Older blog entries for bcully (starting at number 25)

I finally switched back to mutt. Mail.app is nice but its shortcomings became more and more irritating. I missed:

• threading
• save hooks
• proper polling of mailboxes other than the Inbox over IMAP
• being able to choose my From: address at all, and especially having it chosen automatically based on the To: of the message I was replying to
• mailcap
• speed. The text interface is just a million times faster, even though Mail.app has an IMAP mailbox cache. Go figure.

Things that I'll miss from mail.app:

1. Inline image/HTML viewing
2. Integration with AddressBook.app, where I keep all my contacts

Well, 1. isn't that big a deal. Mailcap can spawn Navigator so it's really only an additional keystroke and a very small delay.

2 drove me nuts, so I wrote a little AddressBook plugin for lbdb last night. It was surpisingly straightforward, considering I've never done Objective C (let alone Cocoa) before. I'd be a little embarrassed if anyone saw the code, but it works, and that makes me happy. I've missed you, mutt!

Loads of ices work. I ported it to libshout2 (and wrote a bunch of unfinished libshout2 code to boot, like metadata handling), fixed vorbis mono/bigendian problems, added ID3v2 support, and handled sample rates other than 44.1 kHz, and finally got mono output working.

Trying to have multiple versions of autoconf/automake/libtool for different projects is a real horror show so far. I haven't touched mutt (the only CVS code I use that requires an autoconf no newer than 2.13) on account of it. Well, to be fair, I've been busy with icecast stuff anyway.

I finally did it. I don't know whether it was smart or stupid, but I gave notice Friday. In three weeks I'll be in Paris for the first time in ten years. A friend of mine has a few months off before becoming a stinking lawyer, so she's taking her first big trip and invited me along as a travel safety blanket.

I didn't like the work, but I guess a lot of people don't like their work. What clinched it is that all my hobbies dried up while I was working there - minimal music, no free software, little reading. Just metro boulot dodo, as I heard it put ten years ago :)

Hopefully this is good news for users of mutt/IMAP. I feel pretty bad about the way I disappeared from mutt (and icecast), but I wasn't getting anything else done either. The dark cloud lifts...

Tromey: I bet libtool gets it far worse than automake. Probably deservedly so (oops, naughty me).

I've done no development to speak of in ages. I continue to blame my job. But I'm looking forward to a little trip to Ireland in two weeks - maybe it will be rejuvenating.

Here's me in a turtle suit.

djcb: There already is a GTK+ front-end for mutt :)

Cactus: Tk's email address is in Singapore. Perhaps your prejudice is poorly founded?

Scandal: I for one have no objection to your SMTP patch (but it will be made to do TLS). In fact I think having skeletal SMTP and a configure option to use libesmtp too might not be bad, except I haven't looked at libesmtp and don't know how much additional code it might require in mutt...

As for disconnected mode being slow to develop - yeah, I haven't even planned to look at it until 1.4 finally comes out. But on top of that I've been so insanely busy with my job that I have to admit I've let the other projects fall into the weeds a bit. I personally am convinced that disconnected mode inside of mutt is a big win.

In other news, I'm insanely busy. So I was annoyed that when I spent my precious free time to see Brotherhood of the Wolf tonight it turned out to be one of the biggest turkeys I've ever seen. The advertising was slick, but why didn't someone tell me? Not only does it not make any sense at all but it shamelessly steals the cool tricks from at least 5 other movies. And, it looks like the director's previous experience was shampoo commercials. You could make a pretty good drinking game out of waiting for someone to face away from the camera and toss his or her hair.

Hehe, I certified dto because of his musical tastes. It's so great to see someone talking about Peng and Mars Audiac Quintet on advogato! By the way, the latest Stereolab is really terrific - the best since Emperor Tomato Ketchup. I'm looking forward to their show here on the 10th.

I've done a couple bugfixes for mutt, but still haven't had any time to do real free software (ouch, it's hard to break the habit of saying open source) work. I've really let ices and icecast slide, jack is probably not too happy. Sorry jack.

I'm moving out of Battery Park City into Sunset Park, Brooklyn this weekend. It's a lot better here than it was a while ago, but the air can still get really bad. It is today. It's also a very strange feeling having to push through crowds of gawkers around Rector St to get to the subway. It makes me angry the way pushing through crowds always does, and I get annoyed at the excited and entertained looks on the faces of some of the tourists, running their hands happily through the dust of the old buildings. But on the other hand I can understand why some people feel they have to come down and see the wreckage for themselves. At any rate, I'm looking forward to Brooklyn.

Thank God October is finally here. Thanksgiving would be this weekend, if I were Canadian.

Speaking of Canada, I just got back from a weekend in Toronto, where I attended (and did some spinning for) the launch party for my NO LONGER SECRET WEB SITE (but still sort of secret radio station, until I have gathered my defenses against the RIAA ninjas). We packed the place, it was great fun. It was also great to be out of NYC again, even though I've only been back for a few days. I live just down the street from the WTC (can see the remains out my window, and they still have a huge mound of flattened fire trucks and ambulances on the sidewalk downstairs). Depressing. Anyway, flying wasn't so bad - the nice thing about worrying about terrorists is my usual low- level nervousness that the wings are going to fall off or something just up and vanished. The steel-toe shoes were a little inconvenient though.

I've been slowly getting a bit more productive, although mostly on work and the web site. I have horribly neglected mutt and icecast over the last three or four weeks. Must be fall coming on? I've felt the same loss of motivation everyone else is talking about...

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