Round cube webmail is a browser based multilingual IMAP email client. The interface is familiar like desktop application. The application have features viz MIME support, folder manipulation, address book, message searching spell checking etc. The application is open source so any one can download and install. The requirement is apache with PHP module, libraries like PEAR and IMAP wrapper from IlohaMail.org and database as MySQL or Postgres. The user interface is heavily configurable since it uses XHTML and CSS.

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The application is licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL) so anyone can download, deployed and re-distribute. The application is still under development new releases are available after beta testing.

Iamatechie interviewed the open-mesh firmware developer Antonio Anselmi. We are publishing the summary to our readers.

1. What is your education/work Background?
I’m an IT Engineer and work as freelance System & Network admin, mainly on TCP/IP Linux platforms.

2. What is your role in the open-mesh project?
I’m the maintainer of the firmware

3. Can you say a few words about the team behind open-mesh?
We are a few team composed by people all around the world, other than me there are:
- Mike Burmensteir (from open-mesh.com) and Shaddi Hasan (from UNC Chapel Hil) working at Dashboard and at Orange Dashboard
- Marshal Dias (wifiCPA.com) is involved in the porting of coova-chilli
- Joe Bowser (VONI Vancouver) who merged his ruby-dashborad and wifidog captive portal solution
- Aaron Kaplan (OLSR team) is working to port OLSR into robin

4. What are your views on other mesh products like Meraki and MeshCom?
Currently Meraki has the best play in town: it’s a robust company with important collaborations with google, but we hope to grow in a few months. Meraki recently changed their politics with customers and “closed”
their device (look at their license agreement) so folk is very excited on our. Really don’t know MeshCom, I’m sorry.

5. If there was no open-mesh project, then what else would you be working on now?
IT stuff such as consulting, administration and so on…

6. What are the future plans for open-mesh?
Just in these days two big customers from Canada and UK have in plan to roll-out 10K nodes in this summer so our big goal is a stable release (beta-1.2) at the end of June: we all are working towards this direction.

We have solid contacts with Accton and this will allow us to have a better hardware (such as second integrated antenna, POE, GPS, Acton drivers,… ) in a month or two. We collaborate with Ubiquiti Networks too in order to release a pico-station with robin pre-flashed at the beginning of the summer (I’m waiting some samples from Ubiuiti to start tests).
About firmware we stay currently on top of Openwrt kamikaze 7.09 but other features are in plan according to new hardware (GPS first) and users requests… we are open!

Thanks

Antonio

If you are using Windows Vista you might be experiencing performance issues. Microsoft recently released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 which contain a performance improvement pack called Hotfix.

Alternate way to install Hotfix, download it from the link provided below.

Vista 32-bit users

Vista 64-bit users

After installing Hotfix it will improve performance for layered functions like accessing menus and low response times etc. The performance improvement are about 2 to 4 times. I feel better performance improvement for my laptop now.

I guess slew people heard about uTorrent it’s a Bittorrent client for Windows, it is a light weight tool for torrent downloads. It have a WebUI for downloading. Now they created a Facebook application to control your downloads called uFacebook. Since it is a web interface we can remotely manipulate all the bitTorrent downloads.

Suppose you are having a better bandwidth @ your office than house. You can run the download @ office, and you can control it from your home. You can start, stop, pause, delete the downloads, moreover your friends can see your downloading activity however there is an option to disable your friends watching it. Anyway the feature is nice because it is integrated with Facebook.

uFacebook shows your downloads and it’s statistics viz downloading speed, data downloaded yet of each and every downloads. Once installed with your profile you can use it from any place. It doesn’t work with internet explorer 6. Just go through the installation process.

Today while I was stumbling I came to know about an online image editing tool. I just do couple of things what I can do with Adobe’s Photoshop what say splashup is the real photoshop online. I used the Adobe Express before, but I strongly suggest splashup is the best image editing tool available online. The application is giving more importance to Flex action script than server side scripts, so that it will create more user friendliness.

You can directly start a project without even having an account with splashup, however creating an account at splashup add more to us. As it have seamless integration with popular photo sharing sites, so that we can take photos from the photo sharing sites. Lots of tools are there with splashup viz crop, In canvas text editing, re sizable windows panels, layering concepts, heavily improved work flow etc. You can capture image from camera which may be a webcam, USB camera etc.

The company behind splashup is Faux Labs. Don’t be baulked to try this tool I would say its will give you value for your time. Please go through this tour. If you register an account at splashup you can save your work and lot more features are there.

All are going into web based. Today I found an application which is a web based operating system eyeOS. We can sync our documents with eyeOS provided an account @ eyeOS. After syncing the documents we can use the operating system from any place we don’t need to carry our laptop or desktop. The concept is, you can sync your personal files in your PC to eyeOS thus you can access your file anywhere from the world.

The software used for synchronization is called eyeSync which allow us to synchronize different folders and files in your PC. The eyeSync is available for almost all popular operating systems, Mac OS X (Tiger/PPC and Leopard/Intel) and Linux (in deb and source/targz), Windows XP and Vista.

The concept

The main concept is to avoid carrying your own laptop or personal computer anywhere. Even without your PC you can access your personal files anywhere, what you need is just a browser and an account @ eyeOS.

Main features.

The eyeOS have almost all applications for our daily need. PIM applications, Word processor, notebook, file management, games, email client, system manager, desktop etc.

The eyeOS targets both user segment and also the developer segment.

Developer community can also develop applications for eyeOS, developers can develop web application, applications etc using eyeOS toolkit.

Lots of applications are available for eyeOS.

eyeOS 1.6 Gala Sync is the latest release of the operating system, the operating system is cool however there are couple of bugs, I believe the operating system is in its infant stage. eyeOS basic idea is to bring work and entertainment into a single place. The eyeOS is Open Source, licensed under the GNU Affero Public License version 3, So you can use it for free and even you can customize it according to your requirements but you need to publish the code to the community. Have a look @ my desktop image below.

I know this age is all about SaaS based products, now I am going to introduce you a desktop application but that create a real value for money and time. We can develop both desktop and mobile application using this RAD tool. One major feature that makes LyteRAD different from other RAD tools is we don’t even need to code a single line code for building database applications. The application was developed by a company based in Bangalore called LyteCube.

LyteRAD is developed using Java platform we don’t need to care about database administration configuration etc. So a normal user without enough knowledge in coding can build CRM tools, financial marketing tools etc. The application store database in binary files so the database can be export to other databases like Oracle, MySQL, Postgres. There are 2 version available for download LyteRAD CE and LyteRAD Pro in which LyteRAD CE is free of cost while LyteRAD pro cost $149.

The company is merchandising the product to Indian markets who want to build there own application without investing much money. They are mainly concentrating on small business companies who hesitate to use SaaS based hosted solutions because of security, privacy & reliability issues.

LyteRAD also allow us to develop mobile applications. In the Pro version we can develop applications called RADlets. This application can be deployed to any J2me enabled mobile devices. We can even develop the application in mobile phone itself. Just look at this video. A good documentation is available for LyteRAD.

Before discussing in detail about Meraki and Meshcom, lets discuss about Open-Mesh. Its truly poor man’s wifi mesh networking product. As written on their site, the product is ideal for school/office campuses, hotels, apartments and towns. My first Open-Mesh network is successfully running in Chennai serving more than 10 users in an apartment complex.

The product comes with hardware routers and a hosted online interface to manage it. Routers cost 49$ a piece and if you buy 20 pieces together you will get it for 799$. The routers are very small with the size of a toilet soap.

The hosted dashboard is very simple to use and any one can create and deploy a network without anyone’s help. To add a node to a network, all that is required to do is to punch in its MAC id into the hosted admin interface. The system will find the router, next time its powered.

One major feature of open-mesh is that, it supports multiple internet gateways. When you have a mesh containing 20+ routers, you will definitely need to have multiple gateways on your network. This is to act as a fail safe arrangement and also for bandwidth distribution.

Carry your live operating system in a USB pen drive using liveusb-creator, it is a cross platform tool. Liveusb-creator supports several fedora flavor including Fedora 9. It has a feature of persistent overlay creation which allow us to save files which is persistent that means it will be even available on the next reboot(but this feature is only available with Fedora9).

Download the windows executable here.

I am going to explain one coolest video conferencing software on web, ekkotv. One of the attractive feature is that there is no need of a login to initiate chat conversation. You can enter into group chat with your 2 friends provided the nicknames. When you start a conversation you are entitled with a URL, You can share the URL to your friends for group chat.

The main feature is the application record the web cam audio and video, broadcast to your 2 friends from web browser, however the broadcasting is pretty sluggish I appreciate the application since it record web cam video and audio from a web browser. The recording application is developed in flash and asp.net. I guess the media server used in the backend will be RED5, because Adobe’s media server is pretty costly.

You can start the video conferencing now just enter a nickname and start conference. The URL entitled with you is shared to your friends using any medium like gtalk, yahoo IM or email. The application is lacking one main feature, we can’t invite your chat friend directly since there is no login session instead sharing a URL, so we need to use some other software for sharing the URL.