Older blog entries for suso (starting at number 12)

aero|oreaMail

So I received a message from Mark Cushman last night about my changes to AeroMail. He liked them but he didn't want to implement all of the MySQL features. He basically thought that LDAP is a more widely used solution for storing user address books and options. He basically summed things up by saying that the features that I've added to AeroMail are not part of the straight line path that he is taking from version 1.4 to version 2.0 of AeroMail.

I'm cool with that and he has every right as the author of the program to decide where it's going to go. I just don't want to do a code fork. He suggested that I change the name of my code base to something else so as not to confuse users with a name like aeromail-mysql or something like that. So in my first attempt at coming up with a name I tried OreaMail(orea being aero spelled backwards). I went ahead and changed some things in the tarball and released my modified aeromail to the aeromail mailing list as OreaMail 1.0. Before I fell asleep last night I thought of a better name. WindMail. Since Aero is like air I thought Wind would be a nice related name and also it's a pun on windmill. There could be a little logo with envelopes as the blades on a windmill. Ok.....

So I recieved a message from someone on the aeromail list today saying that the changes I made were great and that they were just what he was looking for. That got me a bit hyped up and now I think I might continue on with my fork of AeroMail. But I think what I will do is everytime I make a new release of WindMail, I will also submit the changes back to the aeromail list and likewise whenever a new version of AeroMail is released I will try to incorporate the changes back into WindMail. That way they evolve somewhat as sister programs.

11:54pm

Hmmm, obviously the advogato software doesn't do input checking very well. As I was able to make myself a doubter of project universe by telneting to port 80. Not that I shouldn't be a doubter, but I shouldn't be allowed to be one officially I guess.

Well after a lot of work, I've done it. My changes to AeroMail are finished. In addition to the changes mentioned in my Feb 6th posting, I have made the following:

• Textarea now wraps at 72 columns by default and is user definable. (thanks Chris)
• Theme and Language display names are defined at the top of their respective files by the following format: //LanguageName: English or //ThemeName: Red
• Date string for each message can now be configured to come from the header or the Date recieved from the IMAP server.
• Date can be configured to different formats.
• Forwarded messages are no longer quoted.
• Bugfix: Index From: display will now check to see if personal is blank. If it is, it will set it to the e-mail address.
• Titles on pages now are formated like this Program name - Folder or Action - # of messages, etc.
• Added themes: red, blue and yellow.
• Changed folders page to use the COLOR_ROW_ON, COLOR_ROW_OFF variables to alternate the color of the rows.
• Bugfix: Fixed Personal name display problem on foreign character sets by using the e-mail address as the display name instead. I don't know of a better way to fix this one.
• Bugfix: Missing newlines at the end of most of the files.
• Fixed image attachment display so that it doesn't display the uuencoded text. This needs work though.
• Composed messages now have a Message-ID: header line.
• Replies to messages now add to the References: line or create it if there isn't one already.
• Personal Name is added in the From: line along with the address.
• Removed L_REFRESH_BTN translation in Hungarian language file because it's not referenced by anything.
• Added option to options screen to let the user define their From line.
• Made the MySQL options bit a configurable feature so that people who don't want to use a MySQL database for user options don't have to.
• Appropriate changes made for languages.

So I've tarred up my new source tree and made a patch file against the aeromail 1.40 source code. I notified Mark Cushing with this info so that he can decide whether he is going to implement them in the next version or what. I'm going to give him a few days to respond before sending the patch to the AeroMail mailing list. I still haven't heard back from Mark on the e-mail I sent him a week ago.

WOW! It's 2:30am and I'm the stick tommorow morning.. Zzzzzzz.

I'm almost done with my changes to Aeromail. Right now I'm documenting all that I've changed and getting ready to make a patch and tarball, etc. for Mark Cushman. He still hasn't responded to my e-mail so I will probably also post my patch to the aeromail mailing list. Maybe I'll put the tarball on my website or something. I'm somewhat worried that he won't want to accept the changes that he's made perhaps because he wants to keep the "bloat" out of aeromail. Which is perfectly understandable, so I've tried to keep the feature additions to reasonable changes. However, the changelog that i've logged so far is larger than the complete official changelog for all versions of aeromail since 1.0. :-)

OpenFX

So I jumped on the oppurtunity today to be an official mirror site for the OpenFX project, which is an open source 3d modeler and render for Windows. They are in the process of making a Linux and *BSD port. I've always wanted to see a good open source 3d compliment to GIMP. There are several half-baked/half-started projects, most of them are no longer being developed. I hope this one sees some light...

Webmail stuff

So over the past week I've been making a lot of bugfixes and feature enhancements to the PHP webmail application called AeroMail. I've written the author, Mark Cushing about what I may need to know as far as re-submitting the changes back to him. It's been a week since I've written him so I think I'm just going to post a message to the AeroMail mailing list with a patch for the 1.40 source code. Here is a laundry list of bug fixes and features I've added.

• Bugfix: Cc header is now only included if you specify it.
• Outgoing mail is saved to a sent-mail folder.
• Upon replying to a message, the previous message is indented.
• Reads in signature file from a specified path on the filesystem.
• Bcc compose header added and works properly.
• User saveable options support through a MySQL database.
• Can now change the following options:
  • Personal Name
  • Reply-to address
  • sent-mail folder.
  • Reply indentation string (defaults to "> ")
  • Signature file location.
  • Turn on/off Bcc: compose header
  • Turn on/off File attachment header
  • User selectable language support
  • User selectable color theme support
  • Configurable messages per index page.
  • Whether to show e-mail addresses next to personal names.
  • Whether to show uuencode attachment text along with attachment. (this needs work at the moment)
• Bugfix: Index page range links at the bottom now wrap when the string of ranges gets too long to fit on the page.
• When viewing the sent-mail folder the From: column shows the Recipient (To:) value instead.
• Compose page now has a "Go back" button.
• Message flags are now shown next to the message subject on the index page (eg. N for new message, A for answered, * for flagged).
• Successfully replying to a message properly sets the A flag for the message you replied too.
• Textarea width is now set to 80 columns instead of 85. (Maybe I should make this user definable too.)
• Themes and languages are now automagically added to the options lists simply by putting an appropriately named file in the lang or themes directories.
• Some other fixes and enhancements that I can't think of right now.

The reason why I haven't released all this yet is because I have to release a stable and featureful version of this web mail application for the users of suso.org anyways. I guess I'm going to go through a beta test cycle first. I've been using it for the past few days to read and compose some of my own e-mail. It works pretty well. I have to give thanks to Mark Cushing himself for writing some pretty easy to read and modify code. Kudos!

Other stuff

So I received an e-mail from Ken Coar (aka Rodent of Unusual Size) informing me that my proposal for a presentation at this years ApacheCon was accepted. Yea! Now comes all the work and preparation that I'll need to do. The presentation that I'll be doing is called "Apache and Frontpage" and is going to be detailed information on how to get Frontpage extensions to work with Apache in the most strange circumstances out there. Trying to get them to work at Kiva proved to be most fruitful as our complex webserver setup required us to make several modifications to the standard installation. Mainly to get it to work with RH SecureWebServer and do radius authentication.

I suppose everybody who goes for a long time without posting a diary entry says something like "Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted a diary entry. I've been really busy and bleh bleh bleh..." Well, I have been busy, but that's not really my excuse this time.

Lately I've been trying to do other things to help calm the mind and bring better harmony to my life. So over the past few months I've been spending time with my girlfriend, playing Ultimate Frisbee on Tuesdays and Thursday with wetdog and friends, Going to see a film/movie at Chris Dent's house on Monday nights, playing Poker with some friends on Friday nights and playing a weekly game of DnD on Saturday afternoons. Also, I've recently starting working with my favorite 3D rendering program Imagine again. I'll try to post some images for all to view soon enough.

I've started redesigning my personal website mainly because it needed it and also because I'll want it to look a bit nicer once I start applying for jobs out in Seattle in the spring (at a time when kings go off to war). Check it out here.

Lately I've been doing documentation at work on the web server improvements I've made. So nothing really exciting is going on there.

I've been helping Joe out with the testing of spinwebd by installing it on the suso.org webserver. It's working like a charm after we made a few tweeks. I think I'm going to modify the program though so that it forks away from the shell instead of having to background it manually.

Last night I nearly finished up a program I've been working on that will send suso.org user's accounts invoices to them automatically each month. This will help me out a great deal so that I don't have to spend so much time doing these administrative things. Now I just need to get more users.

So I'm posting this diary entry for two reasons. One is to let everyone know that I'm back from visiting Seattle and I think it rocks there and two because I'm testing out Chris Dent's Diary Sucker program which he may release soon.

Deb Richardson posted something in her diary about needing PHP4.0 RPMs. I had already built some for Kiva and so I modified them a bit so that they would be better suited for public consumption. If you're interested, the RPMs are available at http://suso.org/programs/net/php-rpms/.

I've been rather down lately because I've been lonely and feeling a bit depressed. I'm really getting tired of the midwest and want to go someplace else. I think part of the reason things have gotten so bad is because of all the Microsoft shit I've had to put up with lately like Frontpage extensions issues and just today I had to deal with someone's Internet Explorer not recognizing the wildcard SSL certificate that we use for internal Kiva stuff.

Appearently Microsoft has officially stated at some point somewhere that they don't like the idea of wildcard SSL certificates. I find that stupid because they are very useful and can make securing lots of web services at an ISP more practical. Oh fucking well.

Ironically enough I'm going to be taking vacation at the end of this month in Seattle. I'm going out there because I have a friend that works for Boeing and he likes it out there. Maybe if I'm fond enough of the place I'll head out there too.

Well, the new webservers at Kiva were brought online last Thursday morning and all in all things were successful. As it was to be expected there were some bugs that showed up in the design and also some things that we hadn't prepared for. I feel so relieved now and don't know what to do with my extra time. ;-)

There is a good article up on the main advogato page right now by eskimoses about Computer Science vs. Computer Programming. I think he makes some good points that we should put more craftmanship into this art that we all love. I have definately been inspired to take more time with software I write for the community. I've also been tempted from time to time to pickup one of Donald E. Knuth's fine books.

On the way back from my parent's house last night I was thinking that I need to change something about my life that will make things more interesting. I thought that it might be interesting if I could not tell a lie from now on. Not that I tell lies all the time and I don't mean that I'd constantly volunteer the truth. But sometimes you're likely to lie about something because you're protecting something or someones feelings. Like when you say "No, you're not fat." I think I'm just going to say exactly what I think and if it gets me into trouble well wouldn't that just be ironic. :-)

No big news yet. I have been doing a TON of preparing for bringing our new webservers online at Kiva Networking, where I work. Once I have some time, I'm going to put up a document at Systhug detailing the webserver setup we've designed to allow for a lot of cool features. Hopefully this information will be useful to other ISPs. We were also able to get Frontpage extensions working with RedHat's Secure Web Server(which they claimed impossible).

A bunch of us from Kiva went out last night to celebrate Joe Bowman's 21st birthday. Be sure to send him an email and wish him a happy birthday. He now knows the joys of Cinnamon Schnapps. ;-)