I am always tickled when I can write about (and introduce others to) open source applications that solve, quickly and easily, the very real problems that frequently arise when technology manufacturers (or providers) assume that customers use their devices in completely homogenous settings.

So today, it seems, is my lucky day -- today Funambol unleashes version 8 of its nifty open source mobile cloud push and sync software that enables a wide variety of mobile phones (including iPhones, Blackberry, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices) to share and sync information with a number of email clients, POP and IMAP mail servers, PIMs, and social networks. And while it's great to wax poetic about the subtle joy that can be had just by syncing your smartphone that wasn't designed to communicate with another software company's email and calendaring application, I'm fortunate enough to be able to share the experience with ten readers in the form of membership invites.

First, though, the important part: What's new in Funambol v8?

If you're looking for a way to keep all your personal and project information organized and in one place, have a look at Picok. Short for "personal information cockpit," this nifty open source application helps you manage all those little dribs and drabs of information that keep your day humming right along. It works a bit like iGoogle in that you can assign tabbed pages to specific types of content and organize data by modules that you can drag and drop into whatever order you choose.

Picok is developed in Switzerland so most of the existing modules, or portlets as they're known in this app, are aimed at European users. Current portlets include a Swiss weather radar, Pons German-English dictionary, and European rail schedule. However, the project wiki has clear instructions for creating custom portlets on your own.

The Chandler Project has been around for a long time. How long? Long enough for a book to be written about it; long enough to be used as a bad example of how to run a project; long enough to be cited as evidence that dynamic languages can't scale. And yet...despite setbacks and revisions, the project never went away. Last week, version 1.0 of the "note-to-self organizer" software shipped.