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Is Mitch Kapor going to save us all? You'd think so by the response to his latest project announcement: an open source personal information manager.
Our product (code-named "Chandler" after the great detective novelist Raymond Chandler), is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list. Because of the ease with which Chandler users can share information with others, we might call Chandler the first Interpersonal Information Manager. (The term PIM was first used in conjunction with the product Lotus Agenda in the 1980's. Chandler is the spiritual descendant of Agenda (and has a common designer in Mitch Kapor.)Mitch has a blog where he talks about what they are doing.
We are trying to make a PIM which is substantive enough and enticing enough to make people want to move to it from whatever they are currently using, which statistically is probably Microsoft Outlook.If you've ever talked to a business person about switching to unix from microsoft you already know that Outlook is what maintains the monopoly. (Well, OK, Excel and Powerpoint too, but those are easier to deal with.)
Dan Gilmore has a good non technical article that ends with this bit of profound understatement: "This is potentially a big deal."
I think people are going to cast this as the big showdown. Can open source really slay goliath? Or at least give him a bad case of heartburn? The geeks are tripping over themselves to get on board ("Oy am I drooling over the ProductManagement job enough to almost wish I lived out West...." Bill Seitz; "Just look at the architecture and feature list. I must be dreaming! This is way too good to be true!" Aaron Swartz.)
Not only will the entire code base be open source, but it's going to be built with just about every ultra hip open source technology, including python, ZODB, Jabber, RDF, and parts of the mozilla project.
This looks like a really important showdown in the final struggle. Will you control the details of your digital life, or will your digital future be locked into someone else's plan for world domination? Go Mitch!
Lots of people linking to todays Doonesbury. But this isn't the first mention of blogs, I remember blogging this one almost two months ago. Still, this one is more subject matter than mention.
Crap. I just erased about 80 pictures from the server. That was a really stupid mistake. I always read about people screwing up with rm -f but I never really though it would happen to me. I was actually 2 characters away from erasing all the pictures, so it might have been even worse.
Update: turns out this wasn't as bad as I thought. Still some loss though. I'll email people.
David Weinberger is blogging the PopTech conference. Sounds like great stuff. Right now you can tune in here. If you're in the future you can find it around here (plus maybe a little forward or back, depending on how long it goes on.)
Long John Perry Barlow on where we're at: THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC IS DEAD. HAIL THE AMERICAN EMPIRE. OR ELSE.
He makes some important points at the end (yes we were already aware) about the organizers behind the Oct. 26th marches in DC and San Francisco. We all feel like he does. We don't want to support them, but we're going anyway with the hopes of drowning those voices out.
We're standing with Tom Moody at his elevator installation for the dumbo art festival. I can't believe how many people came out for this. Very cool.
Two nights ago at Barramundi I dropped my sidekick from about three feet onto a very hard floor. The screen was open, but the unit landed squarley on it's bottom. Thwack.
I picked it up and it was still on, but frozen. Rebooted without a problem and everything was working again. Nice.
Still working on the follow up report. I doubt anyone has used it more than me.
Flat rate wireless data pricing seems to be catching on.
SPRINT PCS JOINED Verizon this week in announcing a nationwide flat fee pricing model for unlimited access to data on its 3G PCS Vision network. Verizon launched an unlimited data plan on its Express Network (3G) this summer.
While my Sister and family were in town we did a little site seeing. One stop was the Winter Garden. I never knew it was called that. This is the glass enclosed space that used to be connected to the WTC by a walkway suspended over the west side highway. I knew it as the yearly location for the orchid show. In any case, it is now rebuilt, and instead of connecting the WTC, it features big windows looking across the street at the huge pit. Probably the best viewing location, although there is really not much to see. As before, palm trees dominate this really cool looking space.
That was harder than I expected. But I finally have my gateway built so that I can email the server the tiny pictures from my sidekick, and the server will take them out of the mail box, put them in the image folder, and add the image information to the database.
Turns out that email attachments are a pain. And PHP imap functions are difficult to understand. Devshed has an excellent article that really helped. Not sure if I could have done it otherwise.
Get ready for a steady stream of tiny low res pictures.