AK's weblog

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.

In the last few days I read two other books written by Wladimir Kaminer, the author of Russendisko. They're similar in style, and absolutely hilarious: as with Russendisko, I am fascinated by the easy way of telling stories like Wladimir Kaminer does: simple, straight, funny, but in no way primitive. The two books are "Militärmusik", where he writes about all the experiences he made during his 2 year service in the Soviet Union's Red Army, and "Reise nach Trulala", containing stories about all the journeys to other countries that he did or at least planned to do. Wladimir Kaminer can really show that, sometimes, plain reality is way more interesting and funny than fiction.

Oh, BTW, he will present his new book at Amadeus Linz on 28th of January, and I reserved a seat already (although it's free)!

I was just thinking about "The Simpsons", and about the Flanders family, and something came to my mind: Ned Flanders called his boys "Rod" and "Todd", both names which rhyme to "God". Now, when you take the first letters of each of the names (with God first of course), you get "GRT" - "great" (without vowels). Is that some kind of subliminal message?

BTW, if you're interested in other subliminal messages in music, check out this page. It's awesome (except for the Pink Floyd one, that's boring)!

Update: even more interesting stuff can be found here.

You fucking US-American trackback spammer asshole, I'm gonna cut off your balls if I ever meet you IRL! Your IP address is being blocked, and trackbacking is disabled.

Update: deactivation of trackbacking was broken. exit(0) on the top of the file helps. Thank you, you fucking spammers, for destroying useful communication infrastructure!!

I was just introduced to the Xen virtual machine monitor, a system to run several Linux virtual machines on top of a (modified) Linux kernel. Of course, such systems already exist, but Xen seems to be special: it is easy to install, virtual machines are easy to configure and everything runs just smooth. As root filesystem, you can use physical partitions or disk images. At work, we use it to separate the different test systems from each other: currently, we have one domain (that's a VM instance in Xen speak) running Oracle 9i, one domain for web development, and one domain that is planned to be used for automated test compilation. Anyway, it looks really recommendable, and I will probably also use it at home.

Here a photo that I took on 1st of January in Vienna's 2nd district at around 11am. It shows some dog poo with an exploded fire cracker sticking in it.

21C3 was just "w00t!" To me, it's been definitely the best Congress I've been to, with so many great talks and lectures, so much interesting discussions and fun with other people. To all those people who haven't been there: you definitely missed something.

I'm just coming from the 21C7 award ceremony, even with a prize, although I didn't win. I "only" got a special prize for the most inventive entry. The prize itself is a Toll Collect propaganda CD, sponsored by Volker Birk. Hooray! You can download my entry here.

64 bytes from xxx.xx.xxx.xx: icmp_seq=412 ttl=53 time=16678.5 ms
I only experienced such huge RTTs before only once, and that was when one of our switches at work was b0rken due to evil electrons that came through the network cables (i.e. creeping current).

Today I had my lightning talk, starting at around 11. I was the second in row, it took me only 4:32 to present TPP, and about one more minute to answer all the open questions. I even got scene applause for showing the slide-in feature. Then, I watched the other lightning talks, some of which were quite interesting, too. After that, Thomas Warwaris presented some really funny and new things about software patents, followed by Richard who gave interesting insight into the area of natural language steganography. Even though Richard had explained the whole topic to me before, I heard a lot of new things about steganography in general and ways of breaking steganography. Unfortunately, there are not really any good lectures until the late evening, so I have to find something else to waste time without getting too bored.

Time for a first update on the 21C3: Yesterday, we arrived here in Berlin. At the airport in Vienna, we met Jule who was taking the same flight. The flight itself was extremely turbulent, from Vienna as far as the border from Czechia to Germany, from 3000 to 30000 feet. And just when the turbulences ended, we started the sinking flight again. Oh, and I spilled my apple juice all over Richard.

After we landed, we first brought our luggage to the youth hostel, and then bought our tickets for the 3 days. After that, we went for a quick snack and a long chat, and then Richard and me back to the hostel. Then night was turbulent, too, as we were woken up 3 times by different events...

Today started w/ coffee and donuts, and then lectures all day. Quick lunch at Burger King, then back to BCC. I bought the Conference Proceedings of 21C3 (finally they have some! with ISBN! Hooray!), 400 pages of hacker-related papers for EUR 25, a fair price methinks. Right now, I'm enjoying real net that actually works for the first time. Thanks to Teemu for the beer!

Today, I'm going to Berlin. First, from Linz to Vienna by train, then a shuttle bus to Vienna Airport, and from Vienna Airport to Berlin Tegel. We should arrive at around 13:50. Afterwards we will first bring our stuff to our hostel, and then go to BCC to buy our tickets for 21C3. After that... we don't know yet. If anybody needs to contact me, here's my mobile phone number: +43/699/17778107.

This year, I got a really cool thing: a reflector telescope. I haven't been able to adjust it correctly, yet, but that's going to happen tomorrow. Anyway, that was a present that I definitely didn't expect, but it was just perfect (besides vouchers for buying beer, a cookbook for male singles, and a sci-fi radio drama on 6 CDs -- "Otherworld").

All packages are wrapped, the christmas tree is being decorated, and I'm totally bored already. Merry christmas and a happy new year, BTW (produced with OSX's say(1) utility).

Which flock do you follow?

this quiz was made by alanna