AK's weblog

Yes, I admit it, I'm a fanboy. Today I've been at an event where Wladimir Kaminer, the author of Russendisko and other books, read a few unpublished stories from his new upcoming books about soviet cooking and music. It was just brilliant, and I really enjoyed this a little bit more than one hour. Afterwards, I even bought yet another book (Schönhauser Allee), got it signed, and even took a photo of Wladimir and myself (actually, someone else took it).

Since yesterday, I'm using Adium X as instant messenger client unter Mac OS X. Adium X is based on libgaim, and so I can finally throw away all the other IM clients I had running before as Adium X connects to Jabber, ICQ and MSN (and many more, but these are the protocols I use). It perfectly integrates into the OSX GUI, supports tabs, it looks really cool, and the duck logo is cute. And it calls itself "the best IM client ever". Well, I'm still missing some bits and pieces, but it's definitely better than the other clients I've used before, so I think I can agree on that.

Oh, one more thing: for a huge pile of nifty add-ons and extras, have a look at www.adiumxtras.com.

OK, it's time again for a rant about Symbian OS. First of all, I would like to point to an article about Symbian OS design faults. If you know about Symbian OS programming, you will know about most of the things mentioned in the article. If you like your job as developer for Symbian OS (which I cannot image), you will deny that these are issues, and that it's all intended. If you don't like Symbian OS (like me), you will most likely say, "Oh, how true" (like me). In case you don't know about Symbian OS, I can still recommend reading the article, as it tells you about the daily horrors of development on this crude platform.

Then, a colleague found another "nice" piece (see here). The last two paragraphs of the CCoeControl::PrepareForFocusLossL() method are contradicting each other, and the best thing is that the last but one paragraph is actually not true - at least not for any of the CCoeControl-derived classes where he would require that method. gna

And last, but not least, I'm currently trying to locate a bug that leads to interesting symptoms like the debugger sometimes stopping the program on more or less random position like the DLL of the ethernet driver or the drag'n'drop support for the Symbian OS emulator. This operating system, and especially its version for the Series60 type of mobiles, is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever seen, both in complexity, easy debugability (does this word even exist), and quality of documentation. Oh, yeah, the documentation: all Series60-specific things in the documentation are either header files, reformatted in nice HTML (and hyperlinked!), or if there is "additional" information text, a mere rewording of the class and/or method name.

Last weekend, I spent quite a lot of time with hacking on mutt-ng, my mutt fork. I was able to integrate a number of interesting features, such as the edit-threads patch (Debian users probably know this), the GNU TLS patch (I integrated it in such a way that the person who compiles mutt-ng can decide whether OpenSSL or GNU TLS shall be used), then Thomas Glanzmann's excellent header cache patch, which greatly increases performance when using IMAP, and Florian Weimer's fix to improve performance with Maildir on Linux 2.6 and ext3. Besides that, I implemented an option to set mutt's umask, which will be honored whenever files are created in write mode. Before, the mutt developers dogmatically refused to implement such a feature, and simply hard-coded the umask to 077. Thanks also to Michael Prokop who tested the latest versions of mutt-ng and helped uncover several issues with the build system and a small regex bug which I was quickly able to fix.

Oh, and one more thing: if you don't want to install subversion, but still want to try out mutt-ng, you can download daily snapshots from http://mutt-ng.berlios.de/snapshots/.

After the quite long love letter that I wrote to my girlfriend (3 pages with 1.5 line spacing, written using LaTeX; yes, I write love letters using LaTeX), and the fact that I'm very much interested in languages (even while I only speak one foreign language and currently learn another one), both natural and formal, make the result look quite accurate.
(via MP)

Yesterday, I played a bit with the latest development build of the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0. A new part of OpenOffice.org 2.0 will be "OpenOffice.org Base", an MS-Access-like database application that comes with hsqldb as database backend, and also provides connectivity to all other variants of databases via JDBC.

Generally, OpenOffice.org Base is really good as a simple alternative to MS Access: you can create new simple db tables via a wizard or via manual editing, you can set relationships, you can create forms and queries that operate on the tables, and so on. One thing that I didn't like was that the table editing dialog wasn't very flexible: once you click "save", you cannot edit existing table fields anymore, you can only delete them and create new ones. I still have to get more into the form creation stuff, how flexible it really is and how difficult it is to create database applications that one used to create using MS Access (well, I never created any MS-Access-based applications). But what I know already is that OpenOffice.org Base is definitely easier to grasp than MS Access when you have basic knowledge about relational databases.

Quit endless discussion.

(via Jochen)

Today, the latest Tocotronic album, "Pure Vernunft darf niemals siegen", was published, and I immediately bought it. After listening to it once, it is definitely better than the white, self-titled album, but still, the unique style of the older albums is completely missing. To me, the lyrics are just too abstract, but the other aspects of the songs are pretty good, actually.

As you can read here, EU tries to forbid the swastika after Prince Harry's scandal. All I can say is that (a) forbidding symbols won't hinder national socialism to keep on existing and (b) the swastika isn't always related to national socialism. In fact, the swastika is a religious symbol in Buddhism. Or would you call the [[Dalai Lama]] a Nazi? So, forbidding swastikas per se makes absolutely no sense.

I just found wonderful Pearl Jam bootleg mp3s here. They've got lots of wonderful stuff, mostly songs that are cover versions. Pretty cool, although the download is quite slow for me.

Yesterday I had my first Spanish lesson at Wifi Linz. It was quite interesting, and from the didactic point of view, it looked much better than the last language lessons that I had before (i.e. English and Latin at school): we started by learning a few phrases, and then we had to walk around and use it in dialogues with the other people in class. So the lessons get a lot more interactive, and you immediately train what you learn. What I also like very much is that the teacher is not Spain-centric, as she's been to South America for quite some time, and so we learn about the differences of Spanish in Spain and South America.

This is something that definitely should not be:

Liwest owns 81.10.128.0/17, and the above IP address is part of it. And my colleague was able to gather such an IP address by simply activating WLAN on his notebook.

One thing that I always regretted about mutt that hardly any new features were added. A few years ago, I wanted to have a certain feature included in mutt, but when I posted this on the mutt mailing list, the only answer I got was that the authors don't want to add any new features anymore. I forgot about this again, well, until a few days ago.

And that was when Sven Guckes was ranting about the mutt development process in at.linux, closing with the sentence "mutt is dead" (he got famous in Austria's Linux scene for his legendary demo session at Linuxdays 2001 in St. Pölten, with quotes like "elm is dead"). At around the same time, another annoyance of mutt hit me that I wanted to have fixed once and for all.

So I started searching around and found lots and lots of mutt patches that added very interesting and useful features or fixed that little annoyance that always itched but that was not annoying enough to have it fixed. So, I thought, why not use the creative potential of all these people out there, take the mutt source, and enhance it with a number of patches out there. And so I (finally) had the idea of forking mutt, making it a more feature-rich email client than mutt ever was. Because open source is about feature competition after all, isn't it? Another advanced email client would definitely heat up the email client "market" (if you can say so) in the open source scene. And so I forked, added a number of interesting patches (and I still keep adding), fixed a few bugs by myself, and put it online under the name "mutt next generation", or short, mutt-ng. Of course, development will be very active in the next few weeks/months, depending on how much I need to do to get a really nice email client.

I think a fork was clearly necessary, as mutt development got totally stuck after the last release, and forks at the right time in the past did either produce very viable alternatives or helped the original project. Emacs/XEmacs and gcc/egcs come to my mind. So, my hope is that the word gets spread, that people use and test mutt-ng, and don't hesitate to submit their own patches, because unlike the mutt developers, I'm very happy to integrate feature patches and bugfixes.