Ok, the sky is definitively falling. Or Hell freezing over (which it definitively feels like, walking outside today).

• Sarge is released (Read the Description line)

• Apple is moving away from PowerPC chips and switching to Intel instead.

21:09 -!- biella is now known as dr_biella

Congratulations!

I’ve finally gotten around to releasing version 0.2 of the tdb backend for evolution-data-server. The main changes are:

• No longer needs the evolution tree to build, it just needs the library packages
• Some leak fixes, thanks to Ross Burton

Get it from http://err.no/download/e-d-s/evolution-backend-tdb-0.2.tar.gz

A couple of years ago, I stumbled across linuxjewellery, a jewellery store selling small brass BSD daemon statues, Apache feathers and various forms of Debian bracelets, earrings and so on. Apparently, it’s either misconfigured or has been taken down now, since the only thing I can see is an empty directory listing:

I hope this is just a temporary thing and they’ll come back, since even though I never bought something from them, my Debian swirl necklace is inspired from them.

Inspired (or provoked or whatever) by Joey Hess’s blog entry about pymarkdown in pyblosxom. I decided to fix it up a bit (I also had an outstanding request for actually putting some usage instruction in there from February or so).

• Now actually has a license. (GPL)
• Includes a short summary on how to get it working with pyblosxom (and it should work more or less out of the box.

Not many big changes, but it will make it possible to use by more people than just me.

Get it from http://err.no/pymarkdown or my arch repository (tfheen@err.no–2005/pymarkdown–devo–0).

Update: Blah, I suck. I forgot to actually update the checked-out version. Fixed now.

Since I don’t have a decent media player at the moment, I’m using my laptop for listening to music. I’m going to a talk by Cory Doctorow tonight, in Oslo. That means 45 minutes on a plane with a bit less than an hour on a bus in each end. Being bored, I’ve been running iwlist scan periodically. Some fun results I’ve had:

• ESSID: “privat, hold deg unna” (private, keep out)
• ESSID: “Johnny”. Who guesses where in Oslo I saw this?

A little less than half the networks seems to be running unencrypted. The biggest number of APs I’ve seen at once was 15. Once I got within the city proper, I don’t think I’ve seen less than four or five at any time.

I hope the number of unencrypted networks keeps high. It would be awesomely cool if we could actually get good, working roaming between the different networks so you could sit on the bus and actually use the networks, not just see them.

Update: Make that 19, not 15. No, 20. It seems iwlist scan runs into a bit of trouble then, truncating the output so it just displays the MAC address of the AP.

When travelling back home yesterday, I was bored on the final leg from Amsterdam to Trondheim so I decided to read the KLM in-flight magazine (whatever it’s called). This month’s issue was about “Online”, basically the Internet. A fairly good issue with a decent amount of mostly-correct historical material as well as interesting outlooks on what’s to come.

In the good tradition of such articles, a wordlist was included. Among the words was the word “bitleg” used to describe what would usually be described as software piracy. The latter word gives connotations to murder and robbery. Bitlegging doesn’t have nearly as negative connotations and describe the issue at hand a lot more calmly and better.

The first, initial version of the libtdb backend for evolution-data-server is ready. It seems to work fine so far (for me), but is probably buggy. Feedback appreciated.

To use it:

1. download the tarball

2. unpack into evolution-data-server/addressbook/backends

3. adjust evolution-data-server/addressbook/Makefile.am and configure.in appropriately.

4. rerun auto*

5. build evolution-data-server. The backend should now be in evolution-data-server/addressbook/backends/tdb/.libs/libebookbackendtdb.so and can either be installed with make install or just copied to /usr/lib/evolution-data-server-1.2/extensions/ (adjust as appropriate)

To actually use the backend, you have to add a new type to the e-d-s backend. This is sillily complex, but I haven’t gotten around to actually fixing evolution yet. This is done by running (relative to your evolution-data-server build tree) ./libedataserver/test-source-list --key=/apps/evolution/addressbook/sources --add-group="TDB" --set-base-uri="tdb:///home/tfheen/.evolution/addressbook/local". Adjust the /home/tfheen` part if you’re not me. You should then be able to add a new address book to the TDB category in Evolution.

Again, feedback is appreciated; this is very much a product of release early, release often so the installation instructions aren’t the best. Yet, at least.

Evolution-data-server (or e-d-s for short) seems to be a fairly nice piece of software. It’s being more and more integrated with the gnome desktop and other non-gnome applications such as gaim are using it. I prefer to be able to use my tools from the command line and I want to hook e-d-s into gnus so I can actually look up email addresses and maintain that inside of gnus.

I started writing some command line tools tonight and discovered that the API documentation isn’t really up to speed. It lacks a lot of documentation. The header files are readable enough that I manage to navigate with just those and a fair amount of trial and error. So far, the command line tool just spits out all the people from all the address books with no way to search or do anything useful with the information, but it’s a good start. I just hope integration with bbdb and gnus will go smooth.

I was in tridge’s talk on ldb this morning. ldb is a lightweight database with an LDIF/LDAP frontend which can use tdb, “trivial database” as its backend. E-d-s uses Sleepycat DB as the backend, and I have some performance problems there, in addition to the fact that I never liked libdb. I therefore started writing a tdb backend for e-d-s. It’s a lot of cut-and-paste from the file backend, but that just means I save a lot of time.

I finally got around to changing my system to a UTF-8 system the other day. It was surprisingly easy, but with a few caveats to not annoy people on Latin-1 IRC channels and such.

Pterm supports UTF8 just fine, but is evidently not smart enough to actually pick a unicode font, so I had to tell it explicitly to use one.

Irssi in stable, testing, unstable, warty and hoary are all too old to have proper recode support, so I packaged irssi 0.8.10rc5 and uploaded that to breezy. This has nice recode support so you can say “please use latin1 while talking to this person”. I’ll have to fix that on vawad too when I get home.

Apart from that, it meant adjusting a set of dotfiles to not set LANG if it is already set, changing the default in the gdm login screen and fix up the ssh config on vawad to actually allow passthrough of LANG and LC_* environment variables.

I need to adjust my emacs setup too, but that’s not too urgent and it is fairly simple to do.