I took the opportunity today evening to get myself upgraded (from 4.5.3_GA_733) to the latest (5.0.0_GA_1869) open source version of Zimbra - ZCS 5.0 GA. The database migration took about the longest, mainly due to some schema changes. Lots of starts and stops to the database. Its now running MySQL 5.0.45 Community.

What prompted the upgrade? A few days ago, I got a bunch of new packages, and rebooted the server (new kernel). To my dismay, Zimbra started to have issues - amavisd wouldn’t start. This meant that there was a large amount of mail, sitting in the queue, not being delivered. Things you don’t normally check for, immediately, anyway.

Turns out Compress::Zlib was too old. Well, not the system provided Compress::Zlib, but the Zimbra provided Compress::Zlib. Kind of annoying when there …

Its exciting to see Zimbra being purchased for USD$350 million, by Yahoo!. Exciting because its a great product, exciting because I use it daily, and I guess Satish & team (of over 100 employees) deserve a big pat on the back. The other exciting thing to note is that its got MySQL in its core, and if they’re pushing it out farther and wider now thanks to the Yahoo! purchase, all the better.

There are a few things that are unclear, though, even from their FAQ:

• They mention commitment to Zimbra 5, but I’m still waiting for 4.5.7 :P (My Series 60 phone still …

I’ve been a big supporter of Zimbra, because I think they’re one of the few projects/companies that get email/calendering/a groupware solution, right. Sure, I don’t necessarily like the model where they cripple the open source version in terms of say, backups (but this I guess will be fixed when MySQL supports online backups natively). No AdSense zimlet? Its easy enough to write one (with spare time).

What’s annoyed me of late with Zimbra, is its lack of ability to work with my Nokia E61i. Its a known problem (since February this year?), as it also affected the E61 (and probably other Series 60 phones, when you’re trying to access the Zimbra server over IMAP). You get the certificate being displayed, you get the headers, and when you try to open any email bodies, it just stops working.

The …

I spoke to Matt and Barry today, and it was great to see them at the DotOrg Pavilion at the MySQL Expo, since the last time we caught up was at WordCamp 2006. Since WordCamp, Wordpress.com is now spanning something like 900,000+ registered users! That number used to be over 300,000+, just a few months ago, so it looks like they’re really popular.

While Barry entertained a visitor, Matt and I got to talking about growing companies. He’s really happy with the size of Automattic, and is going to try for as long as possible to keep the company size, under fifty. He’s also found it interesting that some people are running WordPress 1.2 (ick! security holes galore), and while I worried that the database itself might not be migrate-able, he mentions that going …

Rod Johnson, author of the Spring framework, thinks open source is hot right now, but its a “bubble” ready to burst, according to an article titled What Makes An Open Source Project Successful? by Charles Babcock.

Most open source projects are supported by an army of volunteers who buy into the hype, but “capitalism will inevitably reassert itself” and developers will find they need to put more effort into steady jobs and private lives, leaving “open source zombies”–unsupported, unmaintained projects–he predicts.

This is true, with many a project, that hasn’t built a successful ecosystem. Keep in mind that with the gazillion text editors out there, not all stand the test of time, like Emacs and vim do. Capitalism is always going to win hands down, because money in its essence is important to survival. Go …

Don’t know how many of you actually have heard of, or use, Mugshot, but I just started playing with it after a long hiatus, and decided that it’s pretty cool. Something the MySQL community will probably enjoy being part of (currently, to take full advantage, you want to be a Linux or Windows XP user).

By virtue of looking for the next new community hangouts, I figure we create a MySQL Mugshot Group. And before folk wonder what Mugshot’s all about, I suggest reading the feature list. Keep in mind that Mugshot is completely open source, and its a very live social experience, in this “notification era”. Its a whole lot of fun, and from what I can tell, the signups are now open to the public so what’s keeping you?

The site has i386 …

Many people ditch the rat race, to start anything from a one-man show right up to a medium-sized business these days. Globally, computers are being accepted everywhere, and its always been touted to help the business owner, improve business processes. From an open source perspective, how do we help the small business owner?

We start by studying what a small business owner requires:

• contact management - the business is in the network. Without contacts, there’s no exchange of services, and definitely no exchange of money.
• document management - businesses, no matter how large or small, end up with lots of documents. Moving to the e-society that we’re all aiming for, we should aim to manage documents well, right up to the backups of these crucial business data.
• accounting - taxation, income, expense, credit, debit, etc. are what make the business world work. You need to keep track of absolutely every …

Ruby on Rails is hot technology. Its got the essence of Web 2.0 written all over it, right?

Seeing that it supports MySQL out of the box, we like it. We of course want to enhance our support of the Ruby on Rails team, and make sure the RoR users have a rocking time.

As a consequence of this, I’ve been playing with RoR, and will definitely write up more thoughts here at some stage. This is just a quick note to mention that I’d be going to the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, from April 22-23 2006. Anyone else plan on being there?

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups - can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm …