This Saturday (19th May) I am heading over to Manchester University to give a talk at ManLUG on Meldware. This will be the first of my contributions to our LUG Tour. I have also had a talk accepted for LugRadio Live 2007. I am scheduled to speak at 3pm on Sunday afternoon. I expect I will be addressing lots of people on the tail end of some nasty hangovers.

Please check out the My Technology Lawyer Open Source Live Radio Show for today, May 15 [mp3] (WMA - irony). The Meldware segment is near the end (last 15m). Hopefully its good, I'm not accustomed to speaking to an audience I can't see. I generally measure my message against the facial expressions of those I'm in front of. I think it was obvious who was the marketing guy and who was the developer...I wanted to talk tech baby!

I'll be giving a Buni Meldware talk at MIT (Building E-51) to the Boston Linux and Unix User Group AKA "BLU" tomorrow May 16th. Following this I'll be giving another Meldware talk at Unisys's Malvern office to the Philadelphia Linux Users Group - West on May 17th. This is all part of our LUG Tour. I'll give a full demo of ThunderBird + Lightning and Freebusy using WCAP. I'm also working hard to make Freebusy work in our WebCal.

Mikey logged this bug on Hibernate query generation. We've ended up writing a fair amount of native SQL for Meldware to deal with various limitations in Hibernate and/or MySQL or the sticky goo between them (generally Oracle is fine and frankly PostgreSQL is the most capable, easiest to work with database we test on). This latest bug affects when you have two subqueries and is a straight hibernate bug. If I say "delete from Foo as foo where foo.pid not in (select id from Bar) and foo.

I just bought a relatively inexpensive Gateway 4026 Celeron M laptop from Tom Billman of TriLUG. Tom has a Giant Shoulder and gave a good talk on video editing etc at the last TriLUG meeting using this very laptop and my operating system of choice (Feisty Fawn). He even had the projector working, which is more than I can say for my MacBook Pro. After dealing with the ATI double-suck drivers, I'm now a believer in Intel baby.

I needed a TimePicker in Flex 2 in order to help fix a few problems in the Meldware WebMail Client's calendar. I found one that was supposed to be on Adobe's site, but the page was broken. I found another for Flex 1.5 but it also didn't handle a 24 hour clock and had lots of minor issues even when I made it run on Flex 2. So I made my own: I released it under LGPL/MPL 1.1 or whatever version of MPL the Flex SDK is released under proivded there are no amendments (ala Exhibit B).

Like any half-way decent mail server, Meldware needs a SPAM filtering solution. There are a number of good Free and proprietary solutions for managing SPAM floating about. For Meldware I wanted something that was Java-based and embeddable, i.e. a library rather than some external system. That lead me to jASEN, which appeared to meet most of our requirements.

The other day, I gave Adobe a little kick in the shin when their CEO attacked Microsoft's cross-platform record. I've noted multiple times that they hang in the balance between taking serious steps to show they're ready to take the Red Pill (ironically the codename for a Photoshop release) and start to truly embrace open standards, open source and most of all Linux or proving that they were just a few billion dollars and a monopoly short of being just like Microsoft. Well, then...

Sam Ruby writes... David Herron: Robert Burrell Donkin (JCP: Time For An OpenTCK) and Steve Loughran (Open tests for open standards) discuss their thoughts about an Open TCK . These are interesting thoughts .. ones that make it tempting to conclude that there must be an open TCK for Java...Remember that for Java there are at least four different classifications of test suites that exist: 1. The TCKs and the JCK are specifically focused on conformance with the specifications. ...

The Linux Action show is covering Linuxfest Northwest which we're participating in. Yet Slashdot still refuses, despite covering every other linux conference known to man, probably because they think it competes with their favored Penguicon. Though one is more of a regional tech conference and the other is more of a cultural conference. If you've got connections with the Slashdot crowd, I'd appreciate your assistance and will mail you some official Bunisoft panties if you're able to get it posted.