[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] N800 Developer Device program: European discount codes sent

[From: Dave Cridland]

On Tue Jan 23 05:45:30 2007, Quim Gil wrote:
> Important tip to those contacting us aiming to get a discount code 
> in
> the final wave: the less we know you the more you should explain. 
> The
> final wave is primarily for recovering contact details of 
> contributors
> that we imperfect humans have missed.

Hmmm. I'm not terribly good at self-publicity, and I really don't 
enjoy this sort of thing, but I'll see what I can do to persuade the 
Nokians:

1) Who am I?

Dave Cridland. Contact details, homepages, etc, in my signature.

2) How do I meet the criteria?

I'm a specialist in low-bandwidth, high-latency, email access using 
open standards. What this means in practise is that I've been heavily 
involved in the IETF effort known as Lemonade, which is aimed at 
providing a solid platform for mobile email by extending existing 
email standards. The current version is documented in RFC4550, and 
you'll see my name in the Acknowledgements section. Lemonade includes 
things like "push email", and the ability to selectively forward 
messages and attachments without downloading them, known as "forward 
without download".

I currently edit a handful of drafts associated with the next phase 
of Lemonade (known as profile bis), including the new version of the 
profile itself. I'm also working on an extension to allow 
bandwidth-efficient access to potentially large sorted and filtered 
views of the mailbox, known as contexts (draft-cridland-imap-context 
for Googlers), and RFC4731, co-authored by me, provides a 
bandwidth-efficient mechanism for static searches.

I'm also (much less) active within the XMPP community. An off-hand 
comment of mine caused the registration of a URN for namespacing new 
XML elements in XMPP, and I've been involved in XEP-0198, too, which 
is pretty relevant to XMPP on the Maemo platform.

My work life is as an internet messaging engineer at Isode - 
http://www.isode.com/ - a small London company that's been key in the 
development of a few things you might have heard of, such as LDAP.

My personal, open-source, projects are detailed at 
http://trac.dave.cridland.net/ and are:

a) Polymer, which was the first IMAP client to take full advantage of 
Lemonade, and runs on desktop computers. This is written in Python, 
using wxPython. It is used by several IMAP server vendors to test 
their support for the latest developments in internet mail. I'm not 
porting this to Maemo, as such...

b) Telomer, which is a work-in-progress, and is a reworked UI to 
bring Lemonade to Maemo, and is the first client to take Lemonade 
onto a mobile device. This is again written in Python, this time with 
pyGTK, and I'm trying to design the UI specifically to make best use 
of the screen area, so it looks very different to Polymer.

c) The IPL, or Infotrope Python Library, which does the IMAP, ESMTP, 
ACAP, and even XMPP support for the above. (It can also post articles 
to NNTP). It includes a full SASL implementation for robust security, 
and runs to a limited degree on my 7610. This runs already on Maemo.

d) IAS, or the Infotrope ACAP Server, which provides full RFC2244 
ACAP services for remote configuration and roaming services, 
typically to email clients such as Eudora, Mulberry, and of course 
Polymer and Telomer. It's written in C++. And no, this one won't get 
ported to Maemo, it's just relevant technology. I run a "free" ACAP 
service, so anyone can get an account easily.

e) I recently started collecting patches to update the pyOpenSSL 
library, and added in functionality including support for TLS-based 
compression and Python file-protocol object support. This could be 
ported (read: recompiled) to Maemo, but the 770 at least uses OpenSSL 
0.9.7, which - lacking compression - makes it rather less interesting 
to do. (But let me know if you want this).

I personally think that the 770 and N800 could quite easily provide 
an excellent end-user experience for email - they have much better 
capabilities than a simple mobile phone, and yet can still be easily 
carried. Given the general state of the mobile email market, a 
powerful marketing story on the Internet Tablets as mobile email 
devices would surely be in Nokia's best interests. Nokia themselves 
are involved in the Lemonade effort, of course, and at least some 
people in Tampere are quite well aware of Polymer and my work.

I'm not entirely sure I qualify here - yes, I'm actively porting code 
to Maemo, and yes, I'm actively creating new code for Maemo - you 
don't have a criterion of "people heavily involved in open standards 
areas of relevance to Maemo", though.

If I did get a discount code, I'd keep my 770. It'd mean I could aim 
to get Telomer fast enough on the 770, in which case I'd enjoy it 
whizzing along on the N800 (possibly - much of the slowdown is 
currently related to filesystem accesses and UI issues. Given a puny 
40,000 message mailbox, pyGTK wants to iterate through the list for 
no good reason. Pah.).

Most importantly of all, I'd finally stop my two kids fighting over 
who gets to do Tux Paint. :-)

Dave.
-- 
Dave Cridland - mailto:dave at cridland.net - xmpp:dwd at jabber.org
  - acap://acap.dave.cridland.net/byowner/user/dwd/bookmarks/
  - http://dave.cridland.net/
Infotrope Polymer - ACAP, IMAP, ESMTP, and Lemonade