Older blog entries for mones (starting at number 48)

claws-mail 3.4.0, dudesconf 2

The claws-mail packages have reached the 3.4.0 version. These include several important fixes, so all users are encouraged to upgrade. I planned to include Colin's pre-release multiple-fixes patch in a previous upload but finally the lack of time and the near release date provoked this upload hadn't occurred. There's something new in the packaging because I've switched all the copyright files to machine-interpretable copyright format. This is not mandatory (just a proposal) but I think it's interesting enough to support it. I'll be giving a lightning talk about this proposal within the Dudesconf-II event, the small debconf-like conference to be celebrated in A Coruña in a couple of weeks. I'll be traveling by car with chipi, another Debian developer which came with me last year, and baby, who has been recently promoted also to Debian developer (yay! congratz Miriam! welcome to debian.org, the republic of the spammed people! :-)). Hopefully that week I won't be traveling to Madrid for working, otherwise it could be very tiresome. Unfortunately I have to do it tomorrow, so once the claws-mail-extra-plugins have finished uploading (in process right now) I'm going to bed ;-).

Syndicated 2008-04-20 23:09:08 from Ricardo Mones

No-living Madrid

I'm being lazy again updating this. As predicted in a previous entry (oh, I'm lazy enough to link it) my life has changed for a while. A while which is going to last for three months (though the first one is finishing this week). I'm now working from Monday to Friday at Madrid, living in a, well, a kind of single flat, but worse: a bathroom, a couple of small beds (I only use one, the other is handy to leave the luggage), a table with two chairs, a couple of armchairs and a minimalistic kitchen behind accordion doors. All packed in less than 30 square meters. To be honest I spent most of the day at work and most of the remaining time sleeping, so having such crappy residence is not as depressing as it seems at first. The remaining time is filled with unsophisticated cooking, food collecting, personal hygiene and watching some movie on the MacBook. Lacking an internet connection limits the amount of hacking it can be done, and I simply batch it for delivery around valley hours at work.

Connection at work is behind a proxy, but not a fascist one, so I've been able to ssh home using httptunnel. The server part was easy, just drop apache from port 80 (not really a problem because apache2 is running on 443 and serving all the interesting things) and start the hts tunnel server on the same port redirected to localhost's ssh port. On the client side things are a bit more tricky because I'm on a Redmond OS, but the htc client can be run both under cygwin and also compiled for win32 (though this version also uses cygwin1.dll). Amazing enough the "compiled for win32" version which is started directly by a shortcut seems to work better than the cygwin one when started from a shell. Version numbers seem to be the same, and cygwin1.dll is also the same (the version provided with the "compiled for win32" was older than the one in my cygwin installation making impossible to use both at the same time, so I replaced it), so it's a mistery to me why it appears to work better.

While httptunnel is a nice improvement over ajaxterm it fails from time to time and you have to restart the connection to the localhost client. This is a minor annoyance in standard usage, but can appear quickly if you increase the traffic in the tunnel, for example raising an ssh tunnel within the http-tunneled connection for making a remote X display be shown locally in the cygwin X server. Using the ssh tunnel for, lets say, sftp uploads, causes it to fail even more frequently, though limiting the upload bandwidth in filezilla helps to maintain the connection alive.

On the Debian side, I've been dealing with bugs, mostly claws-mail ones and the sylpheed-claws removal, which is pretty advanced right now: all sylpheed-claws* packages are now out of testing and ready to be removed also from unstable. Only a migration path is needed for existing users, which will be providing another virtual package in claws-mail (like it's already done for sylpheed-claws-gtk2). I've also requested a binNMU for claws-mail, because current build dependencies make it uninstallable in unstable. A "binNMU" (which stands for binary Non Maintainer Upload) is a kind of semi-automatic rebuild of the binary packages in a source package, used mainly for library transitions (like this one).

There's another area in the Debian side which itches me lately: the sylpheed upstream bug handling. Day after day I miss more and more a friendly bugzilla (or anything similar) where upstream bugs can be posted and, more important, tracked. The few forwarded bugs in the BTS are like messages in a bottle. I've sent them to Hiro, but no response was received, neither Changelog mention or any other sign they have been treated or discarded. Sending them to /dev/null would have been equally efficient. I've noticed he does usually respond to bugs posted in the list, so maybe that's the way to go.

Syndicated 2008-03-10 00:25:45 from Ricardo Mones

The rest of your life begins at 19:30 UTC

Well, not really, but a lot of changes have happened lately on mine :-). In more or less chronological order:

Hardware
Yep, new hardware! The Nokia guys decided to, finally, provide some n810 devices to the Spanish online store, so poor Spanish developers could buy their awaited discounted tablets. But that couldn't be so easy, of course, and the UPS people played the mouse and the cat with mine for nearly a week, leaving me their infonotes with instructions they didn't honor. Anyway, like it's said, there's no bad that lasts for a hundred years, so the device is finally in my hands and working. First software installed was Claws Mail, of course, and now I can enjoy the deletion of spam from my IMAP accounts from the bed :-D.

Work
As expected, after a short period of transition while some not funny tasks where assigned to me, I'm finally in a new project. This project is big, and has been running for nearly a year now, so the initial learning curve is not easy, but here I am. As expected too, it involves traveling to Swindon (UK), so I'll be there next week from Monday evening to Thursday morning. Don't expect me to see online out of work hours.

Life
Yep, that has changed too, or is going to change very soon: we're going to buy a flat and leave our currently hired home. After some weeks of depressing searching (the prices are ridiculously high in Spain for any kind of place to live) we've found our future home, just 300 m. away from current. Currently we're in the process of finding a bank to marry with for the next 35 years :-), though we hope it won't last so. The search for a bank is also depressing. When you talk to them everything looks pink-coloured, until you start to ask about the fine print... all you think you're saving in the mortgage is being slightly stolen on the insurances, percentages, expenses, taxes, accounts, cards and whatnot. As said, depressing, but that's life.

Free software
Apart of the Clamav issue, which is causing some trouble (like this), there's not much news here, though they're mostly good:


  • Packaged wwp's PECoMaTo for Debian.
  • With the help of Hideki Yamane finally the libsylph packaging was finished, I'm reviewing and sponsoring the uploads.
  • Claws Mail packages are up to date!!
  • Seems my Debian karma has increased from last time I found it - well, not sure if that is really good }:).

... but not all: still didn't request the removal the sylpheed-claws-* packages because of its apparent popularity, though I'm considering just to orphan it, but recommending the removal. If anybody wants to really maintain them, well, is their choice, but I've procrastinated their maintenance for time enough to not deserve even being called the maintainer.

Syndicated 2008-02-14 10:14:56 from Ricardo Mones

Testing effect

By January last year I posted some popcon graphs for fun and comparison. This year I won't repeat myself with the same graphs, but I've found a couple of interesting facts in the graph below which passed unnoticed to me until now.



First thing you may notice is the huge boost claws-mail got this last month. That's nice, and is the "testing effect". Package finally entered testing and a lot of people installed it.

Second, is that, by the end of last year, claws-mail finally had more installations than the ancient sylpheed-claws. It's incredible the amount of people still has it installed, and the only reason I've still not issued the removal request from the archive.

And third (well, I said a couple, but I'm not a mathematician ;-)), and no less important, nearly half of the people who install claws-mail votes for it! That's great compared with the 25% approx. who votes for sylpheed-claws.

Syndicated 2008-01-25 18:01:19 from Ricardo Mones

FSF Directory

Remember this entry about Claws Mail missing in FSF Software Directory? Well, seems the new person in charge did it, and finally we're now listed!. She was kind enough to send me a mail with the URL. It took more than four months (nobody was in charge of the directory at the time I sent the request), but patience resulted fruitful on the long run.

Syndicated 2008-01-08 23:45:55 from Ricardo Mones

EOC, clawsker

The Christmas are over now, and the old daily routine will be probably continued in this new year. The Three Kings have been generous, but not too geek, which is good for a change. Anyway I got a new bluetooth device for the car, a couple of good Sci-Fi books (Tuf Voyaging and Earthworks) and some clothing.

At work we're in extended play now. Some changes and enhancements were approved and the project will be continued for some more time. This means I will probably have to travel to Barcelona again this year.

I've been bored enough to make a minimal site for Clawsker (previously known as cmhpe) and put the current tarball online.

And when I say bored I mean really bored, because the googlepages edition is a real PITA. I guess that's the reason they stopped to provide the feature to newer accounts. Anyway it didn't take too much effort and I'm still waiting for Paul to setup a proper corner in the claws-mail site.

Syndicated 2008-01-07 17:50:26 from Ricardo Mones

Bayonne, cmhpe

This weekend Silvia and me will be visiting Bayonne. Just a quick visit leaving in a few minutes and back tomorrow.

I've also been busy this week developing cmhpe, or the Claws Mail Hidden Preferences Editor. It's a Perl-GTK2 applet, which handles all those properties lying in your clawsrc files not handled by the Claws Mail interface. So far is able to handle all hidden preferences, but there's still some features missing, like "Undo" to restore modifications to the previous state (though quitting the application leaves your preferences untouched). Also some GTK embellishment is required and a method for installing the applet and all the things which come in a source directory :-). No time for screenshots right now, stay tuned!

Syndicated 2007-12-08 08:20:49 from Ricardo Mones

Claws 3.1.0

This is another, and hopefully the last this year, night of Sunday-but-already-Monday when I have to take a plane for Barcelona in about 7 or 8 hours. And as usually sleep is not my companion. I tried hard, not surrendering to the siesta temptation today, but seems it was not enough.

I've finished packaging the new tnef-parser from our plugin Master for the claws-mail-extra-plugins. It's already uploaded to Debian, and given the relative emptiness of the NEW queue looks like it won't take a lot of time to enter the archive. Just 20 packages with no package older than 2 days is a quite healthy condition for this hand-processed queue, and also means our ftp-master team works hard and quick these days, kudos for them!

It's also nice see old time users of Sylpheed coming to the Claws Mail arena. Even if it's to send bugs, which, luckily for me, are tagged as upstream by the reporter. For the curious they're the #452895 and the #452893. The latter seems a case of being more liberal on what is received, the first is the known problem of the local queue. Still not forwarded upstream though.

Syndicated 2007-11-26 00:37:26 from Ricardo Mones

Project endings

Work

After more than a year since its beginning (even before I was hired) and nine months of development the project I'm involved at work is nearly finishing. I've been this last week in Barcelona starting the deploy to production machines, and will be there also next week, to finish deployment and take part in the final tests (integration, performance). I'm proud of bringing some free soft into the project, as I was allowed to setup a trac server running in an Ubuntu 7.10 server (under VMWare) to be able to have some bug tracking facility (the alternative was being a shared MS Word file...). The challenging part was allow internet access to the virtual machine through the fascist proxy server.

Not sure what will be next. There's already some incoming projects at CSC, but I still have not made a decision neither have a clear idea of what would I prefer to be the next. So the final result may be a total surprise for me and even for others!.

Free soft

On the free software side there's been not much movement, since my network access is limited to work hours and time available is nearly zero during that hours. I've been able of sponsoring another upload of ayttm, which is now being (very) actively maintained by Kartik Mistry.

I've also enjoyed being one of the winners of Nokia n810 discount codes, and enjoyed even more to know up to four members of the Claws Team have been awarded the same way. I guess we won't have excuse to not having a good maemo port... oh wait, we already have it! ;-). The hardware itself is still not available, so we'll have to wait until it reaches the (online) shops to spent our 99€ per beard.

Music

Last weekend Silvia surprised me with tickets for two jazz concerts at the Gijón Jazz Festival. First was Medesky, Martin and Wood, which made a great concert I liked a lok, mixing modern jazz with electronic. On Sunday it was the turn of Dee Dee Bridgewater with her African rhythms from Mali. I though this second one would be not as interesting as first, but finally resulted a pleasant concert, despite the songs were a kind of simultaneous translation game, where a piece of song by the Malian singers in original language was repeated in English by Dee Dee.

Tonight we'll go with some friends to dinner and see Kroke, a Polish group from Cracow.

Syndicated 2007-11-17 17:26:42 from Ricardo Mones

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