I had a helpful chat with Nate Stowell of ATT Wireless Services who helped me get the POP mail client on the Nokia 3650 phone to work. Thank you, Nate. That said, it's become clear that the 3650 has a number of deficiencies which make it less than useful to me as an email device.

The Nokia POP client doesn't support authentication so I can't use it with my main mail account. It also doesn't allow retrieval of a small, fixed part of a message. The combination of receiving some large messages, slow-to-medium retrieval speed, and all or nothing retrieval of messages is a showstopper.

Please don't tell me I should use IMAP to retrieve mail or I will be forced to explain why I don't use IMAP and won't until I find (or design) an IMAP client that works properly. IMAP is a complex protocol and not easy to support well.

Really what I want is something to replace my Blackberry which adds the things it doesn't have without taking away the things it does superbly well. I'll keep looking.

I want a portable device which has automatically pushed to it all of my email as it arrives. Push is important. I don't want to have to check mail; I just want it to be there.

I don't want to have to maintain a server or have my organization have to maintain a server. Mail for the portable device should come from the cloud.

It should be able to receive and view common forms of attachments: Word documents, PDF's, HTML. This is getting to be quite commonplace in portable devices.

It needs a keyboard. We've won the keyboard battle. At first the Blackberry was the oddball, but the adoption of keyboards by Palm was a turning point.

It needs a phone, and not as an after-thought.

A color screen would be nice.

It should conveniently be able to synchronize with a variety of personal computer PIM's.

Ideally, updates to the calendar can be sent and received wirelessly.

Any predictions out there on when such a device will come to market?

I recently switched to a Nokia 3650 cell phone. It's the cool-looking one with the buttons arranged in a non-standard way around a circle, kind of like an old rotary dial phone but not really. What I wanted was a next-generation phone with an integrated camera and bluetooth. As I've been relatively satisfied with ATT Wireless, I went with them again.

The camera part is working out nicely. Having it in my pocket at all times has let me take lots of candid photos I otherwise wouldn't have gotten. It takes 640x480 photos. I did figure out how to get Bluetooth working between it and my PowerBook G4. It was relatively painless, except that I can only upload photos one at a time. It fails when I mark all images and try to upload. So far, so good.

I find the email completely baffling and deeply frustrated. ATT is using its mLife branding all over, and I can't figure out what it is or how it works. Today there's a big color supplement in the S.F. Chronicle pushing it. If I can't get things to work, I can only imagine what it's like for others.

The documentation isn't very helpful and I haven't been able to locate useful online resources. The support forums on the ATT Wireless site are pretty random.

What I'm looking for is someone to explain how all the various service options fit together. Mike McCue from TellMe Networks said he though that mMode mail is kind of like a webmail service, i.e., it's an email service hosted by ATT, that they try to steer people too. What I want is to configure the phone to be a POP client. I think I see where to do this, but it appears to require going through mMode, which doesn't make any sense. You see how confused I am.

Has anyone out there mastered this or can anyone point me to an online resource which deciphers the mysteries.

(Pretty obviously, the problem isn't with me, other than being impatient; the problem is with bad design and poor communication. Before I can critique it, I have to understand it.)

From the press release:

MOZILLA.ORG ANNOUNCES LAUNCH OF THE MOZILLA FOUNDATION
TO LEAD OPEN-SOURCE BROWSER EFFORTS

America Online Pledges $2 Million to Help Launch Independent Non-Profit
Industry Leaders Reaffirm Support for Mozilla

See also Mozilla's new home page.

This is a great day for everyone who cares about Mozilla, open source browsers, and the future of open source. Congratulations to the Mozilla folks who have persevered. Now, Mozilla's fate is under its own control. AOL has given it a good send-off so there is enough in the way of resources to get going, but it's going to need to gather more financial support from corporations and others for its long-term future.

I think there will be opportunities to move the browser forward strategically which I am looking forward to participating in.

I'm delighted to have the chance to serve as the founding Board Chair of the Mozilla Foundation and work with Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, and all of the other folks whom I'm looking forward to getting to know better. My day job will continue at OSAF. My Mozilla role is as a board member, not operating executive.

Mitchell deserves enormous credit for seeing this through. Thanks also to Bart Decrem for all of his efforts in pulling together the announcement and media relations materials. Bart will be continuing to help Mozilla, and Mitchell will continue to spend her time at both organizations (OSAF and he Mozilla Foundation).

My Open Source Conference keynote is titled "Linux' Journey to the Mainstream Desktop" and is being delivered on Thursday, July 10, at 9:30 A.M. in Portland. OR.

A PDF of the talk will be available, as will the complete text of the underlying report "Desktop Linux Technology and Market Overview", prepared by Bart Decrem. Get it here.

Here's an excerpt from the Foreword by me, which explains what it's about.

For several years now, many people involved with computing and the Internet have harbored hopes that Linux might become a viable end-user operating system for a broad population. There has been great frustration with problems and limitations of commercial offerings, especially to the extent that the original goals of computers as tools of empowerment for individuals seem to have lost momentum. In turn this frustration has fueled the wish for an alternative which could evolve through the inclusive and open-ended dynamics of open source development.

At the same time, it is an undeniable truth that while Linux-based server software has matured to become an integral and vital component of the global information infrastructure, as yet Linux on the desktop has remained on the periphery. Recently, I initiated a project on behalf of OSAF to take a careful look at the state of Linux on the desktop, and asked Bart Decrem to spearhead a short-term research project to assess the current situation and trends.

As you can read, while we do not believe a revolution is in the offing, there is a great deal of good news about what has already been accomplished, and even more about what is very likely going to be happening with adoption of desktop Linux, especially considering the situation outside the U.S. A further piece of good news is that, by and large, there do not appear to be intractable obstacles to the continuing growth of adoption of Linux as an end-user OS.

I encourage your feedback, which may be sent to desktop-linux-report@osafoundation.org.

One of my long-term goals has been to learn enough Python to make a small original contribution to the actual Chandler code base. I'm an old and very rusty programmer, and given the other demands on my time, I have not yet managed to set aside the time I'd need to focus on learning a new language (oh, and wxPython) and enough about the details of the Chandler development environment to get any traction.

Hence, my bright new idea. I want to hire a tutor (at a mutually agreeable rate) who can meet with me 1:1 for some hours per week, most every week for the next few months, which I will integrate into my schedule. I'm looking for a private class, tailored to my needs, as that will be the most efficient way to make use of my limited time.

You'll find I'm an apt and very motivated pupil, willing to work hard. If you are local to the San Francisco area, like to teach, and have experience with Python development, please drop me a line at mitch@osafoundation.org. Seriously.

UPDATE 7/19/03:

I've found someone who not only knows Python and wxWindows but is already getting up to speed on developing parcels for Chandler. We're going to give it a shot. Details to come in my blog. Thanks to all who have offered help.

I just checked recent comments and found two instances of spam in comments to recent posts, which I deleted, one of them of infamous Nigerian repute.

Is anyone else seeing this in their own blogs?

I thought it would be of interest to periodically update readers what is going on at OSAF, especially since signs of progress are often invisible from the outside.

Our development methodology is evolving. We are using Bugzilla to track development tasks, not just bugs. Michael Toy, OSAF's Development Manager, has written some scripts which report on actual progress compared with the schedule, which provides extremely valuable feedback to individual developers. Morgen Sagen has been working on adding capabilities to our build system.

We are in the midst of coding for the 0.2 release of Chandler, which is targeted for this October and will feature our data framework (data model + repository) and other fundamental architecture. For details, look here and here. These are no longer entirely up to date. Look for an update soon.

In the next two weeks, we are completing a comprehensive proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and members of the Common Solutions Groups university consortium to fund portions of OSAF's work on the Westwood (campus) version of Chandler. Once submitted, we will post the schedule and budget, which looks out over the next two and a half years. In the meantime, details of the product proposal can be found here

A log of more detailed status reports compiled by Mitchell Baker can be found here.

Part of my job, as I see it, is to foster the organizational health of OSAF. Ever since my early days as an entrepreneur at Lotus, I've naturally felt that an organization's success had to be assessed not only in terms of its finances and products but its culture as well.

Prior to forming Lotus in 1982, I had had a checkered career as a disc jockey, meditation teacher, and mental health worker, Never was I in serious danger of being named employee of the month. Generally speaking I had a bad attitude towards authority and regarded virtually all organizational structure as unnecessarily bureaucratic, dumb, and therefore generally oppressive.

When, unexpectedly, Lotus became an instant success (albeit with one of the world's least formally trained or experienced CEO's -- me), it seemed to me a golden opportunity to foster a corporate culture which would be less subject to the failings I found so irksome. I'm as proud of our accomplishments in this realm and as certain of their long-term impact as I am of the company's contributions to application software and its use.

So, paying attention to how people are treated and how they treat each other in the workplace is by now a habit of long-standing. This is where it begins, with attention. It's remarkable to me how often it is the case in Silicon Valley companies how little regard there is for creating workplaces in which basic conditions of respect and fairness are taken seriously. It's not that venture-backed companies are dark Satanic mills. Far from it. It's more that in the furiously single-minded pursuit of success, as defined in these parts, nothing matters but shipping product, getting the customer order, and beating the competition.

The organizational design of OSAF has reflected my concerns from the outset.

As a non-profit, we have the freedom (and the commitment) to focus on the integrity of the product without the undue pressure for short-term results which a board and financial backers often demand (and which, to be fair, is a fundamental way the game is played in Silicon Valley).

At the same time, we also have a "business model", recognizing that we must find a way to become financially self-sustaining. Our intent is to catalyze development of an entire ecology and to foster, among other things, for-profit efforts which license our code base for commercial use reflects this.

As an open source project, we fully embrace an open development process. The code is there to be examined and downloaded, even at this early stage. One of the gratifying results of this is that we already have a small cadre of volunteer developers working on their own parcels.

In a sense, our unique process is our first product, and we are innovating as we go. We are attempting to synthesize features from the world of open source projects with features of entrepreneurial start-up companies.

We offer no stock options (though we do offer competitive salaries), as non-profits have no stock to offer. But we do offer an environment where individual developers can feel what they do makes a difference and contributes to something that matters. That matters a lot, to some people more than the often-illusory promise of riches.

It is as important for us to be as transparent as possible, just as it is almost always important for a private company to be as secretive as possible about its product plans and the "secret sauce" algorithms in its code. Transparency builds trust and invites participation. We have already seen this proven out over and over again. We get more help because there's more to see, more to react to, and more to contribute to.

We are not trying to capture market share in a zero-sum universe where one party's winning implies another party's losing.

High transparency equals low spin. I dislike spin intensely. Spin, to me, is massaging every corporate pronouncement to put things in the best possible light. Low spin is about being straight-forward, taking responsibility, and acknowledging mistakes.

If we can demonstrate that it's possible to create great product under these conditions, and if we can continue to find a balance between the pragmatic necessities required to actually ship code and the idealistic values we profess, if we can find ways to integrate those values into our day-to-day process, then I think that will be a contribution on the order of whatever it is we actually produce as product.