Telaen 1.1.0
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Monday, June 12. 2006 in Open Source
As posted some time ago, I've been hacking away on Telaen, a "new" PHP-based Email client, designed to be easy to use and administer (with no big dependencies). It's nice having some smaller projects to play around with in addition to larger ones, I think. Anyway, after several weeks of development we released version 1.1.0 of Telaen this morning.
Check it out.
More...
Telaen 1.0.0 !
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Wednesday, March 1. 2006 in Open Source
In honor of March 1st, and my birthday being only 10 days away, Team Telaen announces the first official release of Telaen, a small yet powerful PHP-based Webmail system.
It's always neat to have at least one small, fun project to work on, and Telaen is one of those for me.
More...
Increased diversity
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Monday, February 13. 2006 in Open Source
The January 2006 issue of Linux Format had a nice article regarding the topic of Women in Open Source. In addition to others, I was interviewed for the article and they used a few of my quotes in there, which was nice. Of course, this got me thinking about diverity in Open Source even more so than usual, and although I agree that the female population is not adequately represented, there appears, at least to me, an even more obvious under-represented minority: African Americans.
Although it's true that, at least in the US, African Americans as a whole are a smaller minority than women, when I look at the various Open Source projects, and especially when attending conferences, there is a much smaller percentage of African Americans than one would expect.
Why is that?
Not to take anything at all away from the valid desire to increase diversity in gender, I wonder what can be done to increase the diversity in race...
More...
Telaen
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Monday, February 6. 2006 in Open Source
I'm having fun working around with Telaen, which is a simple yet powerful webmail client built using PHP. The nice thing about it is that it requires a very barebones PHP build: no MySQL, IMAP, etc, yet it fully supports POP3 and IMAP, and has support for folders, HTML email, etc...
It's an offshoot of Uebimiau, which I liked and did some patches/development on, but that project seems to have stagnated, so a few of us started Telaen. Just this weekend I released our 2nd release candidate. A number of Uebimiau users seem pretty happy that we've kick-started development and support again. It's a nice little project.
More...
To Build or To Better?
Posted by Jim Jagielski on Sunday, October 23. 2005 in Open Source
Almost every programmer runs into that question on at least a weekly occasion: When writing something, do you build it from scratch or do you take something that already exists and adjust it for what you need? The availability of Open Source makes this an even more viable question, and one which is usually answered via the latter.
As much as I enjoy the craft of designing and coding from start to finish, I also find it worthwhile to take and existing project, and enhance it in ways in which I, and I hope others, find useful. A good case in point was a webmail interface.
I had created an original work, in PHP, and it did a fine job. When I started thinking about releasing it to the world, research showed that there were already a large number of such applications. The vast majority were way to "heavy" for my tastes, until I came upon Uebimiau. The design goals of this little project were the exact same as mine, and so I decided that instead of putting energy into improving my version, why not help this project, which at the time seemed to be suffering from neglect.
So I fixed some code, made some improvements, folded in improvements proposed by others and started releasing the so-call "Jimjag" patches of UM, which seemed to be warmly received and used. I'm up to patchlevel 3 and hope to release patchlevel 4 some time this month. The UM community also seems to have seen a re-birth, now that people are seeing that a few of us are still taking care of the application.
Again, we see how Open Source takes something which, at least in part, is a selfish desire ("I need something so I'll use this") and turns it into something good. Open Source is the alchemy of development and community, turning lead into gold.
More...
Page 1 of 5, totaling 23 entries
Syndicate This Blog
