I was asked to give the toast for Oley’s funeral on Saturday.  Here are my notes, marked up for speaking not writing…

An old proverb “Every end is a new beginning”…While I am sure it is not at *all* what the original author intended, how appropriate it is that we are all celebrating a life, and a bit sadly, recognizing one end, when tonight is also a beginning…

The beginning of NASCAR season in Daytona with the Budweiser shootout. 

This day signals the day that Oley and I would begin our periodic conversations throughout the year of NASCAR news and notes.  Catching each other up on the rumors or changes throughout Silly Season.

About 13 years ago, I was lucky enough to meet his daughter April.  I soon discovered  that because of life’s twists and turns, she had two sets of parents.  Oh boy, *two* sets of in-laws.  A few months later I was making a stop in San Diego, and April came down and we drove up to visit her dad and April.  Despite the usual apprehension of meeting “her dad”, I soon discovered that Oley and I shared many an interest.  

Thus began a relationship that was not nearly long enough.  Even though the majority of the relationship occurred via the phone, well the phone was the perfect medium for a talker of Oley’s ability. 

It culminated with the most amazing 7 hours of time with just he and I in the hospital saying more things to each other through a combination of voice, pictionary, gestures and emotion than we were ever able to with words.  While I don’t wish to focus on those last moments, I can tell you I learned the most about what was inside in that man when I couldn’t understand him from the outside.

I am proud to say he just wasn’t a man I knew, a fellow sailor, my father-in-law or even a friend.  He was Dad.

To the person you knew as Oley, Kent, or Dad

I only hope it did him justice.

Many of the comments I have seen floating around on the blogs, consistently reference Exchange integration or make an “Exchange killer”. My gut reaction is MailCo should not focus on creating another email or calendar server.

The server side of email is “almost done”. I don’t see a lot of gain, for a MailCo, trying to create yet another email/calendar service. While the last 10% is the hardest, it seems that Google Apps, Yahoo, Zimbra, and other email/calendar services are close to having that integration problem solved for the majority of those customers who are looking to leave Exchange for another email/calendaring service. Once one or two of these apps grows out of the “techy” only audience, those customers looking to leave Exchange will have options. The rest of the customers would require selling them on why they should leave Exchange, not sell them on a new destination. This is a much different conversation.

Many of those that are going to stay on Exchange want to for a whole litany of reasons. Not the least of which is their current tool sets for standards compliance. When you start looking at SOX, FINRA, and the other regulations corporations are trying to chase, staying on Exchange is currently a good solution. I know other areas of the world also have many regulatory hurdles to jump. There are many service providers out there that are using Exchange integration to provide the services that solve this compliance problem. If you want to write an Exchange killer, you not only have to convince the corporations that they should leave Exchange. You now have to show them, or provide for them, these compliance tools or a path to another service provider. This does not seem to be a game for MailCo or Mozilla to participate in.

MailCo should instead enhance it’s integration Exchange to the best of it’s ability. Integrate Lighting/Sunbird to try and work with the calendaring interface. Use the 2003 web interface like Windows Mobile and Evolution use to have another option instead of IMAP for the communication pipeline. I have not personally looked at what calendar info comes down the IMAP pipe from Exchange, but it would seem that the web information may be a better, “easier” point to have a two way conversation with Exchange.

If this path is not desired by the community and MailCo (cost vs gain?) then at a minimum the MailCo/Thunderbird site should be the source of information on how to get that integration to be the best possible with the current application. Lately it seems, that the best information on how to do these various things with Thunderbird is found somewhere other than a Mozilla domain. While it shows great community, it gives the feeling of a product with little support from Mozilla or the Thunderbird team.

I come down on the side that Thunderbird should evolve to be the central communication point. A solid, stable base platform that through the use of extensions can be extended to be a common intersection for various communication pipes. Exchange and email in general is just one of them. MailCo should not concentrate so heavily on one type of communication (email) with one type of server (Exchange) that it loses the opportunity to jump out front of the communication aggregation opportunities. After all, there is one tool with awesome integration with Exchange, that is Outlook. If that is the only requirement for a communication tool, then Thunderbird is not the solution you are looking for.

David’s recent entries about Thunderbird and MailCo have gotten me thinking. I believe there are lots of opportunities for Thunderbird to fly out of the Mozilla nest. I left a comment (#6) on David’s thinking-org-onomically post about targeting the road warriors of the corporate world. But I think the bigger issue is how should Thunderbird evolve long term?

David’s posts seem to have brought out some real concerns that MailCo can not be successful without Scott and David. There will most definitely be an impact from them no longer working full time, but I have yet to see any indication they are not going to contribute at all. Even if something in the new structure has made them uncomfortable to the point of leaving Moz, they have not indicated they are leaving the community. David A. indicated they are going to start there own new venture. If it is related to Thunderbird, even a fork, their knowledge will still be available to the community as a whole. I see no reason that David A. and/or Mozilla would make it a confrontational relationship. Open source communities have survived lead developers coming and going in the past, why should Thunderbird be different? I hope Scott and David remain involved in the project they have been immersed in, but new blood can also help a project reinvigorate itself and thrive.

So what should Thunderbird/MailCo do? It needs to move from being just an email client to become the communications toolbelt of choice. Email itself is becoming a smaller part of the communication universe. What is needed now, is a toolbelt to help consolidate all of the individual communication tools to one central control center. We now communicate via email, IM, RSS/Atom, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, MySpace, IRC and the list goes on. However, it is a full time job just trying to keep up. You have to visit many websites just to try and keep up.

There is a definite need for a tool to try and bring all of these conversations to one place. Not all of these tools have API’s to make this easy, but if it was easy everybody would do it. MailCo does not have to be the one to write the interfaces for each tool, if they provide a foundation and community Extensions could be written for each of these tools. Does anyone else think it is ironic that one of the best IRC communication tools (Chatzilla) is an extension for Firefox the browser instead of Thunderbird the communication tool?

If we could bring all of these communication pipes through one clearing house, is there a way we could try to thread the conversations together? Take the entirety of the MailCo conversation occurring on the web lately. What if you could have the conversation with some people on blogs, others on Twitter, start a conversation with David via email and see them all in one threaded window? Meanwhile you could plan a high school reunion with another group using various tools in another threaded window. Could MailCo automate some of this threading? Not all of it, some of it would require you tagging or moving conversations to folder, but you would have it in all one place. But could we not use some of the Bayesian probability tools we use for Spam to figure out the probability of a “message” belonging to a conversation?

Look at contacts. How many different addresses/handles/ids do I have? I have an email address, an IM address, a Twitter “handle”, and a nick I use on IRC. If Thunderbird could help bring all of these together, it would help in this consolidation of communication flow. If I am in the middle of a conversation on IM with David, and he “Tweets” about the topic, Thunderbird would recognize that it was him, review the content, and move that Tweet into the window.

Why can’t we have plugins that integrate (two way) with the various contact managers to help? If you were using Salesforce, Plaxo, etc, would it help to bring all the ways you know someone together?

Email has been done. I believe there are still things we can do to improve it, but the bigger opportunity is to bring all of the flows of the various communication pipes to one location. That is where MailCo should focus. This is a problem that needs to be solved, and MailCo just may be the ones to do it.

For as much grief as NASCAR has gotten for phantom debris and inconsistent speeding penalties, today they did it right.

Ironically to get it right, they first had to mess it up. On the caution around lap 180, they announced on the radio that pit road was open, but the individual manning the lights missed the call. The pit road light stayed red. The result was some teams pitting with a red light (meaning pit road closed) and some teams staying out.

At this point there was no right answer for NASCAR. They could not really penalize the teams that pitted on red, but if the teams that stayed out now pitted they would be behind those that did on the restart. It was a no win for anybody. NASCAR stepped up and told everybody it was a “free pit” and the restart order would be based on the running order at the time of the caution.

Mike Helton then showed up on the broadcast fully admitting that NASCAR “got it wrong”.

NASCAR has suffered from some pretty big credibility issues this year. It looks like they have started down a path to correct that.

Here is an article that covers the race today.

When we converted from MoinMoin to Trac, I wrote a script to convert the current wiki revisions as well as any attachments. I know the cleanup rules and regex’s can be cleaned up. Any suggestions and I will gladly incorporate them. There appears to be a lot of interest on the mailing list for a script but not one that I could find. If this turns into something that is updated and revised often I will move it to a SVN repository.

Download the script, moinmoin.txt, here

Rename to py of course.

Script license by creative commons:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

I installed a MoinMoin wiki at the office for us to get away from “design by email”. We had a definite need to get our tribal knowledge into one place. Currently we have notes in Subversion, email, more email, and on network file shares. Trying to find everywhere we discuss the business rules and changes for feature X was/is crazy.

I can’t say enough for MoinMoin. Easily configurable, the wiki syntax is great. While the idea is to get rid of constraints the templates helped each of us setup a shell we were comfortable with. I was able to dive into the code and clean up the templates where necessary and even added a “feature” or two.

Now for the downside. We still have a bug/ticket tracker. So now we had information consolidated in two places. But still we had a problem of bug tracker pointing to wiki and vice versa. Again now way to search for feature X. Our bug tracker is a win app not web so not much available there in the way of indexing or linking.

So last week I installed Trac. I wrote a conversion script to convert MoinMoin to Trac wiki. It is not perfect. I will put it out there and I’m willling to maintain/add to it. It worked for us and converted simple tables and attachments. I am sure others can add cleanup regex’s and replacement text.
Why convert? Because we wanted all the data in one place. MoinMoin is far and away a better wiki, but Trac offers us the opportunity to consolidate our data. We have to get to the point where we can find information to prevent us from traveling down the same paths we have
already been.

Next up is to convert the bug tracker.

Trac’s subversion browser can not be beat from my experience. It alone is worth an install of Trac. But hopefully with Trac tickets, wiki, and subversion all tied together we can start to wrangle the information monster.

Information is power but only if you can get to it.

Imagined conversation had at King County Metro today:

Hey did you put that map of the shuttle routes for the Hydros? …
Oh damn no, in fact I didn’t even ask for the GIS staff to create it ….
Well we could use google maps, or mapquest…
or we could even use our OWN mapping system….
naaa we will just scan in this sketch on the napkin….

Quality is always important. Always.

Jack and I are very excited that April is coming home today. Alaska Airlines is making us wait even longer. Jack just doesn’t understand.

It will never end. Sad that is has reached here.

More discussion here.

I have seen Jeff Jarvis reference the startup he is involved in, Daylife, a few times. Today I decided to click through and see what it is all about. Clearly they are in a private stage and are not ready for the public to see. Most sites go through this and many are used to the “Sorry we are not ready yet, leave your email address and we will let you know when we are ready.”

Not Daylife. I clicked on the Sign In link thinking there would be a sign up page or leave your email for info. But instead is one of the most unfriendly “go away” messages I have seen on a startup.

Here is what you are greeted with

Granted I do not know who the target audience for Daylife is. It may not be the general public. But I have read and agreed with many instances of Jeff telling corporate America to throw off the protective coverings and open up to the public. Let the public be more involved, let them have a seat closer to the editorial table.

Well now I have to delete any bookmarks to the site? How does that let the public stay close and watch? Does that mean I can’t mark the site with Delicious, is it not a social bookmarking site? This blurb is too much like corporate RIAA speak, not like a web company that wants to engage the public.

My advice? Throw up a sorry we are not ready to show off our stuff type message. Included in that blurb you can put a very nice message that says our site is currently only for the use of our private testers. But encourage me to hang out and stay. Don’t try and scare me with a delete all bookmarks and you are “logging me”. How big brother.

Those of us in the IT world know we are logged, that is where all the metrics come from. But I just am surprised at how a lawyer can make a site so unwelcoming.