For my first post I thought I would let everyone know that soon (as in next week sometime) I plan on creating a tinderbox tree and client for Cosmo. The details are still being hashed out but it’s a good sign that I was able to successfully build Cosmo from scratch.

I added links to the RSS and Atom feeds for entries or comments to the sidebar. There are also per-author and per-category feeds, which you can get to if you click on an author or a category in the sidebar. FYI the blog is currently set up so anyone can register and start posting entries (which I assume is something we’ll turn off once all the OSAF folks have registered?)

I’m assuming that this new blog will actually replace what we have at www.osafoundation.org — all content currently residing at www could be moved into wordpress “pages” linked to from the “SITE” section of this blog’s sidebar. Which also means we could then move this entire blog to live at www.osafoundation.org. Is that the plan?

Scooby is the OSAF web-based CalDAV client. We’re very early in the process of defining what exactly Scooby will do - suggestions welcome. Also, we’re hiring a UI developer (DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML/HTTP) to own the “front end” of the app (I’ll be handling the server parts). For these reasons, and because I’ll be mostly dedicated to Cosmo 0.2 for the next few months, expect slow progress on the Scooby front until we get the UI developer in who can get things in gear.

A quick status report on Cosmo:

0.1 is just about in the can. We’re waiting for a final decision on licensing before we can make a release. We’ll also be putting up Cosmo wiki pages (hopefully this week) where you can find documentation on how to build, install and run Cosmo. An OSAF-internal Cosmo installation for Chandler developers will follow shortly thereafter.

Planning for 0.2 is underway. Goals for the release are currently being discussed, and I hope to have the first draft of the functional spec available for review sometime next week. Broadly, 0.2 will include support for Chandler 0.6 sharing and interoperability features for iCal and CalDAV clients.

Not only is Chandler a client, it’s also a server!

By enabling Chandler’s built-in webserver (provided by Twisted), you can access a few useful included mini web applications called “servlets”. There are two ways to turn on the webserver: either pass the –webserver command line argument, or set the CHANDLERWEBSERVER environment variable to 1 (the number one) before launching Chandler. Once you have done either of those, point your web browser at http://localhost:1888/ where you will see a list of servlets: an RSS reader, a repository browsing utility, and a simple photo album.

To add RSS feeds to Chandler, you may add them through the UI via the File > New Item > New ZaoBao Channel menu, or create a file named inbound.txt in your profile directory and put a list of RSS URLs in there, one per line. Re-run Chandler and it will subscribe to those URLs.

The location of your profile directory depends on the platform:

Linux: ~/.chandler OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/Open Source Applications Foundation/Chandler Windows: C:\Documents and Settings[Username]\Application Data\Open Source Applications Foundation\Chandler

So what exactly is the architectural concept for Scooby?

(About Work or Anything Else)

Here we offer a few simple precautions to help you maintain control of your personal privacy so that you can express yourself without facing unjust retaliation. If followed correctly, these protections can save you from embarrassment or just plain weirdness in front of your friends and coworkers.

This supposedly works if I just link to an audio file somewhere using an absolute URI. Then I need to include a link to the rss feed generator like this: wp.osafoundation.org/wp-rss2.php Then it’s supposed to work!

.mp3 file: Groucho clips

An rss feed of all OSAF Blog podcasts should be available at: http://wp.osafoundation.org/wp-rss2.php?category_name=podcasts

OSAF’s Mitch Kapor and Lisa Dusseault participated in an EDUCAUSE Live! session on April 13, 2005. An archive of the session including the slide presentation and audio recording is now available at: http://www.educause.edu/LIVE057

The session reviewed the work that is currently taking place to solve the problem of practical multiplatform sharing of calendar and scheduling data over the Internet. Lisa discussed CalDAV, a proposal she introduced to the IETF standards body to extend the existing WebDAV standard to handle rich event-based data. CalDAV has been very well received and work is currently under way at OSAF, Mozilla, Oracle, Novell (as part of the newly open sourced Hula project), the University of Washington, and other places to implement this new standard in both clients and servers.

The session also discussed CalConnect, a new consortium established to promote interoperable calendar and scheduling standards. In January 2005, CalConnect sponsored an interoperability event where several early versions of clients and servers successfully exchanged calendar information. The hope is that these efforts will lead to open standardization and implementations that will provide end users with the same simplicity in sharing calendars with friends and co-workers that they now enjoy in sharing e-mail messages.

Now that items can be created in a null repository view, how about persisting them ? By definition, a null repository view, is not capable of persisting items. In the context of Phillip Eby’s Schema API proposal, items are persisted in python code and instantiated into the null repository view upon python’s loading of the module.

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