'Family Wisdom' is in..

Based on strong recommendation from my Dad, I finally started reading Robin Sharma's 'Family Wisdom'. It's a book on how to nurture leadership values in your children. The book has gotten off a great start and I can't wait to see how it pans out. I have read his previous best-seller 'The Monk who sold his Ferrari' and I loved it. So I am really looking forward to reading this one. If you find yourself with some extra time on your hands, be sure to get your hands on this one.

A sabbatical from work

The 4 glorious years at OSAF have come to an end. I sincerely hope Chandler will get a second boost of life from the slowly growing community that is using it. I still continue to use it everyday to maintain all of the kids' and my personal schedule and task lists. I am still subscribed to the users and design list so that I can answer occasional questions from the users or provide input on the design issues. The hardest part was letting my team know that the funding had dried out and therefore this stint was coming to an end.

On personal front, I am taking time off to spend with my 20 month old twins. It's a long overdue sabbatical from work. Having just completed 10 year work span and with 2 demanding toddlers at home, I figured there couldn't be a better time. I have a long list of things I want to accomplish during this time and I hope to get through at least half of those. List includes stuff like catching up on reading, finishing an oil painting, spending time on photography etc.

For now it's a break I am looking forward to indulging in..

purchasing a DSLR?

I am currently researching on DSLRs and found the following articles, pointed to my by a colleague, extremely valuable. Posting them here for wider audience reach.

How to buy a DSLR?
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/how-to-buy-a-dslr-camera/

Should you buy a DSLR or a point-and-shoot?
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/should-you-buy-a-dslr-or-point-and-shoot-digital-camera/

Top 20 DSLRs
http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/top-20-dslr-models-reader-favorites/

OSAF on-site week

We had a rather vibrant and happening week, this last week here at OSAF. All the remote people were on-site for the Preview celebration as well as planning for the next version of Desktop and Server.

Here are some pictures from the on-site week.






With Sheila's twins










At the Preview Party in Kate Obrien's in SF. Rather packed for a 80 people crowd.



Pro-social activity at Half Moon Bay

Mozilla launched new Email and Communications Organization

Mozilla is launching a new organization to develop internet mail and communications software. It will use the open source email desktop client Thunderbird, as a base. It will remain a Mozilla subsidiary with Mozilla providing the initial seed money of $3 million to establish this new company.
The new organization will be led by Dr. David Ascher, currently CTO and VP Engineering of ActiveState, who joins Mozilla to carry out this job.

I am sure people invariably will have questions about potential cross-overs with Chandler but as far as we know, there are no news about an explicit collaboration between Mozilla and OSAF over the email application.

More posts on Chandler Preview

Here's the official post from OSAF addressing the Preview release of Chandler, as written by Katie Capps Parlante, our VP of Engineering and General Manager.

Scott Rosenberg has added a follow-up post on his blog addressing the Chandler Preview release. It has an interesting comparison with the Zimbra client.
I look forward to personally congratulating Scott on the success of his book, Dreaming in Code and the subsequent release of the paperback edition, during the Chandler launch party next Thursday.

Here's Mitch's blog on the Preview release.

'Viral' marketing paid off - Yahoo acquires ZImbra

As quoted by a Zimbra insider that they are ecstatic about the acquisition as this has essential business appeal for both the parties. The Zimbra team will be relocating to Sunnyvale, where Yahoo is headquartered. The relocation and subsequent commute is a minor let down for some Zimbra people, and there is one I can commiserate with, as he happens to be my Husband.

Here's the NY Times article on the acquisition.

Starups, how not to die.

A very interesting post by Paul Graham from Y Combinator, a company that provides seed money to fledgling startups, on what factors account for success or failures in startups. I am sure a lot of us can learn from this..

Here's the link to the article.

iPhone early adopters get $100 back

In this open letter to all iPhone early adopters, Steve Jobs has generously offered a $100 credit towards any purchase in Apple Store. Definitely a good move since the price slash came just months after intial offering of the product. A large number of buyers who were caught up in the excitement of the launch were not part of the early adopter demographic. So they were indeed shocked at the price slash. But people like us who live and breathe in technology land know tech gadgets aren't something you buy as an investment for future. You know if you wait, it will get faster, cheaper, smaller (or bigger) over time and what you have will become obsolete faster than you had imagined (remember the last laptop or digital camera purchase). Folks who bought the iPhone early got something for it, they got to be the first iPhone owners. They got to be the cynosure of everyone's attention and the unmistakable cool image it carried of truly owning something everyone around wanted to lay their hands on, or at the least gaze at. All in all, Apple did the right thing being focused on keeping the customer happy, rather than the bottom line at the end of the day.

Mullahs on the Mainframe

My reading has surely taken a backseat lately but recently I read a book generously loaned by a friend titled 'Mullahs on the Mainframe'. It is a brilliant study by a young American social scientist who delves into the world of Daudi Bohras, a unique Muslim denomination in India whose religious beliefs and practices are largely compatible with modern ideology. It is a resounding example of how a community can live in peaceful co-existence while practicing orthodox religious practices and still maintaining liberal political and secular views and modernization of tradition. The book starts out with the historical background around the roots of the faith and then delves into day to day rituals of a Daudi Bohra life, religious festivals and their code of celebration, insight into domestic life, status of the religious leaders and royals and ultimately maintenance of spiritual and political hegemony. The study is a wonderful introduction of a peace-loving modernistic Islamic community that is often confused with the values of their more aggressive and violent counter-parts in the middle-east. We are used to living in our little cocoon of comfort constantly soaking in information as they are broadcast by the news channels and thereby creating a rather faulty image of certain people or groups of people, and until you read a book like this that completely dispels all your preconceived notions and broadens your mind to wonders and varieties of outside world.

Chandler Preview is here!

After months of grueling hard work, we are proud to announce Chandler Preview.

Chandler Desktop is an open source, standards-based personal information manager (PIM) built around small group collaboration and a core set of information management workflows modeled on Inbox usage patterns and David Allen's GTD methodology. You can manage and share calendars, tasks, messages, notes and other information with the Chandler Desktop application and/or with the Chandler Hub web application.

The Preview releases are public-beta quality applications ready for daily use

Download the desktop application, sign up for an account on the web, look at screenshots, watch screencasts, read about features, read about the project and more: http://chandlerproject.org/

The set of new features are:

1. New Triage workflow featuring the new Dashboard viewFaster Sharing protocol
2. Compatible with Chandler Server Web UI using a single Ticket URL mechanism
3. Support for a OSAF hosted Chandler Hub free sharing service
4. Support concurrent edit with merge and conflict management
5. Support background auto Sync
6. Improved Email capabilities with support for In and Out boxes, Reply/Forward
7. New Edit/Update workflow allows Chandler data to be shared through email without using a server
8. Support for special Chandler IMAP folders to automatize incoming email treatment and parsing
9. Improved Calendar user interface: better visual, better Drag and Drop, new Preview area
10. New Quick Entry widget allows easy entry of new data
11. Improved Search
12. Improved Security with support for encryption
13. New Export/Reload version migration tool
14. Many architectural improvements (performance, API, command line arguments, optional launch dialog, troubleshooting tools, etc...
    

If you are one of my loyal friends following my blog, I am sure you will douse your curiousity about what I have been working on the past few years and download our product and give it a shot.

Be sure to report any enquiries, questions, bugs on our users list at chandler-users @ osafoundation.org

My new Intel Mac is here...

Finally after having waited for months, I ordered my new Intel Mac last week. While I hate the fact that they don't carry them in the 12 inch models any more, everything else has things going for it.

1. Power and Performance (2.2 GHz and 2 GB RAM) - a powerful graphics processor and dedicated memory makes the entire computing experience better than ever.
   
2. Glossy widescreen LCD display - I watched a movie on it the other day and the resolution was far better than my plasma TV I say.
   
3. Built-in iSight Camera - No more fiddling with external, wired web cams which are cumbersome to get mounted and positioned. Now a sleek, built-in high quality iSight camera that is so neatly integrated. No need to worry about installing and configuring, only dressing up.
   
4. Built-in wireless and Bluetooth - Syncing your Macbook Pros with your bluetooth enabled phones and transfering images and data can be enormously handy. I use the feature to take quick photos on my iPhone and transferring easily to my iPhoto albums.
   
5. Multiple OSs - I just installed a version of Parallels and Windows XP on the virtual machine. So now I am able to run Mac OSX and WinXP seamlessly in an integrated environment. How cool is that

For now that's enough to get me going!

connecting in an open source world...

This is the age of social networking and practically everyone you know is on some list making his/her network grow. While some of these tools form the A-list of people's primary networking medium, others are slowing coming up with niches that you didn't imagine existed. I have recently been drawn into Facebook by a handful of friends. I didn't think I belonged there but soon other friends found me, contacted me and before long I realized we had formed a small clique there. When I first read about Facebook I discounted it as some teenage-geeky tool that most youngsters might feel drawn to. I couldn't be more off. I am seeing more and more business professionals signing up on it, and like a colleague casually mentioned, it might soon become the tool of choice for shunning people with finesse and forming small cliques.

While these mediums do exist, I have to say that I have never felt myself being connected to so many colleagues and friends, purely through working in open source community. Just the other day, I heard from a friend I went to school with 11 years back, with who saw a post from OSAF in one of the open source forums and contacted me and here we were chatting, back like the old times. And I hear similar tales from others around me who have hooked up with friends through the community.

So while the social networking tools are doing their job, lets not discount the fact that networking just comes easy being part of an open source community.

I have a crush...

I have a crush. A crush on something that is an indispensable part of my life. I didn't quite think at this age I could ever fall for something but here I am totally bowled over. Viral surprised me the other day bringing home this little thing, nicely coated and wrapped. As I removed the layers and saw the little black thing sitting on my lap, I jumped! It was the new iPhone. I really didn't think a tiny piece gadget would have me all over. I have to admit I am enamored by it. It's been a bit of adjustment getting used to owning a phone that has no keypad, no knobs and yet super-slim. It's cool, extremely functional and loaded with features. Music, video, photos, email, calendar, maps, weather and what not...it has it all.

Here's one of the many pictures taken on my iPhone. It's special because it is the first one. Riya sleeping on the cot cuddled up in her blanket.

Quote of the year

"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten." - Tony Robbins

On why Bombay is a writer's city...

Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, has been a writer's paradise for years now. Like London and New York, there is a very specific sense of the metropolis, with a certain amount of self-mythologising and narrative-making. Life throbbing with activity, unstoppable pace, amalgam of different cultures ,a launch pad of talent and amazing juxtaposition of the riches and the poor - this city has it all.

Among the novels I have read, the following fiction novels' plots are based around Mumbai - my favorite city.

John Irving - A Son Of The Circus - ***/2
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children - ****
Suketu Mehta - The Maximum City - ***

Implicit Bias

Brian Nosek, Professor of Psychology from University of Virginia was one among the many distinguished and prominent speakers who walked the ramp of 543 Howard Street as an invited guest from our sister organization, LPFI. He gave us a scintillating presentation on unconscious bias - thoughts and feelings that exist outside of conscious awareness or conscious control that to a large extent shapes how we think and do things.
Recent results from his lab compared implicit - and explicit -
bias between self-identified conservatives/liberals, with these results,
as reported in the Washington Post:

"Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes -- subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.

That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did."

Here's the complete article from Washington Post.

But better commentary yet was from Stephen Colbert on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show".

Twitter

If you are in for hours of mindless voyeuristic fun, here's something for you:

http://twittermap.com/twittervision

"Small" is BIG

I have been a proud owner of an Apple PowerBook for the last 3 years. While I possessed and used only Windows based machine for about a decade before that, I have to admit my loyalties switched as soon as I got used to a Mac. The resolution of the graphics, the slick user-interface and virus-free system that never crashed on me - all had me going for it. The package was all the more attractive since mine was a really slick 12-inch Powerbook that was handy to carry along and fast enough for running all my cpu and memory intensive applications (earlier version of Chandler included). Recently I was told by my IT guy that it's time to switch to a newer machine and I had to pick one out soon. Well, given practically everyone around me now owns the new Intel-based MacBook Pro and they rave about how swift it is, I couldn't wait to get mine soon. So I was checking out the Apple Store in San Francisco, I have to say I was thoroughly disappointed to learn that they have stopped carrying the 12-inch laptops anymore. All the MacBook Pros now come only in 15 and 17 inches. While I am looking forward to my new MacBook Pro I have to say I am going to miss my "small" book that had become the central domain of my work life the last 3 years. Who ever said, "small" is big has my +1 on that.

What is a brown-paper-bag bug?

There's not much software jargon that I am unfamiliar with. Well, today in one of our discussions, I heard someone say "Can we test this quickly so we can forestall any brown-paper-bag bugs?" It had me wondering what that meant and as usual Google came to my rescue. And here it is for you:

"A bug in a public software release that is so embarrassing that the author notionally wears a brown paper bag over his head for a while so he won't be recognized on the net. Entered popular usage after the early-1999 release of the first Linux 2.2, which had one. The phrase was used in Linus Torvalds's apology posting."