I spent some time today experimenting with Mozilla’s Sunbird calendaring app, trying to build up a comprehensive list of all the events going on within Alfresco. There’s a lot of stuff going on here at the moment but we don’t yet have a single place on our site where you can get a comprehensive summary of all these cool events.

So the solution? Publish an iCal file to the web site that people can subscribe to using their client of choice that will keep them informed about what’s going on.

Sunbird makes it dead easy to create the iCal file and add events to it, but publishing this to the site via FTP is messy and limits the subset of people who can contribute to the calendar to those people with FTP details for the site. Not so good.

So I stored the calendar file in Alfresco instead. Now anyone with write access on that file can contribute, and Sunbird can even update the calendar directly using the fabulous WevDAV support built into Alfresco.

You can download the calendar or if you’re a fellow-Alfrescan with an account on customers.alfresco.com then you can subscribe to it in Sunbird or the calendaring extensions for Firefox and Thunderbird. iCal might well work with it too, but I don’t have a Mac to test this on.

All in all, a pretty good example of what you can achieve in a couple of hours using open source software and open standards like iCal and WebDAV :-).

Hot off the press is our latest podcast, featuring Dave Caruana talking to our Chief Marketing Officer Ian Howells about Alfresco’s support for the standard. Dave is Alfresco’s Chief Scientist and is a member of the JSR-283 committee.

It’s been a few weeks since I last blogged. Since then, we’ve launched Alfresco Blogs and it’s podcast-touting sibling Open Source Talk.

Meanwhile over in California, Esther Dyson has some dangerous ideas about the future of email. Trying to be pragmatic about the whole pay-to-send email debate and not subscribing to the idealist kind of beliefs that Esther claims everyone against the idea holds, I still find it difficult to believe how such a scheme could actually work.

Email systems are already complex enough, without adding another layer of complexity into the mix. We now have server blacklists, spam filters and sender authentication schemes bolted on top of the original SMTP standards but the only technology that’s made a difference to me lately has been Google’s Gmail service.

Just like they did in the search field, Google have done some really innovative stuff with email and the results are amazing. Now I rarely ever see a spam message in my inbox even though around half of the messages coming into the account are junk.

So perhaps if AOL and their like put some effort into making progress like this, rather than demanding money off people who mostly have no interest in paying for something they’ve had for free for years then we might make some progress here 🙂

Home alone in the flat this afternoon, with housemates having gone home for Easter, I decided I’d give opening the drawer at the end of my bed another go, having so far failed on all previous attempts. It was jammed in and had both handles broken, presumably as a result of someone attempting to use brute force to pull it open.

I thought I’d try a different approach. So after taking the mattress off the base and tipping the (bottom end) of the base up on it’s side, the problem was quickly identified: the drawer rollers had become jammed underneath the runners. Easily fixed.

Eager to take advantage of this new-found storage space (every bit matter when you have a flat this small) I returned the base unit to it’s original horizontal position and opened it up. I don’t think it had been opened in a while.

Out of that drawer came the following:

• 1 black VERDI suitcase on wheels – actually in quite good condition overall
• 1 ladies medium Levi’s top with the wording ‘Sun State Califonia’ across the front
• 1 medium Whistles sleeveless hoodie in navy blue
• 1blue GAP tank top with lime green detailing
• 1 cream coloured size 14 ladies jumper from Dorothy Perkins
• 1 turqoise (at least that’s the closest word that describes this rather unique colour) BHS blouse – size 14
• 1 ACTIVE fleece in grey and light blue – size 14-16
• 1 Body Shop fabric bag
• Inside said bag, 1 receipt for £2.55 from Isleworth Recreation Centre for ADULT SWIM, dated 17-05-02 and served by Sarah
• 1 small bottle of bright glittery pink nail varnish
• 1 suit cover
• 7 miscellaneous coat hangers

Now I’m sat here with a mattress lying on it’s side and a bed base covered with this random crap out of the drawer. Anyone know a size 14 colour-blind girl who might like any of the above? 🙂

Thanks to everyone who came to our lovely flat last night, it’s now officially been warmed!

This morning I’ve mostly been eating cold sausage rolls with onion and garlic dip. Woot for left-over party food.

On eating proper food: Thinking back myself to the point around 6-12 months ago where I stopped getting ill and dropped down a jean size was also the point at which I started cooking proper food myself.

Last night myself and housemates D and M forsaked the usual Friday night takeout for a chicken curry that was surprisingly easy to make. And heaps cheaper, of course. Also this week I’ve had pasta in a tomato sauce with chicken and bacon, chicken stir-fry with a lime, corriander and soy sauce and pork with mashed potato and a creamy leek and musard sauce. Sometimes when you don’t feel like cooking it’s nice to have housemates that will either motivate you to do so or even to do it for you.

My two sources of inspriation at the moment are the BBC Food site and the Sainsbury Local by South Ealing tube. I usually decide what meat (including none) I want and build a meal up around that. Add some carbs, a few vegetables and the rest is all down to experimentation. I’m still learning which flavours go well with each other and which herbs and spices to use under different circumstances.

Stir fries are always good if you’re not sure quite what you want to eat – the shops always seem to have the right ingredients even at 9pm after a long day at work. And the corner shop always has fresh ginger.

I try not to buy packets or jars. It’s easy to cook up that jar of pasta sauce in five minutes if it’s sitting there in the back of the cupboard but if it’s not there then I’ll use the can of tomatoes, the tomato puree and the vegatables instead. It might take a bit longer but it’s worth it for the feeling of accomplishment alone.

I think cooking is like blogging – it’s all about keeping up the disclipline. Get out the habit for a while and youn lose it. But keep on at it and gradually over time you start to suck less ;-).

Matt – working in a small company is new to me too. or at least it was two months ago. Now it’s just that daily routine of getting as much stuff done in a day as you can that I have to deal with.

This week the big event was undoubtedly yesterday’s web seminar with MySQL. I spent a lot of time working on the web infrastructure for this, and the effort I’ve put in will hopefully mean we’ll be able to deploy similar resources more readily in the future. Now that we have a proper place for white papers and for newletter sign-ups, it’s just a simple matter of linking this into the existing content we already have on the site.

I’d also like to welcome Chenoa and Villmond Luxembourg SARL as officially-listed partners on our site, which sees the total list rise to 19 partner organisations. It’s not me who’s put in the hard work in bringing these guys on board, but it’s nice to be part of the process that gets this news out to the world.

When I think back to the second I first read about Alfresco some five months ago (and on the other side of the globe, to boot) I was convinced that this company was going places. This week has done more than any other to cement this in my mind. And yeah, there’s a lot of work to be done to realise this, but I guess at least it’s better than being bored :-).

Catching up on blogs seems to be all I’ve had time to do lately with the hecticness of work being as it is at the moment, but now I’ve discovered a way of absorbing the latest open source goings on while I get on with other things!

Mirroring what we’re working to get off the ground at Alfresco at the moment, Novell recently launched Novell Open Audio to the world. I gave it a listen to last night mainly to see what kind of stuff they were doing in their podcasts, and ended up listening intently to the guys talking about iFolder and the collaboration features that they’ve built on top of the stack with the latest 3.0 release. Very interesting stuff indeed, and quite a lot of potential cross-over with the colloboration stuff that we have in Alfresco.

Also interesting is how they’ve now split off a community version of iFolder (complete with the compulsory shiny-MediaWiki-for-a-website thing just like F-Spot, Banshee and Mono – clearly a great way of getting content up on your site) from the enterprise offering and how they’ve split their people between those two areas.

I didn’t get round to listening to the second half of the 50 minute show about NLD, but I’ll make sure I do when I get a chance. Truly engaging stuff – we’ve got a lot to live up to!

The thing about blogging is that whenever some really big thing happens in your life, you get so caught up in dealing with that really big thing that you never get round to actually writing anything about it.

So we moved into the new flat (it’s shiny!) last Monday and since then things have been slowly coming together. The compulsory trip to IKEA was undertaken on Saturday (the car park experience being one which I hope I won’t have to repeat anytime soon), the new sofas arrived yesterday and today the most wonderful thing has happenned – our broadband has been turned on.

Maybe I’ll get home and it won’t work at all, but for now I’m happy. And I’m certainly not staying late in the office today. I have things to play with!

Update: It works!

Apparently the fantasticness of Gmail is soon to be available for business use, with Google now piloting the service within San Jose City College in San Jose, California. They’re also accepting registrations from other organisations interested in taking part, via the original blog post. (How scary does the “Google Blog” sound?)

This kind of service that offers a real compelling alternative to the hosted Outlook type of service that we use for email at Alfresco at the moment. With 2GB of storage per user and the power of Google’s search technology, this is going to turn the market on it’s head.