Bram: have a look at the SPF spec; it sounds much like what you're proposing. I'm a bit dubious about it, because I dislike the idea of having to select an outgoing SMTP server based on the From address I'm using.

blm: I've also done this, although my approach is a bit simpler; I wrote a CGI script which reads the recentlog page and spits it out in RSS format, doing some regexp mangling to try and make links absolute. It's available here: advogatorss-1.0.

Free-software-related stuff that I've been doing lately:

xhippo had a release to get all the small fixes that I've done in the last six months or so out into the world. My to-do list for xhippo is still fairly large; I really need to find a big block of time to catch up on all the stuff I want to do with it.

GARstow continues to grow; I was slightly surprised to count the packages and find I'd built 428 ports for it. (Most of which I have installed on my desktop machine, scarily enough.) I'm not aware of anyone else using it, but it's generated some interest.

onenetd now has at least one major user and is packaged in FreeBSD (thanks, Tim!). I haven't been able to break it lately, although I have a couple of ideas for new features; per-address limiting being the one that would be most useful at the moment.

I was surprised to get patches for freedt from two different people in the same week. It's now got a mailing list and (small) user community, and I've done quite a bit of development work on it in the last couple of weeks, shaking out bugs, improving interfaces and cleaning up the code.

vdesk was the real surprise. I'd written this way back when I used to use aewm, never really used it myself, and only packaged it up for completeness value -- so it came as a bit of a shock to peer at my web logs and discover that not only do other people use it, but evilwm actually has code explicitly supporting it...

Bram: if you're using a Mozilla-derived browser, you can put something like this in your user stylesheet (i.e. chrome/userContent.css in your profile directory):

A:link {
        text-decoration: underline !important;
}
A:visited {
        text-decoration: underline !important;
}

The same trick should work in other browsers that allow you to use a custom stylesheet, but I haven't yet persuaded Konqueror to like it.

Hm, I've done a scary amount of work on xhippo since I last posted here. Most of it has been code cleanups; for instance, it's now split up into multiple files, the configuration file reader is table-driver, and the argument-building code for the players is much more sensible. Now that I'm at UKC, it's easier to find tame xhippo beta-testers---thanks are due to Giles, Matthew and Tim for noticing stuff that I wouldn't have picked up on. Next job I'm planning on doing is moving the documentation to texinfo, since I'm thoroughly fed up with maintaining it in SGML. (I've also got a couple of bugfixes done in my current tree, but nothing major.)

I've also got around to fixing my web pages (spurred on by the apparent demise of netpedia's free-software hosting service). I went through my stuff-I-wrote directory and packaged up pretty much anything that someone might find useful.

keverets, the ncurses idea sounds decidedly interesting. I made an attempt to abstract out the UI in C++ before (see "hippo" on my projects page) before deciding that I really didn't like the language. Currently, xhippo is very closely tied to GTK, so you'd have to either fix it so it's not, or write a library which emulated enough of GTK on text consoles to run it. (xhippo's a bit more usable via the keyboard now, by the way...)