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.

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.

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.

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:

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

Good crack!

What about the upstream/ directory, then?

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

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.

Some time ago, I had my laptop repaired and the motherboard replaced. After a while, I started to wonder where the sound went. Today, I was bored of not having some kinds of sounds, so I popped the laptop case open and discovered that the technician who had replaced the motherboard had forgotten to replace the cable for the loudspeakers. (Though, to call them loudspeakers is quite an exaggeration. They make sounds, period, nothing more.)

After replacing the cable and closing the case, the laptop was a happy beast again, now with sounds coming out of it. It’s annoying that those who fixed it didn’t do the job properly, they probably have a check-out list of some kind which the forgot to follow, or they were just being lazy.

(as per the 20 Questions to a Better Personality test)

Doesn’t sound too wrong.

Yesterday and today has mostly been chaotic. Lots of small things to be taken care of, including more registrar work. Most of that should now be up-to-date, and I hope to keep it that way. Ate shrimps by the dockside today, which was nice.