Older blog entries for edd (starting at number 13)

Not much time to write today. Have been invited to join the development team of BlueZ as the Debian packager. Very nice!

Been spending more time fiddling with xkb keymaps, helping out the other poor souls I lured into installing Debian on an iBook.

You know how you start out the day promising yourself you'll do all those things that are boring, but really need to be done? That's how today was. Suffice to say, I didn't get those things done.

What I did manage, however, was to package up the latest release of the BlueZ Bluetooth libraries and tools for Debian. Here's the release announcement.

This is the biggest Debian packaging thing I've tried so far. If these go well I'll probably start the New Maintainer process.

More exim hackery last weekend. Got SMTP AUTH and TLS going, so secure use of my mail server from remote sites is permitted. Very busy with XML Europe 2002 right now, getting the proceedings together. It gave me the chance to write some useful Perl using XML::LibXML and DBD::Excel. Special thanks to DV for the underlying libxml stuff.

Spent yesterday moving mail filtering back from using the exim filters in my .forward file to procmail. All went smoothly, but had to do some fiddling to properly emulate the vacation functionality from exim.

I have an autoresponder on my edd at xml dot com address, but I don't want it to send the response more than once to a recipient. Here's the procmail recipe I came up with. It depends on the sender address being specified to procmail with the -a option from the exim driver.

SENDER=$1
:0 Whc: autorespond-xml.lock
* ^To.*edd@xml\.com
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^FROM_MAILER
* !^X-Loop: edd@xml.com
* !^X-MailScanner-SpamCheck.*
* ? test -f $HOME/.autorespond-xml
* !? grep -qi "$SENDER" $HOME/.autorespond-xml.cache
| (formail -rI"Precedence: junk" \
    -A"X-Loop: edd@xml.com" \
    -I"From: Edd Dumbill <edd@xml.com>"; \
    cat $HOME/.autorespond-xml \
  ) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t && \
      echo $SENDER >>$HOME/.autorespond-xml.cache

In the procmail_pipe entry of exim, ensure the command looks like this (all one line):

  command = "/usr/bin/procmail -a ${sender_address} -d
${local_part}"

I also did another version of this that doesn't require altering the exim config, but it does abuse formail in strange and interesting ways.

:0 Whc: autorespond-xml.lock
* ^To.*edd@xml\.com
* !^FROM_DAEMON
* !^FROM_MAILER
* !^X-Loop: edd@xml.com
* !^X-MailScanner-SpamCheck.*
| formail -rD 200000 $HOME/.autorespond-xml.cache \
    -I"Message-ID: $1"

  :0 ehc      # if sender not in the cache
  | (formail -rI"Precedence: junk" \
    -A"X-Loop: edd@xml.com" \
    -I"From: Edd Dumbill <edd@xml.com>"; \
    cat $HOME/.autorespond-xml \
    ) | $SENDMAIL -oi -t

I adapted one of the recipes from procmailex (5). The version requiring the exim change seems cleaner to me, as it doesn't abuse the semantics of formail quite so badly. But I'm a novice at this game.

So, I bought an iBook recently to replace my ailing Intel laptop. The idea was to run Debian GNU/Linux: in other words, the choice to buy Apple was made on hardware alone. A few people thought this was odd! I wrote my experiences up for O'Reilly Network: iBooks Love Linux.

Thanks to cmiller's advodiary script I've now got a bit more energy to write up what I've been doing.

A brief update: I've been spending some time hacking around with Bluetooth and Linux. Things are looking good, thanks to the guys working on BlueZ. I'm set to write some articles for O'Reilly on my Bluetooth experiences.

The BEEP hacking went well, and I've written up two articles (one, two) for developerWorks.

Been continuing on and off with GNOME hacking. I've been working on an module for gnome-vfs which allows browsing of the USB device chain (screenshots: progress report on the daily chump).

Soon, it'll all come together in one device-convergence GNOME-pretty lovely bundle.

Wasted too many hours this week on the new 2.4.10 Linux kernel. Finally got it all sorted out for my Debian machines.

Did more work on familiarizing myself with FreeBSD. Got exim running with TLS and SMTP AUTH, also got SSL enabled pop3 server up. After the craziness that is getting started with OpenSSL, things seem to have gone well.

Spent last few days hacking Java and BEEP around, for an article I'm writing for developerWorks.

Also been researching Bluetooth products quite extensively.

Done some hacking with OpenOBEX: got my laptop communicating to the cellphone. Plan is to write some sync software for it.

Taught myself GNOME/GTK in a day (well, a day and half). Here's my first toy app: gmaed, an editor for my mutt aliases file. There's source, .deb and RPM as well as a PNG screenshot there.

It's only a toy, but I think it's given me a good grounding in GNOME/GTK programming.

Spents lots of time bug-hunting on Evolution today. Did some triage and even managed to post a small patch for one bug that was annoying me.

Also, been spending some time reading up on GTK and GNOME hacking. Not long now before I get stuck into my new (sekret) project...