Tollef Fog Heen's blog

Monday, Karianne and I wandered about downtown looking for cheap ways to get to Venice. She later found some decent prices and we ordered. I got a bit of work done at the university, though unfortunately, not too much. Spent the evening at Samfundet, talking a bit with the new people there. Dropped by Bjørn-Ove on my way home and we discussed a bit with regards to food on Friday. It'll be good (and fun). Got home, tired.

Tuesday, forgot my USB keychain at home, so I couldn't check in any changes during the whole day. Icky. Had a lecture in the morning, then a meeting with Anders, where we discussed a bit how to go on with the project. Got a bit further on the project, but I feel it's going very slowly. Had a lecture in maths again. Walked home with Karianne and ate dinner. Been working a bit on Canonical stuff, and setting up planet.tut.no, a blog aggregator for people on an IRC channel I hang out on. Drop me a mail if you are there, blog and want to be on the planet.

I was supposed to write this Sunday evening, but for various reasons, I didn't. So there. Friday, I dropped by Omega Verksted, the electronics club at the university and bought an Atmel development board. I also got a few extra micro controllers. Played a bit around with them when I got home, except that I could not get the board working. I tested my board with Kristian Barek's power supply, and then it worked perfectly. Measured my power supply, and instead of delivering 12V, it delivered 5.25V. Fixed that up, and the board ran along happily.

Saturday, I worked a bit on ia32-libs, don't remember much else that happened, I think I slept a bit. Sunday was a slow day, much sleeping, some work. Saw "Garfield" at the movies with Karianne, a nice movie, but a bit too much according to the book, so it wasn't really surprising in any ways.

Some people recommended I take a look at gnus as an IMAP client. I cheated, since I had most of my gnus setup already in place. Gnus is like a battleship -- it is big and sturdy, but a bit slow. (It probably didn't help that I ran it over a forwarded SSH X connection.) It has good IMAP support, it seems.

Gnus also has this excellent concept of "only show folders with unread mails in them", this means that I don't get a zillion folders lying about without anything interesting in them. Listing them is a short L away, so it's not a big issue to find them when you need them. Also, autosubscribing to new groups is easy, just add ^nnimap to the gnus-auto-subscribed-groups variable. It would be nicer if it used the subscribed list from the server, but evidently, it's not going to do that.

I guess a screenshot is also in order, so you can see how well-ordered gnus is, compared to wanderlust.

(And no comments on me having a lot on unread mail, gnus seems to act up a bit until I've entered all the folders with it, showing the total number of mails, not the unread number.)

As I got a bunch of feedback from different people about different clients, I promised to try them and give some feedback on how they worked.

So, I've taken a look at wanderlust. It's written in elisp, but by some Japanese. I generally dislike software written by Japanese people as their docs suck (most Japanese can't write English, it seems), so it is often difficult to get working. So also with wanderlust. After a bit of wrestling, I discovered that it was using openssl for handling the SSL tunnel, while openssl was really unhappy about the fact that my mail server is using a self-signed certificate. After putting said certificate into the right place and whacking c_rehash to do the right thing, it now seems to work fairly well.

Wanderlust is fast, very fast. I really dislike the default folder overview, mostly for two reasons: it is cluttered:

And there is no way to sort the folders on criteria. I don't want to maintain a .folders file with all my folders, they are created on the mail server automatically, and I want my MUA to pick them up as they appear.

If somebody knows how to customize the folder look a bit, I might stay with wanderlust. Also, getting it to actually understand that IMAP folders form a tree would be most useful.

As we didn't finish the discussions until about three last night, I decided to oversleep my class at 0915. Got up and to the university at around eleven. Got a bit of work done on my project. Not much, but a little, at least. Met up with Stein Magnus and did some maths before heading back to my project.

Math lecture today was ok. I was sleepy, as usual, but I slept during the break rather than in class today. Went up to Karianne's, relaxed a bit and didn't really do much. Got home and worked a bit on ia32-libs and started a gcc compile which will hopefully work fine.

The drive I'm working off doesn't support DMA properly, so it is dog slow and compiling gcc will take a while.. I'm going to sleep now.

Woke up not-too-early. Ate some breakfast after a while. Hacked on ia32-libs, so we'll have a working amd64 compiler soon. The whole afternoon, evening and most of the night was spent interviewing and discussing candidates for the IT Committee at Samfundet. Quite fun, but also exhausting. We did end up agreeing, somehow, as we always do in the end.

The process takes a while: first we interview all the candidates, then we discuss until we have the required number and everybody is happy with the solution. This year, we discussed for about five hours.

Tired now, must sleep.

I had a meeting with Anders at 0815. By some strange magic, I managed to wake up for it and eat some breakfast before meeting him. We discussed quite a bit about my project and I feel a lot more prepared for actually sitting down and writing something now. The rest of the day was spent getting everything set up on my desktop computer -- arch archive setup, archive mirroring and so on. Fairly useful work.

I also was to a lecture in maths, about the Laplace transform. Fell asleep, as I often do during lectures. Karianne and I ate dinner at Sesam afterwards, before heading home. Spent the rest of the evening doing house chores and signing some GPG keys.

John Gruber has a Text-to-HTML system, called Markdown. Markdown resembles wiki syntax in most ways and seems a bit more well-designed than Textile. I decided I wanted Markdown for my blog. However, Markdown is written in Perl, while I'm using PyBlosxom, so I needed to convert it to python. It took a few hours, but it seems to be working fairly well now. In addition, I converted all my old posts to the new syntax. A fair bit of work, but I think it's totally worth it.

I'm too tired to actually publish the pymarkdown source right now, but I'll do that once I have woken up tomorrow.

Saturday, I woke up a bit before my alarm went off (which was very nice), had some breakfast (at first alone, before I discovered fabbione and a guy whose name I tend to forget. Fabio and I took a taxi to the bus station, I had to run off in order to find some post cards (which meant we just missed the first bus, but caught a later one).

The bus trip was uneventful (as expected), then we got to Heathrow. Checking in, security check, passport check. Boring stuff, but it takes a bit of time. Shopped a bit of alcohol and some chocolate, got some food together with fabbione and window-shopped a bit. Got Karianne a flying warthog. Plane took a while to take off, and the trip to Oslo then further on to Trondheim was boring. I'm sick and tired of airports and such.

It was very nice to get home. Karianne had completely cleaned my whole apartment while I was gone. I was amazed, but very, very happy. She's a great woman and I love her a lot. She had also made dinner, some soup, for us. Again, very nice.

Her parents came visiting a few hours later. Nice, but I was fairly tired and had trouble concentrating, so I ended up fixing up small issues around my place. We went up to Karianne's for sleeping.

Woke up there and had a long and lazy morning, before I headed off to Samfundet, at about 1500. Talked a bit with people and helped man the IT committee part of the tour. Afterwards, I bought some food for Karianne and me before heading home for a game of Munchkin with her, Marianne, Per and Jens Ådne. Nice game, but both Karianne and I were tired, so we didn't play for too long, "only" a couple of hours.

Erich Schubert commented a bit on my post concerning filtering. He just wants his filter to run on his server. I agree, that's where I want it to run as well. However, sometimes I subscribe to a mailing list, then realize a bit too late what I should have filtered on, so I have some mails I'd like to get refiltered. As I am lazy, I would very much the suggestion from my MUA to be somewhat intelligent. Call it intelligent refiling support or something like that. It is also a nice way to check that your mails will actually be filed in the right folder when you get more mails that will hit the rule.

Today was the last day of the Canonical conference. Morning was as usual, except that Daniel was up a bit before me. I got to move rooms, so I did that after breakfast. Chatted a fair bit with Karianne while I was waiting for gcc-3.4, gcc-3.3 and ia32-libs to compile. It looks like I was barking up the wrong tree about ia32-libs for most of yesterday and a fair bit today, but it should be sorted out now.

The conference was rounded up a bit after 1700, and we went out, first for some beer, then food, then dancing. It was really nice to be dancing again; I've missed it, and it's great fun. My endurance is extremely bad at the moment, and I haven't drunk enough water, so I sweated like a pig, but it was fun nonetheless. Took a cab back with Mark, Lulu, Fabbione and Jane. Shower, then bed.

The food took a while to arrive, so even though we did not end up in a food fight per se (we didn't really have any food), we tried to poison jdub by way of throwing black pepper into his hot chocolate. He blew out the candle multiple times and stuck a flower upside-down in my glass. It was a long and weird meal, I think everybody was very tired and therefore acted as if they were on speed, crack or other kinds of drugs.

It'll be godo to be back in Norway tomorrow: missing Karianne, missing actually speaking a language which I don't stumble around when speaking and hoping to get on with all I have to do.

Today has been very productive. As usual, I woke up fairly early. Breakfast, then off to work. Worked on getting AMD64 up and running, with amd64-libs, ia32-libs. In addition, my last upload of php4 broke it, so I got to fix it this morning. Fairly easy, but still a bit of work to track down what actually went wrong.

In the afternoon, Fabbione, Mako and some other people went off to the pool. We relaxed a bit, was in the steamer and the sauna as well, which was really, really nice. Afterwards, I was dragged into the game of Mao. A fun game which was fairly quick to get into but still a very interesting and fun game. I think I have to spread it around when I get back to Trondheim. One of the basic facts of the game is that you are not allowed to explain the rules, you just play.

I'm missing Karianne, she's missing me, and I'm really looking forward to getting back to Trondheim and having her close by again, even though it's fun and interesting to be around here, learning stuff from people and discussing how to make warty happen.

One of the things I forgot when listing up what a good email client should do is good integration with the filtering system. Sometimes, mail is misfiltered, so I want to rerun it through the filter. Also, when saying "move this mail", the MUA should use the filter to decide on a sensible default. Obviously, this doesn't work too well with IMAP, so either one has to invent an extension to the IMAP protocol or have the same filtering on both the client and the server. The latter would be an acceptable compromise to me, but both mailfilter/procmail needs to be extended (to be able to tell a program "given this mail, where would you put it, and please don't run any side effects") and email clients need to be extended to use it.

Woke up very early, fell asleep again, woke up and so on for a while. Been working mostly on AMD64, gcc and Mailman most of the day. Also attended a BOF on blogging and how to use that as part of presenting Canonical to the world. Most of the morning ended up being chasing bugs in svn around, as it had broken in various spectacular ways breaking already-checked out versions and so on.

Talked a fair bit with Karianne, she seems to be tired and I miss her, so it will be good to get back to her on Saturday. Food here is good and plenty, which is very good as I get very hungry with all the work going on here.

It's fun and a good learning experience for me.

I ended up in a discussion about email clients on #debian-devel today. I tend to do that once in a while, and most people don't understand why I think that all the current email clients are lacking in one way or another. I don't think my list is too unreasonable; what I want in a client is:

• scriptability. A non-scriptable client is totally useless. This has to be on many levels, from "please use out-$YEAR.out-$YEAR-$MONTH as the outbox", to "please look at what email address this is sent to and use the same address as my reply address". I also want to be able to customize what the quoting should look like, strip Outlook's terrible "AW: " and "SV: " instead of the regular "Re: " from as the reply marker from the subject field.

• Fairly fast. It doesn't have to be a speed demon, but I have around 1 million emails, and it needs to be able to handle that.

• Good folder support. Given the number of mails I have, I tend to microorganize them a bit. This means I need a way to see what folders contains unread mail and flagged mail

• IMAP support. Preferably good, with caching and everything.

And then I have other small things like GPG support, the possibility to change user interfaces. Also, good mailing list support is preferable.

I have found three mail user agents which all covers a couple of the areas well, but none of them covers it all. The three are gnus, mutt and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Gnus has excellent scriptability, is dog slow, has good folder support, but I don't know about its IMAP support. It covers the rest of the requirements fairly well.

Mutt is fair when it comes to scriptability, is fast, crappy folder support, crappy IMAP support but covers the rest well.

Mozilla Thunderbird is supposed to be scriptable (but I don't know about Javascript and XUL), is fairly fast, very good folder support (for unread mails, it hasn't really grasped the concept of flagging messages, I think), very good IMAP support, but lousy mailing list support.

Those are what I think about them. You might disagree and some of them might fit you well, I'm just trying to explain to people why I am going to end up writing my own client -- since none of the ones I know do what I want, the way I want them to.

Subversion is on crack:

 : tfheen@yiwaz ..xternal/pkg-mailman/trunk > svn up    
 svn: Working copy '.' locked
 svn: run 'svn cleanup' to remove locks (type 'svn help cleanup' for details)
 : tfheen@yiwaz ..xternal/pkg-mailman/trunk > 

Oh well, let's try something else, then:

  : tfheen@yiwaz ..xternal/pkg-mailman/trunk > svn cleanup
  svn: In directory ''
  svn: Error processing command 'delete-entry' in ''
  svn: Working copy 'upstream' not locked
  : tfheen@yiwaz ..xternal/pkg-mailman/trunk > 

Good crack!

What about the upstream/ directory, then?

  : tfheen@yiwaz ..kg-mailman/trunk/upstream > svn up
  svn: Invalid editor anchoring; at least one of the input paths is not a directory and there was no source entry
  : tfheen@yiwaz ..kg-mailman/trunk/upstream > 

Good crack, I'm going to move this into arch or something.

Woke up just before Daniel Silverstone's alarm went off this morning, at approximately 0730. Breakfast, then a small meeting before I fixed up some work left over from yesterday. We had an AMD64 BOF and after that, a DBUS/HAL BOF, both of them productive. Managed to work a bit more before lunch, starting on a fairly big branding project. That went on until a Security BOF, then continued afterwards until a bit after dinner.

It's very nice to be here, talking with people, getting useful work done and so on. I miss Karianne a fair bit, but we chat a lot on ICQ, which helps (though, it also makes me miss her more). I'm fairly tired from working a 14 hour day, but it's also fun.

As I got back to the room, I discovered we actually have a nice, working wireless connection in here, even though Daniel claimed we did not. Vawad seems to be in a bit of pain, both due to the apache 2 transition in unstable and due to ext3 not handling file systems with large number of links too well. I'm running fsck and so on now, and she should be fine fairly quickly, I hope.

Last week was very, very busy. Karianne and I were sewing costumes for the LARP more or less the whole week. It was fun, and they ended up being nice, both her dresses and my costume. The LARP itself ended up very well for the both of us. I had a great experience and will definitely be playing in more LARPs.

This morning, I flew to London and then took the bus to Oxford for a week-long conference there with the Canonical people. It's fun meeting some old people and a lot of new people, getting to know them and working with them.

I've gotten some useful work done here, and as always, it's so much fun to work with a thriving technical community.

I'm finally back in Trondheim, took the train on Wednesday morning. The trip was fairly uneventful, I hacked a bit and slept a bit. Had a nice evening with Karianne, who arrived here Tuesday. I'm not really sure what I did on Thursday, but I think I mostly did housecleaning tasks (on my computer of course) and unpacked a lot of stuff. I also began doing a bit of work for Canonical, nothing I can say particularly much about yet, but it's fun.

On Friday, I managed to become very, very sick. Flu or something which meant my whole body ached and I had an absolutely terrible headache. Trondheim is quite hot at the moment, right now, at 00:39, it's about 19 degrees outside. Friday, I was fairly comfortable indoors under a duvet and a few blankets.. so I had a bit of fever as well.

Saturday, I was much better, after a horrible night where I couldn't sleep fore more than a few hours at a time. Karianne was a great comfort, though. I was at the compulsory meeting for next weekend's LARP, which was ok, but I felt I shouldn't stay in the shadow for too long. Got home afterwards, worked a bit more and managed to eat some food.

This is my last day at Hardware.no this summer. It feels a bit weird, going back to university again after this long. It feels like a long time, even though it has just been about two months. I've been working a lot on registrar stuff, and I hope it will end up going the right way. NORID's not too happy, which I kindof understand, and cleaning up after other's not any fun, but it has to be done.

In addition, I've fixed numerous small items on the servers, such as gotten a working apt repository, fixed the backup a few times, worked on moving the servers from one hosting centre to another and so on. It has been quite eventful.

I'm looking forward to getting back to Trondheim and my studies, and also seeing Karianne again, it being about a week since we saw each other last time.

Yay, I finally made the amplification step for my software-controlled fan controller project. It was fairly easy, it's just a non-biased normal transistor circuit with a protection diode (as I'm controlling fans, which have motors) and a "brake" resistor on the base of the transistor.

I do really need to fix my soldering skills, I'm totally out of date and having trouble with the iron.

The next step is programming a micro-controller to do pulse width modulation and then hook it up to the fan. From there, it'll just be fun and easy. I also need to make a bunch of those.