Unbeknownst to many, it seems, Microsoft are pushing a new referrals scheme for preinstalled Office 2007s. The “highlights”:
OEMs can ship a disabled version of Office 2007 on every computer that they ship; customers can buy a license – potentially online – and put it into their computer, to activate the dormant suite; customers can purchase any version of Office: more basic versions come with the free trial of the full versions, too; OEMs get a referral fee every time a customer of theirs activates Office.
Actually Andrew, we didn’t do a BOF last year: I did a talk (which was sadly moved at the last minute, and didn’t get as many people as I hoped it would), and me and Seb P. had a chinwag, but we didn’t have a proper BOF.
So I’m thinking this year we should definitely do a BOF. Whether or not we apply for a talking slot, I don’t know – I think we have a lot more to talk about this year, particularly about community transition and perhaps release management 🙂 – but I don’t know to what extent it will be different to the other stuff they will have going on.
Since my last techie post on locks was appreciated and since I’m still crook, here comes another one. Again, the focus on making Thunderbird work better with Bongo was the main aim – after my locking changes, I found that we ran into a whole new set of problems: mostly, that the IMAP agent wasn’t responding in a timely manner.
So, my next step was to address the progress reporting with a small new piece of code which sits in the various command loops inside the IMAP agent.
I haven’t blogged about Bongo for ages, and this is something I’ve thought about writing a few times – but mostly didn’t for fear of taking attention off the more practical stuff, like getting rid of MDB.
But, it seems timely to get some of this stuff out of my brain. First, go and watch Inbox Zero: it’s an hour of your time, but it’s worth it, and I think it’s as seminal for Bongo as JWZ’s Bad Groupware essay was for Hula.
Sebastian has been working hard on logos and templates and things – we don’t want Bongo to lose visual appeal. While others are working on code, Jonny, Dejan, Michel et. al. have been working on web content and it’s all beginning to come together.
You’ll have noticed the new theme being gradually worked in on the planet and the wiki, and the login page for Bongo has changed:
Michel is hoping to arrange something for the forum soon.
So, the efforts of the past few weeks have started to bear fruit. Part of this has been checked into SVN, some will be checked in later today, but we’re definitely beginning to get there.
I thought it would be interesting to look at the problem from the point of view of what the code is doing now. If you recall, the basic problem is this: we want to run an SQL query against our data to return a list of documents, but we then want to be able to refine the data on a number of different criteria.
I haven’t been able to do much Bongo hacking the past couple of weeks – workload has been such that I resigned myself mostly to offering hopefully helpful remarks on IRC, working on the Google SoC application and a few little build fixes. It’s been good to see that Bongo is building on a variety of OSes in the OpenSuse build service. It’s not a great measure of quality, but it helps.
Well, my informal little hackweek is coming to a close today, and it has been really good. The experimental store-sqlite branch is now well and truly merged onto trunk, and I’ve been running it the past couple of days. It’s not managing my personal mail yet, but I will probably switch over this weekend: as well as being a lot more performant, a number of serious issues for IMAP users are now totally gone.
Longish time no blog: not really getting enough hacking time at the moment 🙁
Recently we discovered a problem for IMAP users. IMAP clients can have multiple connections open at any one time, and some clients do that in practice to speed up certain operations: for example, Thunderbird’s filtering system runs more than one connection to move multiple messages at once. Which is great.
Our problem was twofold: primarily our indexing takes a little while, but the main issue is that while the indexing was happening, the mailbox was essentially frozen to other changes for various technical reasons.
I recently wrote to bongo-devel about a problem in our store protocol: in the trunk version, some commands have a “query” parameter which is unspecified in our documentation. The reason it’s unspecified is that it turns out that the parameter just gets passed through to CLucene, which as well as being something of a security issue also makes it more difficult to tell people how to use it.
In the experimental Store (coming soon to a server near you!
