Recent blog entries for baueran

Ok, I switched my weblog from Advogato over to my own homepage. Since I am not running any of the fancy pancy DSL Internet connections, it's also cheaper to add entries to the diary now. However, I'll update information on my Advogato account from time to time, especially about projects I'm involved with.

Final exams are over at last; the grades are quite satisfying. Unfortunately I can't afford having much of a holiday now, as I'm pressured to pickup work on my Master's Thesis at once. It should prove interesting though as I'll be modifying a large open source project's sources. I'll post details as the matter progresses.

Last week's release of mailfilter 0.3.3 was a big success for me. It supports by far more (peculiar) POP3 servers and allows users to split up config files (finally). And since, not a single bug report.

POP3 servers that implement the "TOP" command (which is optional, but well defined anyway) as "TOP x RETR" should be made illegal.

But final exams should be made illegal as well. Ugh...

The development version 0.3.2 of Mailfilter is now available. I probably shouldn't be hacking on open source programs while I am supposed to study, but I really needed to get away from things for a while.

Also, this month an article of mine can be found in the UK edition of Linux Magazine. I'm quite happy about getting published there and the subject fits well into my studies: PostgreSQL. Though, I admit, I simplified the process of data modelling quite a bit, in favour of easy understanding. I just hope people will appreciate it.

Hard to believe I get time to write a diary entry these days, especially with my upcoming final exams. But I took a break this afternoon to write an Ultima IV map viewer and editor as Java applet (yes, this is my definition of relaxation) which I might put up on the web sometime soon. In fact, I think I should convert the entire game as Applet, but probably not before next year.
Anyway, afterwards Bernhard came over to visit and we did some serious hacking on the CBE project until 1 am which wasn't particularly relaxing, but worth the effort. Hopefully our supervisor and examiner thinks so, too. What took us so long was the very peculiar behaviour of Mesa 3.4.2 (Linux), compared to Apple Computer's own OpenGL implementation. It seems like Mesa expects all kinds of switches and texture parameters after you've put together your scene and objects, while Apple's library just doesn't give a damn. Oh well, now we know, don't we?

The new version of Mailfilter is available now. Have a look at the program's homepage to find out what's new.

Reported a bug in flex to the Mandrake Cooker list. It seems that the Mandrake folks have not noticed RedHat introducing (and later also fixing) it. The version I used created code that was incompatible with unistd.h and I spent literally hours to track down a simple software bug. What a cool way to spend a saturday night!

I am more than just busy these days, mainly with university. So don't expect any diary updates in the near future, but look out for a new development version of Mailfilter. I think the list of changes and improvements is large enough now to wrap up the packages. Launch is hopefully next weekend.

Ugh, is low level signal handling and C++ a contradiction?

A new development release of Mailfilter is available. As always, I'm hoping for some constructive feedback.

Spent the day trying to port Mailfilter to Windows properly. It was terrible. No Regular Expressions, no Sockets, no nothing. Well, I knew that from the beginning, but also 50% of all glibc calls are not defined in a typical Windows environment. So before you get to look for a nice Regular Expression library and the Socks API you have to find substitutes for about every bloody (even very basic) system call. But: the Mailfilter development branch does compile and start under Cygwin now. A very warm and satisfying feeling indeed.