
• Full Microsoft Outlook compatibility through their own client.
• Web access through a rich AJAX client.
• iCalendar support for synchronizing 3rd party calendaring products (like Mozilla Lightning and Apple iCal).
• ActiveSync push (ie. iPhone push support for me).

I setup a quick Ubuntu server last night and got the software configured and running.  Here is what I discovered:

• The web interface is nice.  It acts a lot like Microsoft’s Exchange OWA.  The interface is also very limited in that you can manage your data, but you cannot export or import data from the interface.
• In order to import calendar data, I had to use Lightning with their iCalendar support.  I was able to get calendaring data into Zarafa.  But…
• The iCalendar support is awful.  Once the data was in, half of it could not be pulled out by the iCalendar support.  The data looked fine in the web access interface and also with Outlook.  iCalendar support is borked in 6.20.
• This is more an issue with Outlook than Zarafa, but there’s no way of bulk importing vcf contact data that I could find.  In Outlook, I had to import contacts one by one.
• Other than Outlook, there seems to be no way of getting data out of Zarafa.  That’s unfortunate since there are so many Open Source and open standards based solutions available.
• The Outlook Client software from Zarafa is what ties Outlook with the Zarafa server.  The client is tied, version-wise to the version of the server.  So, if any company were to do a big Outlook install using Zarafa server, they would have to install the client on all the boxes.  Worse yet, if they upgraded their Zarafa server, they’d have to go back and upgrade all the Outlook Client software to match.
• ActiveSync actually works and works well.  The only thing missing is support for multiple calendars.  If you create a second “folder” (ie. calendar), it will not get pushed to a mobile device.

So, while I’m not going to use Zarafa right now.  I will keep an eye out on the project.  It all looks very promising, but right now it is not ready for primetime.

Oh, “Zarafa” is Arabic for “Giraffe”.

Let me qualify this posting with this:  Sometimes, I’m a cheap bastard.
So, I have been doing most of my computing now on my HP dv2910us.  Because of this, I wanted to get my iPhone working with the HP.  Right now, my iPhone is being synced on my PowerBook G4 through iTunes using iCal and AddressBook.  [...]

Let me qualify this posting with this:  Sometimes, I’m a cheap bastard.

So, I have been doing most of my computing now on my HP dv2910us.  Because of this, I wanted to get my iPhone working with the HP.  Right now, my iPhone is being synced on my PowerBook G4 through iTunes using iCal and AddressBook.  Not a bad combo, but it really means that I have to fire up the PowerBook and get out the white iPod sync cable every time I want to make changes to my calendar via a computer keyboard (or update a contact).

In all their infinite wisdom, Apple forces Windows users to pickup a copy of Outlook in order to do any calendaring.  This sucks because buying Outlook means shelling out $90 — and I have already made it clear, I am cheap.  I wanted something different and I wanted something that really did not need a cable.  And while instant push is nice, I don’t need it.  I don’t care if my updated or new appointment shows up in a millisecond or in a few minutes.  I just want to be able to calendar and manage contacts from any computer without having to install iTunes or any other software.  I found three options, two are free and one is paid.  The paid one would be OK if it worked, but lets go over the details.

MobileMe(ss) - The last time I tried MobileMe, it lasted two hours — mainly because I was futzing around trying to get it to work.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was the inability for me to set an alert via the web interface for a calendar event.  That was a huge oversight by whoever designed the MobileMe web interface.  I signed up for another trial yesterday and it lasted about as long as the previous try.  Yes, you still can’t add an alert via the web interface.  Yes, the web interface is delicious.  And yes, it still costs $99 a year for this service.

Granted, MobileMe tries to do a lot more than just being a remote version of the Apple iApps.  They give you an iDisk to keep files remotely (which can be had for free with something like Xdrive or Dropbox).  They provide a way to sync up your bookmarks, settings, mail, and other doohickeys between Macs.  They provide a way for you to take control of your Mac remotely.  And they provide easy to use web page and photo gallerry tools.

But, it seems that with all of Steve Job’s huffing and puffing about how MobileMe is not fixed, it’s not.  Contacts still continue to disappear for no reason, webmail continues to have issues, and other assorted issues continue to crop up.  And Apple still wants to charge $99 a year for this stuff.  Yay.  Well, Apple is not the only game in town that has web-based apps that can push information out to iPhones.  This is because Apple implemented ActiveSync into iPhone 2.0 firmware.  MobileMe:  Still Fail.

NuevaSync + Gmail Contacts + Google Calendar - So, this combo is actually very nice.  Basically, NuevaSync is a service that emulates an Exchange server.  What it does is act as an intermediary between an iPhone and the two Google services.  When anything changes, the changes get pushed back to the other side.  I found that changes usually push within five minutes and that is fine with me.  I will admit that I like the Google Contacts and Calendar interfaces a lot.  They are clean and well thought out.  In general, they just work and are intuitive (unlike the Gmail interface).  They both act like their Apple iApp counterparts, so people who choose this route will feel right at home.

But, I couldn’t overlook some stuff.  First, I have this strange paranoia about Google and their fetish for information.  I don’t like leaving a lot of information with them.  In order to use this combo, I would have to let Google know what I am doing and when; and I would have to let them keep track of all my contacts and their information too.  Maybe I’m Lone Gunmen paranoid, but I don’t like giving Google so much of my information.

If you can overlook the whole Google paranoia thing (and lots of people can), there is one other thing that bugged me:  NuevaSync.  NuevaSync is a new company and their product is a beta product.  In their FAQ, they are very clear about the support you’ll get for the product:

It means that while we take every precaution to ensure correct sync, and make every effort to ensure reliable service, we’re still working on the software. We might restart the service to deploy new code or additional hardware, for example. We don’t maintain 24 hour support for our machines either. So if something very bad happens to a machine when we are asleep, we won’t know about it until we wake up. We do recognize that many people have come to depend on our service and we keep that very much in mind.

And, apparently the company has no business plan or revenue stream at all.  That means that tomorrow, they could just turn off their servers and leave if their current funding runs dry.  Again from their FAQ:

How are you guys going to make money?

We’re not certain, but probably by introducing some form of premium paid service.

So, while I really liked the NuevaSync + Google combination, there are some issues that I could not overlook.  The whole thing is currently free and that makes my cheap-bastard heart warm.  NuevaSync + Google: Possible Win.

Mail2Web - While stumbling around the web yesterday afternoon, I discovered a very helpful article from Lifehacker.  The article talks about setting up just what I wanted.  They used a service named Mail2Web Live.  Mail2Web is a Microsoft Exchange Hosting company (they also host other stuff like web, chat and blogs).  And the main benefit of Mail2Web is that they offer free, somewhat limited Exchange accounts that are ad-supported.  The limit on these free Exchange accounts is that you cannot use the desktop version of Exchange to connect and manage your data.  That means that you are stuck using the Outlook Web Access version, which for me is fine — and gives my IE a second task (the first task is being a viewer for Netflix Watch Instantly movies).  The Firefox version of OWA works, but the IE version looks and functions just like the desktop version of Outlook.  If I want to go ad-free and get POP/IMAP access, I can pay $5 a month.  If I want to use Outlook on the desktop, I can go with the $14 a month plan.  For me, the free plan is just fine.

ActiveSync is offered free with all the accounts and there are simple instructions on how to get it setup with an iPhone.  The setup is not as easy as setting up MobileMe, but it is not difficult either — one just has to read and follow the instuctions.  So far, the service has performed flawlessly.  Although not very important to me, the push services from Mail2Web are instantaneous — mail (which I don’t use outside of testing), calendar and contacts.  Mail2Web, unlike NuevaSync does have a business plan and a revenue stream.  The more expensive plan from Mail2Web includes a copy of Outlook or Entourage also.  But, from the standpoint of a normal user, Mail2Web Live (free service) is enough to let anyone manage their calendars and contacts from any computer without any additional software.

What makes this so ironic is that a service based on a Microsoft product (Exchange Server) performs so much better than an Apple product (MobileMe).  Not only does Exchange + ActiveSync push out information near instantaneously, the web-based interface provides better functionality.  Sure, the OWA interface is not as shiny as the MobileMe interface.  And yes, there’s not a lot of “extras” like remote storage or syncing of bookmarks (which I use delicious for) or any other “features”.  But, Mail2Web seems to work well.  It does exactly what I need and the price is right — even if I hopped on the ad-free plan, it would be cheaper than MobileMe.  Mail2Web:  Win.

I did look at hosted Zimbra accounts also, but they all cost money and so far Mail2Web seems to be doing what I need.  I have 59 days of MobileMe trial left, I’ll leave that account open just in case something happens in the next 59 days which will rock the MobileMe world.  Otherwise, MobileMe will not be my choice for pushing information over to my iPhone.  People have had good experience with Mail2Web and the only complaints I found were from a week long outage in early 2007 — which seemed to be more the fault of a bug in Exchange than Mail2Web.  I will update as I keep on using Mail2Web.  For now, my iPhone can be managed from any computer without having to whip out my iPod sync cable, or installing iTunes, or installing Outlook.  Yay!

I haven’t had much time at the kiddie playgrounds before Jacob started walking.  But, now that I have been to the playgrounds a lot more, there seems to be a rash (epidemic?) of parental stupidity.  Mainly, parents who think it is cool to get into fake vehicles built for kids.  What the hell is wrong [...]

I haven’t had much time at the kiddie playgrounds before Jacob started walking.  But, now that I have been to the playgrounds a lot more, there seems to be a rash (epidemic?) of parental stupidity.  Mainly, parents who think it is cool to get into fake vehicles built for kids.  What the hell is wrong with these parents?  What makes them think that it is cool to get in the foam-rubber boat with little Missy?  What makes them think that it is cool to get into the quarter-fed racer car with Junior?  Get the hell out of the kiddie vehicles!  Witness the stupidity:

Someone pleae kick the living crap out of me if I ever attempt any of the above dumbassness.  I thank you ahead of time.

I like hearing that phrase from software companies.  Let me say it again:
“We’ll release it when it’s ready.”
Not, “We’ll release it because our divine leader said that we’ll release it on this day.”
After using the iPhone 2.1 software for a day and change, this is what the iPhone 2.0 software should have been.  Sure, the [...]

I like hearing that phrase from software companies.  Let me say it again:

“We’ll release it when it’s ready.”

Not, “We’ll release it because our divine leader said that we’ll release it on this day.”

After using the iPhone 2.1 software for a day and change, this is what the iPhone 2.0 software should have been.  Sure, the backups are still slow, but they are not painfully slow anymore.  Installing software is faster.  The system is snappier.  There have been no crashes or instant-deaths yet.  The keyboard is usable again.  Battery life is definitely better.  And my phone does not run hot anymore.  This is what Apple should have released to the public in July.

Apple should have released iPhone 2.1 as iPhone 2.0.  Instead, Apple released a half-assed, sloppy piece of crap two months ago and tried to pass that off as production ready software.

What I envision going on inside of Apple was: Steve Jobs took to the stage and announced iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 software.  He gave a date to the public, which he shouldn’t have.  Then he went back to the office and yelled at all the engineers to get things done by then.

Engineers, of course scratched their heads, burned the midnight oil and rushed the iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 software out the door — all the while getting berated and beaten to a bloody pulp by the almighty Steve Jobs.  The software was rushed, there was no testing and half the features were not optimized for general consumption.

And this is how Apple has gotten a black-eye for the crappy iPhone 2.0 release.  They are still dealing with MobileMe and iTunes 8 (which apparently BSODs Windows Vista boxes).

Come on Apple, repeat this chant after me:  “We’ll release it when it’s ready.”

If you continue down the path of half-assed releases, I will wait until “Service Pack 1″ before upgrading any working system.  Or, I’ll just save myself the headache and switch to a Blackberry when my two-year contract is up with AT&T.

After the kiddos went to bed, I got to sneak out of the house and head over to Yahoo’s Open Hack 2008.  I stayed for a little more than an hour and got to see some cool people (and also missed some other cool people).  It was cool to at least see the event for [...]

After the kiddos went to bed, I got to sneak out of the house and head over to Yahoo’s Open Hack 2008.  I stayed for a little more than an hour and got to see some cool people (and also missed some other cool people).  It was cool to at least see the event for a little bit since I missed out two years ago.  See Hack Day news here.  See Hack Day pictures here.