Community Matters

So this is NOT the mail program I have written about before. It is (for now, at least), squarely targeting geeks. You want to know how geeky? The current user interface for Notmuch is Emacs. Yes, Emacs.

Ok, if you stopped laughing, I’ll tell you why I am still quite excited. Notmuch is entirely search based. It tries to do one thing and do it well. Manage the tons of email that many of us get. Have you ever tried to manage several GBs of email, hundreds of thousands of messages with one of today’s “standard” email programs like Outlook, Evolution, Thunderbird or Mail.app? Don’t – unless you are a very patient person.

After a rather lengthy initial import of your email (this can take a few hours, depending how fast your disk is and just how many gigabytes of email you have), most every operation is really snappy. Think someone sent you an email about kittens to your home address? Something like notmuch search tag:tome and subject:kittens will find this email in no time at all. And you can get arbitrarily sophisticated here – after all, these are all just tags. notmuch search tag:unread and tag:lkml and from:torvalds@linuxfoundation shows you the emails that Linus has sent to LKML that you haven’t read (assuming that you’ve set up an lkml tag in your filtering of incoming emails). The possibilities are endless.

So set up some rules on your incoming email. Classify depending on sender, subject, mailing list, topic, almost anything you can think of. And you can search for any combination of these tags – and of course a full text search of the mail bodies. Instead of looking at mail folders you now simply looked at saved searches – you can give names to them and treat them just like folders – except of course they are virtual and near-instantaneous.

Sounds complicated? Try “incredibly powerful”. More so than Gmail. And on your local machine, not somewhere in the cloud with someone else in control of your data.

Notmuch is at version 0,3.1 as of this writing. And there’s still a lot of work that needs to go into it (and especially into a more non-geek friendly UI) – but what is there already is so powerful that I have switched to notmuch as my mail application – and have dusted off my emacs foo to use it within emacs. And even started hacking elisp (and the backend, written in C and C++) to contribute.

Give it a try. You might be surprised.

I like the idea of little “servers” (and I use that term lightly) that are quiet and cool. I have replaced one of the Mac Minis that I used as a server at home with a fanless little system based on an Intel Atom Z530 CPU (a Portwell WEBS2120). 2Gigs of memory, a small SSD and you have a completely quiet and reasonably powerful system. Definitely works as a little web / mail / openvpn / DNS server for your home network. Cheap, cheap to run, flexible.

I expect we’ll see a lot more of these kind of systems used by all the web hosters. These are great little dedicated servers – and since they barely get warm they should keep operating costs low.

It seems that many of the low cost hosting companies have started to offer Atom based dedicated servers at VPS prices. So far these seem to be Atom N270/280 or even new N450 based system. But I’m sure the Atom Z5xx based ones can’t be far behind.

Look at that – there’s a new project out there, doing client Linux for devices, mobile and otherwise. With a focus on phones and netbooks and cool things like connected TVs and in vehicle infotainment (i.e., nav systems that can also play DVDs and surf the web – preferably not by the driver, while driving… but I digress).

So MeeGo has just been launched, the website is still under development and has quite a few spots that are waiting for content, but what is clear is where the project comes from and where it is going.

maemo and Moblin have been around for a while. They are both shipping on products; maemo on phones like the Nokia N900, Moblin on a bunch of Netbooks from Dell, Samsung, MSI and others – delivered through OSVs like Novell or Canonical. They both have track record as solid and competent and innovative. And they are actually quite similar in many of the underlying ideas. Which is a good sign, if you think about it.

But why merge them? Aren’t major mergers always a bad thing (cue the music from the Daimler / Chrysler horror movie). Well it’s not the corporations that are merging. It’s the open source projects that are combining forces. And that’s a good thing. There are too many projects doing the same thing over and over again. Having two of them that are well aligned get together and take the best from both sides to create something that’s even better is promising.

What will this mean in detail? Well, there’s a lot more that will have to be published by the Moblin and maemo leadership teams, but it seems that we will see a base OS that is largely built around the Moblin infrastructure, including fast and flicker free boot, non-root X, connman, etc. And the Qt-based application development environment that maemo has been migrating to. Add to that the experience in building operating systems for phones and netbooks and many other new devices and you have an interesting mix.

The first actual release won’t happen until the second quarter, it seems. But I guess we need to give the teams some time to actually get the details figured out. I’m excited.

My usual disclosure: I work for Intel, so some might conclude that I’m biased. But this is my blog, not an Intel blog. So what you read here are my thoughts, not those of my employer.

I know that most people will shake their heads and call me crazy. I mean, seriously – even the Nexus One (which has one of the bigger screens among phones) has only a 3.7″ display. Tiny.

But stay with me for a moment. The reason I never bought an ebook reader is that I don’t want to carry yet another device with me. I have way too many already. So I instead carried paperbacks. Silly, I know. A kindle would have been smaller. But another several hundred dollars? Plus content from only one monopolist (and we know what that does to prices).

A few weeks ago I tried reading a book on my Nexus One and was positively surprised. The AMOLED screen is great for reading – no backlight! And the best thing about reading books on your phone? If you are anything like me, your phone is always with you. So you can read your book wherever you are, wherever a sudden break comes up.

Yes, the screen is tiny and you flip pages a lot. But it’s not as painful as it sounds – give it a try. I’ve now completed three books on my phone and I think I’m hooked – which makes me feel very sorry for our neighborhood bookstore…

The thing that finally won me over is that there’s a surprising amount of choice when it comes to reading books on an Android phone. You can read Mobipocket books (via FBreader – and Calibre if they are DRM infected). You can read books from Diesel ebooks, ereader.com and of course Barnes and Nobles. The latter is somewhat surprising at first since they explicitly don’t support Android – but it turns out that the free ereader Android app reads Barnes and Nobles ebooks as well. The download from your library somehow fails with the Android browser (still need to figure out why). But download to your computer and manually transfer to the eReader directory on your sdcard and the eReader app will find them and display them just fine. Turns out eReader is a subsidiary of Barnes and Noble and they use the same DRM technology and keys.

With all these choices, most books are available. And you often find wildly differing prices. The book I’m currently reading (Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly) I found in every single one of the stores mentioned with prices from USD 9.99 (Barnes and Nobles) to USD 27.99 (Barnes and Nobles subsidiary eReader.com). Go figure.

As I pointed out before, Nikon is a bit lacking in large aperture prime lenses. So I’m very excited that Nikon added an AF-S 24mm f/1.4 ED lens. I wish I could say “I preordered mine” – but at an expected street price of $2200 (around $500 more than the comparable Canon lens) I don’t think this is within reach any time soon.

Still, it is a step in the right direction and hopefully more lenses in this range will follow. A Nikkor AF-S 28mm f/1.4 ED or AF-S 30mm f/1.4 ED lens would be extremely welcome by the market, I think.

Also announced was an AF-S 16-35mm f/4 ED VR lens. I’m a bit more ambivalent about this lens. VR doesn’t seem to be as important on a wide angle lens – yet f/4 versus f/2.8 to me is a pretty significant step back. Of course the AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8D IF-ED with a street price of about $1600 is even more expensive than the new 16-35mm f/4 (which is expected to start selling at $1260).

I have the old Nikkor AF 20-35mm f/2.8D lens which sadly has been out of production for almost a decade, but still is easily found at less than half the price of this new lens. I love that lens and use it quite frequently – it does of course lack a bit of range on the wide angle side and the VR – but it gives you f/2.8 for a lot less money.

My good friends at Google have done it. They’ve created a truly awesome phone.

I’ve only had the Nexus One for a day (it was waiting for me when I returned from a trip, yesterday) and must admit that I’m thoroughly impressed.

Is this the “iPhone killer”? I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. I never liked the iPhone and haven’t used one enough to really compare them.

Is this the best Android phone? Absolutely. Well, as long as you don’t have to have a keyboard. I know people who just cannot deal with touch screen input, those might prefer the Droid. Or they might not.

The thing about the Nexus One is that it is fast. Impressively fast. It’s testament to the fact that 99% of all phones have an insufficient CPU (and that definitely includes all iPhones – and the rest of the Android phones that I’ve played with). The experience of having a phone with a CPU that is actually fast enough for its software stack is quite amazing. And of course this immediately made me want to get my hands on an LG GW990 – a phone with a real CPU (Intel Atom) and an OS that I am somewhat partial to (Moblin).

But oddly even though I’m part of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center – no one is willing to get me an LG GW990… so for now I’ll enjoy the Nexus One, running a competitor’s CPU.

I think we’ll see the same development in phones that we have seen in PCs in the past. For the next few years Moore’s Law will bring us faster and faster phones – and we will wonder how we ever lived with the slow phone we had last year. That’s certainly how I’m feeling right now.

Thank you, Google. And don’t rest on those laurels, the Atom based phones are coming.

This has been an ongoing frustration for me for a long time.

I used to be a mutt user – still one of the best email clients out there. That is, if your email comes from an IMAP server and is mostly text-only. No images, HTML, links, etc. Yes, it can sort of kinda work with those things, but please, let’s get real.

Emacs and its various mail modes are of course an interesting option (especially as you can, in fact, display most everything inside modern emacs). And Notmuch is making handling tons of email even easier with decent emacs integration (yes, it’s very early in its development, but for things like reading lkml it is amazing).

Or you can go with Thunderbird (version 3 is really impressive, the tabbed UI takes a little getting used to but then worked rather well for me). Or claws-mail (fast but rather unstable and its single-threadedness really got me to hate it). Or even (yikes) Evolution. Sadly without a strong leader anymore and rather aimless for the last year or so.

But the problem is this – if you want to access work email as well as your personal stuff, chances are that you are forced to integrate with MS Exchange. I can give you tons of reasons why Exchange is a Really Bad Idea™, but of course your corporate IT department is likely to ignore those and tell you “Exchange it is”. And among the biggest flaws of Exchange is its rotten IMAP support. Incredibly slow, barely standard compliant (actually, there are a bunch of annoying bugs). And if you want calendar integration (arguably the best feature in Exchange) there is no good way around MAPI (at least not with Exchange 2007).

And that’s where open source email clients really fail. The only one with even attempted MAPI integration is Evolution. And that is one of the weakest parts of Evolution. Extremely unstable, slow, and so frequently flat out broken that I cannot really suggest using it for day to day work. Emails disappear, or their envelope is there and no content, parts of the headers are missing. The calendar is completely hit or miss: the latest version seems to get my single-instances meetings correct if they come from another user, get the time zone wrong if I enter them myself on the Blackberry or via OWA, and seems to completely miss out recurring meetings that were NOT entered by me. Not useful if I need to be able to rely on my calendar being correct (which is, after all, the point of a calendar).

So… what I do today is offlineimap to get emails from Exchange (or any other IMAP server) into a set of local MailDirs (this hides the latency of the IMAP implementation – especially important with Exchange), then Evolution to read that email locally and OWA for calendar.

Really, not a good solution at all. We need a decent MAPI client. The libraries are all there, the communication with the Exchange server is relatively easy to set up. What’s missing is an acceptable front end that can deal with the typical mess of email that people get (Thunderbird seems to be a good start and appears reasonably active and well maintained), that can do calendaring (again, Thunderbird with Lightening could do the job) and that has a reasonable UI, good keyboard shortcuts for the power users and most importantly is fast. So I guess we need MAPI integration into Thunderbird. Any takers?

Yesterday at IDF Dell announced the first Netbook with Moblin preloaded. And I hear rumors of another one being announced shorty from a different OEM, that one based on Novell’s Moblin build.

Two years ago Asus created the Netbook segment with Linux – the Xandros based EeePC 701. A somewhat limited device with a 7 inch screen, a puny little keyboard and a not very well adapted Linux build. It turned out that the customers didn’t like the Linux experience that was offered (at least that’s part of the story). And so right now the vast majority of Netbooks ships with 8 year old Windows XP Home. But this might change now. Assuming, that is, that there’s sufficient demand for a Linux preload that is actually designed for Netbooks and works well out of the box. And has a refreshingly different, well tuned user experience that actually makes sense for computers in the Netbook form factor.

So in a way we are at an inflection point. The Linux community keeps asking OEMs to be more open to preloading Linux. Yet the OEMs tend to be unhappy with the sell through of their Linux preloaded machines. The solution is simple. If you like the idea of Moblin on Netbooks, if you want a really affordable Netbook without a Redmond tax – go to Dell’s site and get a Dell Mini 10v with Moblin for $299 (and sorry, I haven’t figured out yet how this works from outside the US – comments with data points are very welcome).

And yes, I already ordered mine. Even though Dell only offers the Broadcom wireless cards with it – a true disappointment given Broadcom’s lack of Linux support. I wish they offered Intel wireless – I’d happily pay a few $$ extra for that…

The moment I see other Moblin based Netbooks, I’ll post here with links how to get them. I hope we can change the available options for Netbook buyers for good.

I’m the proud owner of a Google Voice account. Awesome. I love the voice mail transcript / email feature. But there’s still room for improvement. This is the transcript of a Spanish phonecall I got today

or leave me a more the best of the stuff i can’t okay hi take care of motel me more i guess

Maybe this wasn’t fair…

Usually I like to post solutions to problems here – but this one I haven’t been able to figure out… maybe someone else has an idea? Please comment.

When connecting the Kindle 2 to a MacBook Pro via USB the connection is basically unusable. I get no where near the 480Mbit/s that USB2 would promise (and I checked in the System Profiler – the Kindle does show up as a USB2 device). I appear to be getting a few kbit/s – transferring a 3MB file takes 15+ minutes.

Doing some googling points to SpotLight as a potential problem. Since the Kinde 2 shows up as a FAT partition many of the usual ways of preventing SpotLight from indexing it don’t appear to work. Certainly disabling Spotlight for the Kindle through the Preferences tab failed for me (with the always helpful “an error occurred” message). What does seem to work is to create a file named .metadata_never_index in the root directory of the Kindle (something like

touch /Volumes/Kindle/.metadata_never_index

in a terminal window.

But even after doing that (and verifying that SpotLight is no longer trying to index the drive) transfer performance over USB is still abysmal.

Help?