Beefing up Email
I installed ZOE, a Java web/email client that runs on
127.0.0.1 and fulltext indexes your email. I'd started cursing every
time I went to Outlook to search through my 5000 messages (which doesn't
seem like a lot) and I listened to my disks start to crawl. I'm running
an IMAP server locally, on an e-smith distribution running at 133Mhz
with slow IDE hard drives. IMAP search _works_, but it doesn't really
have a performance advantage over kludgy Outlook. I've got a dual
Athlon 2GHz workstation for reading the mail, so in my case it makes
vastly more sense to index there. ZOE is so FAST compared to my other
search options, that I couldn't stop smiling after I started using it. It's not just fast because of the full-text search, though. The web UI allows you to drill into the results in a way that native desktop apps can't capture. The google metaphor is so drilled into my brain, and making email search work the same is a huge leap forward. I hope the Chandler team takes note.
On an enterprise software note, integrated email search functionality is something offered by KM vendor
Intraspect, which clients seem to be very happy with. Although I've
deployed it a couple of times, I didn't quite 'get' how powerful the
web UI was when applied to email search. I'm starting to get it. I suspect that email-integration really needs to be baked in to OpenACS before it becomes a serious contender in the KM or groupware space. The modules all do what they're supposed to, but when you go implement on a client site you discover that nobody wants to retype their data into your shiny new forms. Email integration is key.
nitpicking ZOE
I wish ZOE exposed a web services UI, and/or had a templating
mechanism like Amphaetadesk so I could work on different visualizations.
The colorless UI scheme doesn't help the Emacs-font-locked-contrast I'm
familiar with. Also, a Bayesian auto-filter like POPFile would be handy.
Regardless, I'm a believer.
Building tools for the networked society
The Collaboraid Vision:
http://www.pinds.com/blog/archive/2002/11/#blog-entry-5948
Lars has been reading Linked
ESI, not dead yet
I wrote a partial ESI implementation in
mod_perl. It makes so much sense to me for accelerating dynamic content
and taking a load off your back-end servers. But I think proxying just
involves too much coordination between the opps folks and the apps
folks. As an aside, the Zope crew always seems to pick the "right"
technology, whether or not it's feasible or popular (i.e. OODB,
FastCGI, Python, etc.) Kudos to them.
http://devel.squid-cache.org/projects.html#esi
10:20:30 AM 
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