João Prado Maia’s Weblog

So after a few months of frantic work, MySQL Network is finally live. It feels good to finish this big project, and have it live and running for real people to use. There’s obviously still a lot of work and improvements to be made, but at least there is some breathing room to look back and see what could be improved.

Next on my short term todo list is some performance tuning of the knowledge base code. After that, I’m back into Eventum land (and I would love to release a new version of it as soon as possible).

Jan-Willem Hiddink has an interesting post about the possibility of hacking a new Papercut storage module to handle weblog entries.

Jan: that is indeed possible. Bill Seitz also had some interesting thoughts on this, which can be summarized in the following:

– Each weblog will become a newsgroup and each weblog post will be a newsgroup message (maybe comments could become replies to the post?)
– Weblog readers and writers may use papercut as their replication mechanism. Everyone will run papercut locally and then connect to ‘localhost’ using Outlook Express or whatever to either read weblog entries and post new weblog entries (or even comments to existing weblog entries)
– They would need some way to add a weblog papercut host/port to their subscription list (changing settings.py or a local database in the process)

I took a few hours to write down what would need to be developed for this to happen:

– Add support for the IHAVE command in Papercut
– Need a client side tool to help people add weblog servers to their subscription list
– New storage module to store subscriptions/weblog entries locally (maybe SQLite?)
– Need a new authentication mechanism to allow weblog authors to post a new ‘thread’ (or weblog entry) in their newsgroups and to prevent other people from doing the same

Anyway, aside from these requirements a client side tool could be written using Fredrik Lundh’s effbot platform (or just plain TKinter) to make it easier to start/stop the service on Windows, for instance.

Since I last posted something here (looks like this blog business is not for me) a lot of stuff happened in my life:

– I left my job on Lexicon Genetics and joined MySQL AB
– MySQL AB acquired all rights to Eventum, and we will release an open-source version of it in six months
– Some redneck driver hit my car and lied his ass off saying it was somehow my fault
– Got my car fixed (they paid for the repairs)
– Moved to another apartment so I could get a separate home office
– Continued developing new features to Eventum

And now we will finally start using Eventum (still in beta) for our support customers.

I have been working hard lately on Eventum, and a bunch of new exciting features:

– Ability to allow visitors to signup for new accounts, and have these new accounts restricted to customizable set of available projects. The administrator also has the ability to specify which permission level these users should be granted

– A new ‘reporter’ permission level that allows users to all of the same privileges as a ‘viewer’ user, but with the added ability to report new issues, handle support emails and to enter their time in the time tracking module

– RSS feeds for custom filters. The user basically just needs to go to the Advanced Search screen, create a custom filter and then an RSS feed will be available. The problem is that this requires HTTP-Auth support on the RSS reader, but there are available tools out there.

– An installation tool that helps the administrator as much as possible on how to setup the application, including automatically creating the necessary MySQL tables, setting up the permissions and so on

– The handling of duplicate issues is also much better, with the ability to mark several issues as duplicates of an existing one, and from then on all changes to the ‘master’ issue will be propagated to the ‘child’ ones

– The administrator/manager of the tool can create canned email responses and use them while replying to support emails. This will help minimize common tasks a lot

– Ability to save and load draft email responses, so a reply to a support email could be created by several users collaborating together

This is getting pretty good… I’m almost in the level where I’m ready to release version 1.0.

Is it just me, or is the fact that Dave Winer will present a keynote in OSCOM kind of ironic ? I understand that he was behind much of the development of Userland Radio and etc, but that is not Open Source software.

So what gives ? Are we really lacking on other people from the Open Source arena to speak on these conferences ? Or did Dave hyped himself so much that he is invited to talk even on conferences that he should not be a part of (speaking-wise) ?