Open-Xchange is exactly what the name might suggest: an open-source competitor to Exchange. It’s one of the businesses that has both a free (GPL) version and a proprietary, expensive version. Note that the free stuff doesn’t work with Outlook, meaning that it’ll be a great web-based groupware solution (e-mail, contacts, calendar, to-do lists, and even file management, and any of that can be shared with other users on the server), but that it won’t interface with Outlook. There’s a demo of the web GUI here, which seems pretty spiffy. (It’s the non-free version, but the functionality, from what I’ve read, should be the same, or at least similar.)

Open-Xchange appears to sit on top of Postfix for SMTP and Cyrus for IMAP: it’s a spiffy interface to existing (popular, arguably best-of-breed) technologies, instead of trying to write a mailserver from scratch. This means that ‘normal’ mail clients can access the e-mail too. It also means that ‘normal’ server stuff can be dropped in: MailScanner for anti-spam, for example. (Aside: I didn’t know that SpamAssassin includes Bayesian support now.)

However, Open-Xchange is severely limited if it can’t work with an Outlook client (IMHO). I also use GMail for e-mail and calendar, and use my Treo as my primary calendar and contacts database. So it’s getting to be this big mess with things existing in many places.

So enter Funambol. It’s normally described as being something for syncing mobile phones: contacts, calendars, and all that, too. However, I view it as even more novel: it includes a lot of connectors, so that, to me, its best quality is that it can function as a synchronization layer. It’ll sync with Open-Xchange via a connector, meaning that I could update contacts in Open-Xchange and get them on my Treo. (It also includes an Exchange connector.) And there’s a connector for GMail, too, meaning that it might just be possible to get all the places I keep my contacts and calendars and to-do lists to stay synced up.

And, Funambol includes Client Plugins for not just things like Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, iPod (?!), and iPhone, but also for desktop clients like Outlook and Evolution.

I’m sure it won’t work out quite as perfectly as I’m dreaming it can. I’m already starting to doubt the Google integration: it seems the connector might just be for contacts, for example, when what I really want is Google Calendar.

And on the subject of “the cloud” and syncing your data between devices, Kyle’s comment about how he was running his own Mozilla Weave server got me curious. There are some directions on how to set it up here. (Note that there isn’t a “Weave Server” software product per se, it’s just a browser plug-in that communicates with a server using WebDAV in a specific manner. It can do encryption, too, it seems.)

I stumbled across two things I didn’t know existed before.

The Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) is exactly what the name suggests. It sits in front of your existing mailserver and runs various anti-spam measures. Linux users already have MailScanner which seems to bring various technologies together, but there’s something neat about being able to ‘drop in’ an anti-spam tool. (Almost like a Barracuda, except free.)

I also noticed Claros inTouch, which for some reason, I’ve never heard of. Which is a shame because, from the looks of it, it’s the best-looking webmail client on the face of the planet. (Yes, even cooler than RoundCube.) I haven’t looked into it too much, but it seems that it’s free (they refer to “free as a bird,” typically “free as in speech,” but it doesn’t look like you have to buy it, either), and it also seems that, being AJAX, it does POP/IMAP in addition to ‘normal’ webmail, which might be interesting.

Of course, I haven’t actually worked with either of these, but thought they might be interesting options.

Just in case there was ever any doubt that the media is mildly obsessed with Michael Phelps…

Thanks, as usual, to the Google News computers for this interesting photo choice.

There’s a few things of mine that went missing at about the same time, and I can’t for the life of me figure out where they are. So here’s my latest theory. It’s also the most rational one yet:

Things that were stolen* from my car:

• My $10 pair of sunglasses.
• My car’s owner’s manual.

Things that weren’t stolen from my car:

• My iPod.
• My iTrip.
• My GPS.
• My stereo.
• My wallet.
• My registration.
• My spare change.

• Despite it being locked, with the windows closed. Inside of our garage. Which is locked. Clearly, it was a gang of professionals. Bump-keyed the side door to the garage open, probably, and then Slim-Jimmed their way into my car. They knew enough to not take everything, so that I wouldn’t spot anything missing right away. It’s the perfect crime. Almost. Because I’m too smart to fall for it. I want my sunglasses and owner’s manual back!

When I got my license, and again when I got my passport (I think?), I had to fill in my eye color.

The way you always see the question being used on TV (“Oh, you say you love me? Really, then? What color are my eyes?!”), it’s as if it’s the first thing you’re supposed to notice about people.

I realized a year or two ago, and re-realized the other day, that my eyes are definitely not blue, which contradicts what my license says. (Actually, I don’t see it printed on my license?) But the problem is that I really have no clue what color they are, only that “Blue” is definitely not right. I think they defy description, actually.

So I was thinking that maybe, next time I had to get my license renewed (or if I end up moving to Boston), I could take take a photograph of my eyeball a week ahead of time, post it here, and let people vote.

But can you change your eye color? I assume, “Hey, I lost 150 pounds, so I’ve got to update my weight on my license” is something DMV people might deal with fairly routinely. (Okay, so judging by how society looks, it may be going in the other direction. But the point is the same: weight changes over time.) But changing your eye color? I suppose I could try to pretend that whoever entered the data many years ago got it wrong, but they’d probably ask why I didn’t correct it when I got my license renewed.

So maybe I could say that they changed colors?

Also, do you think, in the little “Eye: ___” field, I can fit in, “A chartreuse shade of puce?” (Sadly, you can’t search the text of comics, so I can’t find the link, but I assure you that I’m quoting an old Dinosaur Comics strip, not going off the deep end.)

Edit: Oh. My. God. The comic I mentioned.

So when I see a flash of lightning, I instinctively count seconds until I hear the thunder to gauge distance. I’m always forgetting whether it’s 1 second = 1 mile, or 5 seconds = 1 mile. (It’s 5 seconds per mile. Approximately.)

But what about when you see the flash and don’t even get the first syllable of, “One one-thousand,” out before shouting an expletive in surprise? Sort of a, “Wah—holy!”

My house is not on fire. The trees keep me from seeing my neighbor’s home, so I’m not so sure about theirs.

One thing that Linux “LiveCDs” are good for is fixing/rescuing systems that won’t boot. Windows install hosed? Boot a Linux LiveCD and copy your data! Screwed up your boot loader and nothing will boot? Boot a Linux LiveCD and fix it.

One thing I find myself wanting occasionally, though, is to remotely get at the disk in a system. We have a few machines here protected with Norton that are very slow at disk access. The problem is that there’s no apparent reason for the slowness. One of my theories is that viruses or spyware could have gone unnoticed by the current antivirus software.

The problem is that you can’t have two anti-virus programs running at once. I learned this the hard way: they duke it out, and you end up with a system that won’t boot. And you really can’t uninstall Norton without jumping through hoops.

What I want, then, is a LiveCD that I can boot into, and have the system share each disk over Samba, so I can access them remotely. (Prompt for a passphrase before doing this so it’s not a glaring security vulnerability, of course.)

But then I was thinking… Mac OS X can apparently be booted into “target disk mode,” where the system basically pretends it’s a really expensive USB hard drive. You plug another computer into your Mac’s USB port in that mode, and just access it like it’s a hard drive. None of the partitions are ‘mounted’ by the OS, so you can do whatever you want to them. The disk is basically just a slave.

So I’m thinking that someone ought to make a distro that includes support for every filesystem it can, along with Samba, an FTP server, an NFS server, and “USB target disk” support. I don’t see why you couldn’t fit all of this on a single CD, along with a GUI. Because then I can just plop this in and do a ‘network’ virus scan, or do easy network backups. Or whatever else.

I’m kind of surprised this doesn’t exist, actually.

This diagram on Wikipedia, which illustrates the “Solar chimney” article, is really pretty intuitive. And it takes into account something I’ve thought for a long time: if the earth, once you go down 5 or 10 feet, stays at a constant temperature, why aren’t we exploiting that?

It apparently works pretty well, too. There’s a German standard called Passivhaus which apparently permits something like 90% reductions in energy use (!), and which, in the dead of winter, lose something like 1 degree a day if no heating is used. A big part is the ground-coupled heat exchangers, the big pipes underground that allow air to be passed through and be cooled (or warmed, in the winter) to the earth’s ‘native’ temperature around 60. Simple systems just use the solar chimney (in the diagram), using the fact that hot air rises (and thus ‘pulls’ air in via draft) to bring in outside air, run it through lots of underground tubing, cool the house, and then get vented out. It seems you can enhance the effects, especially in extreme weather, by closing the paths to the outside and making a circular system: take the air that you’d be venting out and pipe it back through the underground tubes, so that it will re-cool the already kind-of-cool air being expelled.

What I like is that it’s so deceptively simple.

People in my family use text messages occasionally, but probably about 2/month on average. Every now and then we think that the $5/month for 250 text messages package that Verizon offers is a good deal, but then realize that, at 20 cents a text message, we’d have to use 25/month to justify it. And we never have, so we pay individually.

So I just got a text message:

Free VZW MSG: Why pay $.20 per text message? Get a $5 text package with 250 messages. Call 800-856-1695 for details. Reply Q to opt out.

Oh yeah, that’s right. My cell phone company is text-messaging me to encourage me to sign up for their text-messaging plan, so that each unwanted text message people spam me with doesn’t cost me money. In their defense (if it’s possible to defend this), it’s a “Free VZW MSG,” so I presumably won’t be charged. Or I will and they’ll pretend it was an accident and take it off our bill 3 months later. One of the two.

I could apparently reply “Q” to opt out. (Of future spam from my cell phone company.) But I’d rather reply DIAF.

Edit: Speaking of text messages, did you hear that, when Obama chooses a running mate, he’s going to announce it via text message? As my post may have indicated, I’m not terribly pleased with receiving text messages from people I don’t know, so I didn’t sign up. We’ll find out in short order anyway. Washington political blogger Garrett Graff has an article in the NY Times explaining the reasoning behind why they’re doing this.

This comment on Ask MetaFilter is the sort of insightful observation that makes you stop and think.

Ludicrously-obvious scammers seem to be pretty popular these days. They’ll contact you wanting your item, but they’re on vacation, so they’re going to have their assistant send you a money order, and send you some extra money on the money order for the trouble.

(The way this scam works is that your bank will accept the money order and credit your account the amount. You ship the goods. But then, maybe a week later, the processing center does its thing and catches that the money order is actually fake, and reverses the transaction, taking the money back out of your account. You’ve already shipped the goods off.)

While discussing how scammers seem to get more and more obvious, “MattD” came in with a neat post pointing out that it’s lowering our defenses. This guy’s not paying by money order, it must be real. This guy will meet me in person, it must be real. This guy doesn’t speak broken English, it must be real.

And then, another interesting point: “The list of 32″ televisions for sale pretty much doubles as a list of nearly-new-in-box 50″ flat panels to steal.”

Just thought I’d pass on the neat post, because it was really pretty insightful.