Fun with GroupWise in Bungee Connect

In my quest to learn how to develop software in Bungee Connect, I decided to use the SOAP service for Novell GroupWise. I chose to use GroupWise as a reference platform for two reasons. First, the SOAP API for GroupWise has all the sophistication you could want: multiple levels of object inheritance, and its scope is comprehensive to say the least. (I wish I had understood that when I was in charge of marketing for GroupWise!) Second, nine years of working at Novell left me knowing how GroupWise works, so I would know when I actually got something to work.

Here’s a video of the project I am working on, available in patent-encumbered mpeg4, and freedom-loving Xiph (Ogg).If you would like access to my source code, drop me a line. I’m happy to provide you with the code and guidance on developing in Bungee Connect.

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–T

SCaLE6: Returning to Socal Linux Expo

Once again I will be presenting at Socal Linux Expo. Each SCaLE so far has been a great show, and this 6th year promises to be excellent. Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon is keynote speaker this year (co-presenting with his beard), and his presentations are quite entertaining (even for denizens of Los Angeles, who are accustomed to seeing the occasional massive traffic accident). So if you’re in the Los Angeles area, come on down and check it out.

This year my presentation is about startups and open source, using case-in-point company, Bungee Labs. They booked me last in line on Sunday afternoon, so if you’re going, please hang out to the very end.

Drop me a line if you’d like to chew the fat, and whatnot.

Oauth: Standardizing Authentication for API

The most recent edition of The Bungee Line features an interview on the coolness of Oauth, an open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.

We have seen a rather impressive number of downloads on this episode so far. If you develop to web APIs (or even if you are just casually interested in why, say, LinkedIn or Facebook apps ask for your Gmail username and password in order to access your contacts in Gmail) then you’ll want to check this one out.

BrainShare 2007 Friday General Session

If you would like to see the General Session that I hosted at BrainShare 2007, it is now online.

• Nat Friedman brought out several guests (including David Reveman!) and showed some killer Linux stuff
• Baber Amin showed an open source InfoCard implementation
• Ken Muir showed the upcoming GroupWise release, codenamed Bonsai
• Alan Murray showed some cool Data Center technologies

Next Mac-PC-Linux is now online…

…see the original post for the links.

Minor Blog Readership Spike

Seems that a few people recently visited this page.

Here’s the 30-day chart:

And, below are the hit counts for yesterday and today:

Mac vs. PC: How Would Linux Fit?

[Please Digg this]

Apple’s “Get a Mac” Campaign
Always a branding powerhouse, Apple is a company whose television advertisements are usually excellent. Their recent Get a Mac campaign (”Hi, I’m a Mac / And I’m a PC”) certainly does not disappoint. At this point, the television commercial are very well known.

The campaign exemplifies the artfully clever use of “framing,” the selective control of information used to shape a viewer’s perception. A simple example is the term “tax relief.” If you have an anti-taxation agenda, “tax relief” is a much more powerful term than “tax cut” because it frames taxes as a burden from which people need relief. The term assumes its own premise and thereby frames our perception.

In the “Get a Mac” campaign, Apple frames an artificial dualism, and then re-enforces the dualism with powerful metaphors. The dualism frames two options: either you use a PC (understood to mean Windows) or a Mac. Those are your options.

“Will it Blend” for Novell?: Now Online

[Please Digg this]

A couple weeks ago, I posted about the filming of the “Will it Blend?” video that we made for BrainShare. This morning, Ron Hovsepian unveiled the finished product during his BrainShare 2007 keynote address. You can check it out here:

• The Video is now in the Novell Videos queue.
  • (I just found out that theweb team forgot to post the Ogg versions. rest assured, they’re on the way.)
• For a short time, Novell.com home page has some fun Flash with Tom Dickson.
• And, you can get it on YouTube, too:

The finished product is what I find most appealing about the whole thing. Here is a high-def still shot I took during the filming.

(Yes, those are legs.)

Special bonus: Find the place in the video where Kel, Blendtec’s videographer, goofed. (Hint: Look for a minor discontinutity.)

BrainShare Backstage: Monday Demo Preparations

In Salt Lake City, the Novell demo monkeys are feverishly laying down the final touches on their demos for the Monday general session.

Available Now: OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows

Good News
I just discovered that Novell has released a Windows version of OpenOffice.org Novell Edition on download.novell.com. (A buddy in Novell IS&T pointed this out to me.)

Why would you want the “Novell Edition” instead of the version from OpenOffice.org? It comes down to early access to some killer features that are not yet available in the non-Novell edition. Let’s consider why Novell maintains a downstream edition of OpenOffice.org, and what some of the features in it are.

Your Host for BrainShare’s Friday General Session

It’s now official: I will be hosting the Friday General Session at BrainShare 2007!

So far, the Friday line-up is really solid. It looks like we will have some cool Linux stuff with Nat Friedman, a demo of some open source identity components with Baber Amin, a look at what is planned for the next GroupWise with Ken Muir, and some mind-bendingly cool data center automation stuff with Alan Murray.

And to top it off, we will be giving away ten–count ‘em! ten!–primo AMD-powered, custom painted laptops.

It’s going to be a lot fun. Hope to see you there!

Take the openSUSE Survey

My friend Michael Loeffler who works on openSUSE informs me that the openSUSE team is conducting a survey of their end users right now. If you use openSUSE, please take a few moments to fill it out. (And of course, there is some thank-you swag involved.)

Novell Open Audio goes Live at BrainShare

We’re taking it live!
Come check out our special “live audience” recordings of Novell Open Audio at BrainShare 2007. Meet Caitlin, Erin, and Ted, or get a chance to acquire a rare autograph from Mike the Audio Guy. And swag? Oh, there will be swag! We have a supply of our custom-made, designer “Audiophile” tee shirts, as well as some of the coveted “I ask Tough Questions” t-shirts to thank audience members for questions they ask at the event. (Early lab results indicate that these shirts boost your IQ by 15 points, make you 20% more sexually appealing, and give you the strength and humor of ten men!)

We will be hosting two extended-length shows from a special theater in the BrainShare Technology Lab:

• Wednesday, March 21, from 3:00-4:15
  • Tomboy with Boyd Timothy
  • Next Steps for SUSE Linux with Nat Friedman
• Thursday, March 22, from 2:30-3:45
  • Open Enterprise Server with Jason Williams
  • Sentinel 6 with Reed Harrison

So, if you will be at BrainShare, please come on down to the Tech Lab for the sessions. We would really appreciate the support.

If you won’t be at BrainShare, then you’ll get the episodes as soon as Mike the Audio Guy has the files ready to post.

“Will it Blend” for Novell?

They blended a bunch of mobile phones. They blended glow sticks. They even blended an iPod! So when Novell’s on-staff video producer Russ Dastrup said, “Let’s go to Blendtec and make a BrainShare video!” Erin Quill and I didn’t hesitate.

Here’s Russ basking in the warm glow of the Blendtec glitz. (Cheese is the name of the game at Blendtec world headquarters.)

Tom Dickson, CEO of Blentec, is an engineer at heart. He invented the blender, made it with a vacuum cleaner engine. Here’s Erin and Tom with the blender full of–

Hey! Why can’t we see what they were blending?!

And here’s me with my new engineer friend Tom.

So what, then, did three dudes from Novell take to Blendtec? Some things are not meant to be found out…until BrainShare.

Status Messages in Desktop Search

This item may be just a minor detail, but it’s an improvement that shows to me that the SLED team are still driving in the right direction.

The Desktop Search in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is extremely helpful. However, if you have just copied a whole bunch of files locally, or maybe you just recently added an email account that contains a lot of messages, those items may not appear in your search results until the search engine has had a chance to index the new data. But that means that you just need to wait, right? No. Getting incomplete results from a search tool leads users to mistrust this important productivity feature.

In a recent Novell Open Audio interview, SLED10 usability team lead, Anna Dirks, tells how her team repeatedly found that users would not use search. Even when assigned obvious find-the-file tasks, they would go through file after file looking for a keyword! Why? Windows users don’t trust that desktop search works. So, Novell’s desktop usability team has become pretty conscientious about making sure that users find as few reasons as possible not to trust search on Linux. (Beyond Novell’s revenue objectives for SLED10, there’s some really good thinking there. The SLED10 team essentially takes an approach that says, let’s try make this feature something that gives users a better experience on Linux than on other platforms. Desktop Linux needs a lot more of that kind of thinking.)

So, to that end, another one of the interface improvements coming up in Service Pack 1: you now know when SLED 10’s Desktop Search engine (Beagle) daemon is still indexing your data: a simple visual cue and message lets the user know what’s going on so that they can search with confidence, knowing that the indexing service is still laboring away faithfully for them.

It looks like this: