Build Better Products, Faster on Alex Hudson

By the time M3 will come out finally, it will have been five months since the last proper release.

My best wishes to everyone in the Bongo community for the year ahead.

Well, I’m sorry to announce that my prediction was about right: we didn’t get into this year’s Summer of Code.

For a long time, I’ve been wanted to do some serious research into the economics of free software: there is an awful lot of opinion about how you can and cannot make money out of free software, and not really much fact (or, at least, no-one has looked at…

It’s not often that I’m reading through some article online and come across someone using my own words in print (as it were), but that happened this morning!

We’re probably going to see 0.3 this week.

We all have New Year’s resolutions in some form or another; I haven’t really got mine straight in my head yet but there are a couple of things I’m committing to over the next month or two – one of which is to spend more time regularly hacking Bongo.

Within this post, I mention the B-word (business) a few times.

There’s a number of things I’ve been meaning to blog about recently.

In general, using shared libraries already available on a system is a good thing.

I had separate chats with people about MDB yesterday, originally about how we’re going to fix a potential security problem with Bongo, but went into a wider-ranging discussion about MDB.

Recently, I decided I needed to move my server downstairs, but in order to do that I had to reduce the noise substantially – it’s going in our living room for now.

We talked about it, and I did the form yesterday – we’ve applied as a mentoring organisation for this summer’s Google of Code.

Very excited to hear about the SMTP changes coming down the line.

I mentioned this on IRC, but I think it’s worth repeating again here: it’s looking like I’m going to be in the States for most of the week ahead.

First things, we just went past r800 yesterday – a commit I bagged myself, woo!

A couple of people now have asked how the store works.

A little while ago, we decided that we would put some system configuration into the store, and rely more or less on access controls to govern who could read/write that data, which is quite a nice flexible system.

Probably most people will have noticed a little bit of a lull in Bongo hacking.

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.

Longish time no blog: not really getting enough hacking time at the moment 🙁 Recently we discovered a problem for IMAP users.

Well, my informal little hackweek is coming to a close today, and it has been really good.

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.

So, the efforts of the past few weeks have started to bear fruit.

Sebastian has been working hard on logos and templates and things – we don’t want Bongo to lose visual appeal.

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.

Since my last techie post on locks was appreciated and since I’m still crook, here comes another one.

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.

Unbeknownst to many, it seems, Microsoft are pushing a new referrals scheme for preinstalled Office 2007s.

Well, it was last weekend, but I meant to write about it before now.

Sorry – another slightly technical post.

It has been a little while in the making, and the construction signs are still up, but we’re almost there.

For a while, I’ve been intending to put a list of inspirational articles on our wiki.

There’s nothing which divides hackers so much as HTML as a format for sending mail.

Last weekend I started looking at Hawkeye, prompted mostly by the need for people to be able to change the config for Bongo while we’re putting the new config system in place.

There has been a little bit of Bongo hacking.

Planet Debian has been a trove of green discussion today.

… today is World Water Day.

So, Bongo didn’t make it into Google’s Summer of Code, but we did get some nice feedback from them.

I do love a good diagram, and I noticed that I have a number of Bongo-related diagrams stuck on my hard-drive.

First post after being “away” – my server was down for a little while too :/ No matter, I wasn’t really in a position to blog anyway.

Chris Lord has posted an essay entitled “Introducing Social Calendaring” which I think is an interesting read for Bongans.

This isn’t a great looking URL, but hopefully it will continue to work into the future: this is a Bongo group on Mugshot.

It has taken a while for the paperwork and stuff to work through, and I’m sure people who followed the discussion on our mailing lists will have almost entirely forgotten about this by now – but today’s big news is that Bongo is now officially a member of…

Many interesting IRC discussions today, so I thought I’d write some of it down.

So, recently a lot of stuff has been going on in my life – displacing the lower status stuff like hacking Bongo, painting the house, washing, shaving, that kind of thing.

It’s been a little while since I blogged about anything 🙂 I have a number of Bongo patches on the go, but have only managed to commit one so far – the creation of secure certificates and crypto data that happens when you install Bongo should now be faster.

As releases go, 0.3 has been turning out pretty well.

Pat and I had a good talk the other day about aliases, which I think was triggered from another conversation he had.

I wasn’t going to mention Hula particularly, but since the recent announcement it seems the right time.