Archive for March, 2005

Bad news for the small fry: EC OKs Software Patents

The European Commission has approved the passage of the software patents bill. It now has to pass the European Parliament so it's not law yet but this is an important setback for small software companies/consultancies in Europe. Why? Well, imagine having to pay someone every time you use a progress bar.

That's how absurd software patents are.

Bill Gates said it best: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can." (Challenges and Strategy memo, May 16, 1991)

Of course, Bill had the means to gather together a multi-million dollar software patent portfolio to defend his company (and thus did.) Many of us don't have such means and this can only spell hardship for small businesses and open source software in Europe. Already there are over 30,000 patents that have been granted in the EU, waiting for this bill to pass so that they can be enforced.

What can you do? Here's what the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure - UK) recommends:

If you live in the UK, you can FaxYourMP online. Write to your local MP as soon as possible with your concerns about software patents, and ask your MP to bring them to the attention of Stephen Timms MP, the minister for e-commerce at the DTI.

Read the full FFII recommendation on their web site.

Beware the Phantom of the Opera…

If I haven't gotten back to you recently by email, there's a reason: Opera. More, specifically, Opera's email client, M2 (also known as Opera Mail.) But let's start at the beginning...

It was three days ago when -- goodness knows what -- something made me download the latest Opera browser. I think it was because I'm so happy with the mobile version on my phone. In any case, one look at its integrated email client, M2, and I was hooked. Love at first sight!

Why?

No folders :)

Everything in M2 is kept in a central database and you define searches (think of them as views) that update with relevant emails. You also have a slew of filters, etc. Well, I was so impressed that I switched pretty much on the spot and shelled out a few bucks for what seemed like an amazing integrated browser/email client. Boy was I wrong!

You see, the way M2 *should* work is great! The marketing hype is outstanding. The thing you learn later, however, when browsing the support forums, is that the M2 mail client has a slight flaw: It doesn't work.

What doesn't work? The main feature: Search. Oh, yes, and IMAP support. Our main info email account at Ariaware is setup for IMAP access via multiple clients. Well, M2 ruined it. After accessing it with M2, we suddenly got about 62 messages that we couldn't delete and would come up as new every time the account was checked (on every client.) Oh boy! The server techs told us they couldn't do anything either -- basically, we were faced with the task of backing up the store and recreating it. Lots and lots of fun! Apparently, they're rewriting IMAP support from the ground up for Opera version 8. Little consolation.

I still love the browser but the email client, well, beware!

My advice to Opera would be: Remove it from an otherwise excellent product and only put it back when it works to a point where it's not corrupting IMAP stores and its fundamental feature (search) works correctly. As much as I love the promise of M2, Opera would be a better product without it.

I hope our email will be back to normal tomorrow and I will be continuing to use my old trusty double-tag team: Thunderbird + X1 Search for my indexing. Btw, I read that Google Search now supports Thunderbird so that would be an option for those of you who don't want to shell out for X1.

Update: Here are some good instructions for importing MBox (mailbox/.mbs files) from Opera to Thunderbird.

MXDU Aftermath

I must apologize for the lack of updates on FlashAnt recently -- no, I didn't drop off the face of the Earth.

I got back from MXDU last week and it's taken me this long to recover from the jetlag, the customary cold I seem to pick up whenever I fly anywhere, and get past the pile of work waiting for me on my return. It's getting harder and harder to take a week out, it seems!

First off, my planned reports from MXDU hit a glitch when the GPRS on my phone decided to stop working for some unexplainable reason that I still need to grill Vodafone about. As you can imagine, that stopped the MMS photos and videos dead in their tracks. I do have a neat interview with Mike Chambers that I shot with my phone right after his keynote on the future of Flash with Mike Downey which I will be putting up here shortly.

MXDU was really a blast and I got to hang out with a stellar bunch of people including Geoff, Daniela, Alex, Andrew, Sas, Clinton, Tatsu, David, Mike C & Mike D, not to mention my roomies, Grant, Guy, Peter, Chafic and Matt...

My theme for the event unfortunately was "Technical Difficulty": Kicking off the first few minutes of my workshop with James' Coldfusion slides streaming into our monitors from the adjacent class and having both the projector and internet connection fail on my during my session (thank goodness there happened to be an Elmo in the room which at least let me project my screen.) I've taken note, though: From now on I'm going to have offline backups of every sample application during presentations -- better safe than sorry!

Technical glitches aside, I really had a great time. The XBox room was, of course, amazing and I wasn't even always last in the deathmatches (thanks Peter!) :P

I'm still trying to get back into the stream of things here and will post Mike's video as well as any other photos I find as soon as I can.

Today, I'm off to London to talk to a friend about an open source Flash components project that you will no doubt be hearing quite a bit about in the coming days... (oh yes, I *do* love to tease!)






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