This seems like a smart approach: Stop spam at the SMTP-level with Whitelists and Bayesian filtering using the Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP):

“The Anti-Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) Server project aims to create an open source platform-independent SMTP Proxy server which implements whitelists and Bayesian filtering to rid the planet of the blight of unsolicited email (UCE). UCE must be stopped at the SMTP server. Anti-spam tools must be adaptive to new spam and customized for each site’s mail patterns. This free, easy-to-use tool works with any mail transport and achieves these goals requiring no operator intervention after the initial setup phase.”

I found searchhi, which is a slick JavaScript library by Stuart Langridge that will highlight keywords in your documents when the referring link to you page comes in from a seach engine such as Google:

“searchhi JavaScript library is a way of automatically highlighting words on a page when that page was reached by a search engine. In essence, if you search, for example, Google for some words, and then follow a link from the search results to a searchhi enabled page, the words you searched for will be highlighted on that page.”

I was actually thinking of using PHP to do this, but Stuart’s JS code seems to be a better alternative given that the performance hit is on the client-side.

AppRocket seems to be a hybrid application manager with “intelligent search” that appears to be based on LaunchBar for Mac OS X. (link via Les Orchard)

“AppRocket uses a very special search algorithm to zip through thousands of items and only show you that which is most relevant.”

Just a note however, AppRocket requires .Net 1.1.

I had a chance to take a look at the new 4.0 version of Jahia and I must say that I am very impressed. As 100% Java solution, it’s a competitive alternative to SharePoint.

Jahia is not quite Open Source however, you do get the source code, but the license model is “Jahia Collaborative Source License (JCSL)”, which roughly means that you can either pay for the license in dollars or pay with code contributions to the project. Certainly an interesting model that is similar to Sun Collaborative Source License (SCSL).

Some of the other interesting facets to Jahia are the stack of Java Open Source Projects that the default install includes. Like for example Tomcat, Slide WebDAV, the Lucerne Search Engine, Struts, OpenLDAP, and HSQL Database Engine.

As far a features go, it definitely crosses the line between CMS and Portal, by integrating rich CMS functionality with workflow and versioning as well as document management (check-in/check-out) with WebDAV access. This is all on top of a highly-configurable “portlet-based” interface framework.

Nice.

I love this stuff too…

“Explorer Bar (Band) Maker is a Windows tool (one-step wizard) that lets you create your own Explorer bar from any HTML page, picture or Macromedia Flash file.” (via Anil Dash’s Links)

Unison seems to be a file-system agnostic replacement for the Robocopy tool found in the NT Resource Kit and others…

“Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.”
(via decafbad)

Yesterday the OpenGroupware.org (OGo) site was Slashdot-ed, so I couldn’t really get a look at the docs, but OGo announced the release of an open source groupware, which according to the OGo FAQ “is something between a mixture of Exchange and SharePoint portal server.”

John sent me a good InfoWorld article as well.

My initial reaction is, “Wow!”

Although, I think it’s lofty and a brash move to make statements like the following during your initial release:

“Just to be perfectly clear, this is a [Microsoft] Exchange replacement.”

Yet I do think, given all the open source groupware that already exists, there is indeed a “missing-link” in the messaging area — specifically an open source Exchange option is something that I think will only help the market.

So far from the OGo FAQ, I really like the fact that WebDAV is one of the primary interfaces to the message store; in addition to XML-RPC.

Overall, I think to really support the Exchange/SharePoint replacement claim, a Windows OS distribution will be vital to the success of the project. Although, being that OGo is a server product, it’s not surprising that OGo is initially available in *nix flavors (mainly Debian at this point it seems) — especially in terms of Total Cost of Ownership and given the fact that Open Office and Mozilla can cover the Windows client needs.

I would certainly like to give OGo a test run and based on the FAQ, they recommend my new favorite Bootable Linux CD, Knoppix, as “the simplest way to get something up quickly.”

I may give that a go.

I needed to do some quick testing in Linux today, but I didn’t have immediate root access to a Linux distro. That’s when I popped the
Knoppix Bootable Linux CD into my drive, restarted and POOF!! …
my laptop is now running a complete Debian-based Linux distro including OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE, and more. I could even get to the local file system.

Awesome!

Don’t leave home without it! It’s a great recovery CD as well.

“KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.”

I certainly agree with Mark that the availability of Open Source Software is tremendous — I believe this has been the case for a long time.

DiveIntoMark: “In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be judged by how much they know about it and how well they can glue it together to build solutions.”

IMHO, the difference is that now so much of the open source software is geared toward the average user and has become increasingly less technically intense to install and deploy.

However, the hard work is applying it to a specific workflow or task.

Congrats go to Jermey and the Jabber gang …

Jabber gets $7.2 million from Intel